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Debt Rattle March 9 2023

Mar 092023
 
 March 9, 2023  Posted by at 10:34 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  60 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Almond blossom 1890

 

• Seymour Hersh Laughs off NYT Article on Nord Stream Culprits (Celente)
• ‘Officials’ Throw More Chaff To Hide Real Nord Stream Perpetrators (MoA)
• German Defense Minister Comments On Nord Stream Sabotage Case (RT)
• CIA, White House Consider Kiev Involvement In Nord Stream Sabotage – WSJ (TASS)
• West Won’t Name Ukrainian Businessman Involved In Nord Stream Incident (TASS)
• Russia: NYT Report on Nord Stream Attack is Deliberate Disinformation (SN)
• EU Threatens Georgia Over ‘Foreign Agent’ Law (RT)
• US Could ‘Shift Focus’ From Europe To Asia ‘Anytime’ – Berlin (RT)
• Vindman Busted For Dealing Lucrative Defense Contracts in Ukraine (TP)
• Elon Musk Blasts MSM, Democrats On January 6th Capitol Riot Revelations (DCE)
• Fox News Host Tucker Carlson Not Credible, Says White House (BBC)
• Moscow Condemns ‘Nazi Celebration’ At White House (RT)
• EU Energy Bills Soared 300% – von der Leyen (RT)
• Ukraine Cuts Off Power To Zaporozhye Nuclear Plant (TASS)

 

 

 

 

Also Sep 2019: Bill Gates buys $30 million in BioNTech stock

 

 

 

 

Southfront

 

 

Scott Ritter
https://twitter.com/i/status/1633549541717966851

 

 

 

 

Garland

 

 

 

 

“I always thought either Somalia or Nepal were behind it.”

• Seymour Hersh Laughs off NYT Article on Nord Stream Culprits (Celente)

Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote the expose on the Nord Stream pipelines sabotage last month, brushed off today’s report in The New York Times that blamed the attack on a “pro-Ukrainian group.” Hersh’s original story went into detail on how the U.S. and Norway allegdly carried out the elaborate bombing. His theory is that President Joe Biden was concerned Germany would turn back to Russia for its natural gas if there was a cold winter and restart the pipeline. The White House called Hersh’s story completely false. The Times’s report cited unnamed U.S. officials who said they reviewed new intelligence about the pro-Ukraine group with no known ties to the Ukrainian government. Ukraine also denied any role in the attack.

The paper said: The review of newly collected intelligence suggests they were opponents of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, but does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation. Hersh seemed unimpressed with the report and laughed when reached by The Trends Journal. He joked, “I always thought either Somalia or Nepal were behind it.” The Times’s decision to even cover the attack is a change in the U.S. media. FAIR, the media watchdog group, ran an extensive article last week that looked into Hersh’s report and the response from top news outlets in the U.S. The watchdog group noted that there was “not a word broadcast by the major US broadcast networks—NBC, ABC, CBS—or the publicly funded broadcasters PBS and NPR. No news stories on the nation’s major cable outlets, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.”

But despite the lack of coverage in the U.S., Russia used Hersh’s story to demand a UN investigation and to threaten open-water chaos. Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, told the Security Council that if the perpetrators are not found and brought to justice, it could become open season on undersea infrastructure for military strikes. Germany’s ARD broadcaster and Zeit newspaper also released a report that said German authorities identified the yacht used in the sabotage, but noted that the lack of evidence could be a false flag, Al Jazeera reported. Last Friday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz flew to Washington for what amounted to a secret one-hour summit with President Joe Biden.

No staff attended the two-man meeting and to illustrate journalistic malpractice, none of the Presstitutes asked the German leader his thoughts about Seymour Hersh’s report that the United States blew up the Nord Stream pipelines. The theory is that the Biden administration was worried Germany could turn back to Russia because of the cheap gas, and so the U.S. destroying the pipelines would prevent such a scenario. And what was the real purpose of this secret meeting? No one was told. Was it to ramp up World War III?

Hersh “they can’t be that stupid”

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“Such deep dives require special gases, special breathing equipment, special training, a decompression chamber for emergencies and lots of well trained people to maintain all that stuff..”

• ‘Officials’ Throw More Chaff To Hide Real Nord Stream Perpetrators (MoA)

The new claim is that some rather small yacht, which would not even be able to carry the necessary equipment to perform such a deed, was the main instrument in this:

“Following joint research by [German main public TV news unit] (ARD’s capital city studio), the ARD political magazine Kontraste, [German public TV] SWR and DIE ZEIT, it was possible to reconstruct to a large extent in the course of the investigation how and when the explosive attack was prepared. According to this, traces lead in the direction of Ukraine. However, investigators have so far found no evidence of who ordered the destruction.
…
Specifically, according to information from [these news sources], investigators have managed to identify the boat that was presumably used for the secret operation. It is said to be a yacht rented from a company based in Poland, apparently owned by two Ukrainians. The clandestine operation at sea is said to have been carried out by a team of six people, according to the investigation. It is said to have involved five men and one woman. According to the report, the group consisted of a captain, two divers, two diving assistants and a female doctor, who are said to have transported the explosives to the crime scenes and placed them there. The nationality of the perpetrators is apparently unclear. The assassins used professionally forged passports, which are said to have been used, among other things, to rent the boat.

According to the investigation, the commando set off from Rostock on September 6, 2022. The equipment for the clandestine operation was previously transported to the port in a van, it is said. In the further course, the investigators succeeded in locating the boat the following day again in Wieck (Darß) and later at the Danish island Christiansø, northeast of Bornholm, according to the research. The yacht was subsequently returned to the owner in uncleaned condition. On the table in the cabin, the investigators were able to detect traces of explosives, according to the research. According to information from [the mentioned news sources], a Western intelligence service is said to have sent a tip to European partner services as early as in the fall, i.e. shortly after the destruction, according to which a Ukrainian commando was responsible for the destruction. Thereafter, there have allegedly been further intelligence indications suggesting that a pro-Ukrainian group could be responsible.”

No. You do not dive down to 80+ meter for an industrial size job, involving the placement of hundreds of pounds of explosives in eight individual charges on very sturdy pipelines, from a sparsely manned boat. Such deep dives require special gases, special breathing equipment, special training, a decompression chamber for emergencies and lots of well trained people to maintain all that stuff.

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“..the sabotage act might have been a “false-flag operation” aimed at framing Ukraine..”

• German Defense Minister Comments On Nord Stream Sabotage Case (RT)

Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius has dodged a question about how the Nord Stream sabotage case could influence Western military aid for Kiev if it turns out that some pro-Ukrainian groups were behind the Russian gas pipeline blasts. It is of no use to speculate on the “hypothetical” indications, the minister told national news radio Deutschlandfunk (DLF) on Wednesday, on the heels of several media reports linking the incident, which occurred in September 2022, to some alleged Ukrainian perpetrators. “We’ll have to wait and see what is actually confirmed,” Pistorius told DLF’s Barbara Schmidt-Mattern when asked about the media reports. On Tuesday, a host of German media outlets, including Die Zeit newspaper and state broadcaster ARD, reported that a vessel believed to be linked to the Nord Stream sabotage operation allegedly belongs to a Ukrainian-owned company.

The reports also said that a Western intelligence agency is thought to have informed European “partner services”that a “Ukrainian commando” unit was behind the attack. The New York Times reported on the same day, citing US intelligence sources, that a “pro-Ukrainian group”was behind the September 2022 attacks. Pistorius brushed off all the claims presented in the reports as “hypothetical” and maintained that the sabotage act might have been a “false-flag operation” aimed at framing Ukraine. The chance of it being a false-flag operation is as “equally high” as the chance of Ukrainians being behind it, the minister said. Berlin has so far not made any investigation results public. A few days ago, Sweden, Denmark and Germany “informed the United Nations Security Council that the investigations are ongoing and that there are still no results,” a government spokesman declared on Tuesday.

Pistorius also insisted it would make little sense to “think about what impact this would have on our support for Ukraine on the basis of such a [journalistic] investigation” when asked about the potential fallout of a probe into the Nord Stream sabotage. The minister also said that Germany and its allies continue to supply Kiev “to the best of our ability.” He added, though, that Ukraine’s Western backers can only provide ammunition for the Ukrainian troops as long as it does not compromise their own defense capacities. “We need certain reserves to maintain our own ability to defend ourselves,” Pistorius said, calling limited defense industry production capacities a real “bottleneck” limiting Western military aid for Ukraine. His words came as The Times reported that Western intelligence agencies had been well aware of the identity of a person behind the attack on Nord Stream. They decided at the time to conceal this information to avoid a spat between Berlin and Kiev, since the suspect had ties to Ukraine, the paper claimed.

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“The US believes that Ukraine had an opportunity to perform such operation..”

• CIA, White House Consider Kiev Involvement In Nord Stream Sabotage – WSJ (TASS)

CIA Director William Burns and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan considered a version of Ukraine’s responsibility for sabotage acts at Nord Stream gas pipelines in October 2022, the Wall Street Journal said, citing unnamed representatives of the US administration. The US believes that Ukraine had an opportunity to perform such operation. No data are available at the moment indicating that Ukrainian authorities were involved in sabotage acts, the newspaper said. The German investigation has almost completely excluded the version of Russia’s involvement in sabotage acts at gas pipelines. The US also does not believe that Russia was involved, the newspaper informed. German investigators arrived at the conclusion of non-involvement of Russia by February 2023, WSJ reported. Conclusions are not final and the investigation continues, the newspaper said.


Ukraine passport found

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Easier that way. Deep secret.

• West Won’t Name Ukrainian Businessman Involved In Nord Stream Incident (TASS)

The Western nations are likely not to disclose the name of a Ukrainian businessman alleged to be involved in sabotage acts at Nord Stream pipelines to keep the unity of the West in providing military aid to Ukraine, the Daily Telegraph newspaper said, citing sources. The businessman, whose name is known to the news outlet, fell under suspicion in view of a special nature of sabotage acts that might hint that he was involved with the incident, sources said. A newspaper’s source in European security agencies confirmed that the businessman is on the radar screen of investigators but said nothing whether he is a formal suspect in the case.

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“I wonder who allows such leaks, filling the media scene with them?”

• Russia: NYT Report on Nord Stream Attack is Deliberate Disinformation (SN)

Russia has claimed that the New York Times report about a ‘pro-Ukraine group’ being responsible for the Nord Stream pipeline attack is a deliberate form of disinformation to distract from the fact that the U.S. was responsible for the blasts. The NYT said that a “pro-Ukrainian group” had sabotaged the pipelines, using a team with as few as six people involved in the mission, contradicting previous assumptions that only a state would have had the resources to carry out the operation. The report was very careful to explicitly state that no Americans or Brits were involved in the attack. A few hours later, German media outlets reported that the vessel involved in the plot, a yacht, had been identified as being rented from a Poland-based company which belonged to a pair of Ukrainians.


The reports contradicted the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who wrote last month that the pipelines were destroyed by the US as part of a covert operation. According to Hersh’s sources, the explosives were planted in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise and were detonated three months later with a remote signal sent by a sonar buoy. One source told Hersh that the plotters knew the covert operation was an “act of war,” with some in the CIA and State Department warning, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.” Russia reacted to the New York Times report by dismissing it as a propaganda ploy designed to obfuscate the truth. “I wonder who allows such leaks, filling the media scene with them?” asked Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. “The answer is: those who do not want to conduct an investigation in the legal field and are going to divert the attention of the audience from the facts in every possible way.”

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NGOs are the vehicle for color revolutions. The law was withdrawn this morning.

• EU Threatens Georgia Over ‘Foreign Agent’ Law (RT)

Georgia risks “significant withdrawal of EU support” if it proceeds with the law on registering foreign agents, Romanian MEP Siegfried Muresan said on Wednesday. The vice-president of the European People’s Party bloc in the European Parliament told Romania’s Digi 24 outlet that requiring NGOs to disclose foreign funding was an attack on democracy. “We see intimidation of civil society,” Muresan told the outlet. Requiring organizations dealing with press freedom, human rights and helping Ukrainian refugees to register as foreign agents if 20% or more of their funding comes from abroad is “intimidation of essential entities for democracy, it is not at all consistent with European standards,” he added.

“What the Georgian authorities are doing endangers the country’s European course,” insisted Muresan, accusing Tbilisi of having “fallen behind Moldova and Ukraine” in implementing EU reforms. On Tuesday, Georgian lawmakers voted in favor of a bill that would impose registration requirements on foreign-funded NGOs. The opposition denounced it as “Russian-like” and organized mass protests outside the parliament two days in a row. Some of the demonstrators carried EU, US and Ukrainian flags. Others wore gas masks and helmets, attempted to storm the legislature, and threw Molotov cocktails at police. The ruling party in Tbilisi says the law is intended to protect the country’s sovereignty from “extremist organizations” funded from abroad.

Georgian Dream party leader Irakli Kobakhidze accused the opposition of wanting to restore the 2003-2012 ‘Rose Revolution’ regime, which he said looted the country and lost 20% of its territory. Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili and the US State Department have sided with the rioters, with the US embassy in Tbilisi calling the proposed law a “dark day for democracy.” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell also described the proposal as contrary to EU values. Muresan told Digi24 that Tbilisi “risks a significant withdrawal of EU support” unless it backs down, because Brussels cannot support “undemocratic tendencies.” “Obviously the EU expectation is that people can express themselves freely and any attempt to intimidate those who take to the streets will not be accepted,” he said.

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Raytheon spokesman.

• US Could ‘Shift Focus’ From Europe To Asia ‘Anytime’ – Berlin (RT)

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has expressed concern that Europe is relying too much on the US in the area of defense. This means there is pressure on him “at all times,” he admitted during a talk with Germany’s Deutschlandfunk (Dlf) radio broadcaster on Wednesday, adding that Washington’s priorities could always change. “We always have to keep in mind that the Americans could… shift their focus… towards the Indo-Pacific [region],” Pistorius said. He added that this could happen for a range of reasons, and the likelihood of such a scenario may be influenced by the outcome of the US presidential elections next year. The minister called on Europe to make “more efforts” to develop its own coordinated defense policy and assume the “corresponding responsibility.”

He maintained that Europe could always rely on its “transatlantic partner,” but added that “the balance can shift and we have to prepare for that.” Pistorius also said Germany and the US would have to coordinate their approaches toward China. Asked about “teamwork” between Washington and Berlin in dealing with Beijing, he said: “I believe it will be done anyway, and that is necessary.” He did not rule out Germany joining US-led sanctions against China should Beijing supply Russia with lethal weapons amid the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev. Pistorius’ remarks come around a week after he admitted that Germany does not have sufficient forces to defend itself against “an offensive” after years of neglecting its own army.

Earlier this week, Germany’s ZDF broadcaster also reported that the German Army – the Bundeswehr – was struggling to fulfill its obligations as part of a NATO rapid response force (VJTF) due to a lack of battle-ready tanks.Despite facing such issues in the field of defense, Berlin has been providing extensive support to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, sometimes at the expense of its own defense capabilities. Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall, the country’s top military contractor, told the Pioneer podcast in late February that the government had transferred to Ukraine two state-of-the-art air defense systems that were meant to protect the German capital.

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Didn’t get paid enough for framingTrump.

• Vindman Busted For Dealing Lucrative Defense Contracts in Ukraine (TP)

A key witness in the impeachment proceedings of President Donald Trump is being called an “opportunist” after pitching lucrative defense contracts to the Ukrainian government in a blatant attempt to profit off the current international struggle. Retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified before the House Intelligence Committee in 2019 in response to questions raised about dealings between President Trump and Ukrainian, has offered logistics and equipment management services to Ukrainian forces for $12 million. The contract was offered through Trident International LLC, of which Vindman is CEO, according to Fox News.

Democrats subpoenaed Vindman to testify in 2019 as part of their impeachment hearings exploring whether or not President Trump appealed to the Ukrainian President Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s involvement in helping his son Hunter secure business dealings with natural gas firm Burisma Holdings. Vindman’s prepared testimony, which was leaked to the media in advance, detailed his concerns that “outside influencers” were attempting to thwart congressional support for Ukraine. He went on to say that such a narrative would “undermine U.S. national security.” The following year, a U.S. Senate committee on homeland security concluded that then-Vice President Biden and State Department officials were aware of the conflict of interest exhibited with Hunter Biden’s business relationship but ignored repeated concerns raised at the time.

Lt. Col. Vindman retired from the military in the aftermath of his testimony, alleging in a subsequent lawsuit that the Trump White House committed a “campaign of intimidation and retaliation has had severe and deeply personal ramifications.” A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in November. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), a sharp critic of Vindman during the impeachment hearings, did not hold back in excoriating Vindman for his Ukrainian dealings: “When conservatives speak the truth, the mainstream media panics and desperately attempts to provide cover for the left. They did this for Alexander Vindman, just like they did for Hunter Biden, Dr. Fauci and teachers unions,” Blackburn said, referencing liberal media outlets’ staunch defense of Vindman throughout his time as a witness during the impeachment investigation.

“Alexander Vindman has always been a political activist and opportunist masquerading behind his career. He saw an opening for personal fame and profited by exploiting the media’s outrage against President Trump,” she accused. “Vindman has spent the last three years on MSNBC and CNN attacking Republicans. Now, new revelations suggest Vindman could be profiting off the war in Ukraine, just as he did by speaking out against the Trump administration,” Blackburn added.

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“they withheld evidence for partisan political reasons that sent people to prison for far more serious crimes than they committed.”

• Elon Musk Blasts MSM, Democrats On January 6th Capitol Riot Revelations (DCE)

On Monday evening, Tucker Carlson released an expose of the over 40,000 hours of footage his producers reviewed of the January 6th Capitol Riot leading to massive reactions online including from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Musk took aim at Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY), Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), and Adam Schiff (D-CA) who, Tucker claimed, painted a biased portrait of what occurred on January 6th. Throughout Tucker’s coverage, he showcased that the House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack lied about how Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died with the Fox host showing that he was walking around following the supposed attack that killed him.

In addition, Carlson debunked the now-famous clip of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) running away from the rioters, showcasing that there were dozens of lawmakers and staff being escorted from their offices by the police, not just the Missouri senator. In addition, Tucker pointed out that Ray Epps, a rioter on January 6th that has gained considerable attention and who has been used as a key witness, in fact, lied during his testimony about when he left the Capitol. All of these facts combined led to Musk blasting the Democrats for misleading the public over the past two years in order to push a narrative to push their own partisan priorities. “Besides misleading the public,” Musk began, “they withheld evidence for partisan political reasons that sent people to prison for far more serious crimes than they committed.”

“That is deeply wrong, legally and morally,” he continued, adding, “This is crazy. The public was misled.” In addition to expressing his own opinion about the matter, he also called upon BBC World to cover the release of the footage honestly: “What say you, [BBC World]?” he asked. “Your credibility is at stake.”

Tucker montage
https://twitter.com/i/status/1633282902615105537

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Him and Seymour Hersh.

• Fox News Host Tucker Carlson Not Credible, Says White House (BBC)

The White House has called Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson “not credible” after he made a number of claims based on previously unseen footage from the 2021 Capitol riots. The criticism echoes similar statements this week from leading Democrat and Republican lawmakers. Mr Carlson showed unseen clips from the riots on his show this week. He argued the footage “does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress” but rather “mostly peaceful chaos”.A top congressional Republican recently gave Mr Carlson and his team exclusive access to more than 40,000 hours of surveillance video from the Capitol. The White House rarely criticises journalists by name but weighed in with a statement on Wednesday about the prime-time TV host’s broadcast related to the footage.

Spokesperson Andrew Bates said the White House agreed with critics, including the “chief of the Capitol Police and the wide range of bipartisan lawmakers” that “condemned this false depiction of the unprecedented, violent attack”. “We also agree with what Fox News’s own attorneys and executives have now repeatedly stressed in multiple courts of law: that Tucker Carlson is not credible.” The BBC contacted Fox News for a response. On his Wednesday broadcast, Mr Carlson showed no new footage but repeated his previous claims and criticised government officials who stated that five police officers died as a result of the riot. One Capitol Police officer died of a stroke the day after the riot, while four others subsequently took their own lives.

