Nov 072024
 


Edouard Manet Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets 1872

 

A Good Morning in America (Paul Craig Roberts)
If The Election Outcome Is As I Expected .. (Bill Ackman)
Trump’s Win Is A Victory For The Non-Brainwashed Americans (Marsden)
Trump Has Sweeping Plans for His 2nd Administration (ET)
Musk Reveals Plans For Trump Government (RT)
The US Should Establish A Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (Corva)
Trump Comeback Also Engineered A Significant Exodus From Democrat Party (JTN)
The Thrill is Gone (Turley)
DOJ Moving To Wind Down Trump Criminal Cases (NBC)
Rachel Maddow Threatens Musk Over ‘Russia Ties’ (RT)
84-year-old Pelosi Projected To Win Reelection (RT)
Trump to Seek ‘Pragmatic’ Deals, No Budget Money to Sustain Ukraine (Sp.)
Dave Smith: Will Trump Be Able To End The War In Ukraine? (ZH)
Biden To Speed Up Arms Deliveries To Ukraine – Media (RT)
Von der Leyen To Prepare EU For War – Defense Commission Nominee (RT)
How British Media Is Turning On Zelensky. And Why (Jay)
German Government Has Collapsed (RT)

 

 

 

 

Jennings

Joe AI

Speech
https://twitter.com/i/status/1854087148552528041

JD
https://twitter.com/i/status/1854073924893757731

Tucker RFK

Wallace

Tucker Elon

Epstein

UK

Decency

Right to Exist
https://twitter.com/i/status/1853940077849641147

 

 

 

 

 

 

“America now has a chance for renewal if Trump doesn’t blow it in forgiving his enemies, who still intend to destroy him.”

A Good Morning in America (Paul Craig Roberts)

I awoke this morning to Donald Trump’s victory. Apparently, the election was not close enough for the Democrats and media to steal it as they did in 2020. Trump’s victory is not only a defeat for Democrats but also a defeat for the ruling elite that pulls the strings of both political parties and a defeat for the American media that serves as an enforcer for the official narratives that serve the agendas of the elite. Trump’s victory is also a victory for the American people who love their country and respect the Constitution. It is their victory over the left-wing intellectuals and university law schools who have been working diligently to overturn the First and Fourth Amendments that are in the way of their revolutionary intentions that are clearly anti-American.

Trump’s determination and strength are rare. Trump was attacked viciously from day one of his first term. Hillary Clinton, the CIA, and the FBI fabricated a “Russian dossier” that alleged that Trump aided by “Russian interference in the election” stole the election from Hillary Clinton. Women were produced to make sexual allegations. The ruling elite made two attempts to impeach Trump. When Trump’s term expired, false claims buttressed by concocted allegations of mishandling national security documents and instigating an “insurrection” were turned into indictments. Democrat prosecutors and judges weaponized law to pursue the former president. The FBI staged a raid on Trump’s home. The corrupt American media poured lie upon lie.

Trump stood up to all of this. The people stayed with him, and he regained the office that had been stolen from him by utterly corrupt people. Trump seems to have won all sectors of the electorate except for college educated white liberal-left women, the most brainwashed and indoctrinated element in American society. I pity any man who marries one of them. America now has a chance for renewal if Trump doesn’t blow it in forgiving his enemies, who still intend to destroy him. The Democrat Party is no longer a political party. It is an ideological party with ideological agendas. It sees itself as a revolutionary force and has no intention of political comprise. If Trump repeats the mistakes of his first term, his victory will be pissed away.

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X thread.

“If, however, you have been active on @X for the last year, you have known the truth days, weeks and often months before the facts appear in the MSM..”

If The Election Outcome Is As I Expected .. (Bill Ackman)

If the election outcome is as I expected, it should cause the large minority of the country who supported @KamalaHarris and predicted her victory to begin to question their sources of truth. Half the country has believed that @X is filled with mis- and disinformation, and that they could only therefore rely on The NY Times, MSNBC, CNN and other mainstream media for their news. And they did. If, however, you have been active on @X for the last year, you have known the truth days, weeks and often months before the facts appear in the MSM. The MSM excerpted, clipped and cut to defame @realDonaldTrump while claiming that @JoeBiden was fit as a fiddle. Then when Biden’s polls collapsed, @KamalaHarris was anointed the candidate and her hagiography was written with glowing acclaim from the press. But this could not hold as she ducked the media and held fast to the teleprompter.

Citizen journalists with their phone cameras in hand captured the real Kamala forcing her to defend her record and her plans in more media appearances. It did not go well and the public demanded to learn more so @KamalaHarris had to risk more unscripted media. The doom loop was underway with perhaps 60 Minutes as one of the more dramatic examples, even after CBS tried to save her, most glaringly by excerpting one answer to replace a word salad response to another. But the citizen journalists on @X quickly caught and outed this fraud and demanded a transcript. As many who supported Kamala began to realize that they have been misled, they became open to Trump as an alternative, but they didn’t want to rely on the media to understand him because they did not want to be misled again.

They wanted to hear the candidate in his own words and that is where @lexfridman and@joeroganhq long form podcasts came to the rescue. When Kamala was offered the same opportunities to explain herself, she rejected them. And the voting public could only draw a negative inference. When the story of this election is written, I expect it will be as much about how half of America woke up to the reality that they have been manipulated by the media. This should lead to an abandonment by many of the MSM as their primary source of information. It will push more people to @X, to podcasts and other empirical sources, and it will lead to a more informed public. The other outcome I hope happens is the implosion of the Democratic Party. The Party lied to the American people about the cognitive health and fitness of the president.

It prevented, threatened, litigated and otherwise eliminated the ability of other candidates for the primary to compete, to get on ballots, and to even participate in a debate. The Party and the administration used lawfare in an attempt to imprison, bankrupt or otherwise kill off Trump as a candidate. These acts are collectively grave threats to our democracy. With the highest irony in order to hide these acts, the Party accused the opposition candidate of being the grave threat to democracy. The Democratic Party proved itself to be fundamentally undemocratic. It needs a complete reboot. The leadership should be thrown out and those responsible should apologize to the American people. Honest Abe said it best: You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

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“Are we done yet with the anti-Trump fake news now that the majority of voters see through it? Probably not, huh?”

Trump’s Win Is A Victory For The Non-Brainwashed Americans (Marsden)

Blowout alert! I guess average Americans don’t like being infantilized. At least Trump trusted them to be able to take a joke, unlike his opponents. So when’s Liz Cheney’s date with the firing squad already? Are we done yet with the anti-Trump fake news now that the majority of voters see through it? Probably not, huh? With the exception of those in a handful of states, Americans united to send former US President Donald Trump back to the White House and handed him carte blanche with Republican control of the Senate and likely the House as well. Not bad for a guy the establishment tried to brand as the reincarnation of Hitler. Did Hitler also have giant Israeli flags at his Madison Square Garden rally? Or hang out at the Jewish wall in Israel or with Hebrew-inscribed tablets in a yarmulke? That should have been the Democrats’ first sign that their branding attempt was off.

Yet, just like the fitting title of the upcoming Harris biography co-authored by Chelsea Clinton: She Persisted. Maybe next time, instead of persisting with their idiocy, they’ll come up with an actual agenda and a candidate who addresses questions and issues on point rather than punting them in favor of talking points and platitudes that leave voters guessing as to what to even expect if ever elected – beyond the usual establishment status quo, which, of course, sucks. Just ask the overwhelming majority of Americans who say that the country is headed in the wrong direction. Presumably, the Democrats figured that they could make a whole campaign about abortion rights – against a guy who, frankly, doesn’t actually seem too interested in the topic, which was recently re-opened by the courts.

It’s telling that, according to CNN exit polls, Harris won the female vote by five points less than Biden did in 2020 and three points less than even Hillary Clinton did against Trump in 2016, when abortion wasn’t even an issue. Certain categories of voters really capture the story of this election. The first is white women with college degrees, 11% more of whom voted for Harris than for Biden in 2020. Institutional establishment brainwashing and virtue signaling apparently works more effectively on well-formatted brains, female or otherwise. The message from the party hacks and their celebrity surrogates was that abortion was really all that should matter to women, reducing them to one-dimensional caricatures of actual human beings. But it turns out that many more women than they figured don’t like being talked down to and treated as little more than a walking uterus – even by other women.

Which would explain why white women with no degree voted overwhelmingly for Trump by 25 points over Harris, and even voters of color with no degree, generally considered a lock by Democrats, still voted by 14 points less for Harris than for Biden four years ago. The youngest voters, aged 18-29, who you’d figure would be most directly affected by reproductive rights issues, either as women themselves or their white-knighting male counterparts who were constantly told by Democrats that they had to cast their vote primarily in support of the reproductive rights of the women in their life, actually ended up shifting their vote to Trump by 11 points compared to 2020.

The bottom line is that women living real lives with a multitude of concerns and interests don’t like being paternalized, which is what the Democrats constantly do. Just because it’s a woman and her surrogates who are doing the talking down to them, doesn’t make it any more appealing. It just makes you a useful idiot of the patriarchal establishment – the same one that’s trying to emotionally manipulate women’s electoral choices to maintain the status quo that disadvantages women in every other possible way that actually matters to all of their lives, from cost of living to foreign wars in which their sons are sent to die and other countries’ sons are subjected to the same. All so Uncle Sam can turn a profit. It’s the guy you keep calling a misogynist who wants to take him on.

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“..the United States has 20 to 25 million illegal immigrants in the country. “What do we do with them? I think the first thing that we do is we start with the criminal migrants.”

Trump Has Sweeping Plans for His 2nd Administration (ET)

Immigration Since 2015, Trump has made curbing illegal immigration a cornerstone of his campaigns. As president, he built or reconstructed about 400 miles of border barrier along the U.S.–Mexico border and implemented a number of rules curbing illegal migration into the country. During the campaign, Trump often said that he would initiate the largest “mass deportation” effort in U.S. history if elected. Recently, he also warned Mexico that he would impose a 25 percent tariff targeting the country if it fails to curb illegal immigration and that he would raise that tariff if Mexico doesn’t comply. Also, he’s suggested more enhanced screenings for immigrants, ending birthright citizenship—which may require a constitutional amendment—and reimposing certain policies enacted during his first term such as the “remain in Mexico” protocol.

Tom Homan, a former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who is expected to join the new administration, told media outlets last year that the scale of deportations depends on what resources are available. During a “60 Minutes” interview in October, Homan was asked about whether families would be separated. Homan responded, “Families can be deported together.” Vice President-elect JD Vance said in his debate with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Oct. 1 that deporting criminals would be a second Trump administration’s initial focus. “You’ve got to reimplement Donald Trump’s border policies, build the wall, reimplement deportations,” Vance said, adding that the United States has 20 to 25 million illegal immigrants in the country. “What do we do with them? I think the first thing that we do is we start with the criminal migrants.”

Taxes and Regulations Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump has promised to curb federal regulations that he said would limit the creation of new U.S. jobs. He also has pledged to keep intact a 2017 tax cut that he supported and signed while in office. His team has also proposed a further round of individual and corporate tax cuts beyond those initiated in his first term. Trump has pledged to reduce the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent for companies that make their products in the United States. In a bid to win Nevada, Trump earlier this year pledged to end the taxation of tips and overtime wages to aid some service workers and waiters. He has pledged not to tax or cut Social Security benefits. Trump also has said that as president, he would pressure the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates but wouldn’t make any demands on the central bank. Some of his proposals would require congressional action. As of Wednesday morning, the GOP is projected to retake the Senate, but the picture around the House is murkier.

Tariffs In multiple campaign stops this year, Trump floated the idea of a 10 percent or more tariff on all goods imported into the United States, which he said would eliminate the country’s trade deficit. He has also said he should have the authority to set higher tariffs on countries that have put tariffs on U.S. imports. He has threatened to impose a 200 percent tariff on some imported cars, saying he is determined in particular to keep cars from Mexico from coming into the country. Trump has targeted China in particular. He proposes phasing out Chinese imports of goods such as electronics, steel, and pharmaceuticals over four years. He seeks to prohibit Chinese companies from owning U.S. real estate and infrastructure in the energy and tech sectors. “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariffs,’” Trump said in an interview with John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, in October. “It’s my favorite word.”

He added at the time, “You see these empty, old, beautiful steel mills and factories that are empty and falling down,” referring to facilities that used to make goods in the United States. “We’re going to bring the companies back. We’re going to lower taxes for companies that are going to make their products in the USA. And we’re going to protect those companies with strong tariffs,” Trump said. Micklethwait said that some economists have projected that the former president’s economic policies, including tariffs, could add trillions to the U.S. deficit. But Trump said that a number of countries, including “allies” have “taken advantage of us, more so than our enemies. ”

More Drilling The former president said that he wants to cut federal regulations on drilling for oil and natural gas, a move that he says would lower energy costs and inflation. In multiple instances, Trump said he would reauthorize drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, which was suspended under the Biden administration. Meanwhile, he would pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords, a worldwide plan that claims to reduce carbon emissions. Trump also said he would roll back some federal policies around electric vehicles. In his campaign, Trump has often said that gas prices were much lower under his administration than they have been under the Biden administration. He has suggested that prices would again fall when he takes office.

“When I left office … gasoline had reached $1.87 a gallon. We actually had many months where it was lower than that,” Trump told reporters over the summer. “But we hit $1.87, which was a perfect place, an absolutely beautiful number.” According to AAA, the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline stands at around $3.10. The highest recorded average price for a gallon was on June 14, 2022, when it reached $5.01, AAA figures show. The federal Energy Information Administration’s data show that the average annual price for a gallon of gasoline did not exceed $3 under the first Trump administration.

Social Policies Trump has pledged to require U.S. colleges and universities to “defend American tradition and Western civilization” and to purge them of diversity and inclusion programs, which he and Republicans have said are leftist in nature. He said he would direct the Justice Department to pursue civil rights cases against schools that engage in racial discrimination. At K–12 schools, Trump would support programs allowing parents to use public funds for private or religious instruction. Trump also wants to abolish the federal Department of Education and leave states in control of schooling.

Regarding abortion, Trump has said that a federal ban on abortion is not needed and that the issue should be resolved by states. He’s also said he backs rules that advance in vitro fertilization, birth control, and prenatal care. In campaign events and interviews, Trump has been critical of schools allowing transgender individuals to compete in women’s sports, saying that he would impose a ban on such practices. “It’s a man playing in the game,” Trump said at an October town hall event. “Look at what’s happened in swimming. Look at the records that are being broken.”

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A lot of public “servants” have good reason to be nervous.

Musk Reveals Plans For Trump Government (RT)

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said he will seek to improve government efficiency by reducing the number of federal agencies if he is given a role in Donald Trump’s administration. Musk, a Trump supporter, made the remarks during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s online show, broadcast from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Tuesday. Despite initially proclaiming political neutrality, Musk officially endorsed Trump after an assassination attempt on the president-elect in July. Trump promised the Tesla CEO that he would establish a special “government efficiency” commission, dubbed the DOGE, to be headed by the billionaire if he wins the election. Speaking with Carlson, the tech billionaire said that he would like to help Trump make the US government more efficient.

“I’d be happy to help improve government efficiency,” Musk said. “We’ve got a gigantic government bureaucracy, we’ve got overregulation, we’ve got agencies that have overlapping responsibilities… this translates into real costs to people, they’re hidden costs but they are very substantial.” Musk has invested millions of dollars in supporting Trump. According to media reports, he donated at least $118 million to the Republican’s political action committee, a group that focused on voter outreach. Speaking at a Trump rally last month, Musk pledged to help the Republican slash US annual budget spending by “at least $2 trillion” as part of a review of federal agencies that he would carry out if Trump returns to the White House. “Your tax money is being wasted and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that,” Musk stated. The tech billionaire has repeatedly sounded the alarm over the US debt, warning just last week that the country is spiraling toward bankruptcy and will quickly go bust if Washington doesn’t curb its spending.

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“We embrace change in the United States. We can tell the world that we’re aware of Bitcoin’s numerous positive attributes and that we want to use them to our advantage..”

The US Should Establish A Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (Corva)

Yesterday, the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) released a 53-page report on the pros of the United States establishing a strategic bitcoin reserve (SBR). As Bitcoin Magazine’s Frank Corva details below, the authors of the report touched on four key benefits of holding bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset:

• Economic and monetary stability – bitcoin is a hedge against currency debasement and debt instability

• Geopolitical competition – the US could gain a strategic advantage over other countries that are contemplating starting a bitcoin reserve and can reinforce the US’ influence over global financial standards

• Energy and climate – Bitcoin mining can be leveraged to accelerate the movement toward renewable energy

• Financial inclusion and human rights – the US can promote both the concepts of individual freedom and financial inclusion for both US citizens and those abroad

While I agree that the US’ establishing an SBR would have these benefits, I also think it would send a certain message loud and clear: We embrace change in the United States. We can tell the world that we’re aware of Bitcoin’s numerous positive attributes and that we want to use them to our advantage. In doing so, we can shift the narrative around Bitcoin from something to be feared and controlled to something that should be embraced and utilized, and we can stand behind a tool that can be used to increase the financial buoyancy of both people and institutions around the globe instead of standing in its way.

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Following the example of Tulsi, RFK et al. They made it look acceptable.

