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Debt Rattle October 3 2024

Oct 032024
 
 October 3, 2024  Posted by at 8:48 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  78 Responses »


Winslow Homer Cloud shadows 1890

 

• 2nd Gentleman Doug Emhoff Slapped Ex-Girlfriend So Hard ‘She Spun Around’ (ZH)
• American Empire is Over – Charles Nenner (USAW)
• Prosecutors Seek Indefinite Delay In Trial Of Alleged Trump Assassin (ZH)
• 30 Million Immigrant-Invaders To Vote Against Trump (PCR)
• JD Vance ‘Made Viewers Feel Safe,’ Walz Had Brain Freeze – Psychiatrist (Sp.)
• Israel Free To Choose How It Retaliates Against Iran – Vance (RT)
• Harris A Threat To US Democracy – Vance (RT)
• Democrats Bringing World Closer To ‘Catastrophe’ – Trump (RT)
• US ‘Helpless’ As Middle East Burns – Moscow (RT)
• Netanyahu Seeks to Drag US Into War With Iran – Ex-Italian Diplomat (Sp.)
• Weakening Iran and Hezbollah Part of Broader Israeli-US Project – Analyst (Sp.)
• Putin, Medinsky, Istanbul-II and “Betrayal Of Russia’s State Interests” (Doctorow)
• Trump May Be More Of An Enemy To Zelensky Than Even Putin (Jay)
• The War on Terror 23 Years Later (Greenberg)
• Guilty (CJ Hopkins)
• 10 Principles for Perpetual Peace in the 21st Century (Jeffrey Sachs)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Censorship

 

 

Ritter

 

 

 

 

24 minutes

 

 

 

 

Just the kind of guy you want in the White House. No, seriously, you can’t do that.

“There’s a special place in hell for men who put hands on women.”

They’ve been hoping for a story just like this one for ten years. About Trump.

• 2nd Gentleman Doug Emhoff Slapped Ex-Girlfriend So Hard ‘She Spun Around’ (ZH)

Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff reportedly assaulted his ex-girlfriend by hitting her in the face so hard “she spun around”, according to a bombshell new exclusive by the Daily Mail. Emhoff allegedly struck the woman, referred to as “Jane,” in the face while waiting in a valet line after a 2012 Cannes Film Festival event, according to the DailyMail.com. Jane, a New York attorney, reportedly called a friend sobbing in a cab after the incident and told others about the alleged assault at the time. Friends provided photos and documents from 2012 to support parts of the story but chose to remain anonymous, citing fear of retaliation. Jane’s friends said she received tickets from wealthy connections to attend the exclusive amfAR Gala Dinner at Hotel du Cap in Antibes, France, on May 24, 2012. The alleged assault occurred after the event, where celebrities like Heidi Klum and Harvey Weinstein were present. Jane, who brought Emhoff as her guest, later called a friend sobbing, saying her date had hit her.

The friend recalled Jane describing how Emhoff slapped her after she offered a valet money to skip a taxi line, which he misinterpreted as flirting. ‘She slapped him back. My impression is that he had a lot to drink. She was sobbing [on the phone afterwards], but she wasn’t slurring her words. She told me that she broke up with him that night,’ one friend told the Daily Mail. A second friend, also a New York attorney, said Jane recounted the incident, describing how Emhoff slapped her out of nowhere around 2-3 a.m. after a pleasant evening. Jane said she was talking to a valet when Emhoff suddenly turned her around and slapped her hard, causing her to spin. Shocked, she slapped him back twice. ‘She said she wanted to go back to the hotel without him. But while she was shutting the door, he forced himself into the car, which she did not want.’ the friend said.

Jane was embarrassed and described it as a “trailer trash moment,” realizing it revealed his true character. A third friend said Jane told her the story in 2018, telling the Daily Mail: ‘She had never been hit in her life. [Jane] is a gorgeous, strong woman and you would never expect somebody to hit her.’ Recall, just days ago Jen Psaki swooned over Emhoff on MSNBC in a sit-down interview, stating he was reshaping masculinity and calling him a ‘supportive spouse’. “There is also an important, interesting part about how people have talked about your role is how your role has reshaped the perception of masculinity,” Psaki said to Emhoff. “I’m not sure you planned on that, but you are an incredibly supportive spouse. Has that been an evolution for you? Do you think that’s part of the role you might play as First Gentleman?”

Emhoff responded: “It’s funny. I’ve started to think a lot about this. I’ve always been like this. My dad’s always been like this. To me, it’s the right thing to do, support women. It is mutual with Kamala and I. We support each other, we have each other’s back,” He continued: “I’ve said many times when we lift up women, we support women whether it’s pay equity, childcare, family leave, and all of these issues in this post-Dobbs hellscape. Women should not be less than. Women should not have less rights and be treated differently. That’s not the American way.” Ironically, Emhoff also said days ago about Trump: “Make no mistake, where he says I will be the protector of women, that is yet more lies and more gaslighting.”

Or said another way…

Emhoff

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“..can Trump still be the winter coat America needs to survive? Nenner says, “I don’t think he can. It’s too late.”

• American Empire is Over – Charles Nenner (USAW)

Renowned geopolitical and financial cycle expert Charles Nenner has been warning of a huge war cycle. The Iran missile attack in Israel that rained down 180 missiles on the Holy land, “is just the beginning,” according to Nenner. Of course, America and everybody else will be involved in this war, and Nenner says don’t expect America to come out on top. Nenner says, “I don’t know how big this war is going to be because everybody is going to be involved. Israel is not going to sit on its hands like last time because this cannot continue. I guess Israel will go for the enrichment of the uranium places and attack Iran whenever they are ready. . . . I don’t vote in the United States because I am Dutch, but if Trump were in, this would be over in an hour.”

When it comes to the 2024 November election, Nenner says, “I think the media is doing a great job. So, I am not sure that Trump is going to win. I really have no mercy for America anymore if they vote for Kamala. It’s just the end of an empire already. Even if Trump wins, I don’t think he can fix what needs to be fixed because the Biden government put all kinds of people in positions that are going to be there for a while. I watch Congress and see who the Biden Administration brings forward for new judges, and I have no words for it. It’s ridiculous. I don’t even know how to fix the United States anymore. . . . According to the cycles the United States is finished. This war now will probably turn into a world war, and the problem is they (US) will have to fight Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, and they have no chance to win. . . .

Nobody will have to invade the United States. They will just finish them off with rockets from the air. It is a hopeless situation.” Nenner famously said several months ago, “If you know winter is coming, you can buy a winter coat. Trump is the winter coat.” So, can Trump still be the winter coat America needs to survive? Nenner says, “I don’t think he can. It’s too late.” On the markets, Nenner thinks there is going to be a stock market crash that will be equal to or greater than the Great Depression market crash in 1929. Nenner says, “We are telling our clients to get out of stocks. . . . We have zero stocks.”

Nenner also thinks gold is the place to be for the next three years. Nenner thinks gold is going much higher. On interest rates, Nenner says they are going higher too, and real estate and bonds are going lower. This is the longer term trend in Nenner’s cycle. When will this market crash come? Nenner says, “It’s still going to take half a year or a year until everybody realizes how bad the situation is compared to the BRIC countries. The dollar is not going to be the major currency. Nixon stopped backing it by gold, and Saudia Arabia stopped backing it by oil. It is not backed by anything. So, why would you trust the dollar?

Read more …

We won’t know his handlers before the election, and likely never.

• Prosecutors Seek Indefinite Delay In Trial Of Alleged Trump Assassin (ZH)

Federal prosecutors on Wednesday requested an indefinite delay in the upcoming trial of Ryan Routh, the man accused of attempting to assassinate former President Donald Trump, claiming that a massive trove of evidence has emerged in recent weeks rendering the case “complex,” ABC News reports. According to a Wednesday filing with Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon, prosecutors have gathered too much evidence to proceed to trial – including hundreds of witness interviews, 13 search warrants, and the seizure of “multiple electronic devices” from locations in Florida, Hawaii, and North Carolina. The overwhelming amount of digital data to review – around 4,000 terabytes – allegedly led to the request.

“The FBI also continues to conduct forensic tests on other evidence, including “ballistics testing, and fingerprint and DNA comparisons,” which will likely require them to prepare several expert witnesses to testify about in advance of Routh’s eventual trial. The filing states Routh’s defense attorneys did not oppose the government’s request to indefinitely delay his trial date. Routh, 58, appeared in federal court in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Monday for his arraignment on attempted assassination charges. Routh’s lawyers entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.” -ABC News.

The delay request came just one day after Judge Cannon had set a tentative trial date of November 18. But with prosecutors still awaiting over 100 subpoena responses and conducting forensic analysis, including ballistics and DNA testing, the government says their case is far from ready to proceed. Routh allegedly staked out the Trump International Golf Course in Florida for 12 hours on September 15, waiting for the former president to arrive. According to prosecutors, his attempt was thwarted when Secret Service agents spotted a rifle poking through the golf course fence. Routh was later apprehended on I-95. The incident echoes a previous attempt on Trump’s life just two months prior, when gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Crooks’ attack injured Trump and left one attendee dead.

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“White people are history. They have placed their fate in the hands of their enemies. Perhaps a few will be kept in zoos.”

• 30 Million Immigrant-Invaders To Vote Against Trump (PCR)

Democrats are passing laws to make sure that a non-citizen who just walked across the border has a vote equal to a United States native-born citizen. Immigrant-invaders are given federal IDs which entitle them to drivers’ licenses. Many jurisdictions automatically enroll driver license recipients on the voting list. Two days ago California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill preventing local governments from requiring voters to present identification at the polls. The Democrat California government has made it a felony to prevent election fraud. The Democrats call it Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. DEI is not for us racist white supremacy citizens, the American majority. It is for the immigrant-invaders who just walked across the border. The Democrats are the party of the immigrant-invaders, and tens of millions of dumbshit white Americans will vote for the party of immigrant-invaders.

It is even worse than that. The Biden/Kamala Regime are using our taxpayers dollars to finance NGOs to recruit from 150 countries immigrant invaders and to provide them with transportation, to Latin America and with food, water, medical care, and sleeping quarters as they march to our border. When Washington’s recruits of immigrant-invaders reach the border, federal and local authorities are required to let them in. Nothing is being done about it. The Republican House and Senate Democrats have not cut off the funding that is flooding America with crime and people unable to support themselves. How do uneducated people who do not speak the language become a work force? How do tens of millions of people who do not speak the language and do not have a first world education become a work force in a first world country? Why is this happening? Why is discussion of the dissolution of the United States into a Tower of Babel blocked by the media and authorities with police power to silence?

Why does the Democrat Party describe native-born Americans who are opposed to their country being overrun by immigrant-invaders as white supremacists, while Democrats focus on saving Ukraine’s borders? Why are Ukraine’s borders more important than America’s? Is there a Democrat anywhere who cares about America’s borders? Apparently not. Is there any politician, other than Donald Trump, who speaks for Americans? Yesterday the Democrats in Minneopolis made a non-citizen a police officer. So now the Democrats have made it possible for a non-citizen to arrest an American citizen. The Democrats call this “inclusion.” Do you look forward to being arrested by a non-citizen? This is your consequence for being so totally stupid that you voted Democrat. The dumbshit American voters have destroyed themselves and all of their prospects.

The Democrats have established a regime in which American citizens have lost their Constitutional protections and are considered to be evil racists and enemies of democracy who must be replaced by third world immigrant-invaders. This is happening before our eyes. If it hasn’t happened to your community yet, it won’t be long. It is the same throughout the Western world. The European Council on Foreign Relations published a report a few days ago on September 25 by Pawel Zerka, obviously not a Western European name. The report published by the European Council concluded that Europe is too white and too European. So here we have Europeans turning Europe’s fate over to someone who intends to bring upon them the Camp of the Saints. Perhaps people this stupid deserve their destruction.

To underline the point, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the largest French political party that is kept out of political office by conspiracy of the ruling elite, has been placed on trial. The false charges are that she and her party embezzled EU funds. This is such a nonsensical charge as to be mind blowing. The EU is not going to give any funds to a French NATIONALIST political party. And even if it mysteriously happened, Le Pen is not sufficiently stupid, having target written all over her, to embezzle them. But in the Western world today truth is of zero consequence. Law is nothing else but a weapon to destroy those in the way of the Woke Agenda. White people are history. They have placed their fate in the hands of their enemies. Perhaps a few will be kept in zoos.

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“..his body language showed a lot of telltale signs of lying, such as fidgeting, touching his face and breathing rapidly.”

• JD Vance ‘Made Viewers Feel Safe,’ Walz Had Brain Freeze – Psychiatrist (Sp.)

