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Debt Rattle November 22 2024

Nov 222024
 
 November 22, 2024  Posted by at 9:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  59 Responses »


Giovanni Bellini Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist and Female Saint 1500-04

 

• Trump Nominates Pam Bondi For Attorney General After Gaetz Withdraws (ZH)
• Biden Is Trying To Throw Trump Under The Ukrainian Bus (Lukyanov)
• This Is The Most Evil Thing I’ve Seen In My Lifetime – Tucker Carlson (MN)
• Ukraine ‘Global War’ After Western Long-Range Weapons Used – Putin (ZH)
• Ukraine Sends Its Own Skilled Workforce To The Front Lines (SCF)
• In The Beginning Was The Pax Americana (Pacini)
• Trump May Not Need to Pull Trigger on Tariffs (ET)
• DOGE Wants To Cut $1.9 Trillion In Government Spending (Duro)
• Musk, Ramaswamy Reveal DOGE Blueprint To Cut Government Waste (ZH)
• The Prospects for Trump’s Agenda (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Trump Opposes Israel Annexation Of West Bank, Republican Sources Say (MEMO)
• ICC Issues Arrest Warrants For Netanyahu, Gallant (Sobczak)
• Former Green Beret: Trump Can “Turn Loose Delta Force” On The Cartels (MN)
• US Played ‘Substantial’ Role In Causing Covid Pandemic – ex-CDC Chief (RT)
• US Government Funded Creation of the Coronavirus (Paul Craig Roberts)
• UK School Removes All Christmas References to Make Children Feel “Safe” (MN)
• French Establishment Desperate To Stop Rise Of Conservatives (ZH)

 

 

 

 

Peace

https://twitter.com/i/status/1859328265644802352

Naomi Alex

Legal immigration

O’Reilly
https://twitter.com/i/status/1859433139568844906

750

Homan

Gore Limbaugh

 

 

 

 

That was fast. Did they feed him to the wolves to keep the others safe(r)?

• Trump Nominates Pam Bondi For Attorney General After Gaetz Withdraws (ZH)

Update: Donald Trump said he is nominating former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and his personal trial lawyer, to run the US Department of Justice, after his first pick, former Representative Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name from consideration. “Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again. I have known Pam for many years — She is smart and tough, and is an AMERICA FIRST Fighter, who will do a terrific job as Attorney General!,” Trump said in a statement on his Truth Social platform on Thursday evening.

Bondi, age 59, is an American attorney, lobbyist, and politician. A Republican, she served as the 37th Florida attorney general from 2011 to 2019. She is the first woman elected to the office. In 2020, Bondi was one of longtime ally President Donald Trump’s defense lawyers during his first impeachment trial. By 2024 she led the legal arm of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. Trump initially picked Gaetz, as his AG but the former US representative from Florida said he would no longer seek the post after intense scrutiny over a House Ethics Committee investigation into allegations that he engaged in sexual misconduct, including having sex with a minor.


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Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has withdrawn his name for consideration for attorney general amid growing controversy over sexual misconduct allegations. “While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” Gaetz wrote on X. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1.”

President-Elect Trump acknowledged Gaetz’ efforts in a statement on Truth Social: I greatly appreciate the recent efforts of Matt Gaetz in seeking approval to be Attorney General. He was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the Administration, for which he has much respect. Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do! It’s unclear what’s next for Gaetz, as he resigned from Congress after Trump picked him for consideration. Rubio’s Senate seat?

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“The final days of Democrat rule in Washington promise to be risky.”

• Biden Is Trying To Throw Trump Under The Ukrainian Bus (Lukyanov)

We’ve seen an uproar since it’s become apparent that the US has given Ukraine permission to launch long-range strikes deep inside Russia. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, Moscow’s unequivocal warnings that such a move would be seen as NATO’s direct entry into the war. And secondly the fallout from the dramatic change in the political situation in the US. Of course, in foreign policy terms, it’s on the Ukrainian issue that the differences between the outgoing and incoming American administrations is most visible. And Kiev is engaged in a feverish search for ways to reverse a situation that is becoming increasingly unfavourable for its interests. Finally, there is the turmoil in Western Europe, where elites are simply unable to comprehend the magnitude of the impending change. The news, which clearly resembles a fateful turning point, was quickly downplayed, if not denied.

The French and the British were quick to distance themselves from speculation that they too had immediately issued such authorizations – at an official level they repeated that they were only considering the possibility. Meanwhile, American sources close to the current ruling circles clarified the area of hypothetical use – only where hostilities are currently taking place. Most importantly, the range of reactions in Western countries was extremely wide. From the unbridled jubilation of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters among liberal NGO lobbyists, the EU’s hardline Josep Borrell and the governments of the most militant countries of Eastern Europe, to the sharp criticism of representatives of the future Donald Trump-led American administration and officials from certain European countries. To sum up, the picture is roughly as follows: the use of the weapons under discussion may complicate Russia’s actions, but will not change the overall nature of the campaign.

Nevertheless, they present significant potential for escalation, the limit of which is unclear. A frequently asked question is: why has this decision, which Kiev has been seeking all year, being taken now? Again, there are several purely speculative answers. Officially, the last straw was supposedly the data on the presence of North Korean units in the area of the armed conflict. For which there is no evidence. The White House, it is said, wants to send a signal to Pyongyang that it should stop cooperating with Moscow by authorizing strikes on their alleged bases. There is no point in speculating on the veracity of these claims. But two points are worth noting. First, it is not entirely clear why the possible involvement of the North Koreans has caused such a stir. Second, why would Pyongyang’s leader Kim Jong-un, seen in Washington as a ruthless totalitarian ruler, would suddenly be frightened by such a signal and rush to reconsider his previous alleged decisions. If indeed it even happened in the first place.

Another version is that the US administration understands that negotiations to end the conflict are inevitable and that Ukraine is approaching them from an increasingly unfavorable position. Accordingly, it is necessary to assist Kiev in improving its bargaining position, and the best way is to hold a bridgehead in the Kursk border area for further bartering. Whether proponents of this theory are right are wrong, we can’t say – but strangers things have happened. Finally, let’s look at what is in fact the generally accepted opinion of most commentators, both in the West and Russia. The Biden administration is trying to secure its historical legacy and make it as difficult as possible for Trump’s new team to get out of the Ukraine quagmire. In terms of legacy, of course, the situation is far from black and white – it all started with an attempt to strategically defeat Russia and reaffirm American/Western hegemony in the world.

Now the task is to ensure that the conflict is prolonged in the hope of some positive changes for Ukraine and vice versa for Russia. What will come out of this is unpredictable. Some Trump associates have been very negative, accusing Biden of trying to provoke World War III. Indeed, if Trump inherits a confrontation at its peak, the responsibility will be enormous and the room to maneuver will be limited. There is, however, a view that this may be convenient for the Trumpists. After all, the new president has the right to turn American policy on its head as soon as he takes office, citing the real threat of dragging the country into direct war.

This is conceivable, but it remains unclear which way Trump will turn. His approach to governing is still rooted in business, hence the endless references to the deals he will make. Trump’s first term failed to prove that business techniques can automatically transfer to international relations. And the members of his team who will influence policymaking are extremely diverse, ranging from market disruptor Elon Musk to more traditional Republican strongmen in positions in the State Department and national security apparatus. Finding a balance won’t easy. Meanwhile, everyone is entering a dangerous phase in which the chances of descending into unmanageable confrontation are greater than before. The final days of Democrat rule in Washington promise to be risky.

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“The US has become a fascist state under the administration of President Joe Biden..”

• This Is The Most Evil Thing I’ve Seen In My Lifetime – Tucker Carlson (MN)

During a discussion with president-elect Trump’s former Office of Management and Budget Director, Russ Vought, Tucker Carlson posited that the outgoing administration is attempting to saddle Trump with a global conflict. “If you doubt how serious the opposition is to the public, not just to Trump, but to the majority of the country that voted for him, They’re trying to leave him with World War III on the way out,” Carlson urged. Russia is furious about the Biden administration lifting restrictions on use of US developed long range missiles, and Putin has repeatedly stated that such a move would mean NATO countries are at war with Russia. Carlson continued, “I can’t imagine a more desperate or evil thing for Tony Blinken, who I think is desperate and evil, in my view, to do. Leave him with a war?”

“A lame-duck president trying to start a war with the world’s largest nuclear power, Russia. What do you make of that?” Carlson asked Vought. Vought responded, “It’s incredibly insidious, and then add to the fact that he can’t put two sentences together and he is largely not in control of his own government,” referring to Joe Biden. “You have almost an unelected president with individuals behind the scenes doing this,” he continued, further asserting “It doesn’t surprise me, though. I mean, these are the same people that have weaponized the Department of Justice and the lawfare.” “I have a colleague, Jeff Clark, who they’re trying to disbar because of the care he showed on behalf of the president in dealing with voter integrity and election fraud after 2020,” Vought further noted.

“The system has thrown everything at the warriors who are on the field. You’re seeing that with Tulsi, you’re seeing that with Matt Gaetz,” he pointed out, adding “Why is all of this stuff being thrown at him slanderously?” Carlson also discussed the spiralling escalation in Ukraine with journalist Glenn Greenwald, noting that the decision to escalate the conflict with ATACMS missiles is “the most evil thing I’ve seen in my lifetime.” Greenwald also pointed out that Ukraine doesn’t have the expertise to use the guidance system for the weapons and therefore NATO countries and the US would be actively involved in launching them at targets inside Russia. As we highlighted yesterday, NATO member state Sweden is sending out pamphlets advising citizens how they should prepare for nuclear war in the wake of the escalation.

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“..the weapon appeared to be an intermediate-range ballistic missile, adding, “But it is a new type we have been tracking.”

• Ukraine ‘Global War’ After Western Long-Range Weapons Used – Putin (ZH)

On Thursday President Vladimir Putin issued a stern warning in the wake of Ukraine launching long-range strikes on Russia’s territory utilizing newly approved US and UK long-range missiles. “Kiev has launched a long-range missile strike against military facilities located within internationally-recognized Russian territory,” began his televised address by saying. He confirmed British-made Storm Shadow missiles and US-made HIMARS were fired targets located in Bryansk and Kursk Regions. He said this action threatens to turn the Ukraine conflict into a global war. “A regional Ukraine conflict instigated by the West has acquired elements of a global one,” Putin spelled out, and noted that these systems cannot be used without the direct operational involvement of Western military specialists.

But he went on to claim that the inbound Western rockets were intercepted by Russian defenses. “The goals that have apparently been set by the enemy have not been achieved.” He suggested injuries among some personnel at a command center in Kursk, but noted it continues full operations. He also asserted that no Western systems can counter Russia’s new missiles, on display earlier in the day. “The use of such weapons by the enemy cannot affect the course of the situation in the Special Military Operation zone,” Putin stressed. He also said it was a big mistake for the US to pull out of the the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019. Can things cool prior to Trump taking office, or will Zelensky and the West risk bigger confrontation, to likely trigger Russian hypersonic missiles or even a tactical nuke? This is indeed an ultra-dangerous slide.

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Update(1057ET): Ukraine’s earlier claim that its territory had been struck by an intercontinental ballistic missile fired by Russia is being hotly disputed, hours after widespread reports first appeared. US officials are saying it appears to be a new intermediate-range ballistic missile and not an ICBM which targeted the central city of Dnipro The NY Times has reported in follow-up of the attack that “several Western officials said that the weapon was not an ICBM and instead was likely an intermediate-range missile that flies shorter distances.” Zelensky himself had claimed Russia used a new class of missile. “All the parameters — speed, altitude — match those of an intercontinental ballistic missile,” he said. “All expert evaluations are underway.” But US defense officials are contradicting this:

A senior U.S. official said the weapon appeared to be an intermediate-range ballistic missile, adding, “But it is a new type we have been tracking.” US officials have also called it an “experimental” missile. There’s also been some quibbling among experts are how to characterize the projectiles which were observed hitting Ukraine at incredibly high rates of speed, in terms of rocket size and distance. Assuming Washington is correct, and that it wasn’t an ICBM, this suggests Zelensky’s hasty verdict is all about threat inflation coming at a time he’s desperately trying to get the West’s attention, arguing in favor of greater NATO military intervention against Russia.

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They’re supposed to keep the country running.

• Ukraine Sends Its Own Skilled Workforce To The Front Lines (SCF)

The situation in Ukraine is deteriorating rapidly, reflecting a reality that the leaders of the Kiev regime have long tried to hide behind empty promises of Western support. As the conflict prolongs, the shortage of human resources at the front has become one of the country’s greatest weaknesses, forcing the authorities to reverse their policies of exemptions from mobilization. Now, those who were previously tasked with maintaining the country’s military infrastructure, such as Ukrspecexport’s and other key defense companies’ workers, are being called to serve on the front lines. The conscription of these professionals, who were previously responsible for maintaining Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian aircraft and systems in various parts of the world, reflects the imminent collapse of Kiev’s military capabilities. Their call-up is not only a desperate measure, but clear evidence that Ukraine, in its attempt to resist, is sabotaging itself by dismantling its own skilled workforce.

For years, Ukraine has relied on its expertise in Soviet-era military technology, providing maintenance services and exporting repairs to countries that still use Soviet equipment. This industry was, for a time, one of the country’s main sources of revenue and influence, allowing Kiev to remain relevant on the geopolitical arena. However, as Russian offensives intensified, Ukraine’s industrial facilities were systematically destroyed, making it impossible for Ukraine to maintain its mask of military power. Russian attacks have strategically destroyed the industrial base that supported Kiev’s armed forces, irreversibly weakening its critical and defense infrastructure. This is evidenced by Ukraine’s increasing inability to repair and maintain its own equipment, a situation that is now directly reflected in the shortage of specialists to repair what remains of its military machinery.

The impact of this situation is really deep. Not only has Ukraine lost the ability to maintain its combat systems, but it is also now forced to call up its best technicians and engineers to serve in the trenches, rather than maintaining what is still functioning in its defense industrial base. If even the most qualified professionals, who are responsible for ensuring the operation of aircraft and other sophisticated systems, are being sent to the battlefield, this points to a complete structural collapse of the Ukrainian military apparatus. It is no longer a question of simply fighting, but of ensuring the survival of the armed forces with extremely limited resources. The country is literally exhausting its ability to maintain the war, leading to its own unavoidable defeat.

This forced mobilization of specialists shows not only a failure in the military field, but also a broader fiasco in the country’s governance. The decision to send its best professionals to the front lines is a direct echo of the exhaustion of the Ukrainian political system. In addition to being a clear sign that Ukraine can no longer maintain effective mobilization, this measure puts vital sectors of society at risk. Soon, other professionals in essential fields, such as doctors, professors, and scientists, may be called up, further weakening the country’s social and economic structure. What remains of Ukraine’s infrastructure is being eroded by a war that Kiev clearly cannot win, and its desperate mobilization only accelerates its collapse.

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“..Huntington, wrote The Clash of Civilizations, in which he predicted that the world would be fragmented into distinct cultural blocs based on civil, religious and economic identities..”

• In The Beginning Was The Pax Americana (Pacini)

We often speak of the collective West, Hegemon, Seapower and Civilization of the Sea in relation to the United States of America. It is necessary to understand well what is the origin of this geopolitically determinant power for the world order. He who wins the war, dictates the rules Let us make clear at once an empirically incontrovertible factual truth: He who wins the war, dictates the rules of the post-war order. Whoever wins, writes history. Whether we like it or not, the defeated never had much decision-making power (which is not to say that they could not organize well to retaliate and return to power – but that is another matter). World War II ended with the victory of the United States of America as the first, undefeated and predominant power. From there followed an expansion of U.S. influence toto orbe terrarum in all respects (cultural, economic, military, political).

The twentieth century was the “American century.” Almost the whole world took the shape the U.S. wanted to give it. The second half of the century was marked by the low-tension conflict of the Cold War, which ended-if it really did-with the collapse of the Soviet political system in the USSR and the beginning of the unipolar phase of American global domination. That period aroused much optimism in the West for a new world order, marking the end of the military and ideological rivalry of the 20th century. Two possibilities were on the horizon: a system based on balance of power and egalitarian sovereignty, or a U.S.-led liberal hegemony based on the values of democracy. The first approach evoked perpetual conflict, while the second promised lasting peace and global stability. U.S. hegemony, already dominant in the transatlantic region after World War II, was seen as a model of peace and prosperity.

However, the collapse of the Soviet Union removed the justification for a world order built on the balance of power, pushing the United States toward a mission of recognized hegemony to prevent the rise of new rivals. American supremacy, as declared by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, was deemed “indispensable to ensure global stability.” This was the Pax Americana: the U.S. would ensure a period of prosperity and global peace – as early as the end of WWII – by extending control over the entire world. A peace for America was equivalent to a peace for the globe; a war for America would mean war for the entire globe. The stated goal of building a peaceful world often justified imperialistic approaches, revealing the contradictions of the hegemonic project. Set this paradigm as an axiom of reasoning in international relations and geopolitical programming, lo and behold, everything acquired new meaning.

The world had been formatted and the “control room” was now in Washington. It was the time of ideologies. In the “short century” everything had changed rapidly. The great world chessboard was constantly being shaken and reshuffled. The clash between the Western bloc and the Eastern – or Soviet – bloc characterized all concepts of each country’s politics in an extremely powerful way. In the 1990s, two visions dominated the debate on world order: that of Francis Fukuyama and that of Samuel Huntington. Fukuyama in his famous book The End of History, envisioned a future in which liberal democracy and capitalism would triumph universally, leading to perpetual peace under the leadership of the United States: he argued that economic interdependence, democratic reforms, and shared institutions would unite the world around common values, which were, of course, American values.

Any other model of civilization would have been beside the point, because History was finished, there would be nothing left to write about. In contrast, Huntington, wrote The Clash of Civilizations, in which he predicted that the world would be fragmented into distinct cultural blocs based on civil, religious and economic identities. Individualism and human rights, according to him, were peculiar to the West and not universal. His theorizing assumed a future marked by conflicts between civilizations, fueled by the decline of Western hegemony and the emergence of alternative powers, particularly in Confucian and Islamic societies.

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“These offers will be in the form of, ‘We promise to buy more natural gas from the U.S. … We promise to move more production to the U.S.’”

• Trump May Not Need to Pull Trigger on Tariffs (ET)

Economists near-universally warn that President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to impose “across-the-board” 20-percent tariffs on imports will trigger inflation, disrupt domestic industries, and spur global trade wars.
Despite overwhelming critical consensus, Trump calls tariffs “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” and hasn’t backed down since his Nov. 5 reelection. But the threats may be a “negotiating tactic” to give the United States leverage in mediating trade pacts, Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) President Adam Posen said during a Nov. 14 virtual event. And it may be working already. Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Canada, “and maybe some others, are likely lining up offers,” he said. “These offers will be in the form of, ‘We promise to buy more natural gas from the U.S. … We promise to move more production to the U.S.’”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suggested on Nov. 8 that European Union (EU) nations can buy more liquified natural gas (LNG) from the United States to avoid tariffs. Speaking to reporters after congratulating the president-elect on his reelection, von der Leyen said Trump appeared eager to sustain what the Congressional Research Service calls “the world’s largest trade and investment relationship,” which accounts for 46 percent of global GDP. About 48 percent of LNG used by EU nations is imported from the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Noting that EU nations import up to 16 percent of LNG from Russia, von der Leyen said there’s room for a deal. “Why not replace it by American LNG, which is cheaper for us and brings down our energy prices?” she asked.Posen said this is exactly what Trump’s team wants to achieve.

“The ideal outcome for the Trump administration is they’ve made this threat, a set of threats, but they don’t actually have to implement them, and they get these goodies,” he said. In the short term, Posen said, some nations may acquiesce. “They’ll say: ‘Okay, we don’t want to be on the bad side of the U.S. We don’t want a bad side of a President Trump.’ But in [the] medium-term, two to four or five years out, I think the reverberations could be quite large.” Responses from “like-minded U.S. allies” will differ from those from China, Mexico, and nonaligned nations, such as India and Indonesia, he said. Allies are “probably just going to try to make nice with Trump: ‘We’re going to be aligned with the U.S. on national security and, therefore, against China,’” Posen said. “We should just … try to be on the inside of a ‘Fortress America economy’ and grow with them.”

There are at least two problems with this scenario, he said. “Getting these goodies is really not necessarily going to solve a bunch of problems. A number of people close to the president-elect believe trade deficits are really a big deal. “These measures are likely to actually increase U.S. trade deficits because they’ll drive up the dollar, drive up inflation.” Posen said the second problem is that “this is not a one-round game,“ adding that ”once this happens … the question is, how do economies adapt and how do they cope?” “Maybe in that sense … people start building the U.S. out. That’s something we’re going to watch,” he said. Without an effort to renegotiate trade deals before imposing “across-the-board” tariffs, which also would slap a 25-to-100 percent fee on imports from Mexico, “I think the Trump administration is underestimating how other countries might react,” he said.

A 60-percent tariff on imports from China will spur “asymmetric trade warfare,” Posen said. “If the U.S. says, ‘Well, we don’t want steel, we don’t want batteries, we don’t want EVs from China’ … then the Chinese can say, ‘Well, we don’t want Hollywood movies, we don’t want American video games, we don’t want American accounting firms,’” he said.

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“..a “ranking of the most crazy expenses funded by your taxes.”

• DOGE Wants To Cut $1.9 Trillion In Government Spending (Duro)

Expectations were high when Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy took the lead in creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but those smiles quickly faded following their first announcements. While Musk, owner of the social network X, promised to cut government spending by $1.9 trillion, Ramaswamy revealed plans to eliminate entire agencies as part of the overhaul they are preparing. Government spending currently stands at $6.75 trillion annually, and cutting it as much as possible is a top priority for Trump. However, Musk and Ramaswamy will have just over a year and a half to implement their reforms, as the president-elect has set an expiration date for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — July 4, 2026. On that date, as part of the 250th anniversary celebrations of the Declaration of Independence, the tycoon aims to make the current government bureaucracy a thing of the past.

“Massive waste, fraud and abuse”
Both businessmen emphasized that much of the current government spending stems from what the former Republican primary contender called “massive waste, fraud, and abuse” within the administration. Ramaswamy further warned on Fox News that suppliers wouldn’t escape the cuts either, stating, “We expect massive reductions from all federal contractors and others who overbill the government.” Before beginning their official duties, both Musk and Ramaswamy have already pointed out several questionable expenses, such as sponsored drag shows in Ecuador, that will be featured in what Musk has promised will be a “ranking of the most crazy expenses funded by your taxes.” This is part of his commitment to transparency in the process. Ramaswamy also announced that ‘entire agencies’ will be shut down as part of the planned cuts. “We expect mass reductions. We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expect massive cuts in federal contractors and others that are overbilling the federal government. So, yes, we expect all of the above.”

From Starbucks coffee makers to overpriced soap at the Pentagon
During his time as a Republican pre-candidate, Ramaswamy identified several agencies for elimination or significant restructuring, both in terms of functions and size. These include the FBI, the Department of Education, the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Also under scrutiny is the Pentagon’s waste, especially following its failure in the most recent audit of its massive $824 billion budget. Among the questionable expenses uncovered were $192,952 spent on Starbucks espresso machines for the U.S. Navy between 2017 and 2021, as well as nearly $1 million the Air Force paid Boeing for overpriced C-17 cargo plane parts as part of a 20-year contract. Perhaps most shocking to analysts, however, was the Defense Department’s purchase of soap dispensers at an eye-popping markup of 7,943%.

Trans monkeys and alcoholic mice to be studied by NIH
On the other hand, animal experimentation, particularly those conducted for ‘woke’ purposes, will also be under review. For instance, a Florida lab received $477,000 to study “transgender” monkeys, injecting male monkeys with female hormones to observe changes in behavior. In a similar vein, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocated $33 million to a company managing around 3,000 primates, funding studies on gambling and methamphetamine addiction without changing the animals involved. In addiction research, it was also reported that the NIH spent an additional $3 million of taxpayer dollars on injecting hamsters with steroids to “assess whether current drugs for aggressive juveniles can suppress steroid-induced aggression.” The NIH also allocated $2.3 million to inject cocaine into six-month-old beagle puppies and $1.1 million to train mice to drink large amounts of alcohol.

Passing the REINS Act, a priority for DOGE
Along with the cuts, part of Musk and Ramaswamy’s task will be to shine a light on excessive or redundant legislation that burdens taxpayers. In this regard, the India-born entrepreneur has called for the swift passage of the REINS Act, which would give Congress greater control over executive spending resulting from presidential executive orders.

DOGECast

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“We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.”

• Musk, Ramaswamy Reveal DOGE Blueprint To Cut Government Waste (ZH)

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have laid out their vision for the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). According to a new WSJ op-ed, the pair writes that “Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government. That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year.” They call government bloat “antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision,’ as it “imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers.” President Trump has asked the two of us to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size. The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long. That’s why we’re doing things differently. We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.”

As the Epoch Times notes, the urgency for downsizing the federal government is due to the ballooning costs of paying interest on our ginormous national debt. I and others have been writing about the debt problem for decades, but now the national debt has reached a critical stage. According to usdebtclock.org, the federal debt passed $36 trillion last week. There is nothing inherently significant about the number $36 trillion, but as you can see from the accompanying chart published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the annual cost of the federal debt has exploded from under $600 billion in 2020 to over $1 trillion now. Here’s the plan:

1. Regulatory Rescissions: Rolling Back Illegitimate Regulations
The most immediate and significant action DOGE will take is targeting the tens of thousands of regulations imposed by federal agencies, many of which exceed the constitutional authority granted to these agencies.

• Using Supreme Court Rulings as a Guide: Following the rulings in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022) and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), DOGE will work to identify regulations that overstep the bounds of the authority Congress has granted. These rulings clarify that agencies cannot enact major economic or policy decisions without explicit congressional approval. DOGE will compile a list of regulations that should be nullified and present them to President Trump for executive action.

• Immediate Suspension and Review of Regulations: Through executive orders, the president will pause enforcement of these overreaching regulations and initiate a full review process for rescission. This action will prevent regulations that were never approved by Congress from continuing to harm businesses and individuals.

• Creating a System to Prevent Reviving Illegitimate Regulations: Once regulations are rescinded, DOGE will ensure that future administrations cannot simply reinstate them. Any reactivation of these regulations would require a new act of Congress, ensuring that regulatory power is returned to the people’s elected representatives.

2. Administrative Reductions: Streamlining Federal Agencies
Alongside regulatory rescissions, a drastic reduction in the size of the federal bureaucracy will be necessary. DOGE will target specific reforms to reduce the number of federal employees, streamline agency operations, and focus government efforts on its core constitutional responsibilities.

• Identifying Minimum Staffing Needs: DOGE will collaborate with agency leaders to identify the minimum number of employees required to carry out essential functions. With fewer regulations to enforce, many agencies will require significantly fewer staff. As regulations are rescinded, the corresponding workforce reductions will follow.

• Cost-effective Employee Transitions: For those whose positions are eliminated, DOGE will support their transition into the private sector, providing incentives for early retirement or voluntary severance. Programs designed to make these exits as seamless as possible will be implemented, ensuring a smooth process for both employees and taxpayers.

• Leveraging Executive Authority to Limit Bureaucratic Growth: President Trump will use his authority to amend civil-service rules to curtail administrative overgrowth. This could include actions like large-scale firings or moving federal agencies out of Washington, D.C., to reduce costs and decentralize power.

• Restoring Accountability in Federal Agencies: Agencies will be required to return to in-person work, ending the COVID-era trend of remote work. This will incentivize employees who are unwilling to meet this expectation to voluntarily exit, reducing the overall headcount.

3. Cost Savings: Tackling Waste, Fraud, and Abuse
Beyond reducing the size of government and eliminating unnecessary regulations, DOGE will focus on eliminating wasteful spending and ensuring that taxpayer dollars are used efficiently.

• Ending Unauthorized Expenditures: A significant portion of federal spending, over $500 billion annually, is either unauthorized by Congress or used for purposes Congress never intended. DOGE will work with the administration to end these wasteful programs, including unnecessary funding to international organizations and progressive groups, while scrutinizing expenditures like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

• Overhauling Federal Procurement: The government’s procurement system is notorious for waste and inefficiency. DOGE will conduct large-scale audits of federal contracts, suspending payments where necessary to identify and eliminate inefficiencies. This will be especially critical for agencies like the Department of Defense, which has failed repeated audits, indicating a lack of oversight over how taxpayer money is spent.

• Targeting the Deficit and Overspending: While entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid are often the focus of budgetary discussions, DOGE will tackle the more immediate waste, fraud, and abuse that plagues most federal agencies. Through targeted executive actions, DOGE will curb these excesses without the need for new legislation.

A Historic Opportunity
With a mandate for change and a supportive legal framework, DOGE has the opportunity to make meaningful strides in reducing the size and scope of the federal government. Through regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and targeted cost savings, this initiative aims to eliminate wasteful spending and restore accountability in Washington. The ultimate goal of DOGE is to make its own existence obsolete by July 4, 2026 – the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. By then, it is hoped that a leaner, more efficient government will be in place, one that is more responsive to the needs of the people and more in line with the vision of the Founders. If successful, this reform effort will be a gift to the nation, ensuring that future generations inherit a government that is both effective and accountable.

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“Trump is going to need intelligent cool hands to keep enthusiasm focused on where it is needed, so that hot heads don’t rush us into wider war..”

• The Prospects for Trump’s Agenda (Paul Craig Roberts)

Cities and states controlled by left-wing Woke anti-American Democrats are busy at work organizing to oppose the will of the American people as expressed in the presidential election. In Pennsylvania the corrupt Democrat authorities are openly defying the ruling of the State Supreme Court and counting invalid ballots in their effort to overturn the election of the Republican US senator. In Massachusetts, Illinois, and California, corrupt anti-American Democrat governors and legislators are prohibiting any cooperation with federal authorities in identifying and deporting illegal aliens. Most Democrat jurisdictions have taken the side of immigrant invaders and criminal gangs against the American people. The Democrat authorities speak of those who have illegally entered the US as “our people” to be protected from deportation. Badly ruled Democrat cities have joined the organized Democrat effort to prevent President Trump from protecting America’s border.

They are proud to be standing for foreign aliens against America. This shows that the Democrat Party is nothing but a collection of far left ideologues who hate the United States and are doing their best to destroy it. Americans have no greater enemy than the Democrat Party. Do Trump, his government, and his supporters have the will and determination to arrest, indict, and imprison elected Democrats who refuse to obey US law? In other words, are the Trump forces as determined to rescue America as Democrats are to destroy it with open borders, critical race theory, and transgender indoctrination? The Democrats had no compunction about trying to destroy Trump with false indictments devoid of evidence. In contrast, Republicans have the evidence. Do they have the strength to act on it? Trump can achieve nothing without a firebrand Attorney General. The sorry excuses he appointed his first term are the reasons he failed. Matt Gaetz is surely a disrupter, a firebrand.

He has the personality and determination to clean up the two most corrupt areas of the US government–the Justice (sic) Department and the FBI. Both are anti-American institutions who commit taxpayer resources to framing up American patriots, while criminals like Hunter Biden and Hillary walk. The question is: can Gaetz be confirmed? Is the corrupt American Establishment going to permit a person who would indict them to be Attorney General? Perhaps Gaetz is a stalking horse whose rejection by the Senate would make it difficult for the Senate to reject Trump’s second nomination. Who should that be? The Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is, like Gaetz, strong, and he has years of experience as an attorney general. Moreover, he has filed 100 lawsuits against the federal government, and he knows how corrupt the FBI is from the interference and harassment he has experienced from this corrupt federal agency. Of all of Trump’s appointments Bobby Kennedy will be the most difficult to be confirmed.

Kennedy has the goods on the adverse health effects we suffer from Big Pharma and from the adulterated foods agri-business feeds us. Both Big Pharma and the corporate food business make profits by destroying our health. How can Trump get Kennedy confirmed given the enormous power campaign contributions give Big Pharma and agri-business over US Senators? Recently, Trump has been giving a series of short speeches that put malefactors on the spot. He can do the same to Big Pharma and agri-business. Prior to inauguration, Trump can say that Big Pharma and agri-business will try to stop me from providing you with safe medicines and safe food. You must write to your senators and demand that they confirm Bobby Kennedy. Any senator who votes against Kennedy, Trump should identify for all to see and brand him a corrupt hireling of Big Pharma and agri-business and ask the electorate why they put him in office.

On the war front the corrupt Biden regime has tried to prevent Trump from peacefully resolving the conflict in Ukraine by giving the go-ahead to the US and NATO launching missiles into Russia. The initial attempt failed, but there will be others. One possible target is the nuclear power station in Kursk, an area permissible to be targeted. A hit on the nuclear facility would release nuclear fallout into Russia. Putin could not rationalize away such a disaster and would, finally, be deprived of an excuse to do nothing in response. What might his response be? Given the extreme superiority of Russian nuclear forces over those of the US, Putin could knock out all US nuclear weapon sites and Washington, and dictate the peace terms to the Americans and Europeans. Would he do this? Not unless he has no other alternative. Putin wants peace, not war. Thinking of the dangerous situation into which Putin has got himself with his limited military operation reminded me of a passage I recently read in Louis L’Amour’s short story, ”West of the Tularosas”:

“Of late she had refused to admit there might be occasions when fighting could not be avoided. She had yet to learn that in order to have peace both sides must want it equally. One side cannot make peace; they can only surrender.” I wonder if Putin understands that neither Washington nor Israel desire peace. Their intention is hegemony. Putin has done nothing to make Washington desire peace. Neither has China. Neither has Iran. It is the American Neoconservatives who have dominated American foreign policy since the Soviet collapse who want war. Trump needs to disempower these dangerous warmongers with one of his short speeches.