Trump Comeback Also Engineered A Significant Exodus From Democrat Party (JTN)

Donald Trump pulled off the most improbable comeback in American political history Tuesday night, securing a likely return trip to the White House by beating back a relentless tide of media, Big Tech and Democrat opposition that stretched from the courthouse to the social media sphere Trump was poised to become only the second American president to secure non-consecutive terms but he did so against far greater odds than Grover Cleveland a century earlier after being impeached and acquitted twice, indicted four times, facing two assassination attempts and enduring an avalanche of lawfare unparalleled in the nation’s history. But even more consequential than his personal journey to President-Elect 47, Trump engineered a once-in-a-generation political realignment, one more deep and pervasive than his 2016 shocker as he peeled away long-rooted constituencies from the Democrat Party.

The electoral movement may soon be known as D-Exit, the American equivalent of Great Britain’s Brexit departure from the European Union as black males, Hispanic voters and young voters showed up more strongly from Trump and less fervently for Harris compared to Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Arabs and Muslims also underperformed for Harris. The shifts were small but compelling, crumbling a coalition born in the Kennedy-Johnson era and key to the Obama-Biden dynasty that dominated 12 of the last 16 years. The shifts toward Trump were jarring for Democrats. Trump cut the Democrat margin of victory in half in one of America’s darkest blue states, New York, and by two thirds in Democrat-stronghold Illinois. He won Florida – scene of the 2020 hanging election – by 15 points, all but erasing the Sunshine State as a battleground.

He won Georgia and North Carolina and was poised to take Arizona and Nevada. Pennsylvania was called for Trump and Wisconsin and Michigan were leaning strongly in his direction. He won a Senate majority and was in decent position to keep the U.S. House, which would make Washington an all red town in 2025. Perhaps most painful of all to blue America, Trump was in a position to win the popular vote, something Democrats have long used as a cudgel to delegitimize earlier GOP victories, including Trump’s in 2016. Mark Penn, the strategist behind the Clinton dynasty, succinctly described D-Exit early Wednesday morning. “The Trump edge is turning into a Trump trifecta. It looks like despite a good effort in a short period of time, Harris is falling short especially with young people and turnout in core urban areas. Black and especially Latino voters showed some shifts,” he noted on X.

“Trump has brought home with working class and created a new coalition of governing but the country remains divided and whoever wins must remember it’s time to genuinely reach out to the many moderate voters looking for the right leadership,” he added. Trump did it by talking directly to constituencies Republicans often ignored in the past, and that Democrats long took for granted. He did it by inviting recovering Democrats or stubborn independents to his big stage: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elon Musk, ex-Rep and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard and podcaster extraordinaire Joe Rogan to name a few. He went to places like the Bronx and Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden in New York to signal he wanted to be all Americans’ president. And when Democrats talked about ethereal ideological terms like ESG, CRT, and DEI, Trump talked about the kitchen table, the grocery cart and the gas tank. He warned of energy poverty, recognizing some were having a hard time to pay utility bills.

He made the EV revolution a debate about exporting jobs to China and the liberal transgender movement a debate about the safety and dignity of women’s sports and the sanctity of parents’ rights. Democrats did a historic switcheroo atop the ticket, subbing a younger female Harris for an aging Biden. But they didn’t change the debate. Trump chose the issues of insecurity, inflation and insanity and Democrats offered few specifics to counter. In the end, Trump’s prior record of economic growth in his first term seemed preferrable to Harris’ vagaries. Trump’s optimism that the nation’s woes could be solved was more appealing than Harris’ dark insistence that fascism, extremism and Hitler-like characters would destroy democracy.

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“Smith’s prosecutions ended with the 270th Electoral College vote secured around 2 a.m. Wednesday.”

The Thrill is Gone (Turley)

After years of thrill-kill prosecutions, the thrill is gone for lawfare warriors. Election Day’s greatest losers may be special counsel Jack Smith, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Donald Trump’s victory was the largest jury verdict that some of us anticipated for years of unrelenting weaponization of the legal system. Smith’s prosecutions ended with the 270th Electoral College vote secured around 2 a.m. Wednesday. His unrelenting efforts to convict Trump and then, when prevented from holding a trial, to release damaging material before the election have collapsed with the blue wall in the Midwest. Trump has said he plans to fire Smith on Day 1. That means the end of both the January 6 and the classified documents cases. That leaves James and Bragg as residue of long-forgotten lawfare battles, but even there Trump’s prospects look good.

James was able to secure a fellow lawfare warrior in Justice Arthur Engoron, who imposed a grotesque $455 million in fines and interest. That ruling is pending an appeal that is expected to be a partial or even total victory for Trump. Unlike Engoron, the appellate judges expressed great skepticism in September over the size of the penalty and even the use of this law. Trump faced half a billion dollars in penalty in a case where no one lost a dime, and the alleged victim banks wanted more business with Trump and his company. Separately, there is a hearing scheduled in front of Judge Juan Merchan for Nov. 11 on the “hush money” case involving Stormy Daniels, and a possible sentencing on Nov. 26. If Merchan seeks to jail Trump, it is unlikely to be carried out, as Trump appeals the case and the many alleged errors committed by the judge.

Merchan made an utter mess of a case that should never have been filed, let alone tried. Even commentators like CNN’s senior legal analyst, Elie Honig, have denounced the case as selective prosecution and unfounded. The case should result in a conditional discharge with no jail time if Merchan can resist the temptation to unjustly punish Trump, a level of restraint that has largely proven difficult for him in the case. Merchan created layers of appealable errors in the case. Putting those alleged errors aside, any sentencing to jail would create its own constitutional conflict with Trump’s performance of his federal duties. The question is whether the election will bring a moment of sobriety for New Yorkers who have spent years in a full rage-driven celebration of lawfare.

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Turley gets it. NBC not so much.

DOJ Moving To Wind Down Trump Criminal Cases (NBC)

Justice Department officials have been evaluating how to wind down the two federal criminal cases against President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office to comply with long-standing department policy that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted, two people familiar with the matter tell NBC News. The latest discussions stand in contrast with the pre-election legal posture of special counsel Jack Smith, who in recent weeks took significant steps in the election interference case against Trump without regard to the electoral calendar. But the sources say DOJ officials have come to grips with the fact that no trial is possible anytime soon in either the Jan. 6 case or the classified documents matter — both of which are mired in legal issues that would likely prompt an appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, even if Trump had lost the election.

Now that Trump will become president again, DOJ officials see no room to pursue either criminal case against him — and no point in continuing to litigate them in the weeks before he takes office, the people said. “Sensible, inevitable and unfortunate,” said former federal prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg, an NBC News contributor. How Trump’s legal jeopardy has unfolded over the past year, in terms of both the criminal charges and his sweeping election victory, is unprecedented. The sources said it will be up to Smith to decide exactly how to unwind the charges and many questions remain unanswered. Could the prosecutions resume after Trump leaves office or would they be time-barred? What happens to the evidence? What about the two other defendants charged with helping Trump hide classified documents? Will the special counsel write a report, as special counsels usually do?

At the same time, Trump’s legal team is weighing its own next steps for how to resolve the outstanding federal cases in his favor now that he is the projected winner of the election. The ultimate goal is to get all the federal and state cases wiped out completely — the strategic call is how best to accomplish that task, according to a person familiar with the discussions. If the Trump side, for example, moved again in court to dismiss the charges in Washington related to election interference, then the Justice Department could use its legal response to explain its position on not moving forward with that case. Trump’s New York criminal case presents different challenges with a felony conviction and sentencing hearing scheduled for Nov. 26. The immediate goal of Trump’s legal team is to get that postponed indefinitely or otherwise dismissed.

The Georgia election interference case against Trump remains tied up on appeals over ethical issues surrounding the district attorney. “The American people have re-elected President Trump with an overwhelming mandate to Make America Great Again,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement. “It is now abundantly clear that Americans want an immediate end to the weaponization of our justice system, so we can, as President Trump said in his historic speech last night, unify our country and work together for the betterment of our nation.” The DOJ’s thinking on Trump’s federal cases flows from a 2000 memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which affirmed a Watergate-era conclusion that a prosecution of a sitting president would “unduly interfere in a direct or formal sense with the conduct of the presidency.”

“In light of the effect that an indictment would have on the operations of the executive branch, ‘an impeachment proceeding is the only appropriate way to deal with a President while in office,’” the memo concluded, quoting the earlier conclusion. The practical reality of Trump’s electoral victory Tuesday is that he is unlikely ever to face legal consequences in relation to the serious federal criminal charges brought against him by career Justice Department prosecutors working with career FBI agents. Some commentators have said the charges were arguably more serious than the conduct in the Watergate scandal that cost Richard Nixon the presidency and left him banished from politics. In the case accusing Trump of conspiring to illegally overturn the 2020 election, he is charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.

In the classified documents case, he is charged with willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, lying to investigators and withholding documents in a federal investigation. “The idea that you could win an election to avoid justice just cuts so deeply against my expectations for our legal system and for our politics too,” said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney and NBC News contributor. “But the voters have spoken, and that’s where we are.” She added that it has never been a foregone conclusion that Trump would be convicted — that would be up to a jury. “What bothers me so deeply is that he’s avoided the quintessential part of American justice — letting a jury decide, based on the evidence.”

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“Rachel Maddow is a crazy person,” Musk said, describing her as “frothing-at-the-mouth crazy fascist, basically, sort of pretending to be a liberal.”

Rachel Maddow Threatens Musk Over ‘Russia Ties’ (RT)

Elon Musk can’t possibly keep his US government contracts because of his alleged secret contacts with “America’s worst enemy,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has said. The Wall Street Journal claimed last week that Musk had communicated with Russian President Vladimir Putin and withheld the services of his Starlink network to Ukraine’s military. Both Musk and Moscow have dismissed the report as fake news. Maddow, however, proceeded as if the Journal’s reporting was a proven fact in her election day show on Tuesday evening. “You really can’t have the head of a company that is the primary rocket launcher for the defense department and NASA, you can’t have the head of that company in secret communications with America’s worst enemy while America’s enemy is actively waging a war against one of our allies, especially once you learn that he’s using his businesses to help the other side, to help Russia in that war,” Maddow said.

“Now that we know what we know about Elon Musk, this election – regardless of who wins – has produced a national security problem,” she continued, arguing that it will likely produce “tons of drama.” “So, buckle up. Even if [Donald] Trump doesn’t win, the Defense Department and NASA are gonna need a new arrangement for all their rockets and for all the multi-billion-dollar contracts Elon Musk’s companies have with the US government,” Maddow said. Either the government will have to get out of those contracts, or Musk’s companies “will have to unwind from him.” Musk has denied the Journal’s claims, pointing out that Starlink was “the BACKBONE of Ukrainian military communications at the front lines, because everything else has been blown up or jammed by Russia.” The founder of SpaceX and owner of X (formerly Twitter) addressed Maddow’s comments shortly afterward, speaking to journalist Tucker Carlson in a livestream from Mar-a-Lago.

“Rachel Maddow is a crazy person,” Musk said, describing her as “frothing-at-the-mouth crazy fascist, basically, sort of pretending to be a liberal.” Asked how much pressure he has been under because of his support for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Musk resorted to a joke. “Well, apart from multiple Democrats saying they want to put me in jail, take away government contracts from my companies, nationalize my companies, deport me as an illegal, and have me arrested for apparently being Putin’s best friend, nothing besides those things,” he said. Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Journal’s claims were untrue, “most likely linked” to Musk’s support for Trump, and should not be taken seriously. While the official count of votes in the US presidential election is still pending, Trump has secured the needed 270 electoral votes, according to multiple media organizations.

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“..while promoting her latest book this August, Pelosi called it her “goal in life” for Trump to “never step in the White House again.”

84-year-old Pelosi Projected To Win Reelection (RT)

Former US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi could return to Congress next year for a landmark 20th term, The Hill reported on Wednesday, citing voting projections. Congressional elections are being held along with the race for the White House, with 34 of 100 seats in the Senate and all 435 in the House of Representatives up for grabs. According to the report, the 84-year-old Democrat is expected to win reelection to the House in California’s 11th Congressional District, which includes most of San Francisco. The report came after 50% of the votes were counted, with Pelosi securing over 80%. First elected to Congress in 1987, Pelosi became the first woman to serve as House speaker, a role she held twice. She has also been the longest-serving leader in the Democratic Party’s history in Congress.

Pelosi publicly encouraged incumbent President Joe Biden to drop his reelection plans, which led to him quitting the race as the Democratic candidate and being replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris. Reports of Pelosi’s win come as the final votes are being counted in the presidential race. While the official results of the election have yet to be announced, Trump has already secured wins in key battleground states and passed the threshold of 270 electoral college votes required to take the White House, according to media projections. Pelosi is among the fiercest critics of Trump. She has called him a “snake-oil salesman” and “the creature from the Black Lagoon,” and led Democratic efforts during impeachment proceedings against Trump in his previous term in office. Speaking to reporters while promoting her latest book this August, Pelosi called it her “goal in life” for Trump to “never step in the White House again.”

Trump railed against Pelosi in his campaign’s closing speech on Tuesday, recalling her efforts to impeach him. He said Pelosi is an “evil, sick, crazy, horrible human being” and “trouble for our country,” adding that he wanted to call her the “B-word.” In an interview on Fox News last month, he called Pelosi America’s “enemy from within.” According to the latest media reports, the Republicans have won control of the Senate for the first time in four years. It is still unclear which party will control the House of Representatives, as there are too many races that have yet to be called.

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“..the Biden administration and its European acolytes fueling NATO’s proxy war “are history.”

Trump to Seek ‘Pragmatic’ Deals, No Budget Money to Sustain Ukraine (Sp.)

Throughout his election campaign, Donald Trump consistently expressed his reluctance to continue funding the Zelensky regime in Ukraine. Following his declaration of victory in the US presidential race, Trump addressed his supporters in a celebratory speech, promising to “stop wars” across the globe. As the 47th US president, Donald Trump will not guarantee the US budget “to keep Ukraine afloat,” strategic analyst Paolo Raffone told Sputnik. He conjectured that the Biden administration and its European acolytes fueling NATO’s proxy war “are history.” “Trump does not see any advantage for the US to continue spending enormous budgets and political capital in Ukraine. If a deal with Russia and Ukraine cannot be reached, it is possible that Trump will push for a ‘frozen conflict policy’ as a sort of damage control… Europeans will have to cover those costs. It will probably be the end of the EU,” the director of the CIPI Foundation in Brussels speculated.

On the foreign policy front, the Republican is likely to display openness to “pragmatic” solutions with allies and foes to achieve “maximum advantage” for the US, he surmised, adding: “I expect a great bargaining in which Trump will keep the centrality of the US as the ‘indispensable interlocutor’ in bilateral relations, also within the framework of multipolarity. Probably, there will be much less hysteria about Russia, Iran, China. The probable objective is ‘rebalancing the interchange’ with all these countries. They may not become friends, but deals are possible in mutual interest.” In his pursuit of a national interest agenda, Trump may redefine America’s contributions to NATO, emphasizing that US protection for Europe “is not a free ride,” Raffone noted. “Trump will guarantee the Europeans the military shield, but each European state will have to contribute much more to NATO. The previous US administrations asked to raise European military expenditure above 2% GDP. Such a target will probably be insufficient during the new Trump administration,” said Raffone.

It is difficult for Trump to “accept any idea of European strategic autonomy,” emphasized the pundit. He supposed that a new Trump administration would brandish “a combination of trade, tariffs, security levy to force the Europeans to increase their military budgets and buy more American.” “European energy and technology dependency is a fact… Europe must find space for compromise to deal with not only the US, but also with Russia, China and the Middle East. The current ideological positions in the EU Commission, Paris and Berlin are not encouraging,” stressed the pundit. Looking ahead to the US elections of 2028, none of the “old guard” will be running, conjectured Raffone, suggesting that “new forces will emerge during the current Trump term.” “The Trump administration will probably be a transition time. The outcome will be visible in US politics over the next decade. Currently, the two US parties live a populist momentum. Time will tell if politics will arise again in the US,” he concluded.

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“..if he listens to Tucker Carlson, and ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, and Vivek Ramaswamy, and all the smart people around him – then yes, he could negotiate an end to that war.”

Dave Smith: Will Trump Be Able To End The War In Ukraine? (ZH)

At a recent pre-election speaking and podcast event, comedian and Libertarian political commentator Dave Smith expressed his view that it is very realistic that the next President Donald Trump could successfully negotiate an end to the Ukraine war. Smith’s view is optimistic, as he articulated that he believes Trump’s expressed desire to end wars in Ukraine and Gaza is genuine. But Smith also laid out that much depends on who Trump puts around him in top national security positions. Below is the hard-hitting segment featuring the prominent commentator addressing the question: will Trump be able to end the war in Ukraine? Below are Dave Smith’s words from the segment on Trump and Ukraine below …

“Why the hell are we even expanding our military alliance to Ukraine? And listen, Donald Trump always says that the war ‘never would have happened if I was president, and I would negotiate an end to this.’ And I gotta say I think he’s right about that. I don’t think the war would have happened if he was president – I think he will negotiate an end to it. I don’t think he’s right that Hamas wouldn’t have attacked Israel if he was president – that seems kind of ridiculous to me. But he’s right: the Ukraine war could be over tomorrow if American wanted to negotiated a peace to it. Vladimir Putin has been trying to the entire time… Well the question becomes who does Donald Trump put around him? If Donald Trump puts Mike Pompeo, aka Liz Cheney’s pick for Defense Secretary… if he puts John Bolton, aka Hillary Clinton’s pick for national security adviser – then maybe not, maybe it doesn’t happen. But if he listens to Tucker Carlson, and ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, and Vivek Ramaswamy, and all the smart people around him – then yes, he could negotiate an end to that war.”