Dr. Carole Lieberman, a board-certified psychiatrist and best-selling author based in Beverly Hills, California, told Sputnik that Republican Senator JD Vance had prevailed over Democratic Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota in the vice-presidential debate. “I found this debate fascinating because the two had only 90 minutes to show the voters what they could do for America,” Lieberman said, arguing that Vance “projected a steady, self-assured persona that made viewers feel safe.” Walz’s “discordant words and body movements made viewers feel uncomfortable,” she argued. He was “clearly nervous and his body language showed a lot of telltale signs of lying, such as fidgeting, touching his face and breathing rapidly.” The debate began with both candidates fielding a question on a possible pre-emptive strike by Israel on Iran. “Tim Walz stuttered and stumbled over his answer.

He gave misinformation about Trump and a deal with Iran, but never answered the question. JD Vance, on the other hand, answered with, ‘It is up to Israel,’ which is the best answer,” the psychiatrist said. Vance answered a question about hurricanes and climate change “in a straightforward manner, whereas Tim Walz started grimacing, making jarring movements and having pauses that seemed like brain freeze or senior moments,” she noted. On immigration, which Walz knew was a weak spot because Kamala Harris “as the Border Czar that had let everyone in,” he again started blaming former president Donald Trump. “It was obvious that his preparation for the debate focused on trying to blame Trump for everything,” Lieberman said.Vance won “because he was authentic throughout and his words matched his body language,” the psychiatrist concluded.

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Is Iran also free to choose?

• Israel Free To Choose How It Retaliates Against Iran – Vance (RT)

The US should support Israel in its retaliation against Iran, even if it includes a preemptive strike, Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, said during a televised debate on CBS News on Tuesday. Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, faced his Democratic opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz on live TV only hours after Iran fired nearly 200 missiles at Israel, marking a significant escalation in Middle East tensions. Asked by a moderator if he would back an preemptive Israeli strike on Iran, Vance reaffirmed Washington’s long-standing support for the Jewish state. “Look, it is up to Israel what they think they need to do to keep their country safe, and we should support our allies wherever they are when they’re fighting the bad guys. That’s the right approach to the Israel question,” Vance replied.

He went on to argue that Trump had kept America’s adversaries in check when he was president. “Trump actually delivered stability in the world, and he did it by establishing effective deterrence. People were afraid of stepping out of line,” Vance said. Walz avoided answering directly if he would back an Israeli preemptive strike. He said, however, that “Israel’s ability to be able to defend itself is absolutely fundamental.” The Democrat accused Trump of damaging the US standing in the world and criticized him for tearing up the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Iran is “closer to a nuclear weapon than it was before – because of Donald Trump’s fickle leadership,” Walz said.

Iran has claimed that the missile attacks were a response to the “genocide” committed by the IDF in Gaza and Lebanon. The IDF launched a cross-border ground operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon on Tuesday. Israeli jets previously bombed Lebanon, killing several senior Hezbollah members, including the armed group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The IDF said the goal of the operation is to prevent Hezbollah from firing rockets and mortars at Israeli cities in the northern part of the country.

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“Limits on free speech have become the biggest threat to US democracy..”

• Harris A Threat To US Democracy – Vance (RT)

Limits on free speech have become the biggest threat to US democracy, Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance claimed during a televised debate on Tuesday. Donald Trump’s running mate for the November election faced off with his Democratic opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, on CBS News. Vance claimed that “rather than debating and persuading fellow Americans,” Democratic nominee Kamala Harris “would like to censor people who engage in misinformation.” “Harris is engaged in censorship on an industrial scale. She has done it over a number of issues. That’s a bigger threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said protesters should peacefully protest on January 6.” Vance was referring to the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol building in Washington by Trump supporters following his election defeat.

Trump, whose public statements are alleged to have incited the Capitol riots, faces four federal felony charges in the case. He is accused of acting unlawfully after the 2020 election, by trying to overturn the result. The former president has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and denounced the case as an attempt to prevent him from returning to the White House. In a series of posts on his Truth Social platform in August he called it “a direct assault on democracy” and a “resurrection of a dead witch hunt.” In the TV debate, Vance argued: “I believe we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country. Unfortunately, it’s not the threat to democracy that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It is the threat of censorship.” He went on to accuse major technology companies of “silencing their fellow citizens.”

In August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said senior Biden administration officials had pressured Facebook to “censor” some Covid-19 content during the pandemic. He also admitted that Facebook suppressed a New York Post story about Hunter Biden after an FBI warning in the lead-up to the 2020 election. “A president’s words matter. January 6 was not Facebook ads,” Walz responded, on the issue of the January 2021 Capitol riots. He asked Vance directly if Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance replied that Trump is “focused on the future.”

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”War or the threat of war is raging everywhere, and the two incompetents running this country are leading us to the brink of World War III..”

• Democrats Bringing World Closer To ‘Catastrophe’ – Trump (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump has blamed his successor, Joe Biden, and his rival in next month’s presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris, for a retaliatory strike by Iran on Israel on Tuesday night. The Republican nominee discussed the latest escalation in the Middle East crisis during a campaign rally in Waunakee, Wisconsin, and posted a similar statement on his Truth Social platform. He accused the Biden administration of failing to keep Iran in check, and claimed that he would have done a better job. Trump claimed that, under his presidency, Tehran was “starved for cash, fully contained, and desperate to make a deal.” “Kamala flooded them with American cash and, ever since, they’ve been exporting terror all over,” he added. ”War or the threat of war is raging everywhere, and the two incompetents running this country are leading us to the brink of World War III,” said Trump.

If Democrats win next month’s election, “the world goes up in smoke,” he warned. Tehran described its attack as retaliation for Israel’s assassination of senior figures in the militant movements Hamas and Hezbollah on Iranian and Lebanese soil. The two regional rivals have made opposing claims about the effectiveness of the ballistic missile strike. Israel has promised a response, which the media predict will come within days.

Both main US political parties are offering what appears to be unconditional support for Israel’s actions. This position appears to have become something of a liability for the Democrats, as a notable portion of their supporters have protested against continued shipments of weapons to Israel as it conducted a military siege of the Palestinian enclave of Gaza. The “uncommitted” movement has threatened to withhold their votes unless Biden applies pressure on Israel to secure a ceasefire in the conflict. With their demands unsatisfied, they stopped short last month of publicly urging people not to vote for Harris, but did say people should vote against Trump. The ongoing escalation was triggered by a deadly Hamas incursion into southern Israel almost a year ago. In recent weeks, Israel refocused its attention from Gaza to Lebanon, reportedly with the blessing of the Biden administration.

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“Without the comprehensive support you provide to Israel, the conflict could be ended quickly and effectively.”

• US ‘Helpless’ As Middle East Burns – Moscow (RT)

The surge in violence in the Middle East signifies the “complete failure” of US policy in the region under President Joe Biden, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said, shortly after Iran launched a significant retaliatory missile barrage against Israel on Tuesday evening. According to Israel, Tehran fired 181 ballistic missiles at targets in the Jewish state, although the Israeli military said that most were repelled by its air defenses. Sources in Iran, however, have claimed that Israeli military infrastructure suffered significant damage. Iranian officials described the strike as its long-expected response to the July assassination in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, and last week’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut.

Israel has pledged to retaliate against Iran for the attack, and is continuing a bombing campaign and a “limited incursion” in Lebanon. Commenting on the escalating violence, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova pointed the finger at US policy. “This bloody drama is just ramping up. Incoherent statements by the White House demonstrate its total helplessness in resolving crises. Efforts by [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken have led to tens of thousands of casualties and into a dead end,” the spokeswoman said. The current hostilities erupted last October, when Hamas launched a deadly raid into southern Israel from the Palestinian enclave of Gaza. Israel responded with a massive military campaign, seeking to “eliminate” the movement. The Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which supports Hamas, has been conducting regular rocket attacks across the border, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate from northern Israel.

The US has publicly called on Israel to defuse the tensions and seek a ceasefire in Gaza, although the Israeli government has maintained its military pressure. The number of Palestinian deaths has exceeded 41,000, according to local health authorities. Some observers have accused West Jerusalem of trying to make Gaza uninhabitable so that its population has no option but to flee. “The Middle East has once again found itself on the brink of a big war, which, it appears, someone is eager to see break out,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned last week at a UN Security Council session on the unfolding crisis. Lavrov went on to call out the US over its rejection of proposals to demand a ceasefire backed by the authority of the UNSC. The Russian diplomat stressed: “Without the comprehensive support you provide to Israel, the conflict could be ended quickly and effectively.”

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Netanyahu IS not Israel, anymore than Zelensky IS Ukraine. Just stop supporting them.

• Netanyahu Seeks to Drag US Into War With Iran – Ex-Italian Diplomat (Sp.)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a provocative address to the people of Iran a day before Tehran’s ballistic missile attack in Israel, claiming the nation would be “finally free” and that “that moment will come a lot sooner than people think.” Netanyahu is “probably provoking the Iranian leadership to react to have a further justification to hit the country and, ideally, to draw the US to join Israel in attacking Iran,” Dr. Marco Carnelos, former Italian diplomat and Middle East adviser to Prime Ministers Prodi and Berlusconi, told Sputnik. In the wake of Tuesday’s missile strikes, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian stressed that Iran exercised “legitimate self-defense rights” in response to Israel’s aggression. The missile attack followed Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon and air raids against Yemen and Syria.

Together with Iran, those countries form the so-called Axis of Resistance which has opposed Israel’s war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since October 2023.Netanyahu claimed that “Iran made a big mistake” on October 1 and “will pay for it.” “There is no doubt that Israel is leveraging Washington against Iran,” Carnelos said, but it was “far from certain if the Biden Administration will decide to join Israel in attacking Iran unleashing a regional war.” The former Italian diplomat said the Biden administration wants to avoid a direct confrontation with Iran before November’s presidential election. Voters have no interest in starting “another potential endless war in the Middle East,” the pundit stressed.

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“..all the Israeli operations on the ground are influencing the balance of power in Lebanon, and trying to change the equation of power there..”

• Weakening Iran and Hezbollah Part of Broader Israeli-US Project – Analyst (Sp.)

Tel Aviv earlier described the Israeli military’s incursion into southern Lebanon as limited in scope, claiming that there will be “no long-term occupation.”Commenting on Israel’s recently announced start of its “targeted raids” in southern Lebanon, Dr Lorenzo Trombetta, Rome-based senior analyst and UN consultant on the Middle East, told Sputnik that those attacks are just preparatory measures before a broader military offensive on the ground.”In this sense, Israel is serving US purposes. That’s why all the Israeli operations on the ground are influencing the balance of power in Lebanon, and trying to change the equation of power there. Weakening not only Iran, but Hezbollah mainly, is part of the broader Israeli-US project,” Trombetta pointed out. The White House National Security Council earlier said that President Joe Biden had directed the US military to help Israel shoot down Iranian missiles targeting the Jewish state.

“The US military presence increased in the Middle East, mainly towards Iran, in order to threaten it and send a clear message to Tehran and its allies,” the analyst said. He suggested that the US won’t change their Middle Eastern policy and will continue “to manage the balance of power from their side, by being on the backseat and clearly supporting Israel and their other allies.” The Israeli military has meanwhile resumed air strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon, hours after Iran launched a massive missile attack on Israel in response to its “aggressive acts” against Tehran’s allies, including the assassination of Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. While Tel Aviv argued that most of the missiles were intercepted by Israeli air defenses, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps maintained that 90% of projectiles had hit their targets.

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Part 3 in the Putin Surrender saga. After Helmer and PCR, here’s Gilbert Doctorow.

• Putin, Medinsky, Istanbul-II and “Betrayal Of Russia’s State Interests” (Doctorow)

As a rule, on these pages I do not write critiques or responses to the writings of others, but today will be an exception. A colleague in Germany sent me the link below to a remarkable essay by John Helmer which is too important to ignore. Then one reader of my essays spontaneously asked me to comment on the points Helmer makes in the article in question. I now will do just that. For those who are unfamiliar with him, John Helmer is an Australian born, Harvard educated journalist who has been living in Moscow since 1989 and who is best known for his web platform Dances with Bears. His long residence in Moscow, his broad contacts with political elites there and his diligence at investigative reporting all mean that Helmer fills his articles like this one with invaluable insider’s talk. However, the question is whether his assembly of the facts at his disposal and his overall interpretation are as good as his skills at bringing to our attention little known connections between state actors. I have my doubts, which I will set out here.

In the given case, Helmer focuses attention on a certain Vladimir Medinsky, the man most widely known in the West as Putin’s chief negotiator in the March 2022 Russia-Ukraine peace talks in Istanbul that produced a lengthy draft treaty that was initialed by both sides but subsequently was rejected by Zelensky at the urging of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Helmer intimates that Medinsky was working on the side of the oligarchs back in March 2022 for a settlement that would end the conflict with minimal loss to the oligarchs’ interests and at the cost of Russia’s national interests. Moreover, he sees the same likelihood should Medinsky now be reappointed by Putin to lead the next round of peace talks, which appears probable given his recent reappearance at top state meetings relating to the Ukraine war.