On the Middle Eastern war front my confidence in Trump fades. He is in Israel’s pocket, as is the entirety of his war cabinet. Russia and China cannot permit a US/Israeli attack on Iran. China, perhaps, is useless, as China, which has survived for 5,000 years, relies on time, not war, to dispose of enemies. For Russia, the situation is different. If Iran falls, the CIA has an entrance through which to send anti-Russian Muslim activists to disrupt the Russian Federation. Attacked from the West and East and also perhaps from a Maidan Revolution in Georgia, Putin might realize that he has waited far too long to fight, and all hell could break loose. To handle these challenges, Trump is going to need intelligent cool hands to keep enthusiasm focused on where it is needed, so that hot heads don’t rush us into wider war. Does Trump have such people? Who are they? What authority do they have? His war cabinet are people lined up with Israel against Iran. Where is the promise in this?

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“..a normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia – a key priority for the incoming Trump administration..”

• Trump Opposes Israel Annexation Of West Bank, Republican Sources Say (MEMO)

Newly-elected United States’ President, Donald Trump, is in opposition to Israel’s reported plans to annex the Occupied West Bank, sources from his Republican Party have revealed. According to Israeli outlet, Ynet News, a senior Republican Senator close to the President-elect has said that “Trump will not approve annexation” of the West Bank. Such a move is reportedly seen by the new President as one that would be “a mistake for Israel” which would worsen its international standing – already severely damaged after over a year of the Occupation’s bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Trump is also apparently primarily concerned that any official annexation could further disrupt and severely derail efforts to finally reach a normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia – a key priority for the incoming Trump administration, with Republican Senator, Lindsey Graham, particularly working on that goal. The reported comments by the unnamed sources follow increased speculation in recent weeks over Trump’s appointments of controversial figures in his incoming administration, with many of the relevant roles being filled by radically pro-Israel figures who favour annexation of the West Bank.

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EU countries have said they will arrest them.

• ICC Issues Arrest Warrants For Netanyahu, Gallant (Sobczak)

On Thursday the International Court of Justice (ICC) issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as a member of Hamas leadership. The warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant were for charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The court unanimously agreed that the prime minister and former defense minister “each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” “The Chamber considered that there are reasonable grounds to believe that both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity, from at least 8 October 2023 to 20 May 2024,” the court detailed in its allegations.

The ICC also charged Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri for mass killings during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, including rape and hostage taking. A plan suggested by former IDF general, Giora Eiland, called for the explicit emptying out of northern Gaza and the labeling of all remaining civilians as military targets, as well as the purposeful blockage of humanitarian aid. Netanyahu reportedly did not agree to the plan, but evidence points to aspects of the plan being enacted. “The ICC decision shows once more how out of sync Biden’s Gaza policy is with both American and international law,” says the Quincy Institute’s Executive Vice President Trita Parsi. “Biden has sacrificed America’s international standing to arm and protect leaders who the international courts have deemed to be war criminals.” The ICC’s move comes just one day after unprecedented votes in the U.S. Senate to end the sale of certain offensive weapons to Israel. The measures ultimately failed, with the White House telling senators that they would be supporting Iran and Hamas should they vote to curb weapons sales to Israel.

Because of the ICC warrants, Netanyahu or Gallant could be arrested upon entering a nation that has recognized the ICC and its rulings. However, Israel is among dozens of other countries, including the United States, that do not recognize the court’s jurisdiction. After warrants were requested in October, Israel reacted by challenging the jurisdiction of the ICC in the matter, but that challenge has been rejected. “Israel’s reaction — that no other democracy has been treated this way by the ICC — is indicative of how perverted certain approaches to international law have become,” said Parsi. “Israel essentially argues that because it defines itself as a democracy, it should be above the law. That war-crimes, apartheid, and genocide are ok as long as the perpetrator identifies as democratic. This approach — creating different sets of laws and standards for different countries — is a recipe for global instability and a threat to American security.”

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“..if they turn loose Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 on cartels and pedophiles, we could just kind of like erase the problem in about two years. It’d be gone..”

• Former Green Beret: Trump Can “Turn Loose Delta Force” On The Cartels (MN)

During a discussion with Joe Rogan, former Green Beret Evan Hafer, noted that if president-elect Trump decides to go to war with the cartels he could opt to use US Special Forces to destroy them. Hafer noted “if we declare war on the cartel, these dudes are not going to understand what the fuck is going on,” “They are in for a world of ultra violence they’ve never actually felt before because you know, obviously this is a very capable violent organization,” Hafer added. He continued, “They have fucking no clue if we organize these tier one units against them this is gonna be — what I would be doing if I was down there… I’d be getting ready to retire right now,” “That’s what I would be doing. Because if Delta Force is hunting me bro, I would be so terrified,” Hafer further urged.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1858851449725153571

“I thought about this for a long time where I’m like if they turn loose Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 on cartels and pedophiles, we could just kind of like erase the problem in about two years. It’d be gone,” Hafer, the founder of Black Rifle Coffee Company, emphasised. Trump has repeatedly said that this option is on the table. His incoming border czar Tom Homan also recently stated that Trump intends to “use the full might of the United States Special Operations to take ’em out,” and “ take ’em off the face of Earth.”

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“I think there is a real possibility that the virus’s birthplace was Chapel Hill.”

• US Played ‘Substantial’ Role In Causing Covid Pandemic – ex-CDC Chief (RT)

Robert Redfield, a former director of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), has claimed that Covid-19 was artificially developed, and that the US played a “substantial” role in starting the pandemic. Redfield, who led the agency under the administration of US President Donald Trump, made the claim in an interview that was released on November 14, but only drew media attention this week. Speaking to author and podcaster Dana Parish, he suggested that the virus was “intentionally engineered as a part of a biodefense program.” “When you look at the accountability for China, their accountability is not in the lab work and the creation of the virus,” but in their failure to quickly report the incident to health authorities worldwide including the CDC, when they realized the virus was on the loose, he said.

However, the US “role was substantial,” he added. “They funded the research, both from NIH [National Institutes of Health], the State Department’s USAID and the Defense Department.” According to the former CDC chief, the “scientific mastermind behind the research” was Dr. Ralph Baric, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on coronaviruses. Redfield suggested that the professor, who works at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was “very involved in this research.” “I think he probably helped create some of the original viral line”, Redfield said, admitting he did not have any proof. “I think there is a real possibility that the virus’s birthplace was Chapel Hill.”

Redfield previously said the Covid-19 pandemic, which killed more than seven million people worldwide and caused a global economic downturn, most likely started with a lab leak in Wuhan, China, and suggested that the debate on the virus’s origins was “squashed.” He has also criticized the World Health Organization (WHO) for failing to hold Beijing accountable. One of the prevailing theories of the origin of the Covid pandemic is that the virus was transmitted to humans from an animal, possibly a bat, at a food market. China has maintained that the virus is of natural origin, and has dismissed the laboratory leak theory as an attempt to smear the country for political reasons.

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“Millions of letters must pour into the Senate promising to drive the senators from office if they continue to protect Big Pharma’s assault on Americans’ lives and health..”

• US Government Funded Creation of the Coronavirus (Paul Craig Roberts)

Robert Redfield, former Director of the Centers for Disease Control, has revealed that US government agencies funded the creation of the Coronavirus. “They funded the research, both from NIH [National Institutes of Health], the State Department’s USAID and the Defense Department.” According to the former CDC chief, the “scientific mastermind behind the research” was Dr. Ralph Baric, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on coronaviruses. Redfield said that the virus was “intentionally engineered as a part of a biodefense program.” I am convinced that the “vaccine” was intentionally designed to reduce the world’s population via early death and infertility. This was the agenda behind the pressure to vaccinate the Earth’s entire population. The vile despicable American media and the corrupt Big Pharma-dominated US medical system continue to deceive Americans with their lies that Covid came from bats and the Covid “vaccine,” which is not a vaccine, is safe and effective.

Big Pharma uses campaign contributions to keep the US Congress silent. Murder and injury larger in scale than Israel’s genocide of Palestine has been covered up by the whore American media and cowardly US Congress. How can Trump make rot this huge great again? If Trump is to get Bobby Kennedy confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, he must begin his speeches now putting the Senate and the American people on notice that Big Pharma will purchase from the Senate a non-confirmation vote. Millions of letters must pour into the Senate promising to drive the senators from office if they continue to protect Big Pharma’s assault on Americans’ lives and health. Can Trump do this when his chief of staff is a former Big Pharma lobbyist? The great danger of the Trump presidency is that he will achieve nothing, and the disappointment will demoralize the American people who have put their faith in him. Once Americans give up, tyranny will have its way with them.

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Gone. Hopeless.

• UK School Removes All Christmas References to Make Children Feel “Safe” (MN)

A school in the UK announced to parents that it was removing all Christmas references from a panto in order to make children feel “safe”. Yes, really. The head teacher of Wherwell Primary School in Andover, Hampshire, banned any reference to the festive season from a Jack and The Beanstalk show so as not to offend any non-Christians who were attending. Mandy Ovenden said the embargo was necessary in order to make children feel “safe” and “valued”. “When we chose to invite the travelling pantomime to Wherwell, our request was a practical step to ensure all children at the school would be able to attend and enjoy the show,” said the school. “Our aim, as always, is to foster inclusivity in our school community, and be a place where children and their families feel safe, welcomed and valued.”

Ovenden said the school had requested the company putting on the play “that the show contain no reference to Christmas.” According to a report by the Telegraph, parents were outraged, asserting that the decision “shouldn’t be allowed” in order to merely ensure that “a few people will not be offended.” In order to ensure a “fully inclusive event,” the head teacher asked that all Christmas references be eradicated because, “We have a number of families who either do not celebrate Christmas or do so in a different way.” Chaplins, the company behind the Jack and The Beanstalk play, said it normally included references to Christmas at this time of year. Because God forbid children in a supposedly Christian country be exposed to anything related in any way to Christmas during Christmastime.

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“..prosecutors were “only interested” in preventing her from running for president in 2027. “I understood that well,” she said.”

• French Establishment Desperate To Stop Rise Of Conservatives (ZH)

EU elites and globalists with extensive political influence have been on the war-path the past several years as it has become increasingly evident that the European populace is shifting more conservative with each new election. In Germany, leftist officials are attempting an outright ban of the conservative AFD Party, primarily because they stand against mass immigration (a position which progressives claim is “xenophobic”). The AFD is currently the second most popular political party in Germany and is expected to gain substantial influence in the 2025 federal elections, unless their candidates are blocked from participation. In Austria, the conservative Freedom Party won a parliamentary election victory in September, though left wing and centrist parties are seeking to cement a coalition to nullify the FP’s ability to govern.

The European media has consistently compared the success of the Freedom Party to the rise of the Third Reich – The only fallback of failing leftists is to claim their opponents are “literally Hitler.” A similar coalition coup was exploited in France under Emmanuel Macron in order to stop Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party. The coalition is a fragmented mess but it served its purpose of disrupting the will of French voters seeking smaller government and secure borders. Keep in mind, the same people that constantly howl about “threats to democracy” are now trying to silence some of the largest political parties in Europe because they won’t submit to progressive ideologies. For example, if the AFD is banned, who is going to represent the will of millions of conservative German voters? The leftist establishment does not care about those voters or their concerns, nor do they care about fair elections. Their vision of democracy is a sham.

There is, in fact, a coordinated effort by the leftist regime in Europe to shut down any and all public dissent, starting with opposition movements and their access to the ballot box. Recent news from France highlights this reality, as efforts are now underway under the French government to pursue legal actions against Marine Le Pen. Le Pen has been accused by Paris prosecutors of using money intended for EU parliamentary aides to instead pay staff who worked for the party between 2009 and 2016. One problem is that the law Le Pen is being charged with was not created until 2016. Furthermore, Le Pen argues that National Rally employees can also work within the EU parliament and that the two roles often overlap. She assert that no laws were broken and no one received EU funds that were not already owed to them.

If convicted Le Pen could receive up to 5 years in prison (3 suspended) and extensive fines of €300,000, but the real kicker is that she could also be banned from participating in elections for five years even if she files an appeal. Government officials admit that Le Pen might not spend any time in jail (she might become a conservative martyr if that happened), but her inability to run for office would effectively end the chances of the National Rally in the 2027 elections. It’s an election which many analysts suggest could catapult the NR to power in France. “It’s no surprise,” Le Pen told reporters after the prosecution’s closing arguments. “I note that the prosecutors’ claims are extremely outrageous.” Le Pen said she felt prosecutors were “only interested” in preventing her from running for president in 2027. “I understood that well,” she said. The case is set to conclude in early 2025.

Establishment media outlets accuse Le Pen of using “Trump-style rhetoric” to distract from her charges. The Guardian claims: “Yet just as January 6 did not stop Trump from being able to move back into the White House, Le Pen’s strategy may well work in her favour. The longer her claims of a political trial get airtime without proper contextualisation, the more likely the French public may think there is some truth to it – it chimes with the widespread anti-elite sentiment among French voters…” This constitutes considerable gaslighting on the part of The Guardian. The “contextualization” is that Le Pen is innocent until proven guilty, and there has been a clear and observable pattern of persecution of right-leaning political figures across the western world in order to stop their constituents from having a say in the governmental process. Trump is just one example of lawfare being used to create accusations of criminality from the thinnest of threads. The American public was savvy enough to see through the smoke and noise.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Friedman pencil

 

 

Rome

YMCA

 

 

Linda
https://twitter.com/i/status/1859583936201994524

 

 

Elephants

 

 

Only girls
https://twitter.com/i/status/1859616060061737365

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle November 3 2024

Nov 032024
 
 November 3, 2024  Posted by at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  86 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Field with Flowers near Arles 1888

 

• “The American System” Made America Great (Rickards)
• Elon Musk Asks Ron Paul To Join Department Of Gov’t Efficiency (ZH)
• House Speaker ‘Really Bullish’ Washington Will Be All-GOP Town In January (JTN)
• House Speaker Plan: Moving Bureaucrats From DC To Reshape Government (JTN)
• Candidates’ Final Tours: A Flustered Harris, And A Joyful Trump (Whedon)
• People Aren’t Garbage. Partisan Politics Is (Matt Taibbi)
• Trump, Vance Take Aim At Renewable Energy, Many Communities Already Did (JTN)
• Polymarket’s Trump-Bullish Whale: “Absolutely No Political Agenda” (ZH)
• Leftists Predict Hysterical Dystopian Future (ZH)
• Kiev Officials ‘Ready’ For Potential Trump Presidency – WaPo (RT)
• West’s Rules-Based Order To Collapse Soon – Medvedev
• West Sees Red Over Failed Second Color Revolution In Georgia (SCF)
• Novichok: UK Government Sedated The Skripals To Stop Them Talking (Helmer)
• Brutally Murdered 13 Years Ago, Gaddafi Is Only Growing More Beloved (Fetouri)

 

 

 

 

Maher
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852565201515630859

In the bag

Tucker

Fulton County

RFK

Dec. 5?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852539432395845815

Tulsi
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852686204921426042

Baris

Jesse

 

 

Tucker Grand Finale With President Donald Trump in Glendale, AZ (start at 1.12?!, Trump at 1.38)

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Donald Trump recently did an interview with John Micklethwait, Bloomberg’s top editor and a former editor of The Economist. Micklethwait made the tired point that Trump’s tariffs would raise prices and be bad for Americans.”

• “The American System” Made America Great (Rickards)

Most of us have been taught that free trade is good and that tariffs are bad. And on the surface it certainly seems true. The theory of free trade based on comparative advantage was advocated by British economist David Ricardo in the early 19th century. Ricardo’s theory said that trading nations are endowed with attributes that give them a relative advantage in producing certain goods versus others. These attributes could consist of natural resources, climate, population, river systems, education, ports, financial capacity or any other factor of production. Nations should produce those goods as to which they have a natural advantage and trade with other nations for goods where the advantage was not so great. Countries should specialize in what they do best, and let others also specialize in what they do best. Then countries could simply trade the goods they make for the goods made by others.

All sides would be better off because prices would be lower as a result of specialization in those goods where you have a natural advantage. It’s a nice theory often summed up in the idea that Tom Brady shouldn’t mow his own lawn because it makes more sense to pay a landscaper while he practices football. For example, if the U.K. had an advantage in textile production and Portugal had an advantage in wine production, then the U.K. and Portugal should trade wool for wine. But if the theory of comparative advantage were true, Japan would still be exporting tuna fish instead of cars, computers, TVs, steel and much more. The same can be said of the globalists’ view that capital should flow freely across borders. That might be advantageous in theory but market manipulation by central banks and rogue actors like Goldman Sachs and big hedge funds make it a treacherous proposition.

The problem with this theory of comparative advantage is that the factors of production are not permanent and they are not immobile. If labor moves from the countryside to the city in China, then suddenly China has a comparative advantage in cheap labor. If finance capital moves from New York banks to direct foreign investment in Chinese factories, then China has the comparative advantage in capital also. Trump understands this, Micklethwait doesn’t. Trump didn’t just make polite conversation in the interview. He called out Micklethwait by saying, “It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re totally wrong.” Ouch! Micklethwait certainly isn’t alone. Listening to hysterical commentary from the mainstream media about Trump’s tariffs, one would think his policies were in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Nothing could be further from the truth. By advocating tariffs, Trump actually wants to return to what made America great in the first place. In fact, tariffs are as American as apple pie. From 1790–1962, the United States pursued high tariff policies under a program known as the American System. It was created by George Washington’s secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who drafted a report to Congress called the Report on Manufactures presented in 1791. Hamilton proposed that in order to have a strong country, America needed a strong manufacturing base with jobs that taught skills and offered income security. To achieve this, Hamilton proposed subsidies to U.S. businesses so they could compete successfully against more established U.K. and European businesses. These subsidies might include grants of government land or rights of way, purchase orders from the government itself or outright payments. This was a mercantilist system that encouraged a trade surplus and the accumulation of gold reserves.

Hamilton’s plan was later proposed on a broader scale by Kentucky Sen. Henry Clay. This new plan began with the Tariff of 1816. Later on, Abraham Lincoln adopted the American System as his platform in the election of 1860, and it became a bedrock principle of the new Republican Party. It was affirmed by William McKinley at the end of the 19th century and by Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. The 19th and early 20th centuries were a heyday of the American System. This period was characterized by enormous economic growth and population expansion by the U.S. The American System was also accompanied mostly by low inflation or even deflation (which increases the purchasing power of everyday citizens) despite occasional financial panics and some inflation during the Civil War. The key takeaway is that America grew rich and powerful from 1787–1962, a period of 175 years, using tariffs, subsidies and other barriers to trade to nurture domestic industry and protect high-paying manufacturing jobs.

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Ron Paul was made for this.

• Elon Musk Asks Ron Paul To Join Department Of Gov’t Efficiency (ZH)

With just two days left before the presidential election, Libertarians are waking up Saturday to a bunch of buzz on X about a potential “Ron Paul Revolution” in the White House—only possible if Donald Trump wins next week. On Friday evening, AFpost wrote on X, “Ron Paul says he wants to join Elon Musk to cut government waste in second Trump administration.” Musk chimed in on X: “It would be great to have Ron Paul as part of the Department of Government Efficiency!” Ron Paul responded: “I’d be happy to talk with you about it, Elon.” X users instantly went bananas on the prospect that Musk would give Ron Paul a role in the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, only if Trump wins. For months, Musk and Trump have been discussing DOGE, which the billionaire would serve as “Secretary of Cost-Cutting” – a government agency that doesn’t exist yet…

Musk would basically take his skills as a successful manager – in which he slashed 80% of the Twitter workforce a few years ago to make the ‘free speech’ social media platform operate more efficiently. In August, Musk said the goal of DOGE was to cut wasteful spending by the federal government and roll back massive regulations that stifle the economy. Musk recently said DOGE could identify “at least $2 trillion in cuts” as part of a formal review of federal agencies. This would also mean tens of thousands of job cuts—if not more—across the federal government. Just imagine if Trump wins, Musk and Ron Paul would wind down unneeded federal agencies like a scene from Argentina’s Javier Milei.

You hear that, Libertarian… Deal of a lifetime. And Libertarians, even Trump’s VP JD Vance, is coming around to Ron Paul’s argument on the Federal Reserve. Ron Paul had fun on X in the overnight hours. Delayed over the years … but now entirely possible. For decades, Ron Paul has proposed a smaller government by eliminating several wasteful federal agencies, ending foreign wars, eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends, eliminating the estate tax, and—everyone’s favorite—abolishing the Federal Reserve. This has become true over the years. The only problem is when federal government spending accounts for 22.7% of the US GDP (in fiscal year 2023), reducing this spending could spark a recession. However, if Trump wins, DOGE could be messaged to the American people as a way to curb sky-high inflation sparked by disastrous ‘Bidenomics.’

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“..Hispanics are no longer a Democrat bloc, that they have become free agent voters..”

• House Speaker ‘Really Bullish’ Washington Will Be All-GOP Town In January (JTN)

House Speaker Mike Johnson told Just the News on Thursday he is increasingly confident that Republicans will sweep control of Congress and the White House in next Tuesday’s election, saying Hispanics, Blacks, Jews, union workers and other Democrat-leaning constituencies are switching parties over frustration the country is moving in the wrong direction. “I feel really bullish,” Johnson said in a wide-ranging interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast when asked about the GOP’s chances for a clean sweep of Washington D.C. “….I believe we’re going to win unified government with Republicans back in the White House and controlling the Senate, and we grow the House majority.” Johnson said the election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris presented a rare moment in U.S. history where voters could choose between two White House holders – a former president and a current vice president – based on their records and not just their promises.

“I genuinely believe we’re going to have an historic demographic shift in this election,” he said. “I think when all the analysis is done on the other side of this, they will see that we had a record number of Hispanic and Latino voters, for example, coming into the Republican Party, a record number of Black and African-American voters, Jewish voters, union workers. I mean, people who have not traditionally been in our camp are coming now. “And the reason is because they’re desperate for change, and they know the unique thing about this presidential contest is that both of these persons have had an administration. This isn’t theoretical…. They know what life is like under Harris and Biden, and they know what it was like under Trump, and I think that has a big effect across the board and all the way down the ballot,” he said.

Johnson’s comments follow several recent polls noting demographic shifts toward Trump by several Democratic constituencies even as Harris holds a commanding leading with female voters. The Speaker also reacted to comments the new CEO of the Spanish-language TV network Univision, Daniel Alegre, made on the John Solomon Reports podcast on Wednesday that Hispanics are no longer a Democrat bloc, that they have become free agent voters driven by issues and are shifting this election toward Trump and the GOP.

“Hispanic and Latino voters are just like everybody else, and they they’re so fed up and fired up about the cost of living and rising crime rates in all their communities.,” Johnson said, adding that border security has become another compelling concern for Latino voters. “And then also, on top of that, remember that Hispanic and Latino voters are very family oriented,” he added. “Many of them have deep religious traditions and beliefs, and they see the Democratic Party abandoning all of these sort of foundational principles. And they’ve had enough, and I think they have the same frustration everybody else does. I think that’s why they’re coming into our camp.”

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” I just think there’s almost unlimited potential in front of us, and we’ve got to seize that moment..”

• House Speaker Plan: Moving Bureaucrats From DC To Reshape Government (JTN)

House Speaker Mike Johnson says Republicans have an ambitious plan to reshape and shrink federal government if they win the election. That vision includes a plan to deport tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats from Washington and relocate them to middle America. In a wide-ranging interview this week with Just the News, Johnson said he and other GOP leaders wants to move federal agency offices, personnel and assets from the nation’s capital to bring them closer to the people they serve and farther from the monied special interests that often hijack policy and spending. “There’s a lot of talk about uprooting, you know, these entrenched bureaucracies and putting them out elsewhere around the country,” Johnson told the John Solomon Reports podcast.

He explained such a re-invention of the monstrous federal bureaucracy with more than 2 million federal workers and contractors would integrate with former President Donald Trump’s plan to name billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to lead a government efficiency office and also tie to fiscal conservatives’ vision to eliminate federal bureaucracies and send monies to the states in the form of block grants. The Louisiana Republican said the deportation of Washington bureaucrats would also create a natural shrinkage in the size and cost of government, “That accomplishes a lot of important goals but the first would be that you don’t have all these career civil service law protected bureaucrats,” he said. “Some of them have been camped out of these agencies for decades. They’re nameless, faceless. We don’t know who to hold accountable,” he said.

Johnson continued, saying “The idea is, if you move the agency to, you know, northern Kansas or southwest New Mexico, or wherever it is around the country, then some of the swamp dwellers they will not desire to follow the job to the new, less desirable location,” he added. “They love the swamp. You know they want to stay. They’ll turn them into lobbyist or something to stay in D.C.” The mass transfer and departure of bureaucrats then leads to a “business reorganization proposition” for federal government, he said. “You’ve got agencies that you can scale down because you have empty cubicles and … almost all the agencies are bloated and inefficient,” he said. “So you can scale that down. And then in the cubicles that you do need to fill, we’ve had America First Policy Institute and some of our other think tanks that have been working to develop a notebook full of highly qualified, previously vetted, limited government conservatives who have expertise in these areas.”

Johnson’s comments were the most sweeping he’s made about a congressional vision for shrinking the budget and reshaping the budget. He said the process would take a “blowtorch” to the regulatory state and align government agencies in the aftermath of a historic Supreme Court ruling this summer that reversed a decades old “Chevron doctrine.” Under the new ruling, federal bureaucrats can’t make up or interpret their own regulations and simply must enforce those authorized by Congress. “We have a once in a lifetime, yeah, once in a lifetime opportunity to really claw back article one authority to the legislative branch under the Constitution and have an administration that is in tune with that whole agenda. So look, I just think there’s almost unlimited potential in front of us, and we’ve got to seize that moment,” Johnson said.

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“We’ve done something that’s unprecedented, and we’ve had fun, but now we have to get, hopefully, to work.”

• Candidates’ Final Tours: A Flustered Harris, And A Joyful Trump (Whedon)

With the election just days away, both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are in the final stretch of their campaign tours, but the tones of each couldn’t contrast more, with Trump on offense and on message and Harris playing defense against the political far-left at her own rallies. Though Harris initially attempted to portray her campaign as one of “joy”, Trump has taken on an almost jovial tone as polling and betting odds increasingly paint him as the favorite. His recent Madison Square Garden rally, moreover, was an offensive play in the heart of Democratic territory and saw tens of thousands of people gather in the Big Apple for what he later deemed a “love fest.” Polling data shows a tight contest, with Trump holding a 0.3% lead in the RealClearPolitics average. That outlet currently projects Trump to win 287 electoral votes to Harris’s 251. Polymarket betting odds also favor Trump to win with a 61.1% chance to Harris’s 39.0%.

Though the race remains in tossup territory, the Trump campaign is quite optimistic. Campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio, this week, released a memo highlighting the difference in polling between this election and 2020. The key point was that, in every swing state, Trump is polling better than in 2020 by a significant margin. “I point this out NOT to stoke overconfidence or complacency, but to illustrate just how close this election is and that victory is within our reach,” he wrote. “It is crucial we do not get distracted by the media noise and remain focused on our closing message, persuading the few remaining undecided voters and turning out our base.” The Trump campaign appears to have taken his words to heart. Kicking off the week with his blowout rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump proceeded to hold event after event all across all the key battlegrounds, often doing two rallies per day.

Election weekend will see him go beyond that and hold three rallies each on Saturday and Sunday, with four more scheduled for Monday. While two are set for North Carolina, Trump plans to appear in Salem, Va., as the Old Dominion appears competitive. His Saturday events come off of Friday rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin. His Sunday will feature rallies in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia while his Monday will see him hold four more, two in Pennsylvania and one each in North Carolina and Michigan. Trump opened his Michigan rally, by applauding the crowd sizes and positive energy of his events, including stunts such as driving a garbage truck after President Biden called his supporters “garbage.” “They’ll never be anything like what we’ve done,” he said of Democratic rallies. “We’ve done something that’s unprecedented, and we’ve had fun, but now we have to get, hopefully, to work.”

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“It’s the people who define us by votes who are garbage, not the other way around.”

• People Aren’t Garbage. Partisan Politics Is (Matt Taibbi)

The cycle was the usual nonsense. At a Donald Trump rally in Manhattan a comic called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” Joe Biden emerged from his crypt to croak, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” The Internet exploded. Reporters were dispatched around the country to gauge how much more pissed off everyone was now. ABC’s take interviewing Harris supporters in Pennsylvania was, “Voters view one another across partisan divide with increasing animosity.” They quoted humans-in-the-street, who all felt strongly. “I would say that some of them are garbage,” said Samantha Leister, 32, while Shawn Vanderheyden, 44, opined, “I just think they are uneducated, and they believe all the lies.” ABC summed up the cultural divide: “Interviews with voters in battleground states reveal that it’s only growing deeper and more insurmountable.”

Surely people know it, but this is all a trick. First, campaign writers only talk to people at campaign events, so the pool of quotes is automatically pared to holders of Very Strong Political Opinions. Second, the odd “Who cares?” answer is instinctively culled by campaign writers as commercially/politically unhelpful. Non-voters or even just people who care more about other things than Harris/Trump — UFOs, knitting, the girl in biology class — ruin the suspension of disbelief. You end up reading copy that hugely over-represents that strange subset of people who define themselves by their votes. When I was first sent to cover campaigns in 2004, a year in which 40% of eligible voters didn’t bother, I was troubled by the absence of non-voters in coverage.

A Rolling Stone editor with whom I rarely worked rolled eyes and said, “We don’t cover them because they’re not part of the fucking story,” which I instantly knew wasn’t true, but I was new and to my shame I didn’t say anything. The numbers of non-voters exposed how inconsequential presidential politics was for most people. It measured the number of people left behind or out, and leaving the non-enthused out of the shot was journalism’s way of covering the holes in the charade. Two years later I was embedded with a group of Oklahoma reservists sent to work as MPs in Iraq. Sgt. Stephen Wilkerson was the team commander. He wore a tattoo on his foot with an arrow pointing to his big toe that read, TAG GOES HERE. His nickname was “Stretch-Nuts” because it was said he could balance a Heineken bottle on his ball-skin. On my first day he asked what I do. I cover presidential elections, I said. He made a jerk-off gesture. That was the last mention of politics on the trip.

In the roughly twenty years since the act of not voting, or even just not really really caring about presidential politics, has been villainized. Now the emotionally healthy person, the one who has a life and isn’t consumed with fears about the Next Hitler, is assumed to harbor secret sympathies, as bad as the worst MAGAT. This is different from the old scam. Now the person who shrugs and says “Who cares?” is called a liar. Everyone must care the way they do, and if you don’t care in that right way — every waking minute, with chewed nails and a carefully weeded social circle to match the correct vote and attitude set — you’re garbage. Many of us have seen in recent years what this hounding has done even to friends or relatives, turning them to Flatland characters, two-dimensional nerve cases scanning everyone for signs of unsuitability. Whatever happens next week, I don’t ever want to be that. It’s the people who define us by votes who are garbage, not the other way around.

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“In 2014, one wind project was canceled. Since then, the total number has grown to 464 wind projects shot down, as well as 281 solar projects.”

• Trump, Vance Take Aim At Renewable Energy, Many Communities Already Did (JTN)

While it’s been difficult for voters to determine exactly where Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris truly stands on energy, former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, each discussed their views at length on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. Vance, who appeared on the podcast Thursday, spent several minutes discussing energy with host Joe Rogan. Vance said he and his wife took a road trip through Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas and for miles all they could see were wind farms. “This is beautiful American countryside that used to be green rolling hills, and now you have these disgusting, dystopian wind turbines. I’m sorry. They are ugly. I will die on this hill. They’re ugly. I don’t want them in American society,” Vance said. The wind energy industry is running up against more and more opposition. Much of it comes from grassroots efforts at the local level.

Energy watchdog Robert Bryce maintains a database of renewable energy projects that have been scrapped, most often because of community opposition. In 2014, one wind project was canceled. Since then, the total number has grown to 464 wind projects shot down, as well as 281 solar projects. The wind industry doesn’t appear to believe these community concerns are valid. The Associated Press reported on comments wind energy lobbyists made at a conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey Tuesday, claiming that concerns about wind projects are driven by “misinformation.” The industry is vowing to fight against it. Paulina O’Connor, executive director of the New Jersey Offshore Wind Alliance, told the Associated Press that she has trouble predicting “what crazy thing they’re [wind energy opponents] going to come next.” Bryce told Just the News that, while lobbyists the Associated Press quoted are dismissive of communities’ concerns, developers are going to find it harder and harder to get a welcoming response.

“The public acceptance of wind energy is exhausted. People don’t want to live near these massive turbines, and they are expressing that in many [places] across the country, from Maine to Hawaii,” Bryce said. Among the concerns that wind lobbyists described as “misinformation” was the claims that offshore wind is killing whales. During his appearance on the Rogan podcast, Trump commented on these concerns. “I wanna be a whale psychiatrist. It drives the whales fricking crazy. And something happens with them, but for whatever reason, they’re getting washed up onshore and you know, they’re ignored by these environmentalists. But they don’t talk about it.” Trump said. The Associated Press, which has received millions of dollars from political advocacy groups that promote the wind and solar industry, reported that these claims are “unsubstantiated” based on the fact that federal agencies tasked with carrying out the Biden-Harris goal of building 30 gigawatts of offshore wind have denied any connections between offshore wind and whale deaths.