[..] The justice department says about 140 police officers were assaulted that day.Around 1,000 people have been arrested so far in connection with the riot, most of them charged with entering or remaining in a restricted federal building, according to justice department figures.More than 300 have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees, including more than 100 who have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to a police officer.

LMAO

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Biden throws a party.

• Moscow Condemns ‘Nazi Celebration’ At White House (RT)

The White House’s decision to bestow the International Women of Courage Award on a member of an infamous Ukrainian nationalist battalion is “disgraceful,” Moscow’s ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, said on Thursday. He claimed that the move was further proof that Washington is ready to support Nazis in the fight against Russia. Speaking to reporters, Antonov was asked to comment on the award received at the White House by Yulia Paevskaya, who goes by the nickname ‘Taira’. The ambassador said Moscow had noted the honoring of a member of the Azov battalion, a Ukrainian unit closely associated with neo-Nazi ideology, on International Women’s Day. “This is a disgrace. It is incomprehensible that Nazis can be celebrated within the walls of the White House.”

Antonov described Paevskaya as a “terrorist cutthroat whose hands are covered in the blood of the elderly, women, and children.” In March 2022, as the fighting raged in the besieged city of Mariupol, which is now part of Russia, Paevskaya “pretended to be a mother of two children whose parents she had killed herself,” and then tried to escape disguised in civilian clothing, Antonov stated. “The abducted minors later confessed that Paevskaya had threatened them with violence,” the diplomat added. Paevskaya also took part in the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, trained neo-Nazis in the Donbass region, and “committed crimes against civilians,” Antonov claimed. He also stated that the Azov battalion, which Paevskaya is part of, bears the symbol of a Nazi Germany SS division.

Antonov asserted that Washington is well aware of all of this information, but “to hurt Russia, the United States is willing to glorify Nazism.” He added that the authorities in Washington should be “ashamed” of themselves for dishonoring the American and Soviet veterans who fought against fascism during World War II. Paevskaya was captured by Russian forces in Mariupol in March. In June, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky announced that Kiev had managed to free her from captivity, describing her as a paramedic, but without providing further details. The International Women of Courage Award is a prize annually distributed by the White House. This year, in addition to Paevskaya, it was bestowed upon 10 other “extraordinary women… who are working to build a brighter future for all.”

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Get her out.

• EU Energy Bills Soared 300% – von der Leyen (RT)

The EU member states saw their energy bills skyrocket by at least 300% last summer after a dramatic reduction of Russian gas supplies, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday. According to the EC chief, the bloc managed to replace the shortfall in Russian natural gas by purchasing more from alternative suppliers, as well as by increasing energy efficiency by reducing consumption by 20%. “Russia cut its gas supply to Europe by 80% in eight months, sending energy prices in Europe soaring,” von der Leyen said addressing a joint session of the Canadian parliament. “Last summer, our energy bills rose by 300%.”

The top official alleged that Russian officials tried to blackmail Brussels by reducing the supplies as EU nations were heavily dependent on Russian gas. She highlighted “an important role” Canada played to help tackle the energy crisis by boosting its production of liquified natural gas (LNG). The head of the EC has previously accused Moscow of blackmailing EU countries, after Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom stopped gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria in April 2022.

In response, the Kremlin assured everyone that the Russian party “was and remained a reliable supplier of energy resources to its consumers and was always committed to its contractual obligations.” Moscow insisted that both Bulgaria and Poland were cut off from Russian supplies only after they rejected the gas-for-rubles scheme. This scheme was introduced by the Russian government in response to the sanctions imposed on Moscow over the military operation in Ukraine. Moscow demanded that the nations that had imposed the penalties pay for natural gas in rubles. The scheme requires importers to open accounts in Gazprombank. They can then deposit funds in their currency of choice, which the bank converts to rubles and transfers to the supplier.

Terhes

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“..It is just an act of pure spite on the part of Kiev..”

• Ukraine Cuts Off Power To Zaporozhye Nuclear Plant (TASS)

Ukraine has cut off power to the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Energodar, Chairman of the We Stand With Russia movement Vladimir Rogov told TASS on Thursday. “[Ukraine] cut off the supply through the last remaining powerline to the Zaporozhye NPP at 4:53 a.m. The nuclear power plant is currently disconnected from external power sources,” he said. “It has nothing to do with shelling attacks, nothing happened in the area that could have led to the power cutoff. It is just an act of pure spite on the part of Kiev,” Rogov noted. He added that the nuclear power plant had been switched to diesel generators.


The Zaporozhye nuclear plant, located in the city of Energodar, is the largest in Europe and has a capacity of about 6,000 MW. Russian troops took control of the facility in late February 2022. Since then, the Ukrainian military has been shelling both Energodar’s residential areas and the premises of the Zaporozhye nuclear station, using drones, heavy artillery and multiple rocket launchers. An IAEA mission led by Grossi visited the facility in early September and two of its members remained at the site as observers. The IAEA later published a report calling for the creation of a safety zone around the plant to prevent any calamities from the ongoing military activities.

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Submarine

 

 

Cats

 

 

Mountain goat
https://twitter.com/i/status/1633357220514791425

 

 

Xizi pagoda
https://twitter.com/i/status/1633537858295193617

 

 


A member of the pheasant family, the Himalayan monal, is the national bird of Nepal

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle September 9 2020

Sep 092020
 
 September 9, 2020  Posted by at 9:29 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  23 Responses »


Pablo Picasso The Dream 1932

 

• Assange Legal Team Focuses On US Torture And War Crimes (Gosztola)
• Politics and Violence Go Hand in Hand (Knapp)
• Scott Adams: Trump Is The Most Successful Stand-Up Comic Ever (RCP)
• Biden Loses His Florida Lead As Latino Voters Shift To Trump (Week)
• Docs Show Former Officials “In Real Trouble” In Durham Probe – Meadows (ET)
• Vindman, Not Whistleblower, Was Driving Force Behind Impeachment (Fed.)
• On-the-Record Sources, Paper Trail Rebut Anonymous Atlantic Claims (JTN)
• AstraZeneca COVID19 Vaccine Trial Put On Hold Due To Adverse Reaction (STAT)
• England To Ban Gatherings Of More Than 6 People As Coronavirus Cases Spike (AP)
• Britons Scrambling To Get Back Home From Greek Islands On UK Red List (K.)
• Netherlands Puts All Greek Islands On Orange Travel List (K.)
• 35 Migrants In Moria Found Positive For Coronavirus (K.)
• 1,000s Flee Fire At Moria Migrant Camp On Virus Lockdown In Greece (K.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CNN’s Zucker wanted to give Trump a show

 

 

“Lewis insisted the U.S. government only charged Assange with documents that revealed the names of informants..”

Assange personally redacted out 10,000 names in one night after the journalists at the Guardian etc. refused to do it. He’s the only one who cared.

• Assange Legal Team Focuses On US Torture And War Crimes (Gosztola)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s legal team spent the second morning of a major extradition hearing focusing a magistrate court judge’s attention on United States torture and war crimes that Assange helped to expose. Defense attorney Mark Summers called Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights attorney who has represented prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, to the witness stand. He was asked about human rights cases he pursued, which were bolstered by revelations in documents WikiLeaks published. For example, Stafford Smith told Judge Vanessa Baraitser that U.S. State Department cables helped those impacted by U.S. drone killings in Pakistan. It contributed to “court findings that US drone strikes are criminal offenses and that criminal proceedings should be initiated against senior U.S. officials involved in such strikes.”

A high court in Pakistan ruled “drone strikes carried out by the CIA and U.S. authorities were a ‘blatant violation of basic human rights’ including ‘a blatant breach of the absolute right to life’ and ‘a war crime,’” Stafford Smith declared in a statement to the court. Due to the decision, drone strikes that caused many “innocent deaths” stopped “very rapidly.” None were reported in 2019. The defense had Stafford Smith testify in order to persuade the court that Assange “disclosed U.S. involvement in criminal activity.” Specifically, these were “public interest disclosures” of war crimes and torture. Some of the publications are currently the subject of a criminal investigation into the CIA that is before the International Criminal Court (ICC). In other words, the prosecution against Assange is retaliation for bringing increased scrutiny to U.S. actions throughout the world.

But James Lewis, the lawyer representing the Crown Prosecution Authority on behalf of the U.S. government, was irritated by the defense’s focus on documents that exposed torture and war crimes. Lewis insisted the U.S. government only charged Assange with documents that revealed the names of informants, and none of the materials Stafford Smith was asked about mattered in the extradition case. [..]

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Word. But not sure I would say Power Corrupts. I think the people seeking power are already mentally corrupted.

• Politics and Violence Go Hand in Hand (Knapp)

“[W]e currently have an inferno of political violence to which the president of the United States adds fuel,” Jennifer Rubin thunders from her bully pulpit at the Washington Post. “[I]t is time for bipartisan voices, local and state leaders, police and other first responders, civic and religious leaders, and all responsible media outlets to try to quench the flames of violence.” Rubin is no lone voice in the wilderness. As America’s latest long hot summer drags into autumn, politicians and pundits are getting louder and more shrill in their denunciations of political violence. Considering the sources, those denunciations smack of hypocrisy. In another Post column published the very same day as her rant against political violence, Rubin tells us US Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) should be “revered and thanked for her courage and service to the country.”

Duckworth lost her legs co-piloting a helicopter during the US occupation of Iraq. That is, engaging in unambiguously political violence on behalf of the US government. Rubin denounces political violence out of one side of her mouth while lionizing it out of the other. Politics as we know it today is entirely based on violence and the threat of violence. That’s most obvious in the case of war, in which governments settle their political conflicts by sending forth their armed servants in large numbers to murder one another (and anyone else with the bad luck to get in the way), but don’t be fooled: Every government edict, at home and abroad, is backed by the credible threat of violence.

According to the Declaration of Independence, government exists to protect our rights. It may only legitimately use force to do so, and to bring to justice those who violate those rights. If government accomplished that mission and went no further, it might be an acceptable, even worthwhile institution. But it doesn’t accomplish that mission very well, and it inevitably turns the inch it’s given into miles. Why? Because the problem with power, as Lord Acton noted, is that it corrupts. Governments, and those who run and rely on them, always turn from the task of protecting our rights to increasing their power. At the far, not always visible, end of every government demand — a speed limit, a tax code, a drug prohibition, what have you — stand men and women with guns, waiting to cage or kill you for non-compliance or defiance.

As for democracy, as currently practiced it’s merely a contest to see who gives armed enforcers their marching orders. America’s two “major” political parties don’t want to end political violence; they merely want control of those they deem its “legitimate” combatants. The present conflagration — marches in the streets, clashes between protesters and police, cities on fire — shouldn’t surprise us. Sometimes the state’s victims fight back. And then the state pours on even more force, because that’s its nature. It’s a cycle that can only be broken by abolishing the state itself. Which means that only anarchists enjoy moral standing to denounce political violence.

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“We’ve decided to call all our rallies peaceful protests.”

 

 

Scott has his own way of looking at things. Is he that far off here?

• Scott Adams: Trump Is The Most Successful Stand-Up Comic Ever (RCP)

During Monday morning’s “Coffee With Scott Adams” podcast, the comedian and ‘Dilbert’ creator again discussed Joe Biden’s repeated references to what Adams calls the “fine people in Charlottesville” race hoax. Last week, Adams extensively explained how a simple edited video has convinced tens of millions of people that President Trump ever praised members of hate groups after the deadly clash in Charlottesville 2017. This week, he compared the “fine people” hoax to the newest outrage about the president, The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s “anonymous source” alleging that the president insulted those buried in an American war cemetery during a visit to France in 2018.

According to Adams, the common thread between why so many people believe these claims to be true without any evidence (or even in the face of counterevidence) could be that they simply have no sense of humor. People hate the president so much because they literally can’t recognize the difference between an off-color joke and violent hate speech. Adams described a conversation he had on Twitter with an actress who said she believed the claims in Goldberg’s article because of the joke Trump made in 2015 about John McCain not being a war hero because he was “captured.” “This is typical Trump, he is a dumb, hate-filled liar and misogynist!” Scott’s Twitter correspondent said. “When I saw that I commented back [that] Trump told a Chris Rock joke about McCain because Chris Rock actually did that same joke before Trump did,” Adams replied.

“And then I said, you literally want to overthrow the government because you don’t recognize a joke. That’s actually what happened, this is someone who wants to get rid of Trump at any cost in part because she doesn’t recognize a joke. So, I said maybe the problem’s on your end.” She responded: “B.S. Circus with Trump’s trained Monkeys defending his stupidities. What’s wrong with you people? Who cares if Chris Rock made a joke?” “See where this is going?” Scott asked, holding back a laugh. “She has now acknowledged that the president told a joke. She did not know until I explained it that it was a joke. So now she has to change her objection from being a horrible thing he said, to ‘Yeah, it was a joke but it was still horrible, and here’s why.'” She responded: “A president must know better than to say something like that! There are better things to quote as president, how do you fall for this crap?”

“Now, she also said earlier that Trump had no sense of humor, therefore it couldn’t be a joke. To which I pointed out that he is the most successful stand-up comedian in the history of humanity. His rallies with gigantic audiences are literally stand-up comedy. He does it to entertain. He literally says funny things and his audience laughs. And they go because he will say funny things that will make them laugh. He’s literally the most successful stand-up comedian in the history of civilization if you look at the numbers of people who go in person,” Adams revealed. “You have to admit the reason the crowd is so big is because he brings entertainment and humor.”

Chris Rock

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Uh-oh.

• Biden Loses His Florida Lead As Latino Voters Shift To Trump (Week)

The sun may be setting on Democrats’ hopes of picking up Florida. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has seemingly lost his advantage over President Trump in the crucial swing state of Florida, an NBC News/Marist poll released Tuesday found. A lot of that shift seemingly stems from Florida’s Latino voters, who have gone from resoundingly supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 to actually tipping in Trump’s favor this time around, the poll showed. Less than two months before election day, Biden and Trump are tied in Florida with 48 percent support among likely Florida voters. Biden had previously pulled as much as a 13-point lead over Trump in Florida. That dip comes as a majority of Latino respondents say they’re voting for Trump over Biden, 50-46 percent; Latino voters went for Clinton 62-35 in 2016.


A poll from the Miami Herald and Bendixen & Amandi International backed up NBC News’ findings, at least in Miami-Dade County. Biden still has a strong advantage, 55-38 percent, in the heavily Democratic part of the state, the Tuesday poll found. But it’s not the best news considering Clinton won that county by 30 points in 2016 and still lost the state by 1.2 points. In addition, the Miami Herald poll found Trump and Biden are splitting Hispanic voters, 47-46, though there’s a larger margin of error among that smaller subset. NBC News/Marist surveyed 766 likely Florida voters from Aug. 31–Sept. 6, with a 4.5 percentage point margin of error. The Miami Herald poll surveyed 500 likely Miami-Dade voters from Sept. 1–4, with a margin of error of 4.4 points.

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Wonder if the Durham report will ever come out.

• Docs Show Former Officials “In Real Trouble” In Durham Probe – Meadows (ET)

Newly reviewed documents show that former FBI agent Peter Strzok and other officials involved in the counter-intelligence probe against Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign are in trouble, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said. U.S. Attorney John Durham is reviewing the origins of that investigation and landed his first guilty plea last month. While he doesn’t have visibility into the timeline of Durham’s probe, Meadows said he’s reviewed additional documents that “say that a number of the players, the Peter Strzoks, the Andy McCabes, the James Comeys – and even others in the administration previously – are in real trouble because of their willingness to participate in an unlawful act.”

“And I use the word unlawful at best, it broke all kinds of protocols and at worst people should go to jail as I mentioned previously,” Meadows said during a virtual appearance on Fox Business’ “Mornings With Maria” on Monday. Strzok, McCabe, and Comey are former high-level FBI officials. Strzok, best known for exchanging biased text messages about Trump with an FBI lawyer he was having an affair with, was fired by FBI officials in 2018. The former agent sat down for an interview with CBS that ran over the weekend. He insisted that the counter-intelligence probe, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane, was opened on a legitimate basis. Meadows said it was easy for Strzok to make claims when not under oath.

“In all of his interview, I can tell you this: It’s not backed up by the facts. It’s not backed up by documents that I’ve seen. And ultimately his house of cards will come falling down,” Meadows said. The facts that have come out show that officials treated Trump “very differently, in an inappropriate way, and they must be held accountable,” he added. Durham’s criminal investigation is being kept under tight wraps, prompting much speculation about when another development will come, or even if any other people will be charged. Trey Gowdy, a Fox News contributor who used to serve in the House of Representatives, said over the weekend that there’s concern that Durham “is dragging his feet.” Durham, he said, “is going to access documents that the FBI never shared with Congress and he’ll write the definitive accounting of what happened.”

“Whether or not there’ll be more indictments or not, I don’t know and I like to assume that there will not be,” he said, adding: “That puts me in a small minority, but I’m assuming that the Clinesmith indictment will be the only one.” Kevin Clinesmith recently pleaded guilty to altering an email to say Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, was not a CIA asset when the CIA had said the exact opposite. The altered email was used to obtain spy warrants against Page, enabling the FBI to conduct surveillance against Page and people he was linked to in the future and past. Meadows, meanwhile, said Trump supports the declassification of all documents, along with full transparency. “He has nothing to hide,” he said.

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New book. Vindman was the whistleblower, but nobody knew it. That allowed him to be a witness – twice.

• Vindman, Not Whistleblower, Was Driving Force Behind Impeachment (Fed.)

The most interesting thing about Byron York’s exhaustively reported and richly detailed new impeachment book, “Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump,” is that the whistleblower who filed the official complaint that got impeachment rolling isn’t ever identified. It turns out that the heated discussion over the whistleblower, who was previously identified by Real Clear Investigations as the CIA’s Eric Ciaramella, was a diversion from allowing the American people to understand who was the actual instigator of the failed effort to oust President Donald Trump from office.

Rather than being a witness who independently supported the claims of the whistleblower, the National Security Council’s Lt. Col Alex Vindman was the driving force behind the entire operation, according to the book’s interviews with key figures in the impeachment probe and other evidence. The whistleblower’s information came directly from Vindman, investigators determined. “Vindman was the person on the call who went to the whistleblower after the call, to give the whistleblower the information he needed to file his complaint,” said Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y. “For all intents and purposes, Vindman is the whistleblower here, but he was able to get somebody else to do his dirty work for him,” explained one senior congressional aide.

[..] In his complaint, the whistleblower claimed “multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call” described to him the contents of the conversation. It is unclear if he was sourcing his knowledge just to multiple Vindmans or any other White House officials. The description of the call appeared to come from the White House’s rough transcript, which Vindman helped prepare. It repeated Vindman’s unique interpretation of the call as seeking foreign interference in a campaign. It mentioned that lawyers had been informed, and Vindman had done just that. The complaint also included information from public news reports.

At first Schiff publicly promised that the whistleblower would testify and that any attempt by the White House to thwart that would be fought vigorously. But then news broke that Schiff’s office had worked with the whistleblower prior to him filing his complaint. Schiff switched his stance to refusing to allow the whistleblower to testify. What’s more, he refused to allow any investigation into how the Ukraine investigation began. [..] Vindman repeatedly said that he viewed Trump’s phone call with Zelensky as “wrong,” but he was unable to articulate precisely why. He expressed frustration that the elected president was pushing a foreign policy at odds from the “interagency consensus” of the bureaucracy that he felt should control foreign policy.

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I count 15. That does not include Bolton. But it doesn’t matter, the story is out there, it’s doing its damage, and who cares if it’s true? Because what are the odds the Atlantic will be sued over it?