Helmer airs the attacks that some high military officers have made on the political leadership of Putin going into peace talks. The suggestion is that Putin has been aligned with the oligarchs in Round One of the peace talks and cannot be trusted now. As for Medinsky, Helmer somewhat gratuitously tells us that he was born in Ukraine. He talks about Medinsky’s dubious merits during his term as Culture Minister which ended in the fall of 2019 when Putin reassigned him to be a presidential adviser. That was his title when, out of nowhere, Medinsky was made chief negotiator.

I take a personal interest in the discussion of Medinsky because he is someone whom I actually met back in the autumn of 2019 when he was still Culture Minister and visited various seminars within the St Petersburg Cultural Forum that Helmer mentions at the start of his essay. Medinsky spent perhaps 20 or 30 minutes with the dozen of us sitting around a seminar table. This was enough time to understand that he was a shallow chap. Subsequently I looked closely at the whole series of Russian history books that were published over Medinsky’s name for use in Russian secondary schools. None of them was impressive from an academic point of view, though they all were strongly patriotic. Indeed, Medinsky’s chief goal as Culture Minister was to restore patriotism to the school curricula. I also became acquainted back then with the allegations over possible plagiarism by Medinsky in his dissertation. These charges eventually were dropped but certainly tarnished his name.

[..] Would Medinsky have negotiated a treaty with Kiev that betrayed Russia’s state interests? I think that has to be excluded. After all, he did not go into the talks as sole negotiator, only as the lead. At his side there was Leonid Slutsky, who was present in his capacity as Chairman of the Duma Committee for International Affairs. Slutsky was/is the successor to the arch nationalist founder of the LDPR party Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who, we were recently reminded by Russian state television, was saying back in 2014 that Ukraine is not a country but a collection of beggars who should not be given one ruble (this when Putin was offering them $15 billion to keep them on Russia’s side and out of the clutches of the EU). Accordingly, Slutsky’s complicity in a sell-out of Russian interests, of a capitulation to satisfy oligarchs, is unthinkable.

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“Putin might end up being someone to turn to in the storm as Zelensky will want to avoid a Ceausescu finale to his term in office..”

• Trump May Be More Of An Enemy To Zelensky Than Even Putin (Jay)

It was frosty, awkward and the kind of media moment that President Zelensky of Ukraine would have preferred to have avoided. Trump offered an opportunity to rise to the mention of the word “Putin”. He could have said “we’re ready to work with him on a solution” or something similarly non-committal. But Zelensky, who is gambling with his own presidency by not having western media advisers – or at least not listening to them if they exist – did not prepare for the media moment. He believes he is bigger than that and it showed. Thrown, he mumbled something which pundits are still trying to decipher even now, which didn’t impress Trump who replied “it takes two to tango”. Trump’s point is that Zelensky has to come down from the clouds and look at the reality facing him. The war is lost for Ukraine regardless of who wins the White House. And yet, the media gaffe showed the world what the author has been predicting for some time: Zelensky’s real enemy is not Putin. It’s Trump.

If Trump comes to the conclusion early on that Zelensky is really the core of the problem in Ukraine, then he will very quickly show him in a matter of hours, if he wins the U.S. presidency, just which part of this U.S.-Ukraine relationship is the dog and which part is the tail. It beggars belief that Zelensky, at this late stage in the game, is still clinging on to the preposterous if not deluded idea that he is in a position to negotiate anything. If he chose to work with Trump however, he would have some wiggle room. If not, it will be a matter of days into the Trump presidency where we will see the implosion of Zelensky and his cabal as the Donald will hang him out to dry. It might well turn out that Putin might end up being someone to turn to in the storm as Zelensky will want to avoid a Ceausescu finale to his term in office. In reality he will flee in the dead of night on a private jet with one or two of his closest friends and live in Florida.

In many ways, a Harris win might appear to Zelensky as an even slower death, given that the aid packages and arms procurement are declining making a Ukrainian win harder to pull off. Not enough arms and what is sent is too little too late. And the infantry problem which never goes away. Nowhere near enough men to give Russian forces a run for their money.And yet, facing a baptism of failure, Zelensky continues to kid himself. This is the consequence of destroying all media, shutting down opposition parties and silencing any dissidents who cry out common sense. When you create exactly the scenario that Hitler did in the 30s, particularly with what was called “propaganda” then and what we commonly call “fake news” today, inevitably you start to believe it yourself. It’s the same venal, perverse relationship that Zelensky has with the West. It’s an echo chamber and in such circumstances we should not be surprised that Zelensky has become so deluded with such a jarred view of his own circumstances and that of his own military.

With the on camera moment with Trump going so badly, one can only hope that backchannel talks with Zelensky’s people and those of Trump’s are going on to fix the gulf of what could at best be called miscommunication or at worst an ideological malaise. Zelensky needs to listen to the Trump camp and show more respect to Trump as the quickest way to become an enemy of the Donald is to show irreverence and not take him seriously. Was that awkward moment a breaking point? We will probably know in the coming days as it’s only a matter time before someone squeals to a social media influencer or pseudo journalist. The problem for him is that no scenarios are good. All roads take him to a place he doesn’t want to go. But this is the price he must pay for being bullied into tearing up a peace treaty he signed with Putin in Istanbul which by now must be a sore wound that he constantly licks. He messed up. How he reacts to his grave errors of judgement will decide how history writes his political eulogy. The word ‘hero’ is probably not going to make it in there.

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“Judge Brinkema reversed her decision following a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found the term “crime of violence” to be “unconstitutionally vague.”

• The War on Terror 23 Years Later (Greenberg)

September marked the 23rd anniversary of al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the United States, which left nearly 3,000 people dead. For the two decades since then, I’ve been writing, often for TomDispatch, about the ways the American response to 9/11, which quickly came to be known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, changed this country. As I’ve explored in several books, in the name of that war, we transformed our institutions, privileged secrecy over transparency and accountability, side-stepped and even violated longstanding laws and constitutional principles, and basically tossed aside many of the norms that had guided us as a nation for two centuries-plus, opening the way for a country now in Trumpian-style difficulty at home. Even today, more than two decades later, the question remains: Will the war on terror ever end?

Certainly, one might be inclined to answer in the affirmative following the recent unexpected endorsement of presidential candidate Kamala Harris by two leading members of the George W. Bush administration which, in response to those attacks, launched the GWOT. First, Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, who, after September 11th, sought to take the country down the path to what he called “the dark side” and was a chief instigator of the misguided and fraudulently justified invasion of Iraq in 2003, endorsed Vice President Harris. Then, so did Alberto Gonzales who, while serving as White House counsel to George W. Bush and then as his attorney general, was intricately involved in crafting that administration’s grim torture policy. (You remember, of course, those “enhanced interrogation techniques.”) He was similarly involved in creating the overreaching surveillance policy designed and implemented during the first years of the war on terror.

Consider those surprising endorsements by former Bush war hawks a possible coda for the war on terror as a major factor in American politics. In fact, for almost a decade and a half now, there have been signs suggesting that the denouement of that war might be at hand (though it never quite was). Those markers included the May 2011 lethal raid on the hideout of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden; President Barack Obama’s December 2011 authorization for the “final” withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (though a cadre of 2,500 military personnel are stationed there presently and another 900 are in neighboring Syria). In August 2021, 10 years after the killing of bin Laden, the U.S. did finally exit, however disastrously, from its lost war in Afghanistan. And in 2022, a U.S. drone strike killed bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The counterterrorism measures have had an impact on the American threat environment.

As reported in the Department of Homeland Security’s 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment, in 2022, “Only one attack in the United States was conducted by an individual inspired by a foreign terrorist organization” such as al-Qaeda or ISIS. Notably, prosecutions of alleged international terrorists have declined precipitously since the Bush administration years (and some of the convictions then have been reversed or altered). In a 2009 report, the Justice Department stated that, “since September 11, 2001, the Department has charged 512 individuals with terrorism or terrorism-related crimes and convicted or obtained guilty pleas in 319 terrorism-related and anti-terrorism cases.” Soon after that, however, the decline began. TRAC, a database that monitors such cases, reported that, in October 2014, “[t]here were no prosecutions recorded that involved international terrorism.”

By 2022, TRAC was reporting that the number of domestic terrorism prosecutions far outnumbered international terrorism cases, due in large part to the charges leveled against those involved in the January 6th insurrection. And that trend has only continued. This year, as TRAC indicated, “Overall, the data show that convictions of this type are down 28.6 percent from levels reported in 2019.” And when it comes to terrorism prosecutions, something unthinkable not so long ago has now happened. Several judges have recently given early release or simply overturned cases involving individuals convicted and sentenced in jihadi-inspired terrorism cases during the first decade of the war on terror. In July 2024, Eastern District of Virginia Judge Leonie Brinkema threw out three of 10 charges against and overturned a conviction carrying a life sentence for Ali Al-Timimi, a U.S.-born computational biology scholar sentenced in 2004 for soliciting treason by inspiring his followers to commit acts of violence abroad to defend Islam.

Judge Brinkema reversed her decision following a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found the term “crime of violence” to be “unconstitutionally vague.” Al-Timimi’s fate on the other counts is now on appeal. Having been released to home confinement after the onset of the Covid pandemic, he now no longer faces a life sentence, though, as the Associated Press reports, he could potentially see “decades of prison time beyond the 15 years he already served.” Nor was this Brinkema’s first reversal in a terrorism case. In 2018, she ordered the release of two prisoners convicted in what was known as the Virginia “Paintball Jihad” case following two Supreme Court rulings that held the charges in those cases to be similarly unconstitutionally vague.

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Never ending. The pic tells the story.

• Guilty (CJ Hopkins)

So, the Berlin Appellate Court overturned my acquittal today. I am now, officially, at least according to the New Normal German authorities, a “hate-speech” criminal. I’m officially a “hate-speech” criminal because I compared New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany, and I challenged the official Covid narrative, and I used the cover art of my book to do it. The New Normal German authorities didn’t like that, and were determined to punish me for doing that, and to make an example of me, in order to discourage other people from doing that. It took them two tries, but they pulled it off. The judge in my original trial screwed up and acquitted me, but the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s office didn’t give up. They appealed the verdict — yes, they can do that in Germany — and this morning the Appellate Court overturned the verdict and declared me guilty.

I’ll report on all the ugly details of my day in court in a proper column sometime later this week, when I’ve sufficiently recovered from the hangover I am currently about to start working on. I’ll also be resurrecting my legal defense fund and telling you about that in my next column, because the only recourse my attorney and I have left at this point is to try to get the German Constitutional Court (i.e., Germany’s supreme court) to hear the case. In the meantime, I wanted to share my Statement to the Appellate Court. Here it is.

Statement to the Berlin Appellate Court, September 30, 2024

Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is CJ Hopkins. I am an award-winning playwright, author, and political satirist. My work is read by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. For over thirty years, I have written and spoken out against fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and so on. Anyone can do an Internet search, find my books, reviews of my plays, my essays, and learn who I am and what my political views are in five minutes. And yet, I am accused by the German authorities of spreading pro-Nazi propaganda. I’m accused of doing this because I posted two Tweets challenging the official Covid narrative and comparing the new, nascent form of totalitarianism it has brought into being — the so-called “New Normal” — to Nazi Germany.

Let me be clear. I did that. In August 2022, as Germany was debating whether to end its Covid mask mandates, I tweeted those two Tweets. I challenged the official Covid narrative. I compared the New Normal to Nazi Germany. I did that with the cover art of one of my books. I did what anyone is allowed to do according to German law. I did what Karl Lauterbach has done. I did what German celebrities like Jessica Berlin have done. I did what major German newspapers and magazines have done. A few months ago, Stern and Der Spiegel published covers of their magazines featuring swastikas. Der Spiegel’s cover featured exactly the same artistic concept as my book cover and my Tweets. The only difference is, the swastika on Der Spiegel’s cover is behind a German flag, whereas the swastika on my book cover and in my Tweets is behind a medical mask. That’s it. That is the only difference.

Stern and Der Spiegel displayed swastikas on their covers in order to warn the public of the rise of a new form of totalitarianism, and that is precisely what I did. I compared the New Normal — i.e., the new nascent form of totalitarianism that came into being in 2020 — to Nazi Germany. Stern and Der Spiegel compared the AfD to Nazi Germany. That is the only difference. I’m not a fan of the AfD. I’m not a fan of Stern and Der Spiegel. That doesn’t matter. Stern and Der Spiegel have the right to do what they did, and so do I. That right is guaranteed to us in the German constitution. We all have the right, if we see a new form of totalitarianism taking shape, to oppose it, and to compare it to historical forms of totalitarianism, including Nazi Germany. I don’t follow German electoral politics very closely, so I don’t know exactly what the AfD has done that prompted Stern and Der Spiegel to compare them to the Nazis. But I know exactly what the German authorities did during 2020 to 2023.