While it’s true that wind turbines aren’t directly killing whales, whale advocates argue that the noise of the construction causes harm that results in the animals swimming into vessel traffic. Robert Rand, founder of the acoustics consultancy company Rand Acoustics, has surveyed noise levels from pile driving and sonar survey vessels. Both studies found that the incidental harassment authorizations — permits that offshore wind developers are required to obtain to conduct activities that may adversely affect marine animals — don’t impose sufficient mitigation requirements to protect marine animals. Rutgers professor Apostolos Gerasoulis performed a statistical analysis and found a strong correlation between where whales are dying and offshore wind development.

Besides growing opposition to offshore wind, especially after a blade broke off a wind turbine near Nantucket and scattered debris across multiple beaches, the offshore wind industry is struggling financially. An offshore lease sale in the Gulf of Maine netted only 4 bidders on 439,096 acres that were offered, and the bids came in at $50 per acre. A 2022 auction for a lease area off the coast of New York and New Jersey sold 6 leases on 488,000 acres for $8,955 per acre. The sale may be the last for at least a year, as a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act prohibits offshore wind lease sales without offering up oil and gas lease sales. The Department of Interior’s five-year offshore oil and gas lease shale program offers the fewest leases in the program’s history.

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“..leftist major media outlets are setting America up for post-election social unrest by perpetuating a fiction that the race is a close one.”

Be that as it may, there have been some major shifts at Polymarket. Overnight, Trump has fallen from 67% to 55%. Wisconsin and Michigan are now Harris. The House has gone Democrat.

• Polymarket’s Trump-Bullish Whale: “Absolutely No Political Agenda” (ZH)

While still guarding his anonymity, the mysterious man who’s bet more than $30 million on a Trump election victory via the Polymarket prediction marketplace has come forward to assert that his wagers aren’t intended to sway the election, but simply to profit from an outcome he’s highly confident in. “My intent is just making money,” said the man who describes himself as a Frenchman and former US resident who was a trader for American banks. In an exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal via Zoom, he used the pseudonym “Théo,” saying he wanted to remain anonymous out of a desire to conceal the extent of his assets from his children and friends. The Journal said he was “sport[ing] a short, neatly trimmed beard” and spoke English with a small accent. Here’s how the Journal described the precipitation of the interview, and the paper’s process to ensure it wasn’t talking to an imposter:

“Théo emailed the Journal after the publication of an Oct. 18 article about his wagers. To prove that he was behind the Polymarket wagers, the Journal asked him to place a bet on whether Taylor Swift would announce that she is pregnant in 2024—one of the many small, nonpolitical wagers available on the platform. Minutes later, Polymarket’s website showed that one of the four accounts, Theo4, had placed a small bet on Swift’s pregnancy. ” In that original Oct. 18 article, the Journal gave some credit to the idea that the concentrated bets may represent some form of intentional narrative-control scheme meant to benefit Trump. Théo emailed the Journal to refute that theory, writing, “I have absolutely no political agenda.” In his subsequent interview, Théo told the Journal he’s a veteran trader with a history of risking tens of millions of dollars when he discovers a high-confidence trade — and said that’s what he sees in the chance to wager on a Trump victory.

When news broke of the whale’s huge wagers on Trump, Polymarket engaged outside experts to scrutinize transactions in presidential election betting, an unnamed source told the Journal at the time. Last week, Polymarket said it had contacted the whale and confirmed it was a French citizen with an extensive financial services and trading background. “Based on the investigation, we understand that this individual is taking a directional position based on personal views of the election,” the firm said. Théo said his conviction on a Trump victory rests on pollsters’ failure to capture the full extent of Trump’s support in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, and his belief that the “shy Trump voter effect” still endures in 2024. “I know a lot of Americans who would vote for Trump without telling you that,” he said, while also scoffing at the possibility that pollsters have improved their methodologies this time around. Having been previously accused of trying to shape the election, Théo dished out an accusation of his own, saying leftist major media outlets are setting America up for post-election social unrest by perpetuating a fiction that the race is a close one.

Théo thinks Trump is poised to rout Harris, which is why he has more than $30 million on Trump reaching 270 electoral votes, with the potential to receive $80 million if he’s right. He says his $30 million on Trump represents most of his liquid assets. Théo also has bets on a Trump popular-vote victory, along with bets on various swing-state wins. He also gave some insights into how he’s been trading: He started quietly in August by betting several million dollars on Trump, using an account with the username Fredi9999. At the time, Trump and Harris had roughly even chances on Polymarket. Théo spread out his wagers over multiple days and weeks to avoid causing a price spike. Still, as his bets grew, Théo noticed other traders were backing away from quoting prices when Fredi9999 was buying. That made it harder for Théo to get attractive prices. He created the other three accounts in September and October to obscure his purchasing, Théo said.

Single-handedly accounting for 25% of the contracts on a Trump electoral college win and 40% of the bids on a popular vote victory, Théo would have a hard time pulling money off the table without pushing the value of his contracts down. Speaking of which, the electoral college version of a Trump win peaked on Wednesday at 76 cents (with a dollar payoff if Trump wins). However they’ve taken a big dive since — plunging to 57.5 cents as this is written in the wee hours of Saturday morning. [..] If you’re itching to buy the dip, note that Americans are officially barred from Polymarket. You can thank your all-powerful, all-knowing, Constitution-violating federal government for protecting you from yourself: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined the platform in 2022 for allegedly providing illegal trading services, prompting Polymarket to bar Americans going forward.

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“JD Vance as dictator for life? Conservatives banning contraception? Elon Musk as an immortal techno god who spies on the masses using X and AI?”

• Leftists Predict Hysterical Dystopian Future (ZH)

The secret to understanding the average progressive mind is to first realize that everything they do revolves around a deeply ingrained fantasy world in which they are rebels; righteous underdogs fighting against “the system” or “the patriarchy.” Leftists cannot function within their collectivist ideology without first creating a fascist bogeyman to revolt against. If they were to ever realize that they are, in fact, the establishment and the authoritarians, their entire world view would collapse. This is why you will continue to see content like the election propaganda video below, no matter how ridiculous the premise might be. Leftist activists create these narratives, not because they are necessarily convincing to most people, but because they need to convince themselves that they are still the good guys.

JD Vance as dictator for life? Conservatives banning contraception? Elon Musk as an immortal techno god who spies on the masses using X and AI? Global warming destroying the planet and creating a Mad Max future in which the homeless are forced into concentration camps? The only thing missing is the forced birthing ceremonies from The Handmaid’s Tale. The video credits cite a handful of progressive NGOs as references for donations (including Vote.org) but little on who specifically made it. The relevant issue is the insight this gives into the insanity of left activists. They cling to so many assumptions they have been proven wrong about time after time (global warming), and they also imagine a world in which conservatives are the elites searching for immortality. They seem to be projecting the habits and hobbies of the very globalists that fund leftist groups today.

One could argue that perhaps this is gaslighting – They’re accusing conservatives of scheming to rule the world when they are the people that actually want control. That could be, but the conspiracy theories surrounding “Project 2025” suggest a Q-Anon level of delusion going on that feeds directly into bizarre narratives like those in the video. Leftists have to believe they’re fighting the good fight, even though they’re actually useful idiots for the establishment. This desperate need to take on the role of “freedom fighter” doesn’t mesh very well with reality. Keep in mind, for nearly two decades progressives have enjoyed expanding political and social power, with nearly every western government, every major NGO, every corporation, every legacy media outlet and every Big Tech platform dominated by woke ideology. From ESG to DEI to LGBTQ+ and beyond, Americans and much of the west have been endlessly bombarded from every angle by leftist propaganda.

Their war on conservative principles and individual freedom nearly came to a crescendo during the covid pandemic when they claimed the power to take away people’s access to the economy if they refused to accept an experimental vaccine and follow the mandates to the letter. Surveys showed a disturbing number of Democrats supported the outright destruction of constitutional freedoms in the name of forcing people to adhere to medical mandates based entirely on lies. Leftists also supported the widespread censorship of conservative voices on everything from the covid vaccine, to the lockdowns, to climate change, to Hunter Biden’s laptop. This censorship was spearheaded by the Biden Administration acting in violation of the constitution as they worked closely with Big Tech companies to shut down dissent. They aren’t fighting “the man”, they are the man. Ridiculous AI generated political videos like the one above are not going to change that.

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“There is optimism in Zelensky’s office that he could forge a personal bond with Trump..”

• Kiev Officials ‘Ready’ For Potential Trump Presidency – WaPo (RT)

Officials in Kiev reject the notion that an election victory for Donald Trump would spell disaster for Ukraine, despite his criticisms of US aid to Kiev and pledges to quickly end the conflict with Moscow, the Washington Post reported on Friday. Two unnamed members of Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s team told the paper that the Republican presidential candidate’s “negative” messaging on Ukraine was “just campaign rhetoric” that will not necessarily correlate with his actions if he wins the election on November 5. There is a belief in the Kiev government that Trump would not want to look weak on the global stage by turning his back on Ukraine and, as a result, might make more decisive moves to support Kiev, WaPo said.

“With Russia advancing on the battlefield for the past year,” the Ukrainian officials believe that the status quo, which is likely to be maintained if Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris prevails in the race for the White House, is “not working,” the report read. Because of this, they suggested that “a drastic change” in US policy towards Ukraine could actually “be good” for Kiev. There is optimism in Zelensky’s office that he could forge a personal bond with Trump and eventually turn him into a supporter of Kiev, WaPo said. However, some Ukrainian officials, who talked to the paper, acknowledged that there is a “higher potential for a downside” if Trump wins a second term, and expressed concern that he would pressure Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia in exchange for peace.

Last month, Trump said on the PBD Podcast that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine was “a loser” and that Zelensky “should never have let that war start.” He described the Ukrainian leader as “one of the greatest salesmen I have ever seen,” referring to his ability to persuade the Biden administration to provide him with more military aid every time he comes to Washington. The Republican presidential candidate also reiterated his claim that he “will settle the Russia-Ukraine [conflict], while I am president-elect,” but did not reveal how he might achieve this. Back in June, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commented on media reports of that Trump’s team was developing a roadmap for settling the Ukraine conflict, and stressed that “the value of any plan lies in the details and whether it takes into account the situation on the battlefield.” Peskov reiterated that Moscow remains ready for negotiations, but only if Ukraine recognises the realities on the ground.

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“.. the rules-based order is actually what that the West believes “is right”, adding that “once you are out of this order, you’re a perpetrator.”

• West’s Rules-Based Order To Collapse Soon – Medvedev

The so-called rules-based order imposed by the US and its allies on the global scene is an unstable structure, which is about to fall apart, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said in an exclusive interview with RT. Creating crises such as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in various places is how the US is trying to rule the world, Medvedev, who now serves as the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, told the broadcaster on Saturday. “So, the more crises they create, the better, they think, the situation is for America… It makes money from weapons, supplies, and by allocating money to its defense industry,” he said. “The Americans are getting what they want at the price of more blood and casualties. This is why the Americans are engaging in feeding the war. But that system is coming to an end,” the former president warned.

The authorities in Washington “feel the world is falling out from under their feet and they are resisting it in every way possible,” he said.This is why the Americans see BRICS and other unions currently being created around the globe, in which the US has no say, as “hostile,” Medvedev explained. Washington and its allies accuse the members of those groups of “violating the rules-based order,” but, at same time, cannot explain what this order is,” he said. “I have carefully picked through the legal text and studied it: it is incomprehensible. It is not clear what the order is and who approved it. It is really just an idea of the US and its allies, while mostly in NATO, of how best to do business in the world,” the former president stressed. According to Medvedev, the rules-based order is actually what that the West believes “is right”, adding that “once you are out of this order, you’re a perpetrator.”

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“Western media reported that “Western pollsters” claimed that there were voting irregularities. What were Western pollsters doing in Georgia in the first place?”

• West Sees Red Over Failed Second Color Revolution In Georgia (SCF)

The United States and European Union are threatening consequences for Georgia after its citizens voted “the wrong way” – for peaceful relations with Russia and traditional moral values. Farcically, this is while the U.S. heads into presidential elections that are mired in chaos and recriminations over vote rigging and buying of votes by oligarchs and big businesses. Welcome to Western-style democracy where if you vote the way the powers-that-be want, it’s a fair election. If you vote the wrong way, it’s a rigged, flawed result that should be ignored or, worse, overturned. Such was the heated reaction from Western states to the electoral victory of the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party last weekend in the South Caucasus nation. The party campaigned on a strong, clear platform for pursuing peaceful neighborly relations with Russia.

GD also declared support for traditional social and moral values, rejecting the Western pseudo-liberal agenda of promoting gender-bender LGBTQ+ identities, which was espoused by the Western-backed Georgian opposition parties. At the end of the day, Georgian Dream won a stunning victory, taking nearly 54 percent of the vote, translating into obtaining 90 out of a total of 150 parliamentary seats. Four opposition parties, which touted closer integration ties with NATO and the EU and acclaiming LGBTQ+ rights, won less than 38 percent of the vote. The Georgian people are to be commended for asserting their democratic rights in the face of massive Western interference in the election. Western money and NGOs amplified the opposition parties. If they had won, the new pro-Western administration would have turned Georgia into a second war front against Russia in conjunction with the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime.

Georgian and Ukraine have been at the center of the Western policy of expanding NATO around Russia’s borders. Both countries were declared future members of the military bloc as far back as 2008, although NATO membership is a red line for Russia. Fortunately, Georgian voters were aware of the geopolitical stakes and rallied to the cause of prioritizing peaceful regional relations and rejecting the notional security privileges of NATO. Western recriminations were fast and furious after the result. Western media reported that “Western pollsters” claimed that there were voting irregularities. What were Western pollsters doing in Georgia in the first place? Such entities sound more like a plant to stir post-election trouble.

As it turns out, there were indeed incidents of vote buying, ballot stuffing, and intimidation at polling stations. But videos showed that the incidents were agitprops organized by the Western-sponsored opposition parties. However, thankfully, such malfeasance was relatively minor and did not invalidate the overall final result. Georgia’s Central Election Committee declared the process to be free and fair. The authorized election invigilating body has given its verdict, and that should be the end of it.

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“As a result of having communicated with Yulia Skripal I was interviewed by the police and my statement recorded.”

• Novichok: UK Government Sedated The Skripals To Stop Them Talking (Helmer)

The British Government was exposed in the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry this week as keeping Sergei and Yulia Skripal unconscious to silence them. That was six years ago, when they were in Salisbury District Hospital in March 2018. Now, prevented from testifying in public at the public inquiry under way in London, they are still incommunicado, either in prison or dead. The evidence revealed in the published witness statements and transcript of testimony in four days of hearings at the Sturgess Inquiry October 28-31 shows that British Government officials have lied in public and lied on oath in the courts to conceal what they have been doing to accuse Russia of Novichok poisonings in the Salisbury area in 2018. The Inquiry records show that the chairman and judge, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley), and the lawyers working for him are actively working to protect the lies and prevent contradicting evidence from becoming public. .

Surprise testimony by Dr Stephen Cockroft, the doctor who cared for Sergei and Yulia Skripal on their admission to Salisbury District Hospital (SDH) on March 4, 2018, has revealed that the British Government kept them heavily sedated in order to tell the courts and media that they were unconscious and unresponsive when they had revived. Government officials ordered the hospital to punish Cockroft from talking directly to Yulia Skripal when she came out of her coma on March 8, 2018. Cockroft’s evidence of March 8, 2018, directly contradicts the evidence given on oath in the High Court in London on March 20-22, 2018, by state officials and an SDH “treating consultant” – the name was kept secret in the published court report — that “Mr Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent. Ms Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent. Mr Skripal is unable to communicate in any way. Ms Skripal is unable to communicate in any meaningful way.”

Cockroft’s disclosures also contradict the script which Yulia Skripal read out at a MI6-supervised and Reuters-filmed appearance for two minutes at a US bomber base in the UK in May of 2018. Skripal claimed then “after 20 days in a coma I woke to the news that we had both been poisoned.” In fact, Yulia woke from her coma after four (4) days. On July 18, 2024, Cockroft told the Inquiry which questioned him for a second witness statement: “An untoward event took place on Thursday 8 March 2018. A colleague (Dr James Haslam) had ordered all sedation to be discontinued temporarily to Yulia Skripal. This is quite a common practice on Intensive Care Units (ICU) and we refer to it as a ‘sedation hold’ and would normally be planned and discussed with the team. Unfortunately, having ordered the sedation hold, Dr Haslam left the ICU without advising me. I was present on the ICU treating another patient. As a consequence, Yulia Skripal regained consciousness very quickly and was confused, frightened, trying to get out of bed and was pulling at her various vascular access lines and breathing tube.

Cockroft then revealed that because the sedation had been stopped and Yulia was no longer comatose, Cockroft was punished by Blanshard, the hospital’s chief doctor. “I tried to feedback my concerns to Dr Haslam, but he was of the opinion that nothing untoward had occurred, but when these events were reported back to the Medical Director (Christine Blanshard) she had a very different opinion and I was summoned to a meeting with her on Monday 12 March to discuss my management of the incident. There is no formal record of that meeting [sic], however I was suspended from working on the ICU with immediate effect until Yulia and Sergei had either been discharged or died. Apparently by having had a conversation with Yulia Skripal I had been unprofessional and should have left such a conversation to the security services. I was warned by Dr Blanshard that I should not discuss any aspect of the poisonings with colleagues or other individuals and advised that any such discussion would be treated as serious misconduct. As a result of having communicated with Yulia Skripal I was interviewed by the police and my statement recorded.”

The Salisbury hospital official who collaborated with government officials and police to conceal the condition of the Skripals in hospital; to threaten and sanction the medical staff; and to intervene in the treatment of the Skripals, was the SDH medical director, Dr Christine Blanshard. By enforcing sedation on the two patients for the government’s political purpose, without their consent when they were conscious, out of coma, and capable of communicating, Blanshard violated her Hippocratic Oath.

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“..the strongest military alliance in human history had just launched its first war in North Africa since France was defeated in Algeria in 1962..”

• Brutally Murdered 13 Years Ago, Gaddafi Is Only Growing More Beloved (Fetouri)

October marked 13 years since Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was brutally murdered by a NATO-supported mob of rebels in circumstances still buried under a barrage of deliberate disinformation. Yet 13 years on, Gaddafi is probably the most popular figure in the North African country. Is it just nostalgia that makes the general public yearn for a man who has long been dead, or is there something else that goes beyond mere nostalgia as a human emotion? On September 23, 2009, in his first and only speech before the United Nations General Assembly, Muammar Gaddafi described the UN Security Council as council of “horror.” He explained that the council, by the UN charter, is responsible for peace in the world but has only brought “more wars and sanctions.” What he did not know at the time was that the same UN organ would, less than two years later, authorize his removal and ultimately his murder by adopting resolution 1973, which gave the green light to all UN member states to interfere in Libya as long they notified the UN Secretary General of their intention to do so.

Resolution 1973, adopted on March 17, 2011, was the UNSC response to public demonstrations that engulfed parts of Libya in the previous month, in which people demanded better living conditions, housing, and jobs. By the time the issue was deliberated at the UN, what had been peaceful and legitimate public demonstrations had turned into an armed revolt led by various stakeholders, including Islamists and former terrorists, against the legitimate government. The wave of public discontent in Libya was part of wider public awakenings that began in neighboring Tunisia before moving to Egypt. In both countries, the West attempted to save President Ben Ali in Tunisia and later his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, but failed. There were no calls for military intervention to “protect” civilians in either country. With Libya, it was a completely different matter.

Faced with armed groups seeking to destabilize the country, the Gaddafi government responded, just like any other respected government would do, by using force against the armed rebellion. Under Gaddafi, Libya had seen similar events in the previous four decades, where Western-supported attempts were made not only to kill Gaddafi but also to bring about regime change by force. The government used force to contain the demonstration, but specifically targeting the armed groups that had sprung up among the peaceful demonstrators. In this chaos, many innocent people were killed and wounded, but nowhere near the inflated figures reported in Western media and publically talked about by Western politicians in their quest to widen the rift between the Libyan authorities and its citizens and to sow discord among the Libyans who were divided between supporters of Gaddafi and supporters of what became known as the February 17 Revolution.

William Hague, the UK’s foreign minister at the time, for example, told the world’s media that Gaddafi had already fled the country and was on his way to Venezuela, when in fact Gaddafi never left Tripoli – so Hague misled public opinion, which further inflamed the situation. Under pressure from veto-wielding permanent superpower members, the UNSC passed resolution 1973 under the pretext of the ‘Right to Protect’ (R2P) doctrine that, controversially, allows the UN to use military force to protect civilians when their government fails to do so. Paragraph 4 of the resolution called on all world countries to “take all necessary measures” to protect civilians in Libya, impose a no fly zone, and urged all UN member states to tighten the embargo already imposed on the country by UNSC resolution 1970, passed on February 26, 2011, referring the situation in Libya to the International Criminal Court (ICC), to investigate the alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly being committed on a large scale in Libya on the orders of Gaddafi himself, who was one of three officials indicated by the court.

Resolution 1970 was not passed based on concrete independent investigative reports of facts but, mainly, based on biased media reports. Neither the UN nor any of its relevant institutions investigated events on the ground to be able to lay blame, and the first official UN mission arrived in Libya in March and reported to the UNSC in April 2011. This means the UNSC adopted its two resolutions, 1970 and 1973, based on unverified media reports, unreliable witness statements and biased civil organizations accounts. By the time the UNSC adopted resolution 1973, Libya was already in a full-swing civil war between the armed rebels and government forces that, in being dehumanized by biased Western media, were called “Gaddafi brigades.” The rebels were actually a mix of terror organizations and locals who chose to fight the government.

They included groups such as Al-Qaeda, Ansar Al-Sharia, Al-Qa’ida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and remnants of other groups and Afghan war veterans who infiltrated the country. By mid-March 2011, Libya was consumed by internal violent strife, its government boycotted by most countries, its voice drowned under the barrage of media lies and fake news, its officials banned from travel, and its leader being hunted day and night. The rebels fighting the government were being supplied, financed, armed, trained, and directed by the West and several Arab countries such as Qatar, Jordan, and United Arab Emirates. The stage was set for NATO to take over the military intervention. In fact, France, the US, and UK had already started bombing Libya by launching the first wave of missile strikes on Libyan air defense sites and radars in order to prepare the ground for imposing a no-fly zone. Even civil security forces, manning checkpoints around Tripoli, were bombed.

By the end of March 2011, Libya has become a “theatre of operations” and NATO launched “Operation Unified Protector” with an around-the-clock bombardment. That meant that the strongest military alliance in human history had just launched its first war in North Africa since France was defeated in Algeria in 1962. By the end of its operation, NATO had killed hundreds of Libyan women and children, destroyed private properties and infrastructure, all in the name of reinforcing international law and protecting civilian while the real agenda was far more sinister. The scenes of chaos, destruction, displacements, and killings continued from March to October, in which the Libyan army managed to hold back the rebels on the ground while facing NATO air bombardments. On October 20, 2011, Gaddafi was murdered in gruesome scenes and his body, alongside the bodies of his son and his defense minister, displayed for the horrified public to see.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Rogan Fetterman

 

 

Eva
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852419256232636518

 

 

Dog fight

 

 

Dog kitten
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852392683748372979

 

 

Awesome

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle October 29 2024

Oct 292024
 
 October 29, 2024  Posted by at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  82 Responses »


Jules Adler Panorama de Paris vu du Sacré Coeur 1935

 

• Will Donald Trump Get His Revenge? (Susan Quinn)
• Leftists Are Terrified About What Will Happen To Them If Trump Wins (ZH)
• Worst. Nazi. Rally. Ever. (Margolis)
• Kamala Is Just A Vessel; We Are Running Against Something Far Bigger (MN)
• Speaking of Abortion (James Howard Kunstler)
• Trump’s 19th-Century Solution to Fiscal Disaster (David Stockman)
• Trump Campaign Slams Harris Over Beyonce ‘Lies’ (RT)
• Trump To Make Ukraine The EU’s Problem – FT (RT)
• I Don’t Want War With Russia – Vance (RT)
• University Professors Approaching Near Unanimity as a Democratic Lock (Turley)
• Bezos Explains Why WaPo Dropped Presidential Endorsements (RT)
• Steve Bannon To Be Released From Prison One Week Ahead Of Election (JTN)
• How America Was Destroyed (Paul Craig Roberts)
• The Enormous Constraints Faced By Netanyahu (Juan Cole)
• BRICS Make History – Can They Keep the Momentum? (Pepe Escobar)
• Slovak PM Fico Warns Of Continued Attempts On His Life (RT)
• Volkswagen Planning Mass Layoffs – Workers’ Council Chief (RT)

 

 

 

 

ABC

MSG


https://twitter.com/i/status/1850691657303519451
https://twitter.com/i/status/1850654136293024210
https://twitter.com/i/status/1850744962377510999

Elon

Stossel

 

 

 

 

Trump is not looking for revenge. He and his X-men team have bigger fish to fry. Trump’s “revenge” will be that what happened to him since 2015 -lawfare- can never happen again.

“…the changes he will make will be in the way government operates, not mere petty payback to individual miscreants…”

• Will Donald Trump Get His Revenge? (Susan Quinn)

There’s almost nothing that Donald Trump likes better than throwing his adversaries off their game; he likes to be unpredictable, confusing and in charge. It gives him an edge in achieving his goals. He’s kept his adversaries guessing to the extent that he will pay them back for their lawfare and deep-state machinations, and not surprisingly, they expect the worst. Yet he has said repeatedly that victory in the election will be his revenge. They don’t know what to make of it. A Trump senior advisor made the following observation: “President Trump has made clear that success will be the best revenge,’ Trump senior adviser Brian Hughes said. ‘When others have weaponized government and legal institutions against him for political interference, he will return these institutions to their constitutional purpose of protecting Americans’ liberty and creating a safe and prosperous nation again.

But since the political Left almost always chooses to see deceit in Trump’s comments, they don’t believe he is sincere. He made it even more unpredictable for them with this: “Look when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them,” Trump said. “And it’s easy because it’s Joe Biden, and you see all the criminality, all of the money that’s going into the family and him, all of this money from China, from Russia, from Ukraine.” And then Trump underscored it again, wanting to be sure there was no doubt in the minds of the Left that he could act against them: When asked during a Fox News interview on Wednesday if he plans to use the justice system to punish his political opponents, Trump said: “When this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them.” Note that in both of the previous quotations, Trump commented on what he could do, not on what he would do.

Given the incidents of lawfare that Trump has had to endure, the hyperbole spouted by the mainstream media and the political Left, it’s no wonder that Trump would want to take revenge against those who have relentlessly criticized and attacked him. Jonathan Turley, law professor at Georgetown University, has commented several times on the pathetic and weak lawfare attacks that have been launched against Trump from various attorneys and district attorneys. He made this comment a few months ago about Alvin Bragg, Manhattan District Attorney, who twisted the facts of a Trump misdemeanor to transform them into a felony: Like his predecessor, Bragg previously scoffed at the case. However, two prosecutors, Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz, then resigned and started a public pressure campaign to get New Yorkers to demand prosecution.

Pomerantz shocked many of us by publishing a book on the case against Trump — who was still under investigation and not charged, let alone convicted, of any crime. He did so despite objections from his former colleague that such a book was grossly improper. Nevertheless, it worked. Bragg brought a Rube Goldberg case that is so convoluted and counterintuitive that even liberal legal analysts criticized it. It’s no wonder that Trump is relishing the discomfort and fear that he is eliciting in his opponents. They have spent years trying to ruin his reputation, insulting him, discrediting him and trying to humiliate him. Meanwhile, in reflecting on the 2016 election, Trump said the following about Hillary Clinton:

“I could have gone after Hillary. I could have gotten Hillary Clinton very easily. And when they say lock her up, whenever they said ‘lock her,’ you know, they’d start, 30,000 people, ‘lock her up, lock her up.’ What did I do? I always say take it easy, just relax. We’re winning. Take it easy. Take it easy.” He added: “I could have had her put in jail. And I decided I didn’t want to do that. I thought it would look terrible. You had the wife of the president of the United States going to jail. I thought it would be very bad if we did that. And I made sure that didn’t happen, OK? I thought it would be bad.” But now he has reached the point where striking fear in the hearts of his enemies seems righteous. Yet the changes he will make will be in the way government operates, not mere petty payback to individual miscreants. That will be devastating to the Leftist cause. It will also serve as his retribution.

Read more …

“They lament the undeniable shift of global politics to the conservative right while refusing to ask why it’s happening?”

• Leftists Are Terrified About What Will Happen To Them If Trump Wins (ZH)

After being indoctrinated for almost a decade to believe that their political opponents are secret Nazis ready to install a fascist regime, it’s not surprising that Democrats are freaking out over recent polls indicating a potential Trump win in the November elections. Convinced that America 2024 is going to be a repeat of Germany 1933, ignorant leftists are scrambling to determine whether or not to leave the US or “start a revolution.” The anxiety is palpable. The New Yorker recently asserted in an arduous and rambling article spanning centuries of political history and every rhetorical cliche imaginable that, essentially, Trump is likely to win. The outlet describes Kamala Harris as “virtuous” (which is laughable), but they suggest this trait is not respected enough within the American political sphere. They lament the undeniable shift of global politics to the conservative right while refusing to ask why it’s happening?

They simply default to the old low-IQ and low effort accusations of “racism” and “xenophobia”. The New Yorker argues: “Even when it is utterly self-destructive – as in Britain, where the xenophobia of Brexit cut the U.K. off from traditional allies while increasing immigration from the Global South—the apprehension that “we” are being flooded by frightening foreigners works its malign magic. It’s an old but persistent delusion that far-right nationalism is not rooted in the emotional needs of far-right nationalists but arises, instead, from the injustices of neoliberalism…” The mass immigration from the third world continues in Britain because the same progressive elitists are still in charge despite the Brexit vote. That’s why the country is spiraling into a pit of criminality, mass stabbings and a rape epidemic. It’s the reason why the British voted for Brexit in the first place.

Brexit and the end of mass immigration is the will of the majority of the people, just as it’s the will of the majority of people in many parts if Europe and the US. Yet, leftists who pontificate endlessly about the virtues of democracy dismiss the majority when it suits them. It is this arrogance of the political left that has led directly to the rise of the right wing movement that so utterly terrifies them. The problem is, leftists never take responsibility because they see this as an expression of weakness, and also because their moral relativism allows them to rationalize any behavior as necessary “for the greater good.” Their main character syndrome spurs them to believe they are the ultimate good in the world, and if they are the ultimate good then anyone who dares oppose them must be the ultimate evil. This is why they have a tendency to demonize their political opposition in extreme ways. The New Yorker describes Trump as singularly dangerous, comparing him to mobsters, tyrants and even cancer:

“Trumpism is a cancerous phenomenon. Treated with surgery once, it now threatens to come back in a more aggressive form, subject neither to the radiation of “guardrails” nor to the chemo of “constraints.” It may well rage out of control and kill its host…” And this kind of rhetoric is exactly why there have been at least two assassination attempts on Trump’s life; attempts which the leftist media then shamelessly blamed on Trump. It’s also gaslighting, considering the level of tyranny Democrats have engaged in under Biden and the contempt they have displayed for American ideals over the past decade. The fantasy world of the left is rife with paranoia built on a foundation of emotional sand rather than evidence. They see a new Trump term as the end of everything:

“Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents…” “When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate? Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies…”

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Which was worse? 1939 or 2024?

• Worst. Nazi. Rally. Ever. (Margolis)

When Donald Trump’s campaign announced plans for a rally at Madison Square Garden, Democrats and their media allies knew they had a problem. Trump was going to pack the house on their turf. So they wasted no time pushing the tired Hitler narrative and claimed that the choice of venue was an homage to a pro-Nazi rally held there in 1939. It wasn’t just liberals in the media pushing this narrative, either. Hillary Clinton accused Trump of “actually re-enacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939.” “President Franklin Roosevelt was appalled that neo-Nazis, fascists in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany. So I don’t think we can ignore it,” Hillary added. Then she doubled down.

“Now, it may be a leap for some people and a lot of others may think, ‘I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to say that.’ “But please open your eyes to the danger that this man poses to our country, because I think it is clear and present for anybody paying attention.” Even the Harris-Walz campaign joined in on the rhetoric. “Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden,” Kamala’s running mate Tim Walz said at a campaign event in Henderson, Nevada. “There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden.” Walz added, “And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there.”

Well, the rally took place Sunday night, and boy, talk about the worst Nazi rally ever! In addition to the diverse speakers at the event, a black woman sang the national anthem.

And clearly, Jews didn’t get the memo that this was a “Nazi rally.”

The only Nazi symbols you saw at all came courtesy of the Democrats.

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“I’m asking you to be excited about the future..”

• Kamala Is Just A Vessel; We Are Running Against Something Far Bigger (MN)

During a historic rally Sunday at Madison Square Garden, president Trump urged that Kamala Harris is purely “a vessel” and in reality the MAGA movement is fighting against “something far more powerful.” Trump told the crowd, “We are not just running against Kamala — She means nothing. She is purely a vessel — We are running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala and more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious, crooked, radical left machine that runs today’s Democrat Party.” Trump further asserted that Biden and Harris are “perfect vessels because they’ll never give them a hard time. They’ll do whatever they want.” He continued, “I know many of them. It’s just an amorphous group of people. But they’re smart and they’re vicious, and we have to defeat them. And when I say the ‘enemy from within,’ the other side go crazy.”