• On-the-Record Sources, Paper Trail Rebut Anonymous Atlantic Claims (JTN)

Trump advisor Derek Lyons: “I was with the President the morning after the scheduled visit. He was extremely disappointed that arrangements could not be made to get him to the site and that the trip had been canceled. I have worked for the President for his entire administration. One of my responsibilities is working with him on the many letters he signs to the families of our nation’s fallen heroes. In all my time at the White House, I have never heard him utter a disparaging remark, of any kind, about our troops. In my view, he holds the brave men and women of our armed forces in the highest regard.”

U.S. Ambassador to France and Monaco Jamie McCourt: “In my presence, POTUS has NEVER denigrated any member of the U.S. military or anyone in service to our country. And he certainly did not that day, either. Let me add, he was devastated to not be able to go to the cemetery at Belleau Wood. In fact, the next day, he attended and spoke at the ceremony in Suresnes in the pouring rain.” Trump Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino: “I was with POTUS in France, with Sarah, and have been at his side throughout it all. Complete lies by ‘anonymous sources’…” Trump Senior Advisor Stephen Miller: “The President deeply wanted to attend the memorial event in question and was deeply displeased by the bad weather call.” Former presidential advisor Johnny DeStefano: “I was on this trip. The Atlantic bit is not true. Period.”

Former Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Walsh: “I can attest to the fact that there was a bad weather call in France and that the helicopters were unable to safely make the flight. Overall, the President’s support and respect for our American troops, past and present, is unquestionable.” Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders: “I was actually there and one of the people part of the discussion — this never happened.” Former Deputy Chief of Staff Zach Fuentes: “I did not hear POTUS call anyone losers when I told him about the weather.” Maj. General (Ret.) William Matz: “No one has done more for our veterans than President Trump, and he enjoys a relationship of mutual affection and honor with those who wear and have worn the uniform of the United States military and their families. Those who know President Trump know that the anonymous smears peddled by The Atlantic have no basis in fact or reality, and do a terrible disservice to journalism and to our veterans, living and deceased.”

Secretary Of Defense Mark Esper: “President Trump has the highest respect and admiration for our nation’s military members, veterans and families. That is why he has fought for greater pay and more funding for our armed forces.” Secretary Of State Mike Pompeo: “I’ve been with this president now for coming on four years. I’ve never heard the president use the language that assertively is said in that article.” Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie: Denied ever hearing President Trump make such remarks: “Absolutely not.” Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato: Denied the Atlantic’s story.

Lt. General and National Security Advisor to Vice President Pence Keith Kellogg: “The Atlantic story is completely false. Absolutely lacks merit. I’ve been by the President’s side. He has always shown the highest respect to our active duty troops and veterans with utmost respect paid to those who have given the ultimate sacrifice and those wounded in battle.” Former Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney: “I never heard the President disparage our war dead or wounded. In fact, the exact opposite is true. I was with him at the 75th Anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy. As we flew over the beaches by helicopter he was outwardly in awe of the accomplishments of the Allied Forces, and the sacrifices they paid.”

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So surprised.

• AstraZeneca Covid19 Vaccine Trial Put On Hold Due To Adverse Reaction (STAT)

A large, Phase 3 study testing a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford at dozens of sites across the U.S. has been put on hold due to a suspected serious adverse reaction in a participant in the United Kingdom. A spokesperson for AstraZeneca, a frontrunner in the race for a Covid-19 vaccine, said in a statement that the company’s “standard review process triggered a pause to vaccination to allow review of safety data.” In a follow-up statement, AstraZeneca said it initiated the study hold. The nature of the adverse reaction and when it happened were not immediately known, though the participant is expected to recover, according to an individual familiar with the matter.


The spokesperson described the pause as “a routine action which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness in one of the trials, while it is investigated, ensuring we maintain the integrity of the trials.” The spokesperson also said that the company is “working to expedite the review of the single event to minimize any potential impact on the trial timeline.” An individual familiar with the development said researchers had been told the hold was placed on the trial out of “an abundance of caution.” A second individual familiar with the matter, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the finding is having an impact on other AstraZeneca vaccine trials underway — as well as on the clinical trials being conducted by other vaccine manufacturers.

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Boy, what a mess that country is. I can see the experts brainstorming for hours: 5, no 7, how about 8? Raise your hand for 6!

• England To Ban Gatherings Of More Than 6 People As Coronavirus Cases Spike (AP)

Britain’s government is banning gatherings of more than six people in England, as officials try to keep a lid on daily new coronavirus infections after a sharp spike across the U.K. that has been largely blamed on party-going young adults disregarding social distancing rules. Downing Street said urgent action was needed after the number of daily laboratory-confirmed positive cases hit nearly 3,000 on Sunday. The figure dipped Tuesday to 2,460. Officials said that starting Monday, the legal limit on all social gatherings in England will be reduced from the current 30 people to six. The new law applies both indoors and outdoors, including private homes, restaurants and parks. Failure to comply could result in a 100-pound ($130) fine.

Weddings, school, funerals and organized team sports are exempt, and larger gatherings will also be allowed if the household or “support bubble” is larger than six. Government ministers and scientists took to the airways to urge Britons not to let down their guard. “We’ve been able to relax a bit over the summer … but these latest figures really show us that much as people might like to say ‘Oh well, it’s gone away’ — this hasn’t gone away,” said Dr. Jonathan Van-Tam, the government’s deputy chief medical officer. He said while the rise in infections is “much more marked” among people between 17 and 21, he was concerned about a “more general and creeping geographic trend” across the U.K. “People have relaxed too much,” he said. “Now is the time for us to re-engage and realize that this is a continuing threat.”

[..] Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government has faced strong criticism for its mixed messages since it started easing the coronavirus lockdown in late spring. It spent much of the summer encouraging people to eat out to help the hard-pressed hospitality sector and is now urging workers to return to their offices to help hard-hit businesses in city centers. John Edmunds, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said cases are rising, though “not spectacularly,” but he’s worried about what will happen following the reopening of schools and universities. “There are big movements afoot in the country and these will inevitably accelerate transmission,” he told Sky News. “I’m not sure we have to go back to work when we can work from home.”

The government has also been criticized for testing problems, prompting an apology from Sarah-Jane Marsh, director for the National Health Service’s Test and Trace program. “All of our testing sites have capacity, which is why they don’t look overcrowded. It’s our laboratory processing that is the critical pinch point,” she said. “We are doing all we can to expand quickly.” “The testing team work on this 18 hours a day, seven days a week,” she said.

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60,000 people told from one day to the next that they must quarantine when they return home. Good for the airlines: ticket prices triple. Bad for the airlines: tons of cancellations.

• Britons Scrambling To Get Back Home From Greek Islands On UK Red List (K.)

Some 60,000 Britons are scrambling to get back home from seven Greek islands that were recently added to the UK’s quarantine list, before restrictions take effect at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, the Daily Mail reported on Tuesday. According to the British newspaper, holidaymakers were blindsided by the announcement on Monday by UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps that the Greek islands of Crete, Lesvos, Mykonos, Santorini, Serifos, Tinos and Zakynthos have been put on the government’s red list of destinations from which arrivals would have to spend 14 days in quarantine once returning to the UK.


The measure was announced in response to a spike in coronavirus infections, particularly in Crete, Mykonos and Zakynthos. “I don’t understand it because if anything it seems safer here than in the UK. It’s been very quiet, there’s barely anyone on the beaches, all the staff wear masks and there are hand-sanitizers on every table,” Julie Frew, who is holidaying on Crete, told the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail also said that holidaymakers have seen ticket prices for return flights almost treble since the measure was announced.

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The Brits do 7 islands, the Dutch do them all, including many that have never had one case.

But what’s even funnier: it’s the UK and Holland that have large outbreaks, Greece is nothing compared to that. And now they want to claim that their outbreaks come from Greece?

• Netherlands Puts All Greek Islands On Orange Travel List (K.)

The Dutch government has placed Greece’s islands on its orange list of destinations approved for essential travel only, just a day after Britain said that people returning from seven Greek holiday islands would be quarantined for two weeks after arrival to check for symptoms of coronavirus. According to the directive, citizens of The Netherlands are “strongly discouraged” from traveling to the Greek islands and those who do will be subjected to 10 days of self-isolation on their return. The Foreign Ministry directive also advises that while citizens planning to travel to mainland Greece and the Peloponnese recreationally should not cancel their plans, they should exercise caution and abide by health safety regulations.

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Well, they don’t have to worry about infections in the camp anymore, because it burned down. See below

• 35 Migrants In Moria Found Positive For Coronavirus (K.)

A total of 35 migrants and refugees living in the Moria identification and registration centre on the island of Lesvos have been infected with the novel coronavirus, the Migration Ministry said in a press release on Tuesday, announcing the completion of the checks. The ministry said health teams from the National Organization of Public Health (EODY) conducted a total of 2,000 tests, of which 100 were done on employees and 1,900 on residents. Those infected have been transferred to a separate section of the camp, according to official procedure. Only one of the 35 patients has so far shown any symptoms of the illness, the ministry said. The overcrowded identification and registration centre has been placed on lockdown since last Wednesday (Sept. 2) after a 40-year-old Somalian national tested positive for the virus. During this time, residents are not allowed to enter of exit the camp.

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It’s all gone, the entire camp.

I know there are fires in California., but this is such a human tragedy, visited upon people who already were at the bottom of every ladder you can imagine.

What the EU going to do? Finance a new extra-secure camp? Moria was emant for 3,000 people But still in 2020 there were 15,000 or so living there.

“Some 12,500 people were living at the Moria camp” [..] now “more than 12,000 migrants being guarded by police on a highway..”

• 1,000s Flee Fire At Moria Migrant Camp On Virus Lockdown In Greece (K.)

Thousands of migrants fled a camp under COVID-19 lockdown after multiple fires gutted much of the site on the Greek island of Lesvos, authorities said early Wednesday. Some 12,500 people were living at the Moria camp and the surrounding area, where additional restrictions have been imposed over the past week after a Somali resident tested positive for the coronavirus. “The fire spread inside and outside of the camp and has destroyed it … There are more than 12,000 migrants being guarded by police on a highway,” Stratos Kytelis, mayor of the island’s main town, Mylinene, told private Skai radio. “It is a very difficult situation because some of those who are outside will include people who are positive (for the coronavirus).” There were no reports of injuries.


The fires broke out overnight, police and fire officials on the island told The Associated Press, adding the cause of the blazes, as well as the full extent of the damage, remained unclear. They did not confirm local reports that the fires had been set deliberately in protest at the lockdown measures but said firefighters had “met resistance” from some camp residents. Health authorities on Tuesday said 35 people had been confirmed infected with the virus so far after a major testing drive was ordered at the overcrowded facility. They were being kept in isolation at a separate site that was not affected by the fire, officials said. Early Wednesday, riot police were deployed along the highway that connects the camp to Mytilene, some 5 kilometers (3 miles) to the south.

Moria fire

https://twitter.com/i/status/1303554698083995650

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We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, your support is now an integral part of the process.

Thank you for your ongoing support.

 

 

A comprehensive list from Professor Mark Feldstein, witness who testified on Day 1 of Assange hearing about frequency of published leaks in journalism. The list includes over 20 examples from 1844-2018.

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime.

 

Debt Rattle February 8 2020

Feb 082020
 
 February 8, 2020  Posted by at 10:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  20 Responses »


Marjory Collins 3rd shift workers waiting to be picked up by car pools around midnight. Baltimore April 1943

 

• Virus Named NCP For Now, 86 New Deaths, US Citizen Dies In Wuhan (SCMP)
• Wuhan Facing ‘Wartime Conditions’ As Global Coronavirus Deaths Reach 724 (G.)
• Royal Caribbean Bans All Chinese Nationals From Its Cruise Ships (G.)
• Tesla Shanghai Factory To Restart On Feb 10, Authorities To Assist (R.)
• White House Asks Scientists To Investigate If 2019-nCoV Was Bio-Engineered (ZH)
• Twitter Accounts Of Facebook, Messenger Hacked (R.)
• Sondland Axed Hours After Vindman Twins Escorted Out Of White House (ZH)
• Mortgage Rates Hit Three-Year Low; Housing Inventory Bottoms Out (F.)
• The State of the American Debt Slaves, Q4 2019 (WS)
• Brazil Gives Big Tobacco Companies 30 Days Notice In Smoking Lawsuit (R.)
• Slapstick Suicide (Kunstler)
• Antarctic Base Records Hottest Temperature Ever (R.)

 

 

No leveling off today, apparently they couldn’t keep up that illusion. We’re getting close to 100+ deaths daily.

• 86 new deaths vs 73 yesterday.
• 3,399(?!) new cases vs 3,143 yesterday
• First American death, first Japanese death
• By tomorrow, there will be more deaths than from SARS in its entire episode (89 to go)

Major point today is Monday. How many workers will show up for work, if their factories open at all? Tesla announced its Shanghai factory will open, and I’m sure Huawei still operates as well. But this is about shoving many millions of workers into trains, subways etc., ready to infect everyone in their compartments.

Is that worth the risk? Surely it won’t be in Wuhan. But then as we saw yesterday, 400 million Chinese live in some form of lockdown. It’ll be worth watching. Saw footage of crews forcing people into quarantine today that is ugly.

First American casualty: CDC, WHite House must be getting itchy (pun intended).

 

 

 

On a different topic: I see tons of people commenting on the Dems “Debate”, including on my Twitter feed. Many of them are supposedly smart people. But these TV shows exist only to make money for networks. The level of both the people and their discussion is identical to the 2016 GOP debates without Trump.

If you’re -live- commenting on that poor circus, you’ve missed a few steps along the line. Bernie Sanders is the only one worthwhile but he has no chance because he’s too extreme. Warren is sinking like a stone. As is Biden, who never had anything. Buttigieg is the 2020 corporate shill that Hillary was in 2016. The rest just fill space and time with emptiness.

 

 

They update the graph but not the numbers in the articles.

• Virus Named NCP For Now, 86 New Deaths, US Citizen Dies In Wuhan (SCMP)

The coronavirus has killed 86 more people in China and been confirmed in a further 3,399, the National Health Commission reported on Saturday. That brings the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 34,546.
The new deaths, 81 in Hubei and five in other provinces, brought the national death toll to 722, as of Friday, the commission said. As well as the 81 deaths, Hubei – the epicentre of the novel coronavirus epidemic – reported earlier on Saturday that it had confirmed 2,841 new cases. The province’s totals are now 24,953 confirmed cases and 699 deaths. A US citizen has died in Wuhan from the new coronavirus, the US embassy said on Saturday, in what appears to be the first confirmed foreign death from the outbreak.

“We can confirm that a 60-year-old US citizen diagnosed with coronavirus died at Jinyintang hospital in Wuhan, China, on February 6,” a US embassy spokesman confirmed. “We offer the sincerest condolences to the family for their loss,” the spokesman said. The New York Times reported that the person was a woman and had underlying health conditions, citing two people familiar with the matter. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Thursday there were 19 foreigners infected, and two of them had been discharged. The remainder were being isolated for treatment. A Japanese man hospitalised with pneumonia in Hubei’s provincial capital Wuhan, where the first cases emerged, has died. The man is potentially the first Japanese to have died from coronavirus.

[..] China’s National Health Commission has given the virus a temporary official name – novel coronavirus pneumonia, or NCP. The commission announced the new name at a press conference on Saturday and said it should be adopted by China’s government departments and organisations in China until a permanent name for the infection has been determined. The naming of a new virus is decided by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. A name has been submitted to scientific journals and the committee hopes to announce it within days, the BBC reported.

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Very disturbing videos available of people being forced into quarantine.

• Wuhan Facing ‘Wartime Conditions’ As Global Coronavirus Deaths Reach 724 (G.)

Increasingly desperate officials in the quarantined epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak have tightened controls on an already frightened population, likening the growing crisis to “wartime conditions”. Authorities in Wuhan city have started going door to door checking temperatures, and rounding up suspected coronavirus patients for forcible quarantine in stadiums and exhibition centres that are serving as warehouses for the sick, the New York Times reported. The city and country face “wartime conditions”, the paper quoted vice-premier Sun Chunlan, who has been put in charge of the national campaign against the virus, as saying on a visit to Wuhan. She said: “There must be no deserters, or they will be nailed to the pillar of historical shame forever.”

Meanwhile another three people on a cruise liner off Japan have tested positive, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 64. Foreign passengers on another ship, Holland America’s Westerdam, have also been barred, with suspected virus patients on board, according to authorities. The ship, with more than 2,000 people, was near Okinawa and seeking another port. More than 34,500 people have been infected around the world, the vast majority inside China and two-thirds of them in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province. There have been 724 deaths, all but two of them in mainland China.

Chinese scientists claimed they may have found the animal source of the outbreak, based on genetic analysis, though their results have yet to be published. The coronavirus is thought to have originated in bats but passed through an intermediate host before infecting humans. The researchers have identified a coronavirus in pangolins that is 99% similar to the one causing the current outbreak. The only scaly mammal, the long-snouted, ant-eating pangolin is endangered but often hunted for meat or use in Chinese medicine.

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How about those who only look Chinese?

• Royal Caribbean Bans All Chinese Nationals From Its Cruise Ships (G.)

The US cruise ship company Royal Caribbean has announced that would-be passengers and crew with Chinese passports will be banned from all of its cruise ships – regardless of when they were last in the country at the centre of the coronavirus outbreak. The measure – which also covers people with Hong Kong and Macau passports – comes amid growing concerns over the fast-spreading virus, which has killed more than 700 people and affected individuals in at least 25 countries. But it was likely to face criticism from Beijing, which has bridled at sweeping travel bans on its citizens, and from human rights activists who have denounced such restrictions as discriminatory.

Friday’s announcement by the Miami-based company came after four travelers who were onboard the company’s Anthem of the Seas cruise ship were hospitalized in New Jersey after experiencing feverish symptoms. According to Royal Caribbean, the passengers had come from China for the cruise from the port of Bayonne, New Jersey, to the Bahamas, and were hospitalized out of caution. “None of the four guests being tested by [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] showed any clinical signs or symptoms of coronavirus,” Royal Caribbean said in a statement. “We will delay our [next] departure until tomorrow.”

They added, however, that one guest did test positive for influenza A. The CDC reports no one in New Jersey has been found with the virus so far. The four are among more than two dozen Chinese nationals who were screened for signs of the new virus onboard the cruise ship. None of them were reportedly from Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak.

Read more …

Monday should be interesting. How much production will come back online? What will stocks do?

• Tesla Shanghai Factory To Restart On Feb 10, Authorities To Assist (R.)

U.S. electric carmaker Tesla’s factory in China’s financial hub of Shanghai will resume production on Feb. 10 with assistance to help it cope with a spreading epidemic of coronavirus, a Shanghai government official said on Saturday. Many factories across China shut in late January for the Lunar New Year holiday that was originally due to end on Jan. 30 but which was extended in a bid to contain the spread of the new flu-like virus that has killed more than 700 people. Tesla warned on Jan. 30 that it would see a 1-1.5 week delay in the ramp-up of Shanghai-built Model 3 cars as a result of the epidemic, which has severely disrupted communications and supply chains across China.


Tesla Vice President Tao Lin said this week that production would restart on Feb. 10. “In view of the practical difficulties key manufacturing firms including Tesla have faced in resuming production, we will coordinate to make all efforts to help companies resume production as soon as possible,” Shanghai municipal government spokesman Xu Wei said. The $2 billion Shanghai factory is Tesla’s first outside the United States and was built with support from local authorities. It started production in October and began deliveries last month.

Read more …

What Zero Hedge received a permanant Twitter ban for.