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Kant. 230 years ago.

• 10 Principles for Perpetual Peace in the 21st Century (Jeffrey Sachs)

Next year will mark the 230th anniversary of Immanuel Kant’s celebrated essay on “Perpetual Peace” (1795). The great German philosopher put forward a set of guiding principles to achieve perpetual peace among the nations of his day. As we grapple with a world at war, and indeed at dire risk of nuclear Armageddon, we should build on Kant’s approach for our own time. An updated set of principles should be considered at the United Nations Summit of the Future in September. Kant was fully aware that his proposals would face the skepticism of “practical” politicians: “The practical politician assumes the attitude of looking down with great self-satisfaction on the political theorist as a pedant whose empty ideas in no way threaten the security of the state, inasmuch as the state must proceed on empirical principles; so the theorist is allowed to play his game without interference from the worldly-wise statesman.”

Nonetheless, as historian Mark Mazower noted in his magisterial account of global governance, Kant’s was a “text that would intermittently influence generations of thinkers about world government down to our own day,” helping to lay the groundwork for the United Nations and international law on human rights, the conduct of war, and arms control. Kant’s core proposals centered on three ideas. First, he rejected standing armies. Standing armies “incessantly menace other states by their readiness to appear at all times prepared for war.” In this, Kant anticipated by a century and a half the famous warning by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower of the dangers of a military-industrial complex. Second, Kant called for non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations. In this, Kant inveighed against the kind of covert operations that the US has used relentlessly to topple foreign governments.

Third, Kant called for a “federation of free states,” which in our time became the United Nations, a “federation” of 193 states pledged to operate under the UN Charter. Kant put great hopes on republicanism as opposed to one-person rule as a check on war-making. Kant reasoned that a single ruler would readily succumb to the temptation of war: “…a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like. He may, therefore, resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the most trivial reasons, and with perfect indifference leave the justification which decency requires to the diplomatic corps who are ever ready to provide it.”

By contrast, according to Kant: “…if the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared (and in this [republican] constitution it cannot but be the case), nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war. Kant was far too optimistic about the ability of public opinion to constrain war-making. Both the Athenian and Roman republics were notoriously belligerent. Britain was the 19th century’s leading democracy, but perhaps its most belligerent power. For decades, the US has engaged in non-stop wars of choice and violent overthrows of foreign governments.”

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Chemicals

 

 

Frameless Rembrandt

 

 

Sunlight
https://twitter.com/i/status/1841354818037645715

 

 

Bears
https://twitter.com/i/status/1841458135610855707

 

 

Dolphin

 

 

Free concert wren

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle April 26 2024

Apr 262024
 
 April 26, 2024  Posted by at 8:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  55 Responses »


Herri met de Bles Landscape with Saint Christopher 1535 – 1545

 

• America: Goodbye my Country (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Sceptical Supreme Court Could Hand Trump Partial Victory In Immunity Case (ZH)
• Court to Decide Trump Contempt Sanction (Turley)
• Hillary Clinton and Marc Elias Are Afraid of 2024 Trump Win (Sp.)
• Democrats Want Donald Trump ‘Killed,’ Alan Dershowitz Warns (ET)
• Pollster: ‘Deep State’ Wanted Trump’s Imprint On Failed Ukraine Policy (Sp.)
• Trump Allies Charged In Arizona Election Interference Case (Sp.)
• Biden Rushes Aid to Ukraine As US Cost of Living Skyrockets (Miles)
• Biden Team Doubts US Aid Will Help Ukraine Win – Politico (RT)
• Scott Ritter: US Aid for Ukraine Won’t Hamper Russia’s Strategic Advantage (Sp.)
• Russia To Seize $440 Million From JPMorgan (ZH)
• Harvey Weinstein Conviction Overturned On Appeal (ZH)
• Immanuel Kant Goes To War (Hayes)
• Carbon Emissions CANNOT Cause ‘Global Warming’ (Slay)

 

 

 

 

Trump NY

 

 

Pecker
https://twitter.com/i/status/1783587614928368048

 

 

Immunity
https://twitter.com/i/status/1783600215817163214

 

 


Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

Tucker racism

 

 

Bannon Rickards

 

 

 

 

“Americans have sat on their butts and allowed the destruction of civility, the rule of law, the Constitution, and their nation.”

• America: Goodbye my Country (Paul Craig Roberts)

I would add several more. For example, the independence of doctors requires private practice. Private practice is being destroyed systematically by medical insurance, malpractice insurance, Medicare, Big Pharma, and the US Congress which panders to Big Pharma for campaign contributions. Medical doctors are being forced into becoming employees for HMOs where they have to follow their employer’s protocols or be fired. This means that they must abandon the Hippocratric Oath and follow the profit-enhancing practices of their employer HMOs. Big Pharma provides software for diagnosis and treatment, and doctors have to prescribe according to what Medicare and insurance companies will pay a percentage of the billing amount. Even doctors in private practice find that what they can prescribe and what operations they can perform is limited to insurance and medicare decisions.

During the orchestrated “Covid pandemic,” the entire propaganda operation was geared toward maximizing Big Pharma’s profits from the Covid “vaccine” and to cancelling people’s control over their own health care by imposing “vaccine” mandates. This was the first exercise in the imposition of mass tyranny in the Western World. Individual countries had experienced tyranny, but never before the entire Western world simultaneously. In order to maximize Big Pharma’s profits and impose mass tyranny, it was necessary to prohibit two safe, effective, known preventatives and cures for Covid–hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. Doctors who successfully used these cures and preventatives to protect their patients were subject to persecution by medical authorities and governing boards. Some were fired from their HMO jobs and university medical schools, some were stripped of their licenses, some were prosecuted. In order to mass inject people with an untested “vaccine” under an emergency use order the requirement was that there were no cures.

So, the fact that there were cures had to be suppressed. The utterly corrupt US medical establishment, the whore media and the Western governments suppressed the cures and ridiculed them as “horse medicine.” If the Western peoples were not so insouciant, so gullible, so trusting of “authorities,” so utterly stupid and incapable of thinking for themselves, there would have been no orchestrated “Covid pandemic” and no mass vaccination, which is against all medical protocols in the face of a pandemic. According to all available scientific evidence to date, the “Covid vaccine” has killed and destroyed the health of more people than the Covid virus. The corrupt “authorities” have done their best to cover this up, but as I have reported the coverup has failed. Still nothing is being done about it. Nothing can be done as long as Congress is dependent on campaign contributions from corporations. “Our” representatives are really representatives of those interest groups that fund election campaigns.

Congress reports to them, not to us. The idiot US Supreme Court actually ruled that corporations had a legitimate Constitutional right to purchase the US government. This ruling converted a government that represented the people into one that represented the political campaign contributors. Another addition I would make is the destruction of manners. Try to find today any sign of the manners I grew up with or the civilization that existed. Even when I was in my 20s, when a woman entered the room, the men stood up. Car and restaurant doors were opened for women. Women were helped into their seat at the table. Only when women were seated did men sit down. Men were trained to be gentleman, and ladies to be ladies. No gentleman ever used a four-letter word in a woman’s presence, and no woman ever spoke one. Listen to the barbaric youth today. Even the terms ladies and gentlemen have passed out or have been driven out of use.

[..] Today in the Disunited States we have a government in power that was not elected; instead it used control over the blue cities in swing states and the whore American media to steal the election. Massive amounts of evidence was provided by experts that the election was stolen, but this was strongly denied by the whore media, and experts were prosecuted for making the facts known. Today America is governed by an illegitimate tyrannical regime, and nothing has been done about it. The Republican Party is useless. Only Trump soldiers on with four orchestrated criminal indictments and a number of civil cases arrayed against him. The media, Democrats, and Rino Republicans are all against him. Only the people are for him, and the people are powerless. They don’t even have the vote as the Democrats made clear by stealing the last two elections. Those prosecuting Trump have no concern that they are destroying America’s reputation and reducing the power of all future presidents, making them even more subservient to the deep state.

America’s only representative–Donald Trump–is so overloaded with criminal and civil prosecutions that he has no time to campaign and even as a billionaire is overwhelmed with the legal costs of defending himself from obvious nonsensical charges.The legal profession, the law schools, the bar associations, the Congress, the courts, the media stand aside as if they are not also endangered and as if the weaponization of law isn’t a foundation of tyranny. What we are witnessing most certainly is the transformation of American law into a weapon for subjecting the American population and eliminating anyone who dares to protest or challenge the tyrannical ruling establishment. This is the reason that the United States of America is a totally dead and buried formerly free nation. Americans have sat on their butts and allowed the destruction of civility, the rule of law, the Constitution, and their nation.

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Interesting discussion. To be continued.

• Sceptical Supreme Court Could Hand Trump Partial Victory In Immunity Case (ZH)

After two and a half hours, the Supreme Court has finished hearing arguments on whether a former president is immune from criminal prosecution. Reading the tea-leaves of the comments has left most believing that SCOTUS will fail to grant former President Trump the full immunity he is seeking (choosing instead to narrow the protections for former presidents), but are likely to issue a ruling that could further delay his trial on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. That would be a partial win for the former President. As Axios reports, a definitive ruling against Trump – a clear rejection of his theory of immunity that would allow his Jan. 6 trial to promptly resume – seemed to be the least likely outcome. A majority of the justices seemed inclined to rule that former presidents must have at least some protection from criminal charges, but not necessarily the “absolute immunity” Trump is seeking.

The core distinction during oral arguments came down to a president’s official vs. unofficial actions. — and which of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results were official vs. unofficial. The most likely outcome might be for the high court to punt, perhaps kicking the case back to lower courts for more nuanced hearings. That would still be a victory for Trump, as Sam Dorman reports via The Epoch Times that the outcome of this appeal could delay lower court proceedings in President Trump’s Washington trial as well as his cases in Georgia and Florida. It’s unlikely that the Supreme Court, which is expected to release a decision in June, will write an opinion that delays his ongoing criminal “hush money” trial in New York. The bottom-line is that no clear, concise majority opinion emerged this morning. But there may be five justices willing to kick the can down the road – and that’s enough for Trump, at least for now.

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“Only Michael Cohen would portray himself in terms of a witness simply trying to share evidence of a crime..”

• Court to Decide Trump Contempt Sanction (Turley)

I will confess that there are at times a level of contempt expressed in my columns. However, today will be the first time that a column becomes a legal matter for contempt. Among the ten postings by former president Donald Trump being raised by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in his contempt sanction is the use of a quotation from one of my columns. In a hearing on the gag order Tuesday morning, Judge Juan Merchan reserved any final decision. On April 15, Trump quoted my New York Post column from the day before titled “A serial perjurer will try to prove an old misdemeanor against Trump in an embarrassment for the New York legal system.” Trump posted the title while attaching a link. There is an interesting aspect to this controversy that captures the problem with Judge Merchan’s gag order.

In addition to continually appealing on television to oppose Trump’s election and to discuss his testimony in this case, Cohen has also lashed out against critics and coverage, including my own columns. I have been a critic of Cohen since the time when he was still working as counsel for Trump. Cohen has continued to attack some of us with vulgar postings while posting mocking pictures and attacks on Trump, including running commentary on the trial. In one posting, Cohen posted an insulting attack on myself and others who have raised questions about the Manhattan case while objecting that he is entitled to the protection of the gag order because he is a witness. Only Michael Cohen would portray himself in terms of a witness simply trying to share evidence of a crime.

Cohen has raised money on being the antagonist of Donald Trump. He has cultivated his professional wrestling style as a type of trash-talking, chair-throwing thug to liberal cable programs. Judge Merchan has allowed him to use the gag order to shield him from criticism as he heaps abuse on Trump both as a candidate and a defendant. That includes, like Trump, responding to these very columns, including my own, on the case. I have previously criticized these gag orders on constitutional grounds.

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“.. ‘public servants’ in the United States dole out trillions of unregulated dollars, but can be ‘purchased’ for mere millions of dollars..”

• Hillary Clinton and Marc Elias Are Afraid of 2024 Trump Win (Sp.)

