troll Archives - The Automatic Earth

Bessent on Iran:

On September 23, all Iranian airlines will be shut down around the world.

How do we do that? If they land, you cannot provide them with fuel, you cannot provide them with landing services, you cannot sell them tickets, or you will be knocked out of the dollar… pic.twitter.com/pX5wfEobV3
— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 21, 2026

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2102034074340667514?s=20

This isn't just Trump talking.
Trump has already survived three documented assassination attempts. Federal prosecutors have also convicted an Iranian IRGC operative in a murder-for-hire plot that DOJ says included plans to assassinate Trump. And U.S. officials have received… pic.twitter.com/CatOmto76Q
— Robert W Malone, MD (@RWMaloneMD) September 20, 2026

https://twitter.com/Q_TheStormRider/status/2102052127279632696?s=20 https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2102045797441245226?s=20

There’ll be no WWIII with Trump and Putin.

• Who Had ‘World War III Starting in Estonia’ on Their 2026 Bingo Card? (Green)

While ordinary Russians pretended to vote in this weekend’s mock elections, the Kremlin made what can only be described as very real war preparations on the Narva River against neighboring Estonia, our tiny NATO ally in the Baltic. Before we get to that, a couple of recent news items that escaped most people’s attention but are certainly related.

The first is that — surprise! — Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party won the weekend “election” for the Russian Duma, which is basically Putin’s rubber-stamp parliament. United Russia got almost 53% of the vote, and the even more nationalist LDPR got about 10%. The only effective opposition party, Yabloko, was “barred from the election by Russia’s Supreme Court after they made it public that they are against the invasion of Ukraine” and wasn’t on the ballot. But the question analysts started asking in the weeks before the election was what would follow.
“Western intelligence officials believe the Russian leader is laying the ground for a ‘stealth mobilisation’ after elections this weekend,” the Financial Times reported last week, “in which thousands of Russians could be drafted.” The actual number is believed to be 300,000 or more men forcibly drafted. Whether Moscow can actually pull that off remains to be seen. It’s impossible to say whether the Russian military even has the training cadres to take on so many recruits in short order.
Mobilization makes sense on paper, but the reality might be a bit more confused. We’re only getting started on the stuff that makes little sense, however. “Hybrid war” consists of things we’ve already seen, like damaging undersea communications cables, drone probes of NATO air defenses, hiring locals to bomb European munitions factories, and the like. Moscow has untouchable munitions suppliers in China and North Korea, and would really prefer it if Ukraine didn’t have untouchable munitions suppliers across Europe and the U.S.
Basically, small-scale terrorism with plausible deniability. Only more of it going forward, if the analysts are correct. Europe’s leadership is certainly attuned — finally — to the threat. French President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency all-hands meeting in Paris on Friday to discuss the Continent’s deteriorating situation, and reportedly everybody left more or less ashen-faced.
“Maybe if Macron had spent less of his presidency confronting Israel over ‘Palestine’ and more of it confronting Putin over Ukraine, France—and Europe—would be better prepared for the Russian threat,” FDD’s Mark Dubowitz posted after the meeting, and I couldn’t agree more.
Which brings us to today’s news and Estonia, nicely summarized on X by Eric S. Raymond. “There are intelligence reports that Russia has been building hospital facilities” on the Estonia border, while “Russian border guards have been spotted shoring up the banks of the Narva River in exactly the way you would expect if you thought they were going to throw expedient military bridges across it.”
“Russian border guards have also removed a set of buoys in the river marking the Russian-Estonian border, sparking a formal protest from the Estonian government,” Eric added, literally muddying the waters between the two countries. But here’s where it gets truly disturbing: “The city of Narva, Estonia, sits at the Russian border, on the Narva river, opposite the zone where the Russians have declared a curfew for its inhabitants and a no-go zone for people who don’t already live there.”
Narva is 87% ethnic Russian, a result of Russian colonization efforts in the Baltics, both during the Czarist and Soviet era. “Putin has claimed the right to intervene militarily to protect ‘oppressed’ ethnic Russians in the near abroad,” Eric posted. “The invasion and annexation of Crimea [in 2014] was justified on these grounds.”bI make zero predictions, none whatsoever, about what comes next.
It seems absolutely insane by most measures for Putin to make warlike moves like these while virtually all of Russia’s conventional combat power remains committed to his own Forever War in Ukraine.But then I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Dwight Eisenhower: “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.” Maybe a real test of NATO resolve — and perhaps fracturing the alliance, if Putin can make a joke out of Article 5 — is the Russian leader’s way of enlarging the unsolvable problem of Ukraine.And if NATO resolve is not found wanting?
I’m not sure I want to know, but I’m not the one throwing the dice on the banks of the Narva River.

“..the topic of discussion usually centers on how evil the First World is and why we won’t give them more money.”

• This Might Be Trump’s Most Magnificent Troll of All Time (Stephen Green)

A funny thing happened on the Iranian President’s way to the U.N… But before we get to President Donald Trump’s newest and latest and most magnificent troll, please let me take a moment to remind you of just how high he set the bar for himself. Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Tex.) told the story to Sage Steele on a video podcast way back in 2024.

“I want to leave Afghanistan,” Trump is supposed to have said at a high-level meeting with the Taliban during his first administration. “But it’s going to be a conditions-based withdrawal,” unlike the rushed and bloody mess that Presidentish Joe Biden put us and the Afghans through in 2021. Hunt recalled Trump saying, “If you harm a hair on a single American, I’m going to kill you.”
After the translator did his bit — and Hunt indicated that the translator was shocked by Trump’s statement and hesitated before passing it along — Trump pulled a picture of the Taliban leader’s home out of his pocket, handed it to him, and then left. While Hunt didn’t say, there’s no doubt in my mind that the photo was unmistakably taken by a Hellfire missile-carrying Reaper drone.
Statement. Made.
And thus the bar for international trolling was set at an Olympic-level height. Flash forward to right now, when the United Nations holds its annual General Assembly High-level Week in New York City.
Honestly, I hate these things. It’s bad enough that the UN has long served as a Western-funded playground for Second World thugs and Third World s***holes, where the topic of discussion usually centers on how evil the First World is and why we won’t give them more money. But the worst part is the quality of people involved — preening bureaucrats playing bigwigs on our dime. Our “betters” around the world most certainly aren’t. But I digress.
Among the worst of the worst is Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, with whom, you might recall, we are currently at war. I’ve had my questions about the speed and execution of the war, but not about the necessity of stopping thugs with pretensions of Armageddon getting hold of nuclear weapons. But the UN treaty — the one I’d tear into tiny bits and then burn the tiny bits before unceremoniously dumping the ashes into the Hudson. Or these days, maybe I’d shove the ashes into the mouth of Hizzallah Zohran Mamdani. So many choices.
Shoot, I digressed again. The point is that the UN treaty requires us to issue visas, even to the likes of Pezeshkian, so that they can take their turn dumping on us at the UN. Dutifully, the Trump administration issued Pezeshkian his visa, and he’s supposed to fly here from Iran on Tuesday, and it’d be a real shame if he flew private and his jet suffered some kind of technical mishap.
Now for the troll, courtesy of veteran and podcast host Matt Tardio, who posted Monday that the administration effectively “took away Iran’s ability to fly to NYC.”Or at least to fly back out. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — another master of the international troll — “announced that starting Weds, any country providing fuel to any Iranian airlines will be heavily sanctioned,” according to Tardio.
“For those of you wondering, that’s the same day the Iranian President is scheduled to speak in NYC. GOOD LUCK making it home!” I bow to the master. Say, later this week, while Pezeshkian is waiting at LaGuardia to board his Economy Plus flight to Frankfurt or wherever on his long way home, Trump could show up with a recon photo of Iran’s presidential Sa’dabad Complex.

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell

• Media Outlets Sue White House for Revoking Credentials (ETM)

Politico, MS NOW, and CNN are suing the White House after President Donald Trump announced he was banning the three outlets. “This morning, we notified the government that we are filing a lawsuit today to protect our First Amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes,” the news organizations said. “Without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting. Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”

Trump seemingly responded to news of the lawsuit in a Monday post.“The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America,” he wrote Monday morning. “It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”
When asked Friday by reporters about the ban, Trump said “our country has to have honestness” and the banned press outlets “purposely write negative things, and they do that because they want to try and diminish the Republicans and a Republican administration.” He said he was “sick” of “cumulative stories over the last few years” from the outlets. The news outlets are represented by Theodore Boutrous Jr. of law firm Gibson Dunn. They are suing Trump, chief of staff Susie Wiles, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, and Secret Service Director Sean Curran.
The outlets argue that the ban impedes their ability to cover the White House while also stirring up fear in other outlets. When Trump announced the ban, he said, “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.” District Court Judge Trevor McFadden ruled last year that the White House cannot bar Associated Press reporters and photographers from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and other spaces for journalists.= CNN is one of five outlets that serve as TV pool. In response to the White House’s ban, the other TV networks in the rotation have said they will not fill in for CNN to cover events designated as pool coverage of the president.
This means TV cameras will not capture the president’s activities, including his trip this week to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. “This is to advise that, effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President,” the TV pool chair wrote in the email. “This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place.”
Vice President JD Vance said Trump is not banning media outlets, but refusing to give some certain access. “He’s not banning media outlets,” he told reporters. “What he’s doing is saying we’re not going to give you special access to the White House if you engage in what is effectively propaganda.”

Relief?!