Trump added that these people “are doing such harm to our country with their open border policies, record-setting inflation, ‘Green New Scam,’ and everything else they are doing. But we’re not going to let it happen any longer. We’re going to have the biggest victory in the history of our country on November 5 … We’re going to make America great again.” Elsewhere during his speech, Trump urged that his party is one of real unity and inclusion, while the other side is intent on fomenting hatred and division. “We bleed the same blood. We share the same home and we salute the same great American Flag. We are one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God,” Trump declared.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1850696878469337233

Trump vowed to make America stronger than ever before and to bring back the American Dream. Trump told the crowd “I’m asking you to be excited about the future,” further urging “this will be America’s new golden age.” The MSG event was a roaring success, despite deranged leftists demanding it be shut down claiming it was a literal ‘Nazi rally’.

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“You have not seen such a vivid demonstration of slowly-and-then-all-at-once since the implosion of Lehman Brothers as the collapse of the Democratic Party this fateful October..”

• Speaking of Abortion (James Howard Kunstler)

What were they thinking after they shoved “Joe Biden” into the abyss, like an old refrigerator over the edge of the landfill, and afterward settled — instantly it appears, with no process at all — on Kamala Harris to lead the party to victory in the fall election? I will tell you: they were not thinking at all. The collective mind of the Democrat elite was a vast vacuum devoid of thought, mass, or light, like a corner of deepest space, lacking even a particle of cosmic debris to evoke the existence of existence. Such mindlessness was the consummate expression of a party that for eight years worked every angle of political mental illness toward the loss of its mind, driven by whatever dark energy seeks escape from truth, life, and God — whatever is opposite of creation and being. What you are witnessing is a colossal act of being un-born. The party put out a call to the universe and the universe ordered. . . an abortion of the Democratic Party! You are reminded again: be careful of what you wish for.

And so do things stand one week before the election. You have not seen such a vivid demonstration of slowly-and-then-all-at-once since the implosion of Lehman Brothers as the collapse of the Democratic Party this fateful October. Poor Kamala is just collateral damage at this point. She goes out before some manufactured audience and seven-minutes onstage delivering a door-dash order of precooked blather is all she can stand before being overwhelmed by the emptiness and futility of her task. . . and then she flees back to the waiting limousine (and the chardonnay bottle). Meanwhile, her allies — that is, the Democratic Party’s allies — play their own roles in this political abortion. The LA Times and the WashPo declined their usual proforma endorsements, two kisses of death. Those actions last week provoked nervous breakdowns in both newsrooms, cries of anguish, resignations, professional suicides.

The news media find themselves in a peculiar position, having gone along for years with the gathering mental illness of the Democratic Party, like incompetent parents in a large dysfunctional family, offering unconditional support for their kids’ intolerable and unacceptable behavior. They are flying to pieces now on the CNN chat panels. James Carville, the party’s shriveled Gollum, has gone to IV infusions of Jim Beam, seems like. Jake Tapper gets Sunday schooled by JD Vance and turns into a mewling cat-lady right before your eyes. Anderson Cooper goes all waxy and mute. Joy Reid surrenders to echolalia as her MSNBC fans are subjected to the guest list of P. Diddy’s “freak-offs,” ranting about Hitler. Lawrence O’Donnell is looking more and more like Vincent Price in Return of the Fly. Reality-optional hardly suffices to describe cable news these days.

You’ve got to ask: can they just let it be? Can they just let go of their insane Jacobin rebellion now and let it fade into history? Then, kick back, recuperate, get their minds right, put their house and family in order, and move on as a legit political faction in a functioning republic? Or, do they burn the asylum down? The signals are troubling. They are chattering about Mr. Trump “using the military” against them in the months to come — as if the Abrams tanks were going to roll up to DNC headquarters and blast away. By now, you know that such thoughts expressed by Democratic pols and news pals are always projections of their own wishes. The New York Times published just such a classic paranoid projection exercise last week “. . . telling Americans that if he [Trump] wins, he plans to bend, if not break, our democracy.”

Surely it is too late, with early voting well underway, to stop any ballot harvesting and other election shenanigans as engineered by master fraudster Marc Elias. In fact, frauds are already being discovered (e.g., Lancaster County, PA.) Not a good look. It is exactly what a conspiracy (to commit election fraud) means in law, and the actual people who cooked the ballots and transported them are going to rat-out those who instructed them to do it. Wait for that, and wait for it to pop up elsewhere around the country. This time, watchers are watching, much more carefully.

Read more …

Stockman knows his numbers. Take the following, and then remember (you too, David) that Elon Musk says he can save $2 trillion on spending.

“Trumpian revenue tariffs would generate about $9 trillion over the next decade, or nearly 80% of the $11.5 trillion revenue loss from drastically shrinking the income tax coverage..”

• Trump’s 19th-Century Solution to Fiscal Disaster (David Stockman)

In the last weeks of the campaign, Donald Trump is slicing and dicing the Federal income tax nearly as fast as he served up fries at the McDonald’s drive-thru window last weekend. So far, he has proposed to extend the lower rates, family tax credits, and investment incentives of the 2017 Tax Act after they expire in 2025 and to also exempt tips, Social Security benefits, and overtime wages from the Federal income tax. Those items alone would generate a revenue loss of $9 trillion over the next decade, but he has recently proposed to also exempt firefighters, police officers, military personnel, and veterans from the Federal income tax as well. We estimate the latter would cost another $2.5 trillion in revenue loss over 10 years. As it happens, there are 370,000 firemen, 708,000 policemen, 2.86 million uniformed military personnel, and 18.0 million veterans in the US.

These 22 million citizens have an estimated average income of $82,000 per year, which translates to about $60,000 each of AGI (adjusted gross income). At an average income tax rate of 14.7% these exclusions would generate $250 billion per year of reduced income tax payments. In all, Trump has thus tossed out promises to cut income taxes by $11.5 trillion over the next 10-year budget window. In turn, these sweeping reductions would amount to upwards of 34% of CBO’s estimated baseline income tax revenue of $33.7 trillion over the period. Alas, even in the halcyon days of Reagan supply-side tax cutting no one really dreamed of eliminating fully one-third of the so-called crime of 1913 (the 16th Amendment which enabled the income tax).

10-Year Revenue Loss:
Extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts: $5.350 trillion.
Exempt overtime income: $2.000 trillion.
End Taxation of Social Security benefits: $1.300 trillion.
Exempt Tip income: $300 billion.
Exempt Income of Firemen, Policemen, Military and Veterans: $2.500 trillion.
Trump Total Revenue Loss: $11.500 trillion.
CBO Income Tax Baseline Revenue: $33.700 trillion.
Trump Revenue Loss As % of Baseline: 34%.

Then again, Trump may have something virtually epic in mind. To wit, scrapping the income tax entirely in favor of taxing consumption via levies on imported goods and merchandise. “In the old days when we were smart, when we were a smart country, in the 1890s and all, this is when the country was relatively the richest it ever was. It had all tariffs. It didn’t have an income tax,” Trump said at a sit-down with voters in New York on Friday for Fox & Friends. “Now we have income taxes, and we have people that are dying.” The New York Times is deeply alarmed: “The former president has repeatedly praised a period in American history when there was no income tax, and the country relied on tariffs to fund the government.” Actually, however, 19th-century America was even smarter than Trump realizes.

In 1900 total Federal spending amounted to just 3.5% of GDP because back then America was still a peaceful republic and had no Warfare State or even significant standing army at all. And save for the most advanced precincts of Europe, the Welfare State hadn’t yet been invented, either. So, yes, the so-called “revenue tariffs” of the 19th century did meet the income needs of the Federal government to the point of actually balancing the budget year after year between 1870 and 1900. Indeed, the actual annual surpluses were large enough to pay down most of the Civil War debt, to boot. Today, of course, the Warfare State, Welfare State, and the Washington pork barrels account for 25% of GDP. So Trump may be directionally correct in wanting to tax consumption rather than income, but, as usual, he’s off by about seven orders of magnitude when it comes to the size of the Federal budget that needs to be financed.

Still, Trump has stepped up to the plate when it comes to a 21st-century version of the revenue tariff. He has pledged to impose a 20% universal tariff on all imports from all countries with a specific 60% rate for Chinese imports. Based on current US import levels of $3.5 trillion per year from worldwide sources and $450 billion from China, Trump’s tariffs would generate about $900 billion of receipts per annum. To be sure, Trump’s claim that these giant tariffs would be paid for by Chinamen, Mexicans, and European socialists is just more of his standard baloney. Tariffs are paid for by consumers, but that’s actually the hidden virtue of the Tariff Man’s favorite word. The truth is, government should be paid for via taxation on current citizens, not fobbed off in the form of giant debts on future citizens, born and unborn.

So if we are going to have Big Government at 25% of GDP rather than a 19th-century government at 3.5% of GDP, and Trump is a Big Government Man if there ever was one, better that the burden be placed on consumption, not production, income, and investment. After all, today the “makers” get hit good and hard by the current exceedingly lopsided income tax system. Thus, the top 1% pays 46% of income taxes, while the top 5% pays 66% and the top 10% pays 76% of all income taxes. On the other end, by contrast, the bottom 50% pays just 2.3% of individual income taxes, while 40% of all families pay no income tax at all. In any event, the math works out such that the proposed Trumpian revenue tariffs would generate about $9 trillion over the next decade, or nearly 80% of the $11.5 trillion revenue loss from drastically shrinking the income tax coverage and collection rate. So that’s a big step in the direction of fiscal solvency rather than more UniParty free lunches.

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“They have to use people to get people to come, and then they send buses..”

• Trump Campaign Slams Harris Over Beyonce ‘Lies’ (RT)

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has accused Democratic rival Kamala Harris of misleading voters by attracting them to a rally in the belief that they would see a performance by pop superstar Beyonce. Over 30,000 people turned up at the Democratic event on Friday in Houston, Texas, with some expecting a free concert after it was announced that Beyonce would be present. MSNBC and the Washington Post reported ahead of the rally that the superstar singer would appear with Harris during the event, while NBC cited a source as saying that Beyonce was “also expected to perform.” Beyonce earlier approved the use of her song ‘Freedom’ as a soundtrack for the Harris campaign. The 43-year-old Houston native did take to the stage at the event with her former Destiny’s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland, before announcing that she was there as a mother and not as an entertainer.

In a speech that lasted less than five minutes, Beyonce urged rallygoers to support abortion rights, after Harris called on voters to “mobilize” on November 5 in support of reproductive freedom. “It’s time for America to sing a new song,” Beyonce added. “Our voices sing a chorus of unity. They sing a song of dignity and opportunity. Are y’all ready to add your voice to the new American song,” the singer said, welcoming Harris onto the stage. Speaking at a Michigan rally on Saturday, Trump hit out at the apparent failure of the Harris campaign to meet supporters’ expectations. “Beyonce went up and spoke for a couple of minutes and then left, and the place went crazy,” Trump stated, adding that “they booed the hell out of everybody.”

“They thought she was going to perform… it’s crazy. They have to use people to get people to come, and then they send buses. We don’t send buses. Everybody comes. We’re just going to make America great again. It’s very simple,” the former president added. Tim Murtaugh, a senior adviser to Trump, claimed that organizers of the Democratic rally had “lied to build a crowd.” While the front rows at the rally appeared supportive as Harris proceeded with her speech after seeing Beyonce off the stage, clips on social media indicated booing and heckling at the back, with some apparently leaving the venue in disappointment. The vice president has been backed by American pop sensation Taylor Swift as well as Usher, Eminem, and Cardi B, while Trump has received endorsements from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, rapper 50 Cent, and popular journalist Tucker Carlson.

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“Russia gets a guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine,” while Germany and other EU countries foot the bill for Ukraine’s reconstruction..”

• Trump To Make Ukraine The EU’s Problem – FT (RT)

Donald Trump will leave the enforcement of any peace deal between Russia and Ukraine to European powers, one of the former US president’s advisers has told the Financial Times. The plan is one of several floated by Trump’s advisers and allies, all of which involve the US refusing to deal with the aftermath of the conflict. Trump has promised to bring a rapid end to the ongoing conflict if he is elected president in November. However, he has offered few specifics as to how he would do this, save for pressing Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky into peace talks with US aid to Kiev as leverage. In the absence of any concrete peace plan, a host of Trump’s current and former advisers have outlined how they think the former president could achieve this goal.

One unnamed “long-term Trump adviser” told the Financial Times on Monday that the Republican candidate could resolve the conflict with “a reimagining of the failed Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015,” under which Kiev agreed to grant some autonomy to the majority Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk. This time around, the adviser said, the deal would be enforced by EU peacekeepers. “There are two things America will insist on,” he said. “We will not have any men or women in the enforcement mechanism. We’re not paying for it. Europe is paying for it.” Reviving the Minsk agreements would likely present several major challenges.

After multiple European leaders admitted that they never intended to abide by the 2014 and 2015 agreements, Moscow does not believe that the EU can play the role of honest broker, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said earlier this month. Furthermore, Donetsk and Lugansk – along with Kherson and Zaporozhye – have since joined the Russian Federation, and any peace deal must take into account this “territorial reality,” the Kremlin has said. Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst who served in Trump’s White House, told the British newspaper that the US could “freeze the conflict” along the current front line, and negotiate a lasting settlement with Russia at a later date. Ukraine would not give up its territorial claims in the meantime, Fleitz said, explaining that this plan counts on delaying a final agreement until “Putin leaves the stage.”

However, Fleitz conceded that he does not speak for Trump and does not know the former president’s foreign policy plans. The most detailed proposal has been put forward by Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. Speaking to former US Navy SEAL and podcast host Shawn Ryan last month, Vance said that the current frontline could be demilitarized and fortified, ensuring that “Russia doesn’t invade again.” In exchange, “Russia gets a guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine,” while Germany and other EU countries foot the bill for Ukraine’s reconstruction. The current American policy of “throw[ing] money at this problem, [and] hope[ing] the Ukrainians are able to achieve a military victory” is “stupid,” Vance told Ryan.

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“I think that we should try to pursue avenues of peace.”

• I Don’t Want War With Russia – Vance (RT)

The US is not at war with Russia and should not seek one, Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance has said, when asked whether he would brand President Vladimir Putin an “enemy” of America. The senator from Ohio was asked during his appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday whether he saw the Russian leader “as an ally or an enemy.” Putin is “clearly an adversary, he is a competitor,” but Washington needs to be “smart about diplomacy too,” Vance responded. ”Just because we don’t like somebody doesn’t mean that we can’t occasionally engage in conversations with them,” he suggested. Host Kristen Welker pushed him further on whether he would directly refer to Putin as an enemy. ”We are not at war with him. And I don’t want to be at war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” the senator said. “I think that we should try to pursue avenues of peace.”

The same logic applies to China, Vance said, adding that he perceives it as a greater threat to American interests than Russia. The US may not like having to talk to its rivals, but in the case of the Ukraine conflict, resolving it will require negotiations, the senator pointed out. When asked whether former President Donald Trump would take the US out of NATO, Vance assured that he wouldn’t. If his running mate returns to office, the country will honor its commitment to the organization, but the bloc “is not just a welfare client, it should be a real alliance,” he said. Vance was referring to Trump’s criticism of insufficient defense spending by its European members.

Moscow has identified NATO’s enlargement in Europe as a threat to its national security and a key reason for the deterioration of relations with the West. The organization’s increasing involvement in Ukraine since the 2014 armed coup in Kiev and promise to bring Ukraine into the fold have contributed in a major way to setting off the ongoing hostilities, Russian officials have said. The current Democratic administration has pledged to stand by Kiev “for as long as it takes” to defeat Russia and has pushed other nations to do the same. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on Ukraine aid, Kiev’s troops are currently retreating along many parts of the front. Trump has claimed while campaigning that he would end the hostilities in 24 hours, if elected.

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“..he and others continue to saw feverishly on the branch upon which we all sit in higher education..”

• University Professors Approaching Near Unanimity as a Democratic Lock (Turley)

The 2024 presidential election is shaping up to be the single most divisive election in our history. The public is split right down the middle with almost every group splintering between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. There is, however, one group that seems almost unanimous: professors. A new survey of more than 1,000 professors shows that seventy-eight percent will vote for Harris and only eight percent will vote for Trump. Other than a poll of the Democratic National Committee, there are few groups that are more reliably Democratic or liberal. For anyone in higher education, the result is hardly surprising. The poll tracks what we already know about the gradual purging of departments around the country of conservative, libertarian, and dissenting professors.

Indeed, the lack of political and intellectual diversity may be turning some donors and even applicants from higher education. With failing revenue and applications, universities are starting to re-embrace commitments to neutrality on political issues. Some, however, are doubling down on advocacy and orthodoxy. In an op-ed this week, Wesleyan University President Michael Roth called on universities to reject “institutional neutrality” and officially support Kamala Harris. Calling neutrality “a retreat,” Roth compared Trump’s election to the rise of the Nazis and insisted that schools should “give up the popular pastime of criticizing the woke and call out instead the overt racism.” He added, without a hint of self-awareness or irony, that “we should not be silenced because of fears of appearing partisan.”

In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculties replicate their own views and values. So not only are professors voting en mass for Harris, Roth would have the schools themselves work openly for her election. That ideological echo chamber is hardly an enticement for many who are facing rising high tuition costs with relatively little hope of being taught by faculty with opposing views. There are obviously many reasons why faculty may reject Trump specifically, but this poll also tracks more generally the self-identification and contributions of faculty. A Georgetown study recently found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools — almost identical to the percentage of Trump voters found in the new poll.

Notably, Roth acknowledged that the current lack of intellectual diversity in higher education had become so extreme that there might be a need for “an affirmative action program for conservatives.” However, he and others continue to saw feverishly on the branch upon which we all sit in higher education in calling for even greater political advocacy. There is little evidence that faculty members have any interest in changing this culture or creating greater diversity at schools. In places like North Carolina State University a study found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans 20 to 1.

Recently, I had a debate at Harvard Law School with Professor Randall Kennedy on whether Harvard protects free speech and intellectual diversity. This year, Harvard found itself in a familiar spot on the annual ranking of Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE): dead last among 251 universities and colleges. Harvard has long dismissed calls for greater free speech protections or intellectual diversity. It shows.

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University professors are not the only group with such an outsized bias. MSM editors and writers have it just as much. And Bezos will not solve that by withholding an endorsement. His hiring practices need to change. Or his paper is toast.

• Bezos Explains Why WaPo Dropped Presidential Endorsements (RT)

The Washington Post has abandoned its decades-long tradition of endorsing a US presidential candidate to earn back the trust of the American public, the newspaper’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, has said. He explained his reasoning in an op-ed published by the Post on Monday after facing intense backlash from current and former staff. The newspaper has been endorsing candidates since 1976, but announced the suspension of the practice on Friday, prompting several editors to resign. The Post’s editorial board endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. According to CNN, the Post’s staffers had drafted an endorsement of the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, which was ultimately not approved by the management. Bezos began his Monday’s op-ed by citing a recent Gallup poll, which found that nearly 70% of Americans have little or no trust in the media.

“Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working,” the entrepreneur wrote, adding that “most people believe the media is biased.” “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” he continued. “What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” The founder of Amazon and aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin admitted that the decision to drop endorsements so close to Election Day on November 5 was the result of “inadequate planning.” At the same time, he insisted that neither campaign had affected his decision-making, and that the move to abandon endorsements was not connected to last week’s meeting between Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, and Blue Origin top executives in Austin, Texas.

A total of 21 of the Post’s opinion columnists signed a statement, describing the non-endorsement as “a terrible mistake.” They argued that “this isn’t the right moment, when one candidate is advocating positions that directly threaten freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution.” Three of the newspaper’s 10-person editorial board have since stepped down. More than 200,000 people – or about 8% of the Post’s paid subscribers – had canceled their digital subscription by midday on Monday, according to NPR. The decision to end endorsements was criticized by many prominent journalists, including the Post’s former longtime executive editor Marty Baron.

Last month, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, announced that the newspaper would also not be making presidential endorsements. The move faced similar backlash, with editorials editor Mariel Garza resigning in protest. Throughout his campaign, Trump has blasted “the lying media” for what he said was a long history of unfair coverage of him and his time in office. The Harris campaign and allies have similarly accused pro-Trump media outlets of amplifying “desinformation.”

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“The Trump ally is expected to hold a press conference on Tuesday afternoon in Manhattan, just hours after his release.”

• Steve Bannon To Be Released From Prison One Week Ahead Of Election (JTN)

Former President Donald Trump’s ally Steve Bannon will be released from prison on Tuesday, exactly one week ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison at a federal facility in Danbury, Connecticut, in 2022 after he was convicted by a jury on two Contempt of Congress charges for not complying with a congressional subpoena. A judge had allowed Bannon, who was a first-time offender, to delay his sentence while he appealed the convictions but was eventually ordered to report to prison in July. The Trump ally is expected to hold a press conference on Tuesday afternoon in Manhattan, just hours after his release.

Sam Mangel, Bannon’s prison consultant, told ABC News on Monday that Bannon taught U.S. history and government to other inmates while he was behind bars, and that he was respected by other inmates. “I’m sure he’s quite glad to put it behind him and move on with his life,” Mangel said. “From what I’m told, he feels he’s got a lot left to accomplish now.” Although Bannon will be released from the Connecticut prison, he still faces criminal charges related to an alleged scheme to defraud donors over the construction of a border wall on the United States southern border. That trial is scheduled for December, and he has pleaded not guilty to all charges, including conspiracy, fraud, and money laundering.

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“..the US military is there to use lethal force to suppress those who object. If Trump’s win is too lopsided to be subject to theft, there can be a cybersecurity attack that prevents a vote count..”

• How America Was Destroyed (Paul Craig Roberts)

Those who control the Democrat Party are concerned about Kamala’s election chances. Little wonder. She represents the most anti-American, anti-Constitution, anti-white, anti-peace regime in US history. Top Democrats are concerned that Trump will not only take the swing states, despite the multiple theft mechanisms Democrats have in place, but also some blue states. Polls are revealing that a majority of men of color see Trump as a leader of America and Kamala as a destroyer of America. Those who control the Democrat party, most certainly not the people, are also disturbed by reports of the heavy early voting by Trump supporters. Trump encouraged early voting, because in 2020 Democrats managed to prevent many Trump supporters from voting on election day.

The downside to early voting by Trump supporters is it gives Democrats an idea how many votes they have to steal in order to “win.” It is a no-win situation for Trump supporters. If you wait until election day, voting machine failure, closed precincts, and other excuses can be used to keep you from voting. But if you vote early, you signal to the Democrats how many votes they have to steal. They are well set up to steal them. The Democrats in two swing states have already said that it will be days before they will have the vote count. These days are the time they need to produce the fraud that wins for them. A Democrat and a free election are mutually exclusionary. Arizona officials, for example, say it will take 2 weeks to tabulate the vote count. The Democrats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin say they are unable to declare election results for several days after the election.

Until 2020–the Big Steal–the US has not had a problem of producing a vote count on time. Why do Americans accept the election theft implied by a delayed vote count with ballot boxes coming in by the truck loads long after voting is closed? On October 14, I reported on this website that the Biden regime had issued one month before the presidential election a military directive 5240.01. The directive says the US military can be used to come to the aid of civilian police to quell domestic disturbance and can use lethal force against US citizens. I provided a link to the directive. Fourteen days later I have seen no mention of this directive in the presstitute media.

Now ask yourself where the authority comes from for an executive branch cabinet department to overturn an act of Congress. Where did the Biden regime Department of Defense get the authority to overturn American tradition and the Posse Comitatus Act? That there has been no protest against this illegal and unconstitutional Defense Department directive indicates how close the US is to a tyranny. As we learned from the hoax “Jan 6 Insurrection,” it is a simple matter for those in authority to declare “insurrections.” They can do it again. It has now been admitted that 200 federal agents were at work on January 6 trying to orchestrate an insurrection. Next time there will be 2,000. As the Democrats are in power, they can create an “insurrection” prior to the vote count.

[..] So, some of the swing states have said that election results will not be timely reported. When the results are misreported, the US military is there to use lethal force to suppress those who object. If Trump’s win is too lopsided to be subject to theft, there can be a cybersecurity attack that prevents a vote count. Putin and Trump can be blamed for an insurrection orchestrated by the FBI, and the Democrats will be declared by the American whore media as the winner. This sounds far-fetched, but it isn’t.

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“Israel could not gain overflight permissions from Turkey, Iraq or any of the Gulf Cooperation Council states (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman). Sean Matthews at Middle East Eye points out that as a result, the Israelis would have had to fly down the Red Sea, go west across the Gulf of Aden, and approach Iran from the Arabian Sea. It is a long way around.”

• The Enormous Constraints Faced By Netanyahu (Juan Cole)

The limited strikes on Iran carried out by Israeli fighter-jets early on Saturday morning Tehran time above all demonstrated the constraints under which even this extremist Israeli government has to operate. The bombings are said to have been limited to military targets, including missile manufacturing facilities.The first constraint Israel faced was logistical. The Netanyahu government could not have its fighter jets fly straight to Iran, which would have allowed a more extensive set of attacks. Israel could not gain overflight permissions from Turkey, Iraq or any of the Gulf Cooperation Council states (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman). Sean Matthews at Middle East Eye points out that as a result, the Israelis would have had to fly down the Red Sea, go west across the Gulf of Aden, and approach Iran from the Arabian Sea. It is a long way around. They would have had to bring along large hulking refueling planes. This long, clumsy flight path limited what the Israelis could accomplish.

Extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier not ruled out hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities or its oil fields. Iran, however, essentially held the GCC countries hostage, warning that if US-backed Israel hit Iranian oil fields, Tehran would retaliate against US-backed Arab oil monarchies in the Gulf such as Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration is trying to woo those countries into recognizing Israel, and having a berserker Israeli government draw them into hostilities with Iran would instead make these Arab countries flee both the US and the possible Israeli embrace. For some diplomatic purposes, as with detente with Iran, Saudi Arabia has already gone to China instead. According to Middle East Eye, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, had announced Tuesday that Iran had been promised by the Gulf Arabs that they would not allow their air space or soil to be used for Israeli attacks on Iran. At the same time, Joe Biden pressured Israel not to attack Iranian nuclear facilities or oil fields.

I view Netanyahu as an adventurer who has been attempting to widen the war so as to force the Biden administration to support him. Although Iran backs Hamas, the CIA assessed that the ayatollahs had no idea Hamas was planning to carry out the October 7 attacks, and, indeed, that the Iranian leadership had declined to support Hamas during the past year precisely because they were furious that Yahya Sinwar had tried to drag them into a war without so much as consulting them. Iran also put pressure on Hezbollah not to provoke a war with Israel. That is, though Iran certainly supports anti-Israel guerrilla groups in the region and enjoys harassing the Israelis through them and their rockets and drones, it doesn’t appear to have acted aggressively given the ferocity of Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza.

Netanyahu struck the Iranian embassy in Damascus last spring in an obvious attempt to bring Iran into the war, and Iran replied with a missile barrage that the US shot down. Then this summer Netanyahu assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the civilian head of the Hamas Party politburo (which is not the same as the al-Qassam Brigades paramilitary). The assassination was carried out in Tehran, in a clear attempt to get Iran’s goat. Likewise, Netanyahu’s creepy pager booby trap attack on Hezbollah personnel (and some Iranians, such as the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon) and his assassination of Hassan Nasrallah in September were in part aimed at humiliating Iran. Iran’s October 1 missile barrage at Israel was mostly shot down by the US, but some missiles got through and one hit an Israeli military base. This attack was revenge for the killings of Haniyeh and Nasrallah.

Israel’s riposte was so limited that it might well not elicit any response from Iran, drawing a line under this phase of the Israel-Iran conflict. But Netanyahu was forced into a limited response by the Arab Gulf states (two of which –Bahrain and the Emirates– recognize Israel) and by the Biden administration. The refusal of overflight permissions by the GCC states also limited what Israel could accomplished with its F-35s. I view Iran’s missile program as largely defensive. They have used it against Israel twice this year, and both came in response to Israeli provocations (provocations that I believe to be deliberate on Netanyahu’s part). Israel has made the point that its jets can now reach Iran with extensive refueling. Iran has made the point that a swarm of missile attacks can penetrate Israel’s missile defenses and hit an Israeli military base.

Each side is seeking some form of deterrence against the other, a deterrence that has broken down this year because of Israel’s aggression in Gaza and Lebanon and its anti-missile defenses. I think Iran will be satisfied if it feels that a restoration of deterrence has been achieved. I don’t think Netanyahu is defending; I think he is attacking and attempting to expand his influence in the region. For that reason, it will be difficult to reestablish deterrence between the two countries. For the moment, however, all-out war seems to have been averted.

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“..BRICS China crisscrossing Eurasia from east to west while BRICS Russia/Iran/India crisscross it from north to south..”

• BRICS Make History – Can They Keep the Momentum? (Pepe Escobar)

The not so simple twists of fate always allow certain cities to make their mark in History in ineffable ways. Yalta. Bretton Woods. Bandung – a 1955 de-colonization staple. And now Kazan. The BRICS summit in Kazan, capital of Tatarstan, under the Russian presidency was historic in more ways than one – followed with riveting attention by the whole Global Majority and with perplexity by a great deal of the declining Western order. It did not change the world – not yet. But Kazan should be seen as the departing station of a high-speed train journey towards the emerging multi-nodal new order. The metaphor was also spatial: the pavilions at the Kazan Expo center “station” holding the summit simultaneously connected to the airport and to the aero-express train to the city. The rippling effects of BRICS 2024 in Kazan will be perceived for weeks, months and years ahead. Let’s start with the breakthroughs.

The Kazan Manifesto
1.The Kazan Declaration. That is no less than a detailed diplomatic manifesto. Yet because BRICS is not a revolutionary agent – as its members do not share an ideology – arguably the next best strategy is to propose real reform, from the UN Agenda 2030 to the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, the WHO and the G20 (whose summit is next month in Rio). The kernel of the Kazan Declaration – which had been debated for months – is to move in practice towards in-depth institutional changes and to reject Hegemony. The Declaration will be presented to the UN Security Council. There’s no doubt the Hegemon will reject it. This paragraph sums up the reform drive: “We condemn the attempts to subject development to discriminatory politically motivated practices, including but not limited to unilateral coercive measures that are incompatible with the 5 principles of the UN Charter, explicit or implied political conditionality of development assistance, activities, aiming at compromising the multiplicity of international development assistance providers.”

2. The BRICS Outreach session. That was Bandung 1955 on macro-steroids: a microcosm of how the new, really de-colonized, non-unilateral world is being born. President Putin opened and handed the floor to the leaders and heads of delegations of other 35 nations, most at the highest level, including Palestine, plus the UN Secretary General. Quite a few speeches were nothing short of epic. The session lasted 3h25. It will be circulating all across the Global Majority for years. The session tied up with the announcement of the new 13 BRICS partners: Algeria, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkiye, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam. A strategic tour de force including 4 Southeast Asian powerhouses; the top two Central Asian “stans”; 3 Africans; 2 Latin Americans, and NATO member Turkiye.

3. The Russian BRICS presidency itself. Arguably no other nation would have been able to pull off such a complex and impeccably organized summit, held after over 200 BRICS-related meetings throughout the year across Russia conducted by unnamed sherpas, members of working groups and the BRICs Business Council. Security was massive – for obvious reasons, considering the odds of a false flag/terrorist attack.

4. Connectivity corridors. That is the main geoeconomic theme of Eurasia integration, and Afro-Eurasia integration as well. Putin explicitly named, more than once, the new growth drivers of the near future: Southeast Asia and Africa. Both happen to be key partners of several high-profile Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects. Additionally, Putin named the top two connectivity corridors of the future: the Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese describe as the Arctic Silk Road – and the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), where the three drivers are BRICS members Russia, Iran and India. So that translates as BRICS China crisscrossing Eurasia from east to west while BRICS Russia/Iran/India crisscross it from north to south, with ramifications in all latitudes. And with all the energy add-ons, with Iran positioning itself as a crucial energy hub, opening the finally feasible possibility of building the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, one of the unfinished sagas of what I described in the early 2000s as Pipelineistan.

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“..because of his “attitudes towards Ukraine.”

• Slovak PM Fico Warns Of Continued Attempts On His Life (RT)

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who survived an assassination attempt in May, has revealed that he faced a potential second attempt on his life, due to his stance on the Ukraine conflict. Fico was shot at close range by an activist who opposed the PM’s views on relations with Kiev. An armed man was detained at an event commemorating a World War II battle in eastern Slovakia in early October, the prime minister revealed in an interview to Bratislava-based internet outlet Standard on Sunday. Fico said the man “hates” him because of his “attitudes towards Ukraine.” According to the prime minister, “a fully loaded weapon” was found on the suspect when he passed through a metal detector. The event in question was held on October 6 to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Dukla Pass between German and Soviet forces on the border with Poland. The celebrations were attended by Fico, Slovak President Peter Pellegrini, and members of the government and parliament.