Hillary Clinton has once again evoked the specter of “Russian collusion” and warned the audience of Marc Elias’ “Democracy Docket” podcast that Donald Trump’s role model is no one but Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to Clinton, the danger of a Trump victory to the US democracy is acute, given that Republicans would do whatever it takes to win the 2024 elections, starting with narrowing the electorate, purging votes, creating confusion at polling stations and even weaponizing artificial intelligence (AI). “Probably can’t even imagine what they’re going to do with artificial intelligence and other cyber-attacks on voters in terms of the messages that they will get, sometimes deliberately, to confuse them. You know, different polling places, different days to vote, different times of voting — I mean, whatever they can do to mess people up,” the former secretary of state claimed.

She went on to say that if Trump wins the presidential election in 2024 he would turn into a full-fledged “authoritarian” or “dictator”, who wants to kill his opposition, suppresses the freedom of speech, takes bribes in pay-to-play schemes, and doesn’t believe in the rule of law. Clinton’s outlandish claims expose her as nothing short of a projectionist, according to Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel, who has been examining the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud and pay-to-play scheming for several years. “Hillary Clinton and Marc Elias are both disgraces to the legal profession and mere servants of corrupt donors who plainly understand that ‘public servants’ in the United States dole out trillions of unregulated dollars, but can be ‘purchased’ for mere millions of dollars, often routed via leaky ‘charities,’ or off-market ‘business’ deals and media gigs,” Ortel told Sputnik.

“So far, the known record indicates that Elias, acting for the 2015/16 Clinton campaign and likely working directly with Hillary, rigged the Democratic primaries to favor Hillary and deny Bernie a running shot at winning the Democratic nomination,” the analyst continued. “Then, Elias (likely under direction from Hillary and her corrupt donors) contracted the manufacture of bold lies attempting to link Trump to Russia in the ‘Steele Dossier’ and hyped their deep connections in media and academia to inflate a massive web of deception that hampered the Trump presidency, instigated impeachments of Trump, interfered in the 2020 election, the 2022 election and now in the 2024 election. “If Trump and the GOP win the White House and Congress this year, that could spell serious legal troubles for both Hillary and Marc, the analyst presumed.

Clinton’s claim about Trump’s apparent desire to “kill” his opposition could trigger inconvenient parallels with a string of unexplained deaths around Team Clinton, according to Sputnik’s interlocutor. While Hillary is peddling the idea of the GOP’s forthcoming “election disinformation,” one should recall how she tried to evade scrutiny during the “emailgate” scandal concerning classified government information which ran through her unprotected server, the analyst pointed out. The former secretary of state permanently deleted 33,000 of those emails insisting they were “personal and private”. “Hillary Clinton is an adept liar and mistress of attempting to destroy incriminating evidence,” Ortel said. “In this, she has legions of co-conspirators who have woven fanciful tales of her decades of ‘public service’ without explaining how she managed to convince a major law firm— Williams & Connolly—-to defer collecting millions in legal fees through Bill Clinton’s presidency or how the Clinton family scored millions of dollars in off-market book and speech deals.”

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What is it with Dems and Secret Service protection? Nobody questioned it before..

• Democrats Want Donald Trump ‘Killed,’ Alan Dershowitz Warns (ET)

Retired Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz suggested that Democrat officials want former President Donald Trump to get killed by taking away his Secret Service protection. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) introduced legislation last week that would remove Secret Service protection for people who are convicted of felony or state crimes. The lawmaker mentioned that a “former president” could be an individual whose protection would be terminated if he’s found guilty in four cases. But Mr. Dershowitz, a former constitutional law professor and criminal defense lawyer, asserted in an interview with Newsmax over the weekend that Mr. Thompson’s legislation is “ridiculous” and “means they want him killed because he’s obviously a target.”

“We live in an age where everybody is in danger. Look, Bobby Kennedy ought to be getting Secret Service protection, but certainly Donald Trump needs to get Secret Service protection. He’s not going to jail, but if he goes to jail obviously the law requires Secret Service protection,” Mr. Dershowitz said, referring to President Trump. It comes as President Trump faces a criminal trial in which prosecutors allege that he falsified business records during the 2016 campaign to cover up negative news stories. The trial is scheduled to last around six to eight weeks in total, while opening arguments started Monday. Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the case, “is going to bluff, fine and threat, but he’s not going to throw Donald Trump in jail,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “That would be a guaranteed victory … I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

A press release issued by Mr. Thompson’s office said that with President Trump’s cases, there is now an opportunity for Congress to reform the U.S. Secret Service’s protective mission “by automatically terminating Secret Service protection for those who have been sentenced to prison following conviction for a federal or state felony—clarifying that prison authorities would be responsible for the protection of all inmates regardless of previous Secret Service protection.”

“Unfortunately, current law doesn’t anticipate how Secret Service protection would impact the felony prison sentence of a protectee—even a former president. It is regrettable that it has come to this, but this previously unthought-of scenario could become our reality,” Mr. Thompson said, referring to the former president’s 91 state and federal charges. “Therefore, it is necessary for us to be prepared and update the law so the American people can be assured that protective status does not translate into special treatment—and that those who are sentenced to prison will indeed serve the time required of them,” he added in the news release.

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“..Speaker Johnson and many congressional Republicans snubbed their own voters on Ukraine funding for two reasons: ignorance and ideology..”

• Pollster: ‘Deep State’ Wanted Trump’s Imprint On Failed Ukraine Policy (Sp.)

Most Americans hold a realistic view of the unfolding Ukraine conflict and want their government to prioritize domestic economic and national security interests, according to Patrick Basham, head of Democracy Institute, a politically independent research organization based in Washington and London. Basham likewise does not rule out that Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has been played by the US “deep state” into supporting the unpopular Ukraine aid package. Sputnik: US Congress’ decision to back Joe Biden’s $61 billion aid package for Ukraine to fight its war against Russia has been met with disapproval from US voters on both sides of the political aisle, according to your new poll. Why did Mike Johnson and some of his fellow Republicans in the House decide to snub the GOP’s base on Ukraine?

Patrick Basham: Speaker Johnson and many congressional Republicans snubbed their own voters on Ukraine funding for two reasons: ignorance and ideology. These Republican politicians, along with the majority of American congressmen and senators, are abysmally ignorant about the state of the war in Ukraine. They do not realize that Ukraine has been defeated; many of them even believe Ukraine can still win the military contest with Russia. They are also adherents to a foreign policy ideology that is at odds with the perspective held by the overwhelming majority of conservative and Republican voters in America. The politicians are neoconservatives who divide the world into black and white, good and bad nations.

They believe that American and Western military and economic power can and should remove from power foreign governments that America dislikes – and, crucially, that the removal of these governments will be met with approval from those formerly ruled by them. Although these costly interventions consistently fail, they are advertised as projects to advance democracy, freedom, and prosperity. In striking contrast, most Republican voters (and most Americans) hold a more realistic view of American power. They want Washington to prioritize American interests (especially economic and national security) abroad. As such, they are deeply reluctant to put American soldiers in harm’s way for little, if any, apparent benefit to America, and they are also acutely sensitive to the horrendous economic cost of waging a prolonged overseas war.

Sputnik: Your survey has also indicated that Donald Trump’s support for Speaker Mike Johnson failed to sway the American opposition to funding the Ukrainian conflict. Nonetheless, Sen. Lindsey Graham claimed that Trump’s support helped ram the Ukraine package through Congress. What’s your take on Trump’s role in advocating the provision of Ukraine aid in the form of a loan and backing Johnson’s Ukraine bill? Patrick Basham: Trump’s support for Johnson helped to make the Ukraine bill more palatable to some Republican congressmen. Trump provided political cover for those Republican politicians afraid of attacks from “America First” critics within their own party. I presume that Trump’s principal goal was to shore up Johnson’s overall position within the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives so that during the election campaign Republicans would not experience yet another drawn-out, politically painful exercise to choose a new speaker.

Read more …

Raising Arizona.

• Trump Allies Charged In Arizona Election Interference Case (Sp.)

Trump allies Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, and Jenna Ellis are among 18 people charged in an election interference case in the state of Arizona, court documents revealed. “Defendants’ attempts to declare Unindicted Co-conspirator 1 and Pence the winners of the 2020 Presidential Election contrary to voter intent and the law, involved numerous other charged and uncharged co-conspirators,” the filing said on Wednesday. Former President Donald Trump is listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the filing. The defendants are accused of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Arizona, the court documents stated.

In February, a US federal appeals court ruled that Trump is not immune from prosecution in his 2020 election interference case, which Trump appealed to the US Supreme Court. The US Supreme Court is scheduled to decide whether Trump is immune from being prosecuted as a former US president on Thursday. In August 2023, a Fulton County grand jury indicted Trump on 13 felony counts related to his alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges in Georgia over the 2020 presidential election. Trump faces a total of 91 charges in four criminal cases that Republicans say are an attempt by the Democratic establishment to prevent him from returning to the White House. The most serious charges carry penalties of up to 20 years in prison. If the punishment were to be determined by adding up the terms, he could be behind bars for more than 700 years.

Read more …

“..the cost now of living in America has risen by about $11,434, give or take, in comparison to when Biden took office.”

• Biden Rushes Aid to Ukraine As US Cost of Living Skyrockets (Miles)

American households in 2024 are spending an extra $11,434 annually to maintain a similar standard of living to the one they enjoyed just three years ago. That’s according to a new study by Republican members of the US Senate Joint Economic Committee who examined consumer price data to arrive at an analysis of the impact of inflation from state to state. In some parts of the country the cost of living increase stood at a comparatively modest $8,500 per year, while in states like California and Colorado it approached $15,000. The Biden White House rejected the study as one-sided, pointing to attendant wage increases across the economy. Still, recent polling suggests most Americans don’t feel the increased income makes up for the rise in inflation, and economic issues remain at the forefront of voters’ concerns with November’s presidential election less than seven months away.

Geopolitical consultant and founder of Global Perspective Consulting David Oualaalou pointed to the troubling data during an appearance on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program Wednesday, questioning the US president’s focus on foreign policy amidst a grim economic outlook for millions of Americans. “The fact that [the US] keeps sending more money to Ukraine [and] it’s already a failed state, what is it for?” asked the author and global speaker. “We have been taking money out of average Americans that are paying taxes. I hope your listeners understand — and this is a sad reality — that the cost now of living in America has risen by about $11,434, give or take, in comparison to when Biden took office.” “And why? Because we are taking money out of Americans and giving it to the corrupted government in Ukraine.” he insisted. “I saw those images of the incompetent members of Congress waving the Ukrainian flag inside Congress. Well to me it became like, why don’t you go and represent Ukraine?

Shame on our politicians. But, again, until the structure of our system has changed, nothing is going to change fundamentally.” Former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about the emergent US military-industrial complex during his farewell address in 1961. What’s less well known is that an earlier draft of the speech referred to a “military-industrial-congressional complex.” Eisenhower reconsidered the term out of fear of offending Washington lawmakers, but the designation makes clear legislators’ key role in what the former leader considered a corrupt and dangerous phenomenon. Military contractors make up one of the largest political lobbies in Washington; recently, a study found lawmakers who voted to pass a recent National Defense Authorization Act received four to five times more in donations from the defense industry than those who did not. The promise of campaign cash creates a powerful incentive for congress members to vote to fund more war.

“We have nothing to show but conflicts,” said Oualaalou. “We do not sell anything to the rest of the world except conflict and weapons. And at some point when the world is shifting, like what we are witnessing right now, most countries are going to say, ‘sorry, we are not interested in buying what you have to sell.'” Recently the African country of Chad has threatened to order US troops stationed in the country to leave. The move comes after the neighboring country of Niger made a similar request. The United States has, so far, refused to comply, having invested significant amounts of money there as a hub for military and surveillance activity in the region.

Read more …

It’s not about winning. It’s about fighting.

• Biden Team Doubts US Aid Will Help Ukraine Win – Politico (RT)

US officials are not convinced that another $61 billion in American assistance for Ukraine will be enough for it to prevail in the conflict against Russia, Politico has reported. President Joe Biden signed a $95 billion foreign aid package on Wednesday, which also included funding for Israel and Taiwan. The Senate voted on the legislation earlier this week, ending a standoff between the Democrats and the Republicans that had dragged on since the autumn. “Battlefield dynamics [in the Ukraine conflict] have shifted a lot in the last few months,” Politico reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed members of the Biden administration. This happened partially because the stalemate in Congress led to Ukrainian forces running low on weapons and ammunition, the sources suggested.

“The immediate goal is to stop Ukrainian losses and help Ukraine regain momentum and turn the tide on the battlefield. After that, the goal is to help Ukraine begin to regain its territory,” one of the officials said. “Will they have what they need to win? Ultimately, yes. But it’s not a guarantee that they will. Military operations are much more complicated than that.” A senior Democratic Senate aide also told Politico that the question now is whether more US aid can lead to a Ukrainian victory, or if it would just be enough to fend off Russian forces temporarily. “There’s lots of debate about what a winning endgame for Ukraine looks like at this point,” the source said. The outlet argued that there is a difference between Kiev “winning” by getting “most or all of its territory back” and “not losing,” which means that “Ukraine can hold its lines and advance some but fail to claw back what Russia seized.”

