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Debt Rattle August 16 2023

Aug 162023
 
 August 16, 2023  Posted by at 8:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  30 Responses »


El Greco Dormition of the Mother of God 1565-1566

 

• Hunter Biden’s Lead Criminal Defense Attorney Asks To Withdraw From Case (ZH)
• Trump Attorneys Slam ‘Flawed, Unconstitutional’ Fulton County Indictment (Sp.)
• Justice Shrugged: The Persecution of Donald Trump (Miele)
• The Criminalization of Election Controversies (Turley)
• Trump Must Turn Himself In At Georgia Jail – Sheriff (RT)
• Ukraine Matters To Biden More Than Hawaii – Ron Paul (RT)
• Team Biden Hurts US Prestige and Credibility By Walking Into Ukraine Trap (Sp.)
• Ukraine Could Give Up Territory To Russia – NATO Official (RT)
• If Ukraine Agrees To Give Up Territories, It Will Lose Kiev – Medvedev (TASS)
• Western Military Dominance ‘Has Ended’ – Moscow (RT)
• Ukraine’s Military Resources Are “Almost Exhausted” – Shoigu (ZH)
• Shoigu Hails High Level Of Contacts Between Russia, Chinese Military (TASS)
• Why US Drones Prove Useless in Ukraine (Sp.)
• MI6 Plans To Send Ukrainian Mercenaries To Africa (RT)
• How Charities Secretly Help Win Elections (Thayer)

 

 

 

 

Ramaswamy

 

 

 

 

RFK Fauci

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greenwald

 

 

 

 

Longtime Hunter attorney (let’s see who paid his bills!) Christopher Clark for 5+ years got used to anything he wrote being accepted. But when he went for the ultimate sweetheart deal, where Hunter could have shot someone on 5th avenue (the Trump thing) without facing punishment, Judge Maryellen Noreika said: “I don’t like these terms”. Which were in the small print of the deal, of course. And neither Hunter nor Clark ever expected her to read them. She put their world upside down. Now Christopher Clark is trying to sneak out of the building, hoping no-one will notice he wrote the whole thing. Oh, and he may be called as a witness now….

Here’s Clark’s way out ?! “Biden attorney Abbe Lowell blamed prosecutors for drafting the agreements the judge wouldn’t approve..”

• Hunter Biden’s Lead Criminal Defense Attorney Asks To Withdraw From Case (ZH)

Hunter Biden’s top criminal defense attorney has asked a federal judge for permission to withdraw from the case after a plea deal unraveled in late July. Christopher Clark, Hunter’s longtime defense attorney, filed a motion with the Delaware judge overseeing Hunter’s case on the grounds that he could now be called as a witness in future proceedings, CNN reports. “Based on recent developments, it appears that the negotiation and drafting of the plea agreement and diversion agreement will be contested, and Mr. Clark is a percipient witness to those issues,” reads the Tuesday filing. Last week federal prosecutors announced that the had reached an impasse on Hunter’s plea deal related to tax offenses and a “diversion agreement” to take care of a gun possession charges.

After the deal unraveled, the feds asked Judge Maryellen Noreika to withdraw a late August deadline to renegotiate the plea deal, after she said she was not ready to accept it & asked both sides to file additional briefs explaining the legal structure of the revised deal. Noreika also called the deal federal prosecutors reached with Hunter over his gun possession offense “unusual,” and that it contained some “non-standard terms,” such as “broad immunity” from other potential charges. Under the original plea agreement, Biden intended to plea guilty to two misdemeanor tax crimes committed in 2017 and 2018, and would avoid prison on the gun possession charge. As part of the conditions for Hunter’s release, he must not consume alcohol or prohibited drugs, or possess a firearm, must submit to random drug tests as required, must actively seek employment and not violate any laws.

On Sunday, Biden attorney Abbe Lowell blamed prosecutors for drafting the agreements the judge wouldn’t approve. Biden’s lawyers said Sunday they believed the gun diversion deal was still “valid and binding.” Abbe Lowell, one of the attorneys, placed blame on prosecutors for drafting the agreements the judge took issue with. -CNN. After the plea deal unraveled, US Attorney David Weiss requested and was granted “special counsel” status by Attorney General Merrick Garland. According to prosecutors, there is still an ongoing investigation which may carry future charges outside the scope of the plea deal. Biden pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax crimes, and will avoid prison charge for possessing a gun while addicted to an illegal drug. The deal sought to cap a five-year investigation into Hunter’s tax affairs and business dealings, which federal prosecutors say Hunter failed to pay over $100,000 of income tax on at least $1.5 million in income between 2017 and 2018.

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“We look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been..”

• Trump Attorneys Slam ‘Flawed, Unconstitutional’ Fulton County Indictment (Sp.)

A 41-count indictment, including against former US President Donald Trump, approved by a Fulton County grand jury in the state of Georgia in an election interference case, is “flawed and unconstitutional,” Trump attorneys said, adding that they look forward to a detailed review of the indictment. A Fulton County grand jury indicted Monday night Trump with 13 criminal charges related to an investigation alleging he attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to a court document. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis later told reporters that the grand jury had issued arrest warrants for the 19 defendants named in the indictment, but they all have until August 25 to voluntarily surrender.

“This one-sided grand jury presentation relied on witnesses who harbor their own personal and political interests— some of whom ran campaigns touting their efforts against the accused and/or profited from book deals and employment opportunities as a result. We look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been,” the attorneys noted in a statement distributed by the ex-president in an email to his supporters.

The process leading up to the decision was “shocking and absurd, starting with the leak of a presumed and premature indictment before the witnesses had testified or the grand jurors had deliberated and ending with the District Attorney being unable to offer any explanation,” they stressed. “In light of this major fumble, the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office clearly decided to force through and rush this 98-page indictment,” the attorneys emphasized. The former US president was previously indicted on charges related to his supporters’ storming of the Capitol in January 2021, financial fraud in payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and mishandling of classified government documents.

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“You either agree with the government’s interpretation of election results or else you risk going to jail.”