• Nvidia CEO Says “Zero Percent” Chance Of AI Making Humans Extinct (ET)

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has rejected the claims of some artificial intelligence researchers that the technology could wipe out humanity, calling the arguments “doomsday narratives.” Huang said in a Sept. 17 interview with CBS News that predictions made by former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon and Anthropic’s alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, were not grounded in science. Coxon said in a Sept. 9 post on X that the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Hubinger said he agreed that it could end humanity. “Jacob is correct here—We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” he wrote.Huang told CBS’s senior business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent on Sept. 17 that 2030 will not be the end of the world. “There is zero percent chance that’s going to be the end of the world,” he said. “Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible.”
U.S. President Donald Trump said in a Sept. 14 post on Truth Social that the United States needed no AI guardrails and that it already had significant criminal and regulatory power over big tech companies. “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump wrote. Huang said on Sept. 17 that he agreed with the U.S. president’s view on legislation and regulation. “Before we come up with new laws and new regulations, let’s apply the current laws and current regulations,” Huang said.
“There are all kinds of laws and regulations. … You have cybersecurity unauthorized entry, you have damage liabilities, all kinds of liabilities associated with cybersecurity. All kinds of liabilities associated with products. … My point is apply those first, don’t let this doomsday narrative cause someone to relieve them of the laws that currently exist.” He has been invited to a dinner at the White House on Sept. 24, when Trump will host Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Trump has said that AI will be on the agenda during his meeting with Xi.Huang told CBS that Xi wanted China to benefit from AI. “They want China to prosper, just as we want America to prosper,” Huang said. Nvidia manufactures specialized H200 chips that power large language models used by AI agents to synthesize information. Trump said in a Dec. 8 post on Truth Social that he had told Xi that the United States would allow exports of Nvidia H200 chips to approved customers in China “under conditions that allow for continued strong National Security.”
In July 2025, Nvidia restarted exports of H20 graphics processing units (GPUs) to China after U.S. regulators approved it. Nvidia is now worth more than $5 trillion, making it the most valuable company on the planet. The company manufactures many of its chips in Taiwan, but last year, it opened a semiconductor fabrication plant in Phoenix. Last month, Taiwanese authorities indicted nine people, including a senior partner manager at Nvidia’s Taiwan unit, for allegedly taking part in a scheme to export servers with advanced Nvidia chips to China.
In June, Taiwan-born Huang told Nvidia shareholders that attempts to build artificial intelligence data centers with smuggled chips were a “dead end,” because the company provides no support or repairs for such products. “National security is first and foremost,” Huang said. “Where commercial opportunities conflict with U.S. national security, national security comes first.”

“President Donald Trump’s Republicans seem to be well ahead at this.”

• Both Parties Aiming to Lose the Midterm Election (Michael Barone)

This election is a contest to see which party can do its best to lose. Looking forward from mid-September, President Donald Trump’s Republicans seem to be well ahead at this. But the Resistance (or don’t they call themselves that anymore?) Democrats are putting up a contest.Second-term presidents tend to make political mistakes by doing things they think are right. Franklin Roosevelt and court-packing, Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra, George W. Bush and the Iraq surge. You can see two examples of this in the second Trump term.

One is his insistence on haphazardly imposing tariffs. It is an example of providing a plentiful quantity of something for which there is no demand among the electorate.v That’s been true for a long time. William McKinley, cited by Trump as a tariff advocate, called for switching from protective to reciprocal tariffs in his last public speech in 1901. Over the next half-century, as economist Douglas Irwin points out in his definitive book “Clashing Over Commerce,” Republican presidents were leery of tariffs, which were supported by congressional leaders as a way of holding their majorities together: You vote for a tariff that helps my local industry, and I’ll vote for one that helps yours.
The definitive moment may have been when, as Jude Wanniski argued years ago, a proposal for a tariff on the dairy product casein got the progressive Wisconsin delegation to join the legislative mob that passed Smoot-Hawley in 1930. Over 1,000 economists signed a petition begging Herbert Hoover to veto the bill, but he signed it anyway, and the Great Depression followed. Almost no one without a lobbyist wants tariffs now. And voters don’t have to read Irwin to realize that Trump’s tariffs raise prices for consumers and many manufacturers as well.
Trump stands on sounder ground, in my view, in attacking the regime in Iran, which has preached and practiced “death to America” since 1979. But, apparently believing that he could compel a surrender as he had against the Chavista gangsters in Venezuela, he launched a devastating assault without preparing the public for it and while promising a speedy resolution. bThat hasn’t happened; wars turn out to be hard to predict. But it has brought higher gasoline prices and continued inflation and has destroyed Republicans’ previous edge on the economy.
Meanwhile, the president, in childish self-aggrandizement, is devoting political capital to his beloved ballroom, to renaming the lowest-altitude Great Lake “Lake America,” to Hunter Biden-style enrichment of his family members, to closing the Kennedy Center if he can’t put his name on it. “An extraordinary number of dumba** political takes,” as elections handicapper Nate Silver notes. Just to make sure that voters don’t forget these things, the Trump political command has opened up its nine-digit war chest and is spending on ads centered on the president despite his 40% job approval and 58% disapproval. It looks like the strengths, maybe even the identities, of actual Republican candidates will get minimal airing.
If Republicans’ weakness is the self-indulgence of a second-term president, Democrats’ weakness is their propensity to embrace the wildest and least popular impulses of their political left.There’s abundant videotape back from the left-wing craze that followed the death of a Minneapolis fentanyl user in May 2020 of Democrats’ demands for defunding the police, abolishing prisons and abandoning enforcement of immigration laws. Which is exactly what the Biden administration did, raising the number of foreign-born by 8.3 million in four years, 30% more than the Obama administration did in eight years.
That was five times as many as the foreign-born increase in the first Trump administration, and in the 20 months of Trump 2.0, the Census Bureau reports, the foreign-born population was declined by 2.8 million. Democrats’ no-enemies-to-the-left posture is most obvious, perhaps, in Democrats’ reluctance to oppose boys playing in girls’ sports, their support for government-paid transgender surgeries for prison inmates and illegal immigrants, and their policy in states they govern removing teenagers professing gender dysphoria from the custody of their parents.
As the most effective pro-Trump ad of the 2024 campaign cycle put it, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” That still could be a lively issue. So is the reluctance of Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to distance himself from Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, the internet personality who campaigned by his side in the Democratic primary. Piker has said that “America deserved 9/11,” and that Hamas was justified in its Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel.
Piker has also been a prominent supporter of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Reporters and analysts who have been eager to ask Republican candidates whether they denounce extremist Republicans, even those from faraway venues, have rarely asked Democrats to denounce extremist Democrats. But surely it’s far to ask El-Sayed, and Democrats campaigning for him, whether he stands by the man he was pleased to summon to his side earlier this year.

5 Reasons Why…

• Mark Carney’s Animosity Toward the US Will Backfire (Victor Davis Hanson)

Mark Carney in a suit and tie stands indoors near plants and a light fixture, looking slightly to the side with a neutral expression, reminiscent of Mark Carney’s composed demeanor. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now believes he is more than just the Western foil to President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement—he is the global one. Accordingly, he seems determined to demonstrate to the world how to stand up to Trump, to force Trump to lose the midterms, and to hurt the U.S. economy to such a degree that Trump will never again bully other nations.

So, at the 11th hour, Carney stormed out of an apparently completed tariff deal with the United States that would have privileged Canada over almost all of America’s other trading partners. Canada, we recall, has enjoyed a $50 billion goods trade surplus with the U.S. for years in a supposedly free and equitable North American trade zone.
Carney claimed that American proposals stripped away Canadian sovereignty and quashed Canadian culture, particularly French-Canadian culture. Yet he has not released the documents detailing the bilateral offers he rejected. Nor has he allowed his representatives to explain to the media why Canada blew up the negotiations at the last minute. Carney’s ever-changing excuses, explanations, and invectives about what happened are incoherent and contradictory.
That said, analysts on both sides of the border now concede that American digital-media companies do not customarily pay special taxes, as Carney demands, to promote local, regional, and ethnic culture while operating in Canada—any more than Canadian companies would be taxed for those purposes in the U.S.
Canada and the U.S. both agree that China dumps cheap steel and aluminum into Canada, allowing Canadian manufacturers to use that cost advantage to export assembled vehicles to the vast U.S. market at prices below those of American vehicles. In that way, Canada’s new partnership with China circumvents America’s tariffs on Beijing. China will also send nearly 50,000 electric cars and trucks into Canada under a meager tariff, ensuring that the Canadian EV market is increasingly dominated by Chinese vehicles.
But Carney’s ploy goes beyond helping the communist Chinese dictatorship gain trade leverage over his own NATO neighbor. He has eagerly concluded a comprehensive Chinese-Canadian pact involving travel, visas, food safety, energy, and public security. Carney has grandly described these new agreements with Beijing as part of a new paradigm in which “middle powers” like Canada play China against the U.S. (Canada’s annual nominal GDP is roughly the size of New York State’s).
How ironic that Carney attacks his neighbor, the U.S., for trade unfairness while warming to the communist dictatorship in China. Communist China, after all, is history’s greatest violator of trade protocols—guilty of manipulating its currency, dumping products to secure market share, violating copyright and patent laws, and imprisoning a million Uyghurs. Has Carney learned anything from Panama’s misadventures after naively inviting in a Chinese omnipresence at the American-built Panama Canal? Does Carney recall that the American Monroe Doctrine originally was aimed at foreign intrusion into the North American west?
Canada’s new partner is a totalitarian police state that infected the world with its manufactured gain-of-function COVID-19 virus, which killed more than 1.5 million North Americans. China stonewalled inquiries and never offered details about the pandemic’s origins in its Wuhan lab. It has promised to conquer Taiwan and so terrified its democratic neighbors—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea—that they have joined a defensive alliance with the U.S.
So what drives Carney’s hubristic fantasies? Has Canada’s natural wealth in oil, gas, timber, and minerals made it a military and economic dynamo, as it once was? Hardly. Canada’s population is 11.8% of America’s. Its economy is barely one-thirteenth the size of America’s. Canadian GDP per capita is only 60% of America’s.
Canada quietly relies on the U.S. military to deter foreign powers from North America, whether by fending off challenges to Canada’s extensive Arctic claims—including its dubious claim of absolute sovereignty over the Northwest Passage—or by keeping Canadian skies free of foreign combat aircraft and missiles. Canada’s navy—once one of the world’s preeminent surface fleets—has been reduced to fewer than 30 ships. Its 89 American-made jets are more than 40 years old.
Paradoxically, Carney’s dreams derive not from confidence and strength but from insecurity and defensiveness. Carney and former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau nearly ruined the Canadian economy despite the country’s treasure trove of natural resources. Canada has only half the GDP of California—a state currently decaying under neo-socialist governance—despite having roughly the same population.
Nearly 45% of Canadians are either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents. These often-impoverished immigrants impose gargantuan social-welfare costs that Canada’s European-style socialist economy simply cannot support. While Carney lectures on “Canadian values,” Canada’s fertility rate of 1.25 is among the lowest in the Western world, while euthanasia accounts for 5% of all deaths, the highest rate in the West.
Nevertheless, Carney now claims, in passive-aggressive fashion, that the U.S. bullies Canada—even as Canada runs trade surpluses with America, relies on the American economy for 72% of its exports, and depends on the American military for its safety. That asymmetry indirectly subsidizes Canada’s disastrous energy, immigration, defense, regulatory, and tax policies.
The Canadian energy industry depends on U.S. purchases of much of its tar sands oil, specialized U.S. refineries, and American pipelines. For over a decade, globalist Canada refused to meet its NATO commitment to invest 2% of GDP in defense, relying instead on American magnanimity to protect North America from foreign aggression.
No matter. Carney has melodramatically characterized his tiff with the U.S. as a “fight” and even a “war.” Yet, oddly for such an anti-American Canadian hyper-nationalist, Carney is a globalist banker who, until he became prime minister, held citizenship in three nations. Yet the Canadian prime minister who urges Canada’s vulnerable working classes to decouple from America is himself—like thousands of Canadian grandees—deeply entwined with the United States.
Some 91% of Carney’s investments are in U.S.-based companies, and two of his four children, like their father, attended college in the United States. Both now reside in America, along with nearly one million other Canadians. Apparently, Carney is so eager for a veritable economic, cultural, and political war with the United States that 91% of his holdings remain invested in the homeland of his enemy. But why, from a position of such hypocrisy and vulnerability, has Carney blown up the trade agreement, ginned up anti-American Canadian nationalism—and done so now?
Only in this way, Carney believes, can he stop autonomy referenda in Alberta and Quebec. And only in this way can he openly interfere in the U.S. midterm elections by targeting new tariffs at red and purple border states while working directly with left-wing Democratic politicians to help Democrats regain control of Congress and restore the prior status quo.
His anti-American screeds have certainly worked at home. Canadians now boo at the mere sound of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They brag of a new “elbows up” policy to stop U.S. “aggression.” Their social media is flooded with braggadocio about new ways to hurt Americans. Some three-quarters of the country has bought into Carney’s fantasies. Hating America is the new Canadian pastime. But, sadly, this will not end well for Canada, for at least five reasons.
First, America certainly is not the cause of Canada’s maladies, other than by subsidizing its suicidal domestic choices for years. Canada’s self-destructive socialist and globalist policies are its government’s doing alone. The United States did not force Canada to adopt European-style socialist policies of mass unvetted immigration, subsidized green energy, near-disarmament, and unsustainable social-welfare spending. America did not urge Canadians to stop having children or enlist their government to help them kill themselves.