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s stance that Kiev should fight until it takes back all of its territory, including Crimea, “commits the US to a much longer conflict with no guarantee Zelensky will achieve his goals,” Politico stressed. Commenting on the $61 billion US military aid package on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov insisted that “all these new batches of weapons… will not change the dynamics on the front line.” Earlier this week, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said that Moscow’s forces currently hold the initiative everywhere along the front line and are capturing more settlements. He estimated Kiev’s losses at half a million troops since the start of the conflict in February 2022.

Read more …

“Russia currently enjoys “military superiority, if not outright supremacy, along the entire line of contact..”

• Scott Ritter: US Aid for Ukraine Won’t Hamper Russia’s Strategic Advantage (Sp.)

US President Joe Biden recently signed a long-delayed $95 billion package, including $61 billion in aid for Ukraine, into law. At least $13.8 billion of this sum will be used to deliver weaponry, such as long-range ATACMS missiles and F-16 fighter jets. This is “a lot of money” but it will not turn the tide of the conflict, former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter said in an interview with Sputnik. “The $13.8 billion in military assistance that will be provided to Ukraine will be insufficient to basically halt the ongoing Russian advance,” and “to change the outcome on the battlefield,” he stated. The sum will not help the Kiev regime “turn the tide to send Russian forces back to, according to the Zelensky formula, the 1991 borders,” Ritter stressed, recalling that it isn’t just him making this assessment.

“This is the assessment of Ukraine’s Foreign Minister [Dmytro] Kuleba, who has said that at this late stage in the game, there’s no amount of military assistance that can stop the Russian advance. He’s correct,” the Marine Corps intelligence officer underscored. Ritter also cited “talk of magic weapons” for the Zelensky regime, which he said would be of little help. According to him, Russia currently enjoys “military superiority, if not outright supremacy, along the entire line of contact, not just on the front lines, but extending well into the rear areas of the Ukrainian defense areas.” He also explained that after the US weapons are delivered to Ukraine and brought up to the front line, the weaponry “will be subjected to increasing levels of interdiction.”

“Very little of this military assistance will actually make it to the Ukrainian soldiers at the front line, and when it does, this military equipment will be destroyed relatively quickly by the Russians who will be tracking this equipment throughout its entire journey from the West to the front lines,” Ritter pointed out. The former US Marine Corps intelligence officer suggested that Russia would manage to retain its “strategic advantage” on the battlefield “until victory, regardless of the amount of money that the United States, Europe or anybody else pours into Ukraine. Ritter’s remarks come after Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov underlined that the situation on the battlefield is “self-explanatory and unambiguous,” and that “all these new batches of weapons, […] will not change the dynamics at the front line.”

Read more …

The cost of sanctions.

• Russia To Seize $440 Million From JPMorgan (ZH)

Seizing assets? Two can play at that game… Just days after Washington voted to authorize the REPO Act – paving the way for the Biden administration confiscate billions in Russian sovereign assets which sit in US banks – it appears Moscow has a plan of its own (let’s call it the REVERSE REPO Act) as a Russian court has ordered the seizure of $440 million from JPMorgan. The seizure order follows from Kremlin-run lender VTB launching legal action against the largest US bank to recoup money stuck under Washington’s sanctions regime. As The FT reports, the order, published in the Russian court register on Wednesday, targets funds in JPMorgan’s accounts and shares in its Russian subsidiaries, according to the ruling issued by the arbitration court in St Petersburg. The assets had been frozen by authorities in the wake of the western sanctions, and highlights some of the fallout western companies are feeling from the punitive measures against Moscow.

Specifically, The FT notes that the dispute centers on $439mn in funds that VTB held in a JPMorgan account in the US. When Washington imposed sanctions on the Kremlin-run bank, JPMorgan had to move the funds to a separate escrow account. Under the US sanctions regime, neither VTB nor JPMorgan can access the funds. In response, VTB last week filed a lawsuit against the New York-based group to get Russian authorities to freeze the equivalent amount in Russia, warning that JPMorgan was seeking to leave Russia and would refuse to pay any compensation. The following day, JPMorgan filed its own lawsuit against the Russian lender in a US court to prevent a seizure of its assets, arguing that it had no way to reclaim VTB’s stranded US funds to compensate its own potential losses from the Russian lawsuit.

Yesterday’s decision sided with VTB, ordering the seizure of funds in JPMorgan’s Russian accounts and “movable and immovable property,” including its stake of a Russian subsidiary. JPMorgan said it faced “certain and irreparable harm” from VTB’s efforts, exposed to a nearly half-billion-dollar loss, for merely abiding by U.S. sanctions. The order was the latest example of American banks getting caught between the demands of Western sanctions regimes and overseas interests. Last summer, a Russian court froze about $36mn worth of assets owned by Goldman following a lawsuit by state-owned bank Otkritie. A few months later the court ruled that the Wall Street investment bank had to pay the funds to Otkritie. The tit-for-tat continues.

Read more …

“..witnesses who said that Weinstein had assaulted them, but whose accusations weren’t part of the charges against him..”

• Harvey Weinstein Conviction Overturned On Appeal (ZH)

A New York Court of Appeals has overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crime charges, for which he was sentenced to 23 years in prison. In a 4-3 decision, the court found that the trial judge in the disgraced mogul’s case had made a critical error, allowing prosecutors to call a series of women as witnesses who said that Weinstein had assaulted them, but whose accusations weren’t part of the charges against him, the NYT reports. In 2020, Lauren Young and two other women, Dawn Dunning and Tarale Wulff, testified about their encounters with Weinstein under a state law that allows testimony about “prior bad acts” to demonstrate a pattern of behavior. But the court in its decision on Thursday said that “under our system of justice, the accused has a right to be held to account only for the crime charged.”

Citing that decision and others it identified as errors, the appeals court determined that Mr. Weinstein, who as a movie producer had been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, had not received a fair trial. The four judges in the majority wrote that Mr. Weinstein was not tried solely on the crimes he was charged with, but instead for much of his past behavior. -NYT The decision was determined by one vote on a majority female panel of judges, who in February held a searching public debate over the fairness of the original trial. Weinstein was convicted of raping aspiring actress Jessica Mann at a DoubleTree hotel in 2013 when she was 27-years-old, and forcing oral sex on former production assistant Mimi Haleyi, then 28, at his apartment in 2006.

Now, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who’s currently prosecuting former President Donald Trump, will have to decide whether to seek a retrial of Weinstein – who remains in an upstate prison in Rome, NY at the moment. It’s unclear how the decision will affect his future. In 2022, he was convicted by a California court of raping a woman in a Beverly Hills hotel and sentenced to 16 years in prison. The jury found Weinstein guilty of rape, forcible oral copulation, and sexual penetration by foreign object involving a woman known as Jane Doe 1.

The 2022 jury acquitted Weinstein of a sexual battery charge made by a massage therapist who treated him at a hotel in 2010, and was unable to reach a decision on two allegations, including rape, involving Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom. She was known as Jane Doe 4 in the trial, and had testified to being raped by Weinstein in a hotel room in 2005. Weinstein was convicted of sexually abusing over 100 women – and was convicted of assaulting two of them in the New York case. “That is unfair to survivors,” said actress Ashley Judd, the first actress to come forward with allegations against Weinstein, the NYT’s Jodi Kantor reports. “We still live in our truth. And we know what happened.”

Read more …

“..Though he is as undeniably German as the Nord Stream pipeline, Putin (and anyone else anywhere) has a right to quote him morning, noon and night..”

• Immanuel Kant Goes To War (Hayes)

First off, a hat tip to Russia Today (and to the VPN, which allows me access to it) for telling me that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has lashed out at Russian President Vladimir Putin for quoting iconic German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Because Putin cited the philosopher at an event marking the 300th anniversary of Kant’s birth, Scholz accused Putin of trying to “poach” the great thinker as well as misrepresenting his ideas.n bThe story, at first glance, is so ridiculously funny that I had to google to ensure I was not being taken in by that mercurial NATO chameleon dubbed “Russian disinformation.” Sure enough, as plenty of Western sources later verified the story, we can proceed. Die Zeit cites Scholz at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences ranting that “Putin doesn’t have the slightest right to quote Kant, yet Putin’s regime remains committed to poaching Kant and his work at almost any cost”.

Let’s just stop the reel there. Kant was born in 1724 in Koenigsberg (present-day Kaliningrad), which belonged to the Kingdom of Prussia before later becoming part of the Russian Empire. The philosopher, famous for his work on ethics, aesthetics and philosophical ontology, is rightly considered one of the pillars of German classical philosophy. Though he is as undeniably German as the Nord Stream pipeline, Putin (and anyone else anywhere) has a right to quote him morning, noon and night. Though Kant is as German as Tolstoy, who regarded himself as a philosopher and not a writer, is Russian, their brilliance belongs to the world. Scholz, in other words, is free to quote Tolstoy, once, of course, he first learns to read. As Putin delivered his talk in Kant’s famous birth place, it was, of course, entirely appropriate that Putin should quote the great philosopher and Scholz, if he was not an ignoramus, should have used that to his advantage, rather than coming across as the obvious baboon that he is.

Putin, as it happens, spent much of his working life in Germany and he speaks the language of Kant, Schiller and Goethe at least as fluently as Scholz which is, admittedly, a low bar. Not only that but Putin has been praising and quoting Kant for decades and has even gone so far as saying that the philosopher should be made an official symbol of Kaliningrad Region. Germany and Germans like Kant have had a profound and often benign effect on Russia since even before Vasili III, Grand Prince of Moscow, established Moscow’s German Quarter in the fifteenth century. Catherine the Great, who was actually born in Prussia, and the German speaking and Kant admiring Putin have carried on those links into more modern times. And, though Catherine the Great, sadly, is no longer with us, Putin is, and his remarks that Kant is “one of the greatest thinkers of both his time and ours,” is not only worthy of consideration but it is one more cultured German leaders than Scholz would have leveraged to their advantage.

Scholz, who fancies himself as something of a bar room philosopher, is having none of that. He believes Russia’s role in the Russian speaking areas of Ukraine contradicts Kant’s fundamental teachings on the interference of states in the affairs of other nations, and he defended Kiev’s decision not to engage in peace talks with Moscow, unless they are on NATO’s terms of unconditional Russian surrender. Scholz, with no sense of irony or self awareness regarding the aborted Minsk Accords, said Kant believed that forced treaties were not the way to reach ‘perpetual peace’ – a direct reference to Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, one of Kant’s major and most influential works.

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“..past 400 ppm, “the CO2 concentration can no longer cause any increase in temperature.”

• Carbon Emissions CANNOT Cause ‘Global Warming’ (Slay)

A bombshell new peer-reviewed study has provided conclusive scientific evidence proving that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in Earth’s atmosphere cannot cause “global warming.” Dr. Jan Kubicki led a group of world-renowned Polish scientists to study the impact of increases in CO2 emissions on the Earth’s global temperatures. However, not only did they find that higher levels of CO2 made no difference, but they also proved that it simply isn’t possible for increases in carbon dioxide to cause temperatures to rise. Kubicki and his team recently published three papers which all conclude that Earth’s atmosphere is already “saturated” with carbon dioxide. This saturation means that, even at greatly increased levels of CO2, the “greenhouse gas” will not cause temperatures to rise. Kubicki et al. summarize their evidence by noting that as a result of saturation, “emitted CO2 does not directly cause an increase in global temperature.”

Current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are around 418 parts per million (ppm) but the scientists state that past 400 ppm, “the CO2 concentration can no longer cause any increase in temperature.” The saturation of CO2 in the atmosphere is the hypothesis that dares not speak its name in mainstream media, politics, and across much of climate science. The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) “Net Zero” collectivism agenda is doomed without the constant fearmongering of a so-called “climate crisis.” One of the key propaganda messages behind this “green agenda” is that humans are responsible for the ever-warming climate by burning hydrocarbons and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. The saturation hypothesis is complex, but in simple terms, it can be described by the example of loft insulation in a house.