• Justice Shrugged: The Persecution of Donald Trump (Miele)

Trump’s refusal to accept the election results turns on his deep sense of individualistic ambition, his willingness to challenge societal norms, and his determination not to surrender his principles, even at the expense of public ridicule, political persecution, and now potentially years in prison. But you can’t view the 2020 election in a vacuum. Trump was no different than Rearden in fighting what he knows is a rigged system. For the preceding five years, Trump had been the victim of a series of vicious attacks by the Deep State and the media who never really accepted him as president. So Trump had no reason to accept the election results parroted by the same actors who had already tried to destroy him multiple times. And now, two and a half years after the 2020 election, as Trump has a fighting chance of returning to the White House in the greatest political comeback in history, his enemies have come for him again, with three separate indictments and soon to be a fourth.

The four-count indictment most recently brought against Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith is intended to make a victory in 2024 nearly impossible. The Deep State in this case represents the entrenched bureaucracy of the federal government as well as the individual states’ election officials. This is the same Deep State that gathered up 51 national security officials to sign a statement prior to the 2020 election that falsely claimed that Hunter Biden’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of Russian disinformation.” It had none of them. No wonder Trump was disinclined to accept their conclusions that the election was secure and fair. Trump sought to prove his concerns about the legitimacy of the 2020 election by pursuing a vigorous legal strategy as was guaranteed to him under the First Amendment’s right “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice is determined to deny that right to Donald Trump, and by extension to the rest of us. You either agree with the government’s interpretation of election results or else you risk going to jail. The indictment brought against Trump acknowledges that everyone has a First Amendment right to speak their minds and even to “formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means,” but it then avers that Trump’s right to believe he won the election is abrogated by a string of court losses and equally pessimistic assessments from so-called experts.

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where the Department of Justice has overstepped. The four counts in the indictment are based on what prosecutor Jack Smith calls three conspiracies: “A conspiracy to defraud the United States” by seeking to stop the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021; “a conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the Jan. 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified; and “a conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”

All of these alleged conspiracies and the resulting four charges are directly related to the joint congressional session on Jan. 6, when the Electoral College votes were opened and debated to determine whether they should be counted. Moreover, when Jack Smith announced the indictment, he suggested that Trump was responsible for the riot that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on that day, yet none of the charges hold Trump responsible for the violence. Every charge in this dubious indictment could have been brought even if the protesters had marched “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol as Trump had requested. The charges in the indictment have nothing to do with the violence; they only relate to Trump’s insistence that he won the election, and that he would do whatever it takes to prove it.

In other words, these are not real crimes like insurrection or sedition; they are thought crimes. Smith’s “conspiracy” charges simply reflect that Trump consulted his lawyers to develop a legal strategy on how to right the wrong that he perceived. In its substance, from paragraphs 8 to 123, the indictment merely alleges over and over again that Trump refused to accept the conclusions of others that the election of Biden was legitimate, and that he had help from like-minded attorneys. How infuriating that must be to prosecutor Smith, who believes with all his heart that no one could doubt the veracity of what government officials (like him!) tell us.

Tucker 2020

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Every single word, even every thought, becomes a crime..

• The Criminalization of Election Controversies (Turley)

The long-anticipated indictment by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is expected in the coming days and will focus on alleged election tampering and related offenses in the 2020 presidential election. If indictments were treated like frequent flyer miles, Donald Trump would get the Georgia indictment for free. However, it will be anything but costless. Regardless of the merits, it will magnify both the cost and complications for Trump. Like the New York indictment, a Georgia indictment would not be subject to a presidential pardon. Not only have GOP candidates indicated that they would pardon Trump on any federal charges if elected to the presidency, Trump could pardon himself (including a preemptive pardon before trial) if elected — but that power does not reach state convictions.


As with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, many view Willis as a Democratic prosecutor pursuing the highly unpopular former president. However, given the three grand juries and the three years that have passed, Willis may have found new evidence or witnesses that could tie Trump to criminal conduct in seeking to challenge the results in the election. Thus far, the focus has been on the controversial call that Trump had with Georgia officials — a call widely cited as indisputable evidence of an effort at voting fraud. Yet, the call was similar to a settlement discussion, as state officials and the Trump team hashed out their differences and a Trump demand for a statewide recount. Trump had lost the state by less than 12,000 votes. That might be what he meant when he stated, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”


Mark Meadows was charged for asking for a politician’s phone number…

While others have portrayed the statement as a raw call for fabricating the votes, it seems more likely that Trump was swatting back claims that there was no value to a statewide recount by pointing out that he wouldn’t have to find a statistically high number of votes to change the outcome of the election. It is telling that many politicians and pundits refuse to even acknowledge that obvious alternate meaning. For Trump’s part, he is not helping with his signature, all-caps social media attacks. In addition to attacking Willis for a supposedly “racist” and “unethical” past, Trump recently declared that Willis “wants to indict me for a perfect phone call; this was even better than my perfect call on Ukraine.” I have previously disagreed with the claimed perfection of that Ukraine call, the subject of Trump’s first impeachment. However, neither call needs to be “perfect” to be protected.


The importance made of the call in the likely Georgia indictment will be one of the greatest “tells” as to what Willis has in terms of evidence. If the call is a critical linchpin to the prosecution, it will look like a political stunt out of the Bragg-school of prosecution. There have also been stories indicating that Willis is focusing on connections of Trump team members like Rudy Giuliani to a “breach” of the voting system on Jan. 7, 2021. The team was seeking access to the voting machines to show that they could be compromised or manipulated. Text messages state that the team secured an “invitation” to examine the machines in Coffee County.

Pipe burst

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The biggest show on earth. Brought to you by Disney…

• Trump Must Turn Himself In At Georgia Jail – Sheriff (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants on his racketeering case are set to be booked on their charges at a county jail in Georgia, a departure from the courthouse processing seen in his three other criminal cases. The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office announced the decision on Tuesday, saying that Trump and the other defendants could appear at the local jail to turn themselves in “at any time,” though noted the plan is still subject to change due to the “unprecedented nature” of the case. “At this point, based on guidance received from the district attorney’s office and presiding judge, it is expected that all 19 defendants named in the indictment will be booked at the Rice Street Jail,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement, pointing out that the facility is “open 24/7.”

That procedure would differ from Trump’s other ongoing criminal litigation, in which he has been processed inside courthouses. During booking, defendants are typically photographed and fingerprinted, and while Trump was not required to provide mugshots for his other lawsuits, Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat said he planned to snap a photo of the ex-president for the racketeering case. “It doesn’t matter your status. We have a mugshot ready for you,” Labat told reporters ahead of the latest indictment. “Unless someone tells me differently, we are following our normal practices.” Trump and a long list of his current and former allies were hit with a sweeping 41-count indictment earlier this week, with prosecutors alleging they worked to invalidate Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential race.