Federal prosecutors will likely examine ex-CIA Director John Brennan’s pivotal role at the beginning, in the middle, and during the aftermath of the Trump-Russia investigation as part of the grand conspiracy probe.

• Prosecutors Zero In On John Brennan’s Role In Russiagate (JTN)

With the confirmation that former CIA Director John Brennan received a subpoena to testify in the ongoing “grand conspiracy” weaponization probe based in Florida, prosecutors appear to be zeroing in on how the ex-spy was at the beginning, middle, and aftermath of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

Brennan is currently a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC, and according to one speakers’ bureau, Brennan’s speaking fee typically ranges from $50,000 to $75,000. His security clearance was officially revoked by President Trump in January of last year.
The former director’s lawyer confirmed in a court filing in a separate case – Brennan’s lawsuit against the federal government to preserve records related to investigations of him – that Brennan was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida where prosecutors are trying to build a grand conspiracy case arguing President Donald Trump and his allies were deprived of their civil rights in a decades-long saga of weaponized intelligence and law enforcement statements.
Violation of Trump’s civil rights and Brennan’s false statements to Congress being probed
According to the filing, government prosecutor Kurt Olsen told Brennan’s counsel the probe is “far-reaching” and includes “issues at Mar-a-Lago and beyond.” It is aimed at assessing whether Trump’s civil rights were violated. The prosecutor reportedly told Brennan’s lawyer he was also the “subject” of a separate investigation for alleged false statements to Congress.
“Mr. Olsen explained that Director Brennan was a ‘target’ of the narrower investigation, and the investigation for which he was now being subpoenaed was the ‘more wide-ranging conspiracy,’ as to which our client was a ‘subject.’ However, he explained that the narrower investigation was ‘still viable,’ and that the issues in the narrower investigation might also be part of the larger investigation, such as being overt acts,” Brennan’s lawyer wrote.
Statutes of Limitations overcome by “ongoing conspiracy”
These revelations about the direction of the grand conspiracy probe provide the most detail about how prosecutors appear to be following an outline the FBI began assembling last summer. Shortly after taking the helm at the FBI, Director Kash Patel quietly launched an investigation into the decade of Democratic Party and deep-state antics ranging from phony allegations of Russia collusion to Jack Smith targeting the president. The conspiracy approach allows prosecutors to tie alleged criminal events currently covered by statutes of limitations to older events by treating them as part of an ongoing conspiracy, Just the News reported at the time.
John Brennan’s actions at the beginning, middle, and end of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation and narrative is likely to feature prominently in the questions prosecutors will want him to answer in front of the grand jury.
Brennan’s fingerprints were on the opening of the federal probe that became the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump and his campaign. Brennan previously testified to Congress in 2017 that the U.S. Intelligence Community had gathered evidence of contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian government by July 2016 to initiate an investigation. It was at that point, he told lawmakers, that the CIA set up a special group with both the FBI and the NSA to probe alleged Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.
Brennan hid from Congress and the public Hillary Clinton’s personal approval to gin up a bogus Russia scandal
“I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals,” Brennan said. “And it raised questions in my mind again whether or not the Russians were able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.”
What Brennan did not tell congressional investigators at the time was that he was personally made aware of intelligence that same month that then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton personally approved a project to gin up a bogus Russia scandal against her GOP opponent, according to Special Counsel John Durham. Durham had probed the handling of the Trump-Russia investigation. Brennan even briefed President Barack Obama and senior administration officials on Clinton’s plan, but, not only did Obama’s team fail to stop it, it allowed the FBI to push the investigation into the same allegations raised by the campaign, Durham noted.
Durham ultimately concluded in his final report that the FBI had no verified intelligence or evidence when it opened the Crossfire Hurricane probe of President Donald Trump’s campaign in the summer of 2016. Durham also found the FBI and Justice Department failed to follow their own standards and allowed the probe to persist with a questionable basis under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
“Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” Durham wrote.
Revised and contradicting assessments
The Trump-Russia allegations being probed by the Intelligence Community were later incorporated into the well-known December 2016 assessment from the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA that concluded with “high confidence” that Russian leader Vladimir Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016” and that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
The FBI and CIA also expressed with “high confidence” that Putin had “aspired to help” Trump’s election chances in 2016 by “discrediting” Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.” The NSA had a “moderate confidence” in this.
These conclusions differed drastically from a similar assessment conducted just about three months earlier, when the Intelligence Community made no mention of Russia’s alleged animosity towards Clinton nor of its supposed preference for Trump, included no discussion of the Kremlin allegedly seeking to sink Clinton’s candidacy and elevate Trump’s chances, and generally attributed Russian efforts to a generalized desire to undermine the legitimacy of the U.S. election or the legitimacy of the next presidential administration. But, after Clinton lost the election to Trump, the tone would shift dramatically in that second assessment.
In 2025, the CIA released an eight-page “lessons learned” review which concluded that “the decision by agency heads to include the Steele Dossier in the ICA ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment.” The review sharply criticized Brennan for allegedly joining with anti-Trump forces in the FBI in pushing to include the baseless anti-Trump dossier authored by ex-British spy Christopher Steele in the December assessment.
Brennan was referred for prosecution last year
The House Judiciary Committee last year formally referred Brennan for prosecution, alleging he gave false testimony in 2023 about his role in trying to bring the discredited Steele Dossier into the assessment. Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe also sent a criminal referral on Brennan to the FBI following his CIA “lessons-learned” review earlier in July.
After his tenure as CIA director, Brennan continued to stand by the Intelligence Community conclusions over which he presided, even as evidence emerged that called into question the basis for the investigation into the president.
At the height of Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged Russian collusion, for example, he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in which he said President Trump’s claims of “no collusion” were “hogwash.” The retaliatory screed came after the president revoked Brennan’s security clearance.
“The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted a criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of ‘Trump Incorporated’ attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets,” Brennan wrote, arguing Trump’s revocation of his security clearance was designed to silence those who dared to challenge him.

“Taxing wealth is much more economically harmful than taxing just the increase in wealth and combining the two is even worse.”

• California Risks Killing the Golden Goose With Proposition 40 (EJ Antoni)

This November, California voters will choose whether to implement Proposition 40, a one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires to fund a failing health care system. It’s part of a disturbing trend toward socialism in the U.S., wherein people misunderstand basic incentives and how taxes that target the wealthy end up harming everyone.