• White House Asks Scientists To Investigate If 2019-nCoV Was Bio-Engineered (ZH)

A week ago, we published details that raised questions about the source of the Wuhan novel coronavirus, specifically questioning the official theory for the spread of the Coronavirus epidemic, namely because someone ate bat soup at a Wuhan seafood and animal market as a fabricated farce. The real reason behind the viral spread, we suggested, was that a weaponized version of the coronavirus (one which may have originally been obtained from Canada), was released by Wuhan’s Institute of Virology (presumably accidentally ), China’s only top, level-4 biohazard lab, which was studying “the world’s most dangerous pathogens.” At the time we summarized the series of dots and asked “real reporters” to connect them:

  • One of China’s top virology and immunology experts was and still works at China’s top-rated biohazard lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some have affectionately called the real Umbrella Corp.
  • Since 2009, Peng has been the leading Chinese scientist researching the immune mechanism of bats carrying and transmitting lethal viruses in the world.
  • His primary field of study is researching how and why bats can be infected with some of the most nightmarish viruses in the world including Ebola, SARS and Coronavirus, and not get sick.
  • He was genetically engineering various immune pathways (such as the STING pathway in bats) to make the bats more or less susceptible to infection, in the process potentially creating a highly resistant mutant superbug.
  • As part of his studies, Peng also researched mutant Coronavirus strains that overcame the natural immunity of some bats; these are “superbug” Coronavirus strains, which are resistant to any natural immune pathway, and now appear to be out in the wild.
  • As of mid-November, his lab was actively hiring inexperienced post-docs to help conduct his research into super-Coronaviruses and bat infections.
  • Peng’s work on virology and bat immunology has received support from the National “You Qing” Fund, the pilot project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the major project of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Of course, that is all ancient history and Zero Hedge was permanently banned from Twitter for raising such a conspiracy theory about a publicly-searchable person working a publicly-searchable place.

Read more …

Then again, how bad is a Twitter ban?

If Big Tech can’t protect themselves, they won’t protect you.

• Twitter Accounts Of Facebook, Messenger Hacked (R.)

Twitter confirmed on Friday that the official Twitter accounts of social media giant Facebook Inc and its Messenger platform were hacked. A Twitter spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the accounts were hacked through a third-party platform. “As soon as we were made aware of the issue, we locked the compromised accounts and are working closely with our partners at Facebook to restore them,” the Twitter spokesperson said. Seperately, Facebook also confirmed that some of its official social media accounts were hacked on Friday. “Some of our corporate social accounts were briefly hacked but we have secured and restored access,” Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said.size:13px;color: #FF2222;font-weight:bold”

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Though Sondland is an outlier, you had all these people, including Yovanovich, Fiona Hill, talking about “set” American foreign policy, though they knew that’s the presidents responsibility.

It’s more about that than about the testimony itself, though the two clearly overlap.

• Sondland Axed Hours After Vindman Twins Escorted Out Of White House (ZH)

Today’s Trump admin casualties continue to stack up, after it was reported that Ambassador Gordon Sondland was fired Friday afternoon. “I was advised today that the president intends to recall me effective immediately as United States Ambassador to the European Union,” Sondland said in a Friday statement, expressing gratitude to Trump for having “given me the opportunity to serve.” Sondland testified in Trump’s impeachment inquiry that there was no quid pro quo when President Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens while withholding US military aid (unbeknownst to Zelensky at the time).

Sondland later flipped his story, claiming that he told a top Ukrainian official that a meeting with President Trump may be contingent upon its new administration committing to investigations Trump wanted, according to the New York Times. Sondland’s departure comes one week after anti-Trump impeachment witness and former US ambassador to Ukraine announced her retirement from the State Department. Her departure follows her removal as Ambassador at the request of Ukraine. [..] Anti-Trump impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother have been fired and escorted out of the White House by security, according to his Alexander Vindman’s attorney.

Vindman, a Ukraine specialist who sat on the National Security Counsel who was accused of being coached by House Intel Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), was present on a July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, when the US president asked that Ukraine investigate former VP Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as well as claims of pro-Clinton meddling in the 2016 US election. He was also notably counseling Ukraine on how to counter President Trump’s foreign policy according to the New York Times, which led some to go as far as accuse him of being a double agent.

Read more …

Why the Fed is stuck. They can’t raise rates ever again.

• Mortgage Rates Hit Three-Year Low; Housing Inventory Bottoms Out (F.)

Mortgage rates continued their downward slide this week, hitting their lowest point in three years. According to Freddie Mac, the average rate on 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages clocked in at 3.45%—down from 3.51% last week and 4.41% a year ago. It’s the third week in a row that rates have dropped, largely thanks to investor concern surrounding the coronavirus outbreak. Here’s how Joel Kan of the Mortgage Bankers Association explains it: “The 10-year Treasury yield fell around 20 basis points over the course of last week, driven mainly by growing concerns over a likely slowdown in Chinese economic growth from the spread of the coronavirus. This drove mortgage rates lower, with the 30-year fixed-rate decreasing for the fifth time in six weeks.”

The decrease has spurred a rise in refinancing applications. According to MBA’s weekly mortgage survey, refinance activity was up 15% for the week and 183% over the year. Overall, refinances made up nearly 65% of all mortgage activity last week. There’s room for more refis, too. According to analysis from financial data firm Black Knight, this latest drop opens the door for more than 11.3 million homeowners to refinance. On average, they could shave about 0.75% off their rate and $268 on their monthly mortgage payments. If credit scores and loan-to-value ratios aren’t factored in, there are actually 22 million homeowners who technically have a mortgage rate at least 0.75% over today’s averages.

Refinances aside, sliding rates have also caused other upticks. MBA’s data shows rising loan balances, increased jumbo loan activity and more interest in adjustable-rate loans in recent weeks. And according to Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, a jump in purchase activity should also follow. “The combination of very low mortgage rates, a strong economy and more positive financial market sentiment all point to home purchase demand continuing to rise over the next few months,” Khater says. The latest Home Purchase Sentiment Index from Fannie Mae backs that up, with 59% of respondents saying it’s a good time to buy a home. The only problem? That’d be historically low inventory.

Read more …

Make borrowing cheap and they won’t see it coming.

• The State of the American Debt Slaves, Q4 2019 (WS)

Consumer debt – student loans, auto loans, and revolving credit such as credit cards and personal loans but excluding housing-related debts such as mortgages and HELOCs – jumped by $187 billion in the fourth quarter 2019, compared to a year earlier, or by 4.7%, to a record $4.2 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data released Friday afternoon. Almost all non-housing consumer debts translate into consumer spending on goods and services, which is added to GDP. That $187 billion increase in consumer debt in 2019 amounted to nearly a quarter of the $849 billion increase in nominal GDP over the same period. Without this $187 billion in additional spending funded by $187 billion in additional debt, the US economy would not have grown 2.3% in 2019, but only about 1.8%.

This is why economists from the Fed on down want policies that encourage consumers to spend money they don’t have. It’s the American thing to do. And if there’s a hiccup down the road, so be it. And now there are some hiccups. How heavy is the burden of this consumer debt on consumers? For a substantial part of Americans, there is no burden. They pay off their credit card balances every month, they have no student loans, and if they financed their vehicles it may be through leases that they took out not because that’s the only way they could buy the vehicle but because they saw various advantages in leasing.


Then there is another group of Americans where every month is a mad scramble to make ends meet. Some earn good money but live above their means. Others are scraping by every month on low incomes. Both are up to their ears in debt. They’re one or two paychecks away from defaulting on that debt. That’s where the debt burden is, and that’s where the risks are. But in terms of overall consumer debt, this bifurcation gets averaged out. When measured against the size of the US economy, that $4.2 trillion in consumer debt amounts to 19.3% of nominal GDP, the highest ever in the data. Here are the last two decades:

Read more …

Bolsonaro to the rescue.

• Brazil Gives Big Tobacco Companies 30 Days Notice In Smoking Lawsuit (R.)

The world’s largest cigarette makers, British American Tobacco Plc and Philip Morris International, will have until early March to defend themselves in a lawsuit in Brazil over compensation for tobacco-related diseases. Since last year, the companies have refused to receive subpoenas delivered to their local subsidiaries in the lawsuit brought the Brazilian solicitor general’s office. Souza Cruz Ltda, Philip Morris Brasil Industria e Comercio Ltda and Philip Morris Brasil SA, which produce 90% of the cigarettes sold in Brazil, maintained they were subsidiaries only and notifications had to be sent directly to their parent companies’ headquarters in Britain and the United States.


But the federal judge hearing the case in Porto Alegre, Graziela Bündchen, ruled on Tuesday that the companies are the operational wings of the parent companies and fully capable of relaying the notifications to their head offices. She gave them 30 days to present their defenses. The solicitor general’s office, known as the AGU, said in a statement on Thursday that the cigarette companies had tried to delay the lawsuit, which will now be able to proceed in seeking “the just compensation the Brazilian people deserve.” The landmark lawsuit was filed by the AGU in May against the two multinational companies seeking to recover the public health costs for the treatment of 26 tobacco-related diseases over the previous five years.

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“..a character drawn from the neo-gothic Joker phase of American history ..”

• Slapstick Suicide (Kunstler)

With Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler cast as Laurel and Hardy, the Democratic Party entered the slapstick phase of its self-destruction, moving from one botched scheme to the next amidst a chaos of falling pianos, splintered two-by-fours, and crashed bi-planes. The old 1930s screen comedies usually also featured a “grand dame” character making herself ridiculous, like Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup, and congressional central casting has fashioned just such a late-career role for Nancy Pelosi, all fluster and spleen, and well-supplied with comic props like the carefully pre-torn State of the Union address she ceremoniously sundered on Tuesday night. Can someone drop an anvil on her, please?

[..] Meanwhile, in case you have forgotten, scores of public officials from the Obama administration stand to be indicted as we enter the heart of the spring primary season. On top of three failed seditious attempts to overthrow Mr. Trump since 2016, a cavalcade of perp walks for all that may finally force the recognition among the battered true believers in the Holy Church of Maddow that a genuine coup d’état has been running for three solid years, whether or not you like Donald Trump. They came close to turning the USA into a banana republic.

The news media is saying that President Trump had “his best week ever.” My sense of him hasn’t changed: he remains the Golden Golem of Greatness, a kind of mystical and mystifying comic figure himself, but not of the 1930s slapstick sort, more like a character drawn from the neo-gothic Joker phase of American history — and, hey, he really did spring full-blown on the scene from our real-life Gotham City. I was impressed, during his Thursday post-acquittal White House gala, at the stunning incoherence of his remarks, his facility for leaving absolutely every thought hanging unfinished in mid-sentence as he turned to the next uncompleted thought. I can’t say for sure that this makes him an ineffective manager of the nation’s affairs, but it does leave you kind of wondering. The fact remains, though, that his antagonists have behaved much worse, and now they are going to be punished.

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Bring T-shirts.

• Antarctic Base Records Hottest Temperature Ever (R.)

A research base in the Antarctic has recorded the hottest temperature ever for the continent amid rising concern about global warming that has caused an increase in the melting of ice sheets around the south pole. The Esperanza base on the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula recorded a temperature of 18.3 degrees Celsius (64.94 degrees Fahrenheit), the highest on record, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Friday. “(This) is not a figure you would normally associate with Antarctica even in the summertime. This beat the former record of 17.5 degrees C, which was set back in 2015,” WMO spokeswoman Clare Nullis told reporters in Geneva.


“The Antarctic peninsula … is among the fastest warming regions of the planet. We hear a lot about the Arctic, but this particular part of the Antarctic peninsula is warming very quickly.” The temperature was recorded at the Argentine base on Thursday. Scientists believe global warming has caused so much melting at the south pole that the giant ice sheet is now on course to disintegrate. This would see an eventual global sea level rise of at least three meters (10 feet) over centuries.

Read more …

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle November 23 2019

Nov 232019
 
 November 23, 2019  Posted by at 9:44 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Dorothea Lange Drought hit OK farm family on way to CA Aug 1936

 

• Former Ukraine MP: Bidens Got $12M Kickback From Burisma Owner (CDM)
• MSM Ignores Hunter Biden Buds’ $130 Million Taxpayer Cookie Jar Raid (ZH)
• The Ukrainian Influence-Peddling Rings, Part 2 (Stockman)
• Responding to Lt. Col. Vindman About My Ukraine Columns (Solomon)
• The Storms of December (Kunstler)
• ‘No One Out There’: The Democrats’ Lack Of Star Power (G.)
• The All-Women MSNBC Debate Panel Was a Right-Wing Disaster (Lazare)
• JFK’s Vision For The Future (Ehret)
• The Next Wave of Debt Monetization Will Be a Disaster (Lacalle)
• Barr Says Epstein Died By A Series Of Coincidences (CJ)
• Light Pollution Is Key ‘Bringer Of Insect Apocalypse’ (G.)

 

 

There’s a new Orange Man Bad “bombshell” going around, something about Giuliani and Mike Pompeo being in cahoots about Ukraine and “dirt on Biden”. It’s trying to make John Solomon part of the “conspiracy” as well. You’ll hear a lot about it. Meanwhile, CD Media continues:

• Former Ukraine MP: Bidens Got $12M Kickback From Burisma Owner (CDM)

Update: In further clarification of information provided, CD Media can now report that the $32M referenced below was sent to London, where it was seized by British officials and criminal charges were levied against Zlochevsky. Vice President Biden actively sought to have the charges thrown out in the United Kingdom for Zlochevsky in exchange for the $12M being diverted to Hunter Biden, according to Onyshchenko. Hunter Biden was then brought onto the board of directors at Zlochevsky’s company Burisma and received further payments of $3.1M over a period of months.

KYIV — Former Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Onyshchenko has provided CD Media with information on a transaction in 2013 where Biden family-related companies allegedly received a $12 million illegal kickback while Joe Biden was Vice President of the United States. Onyshchenko alleges the payment was made to gain Biden’s influence in affairs of the group of companies called Burisma owned by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who sold a port facility in Ukraine and shifted partial proceeds of the sale to Hunter Biden. CD Media has already reported on ‘off the books’ payments to Hunter Biden by Burisma.

Onyshchenko alleges that during the sale of the port of Kherson on the Dnepr River in Ukraine in 2013 for approximately $32M, Biden received $12M of that amount illegally. Onyshchenko declared to CD Media that he is providing this information on the money flows to Biden to the U.S. Department of Justice

Read more …

It wasn’t all Burisma.

• MSM Ignores Hunter Biden Buds’ $130 Million Taxpayer Cookie Jar Raid (ZH)

On Thursday, the Washington Examiner reported that an investment firm central to Hunter Biden’s financial dealings received more than $130 million in federal bailout loans while Joe Biden was vice president. Rosemont Capital – named after former Secretary of State John Kerry’s 90-acre Heinz family estate outside of Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania – was founded by Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz, and longtime friend Devon Archer. According to the report, Rosemont was one of just 177 firms to participate in Obama’s 2009 Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), which issued billions of dollars in favorable loans to investors who agreed to buy bonds from struggling banks, including college and auto loans.

“The Federal Reserve funded as much as 90% of the investments. If the bonds were profitable, the borrowers benefited. If not, the department agreed to take over the depreciated assets with no repercussions for the borrowers. Under the terms for the program, any U.S. company looking to invest in select categories of bonds was eligible to apply for the loans. However, the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve maintained the “right to reject a borrower for any reason,” and the internal selection process was criticized by some lawmakers as opaque and open to corruption. One of the firms that benefited was Rosemont Capital, a company led by Hunter Biden’s business partners, Chris Heinz and Devon Archer. The firm received the loans at a crucial time for Hunter Biden. The younger Biden had stepped down from his lobbying business in late 2008, reportedly due to pressure on his father’s vice presidential campaign.” -Washington Examiner

And while the Examiner reviewed “federal banking and corporate records” for their report, the MSM is completely silent about this obvious graft. CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and FOX have all been radio silent on this report.

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Davis Stockman in excellent -long- form. There’s a link to part 1 in the article.

• The Ukrainian Influence-Peddling Rings, Part 2 (Stockman)

Sometimes you need to call a spade a spade, and Tuesday’s testimony before Adam’s Schiff Show by former NSC official Tim Morrison is just such an occasion. In spades! In his opening statement, this paranoid moron uttered the following lunacy, and it’s all you need to know about what is really going on down in the Imperial City. “I continue to believe Ukraine is on the front lines of a strategic competition between the West and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia. Russia is a failing power, but it is still a dangerous one. The United States aids Ukraine and her people so they can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

Folks, that just plain whacko. The Trump-hating Dems are so feverishly set on a POTUS kill that they have enlisted a veritable posse of Russophobic, right-wing neocon cretins – Morrison, Taylor, Kent, Vindman, among others – to finish off the Donald. But in so doing they have made official Washington’s real beef against Trump crystal clear; and it’s not about the rule of law or abuse of presidential power or an impeachable dereliction of duty. To be sure, foolish politicians like Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler and the Clintonista apparatus at the center of the Dem party are so overcome with inconsolable grief and anger about losing the 2016 election to Trump that their sole purpose in life is to drive the Donald from office. But that just makes them “useful idiots” or compliant handmaids of the Deep State, which has a far more encompassing and consequential motivation.

To wit, whether out of naiveté, contrariness or just plain common sense, the Donald has declined to embrace the War Party’s Russian bogeyman and demonization of Putin. He thereby threatens the Empire’s raison d’être to the very core. Indeed, that’s the real reason for the whole concerted attack on Trump from the Russian Collusion hoax, through the Mueller Investigation farce to the present UkraineGate and impeachment inquisition. The Deep State deeply and profoundly fears that if Trump remains in office – and especially if he is elected with a new mandate in 2020 – he might actually make peace with Russia and Putin. So in Part 1 we advert to the basics. Without the demonization of Russia, Ukraine would be the no count failed state and cesspool of corruption it actually is, and not a purported “front line” buffer against Russian aggression.

Likewise, it would not have been a recipient of vast US and western military and economic aid – a condition that turned it into a honeypot for the kind of Washington influence peddling which ensnared the Bidens, induced its officials to meddle in the 2016 US election, and, in return, incited Trump’s justifiable quest to get to the bottom of the malignancy that has ensued.

Read more …

I have no space for all 28 “primary factual elements” here. But do read them.

• Responding to Lt. Col. Vindman About My Ukraine Columns (Solomon)

I honor and applaud Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s service to his country. He’s a hero. I also respect his decision to testify at the impeachment proceedings. I suspect neither his service nor his testimony was easy. But I also know the liberties that Lt. Col. Vindman fought on the battlefield to preserve permit for a free and honest debate in America, one that can’t be muted by the color of uniform or the crushing power of the state. So I want to exercise my right to debate Lt. Col. Vindman about the testimony he gave about me. You see, under oath to Congress, he asserted all the factual elements in my columns at The Hill about Ukraine were false, except maybe my grammar

Here are his exact words: “I think all the key elements were false,” Vindman testified. Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y, pressed him about what he meant. “Just so I understand what you mean when you say key elements, are you referring to everything John Solomon stated or just some of it?” “All the elements that I just laid out for you. The criticisms of corruption were false…. Were there more items in there, frankly, congressman? I don’t recall. I haven’t looked at the article in quite some time, but you know, his grammar might have been right.” Such testimony has been injurious to my reputation, one earned during 30 years of impactful reporting for news organizations that included The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Washington Times and The Daily Beast/Newsweek.

And so Lt. Col. Vindman, here are the 28 primary factual elements in my Ukraine columns, complete with attribution and links to sourcing. Please tell me which, if any, was factually wrong.

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“The parade of State Department diplomats in charge of this-and-that suggests that Ukraine is virtually an occupied territory.”

• The Storms of December (Kunstler)

If the senate majority poohbahs were wise, they would warmly welcome a trial based on articles of impeachment, which would, of course, feature no artificial limits on the witness list, nor on questions that might be asked. The list might start with the UkraineGate “Whistleblower.” Among the many untruths uttered by Adam Schiff was the nonexistent law that gave that shadowy figure a right to anonymity. And besides, in any trial based on due process, the accused has an absolute right to face his accuser. Oddly, a month ago Mr. Schiff was avid to stick his “Whistleblower” in the witness chair, and perhaps not with a black hood over his head.