After a certain point, doubling the lagging will have little effect since most of the heat trying to escape through the roof has already been trapped. Carbon dioxide traps heat only within narrow bands of the infrared spectrum. Levels of the gas have been up to 20 times higher in the past without any sign of runaway “global warming.” At current levels, the Polish scientists suggest that there is “currently multiple exceedances of the saturation mass for carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere.” The latest study is published in the prestigious Elsevier’s Science Direct peer-reviewed journal. Many other scientists are attracted to the saturation hypothesis because it provides more plausible explanations to fit past changes in the climate.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Trump pizza

 

 

Roadster

 

 

Saba

 

 

Lay Down Your Tomato Plants

 

 

Mwinzi

 

 

Donkeys
https://twitter.com/i/status/1783156462681739671

 

 

Cutting

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle January 5 2018

Jan 052018
 
 January 5, 2018  Posted by at 10:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  8 Responses »


GordonParks Place de la Concorde, Paris, France 1950

 

UPDATE: There still seems to be a problem with our Paypal widget/account that makes donating -both for our fund for homless and refugees in Greece, and for the Automatic Earth itself- hard for some people. What happens is that for some a message pops up that says “This recipient does not accept payments denominated in USD”. This is nonsense, we do. We notified Paypal weeks ago.

We have no idea how many people have simply given up on donating, but we can suggest a workaround (works like a charm):

Through Paypal.com, you can simply donate to an email address. In our case that is recedinghorizons *at* gmail *com*. Use that, and your donations will arrive where they belong. Sorry for the inconvenience.

 

 

 

• Global Debt Hits Record $233 Trillion (BBG)
• The Tsunami Of Wealth Didn’t Trickle Down. It Surged Upward – Buffett (CNBC)
• Apple Says All Macs, iPhones and iPads Exposed to Chip Security Flaws (BBG)
• 2018 Economy Goes Cold – Inflation Hot – Danielle DiMartino Booth (USAW)
• Inflation Risk May Shake Global Markets (BBG)
• Economists Think Inflation Will Rise Sharply in 2018: They’re Wrong (Mish)
• China Won’t Be Prioritizing Growth This Year – Andy Xie (CNBC)
• ‘Melt-Up’ Coinage Could Signal Last Hurrah For US Stock Market (G.)
• US on The Cusp of Enjoying ‘Energy Superpower’ Status (CNBC)
• A Good German Idea for 2018 (Varoufakis)
• Monsanto Forecasts Profit Increase as Farmers Plant More Soy (BBG)
• Greek State To Start Its Own E-auctions (K.)
• Work To Improve Greek Island Centers For Refugees Moving Slowly (K.)
• Oceanic ‘Dead Zones’ Quadruple In Volume In 50 Years (Ind.)
• Iguanas Rain From Trees As Animals Struggle With US Cold Snap (G.)

 

 

Private debt is the one to watch. Up rapidly in Canada, France, Hong Kong, South Korea, Switzerland and Turkey. And Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Holland.

• Global Debt Hits Record $233 Trillion (BBG)

Global debt rose to a record $233 trillion in the third quarter of 2017, more than $16 trillion higher from end-2016, according to an analysis by the Institute of International Finance. Private non-financial sector debt hit all-time highs in Canada, France, Hong Kong, South Korea, Switzerland and Turkey. At the same time, though, the ratio of debt-to-GDP fell for the fourth consecutive quarter as economic growth accelerated. The ratio is now around 318%, 3 percentage points below a high set in the third quarter of 2016, according to the IIF. “A combination of factors including synchronized above-potential global growth, rising inflation (China, Turkey), and efforts to prevent a destabilizing build-up of debt (China, Canada) have all contributed to the decline,” IIF analysts wrote in a note. Yet the debt pile could act as a brake on central banks trying to raise interest rates, given worries about the debt servicing capacity of highly indebted firms and government, the IIF analysts wrote.

Read more …

Warren in praise of technology. Blind and boring. “This game of economic miracles is in its early innings. Americans will benefit from far more and better ‘stuff’ in the future.”

• The Tsunami Of Wealth Didn’t Trickle Down. It Surged Upward – Buffett (CNBC)

Warren Buffett knows first hand the power of American capitalism. As the third richest person in the world, with a net worth of more than $86 billion, the octogenarian investor has personally benefited from it. And yet, in a piece penned for Time magazine, published Thursday, Buffett says there is a problem with that economic system, which made him a king: Many individuals suffer even as those at the top prosper wildly. He points to the Forbes 400, which lists the wealthiest Americans. “Between the first computation in 1982 and today, the wealth of the 400 increased 29-fold — from $93 billion to $2.7 trillion — while many millions of hardworking citizens remained stuck on an economic treadmill. During this period, the tsunami of wealth didn’t trickle down. It surged upward.”

America’s capitalist economy requires its winners not ignore the system’s faults, says Buffett. The market system has “left many people hopelessly behind, particularly as it has become ever more specialized. These devastating side effects can be ameliorated: a rich family takes care of all its children, not just those with talents valued by the marketplace,” writes Buffett. He also notes that, in particular, those workers replaced by technological advancements will be left behind. “This game of economic miracles is in its early innings. Americans will benefit from far more and better ‘stuff’ in the future. The challenge will be to have this bounty deliver a better life to the disrupted as well as to the disrupters,” Buffett writes. “And on this matter, many Americans are justifiably worried.”

In the long term, those technological advancements are a boon for the economy. But in the short term, they cause unemployment and anxiety for those who lose their jobs to automation and are left unemployed. To demonstrate his point, Buffett points to 1776, when the United States declared its independence, and the evolution of farming technology. “Replicating those early days would require that 80% or so of today’s workers be employed on farms simply to provide the food and cotton we need. So why does it take only 2% of today’s workers to do this job? Give the credit to those who brought us tractors, planters, cotton gins, combines, fertilizer, irrigation and a host of other productivity improvements,” writes Buffett.

“We know today that the staggering productivity gains in farming were a blessing. They freed nearly 80% of the nation’s workforce to redeploy their efforts into new industries that have changed our way of life.” Indeed, despite the warnings, Buffett is optimistic. “In 1776, America set off to unleash human potential by combining market economics, the rule of law and equality of opportunity. This foundation was an act of genius that in only 241 years converted our original villages and prairies into $96 trillion of wealth,” he says.

Read more …

Don’t be fooled: this is not a flaw, it’s a feature. It’ll be interesting to see how companies aim to fix a pretty much hardware feature with a software patch.

• Apple Says All Macs, iPhones and iPads Exposed to Chip Security Flaws (BBG)

Apple said all Mac computers and iOS devices, like iPhones and iPads, are affected by chip security flaws unearthed this week, but the company stressed there are no known exploits impacting users. The company said recent software updates for iPads, iPhones, iPod touches, Mac desktops and laptops, and the Apple TV set-top-box mitigate one of the vulnerabilities known as Meltdown. The Apple Watch, which runs a derivative of the iPhone’s operating system is not affected, according to the company. Despite concern that fixes may slow down devices, Apple said its steps to address the Meltdown issue haven’t dented performance.

The company will release an update to its Safari web browser in coming days to defend against another form of the security flaw known as Spectre. These steps could slow the speed of the browser by less than 2.5 percent, Apple said in a statement posted on its website. Intel on Wednesday confirmed a report stating that its semiconductors contain a vulnerability based around a chip-processing technique called speculative execution. Intel said its chips, which power Macs and devices from other manufacturers, contain the flaw as well as processors based on ARM Holdings architecture, which is used in iOS devices and Android smartphones.

Read more …

Danielle DiMartino Booth seems like a smart person. But “We can have deflation and inflation at the same time.” is utter nonsense. If only because defining inflation without referencing money velocity is a useless exercise.

• 2018 Economy Goes Cold – Inflation Hot – Danielle DiMartino Booth (USAW)

“We have seen 24 consecutive back-to-back months when credit card spending has outpaced incomes. That tells you households are struggling to get by. This is not Yves Saint Laurent handbags and Jimmy Choo shoes. These are families who are using their credit cards to take care of the necessities, to fill up the gas tank, to buy groceries and fill up their refrigerator… We have seen month after month of subprime automobile delinquencies, and we are starting to see a big tic up in FHA mortgage delinquencies as well. …We are at almost 10% (delinquencies) of FHA mortgage loans. Underlying this sugar high that we will see from all of these hurricanes and rebuilding efforts and wildfires, underneath that, still waters run deep and the economy is not doing well. We are a consumption driven economy that is weakening underneath. The sugar high will absolutely wear off in 2018.”

What about the bond market in 2018? Booth says, “We have gone from $150 trillion (in global debt) in 2007 to $220 trillion and counting today. If you delude yourself into thinking a rising rate environment can be good when we have tacked on $70 trillion of debt in the last decade, you are fooling yourself. It is an accident waiting to happen, and anyone who doesn’t think that it will take the stock market down with it is more optimistic than I am by a country mile.” Booth says, along with a “bond market debacle,” the world will see inflation right along with it. Booth explains, “Look at lumber prices, look at the cost of packaging, plastics, raw materials, the producer price index… is at a six year high right now. It’s called the mother of all margin squeezes.

Companies are suffering. We have inflation. We have very real inflation, and it is hitting corporate America between the eyes. We have seen inflation happening, and we continue to see it happening… Rental inflation is off the scale…Inflation is up for 2018, and it has been up. We can have deflation and inflation at the same time. If all of this debt that has built up, especially for households, if they are allocating more of their income to servicing debt, then they have fewer dollars to spend on other things. So, you are going to have deflation and inflation at the same time.” What does the regular guy on the street do? Booth says, “Figure out a way to have exposure to precious metals. Put your bubble vision on mute. You do not have to be invested in the market. That is a fallacy. Take what you have and pay down your debts.”

Read more …

This whole discussion is vapid. Central banks have been trying in vain for over a decade to push up inflation, and now, overnight, they have not just succeeded, but overdone it?

• Inflation Risk May Shake Global Markets (BBG)

Investors devoted to the idea that inflation will stay subdued should be worried. Worldwide data have recently made clear that producer-price increases have picked up steam. That’s led bond buyers to begin wagering that consumer inflation could be soon to follow, with U.S. breakeven rates above 2 percent in many tenors for the first time since March. The shift represents a sea change for investors who have grown complacent about the threat of rising prices over the past few years, when inflation was subdued by modest economic growth rates, suppressed wages and shifts in technology and demographics. While few are betting on runaway increases anytime soon, even a modest uptick in prices could have an outsize impact on sentiment and change the prevailing narrative.

“There is this idea that inflation is dead,” said Peter Boockvar, the chief financial officer at Fairfield, New Jersey-based Bleakley Financial Group. “But what we are beginning to see – such as in the purchasing managers index surveys – is a lot of talk about inflation pressures. For the markets, inflation is an under appreciated risk in 2018.’ The latest sign of prices pressures came Wednesday. U.S. manufacturing expanded in December at the fastest pace in three months, as gains in orders and production capped the strongest year for factories since 2004, the Institute for Supply Management said. The index of prices paid rose to 69 from 65.5 the month before.

Factories across the globe have warned they are finding it increasingly hard to keep up with demand, potentially forcing them to raise prices as the world economy looks set to enjoy its strongest year since 2011. Purchasing Managers Indexes published Tuesday from countries including China, Germany, France, Canada and the U.K. all pointed to deeper supply constraints.

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Mish is one of the few who still understand the issue. Yes, it’s about definitions. But that doesn’t mean any definition is as as good as the next one.

• Economists Think Inflation Will Rise Sharply in 2018: They’re Wrong (Mish)

Reason Number Five – Money Velocity This reason I found in a Tweet by LizAnn Sonders.

Money Velocity Rebuttal: A three month average vs a six month average offset by 21 months seems like a lot of curve fitting. Here is a Tweet Reply by Martin Pelletier that makes sense to me.

By the way, let’s look at what we are talking about here in actual terms instead of percentage increases.

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Beijing telegraphing lower growth.

• China Won’t Be Prioritizing Growth This Year – Andy Xie (CNBC)

China’s fears of a financial crisis will spur Beijing to keep the country’s growth target in check, a widely followed China expert said Friday. “Their top priority is to prevent a financial crisis, so the government is looking for any pockets (of risk) that might be a trigger,” independent economist Andy Xie told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” Chinese authorities have been cracking down on money fleeing the country and warning on “gray rhinos,” which are risks that could potentially be solved but have been unaddressed so far. “The government does not view growth as the top priority right now — we have to take the government’s word at face value. The government is worried about financial risk,” Xie added.

China will keep its target for economic growth at “around 6.5%” in 2018, unchanged from last year, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing unnamed policy sources. The world’s second-largest economy has been fighting debt for years, but with little success so far as it balances economic stability against fallout from a sharp deceleration. There have also been difficulties with the political buy-in for the debt crackdown. That’s been especially true down the Communist Party pecking order as many local governments still need to hit growth targets. “It takes time to filter down the ranks. Most government officials still don’t believe in the new direction,” said Xie.

However, unlike officials in previous administrations, Xie said current ones are likely to be changed if they don’t agree with the current economic direction, so the government will have more power to push through its agenda. Policies are working toward that direction, with higher interbank interest rates that will remain at elevated levels for the foreseeable future, Xie added. China is also looking to further slow money supply growth in 2018 after it already slowed to the all-time low around 9% in November 2017. With China likely headed toward a money supply growth rate of 7 to 8% in the next few years, it will be a “very different situation” for the economy, said Xie.