High net-wealth folks like Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel already have preemptively moved out of state to avoid the tax. These and other billionaire departures have likely reduced Prop 40’s $100-billion expected haul by about a quarter. But these departures also risk killing the Golden Goose that has funded the Golden State’s bloated budget for decades. California gets almost half of its personal income tax revenue from the top 1% of earners, so every one of these high-earner flights is also a major blow to the state budget for years to come, partially offsetting the one-time revenue from Prop 40.
At first blush, the exodus may seem like an overreaction, since the 5% levy sounds modest next to California’s 13.3% top marginal income tax rate, but that’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. Wealth is a stock, and income is a flow. The honest comparison to a tax on income would be a tax on the change in net wealth, or the return on an asset. bUnder that calculus, the proposed 5% wealth tax is, in many cases, equivalent to a multiple of California’s sky-high top tax rate on income—and in some cases equivalent to an income tax exceeding 100%.
California municipal bonds yield roughly 4%, while 10-year Treasury notes yield about 4.5%. The wealth tax liability will exceed those returns, leaving investors at a loss. Average equity returns in the long run easily exceed 5%, so a good year might surrender one-third or half its gains to this wealth tax. But a flat year would require liquidating and surrendering capital.
Municipal bonds, a favorite among high-income earners because of federal tax treatment, deserve particular attention because Californians pay for that one. If large purchasers of these bonds suddenly eschew them because the after-tax rate of return becomes negative, the governments then must offer much higher yields to sell those bonds, increasing their borrowing costs.
That leaves less money in the budget for roads, water systems, schools, hospitals, etc., all because this wealth tax would destroy the incentives for billionaires to finance the Golden State’s public services. Proponents of Prop 40 might say these analyses are irrelevant since it’s a one-time tax, but nearly all the revenue is already allocated to permanent and growing health care obligations. A single infusion of cash doesn’t solve the negative cash flow problem. Therefore, once California burns through these funds, the budget hole returns and another tax is needed.
Then there are exemptions which will create additional market distortions. Since real estate can escape the tax depending on ownership structure, it creates a tremendous incentive to shelter wealth in an already tight housing market by buying up supply, either directly or through a revocable trust, reducing homeownership affordability for middle-class Californians.
Furthermore, advocates for this tax seem to think wealthy individuals hoard gold coins in a vault somewhere, whereas high-net-worth individuals actually have most of their fortunes actively invested, often in their own companies. Confiscating that wealth means liquidating a portion of the investment, thereby reducing whatever flows from that investment.
In the case of business equity, like stocks, that typically means fewer jobs and slower wage growth for workers, along with less innovation that would’ve benefited customers. If an owner has to sell an equity stake to pay the tax bill, it can even depress share prices, harming other owners, like middle-class Californians holding stock in retirement plans.
Taxing wealth is much more economically harmful than taxing just the increase in wealth and combining the two is even worse. Prop 40 would do just that. For example, capital gains are already taxed by both the federal government and California, while Prop 40 would tax the capital gains again along with whatever asset generated those gains.
What is being sold by proponents of Prop 40 as “the wealthy paying their fair share” is actually a massive economic distortion that will further incentivize tax shelters, encourage unnecessarily risky investments by chasing higher rates of return, and worsen California’s ability to provide public services in the long run.
If California is looking to kill the Golden Goose, they’ve found the silver bullet.

“It is difficult to design a place that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.” —William H Whyte

• The Late, Great Debate About Suburbia, an Apologia (James Howard Kunstler)

Greenland, yes, yes, okay ! Smooth move. . . ! But. . . today we put aside the vagaries of national and geo-politics to return to a longstanding affliction in American life that is evermore absent from the public discourse and deserves an airing: the quandary of our suburban sprawl living arrangement, and what can be done about it.

First, get this: the demolition derby we live in day-by-day is responsible for as much misery, injustice, economic failure, and ill-health as anything else in our collective doings. Its sheer ugliness — the horror of the six-lane highway with its ensembles of strip-malls, burger shacks, muffler shops, topless bars, Big Box stops, screaming signage, and the vast wastelands of parking. . . the suicide-inducing housing pods marching out remorselessly through forest, prairie, upland, lowland, basin and range. . . the depressing freeways with their monster entanglements of on-and-off-ramps. . . this epic mutilation of our continental landscape — is an evil quite beyond our ordinary imaginings.
This inescapable, immersive ugliness, I remind you, is entropy-made-visible. And entropy, of course, is the force in nature that you really don’t want to mess around with because it is the agent of death. I do not exaggerate. It’s a death trap, the way we live in this country, for the mind, the body, the family, the community, and the national spirit. Until fairly recently this was widely apprehended (or at least suspected). But the politicization of everything has wrecked what had been a growing and pretty robust national discussion about it.
To re-cap briefly: this is a big country. It had once been composed of cities, towns, farmlands, and wilderness, a coherent transect of human habitation. The invention of the motor car changed all that, starting in the 1920s. The ambiguous territory outside these cities and towns represented vast potential fortunes in property development. . . and the race was on.
The Great Depression and World War 2 interrupted the suburban expansion, but it resumed on steroids afterward when the rest of the world was a smoldering ruin and we could sell them anything (and lend them money to buy it). The construction of all the new suburban infrastructure alone was a major component of the late 20th century US economy, and then it became the scaffold for our so-called consumer economy, comprised of furnishing that scaffold with so much stuff that it overflowed into thousands of self-storage sheds.
The decanting of our cities that ensued — the steady dribble of the middle-classes moving out, along with the commerce that served them — left most of those cities ruined. Eventually even the small towns got whacked, the farms paved-over, too. What we’re left with is a weird hybrid landscape that is neither town nor country, has few of the civic amenities that add-up to a genuine sense of community, and none of the rural charm formerly found in the countryside. It became painfully obvious that a suburban house was a cartoon of a house in the country, and living in a cartoon is just not spiritually rewarding. Cue the Prozac. . . .
The whole kit, aided by the dogmas of zoning and government lending schemes, became easily reproducible from one locale to the next. For the development industry, the template became a habit. . . and so it boogied on through the decades. By the 1990s, the generation coming into power (yeah, the Boomers) started a revolt against all that. It crystalized in the New Urbanism movement and its signature org, the Congress for the New Urbanism, CNU. We can do better than this, this. . . this. . . national clusterfuck, they declared.
I was excited by this movement, wrote a couple of books about it, got to know the excellent people behind it — architects, urban planners, civic officials, property developers. They were smart, skilled, visionary. They believed that walkable communities and disciplining the automobile would produce places worth caring about and worth living in — and it seemed to me that such an effort would go a long way to curing the desperate anomie of American life. Over the next several decades, the New Urbanists produced scores of great projects. Some were actual new towns, some projects were renovations of existing towns, neighborhoods, business districts, and small town Main Streets. The results of their work are visible all over the country now.
But then, the political crack-up of the country commenced around 2009 with the Great Financial Crash and the ascent of Obama-inspired Wokeness, and really accelerated with the reaction to the advent of Mr. Trump in 2016. From that point on, as a nation, we’ve been arguing about everything but the disastrous arrangement of daily life on-the-ground in America. Some new twists in the spin of history have made matters worse.
One is that suburban sprawl is, by default, the favorite pattern of MAGA (and I happen to be a Trump voter). To them, suburbia is all tied up with ideas about economic liberty, as is the whole apparatus of Happy Motoring. They are still mentally stuck in the imagery of the TV car commercial — the lone sedan gliding through the sine-cosine curves of the empty seacoast highway, the romantic epitome of freedom! It’s a lie, pretty much, because the more universal experience of motoring these days is getting stuck at a crawl in freeway traffic with a thousand other motorists per mile, half of whom desperately need to take a pee and can’t do a darn thing about it.
And then there’s the fallacy of the suburban housing development being a “community” — bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! See: I don’t even have to explain that. But, MAGA tends to see it this way, along with all the activity that enables it — the mortgage system, the production home-builders (“it’s more than a house, you understand, it’s a home!”), all of which is so central to a booming economy. So, you don’t dare inveigh against suburbia — except I will, because it is making America worse, not great again, and somebody’s got to say it.
Yet another thing has come along to wreck the New Urbanist dream of reconstituting the American city and small town, and that thing is the World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) proposal they call the “15-minute City.” Superficially, it seems to resemble the traditional neighborhood model that the NU’s espouse. But deeper down the 15-Minute City is much more about a surveillance and tracking apparatus — and this has caused many conservatives (especially them) to reject anything that looks like traditional urban design.
It’s a most unfortunate situation, but that’s where things stand, and it’s one reason that the debate over suburban sprawl has stopped. A final and equally unfortunate development is that the CNU org came to be taken over the past decade by political Wokesters more interested in Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity BS than in their original mission of providing workable remedies for the tragic fiasco of American suburbia. And now you know why it is so hard to talk about this geography of nowhere anymore.

The advent of AfD could impact all of Europe. For the betteer. Merz is gone.

• Crucial Regional Votes In Germany: What’s At Stake For Merz? (RT)

German regional elections could have major implications for Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s political future, with exit polls projecting a crushing defeat for his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and a weak showing in Berlin. The CDU was languishing at just 20% nationwide as of last weekend, according to an INSA ‘Sunday Trend’ poll. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) remained the country’s most popular party, with 29% support. This comes despite pressure on the AfD from Germany’s domestic security agency over its alleged ‘extremist’ tendencies and efforts by mainstream parties to keep it out of government.

Merz himself has also faced widespread dissatisfaction, with 78% of respondents surveyed by INSA unhappy with his performance as chancellor. The CDU therefore entered Sunday’s vote under considerable pressure, compounded by its electoral drubbing in Saxony-Anhalt earlier this month. The Left Party (Die Linke) is projected to top the vote in Berlin with 25.3% of the vote, according to exit polls. Its lead candidate, Elif Eralp, a first generation German of Turkish parentage, told cheering supporters on Sunday evening that “from today on, we will change Berlin together.”
Merz’s CDU is projected to take 19.1%, while the AfD is in third place with 16.2%, according to DW. If the projections hold, the Left Party will be in pole position to lead Berlin’s next government – potentially for the first time since German reunification in 1990. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD is projected to finish first with 37.9% of the vote in an extraordinary turnaround. Party co-leader Tino Chrupalla said the result showed that the AfD “clearly have the mandate to govern here.”
Merz’s CDU, meanwhile, is projected to suffer another major setback, securing just 5% and barely clearing the threshold for entering the state parliament. The result would be the party’s worst in any German state election since 1949. Merz has described his party’s showing as a “disaster.”
Who is voting for what? In Berlin, which is both a city and one of Germany’s 16 federal states, approximately 2.5 million people are eligible to elect the House of Representatives, the local legislature. Voters have cast two votes: one for a direct candidate in one of 78 constituencies and the other for a party’s state or district list. The second determines the overall distribution of seats. The legislature normally has 130 lawmakers, although its size can increase through so-called ‘balancing’ seats. Preliminary data suggest turnout in Berlin has surpassed that recorded in the previous regional election in February 2023.
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, around 1.3 million people are eligible to elect the state parliament. They similarly voted for both a constituency candidate and a party list. Sunday’s elections also marked the first time 16- and 17-year-olds had been allowed to vote in either contest. bThe rising cost of living has been among voters’ biggest concerns. Some 67% of respondents in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and 56% in Berlin named it as their primary preoccupation in an Infratest Dimap poll conducted earlier this week. In Berlin, unaffordable housing also emerged as a major campaign issue.
Why do the elections matter nationally Sunday’s votes came just two weeks after the AfD won another eastern state, Saxony-Anhalt, with 43.8%, while the CDU finished a distant second with 17.2%. That result intensified scrutiny of Merz’s future as leader of the party.
Table.Briefings reported earlier this week that he planned to convene the CDU executive committee on Sunday and put the question of confidence to a test. ZDF has also reported that talk of replacing Merz has circulated within the party for months, although no clear successor has emerged. Reuters reported earlier this week, citing an anonymous government source, that the chancellor had canceled a planned trip to the UN General Assembly in New York to attend a special meeting in Berlin on Sunday.
A YouGov poll published on Thursday found that 48% of respondents expect Merz to be out of office by the end of the year. .