Then it was discovered that the “Whistleblower” had been consorting at least with Mr. Schiff’s staff members before blowing his fabled whistle, and that they had likely assisted in the assembly of his complaint, and in connecting him to the right lawyers in the Great Blue Okefenokee backwaters of DC lawyerdom, and, naturally, nobody from sea to shining sea over age nine who had paid attention to these antics believed that Mr. Schiff could not know who this “Whistleblower” was. Likewise, the brave Col. Vindman. Both of them deserve some time in a senate witness chair, and Mr. Schiff especially is due some sort of penalty for subjecting the country to his three years of dishonorable, seditious shenanigans — beginning with expulsion from the House and perhaps proceeding to a trial of his very own.

These UkraineGate hearings of the past two weeks raised some additional questions that have not otherwise been aired much in the public arena, chiefly, exactly how much does the US government seek to control the affairs of Ukraine? And how did we become the superintendent of this partially failed state? The parade of State Department diplomats in charge of this-and-that suggests that Ukraine is virtually an occupied territory. Do we realistically suppose that, in the natural course of things, we can shield Ukraine forever from the influence of its neighbor (and former sovereign), Russia?

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Bit of a problem perhaps.

• ‘No One Out There’: The Democrats’ Lack Of Star Power (G.)

Too old. Too young. Too white. Too leftwing. Anxiety over Democrats’ failure to find a standout candidate is raising fears that, despite astounding unpopularity and potential impeachment, Donald Trump could win re-election by default. The Democratic primary’s top tier of candidates does not include a person of colour even in the biggest and most diverse field in history. The leader of national opinion polls turned 77 this week and delivered another stumbling debate performance while fending off questions about his son’s foreign business dealings. The poll leader in Iowa, which will get the first say, is the 37-year-old mayor of a small city who in some surveys is polling close to zero with African American voters.

Two more septuagenarians have seen their momentum stall amid criticism that their healthcare reforms are too radical and unaffordable. And then there are two last-minute would-be saviours: an ageing billionaire from New York and a former east coast governor who this week cancelled a campaign event when only two people showed up. Watching it all with glee are Trump and Republicans, hardly able to believe their luck that they might not have to win next year’s election so much as watch Democrats lose it, just as Hillary Clinton did by failing to motivate turnout in crucial states in 2016. This week’s debate in Atlanta showed that the party is struggling again to find a nominee as inspiring as Barack Obama. “When I ask my students, is there anyone on that debate stage tonight who you see as being presidential, most of them say no, there’s no one out there,” said Monika McDermott, a political science professor, at Fordham University in New York.

“And they’re political junkies so they know as much as any of us do. ..] Indeed, Trump is showing resilience in the polls. A survey of 801 registered voters by the Marquette Law School in the all-important state of Wisconsin over 13-17 November showed only the long shot Cory Booker beating Trump in a head-to-head match up (45% to 44%). The president led Biden 47% to 44%, Sanders 48% to 45%, Warren 48% to 43% and Buttigieg 47% to 39%. John Zogby, a Democratic pollster, said: “In most polls nationwide and in the key states, the president is competitive against every one of the major candidates. The Democrats are still kind of fumbling for a message: it’s really not enough to be against Trump.

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Anything that has Rachel Maddow in it is a disaster.

• The All-Women MSNBC Debate Panel Was a Right-Wing Disaster (Lazare)

The fifth Democratic presidential debate received an outpouring of praise for its all-woman cast of moderators: Rachel Maddow and Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC, Ashley Parker of the Washington Post, and Kristen Welker of NBC. Writing in the Nation, Joan Walsh asserted that the event “showed us what American political life would look like if women’s concerns were routinely at the center of the conversation.” “Democratic Debate Moderator Panel Of All Women Is Celebrated By Viewers,” reads a Huffington Post headline. “Female moderators = more questions to the rights and burdens of women,” tweeted Clara Jefferey, editor in chief of Mother Jones. “When all the moderators are women, issues that affect women get more attention. Funny how that works,” said Michelangelo Signorile, host of the Michelangelo Signorile Show.

The idea that women’s representation in itself — regardless of who those women are — is a boon to women everywhere is hardly new to US political discourse. But what makes the fawning over the November 20 debate particularly tone-deaf is that the moderators’ questions were both inane and right-wing. Their inquiries were almost entirely premised on defending the benevolence of US empire, marginalizing political positions deemed too far left, and asking “gotcha” questions from the right on issues from health care to immigration. Trapped within these ideological constraints, the debate actually struck a blow against feminism — and was a blessing to the forces of chauvinism and austerity.

[..] Andrea Mitchell was responsible for another low point in the moderation when she said: “President Trump has dramatically changed America’s approach to our adversaries by holding summits with Kim Jong-un, getting out of the Iran nuclear deal, and at times embracing Vladimir Putin and other strongmen. So let’s talk about what kind of commander-in-chief you would be. Senator Harris, North Korea is now threatening to cancel any future summits if President Trump does not make concessions on nuclear weapons. If you were commander in chief, would you make concessions to Kim Jong-un in order to keep those talks going?” Mitchell has long doubled as a stenographer for the national security state, but this question was hawkish even by her standards.

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Don’t fight the Deep State. It’s bad for your health.

• JFK’s Vision For The Future (Ehret)

Wall Street’s Dulles Brothers who together ran the CIA and the State Department had made several major efforts to sabotage Kennedy’s “new frontiers” initiative that gripped the imaginations of young and old alike. Kennedy’s program was driven by large scale infrastructure at home and advanced scientific and technological progress in the Developing sector abroad. Attempting to break that trajectory, Allen Dulles had prepared the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba months before Kennedy entered the scene which was a near disaster for the world.

Just days before Kennedy’s inauguration, Allan Dulles ensured that a pro-Kennedy ally who had just recently gained power in the Congo named Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in cold blood knowing that JFK would be blamed, and every effort was made to back up the French fascists trying to stop the Algerian independence movement behind JFK’s back. Both the Cuban invasion and the assassination of Lumumba have been blamed on Kennedy to this day. In response to this treachery, JFK made the bold move of firing CIA director Allan Dulles, and two Wall Street-connected CIA directors on November 29, 1961 saying that he would soon “splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

Recognizing the insanity of the zero sum Cold Warriors who could only look at the world through the perversity of a Hobbesian leans of “each against all”, JFK not only stood alone against the entire array of war-hungry Joint Chiefs calling for war with Russia during the infamous “13 day showdown” and parodied by Kubrick’s brilliant Dr. Strangelove, but also took the advice of Generals MacArthur, and Charles de Gaulle who warned him to avoid all entrapments of a “land war in Vietnam”. On this point, JFK introduced NSAM 263 in October 1963 to begin a full withdrawal from Southeast Asia.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1197290359228944384

Read more …

All these waves have been.

• The Next Wave of Debt Monetization Will Be a Disaster (Lacalle)

According to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the IIF (Institute of International finance), global debt has soared to a new record high. The level of government debt around the world has ballooned since the financial crisis, reaching levels never seen before during peacetime. This has happened in the middle of an unprecedented monetary experiment that injected more than $20 trillion in printed money into the economy and lowered interest rates to the lowest levels seen in history. The balance sheet of the major central banks rose to levels never seen before, with the Bank of Japan at 100 percent of the country’s GDP, the European Central Bank (ECB) at 40 percent, and the Federal Reserve at 20 percent.

If this monetary experiment has proven anything it’s that lower rates and higher liquidity are not tools to help deleverage debt, but to incentivize it. Furthermore, this dangerous experiment has proven that a policy that was designed as a temporary measure due to exceptional circumstances has become the new norm. The so-called normalization process of raising interest rates lasted only a few months in 2018, only for asset purchases and rate cuts to resume. Despite the largest fiscal and monetary stimulus in decades, global economic growth is weakening, and the productivity growth of leading economies is close to zero. Money velocity, a measure of economic activity relative to money supply, thus, goes down.

It’s been explained many times why this happens. Low rates and high liquidity are perverse incentives to push the crowding-out of the private sector by government; they also perpetuate overcapacity due to endless refinancing of non-productive and obsolete sectors to lower rates, and the number of zombie companies—those that cannot pay their interest expenses with operating profits—rises.

Read more …

Barr is simply saying you’ll never find out. Too many “upstanding” people would be damaged goods.

• Barr Says Epstein Died By A Series Of Coincidences (CJ)

In an interview with Associated Press, US Attorney General William Barr put all conspiracy theories to rest once and for all by assuring the world that alleged sex trafficker and alleged billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s death was simply the result of a very, very, very long series of unfortunate coincidences. “I can understand people who immediately, whose minds went to sort of the worst-case scenario because it was a perfect storm of screw-ups,” Barr told AP on Thursday.

This perfect storm of unlucky oopsies include Epstein being taken off suicide watch not long after a previous suicide attempt and shortly before his successful suicide, suggestions that the first attempt may have actually been an assault via attempted strangulation inflicted by someone else, two security guards simultaneously falling asleep on the job when they were supposed to be checking on Epstein, one of those guards not even being an actual security guard, security footage of two cameras outside Epstein’s cell being unusable due to a mysterious technical glitch, at least eight Bureau of Prisons officials knowing Epstein wasn’t meant to be left alone in his cell and leaving him alone in his cell anyway, Epstein’s cellmate being transferred out of their shared space the day before Epstein’s death, Epstein signing a will two days before his death, unexplained injuries on Epstein’s wrists and shoulder reported by his family after the autopsy, and a forensic expert who examined Epstein’s body claiming that his injuries were more consistent with homicide than suicide.

“The attorney general also sought to dampen conspiracy theories by people who have questioned whether Epstein really took his own life, saying the evidence proves Epstein killed himself,” AP reports. “He added that he personally reviewed security footage that confirmed that no one entered the area where Epstein was housed on the night he died. Well if reporting that he’s reviewed footage which we were previously told didn’t exist isn’t enough to dampen those kooky conspiracy theories, I don’t know what is. So there you have it. The US government says that an intelligence asset with damning information on many powerful individuals did in fact kill himself due to an admittedly bizarre and wildly unlikely series of strange coincidences. I for one have no more questions. Checkmate, conspiracy theorists.

Read more …

The whole world as a Christmas tree.

• Light Pollution Is Key ‘Bringer Of Insect Apocalypse’ (G.)

Light pollution is a significant but overlooked driver of the rapid decline of insect populations, according to the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence to date. Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects’ lives, the researchers said, from luring moths to their deaths around bulbs, to spotlighting insect prey for rats and toads, to obscuring the mating signals of fireflies. “We strongly believe artificial light at night – in combination with habitat loss, chemical pollution, invasive species, and climate change – is driving insect declines,” the scientists concluded after assessing more than 150 studies. “We posit here that artificial light at night is another important – but often overlooked – bringer of the insect apocalypse.”


However, unlike other drivers of decline, light pollution was relatively easy to prevent, the team said, by switching off unnecessary lights and using proper shades. “Doing so could greatly reduce insect losses immediately,” they said. Brett Seymoure, a behavioural ecologist at Washington University in St Louis and senior author of the review, said: “Artificial light at night is human-caused lighting – ranging from streetlights to gas flares from oil extraction. It can affect insects in pretty much every imaginable part of their lives.” Insect population collapses have been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, and the first global scientific review, published in February, said widespread declines threatened to cause a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”. The latest review says: “Insects around the world are rapidly declining. Their absence would have devastating consequences for life on this planet.”

Read more …

 

A poster that was put up around Houston in the weeks before JFK visited.

 

 

 

 

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The BIG ONE

Nov 202019
 
 November 20, 2019  Posted by at 7:35 pm Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  29 Responses »


Rembrandt van Rijn The resurrection of Christ 1639

 

Man, I don’t want to do this but I get drawn back in all the time. I haven’t followed the latest episode of the Schiffwives of DC live today, I wasn’t behind my laptop, but I did make a bunch of notes on my phone and mailed them to myself. And all the time I’m thinking: we do remember how this all started, don’t we?

Ukrainegate got started on the premise that Trump wanted to hurt Joe Biden for the 2020 election. But what we see today from Gordon Sondland, and before from Taylor, Volker, Vindman, et al, goes back to spring/summer 2019, a year and a half before the election. Isn’t that premise at least a little bit flimsy, then?

Yeah, Joe Biden was leading in the Dems polls earlier this year, but there are now 28 candidates if I’m not mistaken, and Biden is not shoe-in for the nomination. So is Trump playing the same kinds of games he’s accused of playing with Biden with a handful of others, Bernie, Warren, Buttigieg? How much of this makes sense to you?

Tyler Durden earlier today said something to the effect that Sondland was supposed to be the BIG ONE, but that Taylor, Volker, Vindman were previously going to be just that as well, and turned out not to be. And that reminded me of Russiagate, in which every week or even day there were announcements of this is the BIG ONE, and we all know where that went: Robert Mueller turned out to be America’s biggest loser in decades.

So isn’t it perhaps a reasonable assumption (just as Trump targeting Biden for 2020 is also merely an assumption for now) that what Trump was looking for is fact finding about what happened in 2016? See, I would think it IS reasonable. We’re talking assumptions, not facts, no matter how much either side wants to believe their view is the BIG ONE.

And sure, I’ll admit that I have trouble believing that Trump wanted to hit Biden because of 2020, and I find it more credible that he wanted to figure out what happened in 2016, if only because that is what -perhaps indirectly, but still- led to the Mueller investigation and him being investigated from even before he took office.

And, this is again me speaking for myself, I don’t find Joe Biden’s line that “nothing has ever been proven” about him, his son Hunter and Burisma, particularly strong, because there’s never been an investigation. Or, rather, if we may believe former Ukraine prosecutors, investigations were shut down more than once.

In that light, how crazy exactly is/was it for Trump to ask Zelensky for such an investigation? Only Ukraine can do that, it’s not like the FBI can, or at least not officially. Biden/Burisma/Ukraine warrants an investigation, and saying no such thing should happen because “nothing has ever been proven” is the -apple- cart before the horse. So why are they trying to sell us the idea that Trump wanting to find this out is close to Judas betraying Jesus?

 

As I said, I was following proceedings on my phone earlier, and this headline from the Guardian stuck out: “Sondland’s Bombshell Testimony Blows Holes In Trump’s Ukraine Defence”. And that was after I read Tyler Durden quoting Michael Every at Rabobank:

“Impeachment rumbles on in the US, and while one’s reading of events depends on one’s political leanings, an objective analysis shows very little damage being done to Trump so far.”

And I thought: yeah, not damage to Trump, but what about to the nation? Here are two quotes form BBC and Guardian “live commentaries” on the Sondland testimony. Because these things change on the fly, it’s not much use adding URL’s. But just read them and tell me what you think. Note that both news outlets are strongly anti-Trump.

Sondland put two and two together and figured out the military aid was conditioned on the investigations, he said: “President Trump never told me directly that the military aid was conditioned on the investigations,” Sondland said, but Giuliani said “the Burisma and 2016 elections were conditioned on the White House meetings.” That contradicts Bill Taylor testimony about the nature of the quid pro quo, that Sondland told Taylor that Trump demanded investigations for aid. But “I never heard from president Trump that aid was conditioned on an announcement of elections [sic],” Sondland says. 


Now Sondland is talking about a phone conversation in which Trump told him there was no quid pro quo. Earlier Sondland had said he took the president at his word. Now Sondland is saying he and everyone else knew there was a clear quid pro quo.  Sondland said after “frantic emails to me and to others about the security assistance” from ambassador Bill Taylor, Sondland called Trump and asked, “what do you want from Ukraine… what do you want?”
It was a very short abrupt conversation, he was not in a good mood. He said I want nothing, I want nothing, there’s no quid pro quo. Tell Zelenskiy to do the right thing.”

 

And then this, I don’t remember if it was BBC or Guardian, but what’s the difference anyway?:

 

Vice president Mike Pence’s office denies that the scene with Sondland in Warsaw happened. From Pence chief of staff Marc Short, per @maggieNYT: “Marc Short responds to Sondland: “The Vice President never had a conversation with Gordon Sondland about investigating the Bidens, Burisma, or the conditional release of financial aid to Ukraine based upon potential investigations…”


1/ “Ambassador Gordon Sondland was never alone with Vice President Pence on the September 1 trip to Poland. This alleged discussion recalled by Ambassador Sondland never happened…” 2/ “Multiple witnesses have testified under oath that Vice President Pence never raised Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joe Biden, Crowdstrike, Burisma, or investigations in any conversation with Ukrainians or President Zelensky before, during, or after the September 1 meeting”.

 

Presumption, assumptions, interpretations and “I thought (or I was sure) he meant” are not facts. They are what they are: personal reflections on what someone thought they had observed. They mean zilch in a court of law. or rather, they are not the kind of thing that can get someone convicted: witnesses in a court room may say what they think happened, but no judge or jury can convict based solely on that.

You need evidence. You need the body. You need the weapon. You need the BIG ONE. But Sondland, like all witnesses before him thus far, doesn’t have the BIG ONE. Or it would have been presented by now, either by him or by Adam Schiff. How many more of these supposed witnesses are we going to have to listen to in the Schiff theater?

I fully agree with people who say Schiff himself should be sworn in and conduct his theatrics under oath. Presently, he can say what he wants, accuse Trump of whatever he wants, and he can never be held to account for any of it. As he attempts to hold Trump accountable for a myriad of things that a myriad of civil servants “think” he meant to say or do. The playing field must be leveled. This is not a fair game.

Moreover, do remember that this whole impeachment thing must go to the Senate to get any real meaning; until it does it’s just a circus in which the clowns – or any of the animals- cannot be held to account. And the crows will insist that Jumbo did it. But, you know, that’s still just Disney, it’s entertainment.

 

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Vindman, the Expert

Nov 122019
 
 November 12, 2019  Posted by at 2:17 pm Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  11 Responses »


Rembrandt van Rijn Let the little children come to me 1627-28

 

Let’s see what shape I can give this. I was reading a piece by Byron York that has the first good read-out I’ve seen of the October 29 deposition by Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, self-labeled no. 1 Ukraine expert at the National Security Counsel, and I want to share that in a summarized form, with my comments. There’ll be some longer quotes though. And I know there are people who may not like York, but just skip his opinions and focus on the facts then.

Overall, Vindman comes across to me as a bureaucrat among bureaucrats, who also appears to be on the edge what we think of when we mention the Deep State. And who seems to think his views and opinions trump Trump’s own. “.. his greatest worry was that if the Trump-Zelensky conversation were made public, then Ukraine might lose the bipartisan support it currently has in Congress.”

A US President is elected to determine foreign policy, but Vindman doesn’t like things that way. He wants the policy to be set by people like him. It brings to mind Nikki Haley saying that Tillerson and Kelly wanted her to disobey the President, because they felt they knew better. That slide is mighty slippery. And unconstitutional too.

And the suspicion that Vindman’s report of the call may be what set off “whistleblowing” CIA agent Eric Ciaramella is more alive after the testimony than before. But, conveniently, his name may not be spoken. For pete’s sake, Vindman Even Testified He Advised Ukrainians to Ignore Trump.

Here’s Byron York:

Democrats Have A Colonel Vindman Problem

House Democrats conducted their impeachment interviews in secret, but Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman still emerged as star of the show. Appearing at his Oct. 29 deposition in full dress uniform, the decorated Army officer, now a White House National Security Council Ukraine expert, was the first witness who had actually listened to the phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that is at the heart of the Democratic impeachment campaign. Even though lawmakers were forbidden to discuss his testimony in public, Vindman’s leaked opening statement that “I did not think it was proper [for Trump] to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen” exploded on news reports.

Here are four problems with the Vindman testimony:

1) Beyond his opinions, he had few new facts to offer.

[..] Indeed, Vindman attested to the overall accuracy of the rough transcript, contrary to some impeachment supporters who have suggested the White House is hiding an exact transcript that would reveal everything Trump said to the Ukrainian president. As one of a half-dozen White House note-takers listening to the call, Vindman testified that he tried unsuccessfully to make a few edits to the rough transcript as it was being prepared. In particular, Vindman believed that Zelensky specifically said the word “Burisma,” the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that hired Hunter Biden, when the rough transcript referred only to “the company.” But beyond that, Vindman had no problems with the transcript, and he specifically said he did not believe any changes were made with ill intent.