Among the charges is a felony racketeering count, as well as several counts for conspiracy to interfere in an election, perjury, and soliciting a public official to violate their oath. The latest round of charges mark Trump’s fourth criminal indictment this year alone, with federal prosecutors previously slapping him with dozens of felony counts for the alleged mishandling of classified material after leaving the White House in 2021. He has also been charged in New York for an alleged hush-money scheme with porn actress Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign, and faces a separate election-interference case led by special counsel Jack Smith, who is also spearheading the classified documents trial. Trump, who has announced his candidacy in the 2024 presidential contest, has denied all wrongdoing in each case, insisting he has been unfairly targeted in a politically motivated “witch hunt” which began during his own presidency.

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“..$900 from each and every US household, at a time when most Americans say they can’t afford a $1,000 emergency.”

• Ukraine Matters To Biden More Than Hawaii – Ron Paul (RT)

President Joe Biden is demanding another $24 billion for Ukraine while the US “disintegrates,”former Texas congressman Ron Paul wrote on Monday, pointing out the unprecedented devastation from the Hawaii fires. It’s “hard to look at recent footage of the devastation in Maui and then hear President Biden tell Congress that he needs another $24 billion for Ukraine,” Paul said. “How can this Administration continue to justify tens of billions of dollars for this losing war that is not in our interest while the rest of the United States disintegrates?” The US has poured “well over $120 billion” into the “proxy war on Russia,” Paul added. He cited a Heritage Foundation analysis that calculated this comes out to $900 from each and every US household, at a time when most Americans say they can’t afford a $1,000 emergency.

“How many Americans would rather have those $900 dollars back in their pocket rather than in the pockets of Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, and Ukraine’s oligarchs?” Paul asked, noting that even the establishment media is now admitting that “Ukraine is not winning and cannot win.” “Continuing to pour money into a losing cause will just result in bankruptcy at home and more dead Ukrainians overseas,” Paul concluded. The Texas physician served in Congress for a total of 23 years and ran for president three times – as a Libertarian in 1988, and in Republican primaries in 2008 and 2012 – before retiring in 2013 to found the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Multiple fires broke out in Hawaii last week, devastating the island of Maui and practically destroying the historic town of Lahaina.

As of Sunday, the death toll was reported at 96, with at least 1,000 more people still missing. “This is the largest natural disaster we’ve ever experienced,” Hawaii Governor Josh Green said at a news conference on Sunday. Damages to homes alone were estimated at $6 billion. Biden spent the weekend on the beach in Rehoboth, Delaware. He said “no comment” when asked about Maui. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday confirmed there were no plans for the president to visit Hawaii. Last week, Biden sent Congress a request for $13 billion in “security assistance” and $7.3 billion for “economic and humanitarian assistance” for Ukraine, which has included paying the salaries of government employees in Kiev.

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“hyperbolic rhetoric”

• Team Biden Hurts US Prestige and Credibility By Walking Into Ukraine Trap (Sp.)

US observers have raised the question whether President Joe Biden could shift from his maximalist aims in Ukraine which threaten to turn into a trap for Washington. Prior to the much-anticipated 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive, American politicians and mainstream press had drawn a picture of what the endgame in Ukraine should look like, with Kiev forces seizing as much territory as it could to gain the upper hand in negotiations. Citing White House officials, the US media suggested that by the end of summer, Ukraine would tip the balance in its favor. However, the reality on the ground does not match expectations. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a DC-based think tank, has raised the question as to whether Team Biden has a Plan B for a face-saving exit after it persuaded everyone in the West that anything short of Kiev’s victory would be a global catastrophe.

In fact, the Biden administration set a trap for itself by employing a “hyperbolic rhetoric” in order to sell the idea of Washington’s Ukraine war to the American public and the world’s community. President Biden raised the stakes as high as possible while claiming in February 2023 during his speech in Poland that “what literally is at stake is not just Ukraine, it’s freedom.” Another talking point of the US foreign policy establishment, lawmakers and academia was that Russia’s victory would not only “embolden” Moscow for new “invasions” but also encourage Beijing to “take military action” against Taiwan – something that has been repeatedly denied as nonsense by China which has always seen the island as its inalienable territory.

Republican presidential contender Chris Christie has even gone so far as to claim that China’s potential “invasion” of Taiwan would inevitably necessitate putting American boots on the ground. As a result, the hyped-up narrative deprived Team Biden of room for maneuver: should the US president decide to pull out, he would have to explain to the international community why he is “giving up” on democracy and human values, bowing down to “dictators”, and leaving the world in “danger.”

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Anathema.

• Ukraine Could Give Up Territory To Russia – NATO Official (RT)

Kiev could end up relinquishing some of its former territory in exchange for NATO membership, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s chief of staff, Stian Jenssen said at a debate on Tuesday. In his own statements on the issue, Stoltenberg has insisted that Kiev will set its own terms for “victory.” “I think that a solution could be for Ukraine to give up territory, and get NATO membership in return,” Jenssen said at the debate, according to Norway’s VG newspaper. This discussion is already underway within NATO, he said, suggesting that it could be a “possible solution” to the conflict. No NATO leaders have publicly endorsed the idea of Kiev giving up its claims to the territories of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, or Zaporozhye, which were incorporated into the Russian Federation following referendums last September.

Likewise, while Western officials have cast doubt on Ukraine’s ability to seize Crimea – an historical Russian territory which rejoined the Russian Federation in 2014, none have urged Kiev to abandon its claim to the peninsula. Such an idea has apparently been floated behind the scenes, however. Swiss outlet Neue Zürcher Zeitung claimed in February, citing sources, that CIA Director William Burns had offered Russia a “land for peace” deal in which Moscow would keep “20% of Ukrainian territory.” The White House, the CIA, and the Kremlin all denied that such a proposal had been made. Whether such a deal would be accepted by Kiev or Moscow remains doubtful. Russian President Vladimir Putin stated last year that securing the military neutrality of Ukraine was a key factor behind his decision to send troops into the country, and that having a NATO-aligned Ukraine on Russia’s borders would present an unacceptable security risk.

Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council chief Aleksey Danilov stated on Tuesday that Kiev will never negotiate with Putin’s government, that none of Ukraine’s Western backers are pushing for peace, and that “Russia must be destroyed like a modern-day Carthage.” Achieving this goal is proving extremely difficult for Kiev. Two months into its long-anticipated counteroffensive against Russian forces, the Ukrainian military has lost more than 43,000 men and nearly 5,000 pieces of heavy equipment, according to the latest figures from the Russian Defense Ministry.

Stoltenberg insists that NATO will “ensure that Ukraine gets the weapons it needs to be able to retake territory, liberate the lands and win this war and prevail as a sovereign, independent nation.” While he has delivered variations on this statement throughout the conflict, NATO has been more evasive on when Ukraine can join the military bloc. After a summit in Lithuania last month at which Kiev was denied an offer of membership, NATO’s 31 members put out a joint statement explaining that Ukraine can join only “when allies agree and conditions are met.”

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“..To enter the bloc [NATO], the Kiev authorities would have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus..”

• If Ukraine Agrees To Give Up Territories, It Will Lose Kiev – Medvedev (TASS)

Should Ukraine agree to relinquish disputed territories for the sake of joining NATO, it will have to give up even Kiev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, said on his Telegram channel. While commenting on a remark by the director of NATO’s Secretary-General’s Private Office, Stian Jenssen, to the effect that Ukraine might become a member of the alliance in case of territorial concessions to Russia, Medvedev wrote: “Why? The idea is curious. The only question is that all of allegedly ‘their’ territories are highly disputable. To enter the bloc [NATO], the Kiev authorities would have to give up even Kiev itself, the capital of Ancient Rus,” he added.


“Well, they (the Ukrainian authorities – TASS) would have to move the capital to Lvov then. If, of course, the Poles agree,” Medvedev remarked. The director of NATO Secretary General’s Private Office, Stian Jenssen, said earlier on Tuesday that Ukraine could become a NATO member if it agreed to cede territories that it currently refused to recognize as part of Russia.

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“..Kiev’s foreign advisers are essentially using the Ukraine conflict as a testing ground for various military strategies involving Western weapons, while President Vladimir Zelensky supplies the manpower for these experiments…”

• Western Military Dominance ‘Has Ended’ – Moscow (RT)

Asian, African and Latin American states have seen their role in the global arena increase as Western military dominance has started to wane, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has said. Speaking at the 21st International Security Conference in Moscow on Tuesday, the minister argued that Russia’s military operation in Ukraine has “put an end to the dominance of the collective West in the military sphere.” “Just as the defeat of fascism by the Red Army in Europe in the last century gave a powerful impetus to anti-colonial movements throughout the world, so will the defeat of the Ukrainian neo-fascists supported by the West serve as a factor in counteracting modern neo-colonialism,” Shoigu said.

The minister noted that Russia is currently fighting “not just the armed forces of Ukraine, but the entire collective West,” which, he added, has recently been joined by several states from the Asia-Pacific region. In its confrontations with Kiev’s forces, which have been provided with foreign weaponry worth billions of dollars, Russia has dispelled many myths about the superiority of Western military standards, Shoigu said. It has become clear that the use of Western weapons and supposedly advanced NATO tactics and training “cannot ensure superiority on the battlefield,” he added. The minister also claimed that Kiev’s foreign advisers are essentially using the Ukraine conflict as a testing ground for various military strategies involving Western weapons, while President Vladimir Zelensky supplies the manpower for these experiments.

Shoigu said the losses among Ukrainian military personnel are being disregarded by Ukraine’s Western backers. The Russian minister also claimed that Ukraine’s military resources are almost completely exhausted, according to preliminary estimates. Russia’s Defense Ministry had previously reported that since launching their counteroffensive operation in early June, Ukraine’s forces had lost some 43,000 soldiers as well as nearly 5,000 pieces of heavy equipment, including dozens of Western tanks and combat vehicles. Shoigu suggested that the US is using the Ukraine conflict to line the pockets of its defense industry by forcing its partners in Europe to procure new products to replace those they have sent to Kiev.

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“Under these conditions, bilateral relations between Russia and China have surpassed the level of strategic ties in all respects, becoming more than just allied.”

• Ukraine’s Military Resources Are “Almost Exhausted” – Shoigu (ZH)

Russia’s defense minister Sergei Shoigu in fresh remarks before a security conference in Moscow acknowledged that while the special military operation in Ukraine has been a real test for Russia, the reality is that Ukraine’s ability to fight and its resources have been “almost exhausted”. He further said the Russian military has learned much about the West’s advanced weapons systems in the process. “In the special military operation, the Russian army has debunked many myths about the superiority of Western military standards,” he said in the rare public speech, as cited in Reuters. “The preliminary results of combat operations show that Ukraine’s military resources are almost exhausted,” he emphasized at one point, but without providing further specifics.

Importantly, China’s own defense chief, Li Shangfu, was in the audience for the event. The Kremlin has recently said that a Putin trip to Beijing to meet with President Xi Jinping is “on the agenda”, to happen by year’s end. Shoigu during the speech touted the large numbers of Western-supplied tanks and armored vehicles that have been taken out on the Ukrainian battlefield. “We have data on … the destruction of German tanks, American armored vehicles, British missiles and other weapons systems,” he said. “We are ready to share our assessments … with our partners.” Likely he had China in particular in mind, also as he followed by comparing the West’s deep involvement in Ukraine to the Taiwan situation. He then said: “Under these conditions, bilateral relations between Russia and China have surpassed the level of strategic ties in all respects, becoming more than just allied.”

While time may soon tell whether or not Ukraine’s defenses are “almost exhausted” – it has become very clear that the counteroffensive is not going well, and Biden’s ‘all in’ support to Kiev is becoming politically unpopular and an additional liability for Democrats going into the 2024 presidential election. Another key part of the Russian defense chief’s speech touched on nuclear weapons. He blasted allegations by the West that Putin is ready to use them: “From a military point of view, there is no need to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine to achieve the set goals,” Shoigu said at an international security conference in Moscow. He slammed media speculation that Russia could potentially use nuclear or chemical weapons to compensate for slow progress in its nearly six-month military campaign in Ukraine as “absolute lies.”

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As NATO eyes the Pacific.