https://twitter.com/Miaavswpv/status/2101768958835909012?s=20

++ Ursula #vonderLeyen definitely needs to be charged with her crimes! ++

And she has to be put in front of a jury, and, as far as I am concerned, should be locked up for a very long time for all the evil that she has brought on the citizens in the EU member states. pic.twitter.com/IpK1CwDFBT
— Christine Anderson (@AndersonAfDMdEP) September 21, 2026

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Debt Rattle July 18 2015

Jul 182015

July 18, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:26 am Finance Tagged with: Argentina, China, El Nino, euro, Greece, Ireland, Schäuble, troll, Tsipras, war 1 Response »

Harris&Ewing State, War & Navy Building, Washington DC 1917

• Those In Power Will Risk War And Civil Unrest To Preserve It (Martin Armstrong)

• Irish €14.3 Billion Payments To Bank Bondholders May Have Been Avoidable (TFM)

• Why Argentina Consistently, and Unapologetically, Refuses to Pay Its Debts (BBG)

• China Unleashes $483 Billion to Stem the Market Rout (Bloomberg)

• China Destroyed Its Stock Market In Order To Save It (Patrick Chovanec)

• Greece’s Tsipras Shakes Up Cabinet in Bid to Rebuild Government (Bloomberg)

• Wolfgang Schäuble, The Trust Troll (Steve Keen)

• Alice In Schäuble-Land: Where Rules Mean What Wolfgang Says They Mean (Whelan)

• Greece, Europe, and the United States (James K. Galbraith)

• The Euro Is A Disaster Even For The Countries That Do Everything Right (WaPo)

• Blame the Banks (The Atlantic)

• Greece’s Debt Can Be Written Off – Whatever Wolfgang Schäuble Says (Guardian)

• Greece And Europe: Is Europe Holding Up Its End Of The Bargain? (Ben Bernanke)

• Why Is Germany So Tough On Greece? Look Back 25 Years (Guardian)

• Greece Made The Wrong Choice (John Lloyd)

• The Greek Crisis Represents The Humiliation Of European Democracy (Andrea Mammone)

• The End Of Capitalism Has Begun (Paul Mason)

• The Freakish Year in Broken Climate Records (Bloomberg)

Absolutely must see Farage video.

• Those In Power Will Risk War And Civil Unrest To Preserve It (Martin Armstrong)

Nigel Farage may be the only practical politician these days because he came from the trading sector. He explains the Euro-Project and its failures. He makes it clear that the Greek people never voted to enter the euro, and explains that it was forced upon them by Goldman Sachs and their politicians. Nigel also explains that the Euro project idea that a trade and economic union would then magically produce a political union – the United States of Europe and eliminate war. He has warned that the idea of a political union would end European wars has actually turned Europe into a rising resentment in where there is now a new Berlin Wall emerging between Northern and Southern Europe.

The Euro project was a delusional dream for it was never designed to succeed but to cut corners all in hope of creating the United States of Europe to challenge the USA and dethrone the dollar, That dream has turned into a nightmare and will never raise Europe to that lofty goal of the financial capitol of the world. The IMF acts as a member of the Troika, yet has no elected position whatsoever. The second unelected member is Mario Draghai of the ECB. Then the head of Europe is also unelected by the people. The entire government design is totally un-Democratic and therein lies the crisis.

Not a single member of the Troika ever needs to worry about polls since they do not have to worry about elections. This is authoritarian government if we have ever seen one. The ECB attempts by sheer force to manipulate the economy with zero chance of success employing negative interest rates and defending banks as the (former?) Goldman Sachs man Mario Draghai dictates. Now, far too many political jobs have been created in Brussels. This is no longer about what is best for Europe, it is what is necessary to retain government jobs. The Invisible Hand of Adam Smith works even in this instance – those in power are only interested in their self-interest and will risk war and civil unrest to maintain their failed dreams of power.

If true, a main argument for Greece.

• Irish €14.3 Billion Payments To Bank Bondholders May Have Been Avoidable (TFM)

The legal advisor to the former government has said it WOULD have been legally possible to burn the bondholders of Ireland’s banks, without customers having to lose their deposits. The advice from the former attorney general Paul Gallagher appears to contradict the claims of some former ministers. Ministers in the former administration have consistently claimed that it would have been impossible to ‘burn’ bondholders without also enforcing a haircut on deposits, because the two were considered legally equal. However today Mr Gallagher has said that although it would have been difficult, it was legally possible to break this link and enforce losses on bondholders without depositors also taking a hit.

He said this had also been accepted by the Troika – but that the lenders simply refused to allow any burden-sharing under the bailout programme, making the prospect obsolete. Unsecured senior bondholders were paid around €14.3 billion under the period of the bank guarantee – much of it as a result of the state’s huge investment in the banking sector. Mr Gallagher’s evidence seems to suggest that these payments could have been avoided without depositors also facing any losses, but for the Troika’s stance.

If Argentina can do it…

• Why Argentina Consistently, and Unapologetically, Refuses to Pay Its Debts (BBG)

Argentina’s fight with foreign banks and bondholders is more than just business. It’s part of the national psyche, enshrined in a special museum at the business school at the University of Buenos Aires. The Museum of Foreign Debt is nothing fancy. There are a few flimsy panels plastered with grainy photos, dates, text, and graphs. Oh, but the saga portrayed on those panels! Banks, bond investors, and the International Monetary Fund flood crooked regimes with overpriced credit. The Argentine economy collapses, and the people suffer. International markets are roiled. It happens time and time again. The story has all the emotions of a good tango. Argentina has reneged on foreign debt obligations at least seven times, starting in 1827.

The latest was in July 2014, when Argentina defaulted rather than give in to pressure from Paul Singer of Elliott Management. The fight with Singer has been going on for a dozen years, and the term vulture investor—rather esoteric in much of the world—is now pretty much universally known in Argentina. It’s so much on people’s minds that Buenos Aires toy stores carry a homegrown board game called Vultures, packaged in a box depicting a pair of the birds picking at a pile of dollars. “We planted the anti-vulture flag in the world,” President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said in a speech in mid-May. “We gave a name to international usury and despotism.” One May morning at the debt museum, guide Antonella Fagnano, a 21-year-old business major, describes Argentines’ attitude toward default.

She pauses by a black-and-white photo of the late General Jorge Videla, who led a 1976 coup that ushered in a seven-year dictatorship. Successive presidents in that period loaded up on foreign debt to finance, among other things, the 1982 Falklands War with the U.K. Today’s Argentina, Fagnano says, has no moral obligation to make good on debts like those. In fact, it would be wrong to pay. “Foreigners financed a lot of leaders, like these dictators. They didn’t do what they were supposed to do with the money, and left future generations the debt,” she says, shaking her head. “So, of course, you cannot allow that.” Fernandez is nearing the end of her term, and it doesn’t look like things will change under the next president. Daniel Scioli, the front-runner for October elections, vows to carry on the fight against paying the vultures in full.

And counting.

• China Unleashes $483 Billion to Stem the Market Rout (Bloomberg)

China has created what amounts to a state-run margin trader with $483 billion of firepower, its latest effort to end a stock-market rout that threatens to drag down economic growth and erode confidence in President Xi Jinping’s government. China Securities Finance Corp. can access as much as 3 trillion yuan of borrowed funds from sources including the central bank and commercial lenders, according to people familiar with the matter. The money may be used to buy shares and provide liquidity to brokerages, the people said, asking not to be named because the information wasn’t public. While it’s unclear how much CSF will ultimately deploy into China’s $6.6 trillion equity market, the financing is up to 25 times bigger than the support fund started by Chinese brokerages earlier this month.

That’s probably enough to restore confidence among China’s 90 million individual investors, says Bocom International Holdings Co. The Shanghai Composite Index jumped 3.5 % on Friday, capping a two-week rally that’s turned it into one of the world’s best-performing equity gauges. “It doesn’t have to use up all the money, as long as it can make the rest of the market believe that it has enough ammunition,” said Hao Hong, a China strategist at Bocom International in Hong Kong. “It is a game of chicken. For now, it seems to be working.” CSF, founded in 2011 to provide funding to the margin-trading businesses of Chinese brokerages, has transformed into one of the key government vehicles to combat a 32 % selloff in the Shanghai Composite from mid-June through July 8.

At 3 trillion yuan, its funding would be about five times bigger than the new proposed bailout for Greece and exceed China’s 2.3 trillion yuan of regulated margin financing during the height of the stock-market boom last month. “What the authorities are demonstrating to the market is that if panic does take hold, they have the resources at their disposal to deal with that,” said James Laurenceson, the deputy director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology in Sydney. “Monetary authorities around the word regularly send the same signal in credit and foreign exchange markets.”

“Chinese punters were borrowing in large sums, from both brokerages and more shadowy sources — like “umbrella trusts” and peer-to-peer lending websites — to buy shares, with the shares themselves as collateral.”

• China Destroyed Its Stock Market In Order To Save It (Patrick Chovanec)

During the Vietnam War, surveying the shelled wreckage of Ben Tre, an American officer famously remarked, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” His comment came to epitomize the sort of self-defeating “victory” that undoes what it aims to achieve. Last week, China destroyed its stock market in order to save it. Faced with a crash in share prices from a bubble of its own making, the Chinese government intervened ruthlessly, and recklessly, to turn those prices around. Its heavy-handed approach seemed to work, for the moment, but only by severely damaging far more important goals and ambitions. Prior to the crash, China’s stock market had enjoyed a blissful disconnect from reality. As China’s economy slowed and corporate profits declined, share prices soared, nearly tripling in just 12 months.