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A bit more on Jeremy Grantham: “Keep an eye on what the TVs at lunchtime eateries are showing..”

• ‘Melt-Up’ Coinage Could Signal Last Hurrah For US Stock Market (G.)

Welcome to the world of “melt-up”, a phrase we could be hearing a lot in coming months. It describes the idea that the US stock market, despite currently looking absurdly expensive by traditional yardsticks, could be set for one last euphoric hurrah before the inevitable crash happens. There are a couple of reasons why the “melt-up” theory may not be as wacky as it sounds. First, it comes from Jeremy Grantham, an investor who has rightly earned a reputation for knowing how to read financial bubbles. He dodged the end-of-the-century dotcom bubble and the 2007-09 blowup in the US housing market – two of the best calls anybody could have made in the past 20 years. Grantham’s default setting, as you would expect, tends to be bearish, or at least cautious. If he’s talking melt-up, that’s newsworthy.

Besides, GMO, the Boston-based fund management group he founded, manages $75bn of assets – he’s a player. A second reason is that Grantham is certainly not arguing that shares are cheap. “We can be as certain as we ever get in stock market analysis that the current price is exceptionally high,” he states. Instead, his melt-up thinking is driven by a “mish-mash of statistical and psychological factors based on previous eras”. On the statistical side, he points out that the global economy is in sync, profit margins are fat and president Trump’s corporate tax cuts could make them even fatter and “perhaps provide the oomph to keep stock prices rising”. Then there’s the fact that the current strength in the stock market is fairly broad-based. In past bubbles, the end was nigh when gains were concentrated in an increasingly small collection of “winners”.

The likes of Apple are roaring this time, but the same divergence has not occurred – yet. For “touchy-feely” evidence of excess about to appear, Grantham looks at media coverage. US newspapers and TV stations are getting interested in financial markets (with bitcoin, “a true, crazy mini-bubble of its own”, to the fore) but not yet with the wild obsession of the frenzied dotcom years. “Keep an eye on what the TVs at lunchtime eateries are showing,” he says.

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So much for OPEC cuts.

• US on The Cusp of Enjoying ‘Energy Superpower’ Status (CNBC)

The U.S. is well-placed to join the likes of Saudi Arabia and Russia as one of the world’s leading energy powerhouses, an analyst said Thursday. “There is a big shift in market structure taking place and I think, so far, it really hasn’t got the attention it deserves. The U.S. is emerging as, not only a military and economic superpower, but as an energy superpower,” Martin Fraenkel, president at S&P Global Platts, told CNBC. “We are expecting that by 2020, the U.S. is going to be one of the top 10 oil exporters in the world,” he added. In recent years, America’s unprecedented oil and gas boom has been driven by one factor above all others — and that’s shale.

The so-called shale revolution could help to alleviate Washington’s reliance on foreign oil, including from turbulent Middle Eastern states, while also helping to export to more countries around the world. In November, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected a dramatic increase in shale production could transform the U.S. into the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas by the mid-2020s. The same forecast also predicted that the U.S. would likely notch another milestone a couple of years later. The Paris-based organization said that by the late-2020s, the U.S. would begin to ship more oil to foreign markets than it imports. “This is a big, big shift in the dynamics of energy markets and, in my view, will be a shift in geopolitical markets as well,” Fraenkel said.

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Not sure Germany and France are too likely to philosophize their dominance away.

• A Good German Idea for 2018 (Varoufakis)

No god is necessary, no moralizing is required, to demonstrate our duty to tell the truth. Practical reasoning is all it takes: A world where everyone lies is one in which human rationality, which depends entirely on language, dies. So it is our rational duty to tell the truth, regardless of the benefits lying might bring in practice. Applied to market societies, Kant’s idea yields fascinating conclusions. Strategic reductions in price to undercut a competitor pass the test of rational duty (as long as prices do not fall below costs). After all, producing maximum quantities at minimum prices is the holy grail of any economy. But strategic reductions of wages to ever lower levels (the Uberization of society) cannot be rational, because the result would be a catastrophic collapse, owing to disappearing aggregate demand.

Turning to Europe, Kant’s principle implies important duties for governments and polities. And Germany and France would be held to be in dereliction of their duties to a functioning Europe. If Germany’s current-account surpluses, currently running at 9% of GDP, were universalized, with every member state’s government, private sector, and households net savers, the euro would shoot through the roof, destroying most of Europe’s manufacturing. Equally, universalized Greco-Latin deficits would turn Europe into a basket case.

The trick, and our rational duty, is to embrace policies and to build institutions that are consistent with balanced trade and financial flows. Put differently, authentic German rectitude cannot be achieved without a form of redistribution that is bound to clash with the interests of, say, a French or a Greek oligarchy too lazy to come to terms with its own unsustainability. A critic of this German idea for reforming Europe might credibly ask why anyone should do their rational duty, rather than remain on the time-honored path of narrow self-interest? The only sound answer is: because there is no truly rational alternative. Or, rather, the alternatives are all cant.

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We’re running out of time to block Monsanto.

• Monsanto Forecasts Profit Increase as Farmers Plant More Soy (BBG)

Everything’s pointing to another year of growth for U.S. seed giant Monsanto. Pretax earnings in the fiscal year through August are expected to increase, the company said Thursday is its first-quarter earnings statement. Commodity prices have stabilized from the free-fall of recent years, with corn prices starting 2018 at the same price they began 2017. Like last year, farmers are expected to buy the most expensive, newest hybrid seeds, and companies won’t have to slash prices to keep customers. Prices “are challenging for growers, but when the environment is stable, they can figure out how to operate in that environment,” Brett Wong at Piper Jaffray & Co., said by phone. “The industry has stabilized and there’s good demand for new products.”

While the company isn’t providing detailed guidance for full-year earnings, as its $66 billion takeover by Germany’s Bayer is still pending, Monsanto will be helped by growth in its soybean business. U.S. farmers are planting the crop more than ever, devoting as many acres to the oilseed as they will to corn. Adoption of Xtend, the company’s new herbicide system for soy, is expected to double in acreage this year. South American farmers are also buying more of the company’s Intacta-branded soybean seeds, which are resistant to caterpillars, and at higher prices, Christopher Perrella, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, said in a note last month. Recent U.S. tax reform legislation will have a positive impact on Monsanto’s effective tax rate in fiscal 2019, the company said. Early estimates are that the rate for the current financial year shouldn’t be more than 30%, and could be lower.

Monsanto expects the Bayer deal to close in early 2018, with about half of regulatory approvals secured so far. It also said its digital agriculture platform, Climate FieldView, was on 35 million paid acres last year, and expects the total to grow to 50 million acres. Roundup, Monsanto’s blockbuster herbicide, is also making a comeback. The price of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weedkiller, is rebounding faster than expected as Chinese producers of generic brands cut output due to environmental restrictions, Don Carson, an analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group, said in a note. The increase for gross profit in 2018 for the company’s unit that produces glyphosate will exceed $1 billion for the first time in three years, according to Carson.

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The Greek state is in a very bad position to auction off properties.

• Greek State To Start Its Own E-auctions (K.)

The Greek state is planning to launch its own online auctions – to be conducted according to properties’ market value – with a legislative intervention that will bring the country in line with its commitments to international creditors. The Finance Ministry is expected to presents lawmakers with the relevant clause by the end of the month – along with dozens of other pending prior actions – so that the state’s online auctions can begin in February or early March at the latest. In any case, as of the first quarter of the new year homes, land plots, stores and corporate buildings owned by state debtors will go under the hammer at market rates, which tend to be far below the taxable ones, known as “objective values,” as dictated by the law.

Ministry officials say the state will use the same platform as the one used by banks or other private creditors, arguing that there is no reason to create a separate system. It is noted that the state did not conduct a single auction in 2017, while in 2016 there were just 11 conventional auctions – all requested by the debtors themselves so they could pay off their arrears to tax authorities. However, one ministry official expressed concerns about the impending state auctions, arguing that the state comes low in the ranking of creditors – as others take precedent – and that tax authorities have a slew of other procedures for collecting debts, such as the ongoing repayment programs and the most recent out-of-court settlement plan for debts of up to 50,000 euros.

He added that after the above clause is ratified, the government will have to decide on the policy the state will follow in the auctions. Each of its 4 million debtors will have to be judged separately and according to their property assets, as “owning a house in Kolonos is very different to having one in Kolonaki,” he said, referring to one poor and one affluent Athens neighborhood. The official also expressed reservations over the result of the state’s initiative to push for auctions where several other creditors are likely to secure more benefits by ranking higher on the creditor list.

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Playing off one group of people against the next.

• Work To Improve Greek Island Centers For Refugees Moving Slowly (K.)

Efforts to improve living conditions at reception centers for migrants on the islands of the eastern Aegean are progressing slowly amid continuing resistance from locals toward expanding facilities to accommodate hundreds of new arrivals from neighboring Turkey. On Tuesday alone, 196 undocumented migrants reached Aegean islands from Turkey, being sent to reception centers that are already cramped. On Lesvos and Chios, the facilities are hosting more than double the number of people they were designed to hold: 7,520 and 2,063 respectively. Hundreds of migrants have been transferred from the island facilities to less crowded camps on the mainland but, as the pace of arrivals is faster than that of the transfers and conditions remain substandard at the island camps.

The general secretary for migration policy, Miltiades Klapas, traveled to Chios on Wednesday to inspect progress in the erection of prefabricated buildings around the island’s main reception center to host scores of asylum seekers sleeping in tents. A total of 50 structures were sent to the island before the holidays but, by Wednesday, only eight had been set up. Works to upgrade the electricity and drainage systems for the accommodation are also dragging. A key reason for the delays is the continuing objection of local authorities to the presence of thousands of undocumented migrants on the island. The municipality of Chios has appealed to the Greek justice system, seeking the evacuation of the Vial reception center.

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Ten-fold in coastal regions.

• Oceanic ‘Dead Zones’ Quadruple In Volume In 50 Years (Ind.)

The volume of water in the world’s oceans that is totally devoid of oxygen has more than quadrupled over the past 50 years, according to a new study. Over the past half century, the open ocean has lost around 2% of its dissolved oxygen, vital for sustaining fish and other marine life. There has also been a ten-fold increase in low oxygen sites, known as “dead zones”, in coastal regions during this period. Oxygen saturation is a major limiting factor that affects ocean productivity, as well as the diversity of creatures living in it and its natural geochemical cycling. The new study, published in the journal Science, represents the most comprehensive view yet of ocean oxygen depletion.

Pollution and climate change both play significant roles in depleting the ocean’s oxygen levels and the authors emphasise the role humans must play in addressing these issues. “Oxygen is fundamental to life in the oceans,” said lead author Dr Denise Breitburg, a marine ecologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Centre. “The decline in ocean oxygen ranks among the most serious effects of human activities on the Earth’s environment.” [..] In dead zones oxygen levels tend to be so low that any animals living there suffocate and die. As a result, marine creatures avoid these areas, resulting in their habitats shrinking. Even in areas where oxygen depletion is less severe, smaller decreases in oxygen levels can impact animals in various non-lethal ways such as stunting their growth and hindering reproduction.

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Just for the headline.

• Iguanas Rain From Trees As Animals Struggle With US Cold Snap (G.)

As New Englanders bundle up and hunker down to ride out the “bomb cyclone” that is currently hammering the eastern United States with freezing temperatures, heavy winds and snow, they can take comfort in one thing: at least it’s not raining iguanas. That’s the situation in Florida, where unusually cold temperatures have sent the green lizards tumbling from their perches on trees – a result of the cold-blooded creatures basically shutting down when it gets too chilly. The iguanas are likely not dead, experts say, but merely stunned and will reanimate when they warm up. Iguanas aren’t the only species struggling to cope with the cold snap. In Texas, the temperature in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico has dipped low enough to cold-stun sea turtles, causing them to float to the surface where they are vulnerable to predators.

The National Park Service had rescued 41 live but freezing turtles by midday Tuesday. Meanwhile on Massuchusetts’ Cape Cod, the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy has reported the strandings of three thresher sharks. Two of the sharks were likely suffering from “cold shock”, the group said, while the third had frozen solid. “A true sharkcicle!” the group wrote on Facebook. Even animals that seem particularly well-suited to frigid temperatures are feeling the chill. The Calgary Zoo announced Sunday that it was moving its king penguins inside amid -13F (-25C) temperatures. King penguins are native to the subantarctic islands surrounding Antarctica. And a group of snowmobilers in Canada rescued a bull moose buried in 6ft of snow.

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