• Shoigu Hails High Level Of Contacts Between Russia, Chinese Military (TASS)

Russia and China maintain communication between the two countries’ military at a high level and conduct joint land, naval and air drills, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Tuesday. “We are maintaining contacts at a high level, exchanging delegations, conducting joint exercises and drill – this is shown on all global channels – about our joint patrols on land, at sea, and in the air,” he said during a working meeting Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu on the sidelines of the 11th Moscow Conference on International Security. The Russian defense minister noted that cooperation with China is developed both bilaterally and within multilateral formats, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the ADMM-Plus (ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting Plus).

“Russia and China are strategic partners, good neighbors and close friends,” he stressed. “During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia this March, the leaders of our countries reiterated that Russian-Chinese comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation have reached the highest point ever in the entire history of bilateral relations. We are implementing our leaders’ agreements in practice.” Shoigu thanked his Chinese counterpart for taking part in the Moscow security conference, noting that Li’s speech at the conference opening and the analysis of international situation “deserve closer attention.”

The Russian defense minister noted that China traditionally takes an active part in the Army international forum and China’s products traditionally attract specialists’ interest. “Yesterday, I visited your exposition, which broadly represents China’s defense sector. I saw many new and promising things,” Shoigu said, adding that since the previous exhibition, where China also took part, “a serious step forward had been taken.” “Today, all companies, all countries taking part in the exhibition take into account the experience of the latest development, including in the zone of the special military operation,” he said. The Russian minister said he is confident that today’s meeting will help strengthen the traditionally friendly ties between the two countries’ defense ministries and enhancing regional and global security.

He noted that this is his third meeting with his Chinese counterpart this year and congratulated him on the 96th anniversary of the establishment of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, which was marked on August 1. The Army 2023 international military-technical forum is running at the Patriot Congress and Exhibition Center, the Alabino training ground and the Kubinka airfield outside Moscow on August 14-20. About 1,500 leading Russian defense enterprises and 85 foreign companies and businesses from seven countries are participating in the forum’s expositions and business program. The forum has been organized by the Russian Defense Ministry. TASS is the forum’s strategic media partner.

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“..despite “outstanding performance characteristics” their highly-sophisticated equipment couldn’t perform appropriately in Ukraine’s tough battlefield conditions.”

• Why US Drones Prove Useless in Ukraine (Sp.)

After China banned exports of long-range remotely-piloted aircraft to Ukraine, US military experts found that American arm-makers have nothing to offer the Ukrainian military to fill the gap. On one hand, US defense-tech firms produce drones with a price tag starting from $16,000, well above China’s DJI Mavic UAVs that cost around $2,000 or even less. What’s more, according to the US mainstream press, some US defense contractors who have spent months testing their drones in Ukraine have now decided to leave their drones in storage. The crux of the matter is that despite “outstanding performance characteristics” their highly-sophisticated equipment couldn’t perform appropriately in Ukraine’s tough battlefield conditions.

American arms manufacturers have long been focused on qualitative superiority of their systems while their Russian and Chinese peers concentrated on functionality and quantity, as per David T. Pyne, an EMP Task Force scholar and former US Department of Defense officer. “During the latter stages of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, the US focused on producing more expensive high-tech weapon systems that were qualitatively superior to Soviet systems in most areas while the Soviets more than compensated for US technological superiority by outproducing the US and its NATO allies by a wide margin. While Russia has caught up with the US technologically, I think the same Cold War-era mentality that quality is more important than quantity continues to hold true here in the US as we continue to prioritize more high-tech equipment even though it costs a lot more money to produce,” Pyne told Sputnik.

According to Pyne, Russia appears to have a much more cost-effective military budget than the US has “because its procurement, manufacturing and personnel costs are lower.” Russia’s electronic warfare (EW) systems, air defenses and aircraft reportedly pose yet another challenge to NATO-grade unmanned vehicles. “Russian electronic warfare capabilities remain the best in the world across the electromagnetic spectrum,” the EMP Task Force scholar stressed. “I think that Russian EW systems remain highly effective against US-built drones although media reports indicate that the US is helping Ukraine learn how to more effectively counter Russian GPS jamming equipment, likely reducing the percentage of Ukrainian drones it can successfully jam down to perhaps eighty percent.”

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“..a “sabotage hit squad” consisting of some 100 Ukrainian “nationalist and neo-Nazi militants..”

• MI6 Plans To Send Ukrainian Mercenaries To Africa (RT)

The UK foreign intelligence service MI6 has allegedly prepared a group of saboteurs to disrupt Russia’s growing economic cooperation with African states, a military-diplomatic source told the RIA and TASS news agencies on Wednesday. The British spy agency created a “sabotage hit squad” consisting of some 100 Ukrainian “nationalist and neo-Nazi militants,” the source claimed, citing “information confirmed by several sources.” London reportedly asked Kiev back in July to “provide maximum and prompt assistance to representatives of the British intelligence MI6 and SAS special unit” in order to select fighters with “significant combat experience on the ‘eastern front’.”

The source, cited by both RIA and TASS, claimed that the British-Ukrainian unit will be tasked with “sabotage of infrastructure in African countries, as well as the elimination of African leaders oriented towards cooperation with Russia.” The militant group, alleged to be headed by Kiev’s Main Directorate of Intelligence officer Lt. Col. Vitaliy Prashchuk, is expected to be deployed to the Sudanese city of Omdurman from the Ukrainian port of Izmail by a “chartered civilian ship” sometime during the second half of August, the source added. London has been deeply involved in the Ukraine conflict since its escalation in February 2022, supplying domestically produced and foreign military hardware to Ukraine, training Ukrainian troops in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, and sharing intelligence.

The Wall Street Journal reported in May that British special forces “are operating very close to the front lines” and that their “guiding influence on Ukrainian special-forces activity is evident in the sabotage operations Ukraine has conducted against Russian railway, airfield, fuel and other logistical nodes.” “We can’t rule out that the British participated in the planning, organization and support of terrorist attacks carried out by the Kiev regime on the territory of Russia,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said at the time, adding that Moscow reserves the right to respond to such conduct by the UK at a time and place of its choosing.

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“..charities and foundations are strictly forbidden by law to operate with the effect, much less the intent, of benefiting a political party..”