Indeed, the question ultimately becomes: will Trump really keep the ‘swamp’ out of his administration this time around? We hope so.

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“Politico described the plan as “the only option” to maintain the flow of weapons to Ukraine, although its sources acknowledged “immense” challenges..”

Biden To Speed Up Arms Deliveries To Ukraine – Media (RT)

The White House intends to expedite up to $9 billion in new military aid in a last-ditch effort to bolster Ukraine against Russia, before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January, according to sources within the outgoing administration. The plan is driven by concerns that Trump, who has criticized President Joe Biden’s generous support for Kiev, may halt or significantly reduce US taxpayer-funded aid, as reported by sources speaking to Reuters and Politico on Wednesday. “The administration plans to push forward… to put Ukraine in the strongest position possible,” a senior official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. Politico described the plan as “the only option” to maintain the flow of weapons to Ukraine, although its sources acknowledged “immense” challenges. US officials worry that even if Biden approves new aid, it could take the Pentagon months to actually deliver munitions and equipment to Ukraine, and the next commander-in-chief could halt shipments at any time.

It remains unclear whether the US military would be willing to draw more deeply from its stockpiles – risking its own readiness – to expedite the deliveries. Since February 2022, the US Congress has approved more than $174 billion to support Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. The latest tranche of $61 billion was delayed for several months amid a standoff between Republicans and the White House. Of that package, only $4.3 billion remains, along with another $2 billion allocated for new contracts with the US arms industry. With $2.8 billion in previously announced shipments, the White House has just over $9 billion available for emergency supplies to Kiev. Trump’s victory will not change Washington’s antagonistic stance towards Moscow, but will make it more difficult for Kiev to access American taxpayers’ money, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday.

“As a dyed-in-the-wool businessman, he hates wasting money on all sorts of freeloaders and tagalongs: On wacko allies, misguided grandiose charity projects, and insatiable international organizations,” Medvedev wrote in a Telegram post. “The only question is, how much will Trump be forced to fork out on the war? He’s stubborn, but the system is more powerful.” Trump has said that Ukraine cannot win against Russia militarily and has criticized Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky as “the greatest salesman in history,” who secures billions every time he visits Washington without getting any closer to victory. Trump claimed on the campaign trail that he could end the Ukraine conflict in 24 hours if reelected. In his victory speech, Trump reiterated: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

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“..the EU has already spent nearly €120 billion ($128.8 billion) on supporting Ukraine, with another €74 billion pledged but yet to be allocated..”

Von der Leyen To Prepare EU For War – Defense Commission Nominee (RT)

A top priority for the next European Commission will be making Europe self-reliant and ready for war, as the US is likely to focus on China in the coming decades, said Andrius Kubilius, the nominee for the EU’s new top defense post. Kubilius made this statement at his confirmation hearing in Brussels on Wednesday, after he was nominated to become the first-ever EU Commissioner for Defense and Space. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen designated the former Lithuanian prime minister for the position in September. The new Commission is expected to take office by December 1. “Defense is one of the top priorities for the next Commission,” Kubilius told MEPs. “Von der Leyen’s mission letter tasks me with helping Europe prepare for the most extreme military contingencies, which means preparing for the possibility of Russian aggression.”

While it is difficult to predict the policies of the upcoming administration of US President-elect Donald Trump, “we can anticipate that in the coming decades, the U.S. is likely to increase its focus on the strategic challenge posed by China,” Kubilius said. This shift “necessitates a more self-reliant European defense structure,” he added. “Adversaries and strategic rivals are rapidly outpacing us,” with Russia and China far ahead in defense spending, Kubilius noted. He claimed that Russia will spend more on defense than all of the bloc’s 27 states combined, in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP). In the meantime, the best defense strategy for the EU would be to continue funding Ukraine, he stated.

Since 2022, the EU has already spent nearly €120 billion ($128.8 billion) on supporting Ukraine, with another €74 billion pledged but yet to be allocated, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. As emphasized by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the best investment in European security is investing in the security of Ukraine. Officials in Brussels are waiting for the US election results to determine their next steps in supporting Ukraine, Deutsche Welle reported earlier this week. During his reelection campaign, Trump has repeatedly suggested he would curtail funding for Kiev and focus on domestic American issues. The outgoing Biden administration intends to fast-track billions in military aid to Ukraine to reinforce Kiev’s military before Trump takes office in January, Reuters and Politico reported on Wednesday, citing anonymous sources.

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“Kursk is the ultimate meat grinder for Ukraine soldiers. No one comes back alive.”

How British Media Is Turning On Zelensky. And Why (Jay)

It’s a little-known fact that the two British media giants, The Economist and The Financial Times, enjoy a very cosy relationship with the European Commission, so much so that one could almost imagine them all being one family. Each does its own bidding for one another and each assists one another with its aspirations, its viewpoint. And it’s fake news. And so, when you read in The Economist that the war is not going at all well for Ukraine and its hapless president you can more or less assume that this is the interpretation also of the very highest echelons of the EU. Since the war started, Ukraine’s president has had the full support of western media, which has agreed to go along with the fake news racket which his people organize; curtailing the freedom of western journalists, blocking them from getting hard news stories, data, statistics but above all taking them by the hand and leading them to the stories which they want reported.

This game reached epic proportions in recent months as a parody of journalism reached its apex when the war turned on Zelensky in the summer of this year. Journalists didn’t report on it in such a way. Many stayed in Kiev and other large cities and were so desperate for a story which wouldn’t upset their hosts that they peddled the same one over and over again of the conscripts being bundled into the backs of vans. It was literally all they could do to keep active. But this business model of late appears to have run aground. Both the Economist and the BBC have each reported on the frontlines and really told it how it is: bleak. No one can turn a blind eye any more to the advancement of Russian forces. The capture of Selydove might be played down by the Kiez media machine whose list of hilarious fake news stories is too long to publish; but Pokrovsk, which is the next target for Russian forces, will be a considerable victory which might topple the entire confidence of Zelensky and his cabal of advisors and sycophants.

Pokrovsk is a town which is a transport hub, which supplies thousands of Ukrainian troops. If it is taken, it would effectively mean the mass surrender of most of them, or their hasty retreat as they won’t be able to eat or replenish their ammunition stocks. This itself will have a devastating blow on Ukrainian troops’ morale and we might well see a domino effect which accelerates Russia’s advance from a kilometer or two in a day to scores. How will western media report the fall of this city? If The Economist and BBC reports are anything to go by, with some zeal one would imagine. It’s as though big media, in particular British, is anxious to stay on the right side of history when things start to fall down and emerge from the dust as wise old men with that “I told you so” sparkle in their eyes. It’s also about collective guilt. Western Media has blood on its hands as the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers sent to the “meat grinder” is partly attributed to the support U.S. and UK media gave Zelensky.

What we are witnessing now from Zelensky is a panic mode which is accelerating at the same pace. His so-called “victory plan” hasn’t been taken seriously by any western leaders and he looks stupid now, alienated. His recent outburst about Biden leaking to the press about the ludicrous idea of using U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles might have been a defining moment which history writers obsess over then they write his eulogy. For now, the panic isn’t really even about the battlefield, although it must be hard for Zelensky to read the dispatches each day of the losses in Kursk which could be considered Ukraine’s own Battle of the Bulge where German troops fought hard at the end of WWII against larger, bigger numbers of allied soldiers in the Ardennes and ultimately lost. In many ways Kursk was a trap which Zelensky set for himself, as the failure to capture the nuclear power plant pales into insignificance compared to the losses of men. Kursk is the ultimate meat grinder for Ukraine soldiers. No one comes back alive.

The real panic for Zelensky is now about his own political credibility. He is only thinking now how to survive the inevitable loss to Russia and stay a president. He knows only too well that if a quick ceasefire happens under Trump’s leadership, the Martial Law status of the country will be cancelled and presidential elections will be obligatory. Under Harris, the pain will only be drawn out longer, but with even more lost ground, lost bargaining leverage as she will force Putin to shift gear with his advance and head for Kiev. The irony of The Economist piece and its timing is that it prepares the ground for a massive blame game which starts with those who have been doing it like pros for decades – The European Commission – and amateurs who have just started to learn how it works, like Zelensky. The Economist is just warming up.

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Economy is breaking down.

German Government Has Collapsed (RT)

Germany’s ‘traffic-light’ coalition has fallen apart, leaving Olaf Scholz at the helm of a minority government consisting solely of his Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens. This follows the Chancellor’s dismissal of Free Democratic Party (FDP) leader Christian Lindner from the position of Finance Minister. After failed crisis talks on Wednesday night, the Chancellor dismissed the Free Democratic Party (FDP) leader Christian Lindner from the position of Finance Minister. In response, the FDP’s parliamentary group leader, Christian Durr, announced that the party is withdrawing all its ministers from Scholz’s government, formally ending the three-way coalition. The Greens expressed regret over this development but stated they wish to remain part of a minority government, emphasizing the need for the EU – and Germany in particular – to demonstrate its capacity for action following Donald Trump’s election as US President.

“I want to say for us that this feels wrong and not right tonight – almost tragic on a day like this, when Germany must show unity and the ability to act in Europe,” said Vice Chancellor and Economy Minister Robert Habeck in a joint press statement with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Wednesday night. “This is not a good day for Germany and also not a good day for Europe,” Baerbock added. Finance Minister Christian Lindner was fired after he reportedly proposed early elections when the leaders of the three coalition parties once again failed to find common ground on how to address the multibillion-euro deficit in next year’s budget. “All too often, Minister Lindner has blocked laws in an inappropriate manner,” Scholz stated, accusing Lindner of refusing to ease spending rules which among other things would allow for more aid to Ukraine.

Lindner, in turn, accused the Chancellor of ignoring the real “economic concerns” of the German people. “Olaf Scholz has long failed to recognize the need for a new economic awakening in our country,” Lindner said. Scholz said he now wants to reach out to opposition leader Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democrats to offer him the “opportunity” to collaborate with his government, adding that in light of the US elections, this is “perhaps more urgent than ever.” Meanwhile, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) opposition party welcomed the coalition’s collapse as a long-overdue “liberation” for Germany.

“After months of gridlock and countless self-centered therapy sessions, we now urgently need a fundamental political fresh start to lead the economy and the country as a whole out of the severe crisis into which it has been plunged by the ideology-driven policies of the SPD, Greens, and FDP,” said AfD parliamentary leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla in a statement on X. Scholz announced that the Bundestag will hold a vote of confidence on January 15. According to the German constitution, if the Chancellor fails to secure sufficient support, he may formally request the President to dissolve the 733-seat lower house and call new elections within 60 days. This could push Germany’s parliamentary elections from next fall to March 2025.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Fishing

 

 

Mature tree

 

 

Flow hive
https://twitter.com/i/status/1854145206733373820

 

 

Slow motion fluid

 

 

Mesh

 

 

Hair
https://twitter.com/i/status/1854109578490782018

 

 

Pnut

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Sep 052021
 
 September 5, 2021  Posted by at 8:42 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  49 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler 1910

 

UK Care Workers Leave En Masse After Being Told To Get Vax Or Quit (RT)
Israel Virus Czar Calls To Begin Readying For 4th Vaccine Dose (ToI)
Give Pupils Covid Jab To Prevent Virus Running Through UK, Expert Says (G.)
The Virus That Stole Christmas (Sky)
Slowly But Surely, The Stupid Is Failing (Denninger)
Vaccine Voodoo (Rickards)
Rolling Stone ‘Horse Dewormer’ Hit-Piece Debunked (ZH)
I Have Not Been Silenced (Malcolm Kendrick)
The Road to Totalitarianism (CJ Hopkins)
China’s Marxist “Profound Revolution” Is Here (Every)

 

 

Good morning from Athens.

 

 

I hear you can deworm your horse with it too.

 

 

Natural Immunity (compiled)
https://twitter.com/i/status/1432342656642867207

 

 

They make £9.30 an hour and then the gov’t comes in demanding they obey or else.

UK Care Workers Leave En Masse After Being Told To Get Vax Or Quit (RT)

Many care workers in the UK who were told to get vaccinated against Covid-19 or lose their jobs have left the industry en masse for better paid positions at companies such as Amazon, creating massive staffing shortages. According to the Guardian, which spoke to several care home industry officials, “three-quarters of care home operators are reporting an increase in staff quitting since April,” with the reasons being “a desire for less stress and for higher pay” and “to avoid mandatory vaccination, which comes into effect on 11 November.” The newspaper reported that many care workers are leaving for other positions in the NHS, where vaccination has not yet been made compulsory, and for unrelated jobs at companies such as Amazon where they have been offered a 30% increase in pay and other incentives.

One care worker left their £9.30 an hour job to work as an Amazon warehouse picker, which pays £13.50 per hour and also offers a £1,000 joining bonus, according to the report. In response to the mass exodus, the industry is now desperately calling on the government to end its mandatory vaccination policy for care workers, warning that a “catastrophe” is on the horizon. National Care Association executive chairman Nadra Ahmed told the Guardian that the National Health Service (NHS) will ultimately “have to pick up this mess” and called on the government to reconsider its policy, while public service union Unison declared that ministers “must immediately repeal ‘no jab, no job’ laws for care home staff in England to avert a staffing crisis that threatens to overwhelm the sector.”

Unison warned that the “draconian” mandatory vaccination policy is “pushing thousands to the brink of quitting care work” and said the government is “sleepwalking into a disaster” by ensuring a massive shortage of staff during a pandemic. The union also revealed that many care workers – who are already underpaid and overworked – “feel totally undervalued” and that “being bullied” into taking a vaccine they didn’t want was “the last straw” for many in the industry.

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How many people still get how idiotic this is?

Israel Virus Czar Calls To Begin Readying For 4th Vaccine Dose (ToI)

Israel’s national coronavirus czar on Saturday called for the country to begin making preparations to eventually administer fourth doses of the coronavirus vaccine. “Given that that the virus is here and will continue to be here, we also need to prepare for a fourth injection,” Salman Zarka told Kan public radio. He did not specify when fourth vaccine shots could eventually be administered. Zarka also said that the next booster shot may be modified to better protect against new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, such as the highly infectious Delta strain. “This is our life from now on, in waves,” he said. Zarka made similar comments in an interview with The Times of Israel last month. “It seems that if we learn the lessons from the fourth wave, we must consider the [possibility of subsequent] waves with the new variants, such as the new one from South America,” he said at the time.


“And thinking about this and the waning of the vaccines and the antibodies, it seems every few months — it could be once a year or five or six months — we’ll need another shot.” Zarka said that he expects that by late 2021 or early 2022, Israel will be giving shots that are especially adapted to cope better with variants. Israel — the first country to officially offer a third dose — began its COVID booster campaign on August 1, rolling it out to all those over the age of 60. It then gradually dropped the eligibility age, expanding it last week to everyone age 12 and up who received the second shot at least five months ago. As of Friday, over 2.5 million Israelis had received the third dose.

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When the JCVI, the experts, say something we don’t like, well, we have other experts. This is full-on Groucho.

Give Pupils Covid Jab To Prevent Virus Running Through UK, Expert Says (G.)

Schoolchildren should be given the Covid vaccine to avoid allowing the virus to “run through the population”, a leading scientific expert has said, after official vaccine advisers concluded the net health benefit in vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds was too small. On Friday, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) stopped short of a recommending vaccinating healthy 12- to 15-year-olds against Covid, saying “the margin of benefit is considered too small” to support universal vaccination. Ministers could now for the first time defy the advice of the scientific watchdog and push ahead, in a move that highlights a growing divide between government and scientific advisers over the next phase of the vaccination programme.

Prof John Edmunds, a member of the government’s scientific advisory group for emergencies, said ministers must consider the “wider effect Covid might have” on unvaccinated children. “It’s a very difficult one, they’re going to take a wider perspective than the JCVI took, I think that’s right,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday. “I think we have to take into consideration the wider effect Covid might have on children and their education and developmental achievements. “In the UK now, it’s difficult to say how many children haven’t been infected but it’s probably about half of them, that’s about 6 million children, so that’s a long way to go if we allow infection just to run through the population, that’s a lot of children who will be infected and that will be a lot of disruption to schools in the coming months.”

The chief medical officers of the UK’s four nations will now weigh up whether or not to give the vaccine to younger schoolchildren, with a decision due within days. The JCVI recommended an expansion to an existing programme of vaccinations for older children with health conditions, including heart disease, type 1 diabetes and severe asthma, increasing the eligible group to about 200,000. But the decision came as a blow to the government, which has in recent days both quietly agitated for a decision from the JCVI, given most schools in England have returned this week, and pointed to existing mass vaccination programmes for such children in places including Israel, the US and Germany.

Immediately after the announcement, Sajid Javid, the health secretary, and his counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, wrote to the chief medical officers in their countries, asking them to “consider the matter from a broader perspective”. Prof Anthony Harnden, the deputy chair of the JVCI, said on Saturday that while past decisions had been “fairly clear cut”, it was “quite reasonable for the government to seek further advice about other aspects” and “go ahead and have a look at it from an educational point of view”. When asked about the possibility of extending the vaccine rollout to younger children, he told BBC Breakfast: “Parents need to understand what the risks are, what the benefits are, and make up their own mind about whether they offer consent or not.”

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Famous last words.

The Virus That Stole Christmas (Sky)

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says by the end of the year, Australians should be able to reunite with family across the country, enjoy a proper summer holiday, and New Year’s Eve celebrations where friends can “hug and kiss” at midnight. Under the national plan, interstate travel will occur once 80 per cent of eligible Australians are double jabbed, Scott Morrison tells Sunday Herald Sun. “We don’t have to fear the virus, but we do have to live with it,” he says. “Holding onto COVID zero will only hold Australians back as the world moves forward.” Mr Morrison described the freedoms once 70 per cent and 80 per cent of eligible Australians roll up their sleeves for the jab.