Fico has been an outspoken critic of the EU’s policy of providing lethal aid to Ukraine in its fight with Russia, calling instead for a diplomatic solution to the conflict. In May, Fico was shot four times at close range by a man who, according to Slovakia’s Special Criminal Court, was largely motivated by the decision by the prime minister and his government not to send arms to Ukraine. “I was lucky,” Fico told Standard, commenting on the shooting. He went on to describe the alleged shooter, Juraj Cintula, as a political activist who had attended Fico’s public meetings while “probably” planning the attack. Following the shooting, Fico argued that the assassination attempt emanated from foreign-backed politicians who refuse to accept his government’s policies that prioritize Slovakia’s interests over the agendas of major Western powers.

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“Throughout its almost 90-year history, the carmaker has never closed a plant in its home country..”

• Volkswagen Planning Mass Layoffs – Workers’ Council Chief (RT)

Volkswagen is looking to significantly reduce its workforce in Germany and shut down several factories in the country, amid a major overhaul aimed at lowering costs and increasing return on sales, the head of the carmaker’s Works Council has announced. Daniela Cavallo explained to employees in Wolfsburg on Monday that Volkswagen management is “absolutely serious” about the plans and that the move is “not saber-rattling in the collective bargaining round,” Reuters reported. Throughout its almost 90-year history, the carmaker has never closed a plant in its home country. The last time it shut down any of its facilities was in 1988 in the US. “It is a firm intention to let the locations’ regions bleed dry and the clear intention to send tens of thousands of Volkswagen employees into mass unemployment,” Cavallo said.

Her comments come as the automotive giant has been negotiating for several weeks with unions over plans to overhaul its business in order to remain competitive in light of weaker demand from China and Europe. She did not specify which of the ten Volkswagen plants operating in Germany would be shut down or exactly how many of its roughly 300,000 workers in the country would be laid off, but noted that all remaining facilities would be affected by the changes and that “none of them are safe.” Cavallo also stated that Volkswagen management is demanding a 10% pay cut and no pay raises for the next two years. Cavallo stressed, however, that the German government must urgently come up with a plan to ensure that the country’s economy does not “go down the drain.”

She noted that Volkswagen and other European companies are in agreement as to the nature of the problems they are facing, such as slower-than-expected electric transition as well as fierce competition from Chinese automotive brands entering Europe. “We are not far apart when it comes to analyzing the problems. But we are miles apart on the answers to them,” Cavallo said. Earlier this month, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported that the German economy is expected to contract for a second year in a row as it struggles to keep up with soaring energy costs after cutting itself off from Russian gas. Over the past year, the German government has noted a 5.3% drop in the country’s industrial output as orders for domestic-made goods have also plummeted. Experts at the Berlin-based Forum for a New Economy have warned that Germany’s failures are expected to turn the 2020s into a “lost decade” for the country as it suffers “the worst economic downturn since World War II.”

Read more …

 

 

 

Oxi
https://twitter.com/i/status/1850729272089924043

 

 

Makary

 

 

RFK
https://twitter.com/i/status/1850974386528166152

 

 

Crow
https://twitter.com/i/status/1850822295465369739

 

 

Peggy and Molly
https://twitter.com/i/status/1850930525021823087

 

 

Squid

 

 

Good old days

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle December 15 2019

Dec 152019
 
 December 15, 2019  Posted by at 10:22 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Theodor Horydczak U.S. Supreme Court interiors, Washington DC 1931

 

 

• China Suspends Planned Tariffs Scheduled For Dec. 15 On Some US Goods (R.)
• Unpacking The No Deal Not a Trade War Trade War Deal (Balding)
• Giant China SEO Announces Largest Dollar Bond Default In Two Decades (ZH)
• IG Report Reveals Scandal of Historic Magnitude for the FBI and US Media (GG)
• The Bloated Pentagon Budget Should Be Spent on Human Needs (Nation)
• The Art of Doublespeak: Bellingcat and Mind Control (Curtin)
• WikiLeaks: 20 OPCW Inspectors Dissent From Syria Chemical Attack Narrative (ZH)
• Hunter Biden Drugs Charge Kept Under Wraps As Joe Led Drug War From Senate (WE)
• One-Third Of Credit Card Debt Is Caused By Medical Expenses (CNBC)
• Edward Snowden Speaks Out for Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning (RPI)
• Assange Lawyer Discloses Conditions For British Justice TO RETHINK His Extradition (RT)
• A Million Times More Microplastic In The Oceans Than We Thought (Wef)

 

 

There is one issue underlying all the talks at this point: China is running out of dollars.

• China Suspends Planned Tariffs Scheduled For Dec. 15 On Some US Goods (R.)

China has suspended additional tariffs on some U.S. goods that were meant to be implemented on Dec. 15, the State Council’s customs tariff commission said on Sunday, after the world’s two largest economies agreed a “phase one” trade deal on Friday. The deal, rumors and leaks over which have gyrated world markets for months, reduces some U.S. tariffs in exchange for what U.S. officials said would be a big jump in Chinese purchases of American farm products and other goods. China’s retaliatory tariffs, which were due to take effect on Dec. 15, were meant to target goods ranging from corn and wheat to U.S. made vehicles and auto parts.


Other Chinese tariffs that had already been implemented on U.S. goods would be left in place, the commission said in a statement issued on the websites of government departments including China’s finance ministry. “China hopes, on the basis of equality and mutual respect, to work with the United States, to properly resolve each other’s core concerns and promote the stable development of U.S.-China economic and trade relations,” it added. Beijing has agreed to import at least $200 billion in additional U.S. goods and services over the next two years on top of the amount it purchased in 2017, the top U.S. trade negotiator said Friday.

Read more …

Christopher Balding taught in China for a long time; he knows the country. This is his lenghty analysis of the trade deal.

• Unpacking The No Deal Not a Trade War Trade War Deal (Balding)

Having been subjected to such a barrage of horrendous trade war analysis that seems more like literary therapy for the politically frustrated than actual deal analysis, I have opted to write my own analysis of the deal. I will as studiously as possible try to avoid or limit any political opinionating, and stick strictly to the analyzing the deal points within the USTR Fact Sheet and providing what are the likely trade offs, risks, and perspective about each points. Let’s get started.

This deal is about a lot more than agriculture.I’m leading with this one only because it is arguably the most common myth and repeated like the 10 Ten Commandments and divine truth even though it is clearly false on numerous levels. The USTR specifically lists IP protection, tech transfer, agriculture, financial services, currency, expanding trade, and dispute resolution as the major areas. One report in the news quoted a source as saying there were 9 chapters which would come close to matching these general areas. Even within the broader trade purchase aspect, agriculture is not even the main area. Let us please kill once and for all, this deal is just about agriculture.

Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer The two paragraphs on IP and tech transfer in the USTR statement provide scant detail but use relatively ambitious language with regards to Chinese commitments. In IP, China will “address long standing concerns”. In tech transfer, the language is even more ambitious saying China “agreed to end its long-standing practice of forcing or pressuring foreign companies to transfer their technology to Chinese companies as a condition for obtaining market access, administrative approvals, or receiving advantages from the government” and “commits to provide transparency, fairness, and due process in administrative proceedings and to have technology transfer and licensing take place on market terms” and “commits to refrain from directing or supporting outbound investments aimed at acquiring foreign technology pursuant to industrial plans that create distortion.”

Read more …

Borrowed in dollars, can’t pay back in dollars.

• Giant China SEO Announces Largest Dollar Bond Default In Two Decades (ZH)

Two weeks ago we previewed what we said would soon be a D-Day for China’s bond market, as a massive commodities trader and Global 500 state-owned enterprise was set for an “unprecedented” bond default. As of last week, this historic default is now in the history books after Tewoo, the closely watched Chinese commodities trader, became the biggest dollar bond defaulter among the nation’s state-owned companies in two decades, in what Bloomberg called a “moment of reckoning” for Beijing as China struggles to contain credit risk in a weakening economy, as bond defaults hit an all time high and are set to keep rising in the coming years.

Last Wednesday, Tewoo Group announced results of its “unprecedented” debt restructuring, which saw a majority of its investors accepting heavy losses, and which according to rating agencies qualifies as an event of default. As a result of the default, until recently seen as virtually impossible for a state-owned company, investors’ perceptions are undergoing a dramatic U-turn about government-owned borrowers whose state-ownership had for years offered an ironclad sense of security. No more: The fact that a state-owned enterprise such as Tewoo has now defaulted on repaying its dollar bonds in full, confirms that Beijing will no longer bail out troubled SOEs, let alone private firms, perhaps due to the strains imposed by the economy which while growing at just below 6%, is slowing the most in three decades.

It also raises concerns over the Chinese province of Tianjin, where Tewoo is based, following a series of rating downgrades and financing difficulties suffered by some of the city’s state-run firms. The metropolis near Beijing also has the highest ratio of local government financing vehicle bonds to GDP in China. As a reminder, Tewoo ranked 132 in 2018’s Fortune Global 500 list, higher than many other conglomerates including service carrier China Telecommunications Corp. and financial titan Citic Group Corp. It had an annual revenue of $66.6 billion, profits of about $122 million, assets worth $38.3 billion, and more than 17,000 employees as of 2017, according to Fortune’s website.

Read more …

Glenn Greenwald has dug deep.

• IG Report Reveals Scandal of Historic Magnitude for the FBI and US Media (GG)

Just as was true when the Mueller investigation closed without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, Wednesday’s issuance of the long-waited report from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives from the U.S. media were utter frauds. Before evaluating the media component of this scandal, the FBI’s gross abuse of its power – its serial deceit – is so grave and manifest that it requires little effort to demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI – in order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page during the 2016 election – manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence, and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.

If you don’t consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is? [..] They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course. In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it.

[..] It’s long been the case that CIA, FBI and NSA operatives tried to infiltrate and shape domestic news, but they at least had the decency to do it clandestinely. In 2008, the New York Times’ David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing a secret Pentagon program in which retired Generals and other security state agents would get hired as commentators and analysts and then – unbeknownst to their networks – coordinate their messaging to ensure that domestic news was being shaped by the propaganda of the military and intelligence communities.

But now it’s all out in the open. It’s virtually impossible to turn on MSNBC or CNN without being bombarded with former Generals, CIA operatives, FBI agents and NSA officials who now work for those networks as commentators and, increasingly, as reporters. [..] The past three years of “Russiagate” reporting – for which U.S. journalists have lavished themselves with Pulitzers and other prizes despite a multitude of embarrassing and dangerous errors about the Grave Russian Threat – has relied almost exclusively on anonymous, uncorroborated claims from Deep State operatives (and yes, that’s a term that fully applies to the U.S.). The few exceptions are when these networks feature former high-level security state operatives on camera to spread their false propaganda,

Read more …

Tulsi to the rescue.

• The Bloated Pentagon Budget Should Be Spent on Human Needs (Nation)

Even as our nation fails to allocate adequate resources to feed the hungry, house the homeless, care for the sick and protect our planet, the coffers of war profiteers continue to grow. This is why we joined with 102 faith leaders and groups to call upon those who are vying to become our next president to embrace significant reallocations away from the bloated Pentagon budget toward major reinvestments in the needs of our communities. The Pentagon is on track to receive $738 billion next year, despite its inability to account for the money it already has. This includes taxpayer dollars that are redirected to corporate war profiteers, such as a staggering $34 billion contract announced in October for Lockheed Martin’s costly and fault-plagued F-35 fighter jet.

Congress has increased the Pentagon’s budget by $20 billion compared to last year. To put this in perspective, that’s double the amount of the Environmental Protection Agency’s entire budget and one-third of all the money spent on international diplomacy and development. It’s a stark and appalling contrast to the lived reality in our communities. As just a few examples, there are 140 million poor and low-income people living in the United States; about 40 million people in this country face food insecurity; salaries for our nation’s teachers plummeted by more than 4.5 percent over the last decade; we are losing veterans to suicide and drug overdose at alarming rates; and our national infrastructure is crumbling beneath our feet.

Why, then, would our elected officials agree to pump more money into weapon systems that don’t work, endless wars that don’t make us safe, and a refurbishment of our nuclear weapons arsenal that, if employed, can only end in apocalyptic destruction? It’s not just bad policy. We find it immoral. President Eisenhower said more than half a century ago: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

Read more …

Note: Bellingcat is a crucial provider of “evidence” in the MH17 trial that starts in February. It has no credibility left.

• The Art of Doublespeak: Bellingcat and Mind Control (Curtin)

In the 1920s, the influential American intellectual Walter Lippman argued that the average person was incapable of seeing or understanding the world clearly and needed to be guided by experts behind the social curtain. In a number of books he laid out the theoretical foundations for the practical work of Edward Bernays, who developed “public relations” (aka propaganda) to carry out this task for the ruling elites. Bernays had honed his skills while working as a propagandist for the United States during World War I, and after the war he set himself up as a public relations counselor in New York City. There is a fascinating exchange at the beginning of Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of Self (above), where Bernays, then nearly 100 years old but still very sharp, reveals his manipulative mindset and that of so many of those who have followed in his wake.

He says the reason he couldn’t call his new business “propaganda” was because the Germans had given propaganda a “bad name,” and so he came up with the euphemism “public relations.” He then adds that “if you could use it [i.e. propaganda] for war, you certainly could use it for peace.” Of course, he never used PR for peace but just to manipulate public opinion (he helped engineer the CIA coup against the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 with fake news broadcasts). He says “the Germans gave propaganda a bad name,” not Bernays and the United States with their vast campaign of lies, mainly aimed at the American people to get their support for going to a war they opposed (think weapons of mass destruction).

He sounds proud of his war propaganda work that resounded to his credit since it led to support for the “war to end all wars” and subsequently to a hit movie about WWI, Yankee Doodle Dandy, made in 1942 to promote another war, since the first one somehow didn’t achieve its lofty goal. As Bernays has said, “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today.”

 

[..] There is a notorious propaganda outfit called Bellingcat, started by an unemployed Englishman named Eliot Higgins, that is funded by The Atlantic Council (a think-tank with deep ties to the U.S. government, NATO, war manufacturers, and their allies), and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) (another infamous U.S. front organization heavily involved in so-called color revolution regime change operations all around the world), that has just won the International Emmy Award for best documentary. The film with the Orwellian title, Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World, received its Emmy at a recent ceremony in New York City.

Bellingcat is an alleged group of amateur on-line researchers who have spent years shilling for the U.S. instigated war against the Syrian government, blaming the Douma chemical attack and others on the Assad government, and for the anti-Russian propaganda connected to, among other things, the Skripal poisoning case in England, and the downing of flight MH17 plane in Ukraine. It has been lauded by the corporate mainstream media in the west. Its support for the equally fraudulent White Helmets (also funded by the US and the UK) in Syria has also been praised by the western corporate media while being dissected as propaganda by many excellent independent journalists such as Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Catte Black, among others.

It’s had its work skewered by the likes of Seymour Hersh and MIT professor Theodore Postol, and its US government connections pointed out by many others, including Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal at The Gray Zone. And now we have the mainstream media’s wall of silence on the leaks from the OPCW concerning the Douma chemical attack and the doctoring of their report that led to the illegal US bombing of Syria in the spring of 2018. Bellingcat was at the forefront of providing justification for such bombing, and now the journalists Peter Hitchens, Tareq Harrad (who recently resigned from Newsweek after accusing the publication of suppressing his revelations about the OPCW scandal) and others are fighting an uphill battle to get the truth out.

Yet Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World won the Emmy, fulfilling Bernays’ point about films being the greatest unconscious carriers of propaganda in the world today. Who presented the Emmy Award to the filmmakers, but none other than the rebel journalist Chris Hedges.

Read more …

Dismantling the OPCW is the only possible way forward.

• WikiLeaks: 20 OPCW Inspectors Dissent From Syria Chemical Attack Narrative (ZH)

Late Saturday WikiLeaks released more documents which contradict the US narrative on Assad’s use of chemical weapons, specifically related to the April 7, 2018 Douma incident, which resulted in a major US and allied tomahawk missile and air strike campaign on dozens of targets in Damascus.

The leaked documents, including internal emails of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) — which investigated the Douma site — reveal mass dissent within the UN-authorized chemical weapons watchdog organization’s ranks over conclusions previously reached by the international body which pointed to Syrian government culpability. It’s part of a growing avalanche of dissent memos and documents casting the West’s push for war in Syria in doubt (which had resulted in two major US and allied attacks on Syria). This newly released batch, WikiLeaks reports, includes a memo stating 20 inspectors feel that the officially released version of the OPCW’s report on Douma “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to [Syria]”.

This comes amid widespread allegations US officials brought immense pressure to bear on the organization. The Daily Mail’s Peter Hitchens, who saw the leaked documents just prior to WikiLeaks going public with them had this to say: Sources stress that the scientists involved are ‘non-political, utterly uninterested in any strategic implications of what they reveal’. They just ‘feel that the OPCW has a duty to be true to its own science, and not to be influenced by political considerations as they fear it has been’. An internal memo seen by The Mail on Sunday suggests that as many 20 OPCW staff have expressed private doubts about the suppression of information or the manipulation of evidence.

Read more …

This is about 1988. 25 years later, in 2013, Hunter was discharged from the U.S. Navy after testing positive for cocaine. One year after, he landed his job with Burisma. Two years after that, a 2016 police report said that Hunter Biden returned a rental car in Arizona that contained a cocaine pipe and “a small ziplock bag with a white powdery substance inside all sitting on the passenger seat.”

• Hunter Biden Drugs Charge Kept Under Wraps As Joe Led Drug War From Senate (WE)

Joe Biden’s son Hunter was arrested on Jersey Shore drug charges in 1988 and had his record expunged at a time when his father was pushing for the incarceration of drug offenders drawn disproportionately from minority groups. Congressional records reveal that Hunter Biden, now 49, was arrested in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, where the Biden family has often holidayed over the years, in June 1988. Hunter Biden, then 18, had just graduated from the prestigious Archmere Academy prep school, which his father had also attended. The former vice president and his wife Jill have often been spotted on trips to Stone Harbor.

The arrest has not previously been reported. Republicans have recently highlighted Hunter Biden’s drug abuse, questioning why it was not taken into account when the lobbyist was appointed to a $50,000-a-month post on the board of the Ukraine oil company Burisma in 2014, when his father, as vice president, was the Obama administration’s lead official on Ukraine. A year after the arrest, Joe Biden gave a speech in which he said the federal government needed to “hold every drug user accountable” because, “If there were no drug users, there would be no appetite for drugs, there would be no market for them.” He neglected to mention the drug use in his own family.

[..] Five months after his son escaped a sentence and had his possession charge kept secret, Biden voted for the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which made crack cocaine, often used by poor, black offenders, the only drug with a mandatory minimum penalty for a first offense of simple possession. But while many minorities were imprisoned for minor drug offenses, the wealthy, white Hunter Biden was allowed to participate in a state diversionary program called pretrial intervention. The program allowed first offenders to “avoid a trial and having the stigma accompanying a guilty verdict,” according to the Rubinstein Law Firm in New Jersey.

Read more …

Advice on how to deal with it, not a statement about how ridiculous this is.

• One-Third Of Credit Card Debt Is Caused By Medical Expenses (CNBC)

For millions of Americans, unexpected bills can be summed up in two words: medical debt. Surprise health-care costs have affected about 137.1 million adults in the past year, according to recent research. And many Americans are turning to credit cards to help manage those debt burdens, according to CompareCards.com. The website found that 33% of cardholders are in debt because of medical bills. And nearly 60% said they used a card because they had no other way to pay. If you’re saddled with this debt, you need to take action.


First, start by making sure that you’re getting the best interest rates for your balances. If you have debt sitting on a high-interest card, consider transferring the balance to a 0% credit card. You may also use a medical credit card for out-of-pocket expenses not covered by your insurance. These cards, which are offered by companies like CareCredit, have special financing you may not get on other cards. They’re interest-free for a few months as long as you make your monthly payments on time. After that period, though, be sure to pay the balance off in full to avoid deferred interest that will charged from the original date of purchase.

Read more …

Obama revived the Espionage Act. But he didn’t have the guts to use it against journalists.

• Edward Snowden Speaks Out for Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning (RPI)

Last week, Edward Snowden, a whistleblower who has since 2013 escaped similar silencing via retaining sanctuary in Russia, spoke up in strong advocacy for Assange and Manning’s freedom. He did so in an interview with Democracy Now host Amy Goodman. Snowden points out in the interview that the US cases against Assange, Manning, and himself all derive from the Espionage Act, the same Espionage Act that he notes was used against Daniel Ellsberg in the 1970s after Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to media. Pointing as an example to Ellsberg being prevented from even telling a jury at trial why he leaked the Pentagon Papers that revealed the hidden truth about US actions in the Vietnam War, Snowden emphasizes that the Espionage Act “is a special law that absolutely rules out any kind of fair trial.”

Continuing, Snowden discusses in the interview Manning’s revelations of “torture and war crimes, indefinite detention on the part of the United States government in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba” and Snowden’s own “involvement in the revelation of global mass surveillance” as being part of activities by a “new generation” of whistleblowers. Like Ellsberg, Snowden relates that he and Manning were confronted with the Espionage Act “that forbids the jury to consider” if the leaking activity at issue “was something that did more good for the public to know than it did harm to the government in terms of inconvenience or theoretical risks of investigative journalism in a free society.” And Snowden makes sure to emphasizes that the victims of this type of persecution over the last few years extend beyond Manning and himself.

Indeed, the charging of Julian Assange under the Espionage Act Snowden sees as particularly threatening. States Snowden: “We moved from an individual and exceptional case that was not repeated for decades and decades in the Ellsberg instance to something that under the Obama administration he charged more sources of journalism using this special law than all other presidents in the history of the United States combined. And now, under the Trump administration, we have taken one more step. We have gone from the United States government’s war on whistleblowers to, now, a war on journalism with the indictment of Julian Assange for what even the government itself admits was work related to journalism. And this I think is a dangerous, dangerous thing — not just for us, not just for Julian Assange, but for the world and the future.”

Read more …

“December 20 is an important day..”

• Assange Lawyer Discloses Conditions For British Justice TO RETHINK His Extradition (RT)

A Spanish judge will question Julian Assange on a Spain-based security firm thought to have spied on him in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. His lawyer hopes it may help thwart the WikiLeaks founder’s extradition to the US. Set for next week, the questioning is part of a criminal inquiry the Spanish High Court is carrying out into UC Global, a private security company suspected of gathering surveillance on Assange and passing it further to US intelligence services. “December 20 is an important day,” Aitor Martinez, a lawyer in charge of defending Assange in Spain, told Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency. The Spanish judge will go to Westminster Magistrates Court “to receive a video conference testimony from Mr Assange as a victim of the alleged spy plot,” he revealed.

The firm’s name surfaced this summer when El Pais newspaper reported that it was eavesdropping on Assange during his exile at the Ecuadorian diplomatic mission in London. Citing recordings it has had access to, the paper alleged that the firm – tasked to guard the embassy – specifically focused on Assange’s legal matters discussions. Now, Assange’s input is invaluable as it can pave the way to shooting down US efforts to try the publisher on their soil, Martinez explained. “Obviously, once Spanish justice receives such testimonies from Mr. Assange … the British justice should rethink the usefulness of his extradition [to the US],” he argued. As the inquiry progressed, the Spanish High Court arrested the company’s owner David Morales, a former member of the Spanish military, believed to have liaised with the US side.

He was released on bail, but his company’s premises were searched and his bank accounts frozen. As the story unfolded, it emerged that UC Global operatives also monitored Russian and American visitors to Assange, handing their profiles to US intelligence. Morales himself didn’t try to hide his ties to the “American friends.” According to Germany’s NDR broadcaster, which filed a complaint against UC Global for having targeted one of its journalists who visited Assange, Morales allegedly told one of his employees: “From now on, we play in the first league… We are now working for the dark side.” He is said to have traveled up to twice a month to the US to deliver intelligence taken from the Ecuadorian Embassy.

Read more …

And in our own bodies too, if not now then soon.

• A Million Times More Microplastic In The Oceans Than We Thought (Wef)

There could be a million times more microplastics floating around our oceans than previously thought, according to new research suggesting existing studies could have seriously underestimated the problem. Some microplastics – defined as fragments measuring less than 5 mm – are too small to be caught in the nets traditionally used to collect samples, making them go unnoticed. But researchers say a new technique has enabled more accurate measurements, capturing pieces smaller than the width of a human hair. The study, led by biological oceanographer Jennifer Brandon of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, published in the science journal Limnology and Oceanography Letters, found the concentration of tiny plastic pieces could be five to seven orders of magnitude greater than previously thought.

These fragments make their way into the world’s waterways and end up in our oceans. More than one-third of microplastics in the ocean come from synthetic fabrics, such as polyester or nylon. Car tyres are the second-leading source, releasing plastic particles as they erode. To more accurately record the level of microplastic pollution in ocean waters, the researchers analysed seawater salps, which are tiny, barrel-shaped filter feeders. These invertebrates inhabit ocean waters to depths of around 2 kilometres. Salps pump salt water through their bodies as they perform a pulsing movement both to feed and to move through the ocean. Filter-feeding in the ocean depths makes them a likely place to find microplastics, the researchers say.

All of the salp samples taken from three different ocean zones had mini-microplastic particles in their stomachs. Since food passes through the creature’s digestive system in two to seven hours, it was an alarming find. “The thing that truly surprised me the most was that every salp, regardless of year collected, species, life stage, or part of the ocean collected, had plastic in its stomach,” Brandon explained to Earther. “A species having 100% ingestion rates is quite extraordinary, and devastating for the food web that eats salps.”

Read more …

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle December 14 2019

Dec 142019
 
 December 14, 2019  Posted by at 10:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  10 Responses »


Lewis Wickes Hine Child Labor in Magnolia Cotton Mills spinning room, Mississippi Mar 1911

 

• Fed Policymakers See US Economy On Good Footing (R.)
• ‘Back Up The Truck And Buy, Buy Buy,’ Because There Is No Risk (MW)
• Trump Halts New Tariffs In US-China Trade War (BBC)
• China To Target Around 6% Growth In 2020, Step Up State Spending (R.)
• Rudy Giuliani Can Barely Contain Himself Over His Ukraine Findings (ZH)
• Two for One Holiday Special (Kunstler)
• NY Post Editorial Board Names Eric Ciaramella As Whistleblower (ZH)
• Labour Voters ‘Defected Over Corbyn, Not Brexit’ (Ind.)
• The State of the Canadian Debt Slaves (WS)
• Talks At COP25 Stalled ‘Because Of Australia, Saudi Arabia & Brazil’ (SMH)
• Esper Tells Syrian Kurds US Never Promised Them A State (RT)
• Lawyers Complain About Lack Of Access To Julian Assange In Jail (PA)

 

 

Just yesterday they announced another $500 billion for the repo crisis. Which will take the balance sheet over $4.5 trillion. Everything’s just dandy.

• Fed Policymakers See US Economy On Good Footing (R.)

The U.S. economy is doing well and looks set to stay that way next year, two top Federal Reserve policymakers said on Friday, remarks that suggest they are content to leave interest rates where they are. “I think the economy is in a good place. U.S Federal Reserve Vice Chair Richard Clarida said in an interview with Fox Business Network, adding that the consumer has never been in better shape. “We have the strongest labor market in 50 years, we have low and stable inflation, we have solid growth and our baseline outlook for the economy is more of the same in 2020.” Speaking to students and faculty earlier in the day at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York Fed President John Williams summed it up this way: “The economy is performing about as well as we have seen in decades.”

Williams and Clarida work closely with Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who on Wednesday announced the U.S. central bank’s well-telegraphed decision to hold interest rates steady in a range of 1.5% to 1.75%, and signaled borrowing costs would remain there for the foreseeable future. The Fed cut rates three times from July to October in a mini-easing cycle, designed to sustain the U.S. economic expansion amid slowing global growth and a drop in business investment caused by uncertainty amid the 17-month long U.S.-China trade war. On Friday the world’s two largest economies announcing a Phase 1 agreement that reduces some U.S. tariffs in exchange for increased Chinese purchases of American farm goods.


“Any resolution of that uncertainty, assuming it’s a good deal, is obviously a positive for the economic outlook,” Clarida said. He added, though, that trade was just a number of risks the Fed will monitor. “This is obviously a negotiation; it looks like it’s going in a positive direction,” Clarida said. “But … global developments more broadly have been something we’ve been monitoring. You’ve had a global slowdown this year, emerging markets have been slowing down, there are muted inflation pressures. So it’s not just any one thing that we are focusing on.”

Read more …

There is no risk because the Fed jumps in always and everywhere. Except to protect savings and pensions. Those they kill.

• ‘Back Up The Truck And Buy, Buy Buy,’ Because There Is No Risk (MW)

“Back up the truck and buy, buy, buy.” That was the advice from Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank, who sent a rousing note to clients late Thursday, on the heels of trade optimism that is lifting global equities at the week’s end and a decisive election outcome in the U.K. “All over the world, markets are falling love. Buy it. Buy it all,” reads the headline of that note. Rupkey said a pair of geopolitical risks — an elusive U.S.-China trade deal and yearslong wrangling over Brexit — “thought to be strangling world economic growth” incredibly look to be getting resolved in a “big, big way.”


“There is some smoke and mirrors here, but it looks like this is the time for investors around the world to throw months of caution to the winds and take risk off the table, and they are, buying stocks and selling bonds with abandon, as the economic outlook brightens and central banks shelve their plans to cut interest rates further,” he writes. Investors were waiting for more news on a trade deal after reports surfaced Thursday that the U.S. could trim existing import tariffs on Chinese goods, as well as delaying those set to kick in on Sunday. Notably though, China has remained silent on any deal progress in the wake of those developments.

Read more …

You start out big, so you have room to retreat a little.

• Trump Halts New Tariffs In US-China Trade War (BBC)

The US and China have announced a preliminary trade agreement. The so-called phase one deal will see billions of dollars in tariffs removed or delayed. US stocks hit a fresh record on hopes there will be a continued softening of trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies. A fresh wave of US tariffs on Chinese imports was due to take effect on Sunday. However, this has been cancelled for now. “We will begin negotiations on the phase two deal immediately, rather than waiting until after the 2020 Election,” US President Donald Trump said in a tweet. “This is an amazing deal for all.”


If the new, higher tariffs had gone ahead, Chinese-made goods such as smartphones, clothing and toys would have become more expensive for Americans just ahead of Christmas. US negotiators are reportedly offering to significantly reduce existing tariffs on about $360bn worth of Chinese imports. In return, China has promised to buy large quantities of US soybeans, poultry and other agricultural products. The agreement is a deal in principle, which means if China breaks any part of the agreement, the Trump administration has the ability to re-implement tariffs.

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Almost half a trillion in new local bonds. What a great idea.

• China To Target Around 6% Growth In 2020, Step Up State Spending (R.)

China plans to set a lower economic growth target of around 6% in 2020 from this year’s 6-6.5%, relying on increased state infrastructure spending to ward off a sharper slowdown, policy sources said. Chinese leaders are trying to support growth to limit job losses that could affect social stability, but are facing pressure to tackle debt risks caused by pump-priming policies. The proposed target, to be unveiled at China’s annual parliamentary session in early March 2020, was endorsed by top leaders at the annual closed-door Central Economic Work Conference this month, according to three sources with knowledge of the meeting’s outcome.

“We aim to keep next year’s growth within a reasonable range, or around 6%,” said a source who requested anonymity. Top leaders pledged to keep economic policies stable while making them more effective to achieve growth targets in 2020, state media said on Thursday. Next year will be crucial for the ruling Communist Party to fulfill its goal of doubling GDP and incomes in the decade to 2020. Economic growth of nearly 6% next year could be enough to meet that goal given the economy is expected to expand about 6.2% this year, policy insiders said.


[..] The government aims to boost infrastructure investment by allowing local governments to issue more special bonds next year, but there is less room for tax cuts, the sources said. The annual budget deficit could rise from this year’s 2.8% of GDP, but is likely to be kept within 3%, they said. Local governments could be allowed to issue special bonds worth some 3 trillion yuan ($426.20 billion) in 2020 to fund infrastructure projects, including 1 trillion yuan front-loaded to this year, they said. “Fiscal policy will provide a key support for the economy,” said one source.

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Let’s see it. Bill Barr has said the Durham report won’t be out until spring-summer 2020. Lots of wiggle room.

• Rudy Giuliani Can Barely Contain Himself Over His Ukraine Findings (ZH)

For the past several weeks, the personal attorney to President Trump has been in Ukraine, interviewing witnesses and gathering evidence to shed light on what the Bidens were up to during the Obama years, and get to the bottom of claims that Kiev interfered in the 2016 US election in favor of Hillary Clinton. He has enlisted the help of former Ukrainian diplomat, Andriy Telizhenko, to gather information from politicians and ask them to participate in a documentary series in partnership with One America News Network (OANN) – which will make the case for investigating the Bidens as well as Burisma Holdings – the natural gas firm which employed the son of a sitting US Vice President in a case which reeks of textbook corruption.

According to the Journal, Giuliani will present findings from his self-described “secret assignment” in a 20-page report. “Trump and Giuliani say then-Vice President Biden engaged in corruption when he called for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor who had investigated a Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden served on the board. The Bidens deny wrongdoing, and ousting the prosecutor was a goal at the time of the U.S. and several European countries. -Wall Street Journal. Telizhenko, the former diplomat, tells the Journal that the plan for the series was conceived during the impeachment hearings as a way for Giuliani to tell his side of the story.