• How Charities Secretly Help Win Elections (Thayer)

This investigation reveals the shocking true story of the Everybody Votes campaign—the largest and most corrupt “charitable” voter registration effort in American history—that may have decided the 2020 presidential election and could decide 2024. Commissioned by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, funded by the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, and coordinated with cutthroat Democratic consultants, the Everybody Votes campaign used the guise of civic-minded charity to selectively register millions of “non-white” swing-state voters in the hopes of getting out the Democratic vote for a 2020 presidential win. It worked. Our exclusive research reveals how a little-known organization called the Voter Registration Project (VRP) leveraged connections with billionaire private foundations, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother, and foreign billionaires with a history of breaking U.S. election law to raise $190 million for the Everybody Votes campaign and register 5.1 million people.

Using data from leaked copies of the campaign’s secret plans, as well as 2020 exit polls, our researchers have discovered that the VRP’s 5.1 million new registrations provided Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden with somewhere between 1 million to 2.7 million votes across eight specially chosen swing states during the 2020 election. If the state-by-state projections of the campaign’s Democratic consultants held true into 2020, the Everybody Votes campaign’s “massive registration surge” would have provided Democrats more votes than the total margins of victory in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Biden ultimately won each of these states in 2020, netting him 53 electoral college votes.

Our investigation proves, once and for all, that Democrats used truckloads of money from private foundations and public charities to give their donors enormous tax breaks and pad their electoral margins in 2020, even though charities and foundations are strictly forbidden by law to operate with the effect, much less the intent, of benefiting a political party. The investigation also proves that the campaign’s supposed concerns for the “civic participation” of “underrepresented communities” were nothing more than a convenient lie. Unearthed drafts of the Everybody Votes campaign’s original partisan schematics prove that the campaign was designed to win elections first and worry about “civic participation” later. Changing the electorate’s racial composition was only ever a secondary concern.

If the Everybody Votes campaign was a political action committee (PAC) or a 501(c)(4) “dark money” group and if the organizers had just admitted they cared more about electoral results than inequality, then there would be no scandal. But it wasn’t, and they didn’t, and the result is an enormous scandal entangling some of the Left’s biggest political donors and many of its most powerful nonprofit activist groups. It’s not just a scandal of the past either. The operation was so successful in 2020 that the Everybody Votes campaign has announced it will continue on through 2024, registering millions more. New job listings suggest that this cycle’s operations will target Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin—each a must-win presidential swing state. Only time will tell if the campaign is a repeat success.

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Dig through earth
https://twitter.com/i/status/1691436302162345984

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle July 21 2023

Jul 212023
 
 July 21, 2023  Posted by at 9:10 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  29 Responses »


Hayami Gyoshu Tea bowl and fruits 1921

 

• RFK Jr: from Camelot to Conspiracy-Mongering (G. Ed.)
• China Complicit In Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine, Says MI6 Chief (G.)
• New EU Grant To Ukraine Means Years More Of Fighting – Hungary (TASS)
• Ukrainian Counteroffensive Stumbles Over Russian Minefields (Scott Ritter)
• ‘Vast’ Russian Minefields Zapping Morale Of Ukrainian Troops (Sp.)
• ‘My Mates Have Died And Are Dying’ in Ukraine – Australian Mercenary (Sp.)
• UK Intel ‘Freelancers’ Helped Ukraine Target Crimean Bridge – The Grayzone (RT)
• Repairing Damaged Ukrainian Military Hardware Would Be Nightmare for West (Sp.)
• Kuleba Urges EU To Expand Opportunities For Export Of Ukrainian Grain (Az.)
• Grassley Releases Bombshell FBI Doc Discussing $10MM Biden Bribe
• Rep. Dan Goldman Demolishes Biden Defense in Whistleblower Hearing (Turley)
• A Catastrophic Debt Implosion Can Be Incredibly Quick (Von Greyerz)
• Freedom Flyers (Martin Armstrong)

 

 

At first I thought of RFK: don’t let them come at you with these antisemitism charges. But after seeing him yesterday in the House, I think maybe he is looking for this. That way he can show everybody that he’s not afraid. Everybody including his own party, who tried to silence/censor him there. Not the GOP, but his own party!

 

 

 

 

MASSIE: “Wow, the irony and cognitive dissonance from the other side of the aisle is deafening… This is a hearing on censorship that began with an effort, with a formal motion from the other side of the aisle to censor Mr. Kennedy”

 

 

 

 

RFK fires back

 

 

Morris

 

 

 

 

Putin 2009
https://twitter.com/i/status/1682198027056865284

 

 

 

 

The Guardian is not done with RFK yet. An actual editorial this time.

“The lawyer trades on his family’s image while spreading dangerous ideas. No wonder Republicans hype his bid for the Democratic nomination..”

“Voters, including independents, are not giving Mr Biden credit for the improving the economy or other achievements. That may not be fair. But it’s a fact.”

• RFK Jr: from Camelot to Conspiracy-Mongering (G. Ed.)

Robert F Kennedy Jr, campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for the presidency, likes to call himself a “Kennedy Democrat”. His own siblings disagree. His uncle’s presidency, like his namesake father’s career and presidential campaign, had an aura of hope and responsibility as well as glamour. RFK Jr talks vaguely of overcoming divisions, but in reality trades upon a peculiar blend of “cynicism and credulity”, as one commentator notes. Most recently he claimed that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” in comments reported by the New York Post. However jarring the remarks – he partially backtracked later – they sit comfortably with his long history of fomenting conspiracy theories and his nonsensical, anti-scientific views. He has falsely linked childhood immunisations to autism and wifi to cancer and “leaky brain”, claimed that HIV does not cause Aids, and suggested that chemicals in drinking water could make children transgender.

One of his sisters warned that his latest comments put people’s lives in danger. So much for the Kennedy legacy. Nor does he look like much of a Democrat. He is being hyped by billionaires and rightwing broadcasters such as Sean Hannity, and has gained traction among Republicans rather than Democrats. Some see his campaign primarily as a vehicle for his ego and brand, which may be less damaging to President Biden’s chances than a possible third-party bid by Democratic senator Joe Manchin and Republican former governor Jon Huntsman’s No Labels group. A poll this month suggested that a “moderate, independent third-party candidate” could gain about 20% of the vote and result in a second term for Donald Trump. But talk up Mr Kennedy enough and he might have a marginal effect in denting President Biden.