“Grandparents in the east can hold their new grandchild in the west for the first time,” he tells Sunday Herald Sun. “Kids in the south can be excited for holidays up north, long days on the beach and rollercoasters. “Friends can make plans for New Year’s Eve where they can hug and kiss at midnight. “And everyone can make plans for a family Christmas, with all our loved ones at the dinner table, cracking bon-bons and bad jokes together. “Nobody wants COVID to be the virus that stole Christmas, and we have a plan and the vaccinations available to ensure that’s not the case.” “This means that in coming months, lockdown states can look forward to a return to backyard barbecues, kids’ birthday parties with all of their friends, gathering with the whole family for important moments like christenings, weddings and funerals.”

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“I have a right to be unvaccinated against this virus since neither being not-fat or vaccinated confers a health benefit to others..”

Slowly But Surely, The Stupid Is Failing (Denninger)

As for those who have not been infected the data on personal risk allocation is less-clear. Certainly, Covid-19 can seriously injure or kill you. But, since we now know the vaccines neither prevent infection or passing the virus on to others, and have a wildly higher hazard rate than any of the other commonly-used vaccines the equation is now entirely personal. That is, there is no social or employment and customer-related benefit to be had and thus we are now talking about the same classification of personal choice as is packing on that extra 100lbs or choosing to engage in anal sex, both of which are personally dangerous but do not impact other, non-consenting people except, perhaps, by consuming medical system resources someone else might want or need.

Indeed, the data is that being morbidly obese puts 60% or more on your risk of hospitalization or death from Covid-19. Since every single person who is morbidly obese willingly put every item of food and beverage down their own throat should we not hold them accountable for the load they are now placing on the medical system, especially since we knew this in early 2020 and they willingly and intentionally remained obese rather than lose the weight in the intervening 18 months? If I have a right to be fat (and not be discriminated against on the basis of being fat) then I have a right to be unvaccinated against this virus since neither being not-fat or vaccinated confers a health benefit to others; any benefit, such as may exist, is mine and mine alone.

If you think this is some sort of esoteric argument it is not. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that bodily autonomy is sacrosanct. As just one example you have every right to screw another man in the ass so long as you both are adults and consent, which is why the laws related to such sexual practices across the United States in any public accommodation, housing, employment and similar have been progressively, over the last decades, struck down as unconstitutional. Indeed just last year firing someone for being gay become formally illegal. In short the USSC has, on a consistent basis over the last hundred years, ruled that what you choose in terms of personal risk as a consenting adult is nobody else’s damned business and absent hard, scientific proof that someone else is harmed you are on extremely thin ice legally with an attempt to discriminate on any such basis. The legal record is very clear in this regard; that which used to be able to be proscribed 100 years ago as “immoral” or “dangerous” for a particular person has been repeatedly and almost without exception greatly narrowed as the USSC has considered various cases before it.

I remind you that at the time of Jacobson the Court saw such things very differently and personal choice was much less-respected than it is today. Around the same time as Jacobson, for example, the state legislature of Oregon passed a law allowing forced sterilization of “sexual perverts” — aimed straight at homosexuals and the feeble-minded. Oregon was not alone in passing and enforcing these laws. Do you really think jabbing people was a big deal to the Supremes while the State of Oregon was cutting off people’s balls due to their sexual preference?

Do you think the Judge in Chicago did not take all of this into consideration when he reversed his former ruling that an unvaccinated mother by virtue of refusal lost her rights as a parent? I’d like to see the history on exactly why he originally thought that was a good idea, and if perhaps a little off-the-record urging was involved. Family courts are known for hair-raising rulings and such off-the-record games but this one got reversed awfully-quickly, didn’t it? Perhaps the light went on in his head — since the jabs do not produce sterilizing immunity to the virus and do not interrupt transmission his ruling was that one can be dispossessed of their civil rights for a personal medical, social or political decision with the boundary of impact encompassing nobody but herself. It was likely wise to walk away from that voluntarily before he got slapped in the face on appeal.

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“How many people died because they were denied access to these therapies, especially early on in the disease cycle when treatment is more effective? It’s impossible to say, but they could potentially run into the hundreds of thousands.”

Vaccine Voodoo (Rickards)

The data indicate that the most vaccinated countries have the most cases and deaths per million people, while the least vaccinated countries have the fewest cases and deaths per million people. Israel is providing a useful case study in the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of vaccines. Israel is one of the most heavily vaxxed countries in the world, with over 60% of the population fully vaccinated and almost 100% of the elderly. But now Israel is experiencing a massive increase in infections, including cases among the fully vaxxed. The government has also determined that the vaccines wear off after six months or less and is recommending a third shot for everyone. The problem, of course, is that the third dose will wear off too, so a fourth, fifth or sixth dose will be needed.

And with every new dose comes a new risk of dangerous side effects, including the small but real possibility of death. The vaccinated will be getting boosters for the rest of their lives, and the virus still won’t go away. Meanwhile, effective treatments, including ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, zinc and other inexpensive measures, are being suppressed by the medical establishment. How many people died because they were denied access to these therapies, especially early on in the disease cycle when treatment is more effective? It’s impossible to say, but they could potentially run into the hundreds of thousands.

A new study by the U.K.’s National Health Service and a Canadian biotech company revealed that a nitric oxide nasal spray slashed SARS-CoV-2 viral load by 95% within 24 hours and 99% within 72 hours. If further trials pan out, early treatment with a similar cheap therapeutic could cut serious cases down to almost nothing. But it doesn’t matter. The medical establishment will continue pushing the narrative that only universal vaccination will stop the virus. The media continue to hyperventilate about “cases” but ignore the fact that death rates have declined since January. When one accounts for the 38 million Americans who have survived COVID and already have antibodies, then herd immunity is already here. Data indicate that people who had COVID between January and February of 2021 and recovered have 13 times more immunity to the Delta variant than vaccines provide.

We’re at the stage where we can learn to live with COVID as we do with many other endemic diseases such as the seasonal flu. There’s no reason for fear. But the public health authorities insist that these people with natural immunity must also be vaccinated. It’s not “science.” The zero-COVID policies many governments have pursued are completely unrealistic. The virus goes where it wants. The only real solutions are patience, herd immunity and effective therapies. The time has come to stop living in fear and start treating COVID as an endemic disease that will be with us for a long time, like the seasonal flu or diabetes. Unfortunately, government authorities continue to insist they can control the situation with orders and mandates.

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All it took to find out was one phone call. But nobody at Rolling Stone had a spare dime.

Rolling Stone ‘Horse Dewormer’ Hit-Piece Debunked (ZH)

After Joe Rogan announced that he’d kicked Covid in just a few days using a cocktail of drugs, including Ivermectin – an anti-parasitic prescribed for humans for over 35 years, with over 4 billion doses administered (and most recently as a Covid-19 treatment), the left quickly started mocking Rogan for having taken a ‘horse dewormer’ due to its dual use in livestock. [..] On Friday, Rolling Stone’s Peter Wade took another stab – publishing a hit piece claiming that Oklahoma ERs were overflowing with people ‘overdosing on horse dewormer.’ It was suspect from the beginning. The report, sourced to local Oaklahoma outlet KFOR’s Katelyn Ogle, cites Oklahoma ER doctor Dr. Jason McElyea – claimed that people overdosing on ivermectin horse dewormer are causing emergency rooms to be “so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting” access to health facilities.

“As people take the drug, McElyea said patients have arrived at hospitals with negative reactions like nausea, vomiting, muscle aches, and cramping — or even loss of sight. “The scariest one that I’ve heard of and seen is people coming in with vision loss,” the doctor said.” -Rolling Stone. Except, the article provided zero evidence for McElyea’s claims, causing people to start asking questions. And while neither KFOR or Rolling Stone mention the hospital McElyea worked for, NHS Sequoyah, located in Sallisaw, Oklahoma – just issued a statement disavowing McElyea’s claims, which pops up when you visit their website. It reads:

“Although Dr. Jason McElyea is not an employee of NHS Sequoyah, he is affiliated with a medical staffing group that provides coverage for our emergency room. With that said, Dr. McElyea has not worked at our Sallisaw location in over 2 months. NHS Sequoyah has not treated any patients due to complications related to taking ivermectin. This includes not treating any patients for ivermectin overdose. All patients who have visited our emergency room have received medical attention as appropriate. Our hospital has not had to turn away any patients seeking emergency care. We want to reassure our community that our staff is working hard to provide quality healthcare to all patients. We appreciate the opportunity to clarify this issue and as always, we value our community’s support.”

[..] McElyea is also listed as working at Integris Grove Hospital in Grove, OK as a general family practitioner – not in the ER. A phone call to them provided no insight as to any ivermectin overdoses, however the gentleman who answered the phone sounded quite amused. What’s more, Grove, OK – with a population of 7,129, had just 14 aggravated assaults in all of 2019 according to the FBI’s latest data. We somehow doubt that ‘gunshot victims were lining up outside the ER,’ while just 11 ivermectin related hospital cases have been reported in the entire state since the beginning of May.

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“Very little is referenced, because I can very easily find a contradictory reference to any reference I provide. For each fact, there is an equal and opposite fact.”

I Have Not Been Silenced (Malcolm Kendrick)

Thank you to the many people who have e-mailed me recently and asked if I have been silenced. I have not. I have had letters from Public Health England and the General Medical Council, informing me that I was under investigation for daring to question anything about COVID19, particularly vaccines. The good news is the investigations ended up nowhere, and were closed down. I have also had irate phone calls from doctors, telling me that I must not question vaccination and suchlike. This has been somewhat wearing and has caused me to remain silent for a while and think about things. However, I do know how to play the medical regulations game. Don’t make a statement you cannot reference from a peer-reviewed journal.

Don’t give direct advice to people over the internet. Provide facts, and do not make statements such as ‘vaccines are killing thousands of people.’ Or suchlike. Not that I ever would. My self-appointed role within the COVID19 mayhem, was to search for the truth – as far as it could be found – and to attempt to provide useful information for those who wish to read my blog. The main reason for prolonged silence, and introspection, is that I am not sure I can find the truth. I do not know if it can be found anymore. Today I am unsure what represents a fact, and what has simply been made up. A sad and scary state of affairs. This is not just true of the mainstream and the mainstream media, which has simply decided to parrot all Government and WHO statements without any critical engagement…or thought.

For example, the BBC intones that ‘In the last day, fifty people died within twenty-eight days of a positive COVID19 test…’ Or a hundred, or six. What the hell is this supposed to mean? It means nothing, it is the very definition of scientific meaninglessness. Especially when it seems that very nearly a half of those admitted to hospital with COVID19 were not admitted to hospital with COVID19. They were admitted with something else entirely, then had a positive test whilst in hospital. In short, they were not admitted to hospital with COVID19, and almost certainly did not die of COVID19. They died with a positive COVID19 test. With, not of. But the misinformation is equally a problem for those on the other side. Claims are made for the benefits of Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that simply do not stand up to scrutiny.

Yes, I believe both drugs may provide some benefit, but not the claimed 90% reduction in deaths that I have seen trumpeted. So, I have given up on COVID19. It is a complete mess, and I feel that, without being certain of the ground under my feet, I have nothing to contribute. I too am in danger of starting to make statements that are not true. However, before leaving the area entirely, I would like to make clear some of the things I currently believe to be true, and what I do not believe to be true. If this is of any assistance to anyone. Very little is referenced, because I can very easily find a contradictory reference to any reference I provide. For each fact, there is an equal and opposite fact.

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“And that, my friends, is where we are. We didn’t get here overnight.”

The Road to Totalitarianism (CJ Hopkins)

The time for people to “wake up” is over. At this point, you either join the fight to preserve what is left of those rights, and that sovereignty, or you surrender to the “New Normal,” to global-capitalist totalitarianism. I couldn’t care less what you believe about the virus, or its mutant variants, or the experimental “vaccines.” This isn’t an abstract argument over “the science.” It is a fight … a political, ideological fight. On one side is democracy, on the other is totalitarianism. Pick a fucking side, and live with it. Anyway, here’s where we are at the moment, and how we got here, just the broad strokes. It’s August 2021, and Germany has officially banned demonstrations against the “New Normal” official ideology. Other public assemblies, like the Christopher Street Day demo, one week ago, are still allowed.

The outlawing of political opposition is a classic hallmark of totalitarian systems. It’s also a classic move by the German authorities, which will give them the pretext they need to unleash the New Normal goon squads on the demonstrators tomorrow. In Australia, the military has been deployed to enforce total compliance with government decrees … lockdowns, mandatory public obedience rituals, etc. In other words, it is de facto martial law. This is another classic hallmark of totalitarian systems. In France, restaurant and other business owners who serve “the Unvaccinated” will now be imprisoned, as will, of course, “the Unvaccinated.” The scapegoating, demonizing, and segregating of “the Unvaccinated” is happening in countries all over the world. France is just an extreme example. The scapegoating, dehumanizing, and segregating of minorities — particularly the regime’s political opponents — is another classic hallmark of totalitarian systems.

In the UK, Italy, Greece, and numerous other countries throughout the world, this pseudo-medical social-segregation system is also being introduced, in order to divide societies into “good people” (i.e., compliant) and “bad” (i.e., non-compliant). The “good people” are being given license and encouraged by the authorities and the corporate media to unleash their rage on the “the Unvaccinated,” to demand our segregation in internment camps, to openly threaten to viciously murder us. This is also a hallmark of totalitarian systems. And that, my friends, is where we are. We didn’t get here overnight. Here are just a few of the unmistakable signs along the road to totalitarianism that I have pointed out over the last 17 months.

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Xi is getting bold.

China’s Marxist “Profound Revolution” Is Here (Every)

Political developments in China have been front page news in the financial press over the past few months. Beijing’s crackdown on Ant Financial, largely dismissed by Wall Street, then spread to Didi and on to the broader sectors these championed, fin- and transport-tech; then it grew to encompass swathes of the economy, from tech to health to education to property to private equity to gaming. In terms of tech, there are now sharp limits on IPOs in the US (mirrored from the US side) and new algo/pricing and data regulations that require Beijing to hold on to it; the private tuition field was made non-profit; there has been a sharp reduction in credit to property developers along with the official message that “houses are for living in, not speculation”, and rental increase caps of 5% annually; under-18s have been limited to just 3 hours of computer gaming a week, in allotted slots; and private equity has been cut off from residential investment.

Beijing has also called for curbs on “excessive” income, and for the wealthy and profitable firms “to give back more to society.” (Tencent already pledged $15bn.) This is also matched by: a social campaign against excessive business drinking, “unpatriotic” karaoke songs, and celebrity culture; ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ made obligatory at all schools and universities; and, as Bloomberg puts it, controls on social media financial commentary – “China to Cleanse Online Content that ‘Bad Mouths’ its Economy”. This has all taken place under the slogan of “Common Prosperity”. Going further, commentary reposted by Chinese state media on 30 August stressed these changes are a “profound revolution” sweeping the country, warning anyone who resisted would face punishment.

It added: “This is a return from the capital group to the masses of the people, and this is a transformation from capital-centred to people-centred,” marking a return to the original intention of the Communist Party, and “Therefore, this is a political change, and the people are becoming the main body of this change again, and all those who block this people-centred change will be discarded.” Notably, a WeChat blogger originally made the post, but it was then reposted by major state-run media outlets such as the People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, PLA Daily, CCTV, China Youth Daily, and China News Service. The author also wrote that high housing prices and medical costs will become the next targets of the campaign –which was backed by an official announcement on 1 September– and that the government needed to “combat the chaos of big capital,” adding “The capital market will no longer become a paradise for capitalists to get rich overnight… and public opinion will no longer be in a position worshiping Western culture.”

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Dave Collum: “Yeah. It had nothing to do with those last 2,000 Whoppers and 2,500 bags of Funions…”

Do read the story below the photo.

 

 

God

 

 

 

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Sep 012021
 
 September 1, 2021  Posted by at 9:05 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  88 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Ward in the hospital in Arles 1889

 

Who’s Really Being Hospitalized? (Margulis)
60% of Those Older Than 50 Who Die From Covid Are Double Vaxxed (Mercola)
‘Get Sicker’: Anatomy Of A Failed Policy (Pfeiffer)
There’s An Off Ramp – But It Has A Price (Denninger)
The Case For Covid Vaccine Passports Was Just Demolished (Fee)
Key Vaccine Leaders Departing FDA As Covid-19 Booster Questions Linger (FPhar)
Greek Health Ministry Bracing For ‘Great Exodus’ (K.)
Pharmacy Customers Refuse To Say What Ivermectin Prescription Is For (G.)
Zero Covid, A Once Wildly Popular Ideology, Quietly Faces Extinction (Subs)
Singapore Gives Up Goal of Zero Covid Despite High Vaccination Rate (Gizmodo)
Obama Officials’ Lies About Edward Snowden and Russia (Greenwald)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The stories are collapsing.

Who’s Really Being Hospitalized? (Margulis)

After a battery of testing, my friend was diagnosed with pancreatitis. But it was easier for the hospital bureaucracy to register the admission as a COVID case. Let me explain. This patient had none of the classic symptoms of COVID: No shortness of breath, no fever, no chills, no congestion, no loss of sense of smell or taste, no neurological issues. The only COVID symptoms my friend had were nausea and fatigue, which could also be explained by the surgery. However, nearly three weeks earlier, a COVID test had come back positive. The mainstream media is reporting that severe COVID cases are mainly among unvaccinated people.