By the peak, half the companies listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges were priced above a preposterous 85-times earnings. It was a clear warning flag — one that Chinese regulators encouraged people to ignore. Then reality caught up. At first, when prices began to fall, the central bank responded by cutting interest rates and bank reserve requirements — measures to inject more money that had never failed to juice the market. But prices continued to fall. Then the government rallied the major brokerages to form a $19 billion fund to buy shares and waded directly into the market to buy stocks too. A few stocks rose, but most fell even further. The relentless crash was intensified by a new factor in Chinese markets: margin lending.

Chinese punters were borrowing in large sums, from both brokerages and more shadowy sources — like “umbrella trusts” and peer-to-peer lending websites — to buy shares, with the shares themselves as collateral. At the peak, according to Goldman Sachs, formal margin lending alone accounted for 12% of the market float and 3.5% of China’s GDP, “easily the highest in the history of global equity markets.” Margin loans served as rocket fuel for the market on its way up, but prices began to fall and borrowers received “margin calls” that forced them to liquidate their positions, pushing prices down further in a kind of death spiral.

Chinese regulators, who had been trying (ineffectually) to rein in risky margin lending, now suddenly reversed course. They waved rules requiring brokerages to ask for more collateral when stock prices fall and allowed them to accept any kind of asset — including people’s homes — as collateral for stock-buying loans. They also encouraged brokerages to securitize and sell their margin-lending portfolios to the public so that they could go out and make even more loans. All these steps knowingly exposed major financial institutions, and their customers, to much greater risk. Yet no one will borrow if no one is confident enough to buy, and the market continued to fall, wiping out nearly all its gains since the start of the year.

The deal “has an ownership problem for Tsipras and the Greeks in general..”

• Greece’s Tsipras Shakes Up Cabinet in Bid to Rebuild Government (Bloomberg)

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras replaced some ministers in a cabinet reshuffle after almost a quarter of his lawmakers rejected measures he agreed on with creditors to keep the country in the euro. The prime minister’s office said Friday that Panagiotis Skourletis will replace Panagiotis Lafazanis, who heads the Left Platform fraction of Tsipras’s Syriza party, as energy minister. George Katrougalos will succeed Panagiotis Skourletis as labor minister. The Greek parliament in the early hours of Thursday backed the deal with creditors, needed to unblock further financing aid, with decisive votes from the opposition. With 38 of 149 Syriza lawmakers refusing to support further spending cuts and tax increases, that marked a blow for Tsipras, who came to power on an anti-austerity platform in January.

Tsipras told his associates after the parliament vote that he would be forced to lead a minority government until a final deal with creditors is concluded. The European Union finalized a €7.2 billion bridge loan to Greece on Friday that will help provide the debt-ravaged nation with a stop-gap until its full three-year bailout is settled. In all, 64 of the parliament’s 300 lawmakers voted against the bill. Half of the “no” votes came from Syriza, including from Lafazanis and former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos, called in by Tsipras to replace Varoufakis before the final bailout negotiations, discussed on Friday with Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-prize winning economist, about the difficulties expected in the implementation of the deal with Greece’s creditors.

The deal “has an ownership problem for Tsipras and the Greeks in general,” said Paolo Manasse, a professor of economics at the University of Bologna, Italy. “It’s a liberal program to be carried out by a radical-left premier and imposed on a country that’s just voted no in a referendum.”

“To the Confidence Fairy we can now add the ‘Trust Troll’ : appease the Trust Troll, and all your macroeconomic ills will magically vanish.”

• Wolfgang Schäuble, The Trust Troll (Steve Keen)

Paul Krugman invented the term “confidence fairy” to characterize the belief that all that was needed for growth to resume after the Global Financial Crisis was to restore ‘confidence’. Impose austerity and the economy will not shrink, but will instead grow immediately, because of the boost to confidence:

.. don’t worry: spending cuts may hurt, but the confidence fairy will take away the pain. The idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect, declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, in a recent interview. Why? Because confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery. ( Myths of Austerity , July 1 2010)

To the Confidence Fairy we can now add the ‘Trust Troll’ : appease the Trust Troll, and all your macroeconomic ills will magically vanish. The identity of the Confidence Fairy was never revealed, but the identity of the Trust Troll is obvious. It‘s German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. Schäuble was clearly the primary architect of the Troika’s dictat for Greece. One only has to compare its language to that used by Schäuble in his OpEd in the New York Times three months ago (Wolfgang Schäuble on German Priorities and Eurozone Myths , April 15 2015). There he stated that ‘My diagnosis of the crisis in Europe is that it was first and foremost a crisis of confidence, rooted in structural shortcomings , and that the essential factor in ending the crisis was the restoration of trust:

The cure is targeted reforms to rebuild trust in member states finances, in their economies and in the architecture of the European Union. Simply spending more public money would not have done the trick nor can it now.

Compare this to the first line of the communique:

The Eurogroup stresses the crucial need to rebuild trust with the Greek authorities as a pre requisite for a possible future agreement on a new ESM programme.

The policies in the document match those in Schäuble’s OpEd as well. Schäuble called for:

.. more flexible labor markets; lowering barriers to competition in services; more robust tax collection; and similar measures.

The Troika’s document forces these measures upon Greece. These include ‘the broadening of the tax base to increase revenue’, ‘rigorous reviews of collective bargaining, industrial action and collective dismissals’ and ‘ambitious product market reforms’. At the same time, Greece is required to aim to achieve a government surplus equivalent to 3.5% of GDP -the opposite of ‘spending more public money’ which Schäuble rejected in his OpEd. Rather than debt reduction and rescheduling as even the IMF now calls for, “The Euro Summit acknowledges the importance of ensuring that the Greek sovereign can clear its arrears to the IMF and to the Bank of Greece and honour its debt obligations”.

This cannot in any sense be seen as an economic document, since an economic document would have to assess the feasibility of its proposals. Instead it simply states Schäuble s ideology: regardless of your economic circumstances, simply implement these (so-called) market-oriented reforms, restore trust, and your economy will grow. With the government debt that Greece currently labours under, this is a fantasy. Even if Greece were to pay a mere 3% on its debt, interest payments alone would absorb over 5% of GDP. To do that, and run a primary surplus of 3.5% of GDP in an economy where 25% of the population is unemployed is simply impossible.

Karl Whelan makes much the same point as Steve Keen: “..the truth is it is really Grade-A concern trolling (“I’d love to help you guys but I can only do it if you leave the euro”) dressed up as legal argumentation.”

• Alice In Schäuble-Land: Where Rules Mean What Wolfgang Says They Mean (Whelan)

After trying his best to chuck Greece out of the euro last weekend, Germany’s finance minister Schäuble has continued to openly undermine the deal that was agreed by European leaders and endorsed by the Greek parliament. A key argument he has been putting forward is that a debt write-down for Greece “would be incompatible with the currency union’s rules” but that such a write-down would be possible if Greece left the euro. While this claim is being widely repeated in the German press, the truth is it is really Grade-A concern trolling (“I’d love to help you guys but I can only do it if you leave the euro”) dressed up as legal argumentation.

The rules of the EU and Eurozone are so byzantine that it is quite easy to make false claims about these rules and get away with it. However, I do not believe there is anything in the European Union or Eurozone rules that would preclude a debt write-down inside the euro. The basis for Schäuble’s argument appears to be Article 125.1 of the consolidated treaty on the functioning of the EU. Here is the article in full.

The Union shall not be liable for or assume the commitments of central governments, regional, local or other public authorities, other bodies governed by public law, or public undertakings of any Member State, without prejudice to mutual financial guarantees for the joint execution of a specific project. A Member State shall not be liable for or assume the commitments of central governments, regional, local or other public authorities, other bodies governed by public law, or public undertakings of another Member State, without prejudice to mutual financial guarantees for the joint execution of a specific project.

This is the article that used to be called “the no bailout clause”. However, it is nothing of the sort. It simply says that member states cannot take on the debts of another member state. This did not rule out member states “bailing out” other countries by making loans to them. And indeed, the European Court of Justice in its Pringle decision established that the European Stabilisation Mechanism bailout fund was consistent with Article 125. Also worth noting about Article 125 are all the things it doesn’t mention. It doesn’t rule out loans being member states and doesn’t discuss these loans being restructured. And it makes no mention whatsoever of the Eurozone. So there is simply no legal basis for the idea that Greek debt being written down is illegal while they remain in the Eurozone but is fine if they leave the euro.

It is conceivable that someone could still take a case to the ECJ objecting to a write-off on the grounds that the granting and write-off of loans to Greece would result in more debt for European countries and allowed Greece to pay off other creditors. So you could argue that this was effectively the same thing as the other member states assuming Greece’s other debt commitments. To my mind, this line of argumentation moves far away from the simple and clear language of Article 125.1. I also don’t see much in the Pringle decision to suggest the ECJ would uphold such a case. There would be even less case for a legal argument against an “effective write-off” involving postponing interest payments and principal payments for some very long period of time, such as 100 years.

So there is no “Eurozone rule” against a writing off Greek debt. Conversely, despite Schäuble’s enthusiastic support, the rules don’t allow for a euro exit. Rules it appears, mean whatever Mr. Schäuble wants them to mean.

“After all, Poland, the Czech Republic, Croatia, and Romania (not to mention Denmark and Sweden, or for that matter the United Kingdom) are still out and will likely remain so—yet no one thinks they will fail or drift to Putin because of that.”

• Greece, Europe, and the United States (James K. Galbraith)

SYRIZA was not some Greek fluke; it was a direct consequence of European policy failure. A coalition of ex-Communists, unionists, Greens, and college professors does not rise to power anywhere except in desperate times. That SYRIZA did rise, overshadowing the Greek Nazis in the Golden Dawn party, was, in its way, a democratic miracle. SYRIZA’s destruction will now lead to a reassessment, everywhere on the continent, of the “European project.” A progressive Europe—the Europe of sustainable growth and social cohesion—would be one thing. The gridlocked, reactionary, petty, and vicious Europe that actually exists is another. It cannot and should not last for very long.