Others suspect that Mr Kennedy wants the Republican vice-presidential slot. Steve Bannon and Roger Stone have both floated the idea of a Trump-Kennedy ticket. None of this has prevented him finding up to 20% support among Democrats in polls. Camelot nostalgia and the celebrity factor have clearly played a large part in that. Mr Kennedy has never run for any public office, still less held it, but boasts that he’s “been around” politics since he was a little boy. The lack of enthusiasm for the sitting president is also potent: most Democrats do not want him to run again, although they indicate that they would vote for him over Mr Trump. Voters, including independents, are not giving Mr Biden credit for the improving the economy or other achievements. That may not be fair. But it’s a fact.

Mr Kennedy’s appeal goes deeper, however. He has found a home in the world described by a new book, Conspirituality, where new age spirituality and the “wellness” industry overlap with the politics of paranoia, as well as alongside the Trumpian right. Distrust of institutions, suspicion at the marriage of state and corporate power, and fear and sadness at the despoliation of the environment are in themselves reasonable concerns. But the political ambition that feeds upon and mutates them into more poisonous beliefs is unpalatable.

RFK disinformation dozen

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More Guardian. Make war not peace.

• China Complicit In Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine, Says MI6 Chief (G.)

The head of MI6 has accused China’s government and its leader, Xi Jinping, of being “absolutely complicit” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in a rare public address in Prague. Sir Richard Moore, who has been chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service since 2020, also offered comment on the extraordinary mutiny in June by the mercenary Wagner group led by Yevgeny Prigozhin. Shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine, Xi and Vladimir Putin signed a “no limits” partnership between their countries. After the war began, China’s government sought to present itself as a neutral peacemaker, and there have been signs of Xi’s dissatisfaction with events, but in practice Beijing refused to publicly censure or discourage Russia, and senior officials often expressed direct support.

“When Putin invaded Ukraine, the Chinese very clearly supported the Russians,” Moore said at the event hosted by Politico on Wednesday. “They have completely supported the Russians diplomatically, they’ve abstained in key votes at the United Nations, they’ve absolutely cynically repeated all the Russian tropes, particularly in places like Africa and Latin America – [by] blaming Nato and all of this stuff.” Moore said MI6 now devoted more resources to China than any other mission, which “reflects China’s importance in the world and the crucial need to understand both the intent and capability of the Chinese government”. His comments are likely to spark an angry response from Beijing, and follow a recent speech and essay by Bill Burns, in which the CIA director warned of Beijing’s “actions” accompanying its powerful rise:

“Russia’s aggression poses a formidable test. But China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do so.” Moore said the balance of power between Russia and China had shifted in the latter’s favour, and this had hurt Putin’s prestige in Russia. Putin’s power had also been affected by the Wagner group revolt in June, Moore suggested. “You don’t have a group of mercenaries advance up the motorway towards Moscow and get to within 125km of Moscow unless you have not quite predicted that was going to happen,” he said. “Prigozhin was his creature, utterly created by Putin, and yet he turned on him.”

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“..The question is, how many people will die in these four years, while we finance the supply of arms for 20 billion euros..”

• New EU Grant To Ukraine Means Years More Of Fighting – Hungary (TASS)

The EU leadership’s proposal to allocate 20 billion euros in military assistance to Ukraine over four years will prolong hostilities in the country for years to come. Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Economic Relations of Hungary, Peter Szijjarto voiced this opinion on Thursday. He was taking part in a meeting with his colleagues from the EU countries in Brussels. Szijjarto said that EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell proposed to allocate 20 billion euros to finance arms supplies to Ukraine over a period of 4 years. “This practically establishes the military regime for years,” Szijjarto said at a meeting with Hungarian reporters during a break in the session.

“So now you should not think about peace [in Ukraine], not only in the short term, but also in the long term,” the Hungarian Foreign Minister stressed. His press conference was broadcast on his Facebook page (banned in Russia, owned by the Meta corporation, recognized as extremist in Russia). sSpeaking about the meeting of the EU Council at the ministerial level, Szijjarto said: “To sum up briefly what has been said in recent hours, I can tell you that they don’t really want to talk about peace.” “What does the European Union say? It will be a war zone [in Ukraine] for four years.”

“Such a proposal is shocking. The question is, how many people will die in these four years, while we finance the supply of arms for 20 billion euros. And how many Hungarians [from the Transcarpathia region] will die in these four years?” the Foreign Minister said. In his opinion, the last 500 days have proven that the Ukrainian conflict cannot be resolved on the battlefield, and the more weapons that are delivered there, the more dead there will be. “Therefore, we are asking Brussels, Berlin, Paris and Washington to bring peace, not weapons, to our neighboring country,” Szijjarto said.

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Also check video ‘Agent Zelensky’ – Part 2.

• Ukrainian Counteroffensive Stumbles Over Russian Minefields (Scott Ritter)

Doctrinally speaking, Russian air and artillery fires do not become decisively engaged until an attacking force reaches the first line of prepared defenses, after which both air and artillery will be brought to bear on pre-designated “fire sacs” which the attacker is pushed into by a combination of minefields and defensive positions. Even here the Russians avoid decisive engagement, pulling back to a second line of defenses likewise defined by obstacle barriers consisting primarily of minefields. Russia has been fighting this way since the 1980’s, when the Soviet Ministry of Defense moved away from the “fight until you die” approach of holding on to a defensive position to adapt their tactics and operations to the reality of the modern battlefield. Any officer who has studied Soviet and/or Russian operational art is knowledgeable of this fact.

The problem is that for the past 20 years, the United States military and NATO have not been focused on fighting the Russian threat, but rather dealing with low-intensity combat in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Therein lies the source of General Zaluzhny’s frustration—the NATO trainers who ran the Ukrainian forces earmarked for the ongoing counteroffensive through there paces in the training grounds of Germany were anything but experts on the subject they were teaching—the reduction of a fortified position in depth. Too many assumptions were made about the viability of untested NATO mine-sweeping technology, while too little attention was paid to the reality of Russian defensive warfare and the role played by mines in impeding any advance.

Old school Cold Warriors, especially those who participated in the last major breaching assault against a heavily mined fortified defensive position—the Iraqi forces dug in along the Kuwaiti border with Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm in February 1991, understand what it takes to methodically clear a minefield that is covered by enemy direct and indirect fire. The answer is firepower that meets or exceeds that available to the enemy. Ukraine possesses nothing close to the fire support available to Russia. {..] There is no easy way to clear a minefield. It is slow, dangerous, laborious work that must be undertaken by properly trained and properly equipped forces who are protected from enemy fire by the overwhelming application of friendly suppressive fires. Ukraine lacks this capability, and General Milley knows it. The fact that General Milley fails to admit this, and encourage the Ukrainians to stop their lemming-like appointment with death, is an indictment of his lack of professionalism as a soldier, and the United States as a society totally lacking in humanity.