“You don’t think there was any malicious intent to specifically not add those edits?” asked Republican counsel Steve Castor. “I don’t think so.” “So otherwise, this record is complete and I think you used the term ‘very accurate’?” “Yes,” said Vindman. Once Vindman had vouched for the rough transcript, his testimony mostly concerned his own interpretation of Trump’s words. And that interpretation, as Vindman discovered during questioning, was itself open to interpretation. Vindman said he was “concerned” about Trump’s statements to Zelensky, so concerned that he reported it to top National Security Council lawyer John Eisenberg. (Vindman had also reported concerns to Eisenberg two weeks before the Trump-Zelensky call, after a Ukraine-related meeting that included Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union.)

Vindman said several times that he was not a lawyer and did not know if Trump’s words amounted to a crime but that he felt they were “wrong.” That was when Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe, a former U.S. attorney, tried to get to the root of Vindman’s concerns. What was really bothering him? “I’m trying to find out if you were reporting it because you thought there was something wrong with respect to policy or there was something wrong with respect to the law,” Ratcliffe said to Vindman. “And what I understand you to say is that you weren’t certain that there was anything improper with respect to the law, but you had concerns about U.S. policy. Is that a fair characterization?”

“So I would recharacterize it as I thought it was wrong and I was sharing those views,” Vindman answered. “And I was deeply concerned about the implications for bilateral relations, U.S. national security interests, in that if this was exposed, it would be seen as a partisan play by Ukraine. It loses the bipartisan support. And then for — ” “I understand that,” Ratcliffe said, “but that sounds like a policy reason, not a legal reason.” Indeed it did.

Elsewhere in Vindman’s testimony, he repeated that his greatest worry was that if the Trump-Zelensky conversation were made public, then Ukraine might lose the bipartisan support it currently has in Congress. That, to Ratcliffe and other Republicans, did not seem a sufficient reason to report the call to the NSC’s top lawyer, nor did it seem the basis to begin a process leading to impeachment and a charge of presidential high crimes or misdemeanors.

So Vindman was so concerned that he contacted the National Security Council (NSC) top lawyer, John Eisenberg. However, when John Ratcliffe asked Vindman: “I’m trying to find out if you were reporting it because you thought there was something wrong with respect to policy or there was something wrong with respect to the law..”, it turns out, it was about policy, not the law. So why did he contact Eisenberg? He doesn’t know the difference, or pretends he doesn’t know? Moreover, Eisenberg’s not the only person Vindman contacted. There were lots of others. And remember, this is sensitive material. Vindman was listening in on the President’s phone call with a foreign leader, in itself a strange event. Presidents and PM’s should be able to expect confidentiality.

2) Vindman withheld important information from investigators.

Vindman ended his opening statement in the standard way, by saying, “Now, I would be happy to answer your questions.” As it turned out, that cooperation did not extend to both parties.

The only news in Vindman’s testimony was the fact that he had twice taken his concerns to Eisenberg. He also told his twin brother, Yevgeny Vindman, who is also an Army lieutenant colonel and serves as a National Security Council lawyer. He also told another NSC official, John Erath, and he gave what he characterized as a partial readout of the call to George Kent, a career State Department official who dealt with Ukraine. That led to an obvious question: Did Vindman take his concerns to anyone else? Did he discuss the Trump-Zelensky call with anyone else? It was a reasonable question, and an important one. Republicans asked it time and time again. Vindman refused to answer, with his lawyer, Michael Volkov, sometimes belligerently joining in. Through it all, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff stood firm in favor of keeping his committee in the dark.

[..] Vindman openly conceded that he told other people about the call. The obvious suspicion from Republicans was that Vindman told the person who became the whistleblower, who reported the call to the Intelligence Community inspector general, and who, in a carefully crafted legal document, framed the issue in a way that Democrats have adopted in their drive to remove the president from office. Vindman addressed the suspicion before anyone raised it. In his opening statement, he said, “I am not the whistleblower … I do not know who the whistleblower is and I would not feel comfortable to speculate as to the identity of the whistleblower.”

Fine, said Republicans. We won’t ask you who the whistleblower is. But if your story is that you were so concerned by the Trump-Zelensky issue that you reported it to Eisenberg, and also to others, well, who all did you tell? That is when the GOP hit a brick wall from Vindman, his lawyer Volkov, and, most importantly, Schiff. As chairman of the Intelligence Committee, charged with overseeing the intelligence community, Schiff might normally want to know about any intelligence community involvement in the matter under investigation. But in the Vindman deposition, Schiff strictly forbade any questions about it. “Can I just caution again,” he said at one point, “not to go into names of people affiliated with the IC in any way.” The purpose of it all was to protect the identity of the whistleblower, who Schiff incorrectly claimed has “a statutory right to anonymity.”

Schiff’s role is beyond curious. Sometimes you think he’s the boy with his finger in the dike, mighty fearful that it could break at any moment. But then Vindman’s lawyer jumps in as well:

That left Republicans struggling to figure out what happened. “I’m just trying to better understand who the universe of people the concerns were expressed to,” said Castor. “Look, the reason we’re objecting is not — we don’t want — my client does not want to be in the position of being used to identifying the whistleblower, okay?” said Volkov. “And based on the chair’s ruling, as I understand it, [Vindman] is not required to answer any question that would tend to identify an intelligence officer.”

[..] Vindman’s basic answer was: I won’t tell you because that’s a secret. After several such exchanges, Volkov got tough with lawmakers, suggesting further inquiries might hurt Vindman’s feelings. “Look, he came here,” Volkov said. “He came here. He tells you he’s not the whistleblower, okay? He says he feels uncomfortable about it. Try to respect his feelings at this point.” An unidentified voice spoke up. “We’re uncomfortable impeaching the president,” it said. “Excuse me. Excuse me,” Volkov responded. “If you want to debate it, we can debate it, but what I’m telling you right now is you have to protect the identity of the whistleblower. I get that there may be political overtones. You guys go do what you got to do, but do not put this man in the middle of it.”

Castor spoke up. “So how does it out anyone by saying that he had one other conversation other than the one he had with George Kent?” “Okay,” said Volkov. “What I’m telling you right now is we’re not going to answer that question. If the chair wants to hold him in contempt for protecting the whistleblower, God be with you. … You don’t need this. You don’t need to go down this. And look, you guys can — if you want to ask, you can ask — you can ask questions about his conversation with Mr. Kent. That’s it. We’re not answering any others.” “The only conversation that we can speak to Col. Vindman about is his conversation with Ambassador Kent?” asked Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin. “Correct,” said Volkov, “and you’ve already asked him questions about it.”

“And any other conversation that he had with absolutely anyone else is off limits?” “No,” said Volkov. “He’s told you about his conversations with people in the National Security Council. What you’re asking him to do is talk about conversations outside the National Security Council. And he’s not going to do that. I know where you’re going.” “No, actually, you don’t,” said Zeldin. “Oh, yes, sir,” said Volkov. “No, you really don’t,” said Zeldin. “You know what?” said Volkov. “I know what you’re going to say. I already know what you’re going to do, okay? And I don’t want to hear the FOX News questions, okay?”

[..] It should be noted that Volkov was a lawyer, and members of Congress were members of Congress. The lawyer should not be treating the lawmakers as Volkov did. Volkov was able to tell Republicans to buzz off only because he had Schiff’s full support. And Republicans never found out who else Vindman discussed the Trump-Zelensky call with.

Looking at this, you get to wonder what the role is of GOP lawmakers, and why anyone would want to be one. Their peers across the aisle pretend they can tell them exactly what and what not to do or say. Is that why they are elected? I couldn’t find one question or even word in here that would be labeled unfitting, or out of place, or aggressive or anything like that. But even then, they hit a brick wall.

So what makes Vindman the expert on Ukraine? I get the idea that it’s his compliance with whatever anyone says is the desired and required policy, and in this case, what is not. He certainly doesn’t appear to know everything. Maybe that’s because he left the country at age three.

3) There were notable gaps in Vindman’s knowledge.

Vindman portrayed himself as the man to see on the National Security Council when it came to issues involving Ukraine. “I’m the director for Ukraine,” he testified. “I’m responsible for Ukraine. I’m the most knowledgeable. I’m the authority for Ukraine for the National Security Council and the White House.” Yet at times there were striking gaps in Vindman’s knowledge of the subject matter. He seemed, for instance, distinctly incurious about the corruption issues in Ukraine that touched on Joe and Hunter Biden.

Vindman agreed with everyone that Ukraine has a serious corruption problem. But he knew little specifically about Burisma, the nation’s second-largest privately owned energy company, and even less about Mykola Zlochevsky, the oligarch who runs the firm. “What do you know about Zlochevsky, the oligarch that controls Burisma?” asked Castor. “I frankly don’t know a huge amount,” Vindman said. “Are you aware that he’s a former Minister of Ecology”? Castor asked, referring to a position Zlochevsky allegedly used to steer valuable government licenses to Burisma. “I’m not,” said Vindman.

“Are you aware of any of the investigations the company has been involved with over the last several years?” “I am aware that Burisma does have questionable business dealings,” Vindman said. “That’s part of the track record, yes.” “Okay. And what questionable business dealings are you aware of?” asked Castor. Vindman said he did not know beyond generalities. “The general answer is I think they have had questionable business dealings,” Vindman said.

[..] Vindman had other blind spots, as well. One important example concerned U.S. provision of so-called lethal aid to Ukraine, specifically anti-tank missiles known as Javelins. The Obama administration famously refused to provide Javelins or other lethal aid to Ukraine, while the Trump administration reversed that policy, sending a shipment of missiles in 2018. On the Trump-Zelensky call, the two leaders discussed another shipment in the future. “Both those parts of the call, the request for investigation of Crowd Strike and those issues, and the request for investigation of the Bidens, both of those discussions followed the Ukraine president saying they were ready to buy more Javelins. Is that right?” asked Schiff.

“Yes,” said Vindman. “There was a prior shipment of Javelins to Ukraine, wasn’t there?” said Schiff. “So that was, I believe — I apologize if the timing is incorrect — under the previous administration, there was a — I’m aware of the transfer of a fairly significant number of Javelins, yes,” Vindman said. Vindman’s timing was incorrect. Part of the entire Trump-Ukraine story is the fact that Trump sent the missiles while Obama did not. The top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council did not seem to know that.

York goes on to explain just how much of a bureaucrat Vindman is, as exemplified by things like “..there’s a fairly consensus policy within the interagency towards Ukraine,”. The “interagency” doesn’t set -foreign- policy, the President does.

4) Vindman was a creature of a bureaucracy that has often opposed President Trump.

One of his favorite words is “interagency,” by which he means the National Security Council’s role in coordinating policy among the State Department, Defense Department, the Intelligence Community, the Treasury Department, and the White House. [..] He says things such as, “So I hold at my level sub-PCCs, Deputy Assistant Secretary level. PCCs are my boss, senior director with Assistant Secretaries. DCs are with the deputy of the National Security Council with his deputy counterparts within the interagency.” He believes the interagency has set a clear U.S. policy toward Ukraine. “You said in your opening statement, or you indicated at least, that there’s a fairly consensus policy within the interagency towards Ukraine,” Democratic counsel Daniel Goldman said to Vindman.

“Could you just explain what that consensus policy is, in your own words?” “What I can tell you is, over the course of certainly my tenure there, since July 2018, the interagency, as per normal procedures, assembles under the NSPM-4, the National Security Policy [sic] Memorandum 4, process to coordinate U.S. government policy,” Vindman said. “We, over the course of this past year, probably assembled easily a dozen times, certainly at my level, which is called a subpolicy coordinating committee — and that’s myself and my counterparts at the Deputy Assistant Secretary level — to discuss our views on Ukraine.”

The “interagency” doesn’t set policy, the President does -and with him perhaps the House and Senate. But not an alphabet soup of agencies.

I’ve said it before, and I fear I may have to say it again, this is a show trial. And no, it’s not even a trial, that happens next in the Senate. Jonathan Turley said the other day that he thinks Nancy Pelosi wants a quick -before Christmas- resolution to the House part, but I’m not convinced.

The reason is that the Democrats lose the director’s chair once this moves to the Senate. They can’t silence the Republicans there the same way Adam Schiff does it in the House. Pelosi herself said in March that impeachment MUST be a bipartisan effort. It’s unclear why she abandoned that position in August, but I think it could be panic, and that it was the worst move she could have made.

Because this thing in its present shape is unwinnable. To impeach Trump, the Dems would need Republican votes. But how could they possibly get those when they lock out the Republicans of the entire process?

 

 

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Debt Rattle November 12 2019

Nov 122019
 
 November 12, 2019  Posted by at 9:08 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  13 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Still life with fruit basket 1942

 

• Schiff Witness Vindman Testified He Advised Ukrainians to Ignore Trump (GP)
• Gabbard Lawyers Demand Retraction Of Clinton’s Russia ‘Defamation’ (Hill)
• Alexander Downer: Australia Should Reduce UK Intel Sharing If Corbyn Wins (G.)
• Bolivian Coup Comes Less Than a Week After Morales Stopped Lithium Deal (CD)
• Russia Accuses Bolivian Opposition Of Unleashing Wave Of Violence (R.)
• Correa: Morales Was Forced Out In ‘Coup’, OAS Is ‘A US Instrument’ (RT)
• Death Throes of a Party (Kunstler)
• White Helmets ‘MI-6 Co-Founder’ Found Dead In Turkey
• US Northeast ‘Siberian Express’ Arctic Blast Could Break 200 Records (Ind.)

 

 

As I write this there are many helicopters flying overhead because Xi Jinping is visiting the Akropolis Museum. And of course half the city center is closed.

And really, Vindman told Ukraine to not do what Trump wanted? Do we call that treason or is there a better word? Read the whole article.

• Schiff Witness Vindman Testified He Advised Ukrainians to Ignore Trump (GP)

Adam Schiff’s star witness Alexander Vindman testified to the House Intel Committee that he “thought” the President was wrong in his policy with Ukraine. So he later told Ukrainians to ignore the President. Alexander Vindman’s testimony was recently released and it shows an ignorant underling in the NSC who believed the President’s policy in the Ukraine was flawed and because of this Vindman notified a group of ‘Ukrainians’ to ignore the President’s requests. The Conservative Treehouse reported on the release and highlighted some interesting pieces from the testimony. Apparently in his opening remarks young Vindman stated that he believed the President ‘demanded’ something from the Ukrainians. Representative Ratcliff destroyed him on this assertion –


Ratcliffe challenges Vindman to find in the President’s transcript of the call where the President ‘demanded’ anything from the Ukrainian President – Vindman could not name anywhere in the transcript where the President demanded anything and that it was all what Vindman perceived and not based on the law or others interpretations of the meeting. Vindman had concerns about the President’s policy (who is he?) – Congressman Ratcliffe next destroyed the witness Vindman pointing out how Vindman told Ukrainian officials (not detailed in the discussion) to ignore President Trump – a blatant crime committed by the underling –

Read more …

This has the potential to get really amusing.

• Gabbard Lawyers Demand Retraction Of Clinton’s Russia ‘Defamation’ (Hill)

Lawyers representing Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) on Monday called on Hillary Clinton to retract her comments alleging that the 2020 presidential candidate was a favorite candidate of the Russians, accusing the 2016 Democratic nominee of defamation. “Your statement is defamatory, and we demand that you retract it immediately,” Gabbard’s lawyer wrote in a letter, demanding that Clinton verbally retract the comments and post the retraction on Twitter. Clinton made the remarks last month on the “Campaign HQ” podcast. “She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her, so far,” Clinton said, without referring to Gabbard by name.

Clinton also said “they” are grooming Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate against the eventual Democratic nominee. A Clinton spokesman later said the former secretary of State had been referring to Republicans with the grooming comment. “It appears you may now be claiming that this statement is about Republicans (not Russians) grooming Gabbard,” Gabbard’s lawyer wrote in the letter. “But this makes no sense in light of what you actually said. After you made the statement linking Congresswoman Gabbard to the Russians, you (through your spokesman) doubled down on it with the Russian nesting dolls remark.”


Gabbard has consistently denied she is interested in a third-party White House bid. The congresswoman has faced repeated criticism for some of her foreign policy views, particularly about American military involvement in Syria.

Read more …

Well, well, look what the cat dragged in. Next up is Joseph Mifsud?

• Alexander Downer: Australia Should Reduce UK Intel Sharing If Corbyn Wins (G.)

Australia’s former top diplomat in the United Kingdom, Alexander Downer, has intervened in the British election contest, declaring the Morrison government would need to “substantially reduce” intelligence sharing with London in the event Jeremy Corbyn wins on 12 December. In an excoriating assessment of the Labour leader at the National Press Club in Canberra, Downer contended that a Corbyn victory would imperil substantial Australian investments in Britain, and would trigger a reassessment of the “very intimate” security relationship between Canberra and London. Downer is a former leader of the Liberal party in Australia, and was foreign affairs minister in the Howard government for more than a decade. He was appointed after his retirement from politics as high commissioner in London by the Liberal government in Canberra.

[..] Downer’s appearance at Canberra’s National Press Club on Tuesday was billed as a situation report on Brexit, but the former diplomat and foreign affairs minister faced sustained questioning about his participation in the Barr inquiry in the United States. Donald Trump has established the Barr inquiry to discredit the Mueller investigation. The Mueller investigation began after Downer was allegedly told by George Papadopoulos, then a Trump campaign aide, that Russia had obtained damaging information about Hillary Clinton from her emails.


Downer then informed US authorities, which has led to accusations from Trump allies, such as the Senate judiciary committee chairman, Lindsey Graham, about the then high commissioner’s “directed” role in relaying information to US authorities about the Clinton emails. Australia has rejected those accusations. Downer refused to give direct answers to questions about the level of his participation in the Barr inquiry, or whether he now regretted his conversation in a London wine bar with Papadopoulos. He said he did not want to “play into the toxic politics of America” or disrupt the orderly business of the inquiry by providing commentary, although he signalled without saying so directly that he had been interviewed, and was “fully cooperating with the Australian government”.

Read more …

Morales had been talking about using the lithium reserves for the Bolivian people for much longer. Word has it that his plane is stuck in Paraguay because countries refuse to allow it in their airspace.

• Bolivian Coup Comes Less Than a Week After Morales Stopped Lithium Deal (CD)

The Sunday military coup in Bolivia has put in place a government which appears likely to reverse a decision by just-resigned President Evo Morales to cancel an agreement with a German company for developing lithium deposits in the Latin American country for batteries like those in electric cars. “Bolivia’s lithium belongs to the Bolivian people,” tweeted Washington Monthly contributor David Atkins. “Not to multinational corporate cabals.” The coup, which on Sunday resulted in Morales resigning and going into hiding, was the result of days of protests from right-wing elements angry at the leftist Morales government. Sen. Jeanine Añez, of the center-right party Democratic Unity, is currently the interim president in the unstable post-coup government in advance of elections.

Investment analyst publisher Argus urged investors to keep an eye on the developing situation and noted that gas and oil production from foreign companies in Bolivia had remained steady. The Morales move on Nov. 4 to cancel the December 2018 agreement with Germany’s ACI Systems Alemania (ACISA) came after weeks of protests from residents of the Potosí area. The region has 50% to 70% of the world’s lithium reserves in the Salar de Uyuni salt flats. Among other clients, ACISA provides batteries to Tesla; Tesla’s stock rose Monday after the weekend. As Bloomberg News noted in 2018, that has set the country up to be incredibly important in the next decade:


“Demand for lithium is expected to more than double by 2025. The soft, light mineral is mined mainly in Australia, Chile, and Argentina. Bolivia has plenty—9 million tons that have never been mined commercially, the second-largest amount in the world—but until now there’s been no practical way to mine and sell it.” Morales’ cancellation of the ACISA deal opened the door to either a renegotiation of the agreement with terms delivering more of the profits to the area’s population or the outright nationalization of the Bolivian lithium extraction industry. As Telesur reported in June, the Morales government announced at the time it was “determined to industrialize Bolivia and has invested huge amounts to ensure that lithium is processed within the country to export it only in value-added form, such as in batteries.”