The former Ukrainian diplomat flew to Washington on November 20 to film with Giuliani, while in early December he accompanied America’s Mayor on the Kiev trip – stopping in Budapest, Vienna and Rome. Upon his return to New York on Saturday, Giuliani says he took a call from President Trump while his plane was still taxiing down the runway, according to the Wall Street Journal. “What did you get?” Trump asked. “More than you can imagine,” answered the former New York mayor who gained notoriety in the 1980s for taking down the mob as a then-federal prosecutor.

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The Dems focus on impeachment, the GOP on the elections.

• Two for One Holiday Special (Kunstler)

Hillary Clinton sure got her money’s worth with the Fusion GPS deal: it induced a three-year psychotic break in the body politic, destroyed the legitimacy of federal law enforcement, turned a once-proud, free, and rational press into an infernal engine of bad faith, and is finally leading her Democratic Party to an ignominious suicide. And the damage is far from complete. It’s even possible that Mrs. Clinton will return to personally escort the party over the cliff when, as is rumored lately, she jumps into the primary contest and snatches the gonfalon of leadership from the ailing old man of the sclerotic status quo, Uncle Joe Biden. The citizens of this foundering polity have been subjected to a stunning doubleheader of political spectacle clear through the week.

On Monday, the Horowitz Report was briefly celebrated by the Left for claiming “no bias” and a “reasonable predicate” for the RussiaGate mess — until auditors actually got to read the 400-plus-page document and discovered that it was absolutely stuffed with incriminating details that Mr. Horowitz was too polite, too coy, or too faint-hearted to identify as acts worthy of referral for prosecution. Mr. Barr, the attorney general, and US attorney John Durham immediately stepped up to set the record straight, namely, that this was hardly the end of the matter and that they were privy to fact-trains of evidence that would lead, by-and-by, to a quite different conclusion. This reality-test was greeted, of course, with shrieking for their dismissal from the Jacobin Left.


But then at mid-week, Mr. Horowitz put in a personal appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee and left no doubt that entire RussiaGate extravaganza was spawned by Fusion GPS’s utterly false Steele dossier and the so-called “Intel Community’s” zeal for weaponizing it to overthrow the president. The shock-waves from all that still pulsate through the disordered collective consciousness of this sore-beset republic, and will disturb the sleep of many former and current officials for months to come as the specter of Barr & Durham transmutes into a nightmare of Hammer & Tongs, perp-walks, and actual prosecutions.

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What a weird joke. Yeah, let him do Maddow with a mask on.

• NY Post Editorial Board Names Eric Ciaramella As Whistleblower (ZH)

The New York Post Editorial Board has named CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella as the whistleblower at the heart of the Trump impeachment saga, confirming an October 30 report by RealClearInvestigation’s Paul Sperry which has been widely cited in subsequent reports. Whistleblower lawyers refuse to confirm or deny Ciaramella is their man. His identity is apparently the worst-kept secret of the Washington press corps. In a sign of how farcical this has become, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said his name as part of a series of names during a live hearing Wednesday night aired on television. He never called him the whistleblower, just said he was someone Republicans thought should testify, yet Democrats angrily denounced the “outing.” If you don’t know the man’s name, how do you know the man’s name?” -New York Post

Ciaramella, a registered Democrat, is a CIA analyst who specializes in Russia and Ukraine, and ran the Ukraine desk at the National Security Council (NSC) in 2016. He previously worked for then-NSC adviser Susan Rice, as well as Joe Biden when the former VP was the Obama administration’s point-man for Ukraine. He also worked for former CIA Director John Brennan, and was reportedly a highly valued employee according to RedState’s Elizabeth Vaughn. He also became former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster’s personal aide in June 2017, was called out as a leaker by journalist Mike Cernovich that same month.


He also worked Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American lawyer and Democratic operative involved in allegations that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 US election by releasing the so-called ‘Black Ledger’ that contained Paul Manafort’s name. In 2017, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon wanted Ciaramella kicked off the National Security Council over concerns about leaks.

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It’s Corbyn’s job to realize this. Or it was.

• Labour Voters ‘Defected Over Corbyn, Not Brexit’ (Ind.)

More voters turned against Labour because of Jeremy Corbyn rather than Brexit, according a poll probing the reasons for the party’s greatest electoral defeat in decades. Pollsters Opinium found that among 2017 Labour voters who defected at last night’s general election, 37 per cent of them cited the leadership of the party as their main reason. Despite Mr Corbyn’s claim the election “was taken over ultimately by Brexit”, 21 per cent said they defected due to the party’s stance on EU membership while just six per cent said their main reason was Labour’s economic policies. It comes as the Labour leader indicated he would step down from his role at the start of the new year, but remain in place for the duration of a leadership contest, which could take several months.


Among Labour voters who switched allegiances to the Tories, 45 per cent cited Mr Corbyn’s leadership as the main issue while 29 per cent of those who defected to the Liberal Democrats did so. Of all respondents who said they did not vote for the Labour Party at the first December election in almost a century, 43 per cent said their main reason was the leadership. A further 17 per cent placed blame with the triangulation on Brexit and 12 per cent of the economic policies put forward in Labour’s manifesto.

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“..despite still ultra-low interest rates..”

• The State of the Canadian Debt Slaves (WS)

Canadian households, rated near the top of the most indebted in the world, accomplished something awe-inspiring: They got even more indebted and their leverage rose to a new record, according to data released today by Statistics Canada. The portion of their disposable income (total incomes from all sources minus taxes) that Canadian households spent on making principal and interest payments, including on mortgage debts and non-mortgage debts such as credit card balances, reached a new record of 14.96% in the third quarter, This record beat the prior record of 2007, and this happened despite still ultra-low interest rates:

Mortgage debt was the driver behind this new record, as the portion of disposable income that Canadians spent to make interest and principal payments on their mortgages rose to 6.74%, the highest ever. But these are aggregate numbers, and for some individual households, the burden is a lot higher. Based on data from the 2016 census, 67.8% of Canadian households own their home, and the ratio has been dropping. The remaining households rent, and they do not have a mortgage. And a portion of those who own a home do not have a mortgage either because they’d already paid it off. And another portion of homeowners only carries a relatively small amount of mortgage debt.


But among the remaining homeowners, particularly those who bought in recent years, the burden of their mortgage is heavy. And it’s this portion that everyone is worrying about, not the large number of other Canadian households. In the US, it was this portion that triggered the mortgage crisis — not the renters, and not the one-third of homeowners who’d already paid off their mortgages, and not those homeowners who’d paid down their mortgages significantly. Non-mortgage debt, such as credit-card balances and personal loans, also increased, but did not take out the previous high. In the third quarter, debt service on non-mortgage debts reached 8.23% of disposable income, the highest since Q3 2008. This chart shows the two ratios separately:

Americans were forced to deleverage during the mortgage bust and housing bust, and have never re-leveraged to the full extent, particularly with mortgage debt and credit card debts, which are barely higher than they were at the peak in 2007, but over those 12 years the economy had grown, and the population has grown, and the ratio of mortgage debt and credit card debt to GDP has declined sharply. The exception are student loans, which have totally blown out, and auto loans which have also increased faster than GDP. Canadian households in aggregate never really experienced the full effects of the Financial Crisis in the housing market, and they weren’t forced to deleverage, and there was no lesson to be learned, and they have gone hog-wild on debt to fund their housing bubbles:

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Others say because of the US. It’ll end with big promises that remain unfunded.

• Talks At COP25 Stalled ‘Because Of Australia, Saudi Arabia & Brazil’ (SMH)

Global climate talks have been extended into the weekend as nations wrangle over carbon accounting issues, including whether Australia should be able to slash its Paris emissions reduction goals using a surplus from an earlier era. As is typical with Conference of the Parties (COP) events, the gathering in the Spanish capital of Madrid blew past its Friday deadline. Observers expect negotiations on carbon trading rules and other issues to last until at least Sunday, Australian time. International media singled out Australia’s insistence it be allowed to count “over-achievement” during the 2012-20 Kyoto Protocol period to reduce its abatement task during the 2021-30 Paris accord as one brake on progress.


John Connor, chief executive of the Carbon Markets Institute, said a ban on Australia’s use of so-called Kyoto carry-over credits remained an option in final drafts. The use of a “surplus” – effectively halving Australia’s Paris pledge of reducing 2005-levels of emissions by 26 per cent by 2030 – opened the door to India and former Soviet nations to cut their ambition too, he said. “Other countries definitely care … because the Kyoto carryover is a card only developed countries, who had carbon budget commitments under the Kyoto protocol, can play,” Mr Connor said. “To date it remains that only Australia is willing to play that card and it’s not winning them friends.”

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This goes back to Condoleeza Rice at least.

• Esper Tells Syrian Kurds US Never Promised Them A State (RT)

The US never promised Syria’s Kurds that it would help them build an autonomous state, Defense Secretary Mark Esper has insisted, despite years of hints to the contrary. So much for the birth pangs of that New Middle East… “Nowhere, at no point in time did we tell the Kurds, we will assist you in establishing an autonomous Kurdish state in Syria, nor would we fight against the longstanding ally Turkey on your behalf,” Esper told reporters on Friday. “We live up to our obligations, and our obligation, our agreement, our understanding with the Kurds was this: that we would work together to fight in Syria to defeat ISIS,” he explained, referring to the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorist group.

But now that ISIS has been declared dead almost as many times as its late leader Baghdadi, is it game over for the US-Kurdish partnership? Esper’s words no doubt came as a shock to anyone expecting a continuation of the Assad-Must-Go policies of the Obama administration, in which it was understood that the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces would be rewarded for doing their part to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad with their own semi-sovereign state à la Iraqi Kurdistan. US media have long sung the praises of ‘Rojava’ as some sort of feminist utopia, but this “brave social experiment” is now imperiled by the Trump administration’s stubborn refusal to continue waging a war it has all but lost in Syria.


The SDF provided an ideal anti-Assad proxy through which the US could occupy resource-rich areas of Syria, an occupation which would otherwise be considered illegal under international law. But when the US began pulling out of northeast Syria back in September, leaving the surprised Kurds at the mercy of Turkish forces that view them as terrorists, the Kurds were forced to beg the same Assad government they had decried as the devil incarnate while the US was still propping them up for protection. They ultimately swallowed their pride and worked out an arrangement with Syrian and Russian forces along the Turkish border, but this was not the deal they thought they’d made with the US.

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From our Comments yesterday:

“Finally, DJ Baraitser asked Gareth Peirce if it would help if Julian #Assange were presented in person on the 19th in order to facilitate a meeting afterwards. Peirce declined saying that “It’s a difficult claustrophobic journey from Belmarsh”

So, the main complaint apparently – and the headline to the story – is that they need more direct access to Assange. But when the Judge offers one thing that IS in her power to order that would give them at least some direct access in person, the lawyers decline with a flimsy excuse.

Now that he is on remand he is supposed to be allowed 2 social visits per week and unlimited legal visits. Those two things are separate, one doesn’t preclude the other. If he isn’t getting that and he was my client I’d be raising merry hell about it and dragging whoever necessary into the appropriate Court TODAY to get an Order fixing it.”

• Lawyers Complain About Lack Of Access To Julian Assange In Jail (PA)

Julian Assange has been blocked from seeing evidence in his extradition case because his lawyers cannot get sufficient access to him, a court has heard. The WikiLeaks founder, 48, appeared at Westminster magistrates court by video link on Friday for a hearing to extend his detention in Belmarsh prison, in south-east London. He is being held in the high-security jail before a full hearing in February when he will fight extradition to the US, where he faces 18 charges including conspiring to hack into a Pentagon computer. Assange is accused of working with the former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak hundreds of thousands of classified documents.

Assange appeared uncomfortable as he sat waiting for the hearing to start, clenching his hands together before putting them inside the sleeves of his grey sweater. He spoke to confirm his name and date of birth and to clarify he was Australian, after the court’s legal adviser mistakenly suggested he was a Swedish national. The court heard that his lawyers had made a request to the judge, complaining about a lack of access to their client behind bars. Gareth Peirce, defending Assange, said the legal team were struggling to prepare documents for the case as Assange had no access to the evidence. “Without Mr Assange’s knowledge, some of it is recently acquired evidence, some of it is subject to months of investigation not always in this country, of which he is unaware because of the blockage in visits,” she said.


“Despite our best efforts, Mr Assange has not been given what he must be given, and we are doing our utmost to cut through this.” Peirce said the governor of Belmarsh had prioritised family visits over legal visits, and she asked the judge to step in. But the district judge, Vanessa Baraitser, said she had no jurisdiction over the Prison Service.= “Can I make it clear that I have no desire to stand in the way of any lawyer having proper access to their client and it’s in the interest of justice that they do,” the judge said. “What I can do and say is to state in open court that it would be helpful to this extradition process that Mr Assange’s lawyers have the access to their client.”

Read more …

 

Banksy’s latest in Birmingham

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle October 18 2019

Oct 182019
 
 October 18, 2019  Posted by at 9:10 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Salvador Dali The three pines 1919

 

• McConnell: Senate Impeachment Trial ‘As Soon As Thanksgiving’ (ZH)
• Trump Florida Golf Course To Host G7 Summit (BBC)
• Turkey To Suspend Syria Offensive, Mike Pence Announces (BBC)
• Washington is Wrong Once Again – Kurds Join Assad to Defend Syria (Ron Paul)
• Media And Pundits Misread The ‘Everyone Wins’ Plan For Syria (MoA)
• UK Agrees To Best Of Worst Possible Brexit Deals (MW)
• EU Leaves Door Open To Brexit Extension, In Blow To Boris Johnson (G.)
• UK MPs Win Bid To Vote On 2nd Brexit Referendum In Saturday Showdown (Ind.)
• How Slashing Pentagon Budget Could Pay for Medicare for All (Conley)
• Going Dutch? Low Interest Rates Rattle ‘World’s Best’ Pension System (R.)

 

 

And you thought you had seen absurd theater so far… Biden and Comey and Strzok testifying. Hillary?! Wasserman-Schultz?

“..you’d have basically Thanksgiving to Christmas — which would be wonderful because there’s no deadline in the world like the next break to motivate senators..”

• McConnell: Senate Impeachment Trial ‘As Soon As Thanksgiving’ (ZH)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told Republican Senators on Wednesday to prepare for an impeachment trial of President Trump as soon as Thanksgiving, according to the Boston Globe. The announcement comes as House Democrats roll the dice on a second-hand claim from a CIA ‘whistleblower’ that President Trump pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate former VP Joe Biden – who the whistleblower worked for – and Biden’s son Hunter [..] .. while Trump will almost certainly be impeached by the Democrat-controlled House, the GOP-controlled Senate will be able to pick apart the entire affair.

“In their closed-door weekly luncheon, McConnell gave a presentation about the impeachment process and fielded questions alongside his staff and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who was a manager for the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton. “Impeachment is the first step to remove a president, with the House voting on formal charges and the Senate holding a trial in which it either convicts or acquits him. -Boston Globe “There’s sort of a planned expectation that it would be sometime around Thanksgiving, so you’d have basically Thanksgiving to Christmas — which would be wonderful because there’s no deadline in the world like the next break to motivate senators,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) following the meeting.


McConnell has previously said that if the House impeaches Trump, Senate rules would force him to begin a trial – one which could force the Bidens to testify. “Not only could Mr. Biden be forced to be in D.C. at a critical moment in the presidential campaign, but so could many of his chief rivals — the half-dozen senators also vying for Democrats’ presidential nomination, impeachment experts said. For that matter, if the House chooses to impeach Mr. Trump on charges stemming from the special counsel’s Russia investigation, aides said it could open the door to witnesses such as fired FBI Agent Peter Strzok or even major figures from the Obama administration. Mr. Trump could even be present for the entire spectacle. Experts said the Senate would have a hard time refusing him if he demanded to confront the witnesses against him.” -Washington Times

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Uber trolling.

• Trump Florida Golf Course To Host G7 Summit (BBC)

One of President Donald Trump’s golf resorts in Florida will host the G7 summit next June, the White House says. White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney denied President Trump would profit from the event. The aide said “Donald Trump’s brand is probably strong enough as it is”, so he did not need a branding boost. Mr Trump has previously said he is not involved with the daily operations of the Trump Organization and that his sons run the business. Mr Mulvaney told reporters on Thursday that an advance team of scouts had started with a list of possible locations for the summit in about a dozen states. The team, he said, went to visit the venues in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Florida, North Carolina, Michigan, Tennessee and Utah.

“And it became apparent at the end of that process that Doral was by far and away, far and away, the best physical facility for this meeting. “In fact I was talking to one of the advance teams when they came back and I said, ‘What was it like?’ And they said, ‘You’re not going to believe this but it’s almost like they built this facility to host this type of event.'” The chief of staff said the event would be made available “at cost” and that using the Doral would save millions of dollars and was cheaper than the other potential sites. Earlier this year the US president floated the idea of his Doral property hosting the G7. But Mr Mulvaney denied on Thursday that his boss was profiting from the presidency, pointing out that he donates his salary to charity.


“It’s the most recognisable name in the English language [Trump] and probably around the world right now, so no, that has nothing to do with that,” he said. Mr Mulvaney said he had initially been sceptical about the idea and “aware of the political sort of criticism that we’d come under for doing it at Doral”. He added: “I get the criticisms, so does he. Basically, he’d be criticised regardless of what he’d chose to do, but no there’s no issue here on him profiting from this any way, shape or form.”

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120 hours. Followed by a ceasefire.

• Turkey To Suspend Syria Offensive, Mike Pence Announces (BBC)

Turkey has agreed to a ceasefire in northern Syria to let Kurdish-led forces withdraw, US Vice-President Mike Pence has announced. All military operations will be paused for five days, and the US will help facilitate an “orderly withdrawal” of Kurdish-led troops from what Turkey has termed a “safe zone” on the border. Turkey launched its assault last week. It aimed to repel a Kurdish militia that it views as a terrorist group, and resettle Syrian refugees in the area. Critics fear this could lead to ethnic cleansing of the local Kurdish population.


The cross-border offensive came after US President Donald Trump pulled US forces out of the border region. His decision prompted a raft of criticism at home and abroad, with some accusing him of giving Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “green light” for the operation. Mr Trump tweeted about the ceasefire before Mr Pence announced it, writing that “millions of lives will be saved!” Mr Pence thanked Donald Trump’s “strong leadership” during the announcement. “He wanted a ceasefire. He wanted to stop the violence,” the vice-president said.

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It’s obvious where Ron Paul stands, he always has: The best way to help the Kurds and everyone else in the region is to just come home.

• Washington is Wrong Once Again – Kurds Join Assad to Defend Syria (Ron Paul)

When President Trump Tweeted last week that “it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous endless wars,” adding that the US would be withdrawing from Syria, Washington went into a panic. Suddenly Republicans, Democrats, the media, the think tanks, and the war industry all discovered and quickly became experts on “the Kurds,” who we were told were an “ally” being sent to their slaughter by an ignorant President Trump. But it was all just another bipartisan ploy to keep the “forever war” gravy train rolling through the Beltway. Interventionists will do anything to prevent US troops from ever coming home, and their favorite tactic is promoting “mission creep.”

As President Trump Tweeted, we were told in 2014 by President Obama that the US military would go into Syria for just 30 days to save the Yazidi minority that they claimed were threatened. Then that mission crept into “we must fight ISIS” and so the US military continued to illegally occupy and bomb Syria for five more years. Even though it was the Syrian army with its Russian and Iranian allies that did the bulk of the fighting against al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria, President Trump took credit and called for the troops to come home. But when the military comes home, the military-industrial-Congressional-media complex loses its cash cow, so a new rationale had to be invented.


The latest “mission creep” was that we had to stay in Syria to save our “allies” the Kurds. All of a sudden our military presence in Syria was not about fighting terrorism but rather about putting US troops between our NATO ally Turkey and our proxy fighting force, the Kurds. Do they really want us to believe that it is “pro-American” for our troops to fight and die refereeing a long-standing dispute between the Turks and Kurds?

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Moon of Alabama is the first I’ve seen mention that the YPG “will be disbanded and integrated into the Syrian army.”

As I wrote a few days ago in Trump Talks To Putin. But How?, this whole thing has been planned and co-ordinated, much more than western media report.

• Media And Pundits Misread The ‘Everyone Wins’ Plan For Syria (MoA)

The U.S. media get yesterday’s talks between U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan all wrong. Those talks were just a show to soothe the criticism against President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northeast Syria. The fake negotiations did not change the larger win-win-win-win plan or the facts on the ground. The Syrian Arab Army is replacing the Kurdish PKK/YPG troops at the border with Turkey. The armed PKK/YPG forces, which had deceivingly renamed themselves (vid) “Syrian Democratic Forces” to win U.S. support, will be disbanded and integrated into the Syrian army. Those moves are sufficient to give Turkey the security guarantees it needs. They will prevent any further Turkish invasion.

[..] The U.S. can not “allow Turkey to annex a portion of Syria”. The U.S. does not own Syria. It is completely bollocks to think that it has the power to allow Turkey to annex parts of it. Turkey will not “gain territory”. There will be no Turkish “security corridor”. The Kurdish civilians in Kobani, Ras al Ain and Qamishli areas will not go anywhere. The Turks will not touch those Kurdish majority areas because they are, or soon will be, under control of the Syrian government and its army. [..] The Turkish Foreign Minister Cavusoglu confirmed that Turkey agrees with the Syrian government moves: “Russia “promised that the PKK or YPG will not be on the other side of the border,” Cavusoglu said in an interview with the BBC. “If Russia, accompanied by the Syrian army, removes YPG elements from the region, we will not oppose this.”


These moves have been planned all along. The Turkish invasion in northeast Syria was designed to give Trump a reason to withdraw U.S. troops. It was designed to push the Kurdish forces to finally submit to the Syrian government. Behind the scene Russia had already organized the replacement of the Kurdish forces with Syrian government troops. It has coordinated the Syrian army moves with the U.S. military. Turkey had agreed that Syrian government control would be sufficient to alleviate its concern about a Kurdish guerilla and a Kurdish proto-state at its border. Any further Turkish invasion of Syria is thereby unnecessary. The plan has everyone winning. Turkey will be free of a Kurdish threat. Syria regains its territory. The U.S. can leave without further trouble. Russia and Iran gain standing. The Kurds get taken care of.

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“Boris Johnson has signed a deal he said he didn’t need, creating a border he didn’t want, under the authority of a Court he didn’t accept, to be submitted to a Parliament he doesn’t control. ”

• UK Agrees To Best Of Worst Possible Brexit Deals (MW)

Boris Johnson has signed a deal he said he didn’t need, creating a border he didn’t want, under the authority of a Court he didn’t accept, to be submitted to a Parliament he doesn’t control. The one “great” thing about the agreement with the European Union that the U.K. prime minister hailed Thursday is that it reduces – if slightly – the possibility of a hard Brexit, and the associated foreseeable economic crisis. But beyond the forex market’s obvious relief at the possible end of three years of uncertainty — the pound jumped almost 1% on the news, before reversing — this is still a deal that will hurt the British economy. On a scale of 1 to 10 — from no-pain, remain in the EU to maximum damage, no-deal Brexit — the agreement concluded just a few hours before an EU leaders summit in Brussels registers as an 8 or 9.


Its economic impact will be worse than the deal negotiated by Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May and rejected three times by the U.K. Parliament earlier this year. That is true both in the short term and in the long term. In the short term, it leaves the U.K. outside the customs union where it would have stayed under the infamous “backstop” negotiated by the previous government. But more uncertainty is also hanging over the near term economic future. The dearth of investment in the last three years has been the main drag on the U.K. economy, which explains why the country’s GDP is now 1-to-3% lower than it would have been if voters had opted for remain in 2016.

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People are pressed to vote for a deal they don’t want. Is that really such a good idea?

• EU Leaves Door Open To Brexit Extension, In Blow To Boris Johnson (G.)

EU leaders have left open the option of extending Brexit beyond 31 October if the new deal is voted down by the Commons, in a blow to Boris Johnson’s strategy. The prime minister had been seeking to pitch Saturday’s vote in the Commons as a choice between deal or no deal after coming to an agreement with the EU. Johnson was helped by comments from Jean-Claude Juncker casting doubt on the possibility of a further Brexit delay, but the heads of state and government did not follow the European commission president’s lead. A summit communique issued after two hours of discussion tasked the commission and European parliament with taking “the necessary steps to ensure that the agreement can enter into force on November 1”.


But a senior EU official said that the leaders would follow events on Saturday, and reflect on the next steps if they were in a “different situation”. A second diplomatic source said they had chosen not to interfere in a “sensitive domestic debate … but they leave the door open to the possibility of an extension, to be discussed at a later stage – if required”. Johnson is facing an uphill battle to build a majority after the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist party rejected the revised deal, describing it as driving “a coach and horses through the professed sanctity of the Belfast agreement”. Juncker had tried to help sell the deal by pouring doubt on a further Brexit extension in the event of it being rejected.

Read more …

So even if the deal is accepted, it may still not be?

• UK MPs Win Bid To Vote On 2nd Brexit Referendum In Saturday Showdown (Ind.)

MPs have won a key parliamentary vote paving the way for a Commons bid to secure a second referendum on Saturday. Ex-Tory backbencher Sir Oliver Letwin led a successful attempt to allow backbench MPs to amend Boris Johnson’s Brexit plans, in a knife-edge vote that passed by 287 votes to 275. MPs also approved a rare Saturday sitting to scrutinise Mr Johnson’s new plan – but the government’s proposal for a short debate on a motion to either “approve the deal or approve a no-deal Brexit” were derailed by the backbench victory. The move now clears the way for pro-EU MPs to force a vote on a second referendum, by tacking on an amendment calling for another public vote on the prime minister’s Brexit blueprint.


Sir Oliver said the plan would allow MPs to move any amendment to the government’s proposal and for them to be voted upon, if selected by Speaker John Bercow. He suggested that it could close a loophole in the so-called Benn Act – which requires the PM to seek a Brexit delay if he does not have a deal by 19 October. The law only compels the PM to seek an extension if MPs fail to pass a motion. Sir Oliver told MPs: “That will enable those of us, like me, who wish to support and carry through and eventually see the ratification of this deal, not to put us in the position of allowing the government off the Benn Act hook on Saturday, but only at a time when the bill has been taken through both Houses of Parliament and legislated on.”

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A discussion you won’t be able to escape. It might be good to get the terminology straight. I think Tucker Carlson called Medicare for All pure socialism, but that would mean Canada, the UK, most of Europe and Asian countries like Thailand all pure socialist countries. Hard to maintain.

• How Slashing Pentagon Budget Could Pay for Medicare for All (Conley)

The Institute for Policy Studies on Thursday shared the results of extensive research into how the $750 billion U.S. military budget could be significantly slashed, freeing up annual funding to cover the cost of Medicare for All—calling into question the notion that the program needs to create any tax burden whatsoever for working families. Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), took aim in a New York Timesop-ed at a “chorus of scolds” from both sides of the aisle who say that raising middle class taxes is the only way to pay for Medicare for All. The pervasive claim was a primary focus of Tuesday night’s debate, while Medicare for All proponents Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) attempted to focus on the dire need for a universal healthcare program.

At the Democratic presidential primary debate on CNN Tuesday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was criticized by some opponents for saying that “costs will go down for hardworking, middle-class families” under Medicare for All, without using the word “taxes.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), on the other hand, clearly stated that taxes may go up for some middle class families but pointed out that the increase would be more than offset by the fact that they’ll no longer have to pay monthly premiums, deductibles, and other medical costs. “All these ambitious policies of course will come with a hefty price tag,” wrote Koshgarian. “Proposals to fund Medicare for All have focused on raising taxes. But what if we could imagine another way entirely?”


“Over 18 years, the United States has spent $4.9 trillion on wars, with only more intractable violence in the Middle East and beyond to show for it,” she added. “That’s nearly the $300 billion per year over the current system that is estimated to cover Medicare for All (though estimates vary).” “While we can’t un-spend that $4.9 trillion,” Koshgarian continued, “imagine if we could make different choices for the next 20 years.”

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The state of denial. Pensions funds have all moved into risk assets, so if stocks start falling, it’s over and out. Moreover, there will be far more elderly people soon vs the young, which will reduce contributions enormously while increasing payouts. At least try some realism. Zero interest rates klill pensions. Period.

• Going Dutch? Low Interest Rates Rattle ‘World’s Best’ Pension System (R.)

The planned reductions, due to take effect from January 2020, have shaken a country renowned for having one of the world’s strongest pension systems, and are an early warning to others about the impact of record low interest rates. [..] The European Central Bank’s (ECB) stimulus policies, which have helped drive interest rates into negative territory, are blamed in part for the impending cuts in the Netherlands and have triggered a fierce debate over how the funding of pensions should be calculated. ECB President Mario Draghi said last month that the central bank was “very concerned” about the side effects of negative rates, but maintained they were required for economic growth.

At the heart of the Dutch debate is a technical question over how to calculate the cost of future pension payouts while the ECB helps keep rates low. Actuaries make assumptions about how long pensioners will live, count up the future payments that have been promised to them and then use an assumed interest rate to “discount” how much must be put away to pay them. The lower this interest rate, “rekenrente” in Dutch, the more conservative the accounting, and the more it costs to meet future liabilities. The rekenrente is derived from government bond yields — which have turned negative across Europe as interest rates steadily fell this summer.


Each 1% fall in interest rates has led to roughly a 12% fall in the coverage ratio between assets and liabilities in pension pots, the Dutch central bank says. As a January deadline approaches, cuts appear inevitable. That has led several funds and some experts to argue that the rekenrente, which is around 0.3%, should be raised instead. Many blame ECB policy and see its effects as temporary. Increasing the rekenrente to 2% or 3% would restore the funds to full solvency. Corien Wortmann-Kool, the chairwoman of the 456 billion euro ABP civil servants fund, told Reuters she opposes pension cuts as “unnecessary” for now.

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Debt Rattle October 3 2019

Oct 032019
 
 October 3, 2019  Posted by at 10:37 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  13 Responses »


Rembrandt van Rijn Self portrait 1642

 

• US Hits Scotch Whisky, Italian Cheese, French Wine With 25% Tariffs (R.)
• NYT: ‘Whistleblower’ Spoke To ‘Shifty Schiff’ Before Filing Complaint (RT)
• Trump Attacks Democrats, Whistleblower Over Impeachment (R.)
• Lindsey Graham Urges Foreign Leaders To Assist Barr With Investigation (Pol.)
• We’ll “Definitely” Interfere In 2020, Just “Don’t Tell Anybody” – Putin (ZH)
• Putin Shames Greta Thunberg And Her Handlers Over Environmental Agenda (ZH)
• Dismay In Brussels As Boris Johnson Finally Reveals Brexit Plan (G.)
• 3 Saudi Brigades Annihilated in Houthi Offensive in Saudi Arabia (Pieraccini)
• Ex-Israeli Intel Exec Says Epstein, Ghislaine Worked for Israeli Intel (Webb)
• Julian Assange, Britain’s Unconvicted Prisoner (Cross)

 

 

And it still can’t help Boeing. Boeing has other problems.

This is based on a recent WTO ruling on Airbus and Boeing subsidies. The EU can only strike back in 2020.

Also: “..a 10% levy that could hurt U.S. airlines such as Delta that have billions of dollars of Airbus orders waiting to be filled.”

• US Hits Scotch Whisky, Italian Cheese, French Wine With 25% Tariffs (R.)

The Trump administration slapped 25% tariffs on French wine, Italian cheese and single-malt Scotch whisky — but spared Italian wine, pasta and olive oil — in retaliation for European Union subsidies on large aircraft. The U.S. Trade Representative’s Office released a list of hundreds of European products that will get new tariffs, including cookies, salami, butter and yogurt – but in many cases applied to only some EU countries, including German camera parts and blankets produced in the United Kingdom. The list includes UK-made sweaters, pullovers, cashmere items and wool clothing, as well as olives from France and Spain, EU-produced pork sausage and other pork products other than ham, and German coffee. The new tariffs are to take effect as early as Oct. 18.


The U.S. Trade Representative’s Office said it would “continually re-evaluate these tariffs based on our discussions with the EU” and expects to enter talks in a bid to resolve the dispute. Still some Italian foods — Parmesan Reggiano, Romano and provolone cheese — were hit with tariffs as were Italian fruits, clams and yogurt. Also getting new tariffs are German and British camera parts, industrial microwave ovens, printed books, sweet biscuits and waffles. The main target of the U.S. tariffs is Airbus aircraft made in the EU, which face a 10% levy that could hurt U.S. airlines such as Delta that have billions of dollars of Airbus orders waiting to be filled. EU products winning reprieves include chocolate, Greek, French and Portuguese olive oil, helicopters, frozen fish, lobster, sparkling wine, stemware and tiles.

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“I’d go a step further – I think he probably helped write” the complaint..”

• NYT: ‘Whistleblower’ Spoke To ‘Shifty Schiff’ Before Filing Complaint (RT)

The CIA agent accusing President Donald Trump of a quid pro quo with Ukraine spoke to House intel chief Adam Schiff’s staff before filing his whistleblower complaint, sources say – and Trump believes the collusion goes deeper. The “whistleblower” spoke to a House Intelligence Committee staffer about his concerns, gleaned from secondhand knowledge of a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that the president was abusing his power – and that staffer shared the information with Schiff – before the still-anonymous CIA officer filed his complaint, according to the New York Times, which cited Schiff’s spokesman and “current and former American officials” in a report published Wednesday.