What will become of Europe? Clearly the hopes of the pro-European, reformist left are now over. That will leave the future in the hands of the anti-European parties, including UKIP, the National Front in France, and Golden Dawn in Greece. These are ugly, racist, xenophobic groups; Golden Dawn has proposed concentration camps for immigrants in its platform. The only counter, now, is for progressive and democratic forces to regroup behind the banner of national democratic restoration. Which means that the left in Europe will also now swing against the euro.

As that happens, should the United States continue to support the euro, aligning ourselves with failed policies and crushed democratic protests? Or should we let it be known that we are indifferent about which countries are in or out? Surely the latter represents the sensible choice. After all, Poland, the Czech Republic, Croatia, and Romania (not to mention Denmark and Sweden, or for that matter the United Kingdom) are still out and will likely remain so—yet no one thinks they will fail or drift to Putin because of that. So why should the euro—plainly now a fading dream—be propped up? Why shouldn’t getting out be an option? Independent technical, financial, and moral support for democratic allies seeking exit would, in these conditions, help to stabilize an otherwise dangerous and destructive mood.

The story comes from everywhere now: non-euro countries fare much better than euro nations. Even in Germany, workers are being stiffed.

• The Euro Is A Disaster Even For The Countries That Do Everything Right (WaPo)

The euro might be worse for you than bankruptcy. That, at least, has been the case for Finland and the Netherlands, which have actually grown less than Iceland has since 2007. Iceland, you might recall, went bankrupt in 2008. Now, it’s true that Finland and the Netherlands have had their fair share of economic problems, but those should have been manageable. Neither country is a basket case, and both have done what they were supposed to do. In other words, they’ve followed the rules, and the results have still been a catastrophe. That’s because the euro itself is. Or, if you want to be polite, the common currency is “imperfect, and being imperfect is fragile, vulnerable, and doesn’t deliver all the benefits it could.” That was ECB chief Mario Draghi’s verdict on Thursday.

So what’s happened to them? Well, just your run-of-the-mill bad economic news. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that Apple has kneecapped Finland’s economy. Its two biggest exports were Nokia phones and paper products, but, as the country’s former prime minister Alex Stubb has said, the iPhone killed the former and the iPad killed the latter. Now, the normal way to make up for this would be to cut costs by devaluing your currency, except that Finland doesn’t have a currency to devalue anymore. It has the euro. So instead it’s had to cut costs by cutting wages, which not only takes longer, but also causes more economic damage since you have to fire people to convince them to take pay cuts. The result has been a recession longer than anything in Finland’s living memory, longer even than its great depression in the early 1990s. It hasn’t helped, of course, that the rules of the euro zone have forced Finland’s government to cut its budget at the same time that all this has been happening.

It’s been a different kind of story in the Netherlands. Its goods are more than competitive abroad—its trade surplus is an absurd 10 % of economic output—but its domestic spending is a problem. The Netherlands had a huge housing bubble, fueled, in part, by the fact that interest payments are fully tax deductible, that has since deflated some 20%. That’s left Dutch households with a bigger debt burden than anyone else in the euro zone. On top of that, there’s been the usual austerity to keep its recovery from being much—or any—of one. Indeed, the Netherlands’ economy was slightly smaller at the end of 2014 than it was at the end of 2007. That’s a lot better than Finland, whose economy has shrunk 5.2% during that time, but it still lags the 1.1% growth Iceland has eked out.

Excellent.

• Blame the Banks (The Atlantic)

In buying various assets European banks were doing what banks are supposed to do: lending. But by doing so without caution they were doing exactly what banks are not supposed to do: lending recklessly. The European banks weren’t lending recklessly to only the U.S. They were also aggressively lending within Europe, including to the governments of Spain, Portugal, and Greece. In 2008, when the U.S. housing market collapsed, the European banks lost big. They mostly absorbed those losses and focused their attention on Europe, where they kept lending to governments—meaning buying those countries’ debt—even though that was looking like an increasingly foolish thing to do:

Many of the southern countries were starting to show worrying signs. By 2010 one of those countries—Greece—could no longer pay its bills. Over the prior decade Greece had built up massive debt, a result of too many people buying too many things, too few Greeks paying too few taxes, and too many promises made by too many corrupt politicians, all wrapped in questionable accounting. Yet despite clear problems, bankers had been eagerly lending to Greece all along. That 2010 Greek crisis was temporarily muzzled by an international bailout, which imposed on Greece severe spending constraints. This bailout gave Greece no debt relief, instead lending them more money to help pay off their old loans, allowing the banks to walk away with few losses.

It was a bailout of the banks in everything but name. Greece has struggled immensely since then, with an economic collapse of historic proportion, the human costs of which can only be roughly understood. Greece needed another bailout in 2012, and yet again this week. While the Greeks have suffered, the northern banks have yet to account financially, legally, or ethically, for their reckless decisions. Further, by bailing out the banks in 2010, rather than Greece, the politicians transferred any future losses from Greece to the European public. It was a bait-and-switch rife with a nationalist sentiment that has corrupted the dialogue since: Don’t look at our reckless banks; look at their reckless borrowing.

Legalese.

• Greece’s Debt Can Be Written Off – Whatever Wolfgang Schäuble Says (Guardian)

A vote in the Greek parliament means little to Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble. The self-appointed guardian of the EU’s financial rulebook says Athens can vote as many times as it likes in favour of a deal that promises, even in the vaguest terms, to write off some of its colossal debts, but that doesn’t mean the rules allow it. In fact, as Schäuble delights in pointing out, any attempt at striking out Greek debt is, according to his advice, illegal. Yet Schäuble knows Greece’s debts are unsustainable unless some of them are written off – he has said as much on several occasions. So faced with its internal contradictions, he posits that the deal must fail and the poorly led Greeks exit the euro.

As a compromise, he repeated his suggestion on Tuesday that Greece leave the euro temporarily. Those who care more for maintaining the current euro currency bloc as a 19-member entity immediately spotted this manoeuvre as a one-way ticket with no way back for Greece. The Austrian chancellor, Werner Faymann, a centre-left social democrat, said Schäuble was “totally wrong” to create the impression that “it may be useful for us if Greece falls out of the currency union, that maybe we pay less that way”. Faymann, who has consistently taken a sympathetic line on Greece, showed his growing irritation at the German minister’s stance: “It’s morally not right, that would be the beginning of a process of decay … Germany has taken on a leading role here in Europe and in this case not a positive one.”

Greece and Faymann’s problem is that there are plenty of other forces at play pulling at the loose threads of the latest bailout deal. The IMF has said a big debt write-off is needed to prevent a proposed €86bn deal collapsing under the sheer weight of future liabilities and a reluctance in Greece to carry through reforms.

Bernanke weighs in.

• Greece And Europe: Is Europe Holding Up Its End Of The Bargain? (Ben Bernanke)

This week the Greek parliament agreed to European demands for tough new austerity measures and structural reforms, defusing (for the moment, at least) the country’s sovereign debt crisis. Now is a good time to ask: Is Europe holding up its end of the bargain? Specifically, is the euro zone’s leadership delivering the broad-based economic recovery that is needed to give stressed countries like Greece a reasonable chance to meet their growth, employment, and fiscal objectives? Over the longer term, these questions are evidently of far greater consequence for Europe, and for the world, than are questions about whether tiny Greece can meet its fiscal obligations.

Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are also obvious. Since the global financial crisis, economic outcomes in the euro zone have been deeply disappointing. The failure of European economic policy has two, closely related, aspects: (1) the weak performance of the euro zone as a whole; and (2) the highly asymmetric outcomes among countries within the euro zone. The poor overall performance is illustrated by Figure 1 below, which shows the euro area unemployment rate since 2007, with the U.S. unemployment rate shown for comparison.

In late 2009 and early 2010 unemployment rates in Europe and the United States were roughly equal, at about 10% of the labor force. Today the unemployment rate in the United States is 5.3%, while the unemployment rate in the euro zone is more than 11%. Not incidentally, a very large share of euro area unemployment consists of younger workers; the inability of these workers to gain skills and work experience will adversely affect Europe’s longer-term growth potential. The unevenness in economic outcomes among countries within the euro zone is illustrated by Figure 2, which compares the unemployment rate in Germany (which accounts for about 30% of the euro area economy) with that of the remainder of the euro zone.

Currently, the unemployment rate in the euro zone ex Germany exceeds 13%, compared to less than 5% in Germany. Other economic data show similar discrepancies within the euro zone between the “north” (including Germany) and the “south.” The patterns illustrated in Figures 1 and 2 pose serious medium-term challenges for the euro area. The promise of the euro was both to increase prosperity and to foster closer European integration. But current economic conditions are hardly building public confidence in European economic policymakers or providing an environment conducive to fiscal stabilization and economic reform; and European solidarity will not flower under a system which produces such disparate outcomes among countries.

How Wolfie asset-stripped East Germany.

• Why Is Germany So Tough On Greece? Look Back 25 Years (Guardian)

It was 25 years ago, during the summer of 1990, that Schäuble led the West German delegation negotiating the terms of the unification with formerly communist East Germany. A doctor of law, he was West Germany’s interior minister and one of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s closest advisers, the go-to guy whenever things got tricky. The situation in the former GDR was not too dissimilar from that in Greece when Syriza swept to power: East Germans had just held their first free elections in history, only months after the Berlin Wall fell, and some of the delegates from East Berlin dreamed of a new political system, a “third way” between the west’s market economy and the east’s socialist system – while also having no idea how to pay the bills anymore.

The West Germans, on the other side of the table, had the momentum, the money and a plan: everything the state of East Germany owned was to be absorbed by the West German system and then quickly sold to private investors to recoup some of the money East Germany would need in the coming years. In other words: Schäuble and his team wanted collateral. At that time almost every former communist company, shop or petrol station was owned by the Treuhand, or trust agency – an institution originally thought up by a handful of East German dissidents to stop state-run firms from being sold to West German banks and companies by corrupt communist cadres. The Treuhand’s mission: to turn all the big conglomerates, companies and tiny shops into private firms, so they could be part of a market economy.