Read more …

Russia’s too quiet lately, on South America and in Syria.

• Russia Accuses Bolivian Opposition Of Unleashing Wave Of Violence (R.)

Russia on Monday accused Bolivia’s opposition of unleashing a wave of violence in the South American nation and said it looked like a government push for dialogue had been swept aside by an orchestrated coup. Bolivian President Evo Morales said on Sunday he was resigning to ease violence that has gripped Bolivia since a disputed election, but he stoked fears of more unrest by saying he was the victim of a “coup” and faced arrest. Russia’s foreign ministry said in a statement it was alarmed by the events and called on all political forces to show common sense and to act responsibly.

Read more …

The coup against Correa was way more subtle: his deputy Lenin Moreno did the deed.

• Correa: Morales Was Forced Out In ‘Coup’, OAS Is ‘A US Instrument’ (RT)

Former leader of Ecuador Rafael Correa said the resignation of Bolivian President Evo Morales was the result of a coup d’etat and that events could have ended in worse violence, if the socialist leader had not resigned. “Of course there was a coup d’etat,” Correa told RT Spanish in an exclusive interview on Monday, explaining that such an insubordination of the country’s armed forces “cannot exist in a constitutional state of law” or democracy. “If Evo Morales did not resign, there would have been a bloodbath because there was no public order,” he said. Morales resigned on Sunday at the demands of Bolivia’s military chief, following weeks of protests and only hours after he had promised fresh elections. Morales previously proclaimed he had won the October 20 general election with a 10-point lead, a result which was quickly contested by the opposition, who accused him of tampering with the vote.

Read more …

“Everybody over twelve in this land knows that his kid Hunter was on the grift in Ukraine, plain and simple, and that Joe assisted in the operation. Color him toast.”

• Death Throes of a Party (Kunstler)

Is it possible that Rep. Adam Schiff was hung out to dry by the devious Ms. Pelosi, feeding his vanity to be a one-man impeachment wrecking crew, knowing that the congressman from Hollywood would utterly blow it? Hmmmmm. Begins to look that way as Mr. Schiff’s House Intel Committee goes public this Wednesday with its soviet-style format on full display. Well, first, why? Why allow this nitwit to stage an ersatz impeachment only to see it fail? Perhaps to cancel the Jacobin menace metastasizing in the Democratic Party and get on with the business of winning the 2020 elections — with old-school candidates hand-picked to end-run the gang of fantasists currently on display.

The House Speaker must sniff the odor of failure in the wind. Joe Biden, smiling cretinously, blunders through the primary venues with a big red “L” plastered on his forehead, often uncertain of what state he’s landed in, or what direction to face the camera. Everybody over twelve in this land knows that his kid Hunter was on the grift in Ukraine, plain and simple, and that Joe assisted in the operation. Color him toast. Elizabeth Warren has been caught lying very publicly twice now, first as a phony Cherokee Indian (for career advancement in academia), and lately claiming falsely that she was canned from a teaching job years ago for being pregnant (with a 2007 tape of her out telling a contradictory story). Of course, that’s just the cherry-on-top of her dazzlingly unsound policy proposals to bankrupt the nation. Doesn’t look like she can reel it all back in and pretend to be a credible person in time for a full-on campaign.


[..] Which brings us back to Rep. Adam Schiff and his monkeyshines in the star chamber of his personal devising. Now that the show goes public, will he haul many of the same characters back into the witness chair to spin out his engineered narrative, without any cross examination allowed, or other felicities of due process? Someone ought to advise him that playing the Robespierre role tends toward an unhappy ending for the player. Especially when Mr. Jordan of Ohio, newly-seated on the Intel Committee, starts barking out points-of-order. I’m even half-wondering if Mr. Durham, the federal attorney, has not already measured up bills of indictment for Mr. Schiff himself, for the phony CIA agent “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella, the pre-wired IC Inspector General Michael Atkinson, US chargé d’affaires for Ukraine Bill Taylor, and the spectacularly seditious Colonel Vindman, whose antics stand out in this latest coup attempt against the elected president. And then what kind of bag does that leave Ms. Pelosi holding?

Read more …

There have been dozens of changes made to his Wikipedia page in the past day.

• White Helmets ‘MI-6 Co-Founder’ Found Dead In Turkey (ZH)

The White Helmets, a roughly 3,000 member NGO formally known as the Syrian Civil Defense, was established in Turkey in “late 2012 – early 2013” Le Mesurier trained an initial group of 20 Syrians. The group then received funding from Le Mesurier’s Netherlands-based non-profit group, Mayday Rescue – which is in turn funded by grants from the Dutch, British, Danish and German governments. According to reporter and author Max Blumenthal, the White Helmets received at least $55 million from the British Foreign Office and $23 million from the Agency for International Development. They have also received millions from Qatar, which has backed several extremist groups in Syria including Al Qaeda.

The US has provided at least $32 million to the group – around 1/3 of their total funding – through a USAID scheme orchestrated by the Obama State Department and routed overseas using a Washington D.C. contractor participating in USAID’s Syria regional program, Chemonics. According to their website, the White Helmets have been directly funded by Mayday Rescue, and a company called Chemonics, since 2014. Yet there’s evidence that both of those organizations started supporting the White Helmets back in early 2013, right around the time the White Helmets claim to have formed as self-organized groups. Mayday Rescue, as we said, is funded by the Dutch, British, Danish and German governments. And Chemonics?


They are a Washington, D.C. based contractor that was awarded $128.5 million in January 2013 to support “a peaceful transition to a democratic and stable Syria” as part of USAID’s Syria regional program. At least $32 million has been given directly to the White Helmets as of February 2018. -TruthInMedia Notably, the Trump administration cut US funding to the White Helmets last May, placing them under “active review.” While the White Helmets tout themselves as ‘first responders’, the group has been accused of staging multiple chemical attacks – including an April 7 incident in Duma, Syria which the White House used as a pretext to bomb Syrian government facilities and bases.

Read more …

See? Siberia!!! It’s the Russians again.

• US Northeast ‘Siberian Express’ Arctic Blast Could Break 200 Records (Ind.)

An Arctic blast sweeping across the eastern United States was expected to bring below-freezing temperatures and as many as 200 record lows throughout the week, according to the National Weather Service. The unusually cold air mass came from Siberia — a phenomenon called “Siberian Express” — and was predicted to bring historic low temperatures from the Great Plains to the Gulf Coast beginning on Monday and lasting until Wednesday night. The cold front rolled through the upper Midwest on Sunday before heading south towards Texas, where forecasters said temperatures nearly 30 degrees Fahrenheit (17 degrees Celsius) below typical November averages would be felt beginning on Tuesday morning.


[..] The weather service’s Weather Prediction Centre tweeted on Monday morning that the nation’s cold spot was located in Malta, Montana, where the temperature sat at -24 degrees Fahrenheit (-31 degrees Celsius). The centre said earlier that 148 daily record lows were forecast “to be broken, tied, or come within 1 degree between Tuesday and Thursday this week,” while National Weather Service meteorologist Kevin Donofrio told the Associated Press that some 200 records may be broken this week nationwide. The January-like temperatures are far from common at this time of year in the southeastern US, though it’s not the first time a Siberian Express brought historic lows to the country. The term was reportedly first coined during the January 1982 cold front with air from Siberian origins, which brought record-lows to many parts of the country.

Read more …

 

Watch this interview and replace every mention of “Jamie Dimon” with “Al Capone” and it works perfectly.

 

 

 

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Things November 8 2019

Nov 082019
 
 November 8, 2019  Posted by at 9:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  16 Responses »


Whatever happened to Nancy?

 

• NATO Alliance Experiencing Brain Death, Says Macron (BBC)
• Merkel & Stoltenberg Slam Macron’s ‘Brain-Dead NATO’ Comment (RT)
• Big Tech Is Dragging Us Towards The Next Financial Crash (G.)
• Fed Goes Nuts with Repos & T-Bills but Sheds Mortgage Backed Securities (WS)
• Colonel Vindman Is an ‘Expert’ With an Agenda (Giraldi)
• Obama Admin Tried To Partner With Hunter Biden’s Ukraine Gas Firm (Solomon)
• Assange Lawyers’ Links To US Govt & Bill Browder (Komisar)
• Brazil Court Ruling Could Free Lula (BBC)
• Human Population Came From Our Ability To Cooperate (PhysOrg)

 

 

A slow quarter for French arms sales?

• NATO Alliance Experiencing Brain Death, Says Macron (BBC)

President Emmanuel Macron of France has described Nato as “brain dead”, stressing what he sees as waning commitment to the transatlantic alliance by its main guarantor, the US. Interviewed by the Economist, he cited the US failure to consult Nato before pulling forces out of northern Syria. He also questioned whether Nato was still committed to collective defence. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a key ally, said she disagreed with Mr Macron’s “drastic words”.


Russia, which sees Nato as a threat to its security, welcomed the French president’s comments as “truthful words”. Nato, which celebrates 70 years since its founding at a London summit next month, has responded by saying the alliance remains strong. “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of Nato,” Mr Macron told the London-based newspaper. He warned European members that they could no longer rely on the US to defend the alliance, established at the start of the Cold War to bolster Western European and North American security.

Read more …

Oh wait, it’s time to play good cop bad cop. Gotcha.

• Merkel & Stoltenberg Slam Macron’s ‘Brain-Dead NATO’ Comment (RT)

NATO is alive and well and integral to Europe’s security, German chancellor Angela Merkel and NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg have insisted, hitting back at French President Emmanuel Macron’s claim the alliance is “brain-dead.” Macron’s “drastic words” were “unnecessary, even if we do have problems and must get it together,” Merkel complained at a Berlin news conference on Thursday, insisting the “transatlantic partnership is indispensable for us.” Stoltenberg backed her up, declaring “European unity cannot replace transatlantic unity,” and warning that the EU cannot defend Europe without outside assistance. When the UK finally leaves the alliance, some 80 percent of NATO’s defense will be funded by non-EU countries, he warned.

The general secretary praised Germany as “the heart of NATO” and lauded Merkel’s government for boosting its military spending. With most of NATO’s member countries failing to chip in their promised 2 percent of GDP, Germany announced on Thursday it hopes to hit that target for the first time by 2031 – seven years later than the date agreed upon by the alliance’s members in 2014. That fervent defense of the military bloc’s image hardly addressed the problems brought up by Macron, though. Macron had urged France’s fellow NATO members to “reassess the reality of what NATO is in light of the commitment of the United States” in an interview with The Economist published Thursday, suggesting “we are currently experiencing the brain-death of NATO” and lamenting that Europe was losing its grip on its “destiny.”

After the US’ unilateral decision to pull troops out of Syria without consulting the rest of NATO, Europe can hardly trust the Americans to defend it, Macron suggested.

Read more …

I think it’s the Fed, not Apple.

• Big Tech Is Dragging Us Towards The Next Financial Crash (G.)

In every major economic downturn in US history, the ‘villains’ have been the ‘heroes’ during the preceding boom,” said the late, great management guru Peter Drucker. I cannot help but wonder if that might be the case over the next few years, as the United States (and possibly the world) heads toward its next big slowdown. Downturns historically come about once every decade, and it has been more than that since the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, banks were the “too-big-to-fail” institutions responsible for our falling stock portfolios, home prices and salaries. Technology companies, by contrast, have led the market upswing over the past decade. But this time around, it is the big tech firms that could play the spoiler role.

You wouldn’t think it could be so when you look at the biggest and richest tech firms today. Take Apple. Warren Buffett says he wished he owned even more Apple stock. (His Berkshire Hathaway has a 5% stake in the company.) Goldman Sachs is launching a new credit card with the tech titan, which became the world’s first $1tn market-cap company in 2018. But hidden within these bullish headlines are a number of disturbing economic trends, of which Apple is already an exemplar. Study this one company and you begin to understand how big tech companies – the new too-big-to-fail institutions – could indeed sow the seeds of the next crisis. No matter what the Silicon Valley giants might argue, ultimately, size is a problem, just as it was for the banks. This is not because bigger is inherently bad, but because the complexity of these organisations makes them so difficult to police. Like the big banks, big tech uses its lobbying muscle to try to avoid regulation. And like the banks, it tries to sell us on the idea that it deserves to play by different rules.

Consider the financial engineering done by such firms. Like most of the largest and most profitable multinational companies, Apple has loads of cash – around $210bn at last count – as well as plenty of debt (close to $110bn). That is because – like nearly every other large, rich company – it has parked most of its spare cash in offshore bond portfolios over the past 10 years. This is part of a Kafkaesque financial shell game that has played out since the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, interest rates were lowered and central bankers flooded the economy with easy money to try to engineer a recovery. But the main beneficiaries were large companies, which issued lots of cheap debt, and used it to buy back their own shares and pay out dividends, which bolstered corporate share prices and investors, but not the real economy. The Trump corporate tax cuts added fuel to this fire. Apple, for example, was responsible for about a quarter of the $407bn in buy-backs announced in the six months or so after Trump’s tax law was passed in December 2017 – the biggest corporate tax cut in US history.

Read more …

Will future history books recognize that the Fed collapsed the economy, or will they say it happened DESPITE their genius interventions?

• Fed Goes Nuts with Repos & T-Bills but Sheds Mortgage Backed Securities (WS)

Total assets on the Fed’s balance sheet, released today, jumped by $94 billion over the past month through November 6, to $4.04 trillion, after having jumped $184 billion in September. Over those two months combined, as the Fed got suckered by the repo market, it piled $278 billion onto it balance sheet, the fastest increase since the post-Lehman month in late 2008 and early 2009, when all heck had broken loose – this is how crazy the Fed has gotten trying to bail out the crybabies on Wall Street:

In response to the repo market blowout that recommenced in mid-September, the New York Fed jumped back into the repo market with both feet. Back in the day, it used to conduct repo operations routinely as its standard way of controlling short-term interest rates. But during the Financial Crisis, the Fed switched from repo operations to emergency bailout loans, zero-interest-rate policy, QE, and paying interest on excess reserves. Repos were no longer needed to control short-term rates and were abandoned.


Then in September, as repo rates spiked, the New York Fed dragged its big gun back out of the shed. With the repurchase agreements, the Fed buys Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or Ginnie Mae, and hands out cash. When the securities mature, the counter parties are required to take back the securities and return the cash plus interest to the Fed. Since then, the New York Fed has engaged in two types of repo operations: Overnight repurchase agreements that unwind the next business day; and multi-day repo operations, such as 14-day repos, that unwind at maturity, such as after 14 days.

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“Vindman’s concern is all about Ukraine without any explanation of why the United States would benefit from bilking the taxpayer to support a foreign deadbeat one more time. ”

• Colonel Vindman Is an ‘Expert’ With an Agenda (Giraldi)

Washington inside-the-beltway and the Deep State choose to blame the mess in Ukraine on Russian President Vladimir Putin and the established narrative also makes the absurd claim that the political situation in Kiev is somehow important to US national security. The preferred solution is to provide still more money, which feeds the corruption and enables the Ukrainians to attack the Russians. Colonel Vindman, who reported to noted hater of all things Russian Fiona Hill, who in turn reported to By Jingo We’ll Go To War John Bolton, was in the middle of all the schemes to bring down Russia. His concern was not really over Trump vs. Biden. It was focused instead on speeding up the $380 million in military assistance, to include offensive weapons, that was in the pipeline for Kiev.

And assuming that the Ukrainians could actually learn how to use the weapons, the objective was to punish the Russians and prolong the conflict in Donbas for no reason at all that makes any sense. Note the following additional excerpt from Vindman’s prepared statement: “….I was worried about the implications for the US government’s support of Ukraine…. I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained.” Vindman’s concern is all about Ukraine without any explanation of why the United States would benefit from bilking the taxpayer to support a foreign deadbeat one more time.

One wonders if Vindman was able to compose his statement without a snicker or two intruding. He does eventually go on to cover the always essential national security angle, claiming that “Since 2008, Russia has manifested an overtly aggressive foreign policy, leveraging military power and employing hybrid warfare to achieve its objectives of regional hegemony and global influence. Absent a deterrent to dissuade Russia from such aggression, there is an increased risk of further confrontations with the West. In this situation, a strong and independent Ukraine is critical to US national security interests because Ukraine is a frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression.”

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“Burisma’s own American legal team was lobbying State to help eliminate the corruption allegations against it in Ukraine.”

• Obama Admin Tried To Partner With Hunter Biden’s Ukraine Gas Firm (Solomon)

A State Department official who served in the U.S. embassy in Kiev told Congress that the Obama administration tried in 2016 to partner with the Ukrainian gas firm that employed Hunter Biden but the project was blocked over corruption concerns. George Kent, the former charge d’affair at the Kiev embassy, said in testimony released Thursday that the State Department’s main foreign aid agency, known as USAID, planned to co-sponsor a clean energy project with Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas firm that employed Hunter Biden as a board member. At the time of the proposed project, Burisma was under investigation in Ukraine for alleged corruption. Those cases were settled in late 2016 and early 2017. Burisma contested allegations of corruption but paid a penalty for tax issues.

Kent testified he personally intervened in mid-2016 to stop USAID’s joint project with Burisma because American officials believed the corruption allegations against the gas firm raised concern. “There apparently was an effort for Burisma to help cosponsor, I guess, a contest that USAID was sponsoring related to clean energy. And when I heard about it I asked USAID to stop that sponsorship,” Kent told lawmakers. When asked why he intervened, he answered: “”Because Burisma had a poor reputation in the business, and I didn’t think it was appropriate for the U.S. Government to be co-sponsoring something with a company that had a bad reputation.”

[..] And internal State memos I obtained this week under FOIA show Hunter Biden and Archer had multiple contacts with Secretary of State John Kerry and Deputy Secretary Tony Blinken in 2015-16, and that Burisma’s own American legal team was lobbying State to help eliminate the corruption allegations against it in Ukraine. Hunter Biden’s name was specifically invoked as a reason why State officials should assist, the memos show. A month after Burisma’s contact with State, Joe Biden leveraged the threat of withholding U.S. foreign aid to force Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who at the time was overseeing the Burisma probe.

Read more …

Yes, worrying.

• Assange Lawyers’ Links To US Govt & Bill Browder (Komisar)

Now look at another Assange link. Mark Summers, who is representing Julian Assange is, along with Bailin, a member of Matrix Chambers. But while he is Assange’s lawyer, Summers is acting for Assange’s persecutor, the U.S. government, in a major extradition case involving executives of Credit Suisse in 2013 making fake loans and getting kickbacks from Mozambique government officials. Does Assange, or those who care about his interests, know he is part of chambers working for the U.S. government? And where do you put this factoid? Alex Bailin is representing Andrew Pearse, one of the Credit Suisse bankers that the U.S. government, represented by Summers, is seeking to extradite!

But there’s chambers where two members are each supporting both Browder and Assange. Geoffrey Robertson is founder of Doughty Street Chambers. He is also a longtime Browder / Magnitsky story promoter. He has pitched implementation of a Magnitsky Act in Australia and has served Browder in UK court. In 2017 British legal actions surrounding an inquest into the death of Alexander Perepilichnyy, he represented Browder, who claimed that the Russian, who died of a heart attack, was somehow a victim of Russian President Putin. Perepilichnyy had lost money in investments he was handling for clients and had to get out of town.

Needing support, he decamped to London and gave Browder documents relating to his client’s questionable bank transfers. He died after a jog, Browder claimed he was poisoned by a rare botanical substance, obviously ordered by Putin, but forensic tests found that untrue. Robertson accused local police of a cover-up. He is a legal advisor to Assange and is regularly interviewed by international media about the case. Jennifer Robinson of Doughty Street Chambers also has a Browder connection. She is acting for Paul Radu a journalist and official of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) which is being sued by an Azerbaijan MP. OCCRP is a Browder collaborator.