The Times’ report “shows that Schiff is a fraud,” the president told reporters during a White House press conference with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto Wednesday afternoon when he was asked about the story, calling the fact that the congressman, whom he dubbed “shifty Schiff,” knew about the complaint before it was even filed “a scandal.” “I’d go a step further – I think he probably helped write” the complaint, Trump said. “He knew long before, and he helped write it too,” he continued more confidently. The president – who elsewhere in his remarks tried out his new “corrupt news” moniker for the mainstream media – nevertheless congratulated the Times on the scoop. “Maybe they’re getting better,” he mused.

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“They should look at him for treason because he is making up the words of the president of the United States – not only the words but the meaning..”

• Trump Attacks Democrats, Whistleblower Over Impeachment (R.)

U.S. President Donald Trump kept up his assaults on the Democratic lawmakers leading impeachment proceedings on Wednesday, accusing House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff of treason, as well as attacking the unidentified whistleblower who reported concerns about his behavior. The Republican president has lashed out repeatedly at the impeachment inquiry, which was prompted by his phone call with the Ukrainian president that sought an investigation that would be damaging to a Democratic political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump repeatedly says he did nothing wrong in his July 25 telephone call in which he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate a domestic political rival Joe Biden, the former U.S. vice president.


He has repeatedly attacked the Democratic chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, who is leading the impeachment inquiry. “They should look at him for treason because he is making up the words of the president of the United States – not only the words but the meaning,” Trump said. He accused the Democrats’ impeachment efforts of being groundless and politically motivated. “They’ve been trying to impeach me from the day I got elected,” Trump said.

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Both sides are now timing for the 2020 elections.

• Lindsey Graham Urges Foreign Leaders To Assist Barr With Investigation (Pol.)

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham on Wednesday asked several foreign leaders to continue to assist Attorney General William Barr with his investigation into the 2016 election. In a letter to the prime ministers of Australia, Italy and Britain, the South Carolina Republican requested their “continued cooperation with Attorney General Barr as the Department of Justice continues to investigate the origins and extent of foreign influence in the 2016 election.” At President Donald Trump’s urging, Barr is examining how the FBI investigation into connections between Russia and the Trump campaign began. Graham stated in the letter that during the 2016 election, the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities used a “deeply flawed dossier filled with hearsay and written by a biased, former United Kingdom intelligence officer” — a reference to the so-called Steele dossier — as part of its investigation.


He also added that law enforcement had received “intelligence from an Italian ‘professor’” — referring to Joseph Mifsud, whose interactions with a former Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, prompted the FBI to open its counterintelligence investigation — and accepted information from an Australian diplomat. That was a reference to a reported tip from an Australian official, Alexander Downer, to the FBI about possible collusion between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. [..] “That the Attorney General is holding meetings with your countries to aid in the Justice Department’s investigation of what happened is well within the bounds of his normal activities,” Graham wrote. “He is simply doing his job.”

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Exposing the sheer stupidity that controls America.

• We’ll “Definitely” Interfere In 2020, Just “Don’t Tell Anybody” – Putin (ZH)

Absolutely no laughing matter for the likes of Rachel Maddow and others who have now spent years locked deep in their ‘Russiagate’ navel-gazing, but at least Putin still hasn’t lost his sense of humor about it. While speaking on a panel of industry and political leaders at the Russian Energy Week conference, Putin mocked reports already alleging Moscow plans to interfere in the 2020 US presidential election. When pressed by NBC News correspondent Keir Simmons over whether former Special Counsel Robert Mueller was accurate in predicting Russia would “attempt to interfere” in the 2020 election, Putin leaned forward in a gesture to act like he was whispering a ‘secret’: “I’m going to tell you a secret,” Putin said, leaning forward. “Yes, we will definitely intervene, don’t tell anybody” he continued to an applauding crowd.

“You know, we have enough of our own problems,” Putin continued. “We are engaged in resolving internal problems and are primarily focused on this.” His characteristic public sarcasm was a hit with the crowd, at an event which included OPEC Secretary General Mohammed Barkindo and others. He followed on a more serious note by calling it “ridiculous” that Russia would interfere in the 2020 election. He also talked down his relationship and interactions with President Trump, describing that the two leaders have never been close. “In my opinion, we have good, businesslike relations, and a relatively stable level of trust,” he said during the conference’s plenary session. “We’ve never been close, and aren’t now.” However, Putin did come to the US president’s defense when asked about the Ukraine call transcript.

“From what we know, I don’t see anything compromising at all,” Putin told the audience. “I didn’t see that during this phone call Trump demanded compromising material from Zelenskiy at any cost and threatened him that he wouldn’t help Ukraine.” The Kremlin last week said its consent must be required before any calls between the US and Russian leader are published. Putin said there’s no compromising material at all in those transcripts, and added he that “any conversation can be published — I always proceed from that.” Putin also addressed last year’s controversy over his closed door summit with President Trump, saying he requested that Washington publish details of the talks. “We don’t mind,” Putin said confidently. “I assure you that there’s nothing there that would compromise President Trump.”

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I wouldn’t have said he shames her. He simply understands that Greta IS her PR handlers. She should go home and be a child, not get dragged around the planet by spin doctors.

• Putin Shames Greta Thunberg And Her Handlers Over Environmental Agenda (ZH)

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday chided Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg and her adult handlers, after the 16-year-old gave an emotional speech at the UN late last month. “Sure, Greta is kind, but emotions should not control this issue,” said Putin. “Go and explain to developing countries why they should continue living in poverty and not be like Sweden,” he added, before saying that it was deplorable how some groups are using Thunberg to achieve their own goals. In her speech last week, Thunberg lashed out at the United Nations – saying “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” Thunberg also filed a legal complaint accusing five countries of inaction on global warming – drawing the ire of French President Emmanuel Macron, and many others who noted that she’s left China out of her diatribes and lawsuit, despite being the world’s worst polluter by total volume.

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There are actually Labour MPs who support Johnson’s nothingness.

• Dismay In Brussels As Boris Johnson Finally Reveals Brexit Plan (G.)

Boris Johnson appears to be fighting a losing battle to avoid Britain staying in the European Union beyond 31 October after Michel Barnier privately gave a scathing analysis of the prime minister’s new plan for the Irish border, describing it as a trap. The European commission also refused to go into the secretive and intensive “tunnel” talks with the UK’s negotiators before a crunch summit on 17 October from which the UK had hoped to deliver a breakthrough deal. Despite concerted attempts to avoid publicly trashing the UK proposals, there was dismay behind the scenes in Brussels after Johnson tabled his first concrete proposal for replacing the Irish backstop.

The prime minister had set out the outline of the government’s offer in a speech to Tory party faithful in Manchester that also laid down the battle lines for a general election. On Wednesday night, he was hopeful a parliamentary majority could be assembled to back it. Johnson’s plan involves Northern Ireland leaving the EU’s customs union at the end of transition along with the rest of the UK, necessitating checks and controls on the island of Ireland. Northern Ireland would also stay aligned with EU standards on goods if Stormont agreed by December 2020, the end of the transition period, and then in a vote every four years.

But the UK has also requested that both sides commit at treaty level “never to conduct checks at the border” even if Stormont vetoes the arrangements laid out in the new 44-page Irish protocol. Barnier said that this commitment would prevent Brussels from protecting its internal market if the Northern Ireland assembly blocked the arrangement in 2020 or at a later date. “The EU would then be trapped with no backstop to preserve the single market after Brexit,” he warned, according to someone present in the room.

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Federico Pieraccini on an attack that proves it wasn’t Iran, ever. Where’s the coverage of this in the western press? Too inconvenient?

“Let us salute the resourceful Houthis, today’s unconquerable underdogs, for giving the world’s most repugnant bullies a bloody nose, and a huge blow to their bloated egos.”

• 3 Saudi Brigades Annihilated in Houthi Offensive in Saudi Arabia (Pieraccini)

Many may have hitherto been led to believe that the Houthis were a ragtag armed force lacking in sophistication. Many, seeing the drone and missile attacks on Saudi oil plants, may have declared it to be a false-flag attack carried out by Riyadh to boost Aramco’s market value; either that or it was an operation carried out by Iran or even Israel. On Saturday September 28, the Houthis put paid to such speculation by confirming what many, like myself, have been writing for months; that is, that the asymmetrical tactics of the Houthis, combined with the conventional capabilities of the Yemeni army, are capable of bringing the Saudi kingdom of Mohammed Bin Salman to its knees.

The Yemeni army’s missile forces are able to carry out highly complex attacks, no doubt as a result of reconnaissance provided by the local Shia population within the Kingdom that is against the House of Saud’s dictatorship. These Houthi sympathisers within Saudi Arabia helped in target identification, carried out reconnaissance within the plants, found the most vulnerable and impactful points, and passed this intelligence on to the Houthis and Yemeni army. These Yemeni forces employed locally produced means to severely degrade Saudi Arabia’s crude-oil-extraction and processing plants. The deadly strikes halved oil production and threatened to continue with other targets if the Saudi-conducted genocide in Yemen did not stop.

On Saturday 29 the Houthis and the Yemeni army conducted an incredible conventional attack lasting three days that began from within Yemen’s borders. The operation would have involved months of intelligence gathering and operational planning. It was a far more complex attack than that conducted against Aramco’s oil facilities. Initial reports indicate that the forces of the Saudi-led coalition were lured into vulnerable positions and then, through a pincer movement conducted quickly within Saudi territory, the Houthis surrounded the town of Najran and its outskirts and got the better of three Saudi brigades numbering in the thousands and including dozens of senior officers as well as numerous combat vehicles. This event is a game changer, leaving the US, Mike Pompeo and the Israelis and Saudis unable to lay the blame on Iran as all this took place a long way from Iran.

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Whitney Webb strikes again.

• Ex-Israeli Intel Exec Says Epstein, Ghislaine Worked for Israeli Intel (Webb)

In an interview with Zev Shalev, former CBS News executive producer and award-winning investigative journalist for Narativ, the former senior executive for Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence, Ari Ben-Menashe, claimed not only to have met Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, back in the 1980s, but that both Epstein and Maxwell were already working with Israeli intelligence during that time period. In an interview last week with the independent outlet Narativ, Ben-Menashe, who himself was involved in Iran-Contra arms deals, told his interviewer Zev Shalev that he had been introduced to Jeffrey Epstein by Robert Maxwell in the mid-1980s while Maxwell’s and Ben-Menashe’s involvement with Iran-Contra was ongoing. Ben-Menashe did not specify the year he met Epstein.

Ben-Menashe told Shalev that “he [Maxwell] wanted us to accept him [Epstein] as part of our group …. I’m not denying that we were at the time a group that it was Nick Davies [Foreign Editor of the Maxwell-Owned Daily Mirror], it was Maxwell, it was myself and our team from Israel, we were doing what we were doing.” Past reporting by Seymour Hersh and others revealed that Maxwell, Davies and Ben-Menashe were involved in the transfer and sale of military equipment and weapons from Israel to Iran on behalf of Israeli intelligence during this time period. He then added that Maxwell had stated during the introduction that “your Israeli bosses have already approved” of Epstein. Shalev later noted that Maxwell “had an extensive network in Israel at the time, which included the then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, according to Ben-Menashe.”

Ben-Menashe went on to say that he had “met him [Epstein] a few times in Maxwell’s office, that was it.” He also said he was not aware of Epstein being involved in arms deals for anyone else he knew at the time, but that Maxwell wanted to involve Epstein in the arms transfer in which he, Davies and Ben-Menashe were engaged on Israel’s behalf.

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“These inconsistencies should raise serious doubts as to whether the British justice system is operating objectively and according to domestic and international legal norms.”

We had no such doubts any more.

• Julian Assange, Britain’s Unconvicted Prisoner (Cross)

This article is a second piece focusing on Belmarsh prison, where the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, continues to be arbitrarily detained by the British government. The first part showed how Belmarsh prison has been systematically denying Assange access to justice by restricting all the means through which he could prepare his defence; access to and possession of legal documents, talking to his US lawyers, restricted meetings with his UK lawyers, and access to a laptop as a basic means to prepare his defence. These restrictions have been imposed in contradiction to all legislation and standards regarding the rights of the prisoner. This piece looks at the weaponizing of Category A prison security and the use of prison healthcare isolation as part of a program of the state-sponsored abuse of a journalist imprisoned for releasing prima facie evidence of US war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The decision on 13th September by Judge Vanessa Baraitser in a ‘technical hearing‘ at Westminster Magistrate’s Court, means that although Assange has been given parole half way through what experts believe was a disproportionate 50 week sentence for skipping police bail in 2012, he will still be kept in prison while he is fighting extradition to the US – a process which could take many years. Baraitser justified her decision as follows: “In my view I have substantial ground for believing if I release you, you will abscond again” She described his status now as: “…from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition”

According to the British judiciary, Assange was initially apprehended and sentenced to prison because he had ‘skipped bail’ by seeking refuge for political asylum in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. Despite the fact the original investigation in which he was wanted for questioning (and complied) by Swedish authorities had been dropped, the British courts still treated Assange as a serious criminal and sentenced him as such. The narratives in Baraitser’s statement, the injustices arising from them and the proceedings around this hearing have all been highlighted and roundly condemned. What’s more, despite the change to Assange’s prisoner status, he has so far been kept in Belmarsh. These inconsistencies should raise serious doubts as to whether the British justice system is operating objectively and according to domestic and international legal norms.

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Debt Rattle September 15 2019

Sep 152019
 
 September 15, 2019  Posted by at 9:26 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Marcel Duchamp About young sister 1911

 

• Israeli Attacks On Syria Halted After Russian Threat To Shoot Down Jets (ZH)
• US, Israel Talk About Mutual Defense Treaty – Trump (RT)
• Netanyahu’s Plan to Escape Trial (Haaretz)
• US Blames Saudi Oil Strikes On Iran, Not Houthis (BBC)
• Global Spare Oil Capacity In US Hands After Saudi Outage (R.)
• US Stands Ready To Tap Emergency Oil Reserve After Saudi Attacks (R.)
• London Upper Tribunal Rejects La Repubblica’s Assange Docs Appeal (Maurizi)
• Johnson Is A Liar Who Only Backed Leave To Help His Career – Cameron (G.)
• US To Hit EU With Billions In Tariffs After Victory In Airbus Case (Pol.eu)
• Italy’s New Government Lets Charity Ship Head To Italian Port (R.)
• World ‘Losing Battle Against Deforestation’ (BBC)
• The Spy Who Failed (Ritter)

 

 

What Putin tells Netanyahu, he also tells Trump at the same moment. A red line in the sand. This is the new world order.

• Israeli Attacks On Syria Halted After Russian Threat To Shoot Down Jets (ZH)

According to reports in both Israeli and Arabic regional media, Israel this past week was preparing to expand major airstrikes against “Iran-backed” targets in Syria, but Moscow imposed its red line. The Independent has published a story describing that Russia’s military in Syria threatened to shoot down any invading Israeli warplanes using fighter jets or their S-400 system. The Jerusalem Post, citing sources in the UK Independent (Arabia), writes just after the latest meeting in Sochi between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin: “According to the report, Moscow has prevented three Israeli airstrikes on three Syrian outposts recently, and even threatened that any jets attempting such a thing would be shot down, either by Russian jets or by the S400 Anti-aircraft missiles.


The source cited in the report claims a similar situation has happened twice, and that during August, Moscow stopped an airstrike on a Syrian outpost in Qasioun, where a S300 missile battery is placed.” Netanyahu’s hasty trip to meet with Putin on Thursday – even in the final days before Tuesday’s key election – was reportedly with a goal to press the Russian president on essentially ignoring Israel’s attacks in Syria. Citing further sources in the British-Arabic Independent Arabia, The Jerusalem Post continues: According to the Russian source, Putin let Netanyahu know that his country will not allow any damage to be done to the Syrian regime’s army, or any of the weapons being given to it… Israel sources cited by the Arabic newspaper described Netanyahu’s attempts to persuade Putin as “a failure”. This in spite of Netanyahu telling reporters after the meeting that his relations with Moscow were stronger than ever.

Read more …

Israel is going to defend the US?

• US, Israel Talk About Mutual Defense Treaty – Trump (RT)

The US and Israel are discussing a mutual defense treaty that would further cement the already “tremendous” alliance between the two countries, President Donald Trump has revealed. “I had a call today with Prime Minister Netanyahu to discuss the possibility of moving forward with a Mutual Defense Treaty, between the United States and Israel, that would further anchor the tremendous alliance between our two countries,” Trump tweeted. Trump voiced not-that-veiled support for Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections in Israel. “I look forward to continuing those discussions after the Israeli Elections when we meet at the United Nations later this month!” Trump wrote.


The support surely comes in handy, as Netanyahu’s backing appears to be quite shaky. The September 17 polls are the second snap legislative elections this year after Netanyahu failed to form the government back in April. The outcome of the upcoming vote is hard to predict, as Netanyahu’s party, Likud, has almost equal support as their main opponent the Blue and White led by Benny Gantz, opinion polls show. Netanyahu was quick to respond to Trump’s announcement, lauding the prospects of the alliance and managing to call the US president a “friend” twice in a single tweet.

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Netanyahu wanted to bomb Syria to support himself in the Sep 17 Knesset elections. Putin said we’ll shoot down your jets.

Netanyahu needs victory in the election to keep himself out of jail. He may be indicted by mid-October. Trump might want to reconsider who he’s friends with.

• Netanyahu’s Plan to Escape Trial (Haaretz)

Immediately after the last election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined to members of his inner circle a plan to extract him from facing trial. The plan was based on obtaining immunity from the Knesset and passing legislation to prevent the High Court of Justice from removing that immunity. If his bloc wins 61 Knesset seats next week, Netanyahu will presumably resort to this rescue plan. For him it will be the Day of Judgment. “Stop being frightened. It’s time for them to be frightened,” Netanyahu told his confidants, referring to justice officials, headed by Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit and State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan, who have decided to indict him in three cases, subject to a hearing.

Netanyahu told his confidants why he insisted on his destructive plan, telling them he had lost all confidence in the legal system on all levels – the attorney general’s office, the state prosecutor and the court system. “They want me in prison,” he told one of his cronies, noting that if he were indicted that would indeed be the result – not because he had crossed a red line, but merely due to the jurists’ collective hostility toward him and his ideology. Netanyahu appears to wholeheartedly believe himself to be a victim, framed by prosecutors and that Mendelblit, who is weak, doesn’t believe in them at all, but couldn’t withstand the pressure.

In his interviews with the police Netanyahu acted like a hunted man. “It’s a wacky conception,” he told national fraud squad chief Koresh Bar-Nur in January 2017. Bar-Nur came to Netanyahu’s residence with a team of investigators to question him under caution on Case 2000, involving a bribery deal Netanyahu allegedly negotiated with Yedioth Ahronoth publisher Arnon “Noni” Mozes.

Read more …

Trump was talking about lifting sanctions on Iran and then this happens?! That smells like Assad attacking his own people with chlorine just as things were getting better.

• US Blames Saudi Oil Strikes On Iran, Not Houthis (BBC)

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has blamed Iran for Saturday’s drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities. He dismissed a claim by Yemeni Houthi rebels that they had attacked the two facilities, run by state-owned company Aramco. Saudi Arabia’s energy minister said the strikes had reduced crude oil production by 5.7 million barrels a day – about half the kingdom’s output. Correspondents say they could have a significant impact on world oil prices. TV footage showed a huge blaze at Abqaiq, site of Aramco’s largest oil processing plant, while a second drone attack started fires in the Khurais oilfield. The Saudis lead a Western-backed military coalition supporting Yemen’s government, while Iran backs the Houthi rebels.


If the rebels were responsible for the attacks, their drones would have had to fly hundreds of miles from Yemen into central Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile experts are investigating whether the attacks could have been carried out from the north – either by Iran or its Shia allies in Iraq – using cruise missiles rather than drones, the Wall Street Journal reports. Tensions between the US and Iran have escalated in recent months. since US President Donald Trump abandoned a deal limiting Iran’s nuclear activities last year and reinstated sanctions. In a tweet, Mr Pompeo said there was “no evidence” the drones came from Yemen. He described the attack as “an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply”.

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The US and Saudi Aramco (its IPO is near) stand to gain most if oil prices shoot up.

• Global Spare Oil Capacity In US Hands After Saudi Outage (R.)

An attack on Saudi oil facilities on Saturday is believed to have disrupted half the country’s production capacity, making the United States the only real holder of the global supply cushion via its ability to raise own output or to soften sanctions against other major oil producers. Saudi Arabia has yet to comment on the extent of damage on its oil production but industry sources have said some 5-6 million barrels per day (bpd) or 5-6% of global supply have been affected. Saudi Arabia, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ de-facto leader and largest producer, has been long seen as the custodian of the world’s spare oil capacity.

Spare capacity is the extra oil a producing country can bring onstream and sustain at short notice, providing global markets with a cushion in the event of natural disaster, conflict or any other cause of an unplanned supply outage. Industry sources have said Saudi Arabia will be able to restore supply within days. A prolonged supply outage will have a major bullish impact on oil prices, which in turn will spur further gains in U.S. shale production. The United States has briefly overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world largest crude exporter this year, only a few years after removing a ban on oil exports because of large needs at home as the world’s largest oil consumer.

Analysts have repeatedly underestimated U.S. output growth gains with the country now producing around 15% of global supply. Besides the United States, the only countries which have significant spare capacity are Iran and Venezuela.

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Only to replace it with much more expensive oil?

• US Stands Ready To Tap Emergency Oil Reserve After Saudi Attacks (R.)

The Trump administration is prepared to tap U.S. emergency oil reserves if necessary after drone attacks shut oil output in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude exporter, a Department of Energy spokeswoman said. Energy Secretary Rick Perry “stands ready to deploy resources from the Strategic Petroleum Oil Reserves if necessary to offset any disruptions to oil markets as a result of this act of aggression,” spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes said. Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi group claimed credit for Saturday’s attacks on two plants at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, including the world’s biggest petroleum processing facility Abqaiq.


Perry directed department leaders to work with the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) “on potential available options for collective global action if needed,” Hynes said. The IEA said on Twitter earlier in the day that it was in contact with Saudi authorities and other major oil-producing nations, and that markets for now are well-supplied. The United States has occasionally coordinated with the IEA on collective draw downs of oil from international reserves. The SPR, held in heavily-guarded underground storage caverns on the Texas and Louisiana coasts, currently holds nearly 645 million barrels, or about the amount the United States consumes in a month.

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Where are the British people protesting this?

• London Upper Tribunal Rejects La Repubblica’s Assange Docs Appeal (Maurizi)

The press does not have the right to access the full set of documents on the Julian Assange case. That is what judge Edward Mitchell finally ruled in an appeal taken to the London Upper Tribunal by la Repubblica, after we have spent the last four years trying to access the full documentation to investigate the Assange case and factually reconstruct it.

In an extremely technical judgement just made public and which the judge himself characterises as “unusually long”, Mitchell rejects our legal arguments and states that he believed public knowledge of Mr Assange’s case would not have increased if it was known that the CPS held information from the US State Department or Department of Justice. A rather incredible argument considering that the entire Assange case revolves around the role of the United States authorities, who want to get their hands on the WikiLeaks founder, extradite him to the US and jail him for life: establishing whether the British and US authorities discussed this possibility from the very beginning is crucial.

[..]Our attempt to access the documents has been hindered and hugely delayed in every jurisdiction. However, the very few documents we have obtained so far have allowed us to unearth crucial information. They provide indisputable evidence of the UK’s role in helping to create the legal and diplomatic quagmire which kept Julian Assange arbitrarily detained since 2010, as established by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD). In fact, it was the UK Crown Prosecution Service which advised the Swedish prosecutors against the only judicial strategy that could have brought the Swedish rape investigation to a quick closure: questioning Assange in London, rather than trying to extradite him to Stockholm. It was the Crown Prosecution Service which tried to dissuade the Swedish prosecutors from dropping the case in 2013. Finally, it was the Crown Prosecution Service that wrote to its Swedish counterpart: “Please do not think that the case is being dealt with as just another extradition request” and destroyed crucial documents, even though the case is still ongoing and very controversial.

When we tried to shed light on these facts, to understand why the British authorities acted this way and why the Assange case was not “just another extradition request”, we ran up against a true rubber wall, so much so that we were forced to sue the Crown Prosecution Service. Our first appeal to the London First-tier Tribunal was rejected: the judge established that the press has no right to access the documentation, because the need for the British authorities to protect the confidentiality of the extradition process outweighs the public interest of the press to know. Today, Judge Edward Mitchell has rejected our appeal to the Upper Tribunal. At this point it is not clear who will be able to introduce some transparency and oversight in the Assange case, considering that the press is not allowed to do so.

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Selling a book.

• Johnson Is A Liar Who Only Backed Leave To Help His Career – Cameron (G.)

Boris Johnson is a liar who only backed the Leave campaign to help his career and Michael Gove was a “foam-flecked Faragist” whose “one quality” was disloyalty, David Cameron writes in his memoirs. The former prime minister poured vituperation on both his former colleagues Priti Patel, the current home secretary, and Dominic Cummings, the No 10 adviser, in extracts from the book published on Sunday. In what may be Cameron’s most explosive allegation yet, he effectively accused Boris Johnson of mounting a racist election campaign by focusing on Turkey and its possible accession to the EU. “It didn’t take long to figure out Leave’s obsession,” he writes. “Why focus on a country that wasn’t an EU member?


“The answer was that it was a Muslim country, which piqued fears about Islamism, mass migration and the transformation of communities. It was blatant.” Then Cameron echoes the explicitly racist Conservative campaign slogan used in Smethwick in 1964: “They might as well have said: ‘If you want a Muslim for a neighbour, vote “remain”.’” In Smethwick, Peter Griffiths had been elected as Conservative MP on the slogan “If you want a n**** for a neighbour, vote Labour.” Cameron writes that Johnson’s claims of concerns about British sovereignty were “secondary to another concern for Boris: what was the best outcome for him?”

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Get ready for more fun.

• US To Hit EU With Billions In Tariffs After Victory In Airbus Case (Pol.eu)

The United States has gotten the green light to impose billions of euros in punitive tariffs on EU products in retaliation for illegal subsidies granted to European aerospace giant Airbus. Four EU officials told POLITICO that the World Trade Organization ruled in favor of the U.S. in the long-running transatlantic dispute and sent its confidential decision to Brussels and Washington on Friday. The decision means that U.S. President Donald Trump will almost certainly soon announce tariffs on European products ranging from cheeses to Airbus planes. One official said Trump had won the right to collect a total of between €5 billion and €8 billion. Another said the maximum sum was close to $10 billion.


The decision sets the stage for a showdown between Europe and Washington just as the EU is transitioning to new leadership under incoming Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Trade Commissioner-designate Phil Hogan. In unveiling her team on Tuesday, von der Leyen signaled a robust approach to transatlantic disputes on trade and other issues with the Trump administration. aWashington has previously announced it would follow through with tariffs if it won the case in Geneva and has prepared a list of EU exports worth a total of $21 billion. The U.S. can choose products from that list and then tax them at different rates in order to claw back the total amount of damage resulting from the EU subsidies.

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After EU nations agreed to take the refugees.

• Italy’s New Government Lets Charity Ship Head To Italian Port (R.)

Italy’s new government allowed a French charity ship to bring ashore 82 migrants on Saturday in an apparent reversal of the uncompromising, closed-door policy of the previous administration. However, Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, who heads the 5-Star Movement in the governing coalition, said the Ocean Viking was only being given access to the southern island of Lampedusa because other European states had agreed to take in many of those on board. The government formally took office on Tuesday, promising a fresh approach to migration following the hardline clampdown on rescue ships introduced by former interior minister Matteo Salvini, who heads the far-right League.


Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Thursday that “several EU countries” had agreed to take in the Africans aboard the Ocean Viking but did not give further details. The ship is run by French charities SOS Mediterranee and Doctors Without Borders. It picked up the migrants off Libya earlier this week and had asked both Italy and Malta for permission to dock. Recent such requests from other boats had been rejected, leaving migrants stranded at sea for prolonged periods. The center-left Democratic Party (PD), which has replaced the League in the ruling coalition, applauded the announcement that the vessel had been given access to Lampedusa.

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As long as it pays more to cut and burn trees than to grow them or just leave them alone, this is inevitable.

• World ‘Losing Battle Against Deforestation’ (BBC)

A historic global agreement aimed at halting deforestation has failed, according to a report. An assessment of the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF) says it has failed to deliver on key pledges. Launched at the 2014 UN climate summit, it aimed to half deforestation by 2020, and halt it by 2030. Yet deforestation continues at an alarming rate and threatens to prevent the world from preventing dangerous climate change, experts have said. The critique, compiled by the NYDF Assessment Partners (a coalition of 25 organisations), painted a bleak picture of how the world’s forests continue to be felled.


“Since the NYDF was launched five years ago, deforestation has not only continued – it has actually accelerated,” observed Charlotte Streck, co-founder and director of Climate Focus, which co-ordinated the publication of the report. The report says the amount of annual carbon emissions resulting from deforestation around the globe are equivalent to the greenhouse gases produced by the European Union. On average, an area of tree cover the size of the United Kingdom was lost every year between 2014 and 2018. Tropical forest loss accounts for more than 90% of global deforestation, with the hotspot being located in Amazon Basin nations of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Peru.

Read more …

Your must read for the Sunday. Excellent. You’ll know a lot more about the CIA in Moscow, and in the US elections.

• The Spy Who Failed (Scott Ritter)

Oleg Smolenkov was a controlled asset of the CIA. While he was given certain latitude on what information he could collect, generally speaking Smolenkov worked from an operations order sent to him by his CIA controllers which established priorities for intelligence collection based upon information provided by Smolenkov about what he could reasonably access. Before tasking Smolenkov, his CIA handlers would screen the request from an operational and counterintelligence perspective, conducting a risk-reward analysis that weighed the value of the intelligence being sought with the possibility of compromise. Only then would Smolenkov be cleared to collect the requested information.

It is not publicly known what prompted the report from Smolenkov which Brennan found so alarming. Was it received out of the blue, a target of opportunity which Smolenkov exploited? Was it based upon a specific tasking submitted by Smolenkov’s CIA handlers in response to a tasking from above? Or was it a result of the intervention of the CIA director, who tasked Smolenkov outside normal channels? In any event, once Brennan created his special analytical unit, Smolenkov became his dedicated source. If Smolenko was in this for the money, as appears to be the case, he would have been motivated to come up with the “correct” answer to Brennan’s tasking for information on Putin’s role. By late 2016, Western media had made quite clear what kind of answer Brennan wanted.

Every intelligence report produced by a controlled asset is subjected to a counterintelligence review where it is examined for any evidence of red flags that could be indicative of compromise. One red flag is the issue of abnormal access. Smolenkov did not normally have direct contact with Putin, if ever. His intelligence reports would have been written from the perspective of the distant observer. His report about Putin’s role in interfering in the 2016 election, however, represented a whole new level of access and trust. Under normal circumstances, a report exhibiting such tendency would be pulled aside for additional scrutiny; if the report was alarming enough, the CIA might order the agent to be subjected to a polygraph to ensure he had not been compromised.

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Debt Rattle September 7 2019

Sep 072019
 
 September 7, 2019  Posted by at 9:47 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  13 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Portrait of Dora Maar 1942

 

• The Financialization of the US Economy (WS)
• Fed Chair Powell Repeats Vow To Act ‘As Appropriate’ (R.)
• Tariffs Are No Longer China’s Biggest Problem In The Trade War (CNBC)
• Boris Johnson Urged To Become A ‘Brexit Martyr’ (DM)
• A Trump Brexit Threatens (Wight)
• A Crackup Is Inevitable (Kunstler)
• CIA, Mossad, “the Epstein Network” and an Orwellian Nightmare (Whitney Webb)
• How MIT Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein (Farrow)
• Boeing’s Chief Technical Pilot On The 737 MAX Project Pleads The Fifth (ST)
• For The First Time In My Life, I’m Frightened To Be Jewish (David Graeber)
• Edward Snowden’s Guardian Angels (F24)

 

 

But services don’t make stuff.

• The Financialization of the US Economy (WS)

Service-producing industries dominate the US economy, accounting for over 70% of GDP. And this sector is hopping. Revenues in the major services categories rose 5.3% in the second quarter of 2019, compared to the same quarter a year earlier, to $4.05 trillion, not seasonally adjusted, according to the Commerce Department’s Quarterly Selected Services Estimates released today. For the first two quarters of 2019, service revenues rose 5.5% to $8.0 trillion. The pace of growth so far this year is slightly lower than the hot 6.0% growth for the year 2018.


Four biggies dominate the service sector, and the US economy overall. They accounted for $2.92 trillion in revenues in Q1, or about 72% of total service revenues, with the biggest of them all, finance and insurance, accounting for 32%, up from 31% at the end of last year. It is also the fastest-growing segment, even faster than healthcare, as the US economy is getting more and more financialized. The share of each of the big four of overall service revenues: • Finance and insurance: 32% • Healthcare: 17% • Professional, scientific, and technical services: 12% • “Information” services, such as telecommunications, software, and data processing: 11%.

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Only one act is appropriate: go home. Did you know Jay Powell is worth some $100 million? Do you think he’s concerned about Americans living paycheck to paycheck?

• Fed Chair Powell Repeats Vow To Act ‘As Appropriate’ (R.)