An AP headline from June 29 reads: “Nearly all COVID deaths in US are now among unvaccinated.” Another, from the same date: “Vast majority of ICU patients with COVID-19 are unvaccinated, ABC News survey finds.” Is that what’s really going on? It’s certainly not the case in Israel, the first country to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens against the virus. Now it has one of the highest daily infection rates and the majority of people catching the virus (77% to 83%, depending on age) are already vaccinated, according to data collected by the Israeli government. After carefully reviewing the available data, including the safety and efficacy profiles of the mRNA vaccines, my friend had taken a cautious approach. Though a medical doctor who gives vaccines in the office every day, my friend opted to wait and see.

According to WebMD, a “huge number” of frontline hospital workers have also chosen not to get the vaccine. Indeed, various news reports, from California to New York, confirm that up to 40% of health care workers have decided the risks of the vaccines do not outweigh the benefits. After admission, I spoke to the nurse on the COVID ward. She was suited up in a plastic yellow disposable gown, teal gloves, and two masks underneath a recirculating personal respiratory system that buzzed so loudly she could barely hear. The nurse told me that she had gotten both vaccines but she was feeling worried: “Two thirds of my patients are fully vaccinated,” she said. How can there be such a disconnect between what the COVID ward nurse told me and the mainstream media reports?

For one thing, it is very hard to get any kind of accuracy when it comes to actual numbers. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have publicly acknowledged that they do not have accurate data. As reported by the Associated Press, “The CDC itself has not estimated what percentage of hospitalizations and deaths are in fully vaccinated people, citing limitations in the data.” At the same time, data collection is done on a state by state basis. In most states, a person is only considered fully vaccinated fourteen days after they have had the full series of the vaccine. This means that anyone coming into an American hospital who has only had one dose, or who has had both vaccines but had the second one less than two weeks prior, will likely be counted as “unvaccinated.”

So when the South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control released a report about COVID severity on July 23, 2021, they reported higher morbidity and mortality rates in the “not fully vaccinated.” Are these people who have had one vaccine and gotten sick, two vaccines and gotten sick, or no vaccines at all? Without more details, it is impossible to know what is really going on. “We don’t have accurate numbers,” insists Dr. James Neuenschwander, an expert on vaccine safety based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But what we do know, Neuenschwander says, is that the vaccines are not as effective as public health officials told us they would be. “This is a product that’s not doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to stop transmission of this virus and it’s not doing that.”

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“…breakthrough cases are now multiplying at breakneck speed. “There are so many breakthrough infections that they dominate..”

60% of Those Older Than 50 Who Die From Covid Are Double Vaxxed (Mercola)

The oft-repeated refrain right now is that we’re in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” meaning those who have not received the COVID jab make up the bulk of those hospitalized and dying from the Delta variant. For example, August 20, 2021, England’s chief medical officer professor Chris Whitty tweeted: “Four weeks working on a COVID ward makes stark the reality that the majority of our hospitalized COVID patients are unvaccinated and regret delaying. Some are very sick including young adults. Please don’t delay your vaccine.” Curiously, if you take the time to actually look at the data, you’ll find that this blanket statement is rather deceptive. Here’s a graphic published in the Evening Standard, sourced from Public Health England:

As you can see, as of August 15, 2021, 58% of COVID patients admitted to hospital who were over the age of 50 had actually received two doses of COVID injections and 10% had received one dose. So, partially or fully “vaccinated” individuals made up 68% of hospitalizations. Only in the 50 and younger category were a majority, 74%, of hospitalizations among the unvaccinated. Whitty, however, completely neglected to differentiate between the age groups. The same applies to deaths. Unvaccinated only make up the majority of COVID deaths in the under-50 age group. In the over-50 group, the clear majority, 70%, are either partially or fully “vaccinated.” It’s also unclear whether hospitals in the U.K. (and elsewhere) are still designating anyone who is admitted and tests positive with a PCR test as a “COVID patient.” If so, people with broken bones or any number of other health problems who have no symptoms of COVID-19 at all might be unfairly lumped into the “unvaccinated COVID patient” total.


In Israel, where vaccine uptake has been very high due to restrictions on freedom for those who don’t comply,4 data show those who have received the COVID jab are 6.72 times more likely to get infected than people with natural immunity. The fully “vaccinated” also made up the bulk of serious cases and COVID-related deaths in July 2021, as illustrated in the graphs below.8 The red is unvaccinated, yellow refers to partially “vaccinated” and green fully “vaccinated” with two doses. By mid-August, 59% of serious cases were among those who had received two COVID injections,9 mirroring the data coming out of the U.K.

In an August 16, 2021, Science article,10 Israeli Minister of Health Nitzan Horowitz is quoted saying the nation has entered a “critical time” in the race against the pandemic. Horowitz allegedly was given a third booster shot August 13, 2021, the day they began offering a third dose to people over the age of 50. From Public Health England’s data, it seems clear that the COVID shots are failing to protect people over the age of 50 in the U.K. as well, so it’s probably only a matter of time before booster shots are rolled out there too. And, provided the COVID injections are the same irrespective of country, there’s every reason to assume the same trends will emerge in other countries, including the U.S.


According to Science magazine, breakthrough cases are now multiplying at breakneck speed. “There are so many breakthrough infections that they dominate and most of the hospitalized patients are actually vaccinated,” Uri Shalit, a bioinformatician at the Israel Institute of Technology told Science. Nearly 1 million Israelis over the age of 50 have now received a third booster of Pfizer’s mRNA shot. Time will tell whether this will worsen the rate of breakthrough cases or tame it. Dvir Aran, a biomedical data scientist at the Israel Institute of Technology doesn’t seem very hopeful, telling Science the surge is already so steep, “even if you get two-thirds of those 60-plus [boosted], it’s just gonna give us another week, maybe two weeks until our hospitals are flooded” again.

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“Existing drugs could have relegated COVID to a manageable outpatient disease by the first half of 2021.”

‘Get Sicker’: Anatomy Of A Failed Policy (Pfeiffer)

Throughout COVID, the media has stepped into line like good soldiers in a war on disease, failing, in the process, to do its job. It gave government a pass on the dearth of outpatient care. It fostered the fiction that aggressively treating COVID is a right-wing construct. It dismissed vaccine side effects as rare. It enabled vast censorship. News outlets might be excused for initially minimizing falling vaccine efficacy in this dynamic situation. But it cannot be excused for its politicization of and disdain for generic early treatments. As a mainstream community journalist for decades, with two books and many awards, I am appalled at what this profession has become.

Existing drugs could have relegated COVID to a manageable outpatient disease by the first half of 2021. We have promising generics: ivermectin primarily but also fluvoxamine, hydroxychloroquine, budesonide and protocols that employ them with zinc, Vitamin D and the like. They have been suppressed around the globe, as countries – mainly, but not all, in the first world — have caved under pressure to conform to the U.S.-hatched strategy. In the white-hot frenzy of pack journalism, doctors’ licenses have been threatened, and reputations imperiled, including of a prison doctor who used ivermectin and kept inmates out of hospitals. Will nursing home practitioners, who told me of their own ivermectin success, be next in this witch hunt? Indeed, somehad used it to control scabies and found a remarkable drop in COVID.

As the globe is buttressed by new variants, vaccine efficacy is being tested and so is that of ivermectin. Leading proponents are adjusting doses and adding to treatment cocktails as part of a logical ongoing effort: Use emerging science and clinical experience to learn what works. Although off-label use of approved drugs is well established — accounting for 21 percent of office prescriptions and half of oncology drugs – doctors have instead been told to follow only a few, patented, government-sanctioned treatments, available only in hospitals. Who could blame them, in this heated environment, for not practicing medicine but following orders? Nonetheless, the forces of commerce and incompetence that have pushed a false narrative and demonized treatment for COVID must be held to account.

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“The fifth jab would put the risk of getting screwed at ten percent, which is approximately the rate of death from the original SARS and the sixth would be odds-on as literal suicide.”

There’s An Off Ramp – But It Has A Price (Denninger)

[..] all of the current vaccines deliberately produce that spike protein, which by itself causes disease, specifically clotting-related disease, in your body. Deliberately causing your body to produce that pathogen (which then elicits the antibody response) is how all of them work. This means there is no safe way to vaccinate against this disease because introducing the spike into your body, no matter how you do it, inherently runs the risk of serious clotting-based disorders. You might or might not get nailed but there is no avoiding the risk. That same risk is what kills you, most of the time, if you actually get Covid-19 and die but the premise that you avoid that risk when taking a jab is a lie.

You cannot; the risk is inherent in introducing the spike into your circulation and there is no way around that with an IM injection because the muscles of the body are very well-perfused (that is, there’s a lot of blood flow in them) even if the person who performs the injection does not hit a blood vessel, and they might. These facts are not up for debate on a scientific basis any longer. They also fully explain the myocarditis, pericarditis and myriad other so-called “rare” events that occur with these jabs such as strokes, heart attacks and other clotting-based disorders. In addition the data is that the 2nd shot in the 2-shot series is much more dangerous than the first, which implies an exponential expansion of risk. Whether that expansion of risk bleeds back off over a couple of months or so is entirely unknown as it has not been studied.

Without a data set of hundreds of thousands (so as to get statistical significance) and both baseline and follow-up d-Dimer testing, at minimum, we will never be able to put numbers on this, nor get a decay rate on the risk if it decays, and nobody is doing those studies. That’s the bad news; if you take repeated shots and the risk does not bleed off then eventually you will kill yourself. If, for example, the risk on the first shot is 1/100,000 (extremely rare), on the second 1/10,000 (that’s a bad pattern) and the risk does not bleed off over the space of three or four months then the risk from the third is 1/1,000 (that’s 0.1% and quite nasty) while the risk from a fourth jab rises to 1% at which point you’re in the ballpark for a severely morbid person when it comes to Covid-19 infection itself killing them.

The fifth jab would put the risk of getting screwed at ten percent, which is approximately the rate of death from the original SARS and the sixth would be odds-on as literal suicide. How many jabs did you say you’re willing to risk taking again? You cannot get your health back if you ruin it by being stupid. The younger you are the worse the risk is in terms of years of enjoyable life lost. To take that sort of risk when you’re 85, fat, diabetic, you have an almost-10% risk of death in the next year from all causes and the Coof is 10% likely to kill you is very different than to take that same risk to your health when you’re 17, male, have a BMI under 25, there’s not a damn thing wrong with you medically, your all-cause risk of death (most of it by violence) is 7/10,000 and your risk, by the CDC’s numbers, of Covid-19 killing you if infected is approximately 1/100,000.

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Never was one.

The Case For Covid Vaccine Passports Was Just Demolished (Fee)

A newly published medical study found that infection from COVID-19 confers considerably longer-lasting and stronger protection against the Delta variant of the virus than vaccines. “The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a ‘Don’t try this at home’ label,” the Scientific American reported Thursday. “The newly released data show people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were much less likely than vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms from it, or become hospitalized with serious COVID-19.” Put another way, vaccinated individuals were 27 times more likely to get a symptomatic COVID infection than those with natural immunity from COVID.

The findings come as many governments around the world are demanding citizens acquire “vaccine passports” to travel. New York City, France, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec and British Columbia are among those who have recently embraced vaccine passports. Meanwhile, Australia has floated the idea of making higher vaccination rates a condition of lifting its lockdown in jurisdictions, while President Joe Biden is considering making interstate travel unlawful for people who have not been vaccinated for COVID-19. Vaccine passports are morally dubious for many reasons, not the least of which is that freedom of movement is a basic human right. However, vaccine passports become even more senseless in light of the new findings out of Israel and revelations from the CDC, some say.

Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff said research showing that natural immunity offers exponentially more protection than vaccines means vaccine passports are both unscientific and discriminatory, since they disproportionately affect working class individuals. “Prior COVID disease (many working class) provides better immunity than vaccines (many professionals), so vaccine mandates are not only scientific nonsense, they are also discriminatory and unethical,” Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist, observed on Twitter.

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Very odd moment: boosters.

Key Vaccine Leaders Departing FDA As Covid-19 Booster Questions Linger (FPhar)

Two key vaccine leaders will leave the FDA this fall, just as the agency faces key decisions over COVID-19 booster shots and as variants take a bite out of the shots’ efficacy. FDA Office of Vaccines Research and Review Director Marion Gruber, Ph.D. and Deputy Director Phillip Krause, M.D. will depart the agency. Both have been with the agency for decades and have been pivotal in the United States’ effort to authorize COVID-19 vaccines to fight the pandemic. The news was first reported by Biocentury. Gruber will leave the agency on Oct. 31 and Krause’s last day will be sometime in November, according to a letter shared by the FDA with Fierce Pharma. The letter was signed by Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, under which the vaccine research office sits.

Marks will serve as acting director of the OVRR for now as a search begins for a new chief. An acting director will be announced later. “[Gruber’s] contributions throughout her career have been immeasurable, but never more so than during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Marks said. “Her leadership in the center’s efforts to authorize three COVID-19 vaccines, and more recently to approve one of those vaccines, ensured that the vaccines met the high standards the public has come to expect from FDA, and has positively impacted the public health in the U.S. and across the globe.” [..] For his part, Krause was responsible for liaising with public health officials around the world to “address critical vaccine-related issues,” according to Marks. “His keen insight and experience in addressing a wide variety of challenges will truly be missed,” the letter said.

The departures are the latest high-profile officials to leave the key federal agency that still lacks a permanent leader. Janet Woodcock is leading the agency on an acting basis and will not be considered for the commissioner job permanently. Nevertheless, the FDA expressed confidence that the vaccine work would go on. “We are confident in the expertise and ability of our staff to continue our critical public health work, including evaluating COVID-19 vaccines,” an FDA spokesperson said. Gruber and Krause are leaving the agency following criticism of the White House’s decision to leap frog over the agency to recommend COVID-19 booster shots. The move to start boosters next month has been blasted by the World Health Organization, which questions the data to support the need for a third shot—especially as poorer nations continue to struggle with getting first shots to people.

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Note: in the top article, WebMD is cited as saying in the US, up to 40% of health care workers have chosen not to get the vaccine. But Greece claims “more than 90% of the doctors and 80% of the nurses had been vaccinated”.

Greek Health Ministry Bracing For ‘Great Exodus’ (K.)

With the deadline for the mandatory vaccination of health workers expiring on Wednesday, the Heath Ministry is preparing for an imminent “great exodus” of staff due to the suspensions that will ensue with a wide array of preemptive measures to fill the gaps and to ensure that services are fully operational. These measures include a reshuffle of healthcare workers within hospitals, mergers of clinics and departments, the replacement of those suspended with auxiliary staff and partnerships with the private sector for support services such as catering, care etc. Wednesday is the last day for staff to get at least the first dose of vaccine against Covid-19 so as to avoid suspension as of tomorrow. The government has insisted the relevant legislation for mandatory vaccinations will be strictly implemented.


Those who are exempt from the precepts of the legislation are obviously those that have already been vaccinated and workers who have been infected with the coronavirus within the last six months. Those who do not fall into these categories and have not received approval for exemption due to health issues by the competent committees will be suspended. Moreover, as clarified by the former deputy minister of health, Vassilis Kontozamanis, based on the payroll system in the public sector, which provides advance payment of earnings every two weeks, the government will request that they return this amount of salary as unduly paid. Speaking on the radio station 9.84 on Tuesday, Secretary General of Health Services Yiannis Kotsiopoulos estimated that about 10,000 health workers will not continue working in the National Health System. According to the most recent data, more than 90% of the doctors and 80% of the nurses had been vaccinated against Covid-19, while the percentages are lower for the rest of the staff.

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The Guardian campaign vs ivermectin. Check the picture they use.

Pharmacy Customers Refuse To Say What Ivermectin Prescription Is For (G.)

Australian pharmacists have reported an increasing number of people arriving with prescriptions for the drug ivermectin, but refusing to say what it will be used for. The Pharmaceutical Society of Australia said its members were encountering resistance from some customers when asked why they were seeking ivermectin. “PSA is aware that some pharmacists have experienced an increase in presentations of prescriptions for ivermectin, including where the patient is unwilling or unable to discuss what they are being used for,” a PSA spokesperson said. The Therapeutic Goods Administration on Monday said there had been a shortage of Stromectol 3mg ivermectin tablets in August.


The drug is typically used in humans for treating river blindness, scabies and roundworm infections, but has increasingly been sought as a treatment for Covid-19, despite not being approved for that use in Australia. The TGA also noted there had been a tenfold increase in detections of the drug being imported into Australia, prompting the regulator to warn against using the drug for Covid-19 treatment, stating there is “insufficient evidence” that it works and it may be dangerous to health. The university behind the initial lab trial for ivermectin used to treat Covid-19 has also warned against people self-medicating with the drug or buying drugs meant for livestock. Much of the initial focus on the drug as a Covid-19 treatment stemmed from an April 2020 lab trial at Monash University in Melbourne, where ivermectin was found to have killed the Covid-19 virus in a cell culture within 48 hours.

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“New Zealand is fully trapped in the Zero COVID death spiral, and it has no way out of it for the foreseeable future.”