Browder admits in a deposition that OCCRP prepared documents he would give to the U.S. Justice Department to accuse the son of a Russian railway official of getting $1.9 million of $230 million defrauded from the Russian Treasury. The case was settled when the U.S. couldn’t prove the charge, and the target declined to spend more millions of dollars in his defense. OCCRP got the first Magnitsky Human Rights award, set up for Browder’s partners and acolytes. Robinson is also the longest-serving member of Assange’s legal team. She acted for Assange in the Swedish extradition proceedings and in relation to Ecuador’s request to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights Advisory Opinion proceedings on the right to asylum.

Why did Assange or his advisors choose lawyers associated with the interests of the U.S. government and Browder? Or how could those lawyers be so ignorant about the facts of Browder’s massive tax evasion and his Magnitsky story fabrications?

Read more …

Imagine a country so corrupt you can put your political counterparts on trial.

• Brazil Court Ruling Could Free Lula (BBC)

Brazil’s top court has voted to overturn a rule about the jailing of criminals – a change which could lead to ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva being freed from custody. The ruling, announced on Thursday, stipulates that convicted criminals should go to prison only after they have exhausted their appeal options. The change could lead to the release of thousands of prisoners, including Lula. The left-winger led Brazil between 2003 and 2010, but was jailed last year. He was favourite to win last year’s presidential election but was imprisoned after being implicated in a major corruption investigation.


However, even if he is released, he will be barred from standing for office because of his criminal record. Lula has consistently denied all the accusations against him and claims they are politically motivated. After he was barred from running, right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro went on to win the race. Lula’s lawyers say they will seek the former president’s “immediate release” after speaking to him on Friday.

Read more …

And here I was thinking opposable thumbs.

• Human Population Came From Our Ability To Cooperate (PhysOrg)

Humans may owe their place as Earth’s dominating species to their ability to share and cooperate with each other, according to a new study published in the Journal of Anthropological Research. In “How There Got to Be So Many of Us: The Evolutionary Story of Population Growth and a Life History of Cooperation,” Karen L. Kramer explores the deep past to discover the biological and social underpinnings that allowed humans to excel as reproducers and survivors. She argues that the human tendency to bear many children, engage in food sharing, division of labor, and cooperative childcare duties, sets us apart from our closest evolutionary counterparts, the apes.

In terms of population numbers, few species can compare to the success of humans. Though much attention on population size focuses on the past 200 years, humans were incredibly successful even before the industrial revolution, populating all of the world’s environments with more than a billion people. Kramer uses her research on Maya agriculturalists of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and the Savanna Pumé hunter-gatherers of Venezuela to illustrate how cooperative childrearing increases the number of children that mothers can successfully raise and—in environments where beneficial—even speed up maturation and childbearing. Kramer argues that intergenerational cooperation, meaning that adults help support children, but children also share food and many other resources with their parents and other siblings, is at the center of humans’ demographic success. “Together our diet and life history, coupled with an ability to cooperate, made us really good at getting food on the table, reproducing, and surviving,” Kramer writes.

[..] She found that Maya children contributed a substantial amount of work to the family’s survival, with those aged 7-14 spending on average 2 to 5 hours working each day, and children aged 15-18 spending as much as their parents, about 6.5 hours a day. Labor type varied, with younger children doing much of the childcare, older children and fathers fill in much of the day-today cost of growing and processing food and running the household. “If mothers and juveniles did not cooperate, mothers could support far fewer children over their reproductive careers,” Kramer writes. “It is the strength of intergenerational cooperation that allows parents to raise more children than they would otherwise be able to on their efforts alone.”

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Things October 31 2019

Oct 312019
 
 October 31, 2019  Posted by at 8:28 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  13 Responses »


Paul Gauguin Van Gogh painting sunflowers 1888

 

• Trump-Ukraine Whistleblower Revealed (GP)
• Adam Schiff Coached Vindman Throughout Impeachment Testimony – Nunes (ZH)
• Tulsi Gabbard Unleashes On Erdogan: “Radical Islamist Megalomaniac” (ZH)
• We May Not Have A 2020 Election – Kunstler (USAW)
• The Fumes of Fanaticism (Kunstler)
• Boeing Employee Raised Concern Over Max Sensor Three Years Before Crashes (G.)
• Over 50 Boeing 737NG Grounded Globally With Wing-Related Cracks (RT)
• Union Calls On Qantas To Ground Entire 737 Fleet For Investigation (G.)
• The Age of Anger Exploding in Serial Geysers (Pepe Escobar)
• Russia-India Counter-Terrorism Group Vows ‘Credible Action’ (RT)
• Famed Pathologist Michael Baden Says Jeffrey Epstein’s Death Was Homicide

 

 

Yeah, I know what I said: no more Debt Rattles. But then yesterday I found myself looking at the Epstein story, the whistleblower revealed, and some Boeing stuff, Jim Kunstler etc., and I was thinking: I should at least keep those for reference. So I injected them into the Debt Rattle format, and that sort of gelled. And so I decided I can perhaps do this, but I did give myself a deadline: it can not cost more than two hours in the morning. Which means some of these Things will be short, and some days there may not be one.

Oh, and we still need financial support, badly. People have been mighty generous this week, but we would need 52 such weeks in the year.

 

 

OK, now we know. What is the next step?

• Trump-Ukraine Whistleblower Revealed (GP)

The anti-Trump whistleblower behind the Ukraine witch hunt was revealed on Wednesday night. According to investigative reporter Paul Sperry, one person’s name keeps coming up in the impeachment hearings that fits the description of the whistleblower — Eric Ciaramella. We have reported on Ciaramella previously at The Gateway Pundit. 33-year-old Ciaramella is a registered Democrat, worked for Obama, worked for Biden, worked for CIA Director John Brennan, he’s a vocal critic of Trump and he helped initiate the ‘Russia collusion’ hoax investigation! Ciaramella’s identity was an open secret in the DC swamp, says Paul Sperry.


Mr. Ciaramella is a CIA officer who specializes in Russia and Ukraine who was detailed to work in the National Security Council under Susan Rice in 2015. He was then moved into the West Wing in 2017 to ‘fill a vacancy’ where he was able to ‘see and read everything.’ The Gateway Pundit and others had already identified Ciaramella as Schiff’s CIA whistleblower. But we were not the first to point out that this dangerous Obama operative was working in the Trump White House and was given access to top secret information. Mike Cernovich warned the Trump administration about Eric Ciaramella back in June 2017.

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Vindman is yet another ‘witness’ whose import is heavily promoted.

• Adam Schiff Coached Vindman Throughout Impeachment Testimony – Nunes (ZH)

Rep. Devin Nunes claims that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff was coaching Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the director of European affairs at the National Security Council (NSC), as he told House committees that he “did not think it was proper” for President Trump to ask Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to investigate former VP Joe Biden during a July 25 phone call. “I have never in my life seen anything like what happened today, during the testimony of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman,” Nunes told Fox News’ “Hannity.”


“It was unprecedented,” Nunes continued. “I mean, they’ve been bad at most of these depositions, but to interrupt us continually to coach the witness, to decide… what we’re going to be able to ask the witness.” “And, to see someone coach a witness, this isn’t the first time that Schiff — Schiff is very good at coaching witnesses.”

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I see more and more people suggesting Tulsi is really a Republican. Ostensibly because you cannot be a Democrat and not agree with Hillary and her DNC. Expect ugliness.

• Tulsi Gabbard Unleashes On Erdogan: “Radical Islamist Megalomaniac” (ZH)

A day after the US House of Representatives in a historic vote overwhelmingly passed a resolution to recognize the Armenian Genocide, resulting in an immediate fierce rebuke from Ankara, Democratic Congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard issued a video statement slamming Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan as “a radical Islamist megalomaniac” who for years supported ISIS. Erdogan has been “slaughtering the Syrian Kurds and he’s using terrorists from ISIS and al-Qaeda as his militia,” she explained, and has “been helping ISIS/AQ for years,” according to the social media video message.

She also reiterated her consistent position that the Islamic State was born of the externally funded and weaponized push to overthrow the Assad government. “He has denied this but is now openly using militias of ‘former’ ISIS/AQ terrorists, exposing him for what he really is: a radical Islamist megalomaniac who wants to establish a caliphate with himself as the Caliph — the supreme ruler.” The Democratic presidential candidate said Turkey is now doing this “openly” and “brazenly” but also reminded her audience that she’s been warning about this for years.

[..] Concerning the Saudis, she joined relatives of Sept. 11 victims on Tuesday to demand the US government release its full findings on the role that Saudi state operatives played in the 9/11 attacks. “We are 18 years removed from this terrible crime, and the victims of this crime, the families who are here today, the American people deserve all of the evidence to fully come to light,” the Hawaii congresswoman said.

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Jim Kunstler is one of very few people who agree with me that Trump is not the biggest factor, his antagonists are, in intelligence, in the Democratic party, and perhaps most of all in the media. The MSM have taken it upon themselves to control what you think. And if you get your news mostly from CNN or the NYT or WaPo, what defenses do you have?

• We May Not Have A 2020 Election – Kunstler (USAW)

“What I am waiting for is if and when indictments come down from Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham. I am wondering whether the editors and publishers of the Washington Post and New York Times and the producers at CNN and MSNBC are going to be named as unindicted co-conspirators in this effort to gaslight the country and really stage a coup to remove the President and to nullify the 2016 election. I say this as someone who is not necessarily a Trump supporter. I didn’t vote for the guy. I am not a cheerleader for the guy, but basically, I think the behavior of his antagonists has been much worse and much more dangerous for the nation and the American project as a long term matter.

I really need to see some action to hold people responsible for the acts they have committed. . . . I am not an attorney, and I have never worked for the Department of Justice, but it seems to me that by naming the publishers and editors of these companies as unindicted co-conspirators, that allows you to avoid the appearance of trying to shut down the press because you are not going to put them in jail, but you are going to put them in disrepute. That may prompt their boards of directors to fire a few people and maybe change the way they do business at these places.”

“When all is said and done, I am not convinced there is enough there to convict President Trump of anything. At the same time, there is probably going to be a lot of legal actions brought against the people who started this coup against him, and that’s going to be extremely disturbing to the Left. I think one of the possibilities is we may not have a 2020 election. In some way or another, the country may be so disorderly that we can’t hold an election. There may be so much strife that we cannot handle the legal questions around holding the election, and it may be suspended. I don’t know what that means, but I am very impressed of the disorder that we are already in. It’s more of a kind of mental disorder between the parties, but it could turn into a lot of kinetic disorder on the ground and a lot of institutional failure.”

Read more …

And some more of that.

• The Fumes of Fanaticism (Kunstler)

Judging by the volume of intemperate emails and angry social media blasts that come my way, the party of impeachment seems to be inhaling way too much gas from the smoking guns it keeps finding in the various star chambers of its inquisition against you-know-who. You’d think that the failure of Mr. Mueller’s extravaganza might have chastened them just a little — a $32 million-dollar effort starring the most vicious partisan lawyers inside-the-Beltway, 2,800 subpoenas issued over two years, 500 search warrants exercised, and finally nothing whatever to pin on Mr. Trump — except the contra-legal assertion that now he must prove his innocence.

When you state just that, these frothing hysterics reply that many background figures — if not the Golden Golem of Greatness himself — were indicted and convicted of crimes by Mr. Mueller’s crew. Oh yes! The Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency was indicted for spending $400,000 on Facebook ads (and never extradited or tried in a court-of-law). Pretty impressive victory there! The hacking of Hillary Clinton’s emails by “Russia”? Still just alleged, never proven, with plenty of shady business around the search for evidence. Paul Manafort, on tax evasion of money earned in Ukraine, 2014? We’ll see about that as the whole filthy business of the 2014 Ukraine regime change op under Mr. Obama gets reviewed in the months ahead.

George Papadopoulos for lying to the FBI? Stand by on that one, too; still a developing story. General Michael Flynn, for ditto? You may have noticed that General Flynn’s case is shaping up to be the biggest instance of prosecutorial misconduct since the Dreyfus affair (France, 1894-1906, which badly-educated Americans most certainly know nothing about). To set the record straight I’m forced to repeat something that these New Age Jacobins seem unable to process: you don’t have to be a Trump cheerleader to be revolted by the behavior of his antagonists, which is a stunning spectacle of bad faith, dishonesty, incompetence, and malice — and is surely way more toxic to the American project than anything the president has done.

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Haven’t really seen much of day 2, but it looks like more posing by Capitol Hill. If one person, dies, you get a crminal investigation. And when 346 die, you get a hearing in the House?!

• Boeing Employee Raised Concern Over Max Sensor Three Years Before Crashes (G.)

In a second day of congressional hearings into Boeing’s handling of its ill-fated 737 Max plane, lawmakers were shown internal records revealing that three years before two fatal crashes one employee had expressed concern that an anti-stall flight system at the center of crash investigations could be triggered by a single sensor. “Are we vulnerable to single [angle-of-attack] failures with [the system’s] implementation or is there some checking that occurs?” a Boeing employee asked in an email from December 2015, nearly three years before the first Max 737 crash in Indonesia almost exactly a year ago. The employee, who has not been identified, was referring to a sensor on the outside of the plane that measured its angle in flight and could trigger a system, known as MCAS, to push it down if it thought the aircraft was at risk of stalling.


Relying on a single sensor, aviation experts say, is fundamentally dangerous. With no back-up any malfunction could trigger the plane into a dive – as investigators believe happened with both the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airline crashes, killing 346. The release of the document, in addition to warnings from Boeing’s chief test pilot that the MCAS system could engage without warning, adds to belief that Boeing overlooked safety in a rush to put the Max 737, its most profitable model, into production. The new email is among others unearthed during withering transportation committee hearings during which lawmakers have repeatedly assailed Boeing’s CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, over a failure to prioritize safety. “You have a systemic problem in your company. You’re driving profit. You’re not driving quality, and you’re sure as heck not driving safety,” the California Democrat John Garamendi told the chief executive.

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NG=Not Good.

• Over 50 Boeing 737NG Grounded Globally With Wing-Related Cracks (RT)

Boeing has confirmed that it has grounded over 50 of its planes around the world, after wing-related cracks were discovered, while the company’s CEO has admitted to making safety mistakes. It’s the US aviation giant’s 737NG (Next Generation) model that is now under scrutiny. The plane is a precursor to the infamous Boeing 737 MAX, which killed 346 people in two crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, and has been grounded since March. A Boeing spokesperson told AFP that some 1,000 planes worldwide had “reached the inspection threshold.” The problem these inspections zeroed in on was the so-called ‘pickle fork’ – a part of the plane that connects the fuselage to the wing. The US aviation authority this month ordered checks of Boeing 737NG planes that had made over 30,000 flights.

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33 planes at over $100 million a piece. When are the airlines going to sue Boeing?

• Union Calls On Qantas To Ground Entire 737 Fleet For Investigation (G.)

Australia’s aircraft engineers association has called on Qantas to ground all of its Boeing 737 aircraft after cracks were discovered in one of its planes. Steve Purvinas, the federal secretary of the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA), said the fleet of 33 should be “grounded until such time that Qantas can establish which aircraft are safe and which aircraft aren’t”. According to Purvinas, the crack was discovered in a part of the plane known as the “pickle fork”, which is part of the landing gear. “It is a primary structure which takes the load off the wing,” he told the ABC on Thursday. “This could cause loss of control of an aircraft, and Qantas shouldn’t be flying them.”

“The first [crack] found on a Qantas aircraft was about an inch long, it’s very small. But these things do propagate very quickly when they’re under load…It’s when that grows, and that grows very quickly, that you have problems.” He told the ABC on Thursday that another crack had been found in a second plane overnight. On Thursday morning, Qantas announced it would bechecking more than 30 of its Boeing 737 aircraft after cracking was discovered in one plane during a maintenance check. But Purvinas said the airline should go further and ground the fleet.

[..] The problem came to light after Boeing said that it had found cracking in a part of the 737NG (the model before the troubled 737 Max) called the “pickle fork” on jets being overhauled in China. Nearly 5% of 810 inspections subsequently conducted have found cracks in the part, which attaches the plane’s fuselage to the wing. Purvinas told the ABC that repairs on this kind of crack take “months to fix” and require a special Boeing team.

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The IMF. All the way down.

• The Age of Anger Exploding in Serial Geysers (Pepe Escobar)

The presidential election in Argentina was no less than a game-changer and a graphic lesson for the whole Global South. It pitted, in a nutshell, the people versus neoliberalism. The people won – with new President Alberto Fernandez and former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) as his VP. Neoliberalism was represented by Mauricio Macri: a marketing product, former millionaire playboy, president of football legends Boca Juniors, fanatic of New Age superstitions, and CEO obsessed with spending cuts, who was unanimously sold by Western mainstream media as the new paradigm of a post-modern, efficient politician.

Well, the paradigm will soon be evacuated, leaving behind a wasteland: $250 billion in foreign debt; less than $50 billion in reserves; inflation at 55 percent; the U.S. dollar at over 60 pesos (a family needs roughly $500 to spend in a month; 35.4 percent of Argentine homes can’t make it); and, incredible as it may seem in a self-sufficient nation, a food emergency. Macri, in fact the president of so-called Anti-Politics, No- Politics in Argentina, was a full IMF baby, enjoying total “support” (and gifted with a humongous $58 billion loan). New lines of credit, for the moment, are suspended. Fernandez is going to have a really hard time trying to preserve sovereignty while negotiating with foreign creditors, or “vultures,” as masses of Argentines define them.

There will be howls on Wall Street and in the City of London about “fiery populism,” “market panicking,” “pariahs among international investors.” Fernandez refuses to resort to a sovereign default, which would add even more unbearable pain for the general public. The good news is that Argentina is now the ultimate progressive lab on how to rebuild a devastated nation away from the familiar, predominant framework: a state mired in debt; rapacious, ignorant comprador elites; and “efforts” to balance the budget always at the expense of people’s interests.

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Don’t really know what to make of this, let’s see.

• Russia-India Counter-Terrorism Group Vows ‘Credible Action’ (RT)

Moscow and New Delhi will boost cooperation in the fight against terrorism and destroy militant “safe havens” around the world, the two countries’ counter-terror working group said in a joint statement. Meeting in India’s capital on Wednesday, the working group condemned “terrorism in all its forms and manifestations,” and called for deeper ties on counter-terror issues, including through “intensifying exchange of information” and “regular meetings at [the] experts level.” The two parties also stressed the need for “credible, irreversible … action against terrorists” and terrorist “safe havens” – particularly in the South Asia region – “without double standards.” Drug trafficking and other avenues of funding for militant groups, as well as countering extremism on the internet, were also touched upon.

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Strongly denied by the NY medical examiner.

• Famed Pathologist Michael Baden Says Jeffrey Epstein’s Death Was Homicide

New York City’s former chief medical examiner insisted Wednesday that Jeffrey Epstein’s death was a homicide. Forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden was hired by the pedophile’s brother, Mark Epstein, to observe his autopsy after he was found hanged in his Manhattan lockup in August. “I think that the evidence points toward homicide rather than suicide,” Baden insisted on Fox News Wednesday. “The brother is concerned that if [Epstein] was murdered, then other people who have information might be at risk,” Baden insisted, suggesting powerful players may have been involved in the death.


“If they think he has information, his life could be in jeopardy.” Baden said there were signs of “unusual” activity “from day one” of the autopsy, saying the wounds were “more consistent with ligature homicidal strangulation.” Baden noted three fractured bones in the sex attacker’s thyroid that he insisted he has never before seen from a hanging death in 50 years of examinations. “Hanging does not cause these broken bones and homicide does,” he insisted on Fox. “A huge amount of pressure was applied.”

Read more …

 

Saw this map of remaining elephant populations and noticed most of them are where recently researchers said the origin of mankind is.