The U.S. Federal Reserve will continue to act “as appropriate” to sustain the economic expansion in the world’s biggest economy, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said Friday in Zurich, sticking to a phrase that financial markets have read as signaling further interest-rate reductions ahead. “Our obligation is to use our tools to support the economy, and that’s what we’ll continue to do,” Powell said at the University of Zurich. Still, he said, “We are clearly at a time where there is a range of views” among Fed policymakers meeting Sept. 17-18 to decide on rates.


Powell’s careful wording reflects a split within the U.S. central bank about how best to respond to an economy where the job market and consumer spending are strong but rising trade tensions between Beijing and Washington, Britain’s possibly messy exit from the European Union, and a broad global slowdown pose risks. Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren for instance has made the case for leaving rates where they are until those risks are more tangible in the economic data. Others including St. Louis Fed President James Bullard have called for a half-a-percentage point interest-rate cut to get ahead of the trade war risks and bring the Fed’s policy rate more in line with market expectations. Meanwhile, financial markets are betting Fed policymakers will agree to split the difference and follow their quarter-point rate cut in July with another one later this month.

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Decoupling.

• Tariffs Are No Longer China’s Biggest Problem In The Trade War (CNBC)

It’s not the new round of tariffs that went into effect; we’ve been playing the tit-for-tat tariff war for more than a year. It’s not the economic reports; they’ve been a little too mixed lately to force any dramatic moves. It’s not even the decision by Hong Kong administrator Carrie Lam to fully withdraw the controversial mainland extradition bill; it’s still not clear that the Hong Kong unrest would be affected in any way by a trade deal. Given the timing of the change in tone, it seems more likely that what’s making the difference is a realization on both sides that there’s another way this trade war could end – and that possible ending is one the U.S. is very unlikely to lose.


That alternate ending is summed up in one word: decoupling. The decoupling push is quite different than any U.S. efforts to get China to open up more of its economy to American companies. Instead, it focuses on reducing America’s extremely heavy reliance on China for so much of its manufacturing needs. Even if China’s economy weren’t so closed off to so many American goods and services, a strong argument has long been made that the U.S. needs to diversify its sources for imports. While finding those new sources wouldn’t necessarily do anything to dent America’s trade imbalances, it would reduce the risks of a major disruption to the U.S. economy based on disputes or other problems connected to a single foreign country.

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As I wrote yesterday, he has little to lose by resigning.

• Boris Johnson Urged To Become A ‘Brexit Martyr’ (DM)

Boris Johnson wrote to all Tory members last night to indicate that he would rather defy the law than beg Brussels for a delay in bringing Britain out of the EU. The Prime Minister said he was only bound ‘in theory’ by a law which is expected to receive Royal Assent on Monday, taking a No Deal Brexit off the table. In his letter, he reiterated his determination to stand firm against Remainers, saying: ‘They just passed a law that would force me to beg Brussels for an extension to the Brexit deadline. This is something I will never do.’ Earlier on Friday he told reporters he would not entertain seeking another deadline extension from Brussels, as the incoming law compels him to do if no agreement is in place by October 19.

He was urged last night by Tory grandee Iain Duncan Smith to hold his nerve, saying he would be ‘martyred’ if he chose to break the law and risk a possible prison sentence for contempt of Parliament. Mr Duncan Smith told The Telegraph: ‘This is about Parliament versus the people. Boris Johnson is on the side of the people, who voted to leave the EU. ‘The people are sovereign because they elect Parliament. But Parliament wants to stop the will of the people.’ If Mr Johnson fails to carry out the will of Parliament, he risks being taken to court and, if a judge ordered him to obey Parliament, he could be held in contempt and even jailed for refusing.


Mr Johnson’s latest plans for a snap election appeared to have been scuppered yet again last night by a ’stitch-up’ between Jeremy Corbyn and Remain parties. Labour, the Lib Dems and Scots and Welsh nationalists agreed to block the public going to the polls before October 31. It leaves the Prime Minister in limbo, forced to choose between resigning or defying a law passed by MPs ruling out a No Deal Brexit.

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“This desire for godlike powers of total creation is precisely why free market ideologues are so drawn to crises and disasters.”

• A Trump Brexit Threatens (Wight)

Trump’s otherworldly vice president, Mike Pence, has just said more in one short sentence to unravel the complexities of the Brexit crisis that continues to bedevil the UK, than the ocean of column inches that have been devoted to the subject since the referendum was held in 2016. Speaking at a black tie event in London on Thursday night, attended by an array of business executives, Pence proclaimed, “The minute the UK is out, America is in.” Pence, a man who stands as living proof that human evolution is not wedded to an ever upwards path, delivered these words with the bombast of a Roman proconsul addressing the notables of a soon-to-be client state.

Thus let there be no doubt that the hard no-deal Brexit advocated by the UK’s newly installed Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his supporters is to all intents a Trump Brexit – one that will see the UK economy opened up to the tender mercies of U.S. corporations on terms set not by London but Washington. In other words, we’re talking disaster capitalism on steroids, bringing with it the likely prospect of the decimation of what’s left of the UK’s welfare state, including that most revered totem to social solidarity, the National Health Service (NHS), which since the end of WWII, when it was established, has provided generations of British citizens with free healthcare at the point of need, funded out of general taxation, regardless of social class or personal wealth.


The NHS is therefore a socialist institution in all but name, which Johnson and his privileged right wing establishment acolytes in the hard Brexit camp would sooner see broken up and sold off to U.S. insurance companies in sacrifice to their god, the market. This is regardless of any and all assurances given to the contrary. In her classic work, Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein writes: “Believers in the shock doctrine [of disaster capitalism] are convinced that only a great rupture – a flood, a war, a terrorist attack – can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave,” while earlier in the same passage, warning that “This desire for godlike powers of total creation is precisely why free market ideologues are so drawn to crises and disasters.”

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National sovereignty.

• A Crackup Is Inevitable (Kunstler)

What’s at stake behind all the pushing-and-shoving is the question of national sovereignty. Does it matter anymore? I suspect it will matter increasingly for everyone in many nations, and at a smaller and smaller scale of political divisions so that, for instance, Great Britain itself will be faced with surrendering its dominion over Scotland and Northern Ireland. This is churning in the zeitgeist now, actually has been for some time since the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia cracked up. Even the United States finds itself increasingly disunited and it’s not inconceivable that before the century ends some regions may go their own way. Texans have been talking it up for years, and California is already acting like she’s started divorce proceedings.

China, meanwhile, is whipping its quasi-vassal Hong Kong like a dog because Xi Jinping is not in a position to bust Donald Trump upside the head and Xi’s got to take it out on somebody. Everything was looking so rosy for China as it burst out of its medieval cocoon into industrial adulthood, and now Mr. Trump is ruining the global arrangements that turned the sclerotic old outfit into a global super-dragon. They’ve had a blast driving down the capitalist road — even if they’re actually ruled by communists — but a storm of bad debt is coming up on them from behind, and if it catches up, the joyride is over and some kind of dreadful crackup happens.


All the abiding normality of the past seventy years is slipping away into flux. Modernity is finally yielding – to what? Nobody knows. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the realm of money and economy. Beyond all the other quarrels of modern times — democracy versus communism, Islam versus the West, the wealthy north versus the poor south — one thing remained pretty steady: the flow of oil into the engines of economy. Turned out, the world didn’t have to run out of oil for that normality to fray badly; the oil just had to become marginally unaffordable, and voila! It’s hard for people to grok, especially here in the USA with oil production so far above the old 1970 prior peak that the proposition seems absurd.

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Whitney’s latest. Obvious must read.

• CIA, Mossad, “the Epstein Network” and an Orwellian Nightmare (Whitney Webb)

Prior to the public scrutiny of Barak’s relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, following the latter’s arrest this past July and subsequent death, Barak had come under fire for his ties to disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein. Indeed, it was Ehud Barak who put Weinstein in contact with the Israeli private intelligence outfit Black Cube, which employs former Mossad agents and Israeli military intelligence operatives, as Weinstein sought to intimidate the women who had accused him of sexual assault and sexual harassment. Former Mossad director Meir Dagan led Black Cube’s board until his death in 2016 and Carbyne co-founder Lital Leshem is Black Cube’s former director of marketing.

After Barak put him in contact with Black Cube’s leadership, Weinstein, according to The New Yorker, used the private spy firm to “‘target,’ or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focused on their personal or sexual histories.” In addition, The New Yorker noted that “Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally” and “also enlisted former employees from his film enterprises to join in the effort, collecting names and placing calls that, according to some sources who received them, felt intimidating.”


Yet, more recently, it has been Barak’s close relationship to Epstein that has raised eyebrows and opened him up to political attacks from his rivals. Epstein and Barak were first introduced by former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in 2002, a time when Epstein’s pedophile blackmail and sex trafficking operation was in full swing.

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Pecunia non olet.

• How MIT Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein (Farrow)

The M.I.T. Media Lab, which has been embroiled in a scandal over accepting donations from the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, had a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein than it has previously acknowledged, and it attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him. Dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that, although Epstein was listed as “disqualified” in M.I.T.’s official donor database, the Media Lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds, and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university.


Perhaps most notably, Epstein appeared to serve as an intermediary between the lab and other wealthy donors, soliciting millions of dollars in donations from individuals and organizations, including the technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates and the investor Leon Black. According to the records obtained by The New Yorker and accounts from current and former faculty and staff of the media lab, Epstein was credited with securing at least $7.5 million in donations for the lab, including two million dollars from Gates and $5.5 million from Black, gifts the e-mails describe as “directed” by Epstein or made at his behest. The effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, referred to Epstein as Voldemort or “he who must not be named.”

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By refusing to send documents.

• Boeing’s Chief Technical Pilot On The 737 MAX Project Pleads The Fifth (ST)

A former Boeing official who played a key role in the development of the 737 MAX has refused to provide documents sought by federal prosecutors investigating two fatal crashes of the jetliner, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mark Forkner, Boeing’s chief technical pilot on the MAX project, invoked the privilege in response to a grand jury subpoena issued by U.S. Justice Department prosecutors looking into the design and certification of the plane, the person said.

Invoking the Fifth to avoid testifying, while a legal right, is sometimes interpreted as an admission of guilt. Its use to resist a subpoena for documents is less common and may only imply a dance between prosecutors and defense attorneys, legal experts say. Forkner, now a first officer for Southwest Airlines, referred questions to his attorney when reached by phone. His attorney, David Gerger, of Houston, did not respond to inquiries.


Forkner, who worked at Boeing from 2011 to 2018, according to his LinkedIn profile, was frequently anxious about the deadlines and pressures faced in the MAX program, going to some of his peers in the piloting world for help, a person who worked on the project previously told The Seattle Times, speaking on condition of anonymity. The MCAS system, designed to move a powerful control surface at the tail to push the airplane’s nose down in certain rare situations, played a critical role in the crashes when the planes nose-dived out of the sky. During the certification process, Forkner suggested to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that MCAS not be included in the pilot manual, according to previous Seattle Times reporting.

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The anti-Corbyn campaign fallout.

• For The First Time In My Life, I’m Frightened To Be Jewish (David Graeber)

I am 58 years old, and for the first time in my life, I am frightened to be Jewish. We live in a time when racism is being normalized, when Nazis parade in the streets in Europe and America; Jew baiters like Hungary’s Orban are treated as respectable players on the international scene, “white nationalist” propagandist Steve Bannon can openly coordinate scare-mongering tactics with Boris Johnson in London at the same time as in Pittsburg, murderers deluded by white nationalist propaganda are literally mowing Jews down with automatic weapons. How is it, then, that our political class has come to a consensus that the greatest threat to Britain’s Jewish community is a lifelong anti-racist accused of not being assiduous enough in disciplining party members who make offensive comments on the internet?


For almost all my Jewish friends, this is what is currently creating the greatest and most immediate sense of trepidation, even more than the actual Nazis: the apparently endless campaign by politicians like Margaret Hodge, Wes Streeting, and Tom Watson to weaponize antisemitism accusations against the current leadership of the Labour party. It is a campaign – which however it started, has been sustained primarily by people who are not themselves Jewish – so cynical and irresponsible that I genuinely believe it to be a form of antisemitism in itself. And it is a clear and present danger to Jewish people. To any of these politicians who may be reading this, I am begging you: if you really do care about Jews, please, stop this.

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Justin better act.

• Edward Snowden’s Guardian Angels (F24)

After he revealed the National Security Agency’s illegal mass surveillance programmes in 2013, Edward Snowden received help from some unlikely accomplices. Four refugees and their lawyer allowed the whistleblower to escape and stay under the radar, at a time when he was the world’s most wanted man. For 13 days, they sheltered him in their tiny apartments located in the poorest area of Hong Kong, home to the marginalised community of asylum seekers. The mastermind behind the idea of hiding the American fugitive in plain sight was Robert Tibbo, a Canadian human rights lawyer, well known for defending asylum seekers in the region.

Snowden told FRANCE 24 he believes he owes his life to these unexpected allies, who could have turned him in at any time: “They could have written an email to the CIA and they could have gotten a big cheque or they could have finally gotten asylum in exchange. But they would have had to do it by selling someone into a grave. And for that, I’ll never be able to repay them.”


But since their identity was revealed, especially with the release of the Oliver Stone film “Snowden” in 2016, these refugees are being persecuted by Hong Kong authorities. Arrested on several occasions, they have been questioned about their ties with Snowden. The little welfare they received from the government has been cut. Today, they all live in constant fear in Hong Kong. If deported to their home country of Sri Lanka, they could face imprisonment, torture and even death. All of them have applied for asylum in Canada.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle August 24 2019

Aug 242019
 
 August 24, 2019  Posted by at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Frank Walton Crows on a beach 1884

 

• World Needs To End Risky Reliance On US Dollar: BoE’s Carney (R.)
• China Strikes Back At US With New Tariffs On $75 Billion In Goods (R.)
• Trump Heaps Another 5% Tariff On Chinese Goods In Latest Escalation (R.)
• Majority Of Americans Don’t Want Trump Impeached, Removed From Office (USAT)
• CNN Hires Former FBI #2 Andy McCabe, Who Was Fired For Leaking And Lying (ZH)
• Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein-Bill Clinton Relationship (Webb)
• Bill Barr And Bill Clinton (Webb)
• Long Before Epstein: Sex Traffickers & Spy Agencies (Vos)
• Psychologist Approved Jeffrey Epstein’s Removal From Suicide Watch (R.)
• France Launches Rape Inquiry in Jeffrey Epstein Case (BBC)
• Lost at Sea (Kunstler)
• Tulsi Gabbard Victimized by DNC’s Dubious Debate Criteria (Tracey)

 

 

“Synthetic Hegemonic Currency” sounds creepy to me.

• World Needs To End Risky Reliance On US Dollar: BoE’s Carney (R.)

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney took aim at the U.S. dollar’s “destabilizing” role in the world economy on Friday and said central banks might need to join together to create their own replacement reserve currency. The dollar’s dominance of the global financial system increased the risks of a liquidity trap of ultra-low interest rates and weak growth, Carney told central bankers from around the world gathered in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the United States. “While the world economy is being reordered, the U.S. dollar remains as important as when Bretton Woods collapsed,” Carney said, referring to the end of the dollar’s peg to gold in the early 1970s. Emerging economies had increased their share of global activity to 60% from around 45% before the financial crisis a decade ago, Carney said.

But the dollar was still used for at least half of international trade invoices – five times more than the United States’ share of world goods imports – fuelling demand for U.S. assets and exposing many countries to damaging spillovers from swings in the U.S. economy. Carney – who was considered a candidate to be the next head of the International Monetary Fund but failed to secure backing from Europe’s governments – said the problems in financial system were encouraging protectionist and populist policies. [..] Carney warned that very low equilibrium interest rates had in the past coincided with wars, financial crises and abrupt changes in the banking system. As a first step to reorder the world’s financial system, countries could triple the resources of the IMF to $3 trillion as a better alternative to countries protecting themselves by racking up enormous piles of dollar-denominated debt.

“While such concerted efforts can improve the functioning of the current system, ultimately a multi-polar global economy requires a new IMFS (international monetary and financial system) to realize its full potential,” Carney said. China’s yuan represented the most likely candidate to become a reserve currency to match the dollar, but it still had a long way to go before it was ready. The best solution would be a diversified multi-polar financial system, something that could be provided by technology, Carney said. Facebook’s Libra was the most high-profile proposed digital currency to date but it faced a host of fundamental issues that it had yet to address. “As a consequence, it is an open question whether such a new Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC) would be best provided by the public sector, perhaps through a network of central bank digital currencies,” Carney said.

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Globalization is dead.

• China Strikes Back At US With New Tariffs On $75 Billion In Goods (R.)

China said on Friday it will impose retaliatory tariffs against about $75 billion worth of U.S. goods, putting as much as an extra 10% on top of existing rates in the dispute between the world’s top two economies. The latest salvo from China comes after the United States unveiled tariffs on an additional $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, including consumer electronics, scheduled to go into effect in two stages on Sept. 1 and Dec. 15. China will impose additional tariffs of 5% or 10% on a total of 5,078 products originating from the United States including agricultural products such as soybeans, crude oil and small aircraft. China is also reinstituting tariffs on cars and auto parts originating from the United States.

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Dead as a doornail.

• Trump Heaps Another 5% Tariff On Chinese Goods In Latest Escalation (R.)

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday lashed back at a new round of Chinese tariffs by heaping an additional 5% duty on some $550 billion in targeted Chinese goods in the latest tit-for-tat trade war escalation by the world’s two largest economies. Trump’s move, announced on Twitter, came hours after China unveiled retaliatory tariffs on $75 billion worth of U.S. goods, prompting the president earlier in the day to demand U.S. companies move their operations out of China. The intensifying U.S.-China trade war stoked market fears that the global economy will tip into recession, sending U.S. stocks into a tailspin, with the Nasdaq Compositedown 3%, and the S&P 500 down 2.6%. U.S. Treasury yields also declined as investors sought safe-haven assets, and crude oil, targeted for the first time by Chinese tariffs, fell sharply.


Trump’s tariff response was announced after markets closed on Friday, leaving potentially more damage for next week. “Sadly, past Administrations have allowed China to get so far ahead of Fair and Balanced Trade that it has become a great burden to the American Taxpayer,” Trump said on Twitter. “As President, I can no longer allow this to happen!” He said the United States would raise its existing tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports to 30% from the current 25% beginning on Oct. 1, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the communist People’s Republic of China. At the same time, Trump announced an increase in planned tariffs on the remaining $300 billion worth of Chinese goods to 15% from 10%.

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Don’t take Nadler’s hobby away.

• Majority Of Americans Don’t Want Trump Impeached, Removed From Office (USAT)

A majority of Americans oppose impeaching President Donald Trump, according to a new poll by Monmouth University released Thursday. The data point – with 59% of those surveyed responding that Trump should not be impeached and compelled to leave office – comes as Trump’s approval rating remains at 40% in the same poll. In the poll, there is a clear partisan divide on whether the House Judiciary Committee should pursue an impeachment inquiry. While 72% of Democrats believe such an inquiry is a good idea, only 39% of independents and 8% of Republicans share that belief. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y. confirmed the launch of an impeachment inquiry by his House panel earlier this month in an interview on CNN.

Additionally, Nadler sent a letter Thursday asking four other Democratic House committee chairs currently leading investigations into Trump to share documents to aid his committee’s investigation into possible obstruction and other abuses, which could lead to potentially filing articles of impeachment against the president. Nadler wrote to Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Oversight and Reform Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel, D-N.Y. He asked for “documents and testimony, depositions, and/or interview transcripts that you believe may be relevant to the Judiciary Committee’s ongoing impeachment investigation relating to President Trump.”

The Monmouth University poll surveyed 800 adults in the U.S. via telephone from August 16-20, 2019. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

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Neither Orwell nor Bizzarro World have anything on this: CNN just hired the FBI’s former no. 2, who was fired for lying to his own employer/agency. For which he should obviously be in jail, but he’s not. Want to guess where you would be if you lied to the FBI? Ask George Papadopoulos. His lie was superficial slash meaningless at best, but he served time. McCabe’s lies are a whole different universe.

• CNN Hires Former FBI #2 Andy McCabe, Who Was Fired For Leaking And Lying (ZH)

Another Ex-Obama official has joined the ranks of anti-Trump cable news punditry, this time disgraced FBI #2 Andrew McCabe, who was fired for leaking information to the media – then lying about it at least four times, including under oath. Now, McCabe – who is suing the DOJ and FBI over what he claims was a “politically motivated” firing just days before he was set to retire with full benefits,” will join former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper at CNN. Succinctly put by The Federalist’s Mollie Hemmingway: “Andrew McCabe, one of the central figures of the “Russia collusion” hoax, who was fired from the FBI for lying about his leaks to the media, has been hired by CNN, one of the media outlets that did the most to perpetuate the damaging hoax.” – Mollie (@MZHemingway) August 23, 2019

McCabe authorized an FBI spokesman to tell the Wall Street Journal’s Devlin Barrett – just days before the 2016 US election, that the FBI hadn’t put the brakes on an investigation into the Clinton Foundation – at a time in which McCabe was coming under fire for his wife taking a $467,500 campaign contribution from Clinton associate, Terry McAuliffe. As noted above, McCabe then lied about the leak at least four times and was subsequently fired over it. McCabe claimed that his boss, also-fired former FBI Director James Comey, was well aware of the leaks. Comey shot back on ABC’s The View, calling McCabe a liar.

Comey was asked by host Megan McCain how he thought the public was supposed to have “confidence” in the FBI amid revelations that McCabe lied about the leak. “It’s not okay. The McCabe case illustrates what an organization committed to the truth looks like,” Comey said, adding “Good people lie … I still believe Andrew McCabe is a good person but the inspector general found he lied,” noting that there are “severe consequences” within the DOJ for doing so.

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Part 4 of Whitney Webb’s incredible series on sexual blackmail.

“Of particular importance are Epstein’s relationship to the Clinton Foundation and the alleged role of Epstein’s Virgin Islands-based hedge fund and the Clinton Foundation in money laundering activity.. [..] It is this tale of intrigue that fully reveals the extent to which this decades-old alliance between organized crime, the CIA, and Israeli intelligence has corrupted and influenced politicians of both political parties, both through the use of sexual blackmail and through other means of coercion. ”

• Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein-Bill Clinton Relationship (Webb)

[..] these sexual blackmail operations proliferated during the Iran-Contra affair, which involved this same dark alliance between U.S./Israeli intelligence and organized crime. Though this series has thus far largely focused on the ties of Republican officials to those operations and associated crimes, the final installment of this series will focus on Democratic politicians, namely the Clinton family, and their ties to this same network as well as Jeffrey Epstein. The Clintons’ own involvement in Iran-Contra revolved around the covert activities at Arkansas’ Mena Airport, which involved the CIA front company Southern Air Transport and occurred while Clinton was governor.

Just a few years into the Clinton presidential administration, Leslie Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein would play a major role in Southern Air Transport’s relocation to Columbus, Ohio, leading to concerns among top Ohio officials that both men were not only working with the CIA, but that Wexner’s company, The Limited, sought to use the CIA-linked airline for smuggling. During that same period of time, Epstein had already forged close ties to important Clinton White House officials and prominent Clinton donors like Lynn Forester de Rothschild and made several personal visits to the official presidential residence.

Some of these ties appear related to Epstein’s shady financial activities, particularly involving currency markets and offshore tax havens — activities he began to perfect while working for prominent Iran-Contra figures in the early 1980s, several of whom were tied to the CIA-linked bank Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and had known relationships with Israeli intelligence, namely the Mossad. The nature of Epstein’s work for these individuals and other evidence strongly suggests that Epstein himself had a relationship with BCCI after leaving Bear Stearns and prior to the bank’s collapse in 1991.

Of particular importance are Epstein’s relationship to the Clinton Foundation and the alleged role of Epstein’s Virgin Islands-based hedge fund and the Clinton Foundation in money laundering activity, a relationship still under investigation by MintPress. It is this tale of intrigue that fully reveals the extent to which this decades-old alliance between organized crime, the CIA, and Israeli intelligence has corrupted and influenced politicians of both political parties, both through the use of sexual blackmail and through other means of coercion.

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From the same Whitney Webb article. This part warrants attention.

• Bill Barr And Bill Clinton (Webb)

After Clinton’s half-brother Roger was busted for cocaine smuggling (Clinton would later pardon him while president) the CIA sought to move Contra operations out of Arkansas, hoping to put a damper on the increasingly public and sloppy Arkansas-based operation. According to Terry Reed in his book Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA, co-written with John Cummings, a hushed meeting was held in a bunker at Camp Robinson in North Little Rock, Arkansas. During the meeting, William Barr, who represented himself as the emissary of then-CIA Director Bill Casey told Clinton: “The deal we made was to launder our money through your bond business but what we didn’t plan on was you and your n****r here start taking yourselves seriously and purposely shrinking our laundry.”

Barr chastised Clinton for his sloppy handling of the delicate operation and his half-brother’s very public fall from grace. He would later tell Clinton, according to Reed, “Bill, you are Mr. Casey’s fair-haired boy … You and your state have been our greatest asset. Mr. Casey wanted me to pass on to you that unless you fuck up and do something stupid, you’re No. 1 on the short list for a shot at the job that you’ve always wanted. You and guys like you are the fathers of the new government. We are the new covenant.” Attempts to investigate Clinton’s role in the Mena operations and more broadly in the Iran-Contra affair were allegedly axed by Clinton’s own confidantes, who consistently denied he played a role in the scandal.

According to the Wall Street Journal, former IRS investigator William Duncan teamed with Arkansas State Police Investigator Russell Welch in what became a decade-long battle to bring the matter to light. In fact, of the nine separate state and federal probes into the affair, all failed. Duncan would later say of the investigations, “[They] were interfered with and covered up, and the justice system was subverted,” and a 1992 memo from Duncan to high-ranking members of the attorney general’s staff notes that Duncan was instructed “to remove all files concerning the Mena investigation from the attorney general’s office.” The attorney general, serving under George H. W. Bush, at that time was William Barr, who is currently attorney general under Trump.

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This stuff is so institutionalized, so deeply engrained in our societies, that is will be very hard to get rid of.

• Long Before Epstein: Sex Traffickers & Spy Agencies (Vos)

In the U.S., the New York State Select Committee On Crime in 1982 investigated nationwide networks of trafficking underage sex workers and producing child pornography. Dale Smith, a committee investigator, noted that call services using minors also profited from “sidelines,” besides the income from peddling prostitution. Smith said they sold information “on the sexual proclivities of the clients to agents of foreign intelligence.” Presumably, this information could be used to blackmail those in positions of power. Smith added that one call service sold information to “British and Israeli intelligence.”

Another U.K. scandal included allegations that Sir Peter Hayman, a British diplomat and deputy director of MI6, was a member of the Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE). Police discovered that two of the roughly dozen pedophiles in his circle had been writing to each other about their interest in “the extreme sexual torture and murder of children,” according to the The Daily Mail. In 2015, The Guardian reported that former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been “adamant that officials should not publicly name” Hayman, “even after she had been fully briefed on his activities….formerly secret papers released to the National Archives shows.”

Still, Hayman was unmasked as a subscriber to PIE in 1981 by M.P. Geoffrey Dickens, who also reportedly raised the national security risk of Hayman’s proclivities, implying they were a potential source of blackmail sought by intelligence agencies. The British tabloid The Mirror reported that intelligence agencies, including the KGB and CIA, kept their own dossiers on U.K. establishment figures involved with PIE and the abuse of minors, to blackmail the targets in exchange for information.

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Makes very little sense. Suicide watch is a serious thing, and all it takes is one psychologist?

• Psychologist Approved Jeffrey Epstein’s Removal From Suicide Watch (R.)

A psychologist at the federal detention center in New York City where financier Jeffrey Epstein was jailed on sex-trafficking charges had approved his removal from suicide watch before he killed himself, the U.S. Justice Department said on Friday. The disclosure came in a letter dated on Thursday from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd and addressed to the leaders of the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, seeking details about the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death earlier this month. Epstein, who was 66, was found dead Aug. 10 in his cell inside a segregated housing unit of the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. An autopsy concluded that he hanged himself.


His death triggered investigations by the FBI, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which runs the detention facility. The Boyd letter, provided to Reuters on Friday, confirmed that Epstein had been placed on suicide watch in July, a status under which the designated prisoner is held in a special cell under constant observation by staff or “inmate companions.” Epstein was “later removed from suicide watch after being evaluated by a doctoral-level psychologist who determined that a suicide watch was no longer warranted,” Boyd wrote in the three-page letter. The letter did not state precisely why a suicide watch had been ordered for Epstein. But Epstein in July had been found unconscious on the floor of his cell with marks on his neck, and officials had been investigating that incident as a possible suicide attempt or assault.

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Maybe it takes the French to dig deep enough. Certainly wouldn’t bet on Bill Barr doing the job.

• France Launches Rape Inquiry in Jeffrey Epstein Case (BBC)

French prosecutors have opened an inquiry into rape allegations against the late US financier Jeffrey Epstein. [..] He had an apartment in Paris, and French gender equality minister Marlène Schiappa had called for an inquiry into any abuses committed on French soil. On Friday Paris prosecutors launched a probe for “rape” and “sexual assault”. [..] Epstein spent plenty of time in Paris and owned a luxury apartment near the Arc de Triomphe. Investigations “will focus on potential crimes committed against French victims… and on suspects who are French citizens”, Paris Prosecutor Remy Heitz said in a statement.


A French advocacy group for child sex abuse victims, Innocence En Danger (Innocence at Risk), said this week it had received 10 witness statements involving Epstein regarding alleged sex crimes committed against minors on French soil. Epstein was also friends with French modelling tycoon Jean-Luc Brunel, who was accused in US court documents of procuring young girls for Epstein, along with allegations of rape. Mr Brunel has denied the accusations.

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“The Democratic contest may be peaking way too early. And Joe Biden hasn’t even had a chance to claim he is the out-of-wedlock grandson of W.C. Handy.”

• Lost at Sea (Kunstler)

Elizabeth Warren set the stage for anointing herself America’s Race Hustler-in-Chief by addressing the niggling matter of her former claim to be a Cherokee Indian, since disproven by a DNA test. There was loose talk, you see, that she used the Cherokee ruse to bamboozle her overseers on the Harvard Plantation, where she got to work in the Big House known as the Harvard Law School based on her “diversity” bona fides — a “minority hire!” The claim was so transparently idiotic and dishonest that she was desperate to walk it back as delicately as possible, in order to keep up with the race hustling of her fellow pols chasing the nomination. A rain dance was arranged in the aptly-named heartland town of Sioux City.

“Like anyone who’s being honest with themselves, I know that I have made mistakes,” said Ms. Warren, who was met with a standing ovation when she took the stage [The Times reported]. “I am sorry for harm I have caused. I have listened and I have learned a lot, and I am grateful for the many conversations that we’ve had together.” Was a more disingenuous political statement ever contrived? A bundle of devious platitudinous promises of the sort that white people always offered the indigenous folk at a thousand crooked treaty councils? It would have been a little more satisfying, perhaps, if Ms. Warren had specified the mistakes made, e.g. I was falsely claiming a racial identity for career advancement. Now that’s an apology!

“Listening and learning?” I dunno… sounds a little like groveling and pandering. Anyone can choke down a few bites of humble pie but please don’t make me eat that shit sandwich! The Democratic contest may be peaking way too early. And Joe Biden hasn’t even had a chance to claim he is the out-of-wedlock grandson of W.C. Handy. There are indications that the political center is already a little tired of the Everything-Is-Racist trope that the party ran up the flagpole this summer. For The New York Times, it became the publicly acknowledged official editorial slant when newsroom chief Dean Baquet announced that the paper needed a replacement for the shredded gonfalon of RussiaGate.

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Is the DNC secretly working for Trump?

Gabbard torpedoed Kamala Harris’s shot at the job. That won’t be forgiven.

• Tulsi Gabbard Victimized by DNC’s Dubious Debate Criteria (Tracey)

Tulsi Gabbard is on the verge of being excluded from the next Democratic presidential debate on the basis of criteria that appear increasingly absurd. Take, for instance, her poll standing in New Hampshire, which currently places Gabbard at 3.3% support, according to the RealClearPolitics average as of Aug. 20. One might suspect that such a figure would merit inclusion in the upcoming debates — especially considering she’s ahead of several candidates who have already been granted entry, including Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, and Andrew Yang. But the Democratic National Committee has decreed that the polls constituting this average are not sufficiently “qualifying.”

What makes a poll “qualifying” in the eyes of the DNC? The answer is conspicuously inscrutable. Months ago, party chieftains issued a list of “approved sponsoring organizations/institutions” for polls that satisfy their criteria for debate admittance. Not appearing on that list is the Boston Globe, which sponsored a Suffolk University poll published Aug. 6 that placed Gabbard at 3%. The DNC had proclaimed that for admittance to the September and October debates, candidates must secure polling results of 2% or more in four separate “approved” polls – but a poll sponsored by the newspaper with the largest circulation in New Hampshire (the Globe recently surpassed the New Hampshire Union Leader there) does not count, per this cockamamie criteria.

There has not been an officially qualifying poll in New Hampshire, Gabbard’s best state, in over a month. The absurdity mounts. A South Carolina poll published Aug. 14 by the Post and Courier placed Gabbard at 2%. One might have again vainly assumed that the newspaper with the largest circulation in a critical early primary state would be an “approved” sponsor per the dictates of the DNC, but it is not. Curious.

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Cerberus, the early days.

 

 

 

 

 

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