Zero Covid, A Once Wildly Popular Ideology, Quietly Faces Extinction (Subs)

The Zero COVID ideology began with a Chinese government lie. Zero COVID once recruited almost unanimous advocates in world governments, “global health” organizations, and “public health experts” far and wide. Yet today, just 18 months after its first implementation, the Zero COVID ideology is so rare and so unpopular that you have to travel to remote parts of Oceania or within the confines of an elite American liberal arts university in order to find it. Zero COVID, the idea that demands the total elimination of a virus from a nation state, was spawned as part of a disinformation operation by the Chinese Communist Party in Wuhan, China. In early 2020, Chinese authorities declared the virus that causes COVID-19 had been successfully eliminated from the population through brute force restrictions such as lockdowns, masks, and using the power of a Police State to force people to stay inside their homes for an indefinite period of time.

When COVID-19 spread far and wide, almost every nation in the world (other than rare holdouts such as Sweden and Belarus) implemented the aforementioned draconian policies in an attempt to “stop the spread” and eliminate the virus from the world. In the beginning, even questioning these baseless, pseudoscientific ideas was tantamount to being something of a bioterrorist. Through much of 2020, yours truly was constantly castigated by actors across the political spectrum for asking about the wisdom of using the power of government to wage an elimination war against a submicroscopic infectious particle. Zero COVID was science. Zero COVID was truth. Zero COVID superseded every constitutional protection out there, because no right was too important when a virus was out there.

In 2020, COVID Zero’s membership roster was probably in the billions. Now, the adherents of the COVID Zero ideology are facing imminent extinction. The 18 month effort to contain COVID-19 was not only unsuccessful, it brought unprecedented economic and societal disaster in addition to the unconstrained virus problem. Today, few, if any governments have fully owned up to their failures. Most have taken the scapegoat approach, and without evidence, have blamed “the unvaccinated,” the “highly contagious” Delta variant, or some combination of the two to justify their catastrophic blunders. Over the past few months, the remains of the Zero COVID damn broke in the few nation state holdouts where rulers still adhered to the Zero COVID ideology.

In Australia, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere around the world, the lid on the pressure cooker came flying off, and local populations saw skyrocketing COVID numbers. Now, every country in the world but one has quietly, through their own policies, accepted the failure of the “global elites’” Zero COVID virus elimination strategy. Read some of the media stories that lauded Zero COVID “success story” nations, and you’ll find that they’ve come to age like months-old milk. New Zealand, the one Zero COVID country that remains, is currently under another hard lockdown, which has recently been extended until at least mid September. The country is now almost 2 years into its self siege, in which the government has decreed that the vast majority of citizens cannot enter or exit the country. As for a reopening timeline, Auckland no longer has one. New Zealand is fully trapped in the Zero COVID death spiral, and it has no way out of it for the foreseeable future.

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Bit late.

Singapore Gives Up Goal of Zero Covid Despite High Vaccination Rate (Gizmodo)

Singapore has decided to give up on the dream of covid-zero and will instead learn to “live with the virus,” according to the country’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong on Sunday. The decision comes despite the fact that Singapore has one of the highest covid-19 vaccination rates in the world, with 80% of the adult population fully vaccinated—second only to the country of Malta’s 82%. Singapore, a country of roughly 5.7 million people, has been among a handful of countries that have pursued a strategy of completely eliminating covid-19, rather than just suppressing the virus. Other covid-zero countries over the past year have included New Zealand, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, and Australia.

“It is no longer possible to bring covid-19 cases down to zero, even if we lock down for a long time. Therefore, we must prepare for covid-19 to become endemic, like the flu or chicken pox,” Lee said on Sunday during a speech to commemorate the country’s National Day, according to a transcript from the Strait Times. “Fortunately, with vaccination and added precautions, we can live with the virus and become ‘Covid resilient’,” Lee continued. Singapore has done exceptionally well during our global health crisis, reporting roughly 67,000 cases of covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, and just 55 deaths. And Singapore was reporting fewer than 30 cases per day for much of 2021 until a surge of cases in July that saw the country averaging 150 cases per day.

But Loong promises his government isn’t giving up on suppressing the virus, they’re just abandoning the covid-zero model. “We may have to tap on the brakes from time to time, but we want to avoid having to slam on the brakes hard. So in the next phase, we will move step by step. Not in one big bang like in some countries but cautiously and progressively, feeling our way forward,” Lee said. That “big bang” is likely a veiled reference to countries like the UK, which celebrated a “freedom day” in July where all covid-19 restrictions were lifted, only to see a surge in cases and deaths. Case numbers in the UK have started to plateau again, thanks largely to the vast majority of people in the region having covid-19 antibodies either through vaccination or previous infection, but cases are still very high at roughly 25,000 per day. The U.S. has also seen a surge of infections recently, with a seven-day average of about 157,000 new cases each day.

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“It is hard to overstate how dispositively Rhodes’ own book proves that Obama officials generally, and Rhodes specifically, lied blatantly and cavalierly to the public about what happened..”

Obama Officials’ Lies About Edward Snowden and Russia (Greenwald)

Ever since Edward Snowden received asylum from Russia in 2013, Obama officials have repeatedly maligned his motives and patriotism by citing his “choice” to take up residence there. It has long been clear that this narrative was a lie: Snowden, after meeting with journalists in Hong Kong, intended only to transit through Moscow and then Havana on his way to seek asylum in Latin America. He was purposely prevented from leaving Russia — trapped in the Moscow airport — by the very Obama officials who then cynically weaponized his presence there to imply he was a civil-liberties hypocrite for “choosing” to live in such a repressive country or, even worse, a Kremlin agent or Russian spy.

But now we have absolute, definitive proof that Snowden never intended to stay in Russia but was deliberately prevented from leaving by the same Obama officials who exploited the predicament which they created. The proof was supplied unintentionally in the memoir of one of Obama’s senior national security advisers, Ben Rhodes, entitled The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. It is hard to overstate how dispositively Rhodes’ own book proves that Obama officials generally, and Rhodes specifically, lied blatantly and cavalierly to the public about what happened: a level of sustained and conscious lying that can be explained only by sociopathy.

The memoir of Rhodes, now appropriately an MSNBC contributor, is an incredibly self-serving homage to himself that repeatedly attempts to demonstrate his own importance and accomplishments. The passage about Rhodes’ conduct regarding Snowden is very much aligned with those goals. While repeatedly emphasizing how traumatic the Snowden revelations were for the Obama administrations, Rhodes boasts of the crucial role he played in preventing Snowden from leaving Russia as the NSA whistleblower was desperately attempting to do so — exactly the opposite of what people like Rhodes and Hillary Clinton were telling the public about Snowden.

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May 042018
 


Herri met de Bles c1510-after 1555 Saint Jerome medidating

 

Fed’s QE Unwind Accelerates Sharply (WS)
The Root of It All (Batnick)
Tesla Is A Zombie Company (F.)
With No Letup In Home Prices, The California Exodus Surges (MW)
Demand For US Soybeans Remains Strong Despite China (CNBC)
US Charges VW Ex-CEO With Conspiracy And Fraud (G.)
Mueller’s Questions for Trump Show Folly of Special-Counsel Appointments (NR)
Why We Need To Be Propagandized For Our Own Good (CJ)
Neocons Form Brand New Russia-Bashing ‘Think’ Tank (RI)
UK Pushes To Strengthen Anti-Russia Alliance (G.)
Nobel Prize For Literature Postponed Amid Swedish Academy Turmoil (BBC)
Jacinda Ardern Pledges Shelter For All Homeless People Within Four Weeks (G.)

 

 

As most voices seem convinced QT would be madness.

Fed’s QE Unwind Accelerates Sharply (WS)

The QE Unwind is ramping up toward cruising speed. The Fed’s balance sheet for the week ending May 2, released this afternoon, shows a total drop of $104 billion since the beginning of the QE Unwind in October – to the lowest level since June 11, 2014. During the years and iterations of QE, the Fed acquired $3.4 trillion in Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities. The mortgages underlying those MBS are guaranteed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. The “balance sheet normalization,” as the Fed calls it, was nudged into motion last October. But the pace accelerates every quarter until it reaches up to $50 billion a month in Q4 this year.

This would trim the balance sheet by up to $420 billion this year, and by up to $600 billion in 2019 and every year going forward, until the Fed considers the balance sheet to be adequately “normalized” — or until something big breaks, whichever comes first. [..] The balance of Treasury securities fell by $17.6 billion in April. This is up 60% from March, when $11 billion “rolled off.” Since the beginning of the QE-Unwind, $70 billion in Treasuries “rolled off.” Now at $2,395 billion, the balance of Treasuries has hit the lowest level since June 18, 2014.

[..] Residential MBS are different from regular bonds. Holders receive principal payments on a regular basis as the underlying mortgages are paid down or are paid off. At maturity, the remaining principal is paid off. Over the years, to keep the MBS balance from declining, the New York Fed’s Open Market Operations (OMO) has been continually buying MBS. But settlement of those trades occurs two to three months later. The Fed books the trades on an as-settled basis. The time lag between the trade and settlement causes the large weekly fluctuations on the Fed’s balance sheet. And it also delays when MBS that “rolled off” actually disappear from the balance sheet.

[..] Total assets on the Fed’s balance sheet dropped by $30 billion in April, and by $104 billion since the beginning of the QE-Unwind, to $4,356 billion. This is the lowest since June 11, 2014. Note that total assets are now down by $160 billion from the peak in January 2015:

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“The poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes. Everybody knows.”

The Root of It All (Batnick)

Steven Pinker wrote, “In almost every year from 1992 through 2015, an era in which the rate of violent crime plummeted, a majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising. In late 2015, large majorities in eleven developed countries said that “the world is getting worse.” But crime isn’t rising, and the world is objectively getting better. And while life is improving at the macro level, at the micro level, people aren’t feeling so great. So what gives? We tend to expect the worst as a way to insulate ourselves from disappointment. Life is not about good or bad, it’s about better or worse, so if things don’t turn out as bad as we imagine, we’re pleasantly surprised. If you were asked to think about how your life could improve, a few things might come to mind.

But imagine how your life could get worse, and a barrage of negative possibilities fills your brain. The risk and reward of every day life is asymmetrical. This is why being a pessimist feels safe and being an optimist feels reckless. [..] While the news certainly isn’t doing anyone any favors, there are legitimate reasons why people don’t feel like things are getting better. For too many, they aren’t. The chart below shows the change in real income since 1980. This chart is the root of all the negative things facing our society. People in the top 20% saw their income increase by 60%. People in the bottom 20% saw their income rise by just 5% over the same time. As Leonard Cohen said, “The poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes. Everybody knows.”

Real income increased 38% from 1980-2016, or just 0.87% per year, and 70% of that increase went to people in the top 20%. Things are better, especially around the world, but in our country, way too many people are getting left behind. Extreme poverty is collapsing, but relative poverty is exploding, and everything in life is relative. If things don’t feel better than they were two hundred years ago, it’s because people compare themselves to their neighbors, not to their ancestors.

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As simple as that.

Tesla Is A Zombie Company (F.)

Tesla’s quarter was terrible from a financial perspective, as I had expected. The controlling figure I use, operating cash flow (operating loss plus depreciation minus capital expenditures,) was reported as -$836 million in the quarter, which very nearly approximates one quarter of 2017’s full year cash outflow of $3.4 billion. Things are not improving at Tesla from a financial perspective, and the second quarter is likely to be just as bad as the first. For the third consecutive quarter, Tesla posted negative EBITDA (-$180 million) and if this were any other company, there would be an active death watch on the Street. Tesla’s bonds have dropped sharply in today’s trading, now quoted at 87 cents on the dollar.

This is not surprising given that Tesla is not even remotely close to earning enough profit to cover its interest expense, which management estimated would be $160 million in the second quarter. Tesla added $346 million to its now $10 billion debt pile in the quarter, and the management’s weasel-worded projection of “positive net income excluding non-cash stock based compensation in Q3 and Q4” would still leave Tesla short of covering its debt service costs, by my calculations. So, from a financial perspective, Tesla is a zombie company. There is simply no justification for Tesla’s current market capitalization of $47.2 billion, and the market eventually figures these things out. It’s actually been a slow burn for Tesla shares, not a plummet, but that can be just as painful.

On September 12, 2014, Teslashares closed at $279.20 and the Nasdaq Composite closed at 4567.60. As of this writing, Tesla is trading at $279.04 and the Nasdaq is trading at 7011.00. So that’s where the value destruction Musk has wrought is evident. His shares are down slightly in a period in which his peer companies have collectively risen 53.5%.

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Housing bubbles break communities.

With No Letup In Home Prices, The California Exodus Surges (MW)

Over a million more people moved out of California from 2006 to 2016 than moved in, according to a new report, due mainly to the high cost of housing that hits lower-income people the hardest. “A strong economy can also be dysfunctional,” noted the report, a project of Next 10 and Beacon Economics. Housing costs are much higher in California than in other states, yet wages for workers in the lower income brackets aren’t. And the state attracts more highly-educated high-earners who can afford pricey homes. There are many reasons for the housing crunch, but the lack of new construction may be the most significant.

According to the report, from 2008 to 2017, an average of 24.7 new housing permits were filed for every 100 new residents in California. That’s well below the national average of 43.1 permits per 100 people. If this trend persists, the researchers argued, analysts forecast the state will be about 3 million homes short by 2025. California homeowners spend an average of 21.9% of their income on housing costs, the 49th worst in the nation, while renters spend 32.8%, the 48th worst. The median rent statewide in 2016 was $1,375, which is 40.2% higher than the national average. And the median home price was — wait for it — more than double that of the national average.

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Globally, supple has a hard time keeping up with demand. Everybody involved knows this.

Demand For US Soybeans Remains Strong Despite China (CNBC)

Demand for U.S. soybeans remains strong, regardless of worries China could target the crop in retaliation over Trump administration tariffs. China has canceled several shipments of U.S. soybeans in the last month, raising questions over whether the country is taking preemptive action against the U.S. by reducing purchases. But analysts say the reduction is a minor amount and is not that surprising from a seasonal perspective. The “U.S. accounts for 37 percent of total soybean exports throughout the world. Beyond Brazil, there’s really nobody else,” said Rich Nelson, director of research at Allendale, an agricultural market research and trading firm. “Despite the trade concerns, there’s really nobody else. You’re just simply not going to have a massive decline in U.S. soybean exports,” he said.

Chinese cancellations of U.S. soybean orders for the week ended April 26 resulted in a decline of 133,700 metric tons in net sales to China, USDA Foreign Agricultural Service data showed Thursday. But 66,000 metric tons of those soybeans were sent to Vietnam instead, the data showed. Meanwhile, the U.S. sold 82,700 metric tons of soybeans in new sales to Mexico, 68,800 to Taiwan, 60,000 to Argentina and 52,600 to the Netherlands. Although Argentina is the third-largest exporter of soybeans, a severe drought has reduced production by 7 million tons to 40 million, according to USDA estimates. “That just goes to show we’re not dependent on China for soybean exports,” said Michael Stumo, head of Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nonprofit representing the interests of those in manufacturing, agriculture and labor unions.

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Germany doesn’t extradite its citizens.

US Charges VW Ex-CEO With Conspiracy And Fraud (G.)

US authorities have charged Volkswagen’s former chief executive officer Martin Winterkorn with conspiracy and wire fraud in relation to the car company’s efforts to cheat on US diesel emissions tests. Winterkorn, who resigned in 2015 as the scandal was revealed, conspired to defraud the US and violate the Clean Air Act, federal laws designed to control air pollution, according to an indictment unsealed on Thursday in a Michigan federal court. Five other VW executives were also charged in the indictment. He becomes the highest-ranking executive to be charged over “dieselgate” – a scheme where VW used software to trick government emissions testers.

“The indictment unsealed today alleges that Volkswagen’s scheme to cheat its legal requirements went all the way to the top of the company,” said US attorney general Jeff Sessions. “These are serious allegations and we’ll prosecute this case to the full extent of the law.” When news of the scheme broke Winterkorn said he was “stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group”. He denied any knowledge of the scandal – which was used to evade pollution limits on nearly 600,000 diesel vehicles. Last December, Oliver Schmidt, a senior Volkswagen executive, was jailed for seven years and fined $400,000 for his part in the scheme. Schmidt, who had returned to Germany, was arrested while on holiday in Florida. VW pleaded guilty as a corporation in March, agreeing to pay a record $4.3bn in fines.

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“If Bob Mueller wants that kind of control over the executive branch, he should run for president. Otherwise, he is an inferior executive official who has been given a limited license — ultimately, by the chief executive — to investigate crime. If he doesn’t have an obvious crime, he has no business inventing one, much less probing his superior’s judgment. He should stand down.”

Mueller’s Questions for Trump Show Folly of Special-Counsel Appointments (NR)

I am assuming the authenticity of the questions that Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly wants to ask President Trump. The questions indicate that, after a year of his own investigation and two years of FBI investigation, the prosecutor lacks evidence of a crime. Yet he seeks to probe the chief executive’s motives and thought processes regarding exercises of presidential power that were lawful, regardless of one’s view of their wisdom. If Bob Mueller wants that kind of control over the executive branch, he should run for president. Otherwise, he is an inferior executive official who has been given a limited license — ultimately, by the chief executive — to investigate crime. If he doesn’t have an obvious crime, he has no business inventing one, much less probing his superior’s judgment. He should stand down.

The questions, reported by the New York Times, underscore that the special counsel is a pernicious institution. Trump should decline the interview. More to the point, the Justice Department should not permit Mueller to seek to interrogate the president on so paltry and presumptuous a showing.

When should a president be subject to criminal investigation? It is a bedrock principle that no one is above the law. The Framers made clear that this includes the president. But, like everything else, bedrock principles do not exist in a vacuum. They vie with other principles. Two competing considerations are especially significant here. First, our law-enforcement system is based on prosecutorial discretion. Under this principle, the desirability of prosecuting even a palpable violation of law must be balanced against other societal needs and desires. We trust prosecutors to perform this cost-benefit analysis with modesty about their mission and sensitivity to the disruption their investigations cause.