Schäuble and his team didn’t care that the dissidents had planned to hand out shares of companies to the East Germans, issued by the Treuhand – a concept that incidentally led to the rise of the oligarchs in Russia. But they liked the idea of a trust fund because it operated outside the government: while technically overseen by the finance ministry, it was publicly perceived as an independent agency. Even before Germany merged into a single state in October 1990, the Treuhand was firmly in West German hands. Their aim was to privatise as many companies as possible, as soon as possible – and if you were to ask most Germans about the Treuhand today they would say it achieved that objective. It didn’t do so in a way that was popular with the people of East Germany, where the Treuhand quickly became known as the ugly face of capitalism. It did a horrible job in explaining the transformation to shellshocked East Germans who felt overpowered by this strange new agency. To make matters worse, the Treuhand became a hotbed of corruption.

“As for the future of the euro, it would no longer be the Greeks’ problem. What, they may say, has the euro done for us?”

• Greece Made The Wrong Choice (John Lloyd)

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has, as Macbeth put it, “strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage.” But he will still be heard some more. While Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras pleaded for support Wednesday for a European Union “rescue” plan in which he said he didn’t believe, Varoufakis was busy ripping it apart. In a widely circulated blog, Varoufakis boiled down his belief to this: Greece had been reduced to the status of a slave state. While his words were clearly driven by anger and spite, he’s not entirely out of line. The agreement is, as Tsipras said, a kind of blackmail. The economist Simon Tilford described it as an order to “acquiesce to all our demands or we will evict you from the currency union.”

Pensions will be cut further, labor markets liberalized, working lives extended, collective bargaining “modernized,” and hiring and firing made easier. For a government that takes its inspiration from Karl Marx, this is a neo-liberal dousing. There are few enthusiasts for the deal: the most important of the skeptics is the IMF, which called for the euro zone creditors to allow a partial write-off of its €300+ billion debt, or at least permit a repayment pause for 30 years. In an ironic twist, the IMF, the creditor the Tsipras government most despised, is now its (partial) friend. Skeptics have focused not just on the impossibility of debt repayment, but also on the deepening poverty that will result from the agreement.

Francois Cabeau, an economist in Barclays Bank, told the French daily Figaro that the economy would continue to shrink by between 6 and 8% a year. Because the Greek economy has so few sectors where significant value is added other than shipping and tourism, it depends heavily on consumption — which is being further cut, thus prompting a vicious cycle and a further immiseration of the poor, elderly and sick. These conditions validate Varoufakis’ analysis. Greece is a country so firmly under the unremitting pressure of its creditors and so tied to foreign demands, that it may soon resemble an East European communist state in the high tide of Soviet power. Like two of these states — Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 — Syriza made a failed attempt at a revolt, and was crushed.

[..] So should it leave the euro zone? The objections to a Grexit are twofold: first, that its currency — presumably a newly issued drachma — would be walloped by an unfavorable exchange rate as a result. Foreign goods and foreign travel would be priced out of many families’ reach. At the same time, as euro zone leaders have warned continually, a Grexit would also shake the euro to its foundations — and though the remaining 18 members could be protected, a precedent would be set that this is a contingent currency, with membership dependent on national conditions. That it would be bad is certain: but how much worse than staying in and swallowing bitter medicine? As for the future of the euro, it would no longer be the Greeks’ problem. What, they may say, has the euro done for us?

“The key (overlooked) question here is: Is this EU reflecting Europeans’ will? ”

• The Greek Crisis Represents The Humiliation Of European Democracy (Andrea Mammone)

Fears, disillusionment, uncertainty, and astonishment are mixed together by the hot wind blowing from Greece and the cold rain coming from some of Northern Europe. No, it is not a weather forecast. After the Greek referendum and the recent night-long negotiations, these are the feelings of many people across Europe. Even if the reality will probably be less apocalyptic, the truth is that democracy is being ridiculed around the EU. Some media from all around the world are, in fact, suggesting that Greece has been excessively humiliated and there is a strong attempt to force it out from the Eurozone. And this is not merely because one of the proposals from the summit stated that €50bn of Greek assets had to be handed over to an institution fundamentally controlled by Berlin.

These days Greece has been constantly at the centre of Europe’s microcosm. The “mother” of western democracy and inner culture, according to some, has to learn the lesson. It is a matter of mere power. They rejected austerity, potentially provoking another European downturn, and a default with unclear outcomes. Stories of poverty and unemployment are indeed in the eyes of everyone willing to see them. The situation is undermining the future of the European community. It is not simply opening the way for member states to be essentially pushed out by the strongest ones. Referring to the Greek early approach and a possible “exit”, EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said that he could not “pull a rabbit out of a hat”. This is very true.

But early post-war politicians pulled many rabbits out when Europe had to be rebuilt after the war, and so one would expect a similar proficiency. This contemporary generation of European leaders might be instead remembered like the one leading to the disappearance of many transnational bonds established by Europeans. Europe is, then, really navigating with no compass. It has not a single voice. Socially, there seems to be no concern with people’s living standards. Politically, they lack any preoccupations with geo-politics, as some of the Mediterranean might fall under Putin’s influence. Budget and austerity are the main interests. As Pierre Moscovici, the socialist EU economic commissioner, in fact, put it, the “integrity” of the Eurozone has been saved with the novel agreement.

The key (overlooked) question here is: Is this EU reflecting Europeans’ will? Its image (and also Germany’s image) is seriously damaged even if all Greeks voted yes. For this reason the statement by the German European MP and chairman of the leading centre-right European People’s Party, Manfred Weber, that Europe is “based on solidarity, not a club of egoists” looks highly paradoxical, especially after what it is happening to Greece.

From Mason’s upcoming new book. Lots of technohappiness.

• The End Of Capitalism Has Begun (Paul Mason)

The 2008 crash wiped 13% off global production and 20% off global trade. Global growth became negative – on a scale where anything below +3% is counted as a recession. It produced, in the west, a depression phase longer than in 1929-33, and even now, amid a pallid recovery, has left mainstream economists terrified about the prospect of long-term stagnation. The aftershocks in Europe are tearing the continent apart. The solutions have been austerity plus monetary excess. But they are not working. In the worst-hit countries, the pension system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked to 70, and education is being privatised so that graduates now face a lifetime of high debt. Services are being dismantled and infrastructure projects put on hold.

Even now many people fail to grasp the true meaning of the word “austerity”. Austerity is not eight years of spending cuts, as in the UK, or even the social catastrophe inflicted on Greece. It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up. Meanwhile in the absence of any alternative model, the conditions for another crisis are being assembled. Real wages have fallen or remained stagnant in Japan, the southern Eurozone, the US and UK. The shadow banking system has been reassembled, and is now bigger than it was in 2008. New rules demanding banks hold more reserves have been watered down or delayed. Meanwhile, flushed with free money, the 1% has got richer.

Neoliberalism, then, has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures. Worse than that, it has broken the 200-year pattern of industrial capitalism wherein an economic crisis spurs new forms of technological innovation that benefit everybody. That is because neoliberalism was the first economic model in 200 years the upswing of which was premised on the suppression of wages and smashing the social power and resilience of the working class. If we review the take-off periods studied by long-cycle theorists – the 1850s in Europe, the 1900s and 1950s across the globe – it was the strength of organised labour that forced entrepreneurs and corporations to stop trying to revive outdated business models through wage cuts, and to innovate their way to a new form of capitalism.

“This El Niño hasn’t peaked yet, but by some measures it’s already the most extreme ever recorded for this time of year and could lead 2015 to break even more records than last year.”

• The Freakish Year in Broken Climate Records (Bloomberg)

The annual State of the Climate report is out, and it’s ugly. Record heat, record sea levels, more hot days and fewer cool nights, surging cyclones, unprecedented pollution, and rapidly diminishing glaciers.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issues a report each year compiling the latest data gathered by 413 scientists from around the world. It’s 288 pages, but we’ll save you some time. Here’s a review, in six charts, of some of the climate highlights from 2014.

1. Temperatures set a new record It’s getting hot out there. Four independent data sets show that last year was the hottest in 135 years of modern record keeping. The map above shows temperature departure from the norm. The eastern half of North America was one of the few cool spots on the planet.

2. Sea levels also surge to a record The global mean sea level continued to rise, keeping pace with a trend of 3.2 millimeters per year over the last two decades. The global satellite record goes back only to 1993, but the trend is clear and consistent. Rising tides are one of the most physically destructive aspects of climate change. Eight of the world’s 10 largest cities are near a coast, and 40 % of the U.S. population lives in coastal areas, where the risk of flooding and erosion continues to rise.

3. Glaciers retreat for the 31st consecutive year Data from more than three dozen mountain glaciers show that 2014 was the 31st straight year of glacier ice loss worldwide. The consistent retreat of glaciers is considered one of the clearest signals of global warming. Most alarming: The rate of loss is accelerating over time.

4. There are more hot days and fewer cool nights Climate change doesn’t just increase the average temperature—it also increases the extremes. The chart above shows when daily high temperatures max out above the 90th %ile and nightly lows fall below the lowest 10th %ile. The measures were near their global records last year, and the trend is consistently miserable.

5. Record greenhouse gases fill the atmosphere By burning fossil fuels, humans have cranked up concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than 40 % since the Industrial Revolution. Carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, reached a concentration of 400 parts per million for the first time in May 2013. Soon we’ll stop seeing concentrations that low ever again.
The data shown are from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Data collection was started there by C. David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in March 1958. This chart is commonly referred to as the Keeling curve.

6. The oceans absorb crazy amounts of heat The oceans store and release heat on a massive scale. Over shorter spans of years to decades, ocean temperatures naturally fluctuate from climate patterns like El Niño and what’s known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Longer term, oceans are absorbing even more global warming than the surface of the planet, contributing to rising seas, melting glaciers, and dying coral reefs and fish populations. In 2015 the world has moved into an El Niño warming pattern in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño phases release some of the ocean’s stored heat into the atmosphere, causing weather shifts around the world. This El Niño hasn’t peaked yet, but by some measures it’s already the most extreme ever recorded for this time of year and could lead 2015 to break even more records than last year.