Second, the president is the most essential official in the world’s most consequential government. That government’s effectiveness is necessarily compromised if the president is under the cloud of an investigation. Not only are the president’s personal credibility and capability diminished; such an investigation discourages talented people from serving in an administration, further undermining good governance. The country is inexorably harmed because a suspect administration’s capacity to execute the laws and pursue the interests of the United States is undermined.

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Caitlin Johnstone on the Atlantic Council.

Why We Need To Be Propagandized For Our Own Good (CJ)

I sometimes try to get establishment loyalists to explain to me exactly why we’re all meant to be terrified of this “Russian propaganda” thing they keep carrying on about. What is the threat, specifically? That it makes the public less willing to go to war with Russia and its allies? That it makes us less trusting of lying, torturing, coup-staging intelligence agencies? Does accidentally catching a glimpse of that green RT logo turn you to stone like Medusa, or melt your face like in Raiders of the Lost Ark? “Well, it makes us lose trust in our institutions,” is the most common reply. Okay. So? Where’s the threat there? We know for a fact that we’ve been lied to by those institutions. Iraq isn’t just something we imagined. We should be skeptical of claims made by western governments, intelligence agencies and mass media. How specifically is that skepticism dangerous?

Trying to get answers to such questions from rank-and-file empire loyalists is like pulling teeth, and they are equally lacking in the mass media who are constantly sounding the alarm about Russian propaganda. All I see are stories about Russia funding environmentalists (the horror!), giving a voice to civil rights activists (oh noes!), and retweeting articles supportive of Jeremy Corbyn (think of the children!). At its very most dramatic, this horrifying, dangerous epidemic of Russian propaganda is telling westerners to be skeptical of what they’re being told about the Skripal poisoning and the alleged Douma gas attack, both of which do happen to have some very significant causes for skepticism.

When you try to get down to the brass tacks of the actual argument being made and demand specific details about the specific threats we’re meant to be worried about, there aren’t any to be found. Nobody’s been able to tell me what specifically is so dangerous about westerners being exposed to the Russian side of international debates, or of Russians giving a platform to one or both sides of an American domestic debate. Even if every single one of the allegations about Russian bots and disinformation are true (and they aren’t), where is the actual clear and present danger? No one can say. No one, that is, except the Atlantic Council.

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The entire MSM can’t get the job done?!

Neocons Form Brand New Russia-Bashing ‘Think’ Tank (RI)

A group of neocon heartthrobs have banded together with an eclectic array of Russiagaters to form a visionary organization committed to protecting Western democracy. You can also pre-order their book, according to their website. Chaired by pompous chess wizard turned Kremlinologist Garry Kasparov, the brand-new Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI) is the latest three-letter-initialism non-profit devoted to “the defense of democratic freedom and prosperity.” The trailblazing think tank has already sent shockwaves through Washington, DC and every European capital. Celebrated war cheerleader Max Boot, who serves on RDI’s board of directors, announced the creation of this highly original organization in a Washington Post op-ed.

Interestingly, the unveiling started with a laundry list of 10 other groups that are already “protesting Trump and championing democracy.” So why does the world need RDI, then? Because RDI is different – some might even say “special.” Unlike the dozens of other well-financed bastions of status-quo thinking, RDI aims to “unite both the center-left and center-right” by promoting “liberty, democracy and sanity in an age of discord.” And where will this much-needed sanity come from? From RDI’s all-star team of important intellectuals and free thinkers, of course – some of whom just happen to be really tight with the other 10 groups mentioned in Boot’s WaPo piece. Dear Mr. Boot: does fighting Putin with the Committee to Investigate Russia allow enough spare time to fight Putin with the Renew Democracy Initiative? Curious minds want to know.

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It’s contagious.

UK Pushes To Strengthen Anti-Russia Alliance (G.)

The UK will use a series of international summits this year to call for a comprehensive strategy to combat Russian disinformation and urge a rethink over traditional diplomatic dialogue with Moscow, following the Kremlin’s aggressive campaign of denials over the use of chemical weapons in the UK and Syria. British diplomats plan to use four major summits this year – the G7, the G20, Nato and the European Union – to try to deepen the alliance against Russia hastily built by the Foreign Office after the poisoning of the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in March. “The foreign secretary regards Russia’s response to Douma and Salisbury as a turning point and thinks there is international support to do more,” a Whitehall official said.

“The areas the UK are most likely to pursue are countering Russian disinformation and finding a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons.” Former Foreign Office officials admit that an institutional reluctance to call out Russia once permeated British diplomatic thinking, but say that after the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, that attitude is evaporating. A cross-party alliance in parliament has developed which sees the question of Russian corruption no longer through the prism of finance, but instead as a security and foreign policy threat, requiring fresh sanctions even if this causes short-term economic damage to the UK.

[..] For some old hands in the Foreign Office with deep experience of Russia, however, demonising Russia is a disastrous strategy. Sir Anthony Brenton, the British ambassador to Russia between 2004 and 2008, insists a fruitful common agenda with Moscow on issues such as nuclear disarmament, Islamist terrorism and cyberwarfare is still possible. “What on earth was her majesty’s foreign secretary doing comparing the Russian World Cup with Hitler’s 1936 Olympics?” he asked. “If you are looking for a single statement really calculated to infuriate the Russians there it is, or indeed the defence secretary telling Russia to shut up. Elementary diplomacy goes a long way with the Russians and we need to get back to that.

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Still feels like a weird story.

Nobel Prize For Literature Postponed Amid Swedish Academy Turmoil (BBC)

The organisation that decides the Nobel Prize for Literature has said it will not announce an award this year, after it was engulfed in a scandal over sexual assault allegations. The Swedish Academy has been in crisis over its handling of allegations against the husband of a member. She has since quit, as have the academy’s head and four other members. The academy says it will now announce the 2018 winner along with the 2019 winner next year.

The scandal is the biggest to hit the prize since it was first awarded in 1901. The academy said the decision had been made due to a lack of public confidence. Some academy members had argued that the prize should proceed to protect the tradition, but others said the institution was in no state to present the award. Apart from six years during the world wars, there has been only one year when the prize was not awarded. No worthy winner was found in 1935.

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You go girl. The only right thing to do.

Jacinda Ardern Pledges Shelter For All Homeless People Within Four Weeks (G.)

The New Zealand government has promised to get the country’s homeless population off the streets and into shelter in time for winter. In a joint announcement on Friday, housing minister Phil Twyford and prime minister Jacinda Ardern announced a NZ$100m emergency housing package to tackle the ballooning problem. An estimated 40,000 people live in cars, tents and garages amid a chronic housing shortage in the nation of 4.7 million people. “We’re pulling out all the stops to support people in need and urgently increase housing supply this winter,” said housing minister Phil Twyford. “Our government will make sure everyone is helped to find warm, dry housing this winter.”

With winter starting on 1 June in the southern hemisphere, less than four weeks away, the government has put out an urgent call for anyone with additional accommodation that may be suitable to house homeless people. Seasonal worker accommodation such as shearers quarters, private rental properties, motor camps and maraes (Maori meeting houses) would all be considered. New Zealand has the highest rates of homelessness in the OECD, with more than 40,000 people living on the streets, in emergency housing or in substandard conditions. Per capita New Zealand’s homeless population is almost twice as bad as Australia, which is placed third on the list. More than half of New Zealand’s homeless population live in Auckland but it is also growing in smaller cities such as Rotorua, Tauranga, Queenstown and Wellington.

Read more …

Jul 252017
 
 July 25, 2017  Posted by at 8:34 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle July 25 2017


Vincent van Gogh Sunflowers 1887

 

The Next Financial Crisis Is Parked Out Front (G.)
Bank of England Warns of ‘Spiral Of Complacency’ on Household Debt (G.)
How Big Of A Deleveraging Are We Talking About? (Roberts)
IMF: US Looks Weaker, Rest Of The World Picks Up Economic Slack (CNBC)
Bloated London Property Prices Fuel Exodus (G.)
The Foreclosure ‘Pig’ Moves Through The Housing-Crisis ‘Python’ (MW)
Australian Housing Market At Risk Of Crash – UBS Research (CNBC)
It’s Time To Rethink Monetary Policy (Rochon)
Scandals Threaten Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Grip On Power (G.)
Brussels To Act ‘Within Days’ If US Sanctions Hurt EU Trade With Russia (RT)
EU Divided On How To Answer New US Sanctions Against Russia (R.)
US ‘May Send Arms’ To Ukraine, Says New Envoy (BBC)
Tsipras and Varoufakis Go Public With Spat (K.)
Alexis Tsipras’s Mixed Messages Over Appointing Me As Finance Minister (YV)
Greece Plans Return To Bond Market As Athens Sees End To Austerity (G.)
Greek Spending Cuts Prettify Budget Data (K.)

 

 

Can’t let a headline like that go to waste. More on the topic in the 2nd article.

The Next Financial Crisis Is Parked Out Front (G.)

Good morning – Warren Murray here with your Tuesday briefing. Britain’s rising level of personal debt has prompted a warning from the Bank of England about dire consequences for lenders and the economy. There are “classic signs” that the risks involved in car finance, credit cards and personal loans are being underestimated as financial institutions make hay while the sun shines, says Alex Brazier, the Bank’s director for financial stability. The economy defied expectations when it grew strongly in the six months after the EU referendum. But that was partly fuelled by consumers racking up their credit cards and loans, as lenders offered easier terms and longer interest-free deals. Much higher levels of borrowing compared with income are now being allowed, at a time when household incomes have only marginally risen.

As the anniversary of the global financial meltdown approaches, Brazier has suggested current low rates of default on personal credit may have again caused banks to become blinkered to the potential for disaster. Back in 2007, “banks – and their regulators – were blind to the basic fact that more debt meant greater risk of loss”. “Lenders have not entered, but they may be dicing with, the spiral of complacency. The spiral continues, and borrowers rack up more and more debt. “[In 2007] complacency gave way to crisis. Companies and households were unable to refinance their debts. The result was economic disaster.”

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The BoE creates huge bubbles, and afterwards starts warning about them. Typical central bank behavior.

Bank of England Warns of ‘Spiral Of Complacency’ on Household Debt (G.)

The Bank of England has told banks, credit card companies and car loan providers that they risk fresh action against reckless lending as it warned of a looming “spiral of complacency” about mounting consumer debt. In its toughest warning yet about the possibility of a rerun of the financial crisis that devastated the economy 10 years ago, Threadneedle Street admitted it was alarmed about the increase in the amount of money being borrowed on easy terms over the past year. “Household debt – like most things that are good in moderation – can be dangerous in excess”, Alex Brazier, the Bank director for financial stability, said in a speech in Liverpool. “Dangerous to borrowers, lenders and, most importantly from our perspective, everyone else in the economy.”

Brazier’s said there were “classic signs” of lenders thinking the risks were lower following a prolonged period of good economic performance and low losses on loans. The first signs of the Bank’s anxiety about consumer debt came from its governor, Mark Carney, a month ago, but Brazier’s comments marked a ratcheting up of Threadneedle Street’s rhetoric. “Lenders have been the lucky beneficiaries of the benign way the economy has evolved. In expanding the supply of credit, they may be placing undue weight on the recent performance of credit cards and loans in benign conditions,” Brazier said. The willingness of consumers to take on more debt to fund their spending helped the economy grow strongly in the six months after the EU referendum, a period when the Bank expected growth to fall sharply.

Over the past year, Brazier said, household incomes had grown by just 1.5% but outstanding car loans, credit card balances and personal loans had risen by 10%. He added that terms and conditions on credit cards and personal loans had become easier. The average advertised length of 0% credit card balance transfers had doubled to close to 30 months, while advertised interest rates on £10,000 personal loans had fallen from 8% to around 3.8%, even though official interest rates had barely changed.

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More great work by Lance. if these graphs and numbers don’t scare you, look again.

How Big Of A Deleveraging Are We Talking About? (Roberts)

Debt, if used for productive investments, can be a solution to stimulating economic growth in the short-term. However, in the U.S., debt has been squandered on increases in social welfare programs and debt service which has an effective negative return on investment. Therefore, the larger the balance of debt becomes, the more economically destructive it is by diverting an ever growing amount of dollars away from productive investments to service payments. The relevance of debt growth versus economic growth is all too evident as shown below. Since 1980, the overall increase in debt has surged to levels that currently usurp the entirety of economic growth. With economic growth rates now at the lowest levels on record, the growth in debt continues to divert more tax dollars away from productive investments into the service of debt and social welfare.

It now requires nearly $3.00 of debt to create $1 of economic growth.

In fact, the economic deficit has never been greater. For the 30-year period from 1952 to 1982, the economic surplus fostered a rising economic growth rate which averaged roughly 8% during that period. Today, with the economy growing at an average rate of just 2%, the economic deficit has never been greater.

But again, it isn’t just Federal debt that is the problem. It is all debt. As discussed last week, when it comes to households, which are responsible for roughly 2/3rds of economic growth through personal consumption expenditures, debt was used to sustain a standard of living well beyond what income and wage growth could support. This worked out as long as the ability to leverage indebtedness was an option. The problem is that eventually, the debt reaches a level where the level of debt service erodes the ability to consume at levels great enough to foster stronger economic growth. In reality, the economic growth of the U.S. has been declining rapidly over the past 35 years supported only by a massive push into deficit spending by households.

[..]The massive indulgence in debt, or a “credit induced boom”, has now begun to reach its inevitable conclusion. The debt driven expansion, which leads to artificially stimulated borrowing, seeks out diminishing investment opportunities. Ultimately these diminished investment opportunities lead to widespread malinvestments. Not surprisingly, we clearly saw it play out in “real-time” in 2005-2007 in everything from sub-prime mortgages to derivative instruments. Today, we see it again in mortgages, subprime auto loans, student loan debt and debt driven stock buybacks and acquisitions.

When credit creation can no longer be sustained the markets will begin to “clear” the excesses. It is only then, and must be allowed to happen, can resources be reallocated back towards more efficient uses. This is why all the efforts of Keynesian policies to stimulate growth in the economy have ultimately failed. Those fiscal and monetary policies, from TARP and QE to tax cuts, only delay the clearing process. Ultimately, that delay only potentially worsens the inevitable clearing process. That clearing process is going to be very substantial. With the economy currently requiring roughly $3 of debt to create $1 of real, inflation-adjusted, economic growth, a reversion to a structurally manageable level of debt would involve a nearly $35 Trillion reduction of total credit market debt from current levels.

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Difference: BOJ and ECB still buy trilions in ‘assets’.

IMF: US Looks Weaker, Rest Of The World Picks Up Economic Slack (CNBC)

Despite cutting the economic growth outlook for the U.S. and U.K., the IMF kept its global growth forecast unchanged on expectations the euro zone and Japanese growth would accelerate. In the July update of its World Economic Outlook, the IMF forecast global economic growth of 3.5% for 2017 and 3.6% for 2018, unchanged from its April outlook. That was despite earlier cutting its U.S. growth projection to 2.1% from 2.3% for 2017 and to 2.1% from 2.5% for 2018, citing both weak growth in the first quarter of this year as well as the assumption that fiscal policy will be less expansionary than previously expected. A weaker-than-expected first quarter also spurred the IMF to cut its forecast for U.K. growth for this year to 1.7% from 2.0%, while leaving its 2018 forecast at 1.5%.

But slowdowns in the U.S. and U.K. were expected to be offset by increased forecasts for many euro area countries, including Germany, France, Italy and Spain, where first quarter growth largely beat expectations, the IMF said. “This, together with positive growth revisions for the last quarter of 2016 and high-frequency indicators for the second quarter of 2017, indicate stronger momentum in domestic demand than previously anticipated,” the IMF said in its release. It raised its euro-area growth forecast for 2017 to 1.9% from 1.7%. For 2018, it increased its forecast to 1.7% from 1.6%.

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The Guardian has the guts to claim that people don’t move out because they don’t have the money to stay, but because they want to get on the f*cking property ladder.

Bloated London Property Prices Fuel Exodus (G.)

In the Kent seaside town of Whitstable, long-term residents call them DFLs – people who have moved “down from London”, sometimes for the lifestyle but more often for cheaper housing. The number of people fleeing the capital to live elsewhere has hit a five-year high. In the year to June 2016, net outward migration from London reached 93,300 people – more than 80% higher than five years earlier, according to analysis of official statistics. A common theme among the leavers’ destinations is significantly cheaper housing, according to the estate agent Savills, which analysed figures from the Office for National Statistics and the Land Registry. Cambridge, Canterbury, Dartford and Bristol are reportedly among the most popular escape routes for people who have grown tired of London and its swollen property prices.

The most likely destination for people aged over 25 moving from Islington is St Albans in Hertfordshire, where the average home is £173,000 cheaper. People moving from Ealing to Slough – the most popular move from the west London borough – stand to save on average £241,000. Among all homeowners leaving London, the average house price was £580,000 while the average in the areas they moved to was £333,000. The exodus is not just of homeowners, but of renters too. Rents in London have soared by a third in the last decade, compared to 18% in the south-west, 13% in the West Midlands and 11% in the north-west of England.

The only age group that has a positive net migration figure in the capital is those in their twenties, the research found. Everyone else, from teens to pensioners, is tending to get out. Since 2009, the trend has been steadily increasing among people in their thirties with 15,000 more people in that age bracket leaving every year than at the end of the last decade – a 27% rise. The phenomenon is being driven by a widespread desire to “trade up the housing ladder”, something that is all too often impossible in London according to Lucian Cook, Savill’s head of residential research. “Five years ago people would have been reluctant [to move out] because the economy wasn’t as strong and some owners didn’t want to miss out on house price growth [in London],” he said.

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Pretending it’s the last of the pig. We’ll see about that.

The Foreclosure ‘Pig’ Moves Through The Housing-Crisis ‘Python’ (MW)

As the effects of the housing crisis further recede, markers of distress are declining, with one notable exception: Among the batches of severely delinquent mortgages bought by institutional investors, foreclosures are on the rise. The trend is a reminder of the reasons many community advocates resisted allowing institutional investors to buy delinquent mortgages in government auctions that began in 2010. Wall Street, those advocates said, shouldn’t be rewarded for its role in creating the housing crisis with the chance to buy for pennies on the dollar the very assets whose values it dented. The government auctions promised a risk-sharing solution that would benefit nearly everyone: Homeowners whose mortgages had been bought dirt-cheap could get loan modifications, investors would get profitable assets, and communities would see tax revenues restored and neighborhoods revitalized.

But that win-win-win scenario may bring little relief to the most distressed among those troubled assets. A new Attom Data analysis for MarketWatch shows increasing foreclosures in the mortgages auctioned by the government. A subsidiary of private-equity firm Lone Star Investments, for example, has foreclosed on nearly 2,000 homeowners this year, through early July, and has increased foreclosures every year since 2013. And a Goldman Sachs subsidiary called MTGLQ, which has more than doubled foreclosures each year from 2014 to 2016, may do the same again this year, based on early 2017 data. Those figures stand in stark contrast to the housing market overall, where foreclosures fell 22% in the second quarter, touching an 11-year low of just over 220,000.

The institutional-investor foreclosure figures are a small fraction of the total, noted Daren Blomquist, Attom’s senior vice president of communications. And they don’t surprise investors who intentionally snatch up the most distressed mortgages available because their elevated risk promises higher yield. Attom Data does show an uptick in foreclosures by other lenders, though not all participated in the government auctions. But they’re a reminder that a decade after the housing downturn began, the pockets of foreclosures that still pop up represent the worst of the worst, prompting even those questioning the program to agree that some foreclosures were inevitable, no matter who owned the mortgages. Analysts call the current crop of foreclosures “the last of the pig moving through the python.”

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All bubble countries now face the issue. There’s no way out. So they’ll deny their bubble for a while longer.

Australian Housing Market At Risk Of Crash – UBS Research (CNBC)

The Australian housing market has peaked and could crash if the country’s central bank raises rates by too much or too quickly according to researchers at the Swiss bank, UBS. Property in Australia has boomed and the most recent government data marked growth in residential property prices at 10.2% year on year for the 2017 March quarter. In a note Monday, UBS Economist George Tharenou said any rash interest rate action from the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) could trigger a crash. “We still see rates on hold in the coming year, amid macroprudential tightening on credit growth and interest only loans. “Hence we still see a correction, but not a collapse, but if the RBA hikes too early or too much (as flagged by its hawkish minutes), it risks triggering a crash,” Tharenou warned.

Housing starts fell 19% in the first quarter of the year and May’s mortgage approvals also slid 20%. After a multi-year boom, the cost of an average home in the country now sits at 669,700 Australian dollars ($532,000) but Tharenou said price growth is certain to slow. “Despite weaker activity, house prices just keep booming with still strong growth of 10% y/y in June. However, this is unsustainably 4-5 times faster than income. “Looking ahead, we still see price growth slowing to 7% y/y in 2017 and 0-3% in 2018, amid record supply & poor affordability,” the economist added.

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Raising rates into a gigantesque bubble. No problem.

It’s Time To Rethink Monetary Policy (Rochon)

July 12 marks the date the Bank of Canada ignored common sense and increased its rate for the first time in seven years. Economists are largely divided on whether this was a good move, but in my opinion this was an ill-informed decision, largely based on the usually strong first quarter data, which may prove unsustainable in the longer term. In turn, it raises important questions about the conduct of monetary policy and the need to rethink the role and purpose of central bank policy. For the record, I don’t think there is much to fear from a single increase to 0.75% from 0.50, though it will have an immediate impact on mortgage rates — some Canadians will pay more for their homes. However, it is the prospect of what that move represents that sends chills down this economist’s spine.

As we know all too well, central banks never raise rates once or twice, but usually do so several times. Indeed, the consensus among economists is that there will be at least two more raises before the end of 2018, bringing the bank rate to 1.25%. This is still low by historical standards, but the raises begin to add up. I expect many more rate hikes through 2019 and 2020. You see, the Bank of Canada believes the so-called natural rate is 3%, which means we could possibly see nine more interest rate increases. Imagine the damage that will do. Yet, according to their own model, this rate is the “neutral” or “natural” rate and should have no far reaching impact. Try telling that to Canadians who have consumer debt and a mortgage. Clearly, there is nothing “neutral” about these rate increases. This alone is a reason to rethink monetary policy.

Second, the Bank of Canada targets inflation, and has been officially since 1991, a fact it reminds us of all the time. All other objectives, including economic growth and unemployment, or even household debt and income inequality, are far behind the principal objective of trying to keep the inflation rate on target. There is much to say about this, including whether interest rates and monetary policy in general are the best tool to deliver on the inflation crusade. Even if we accept this, inflation is currently at a near two-decade low. In other words, where’s the inflation beef? Inflation does not represent a current threat, and there are no inflationary pressures in the economy, which raises the question: Why raise rates?

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With Abenomics dead, so is Abe.

Scandals Threaten Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Grip On Power (G.)

Shinzo Abe is fighting for his future as Japan’s prime minister as scandals drag his government’s popularity close to what political observers describe as “death zone” levels. Apart from clouding Abe’s hopes of winning another term as leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) when a vote is held next year, the polling slump also undermines his long-running push to revise Japan’s war-renouncing constitution. Abe, who returned to the prime ministership four and a half years ago, was long seen as a steady hand whose position appeared unassailable – so much so that the LDP changed its rules to allow Abe the freedom to seek a third consecutive three-year term at the helm of the party. “He is no longer invincible and the reason why he is no longer invincible is he served his personal friends not the party,” said Michael Thomas Cucek, an adjunct professor at Temple University Japan.

Abe’s standing has been damaged by allegations of favours for two school operators who have links to him. The first scandal centred on a cut-price land deal between the finance ministry and a nationalist school group known as Moritomo Gakuen. The second related to the approval of a veterinary department of a private university headed by his friend, Kotaro Kake. Abe has repeatedly denied personal involvement, but polls showed voters doubted his explanations, especially after leaked education ministry documents mentioned the involvement of “a top-level official of the prime minister’s office” in the vet school story. Abe attempted to show humility in a parliamentary hearing this week by acknowledging it was “natural for the public to sceptically view the issue” because it involved his friend. “I lacked the perspective,” he said. Experts doubt that Abe’s contrition, combined with a planned cabinet reshuffle next week, will do much to reverse his sagging fortunes.

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The limits of the anti-Russia craze.

Brussels To Act ‘Within Days’ If US Sanctions Hurt EU Trade With Russia (RT)

The EU should act “within days” if new sanctions the US plans to impose on Russia prove to be damaging to Europe’s trade ties with Moscow, an internal memo seen by the media says. Retaliatory measures may include limiting US jurisdiction over EU companies. An internal memo seen by the Financial Times and Politico has emerged amid mounting opposition to a US bill seeking to hit Russia with a new round of sanctions. The bill, if signed into law, will also give US lawmakers the power to veto any attempt by the president to lift the sanctions. The document reportedly said European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker was particularly concerned the sanctions would neglect the interests of European companies. Juncker said Brussels “should stand ready to act within days” if sanctions on Russia are “adopted without EU concerns being taken into account,” according to the FT.

The EU memo also warns that “the measures could impact a potentially large number of European companies doing legitimate business under EU measures with Russian entities in the railways, financial, shipping or mining sectors, among others.” Restrictions against Russia come as part of the Countering Iran’s Destabilizing Activities Act, targeting not only Tehran, but also North Korea. Initially passed by the Senate last month, the measures seek to impose new economic measures on major sectors of the Russian economy. The draft legislation would also introduce individual sanctions for investing in Gazprom’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, outlining steps to hamper construction of the pipeline and imposing sanctions on European companies which contribute to the project.

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So EU vs US, and EU vs EU. The problem seems to be that US companies could profit from the sanctions, as European ones suffer.

EU Divided On How To Answer New US Sanctions Against Russia (R.)

European Commission preparations to retaliate against proposed new U.S. sanctions on Russia that could affect European firms are likely to face resistance within a bloc divided on how to deal with Moscow, diplomats, officials and experts say. A bill agreed by U.S. Senate and House leaders foresees fines for companies aiding Russia to build energy export pipelines. EU firms involved in Nord Stream 2, a 9.5 billion euro ($11.1 billion) project to carry Russian gas across the Baltic, are likely to be affected. Both the European Union and the United States imposed broad economic sanctions on Russia’s financial, defense and energy sectors in response to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and its direct support for separatists in eastern Ukraine. But northern EU states in particular have sought to shield the supplies of Russian gas that they rely on.

Markus Beyrer, director of the EU’s main business lobby, Business Europe, urged Washington to “avoid unilateral actions that would mainly hit the EU, its citizens and its companies”. The Commission, the EU executive, will discuss next steps on Wednesday, a day after the U.S. House of Representatives votes on the legislation, knowing that the U.S. move threatens to reopen divisions over the bloc’s own Russia sanctions. Among the European companies involved in Nord Stream 2 are German oil and gas group Wintershall, German energy trading firm Uniper, Anglo-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, Austria’s OMV and France’s Engie. The Commission could demand a formal U.S. promise to exclude EU energy companies; use EU laws to block U.S. measures against European entities; or impose outright bans on doing business with certain U.S. companies, an EU official said.

But if no such promise is offered, punitive sanctions such as limiting the access of U.S. companies to EU banks require unanimity from the 28 EU member states. Ex-Soviet states such as Poland and the Baltic states are unlikely to vote for retaliation to protect a project they have resisted because it would increase EU dependence on Russian gas. An EU official said most member states saw Nord Stream 2 as “contrary or at least not fully in line with European objectives” of reducing reliance on Russian energy. Britain, one of the United States’ closest allies, is also wary of challenging the U.S. Congress as it prepares to leave the EU and seeks a trade deal with Washington. In fact, the EU’s chief executive, Jean-Claude Juncker, has few tools that do not require unanimous support from the bloc’s 28 governments.

The Commission could act alone to file a complaint at the World Trade Organisation. But imposing punitive tariffs on U.S. goods would require detailed proof to be gathered that European companies were being unfairly disadvantaged — a process that would take many months. Diplomatic protests such as cutting EU official visits to Washington are unlikely to have much effect, since requests by EU commissioners for meetings with members of Trump’s administration have gone unanswered, EU aides say.

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Let’s hope they don’t try.

US ‘May Send Arms’ To Ukraine, Says New Envoy (BBC)

The new US special representative for Ukraine says Washington is actively reviewing whether to send weapons to help those fighting against Russian-backed rebels. Kurt Volker told the BBC that arming Ukrainian government forces could change Moscow’s approach. He said he did not think the move would be provocative. Last week, the US State Department urged both sides to observe the fragile ceasefire in eastern Ukraine. “Defensive weapons, ones that would allow Ukraine to defend itself, and to take out tanks for example, would actually to help” to stop Russia threatening Ukraine, Mr Volker said in a BBC interview.

“I’m not again predicting where we go on this, that’s a matter for further discussion and decision, but I think that argument that it would be provocative to Russia or emboldening of Ukraine is just getting it backwards,” he added. He said success in establishing peace in eastern Ukraine would require what he called a new strategic dialogue with Russia.

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Undoubtedly not the last we hear of this.

Tsipras and Varoufakis Go Public With Spat (K.)

The coalition on Monday rejected calls for an investigation to be launched into the first months of the government’s time in power, as a dispute between Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and ex-finance minister Yannis Varoufakis over that period in 2015 became public. “The evaluation of this period has to be conducted with political criteria, not myth-making or gossip,” said government spokesman Dimitris Tzanakopoulos, who accused Varoufakis of trying to advertise his recent book via the “systemic media” he once attacked. Tzanakopoulos’s comments came after Tsipras gave an interview to The Guardian in which he admitted making “big mistakes” in the past and suggested that Varoufakis’s plan for a parallel payment system could not be considered seriously.

“Yanis is trying to write history in a different way,” said Tsipras. “When we got to the point of reading what he presented as his plan B it was so vague, it wasn’t worth the trouble of even talking about. It was simply weak and ineffective.” The former minister immediately responded to the premier’s comments by claiming they displayed a “deep incoherence,” as Varoufakis claims that he had made Tsipras aware of the plan before he came to office yet the SYRIZA leader still chose to appoint him to the cabinet. “Either I was the right choice to spearhead the ‘collision’ with the troika of Greece’s lenders because my plans were convincing, or my plans were not convincing and, thus, I was the wrong choice as his first finance minister,” he wrote in a letter to The Guardian.

New Democracy called for judicial and parliamentary investigations into the claims made by Varoufakis, as well as by former energy minister Panayiotis Lafazanis. The latter claimed in a radio interview on Saturday that he had secured an advance payment from Russia for a gas pipeline to be used to held fund Greece if it left the euro. “Varoufakis and Lafazanis described with clarity the SYRIZA leadership’s plans to take Greece out of the eurozone,” said the conservatives in a statement. “If these plans were seen through to the end, the country would have found itself in a dramatic situation like Venezuela, with unforeseeable social consequences.”

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Makes sense.

Alexis Tsipras’s Mixed Messages Over Appointing Me As Finance Minister (YV)

[..] the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, having admitted to “big mistakes”, was asked if appointing me as his first finance minister was one of them. According to the interviewer, Mr Tsipras said “Varoufakis … was the right choice for an initial strategy of ‘collision politics’, but he dismisses the plan he presented had Greece been forced to make the dramatic move to a new currency as ‘so vague, it wasn’t worth talking about’”. Given that I presented my plans to Mr Tsipras for deterring the troika’s aggression and responding to a potential impasse (and any move by the troika to evict Greece from the eurozone) before we won the election of January 2015, and I was chosen by him as finance minister (one presumes) on the basis of their merit, his answer reflects a deep incoherence.

Either I was the right choice to spearhead the “collision” with the troika of Greece’s lenders because my plans were convincing, or my plans were not convincing and, thus, I was the wrong choice as his first finance minister. Arguing, as Mr Tsipras does, that I was both the right choice for the initial confrontation and that my plan B was so vague it wasn’t worth the trouble of even talking about is disingenuous, albeit insightful, for it reveals the impossibility of maintaining a radical critique of his predecessors while adopting the Tina (There Is No Alternative) doctrine.

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A brand new line of lipstick for farm animals.

Greece Plans Return To Bond Market As Athens Sees End To Austerity (G.)

Athens has outlined plans to return to the financial markets for the first time since 2014, with a plan to sell new five-year bonds to investors. Existing Greek five-year bonds were trading at 3.6% on Monday morning compared with 63% at the height of the Greek financial crisis in 2012 when the finance ministry was unable to pay public sector wages and there were riots in the streets. Following the announcement that Athens would be returning to the market, the yield fell to 3.4%. The Greek finance ministry has set a goal of a 4.2% interest rate on the new bond. But banking sources believe that level will be hard to achieve and say an interest rate of between 4.3% to 4.5% is much more likely. Government sources say valuation will take place on Tuesday 25 July.

The market test is crucial to Greece for not only judging sentiment of the market, from which it has been essentially exiled since the start of its economic crisis, but also for weaning itself off borrowed bailout funds. Speaking after the bond issue was announced, the EU’s economy commissioner, Pierre Moscovici, described the public spending cuts imposed on Greece since it almost went bust as “too tough” but “necessary”, adding there was now “light at the end of austerity”. Reuters reported that Greece had employed six banks – BNP Paribas, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and HSBC – to act as joint lead managers for a five-year euro bond “subject to market conditions”. Greek ministers will provide more details on Monday afternoon about how much it hopes to borrow, and on what terms.

If the issue is successful, it could help Greece, which is still coping with a debt to GDP ratio of 180%, to exit its long cycle of austerity and rescue packages. Late on Friday, S&P upgraded its outlook on Greek government debt from stable to “positive”, thanks partly to renewed hopes that the country’s creditors could finally grant it debt relief.

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And here’s how it’s done.

Greek Spending Cuts Prettify Budget Data (K.)

Delays in the funding of hospitals, social spending cuts and low expenditure on the Public Investments Program served to prettify the picture of the state budget over the first half of the year, producing a primary surplus of 1.93 billion euros, Finance Ministry figures showed on Monday. At the same time budget revenues posted a marginal increase over the target the ministry had set for the January-June period. However, the big challenge for the government starts at the end of this month with the payment of the first tranche of income tax by taxpayers, followed later on by the Single Property Tax (ENFIA) and road tax at the end of the year.

In total the state will have to collect 33 billion euros by the end of the year, which is considerably higher than in the second half of 2016. According to the H1 budget data, the primary surplus amounted to 1.936 billion euros, against a primary surplus of 1.632 billion in the same period last year, and a target for 431 million for the year to end-June. Expenditure missed its target by 1.15 billion euros, amounting to 22.86 billion in the first half. Compared to last year it was down 757 million euros. Hospital funding missed its target by 265 million.

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