Scott Ritter Investigation: ‘Agent Zelensky’ – Part 2

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“We can push with 10 brigades but it won’t work because the mines are everywhere, every half a meter there are mines..”

• ‘Vast’ Russian Minefields Zapping Morale Of Ukrainian Troops (Sp.)

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu earlier said that since the start of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in early June, Russia has wiped out more than 26,000 Ukrainian soldiers, while also obliterating over 1,200 enemy tanks. “Vast and dense” minefields laid by Russian forces proved to be the most “daunting obstacle” for Ukraine’s counteroffensive, a UK newspaper has reported. According to the paper, these minefields “are destroying NATO-supplied armor, wounding soldiers and zapping morale.” As an example, the news outlet quoted a Ukrainian special forces unit commander as saying that the Russian landmines are having a devastating effect on Ukraine’s attempts to push forward. “We can push with 10 brigades but it won’t work because the mines are everywhere, every half a meter there are mines,” the commander, who was only referred to by his first name Sultan, told the newspaper.

Referring to a “painfully slow” offensive, the newspaper cited unnamed “frontline” Ukrainian soldiers as blaming Russia’s minefields, calling them “a hidden threat that has become a psychological torment.” The media outlet pointed out that Ukrainian troops have to tackle “miles of open fields littered with thousands of mines: anti-tank, anti-personnel, improvised explosive devices and an array of booby traps.” The publication added that even though the US-made Bradley fighting vehicles and German Leopard 2 battle tanks provided some protection, mine strikes finally “put many vehicles out of commission, halting advances, and leaving the [Ukrainian] troops to trek on foot through minefields while under fire.”

Ukrainian military leaders have, meanwhile, urged their Western allies to supply more mine-clearing equipment to Kiev, such as M58 Mine Clearing Line Charge systems (MICLICs). The US has already provided Ukraine with “some” of this equipment, “but not to the extent that was promised,” according to the newspaper. Ukraine’s much-hyped counteroffensive kicked off on June 4 after months of delays over a lack of military supplies from Western donors.

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“a lack of confidence in the leadership of some commanders of the Legion is a pervasive problem, with devastating effects.”

• ‘My Mates Have Died And Are Dying’ in Ukraine – Australian Mercenary (Sp.)

Moscow earlier recalled that all those foreigners, who are fighting on the side of Ukraine in the special operation zone, remain legitimate targets of the Russian military, “who successfully obliterate them.” Foreign mercenaries in Ukraine are threatened with repercussions for spreading information about some “incompetent” Ukrainian commanders, who are putting them in danger, a former Australian soldier currently serving with the Ukrainian International Legion has told an Australian radio station. The former Aussie serviceman, who was only referred to by the call sign “Bush,” singled out the leadership incompetence of some Ukrainian commanders, adding that some mercenaries have been threatened with jail for trying to leave Ukraine.

“The simple fact is that it is a meat grinder out there. My mates have died, and are dying. This is a matter of life and death and this needs to be solved, pronto,” he pointed out. The Australian soldier of fortune admitted that he “has seen things out here that, from a military perspective, are beyond unacceptable and are unfortunately hurting Ukraine.” He also argued that some mercenaries had not been paid at all for their service in Ukraine. When asked whether he fears for his safety in speaking out, the man said, “Absolutely, 100 percent.” The Australian radio station also referred to a recent recorded exchange, in which “the Bush” reportedly tells a Ukrainian commander about a broken system that made it impossible “to do tasks as simple as transferring men from one unit to another.”

In the recording, “The Bush” also bemoans the fact that his mates’ concerns about particular commanders within the Ukrainian International Legion are being ignored. “We will not continue to serve in a military that mistreats us,” he was heard telling the commander, who reacts by admitting that Legion members are angry and frustrated, according to the Australian radio station. Separately, the media outlet cited “the Bush” as saying that although some Australian members of the Ukrainian International Legion are more experienced in operating the Australian-made Bushmasters armored personnel carriers that were recently delivered to Kiev, they are prevented from using these vehicles.“We have been expressly ordered that we cannot use this equipment — only the Ukrainians can use it.” the former Australian soldier said.

“The Bush” was echoed by former Australian Army officer Glenn Kolomeitz, who told the Australian radio station that foreign mercenaries in Ukraine “are threatened with jail and all manner of nonsense,” if they ask to leave.
Kolomeitz described some of the threats received by Ukrainian International Legion members as “horrendous” and “shocking.” He also accused Ukrainian commanders of “disregarding the planning and just sending troops in, Ukrainians and Westerners, into these battles without the benefit of these operational plans.” According to Kolomeitz, “That’s seeing a lot of people being killed to little effect, to little battlefield effect.” The Australian radio station quoted both Bush and Kolomeitz as saying that “a lack of confidence in the leadership of some commanders of the Legion is a pervasive problem, with devastating effects.”

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They can deny they’re NATO.

• UK Intel ‘Freelancers’ Helped Ukraine Target Crimean Bridge – The Grayzone (RT)

Ukraine’s drone attack on the Kerch Bridge was most likely planned by former British military intelligence agents who signed a contract with Kiev in 2022, the independent outlet Grayzone has reported citing leaked documents. A “cabal of British military-intelligence freelancers” led by Chris Donnelly has worked with the Odessa office of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) since April last year, Grayzone said in a report published Wednesday evening. The outlet had published leaked documents proving their partnership in October 2022, after the first attack on the Crimean Bridge. “A review of leaked files previously revealed by The Grayzone provides a solid basis for again blaming Donnelly’s cabal,” the outlet noted in reference to Monday’s drone attack that killed two civilians and orphaned a 14-year-old girl.

Donnelly is described as “a senior intelligence operative and former high ranking NATO advisor.” He is allegedly using a “transnational nexus” involving companies such as Prevail Partners and Thomas in Winslow, to manage “London’s contribution to the proxy war at arm’s length.” The two companies signed a “technical support” agreement with the Odessa branch of the SBU in April 2022, according to Grayzone, which included the use of surveillance drones to “monitor coastline and Russian movement” and access to satellite imagery to assist military and black operations. A “geospatial intelligence” specialist at Prevail provided the SBU with a presentation titled “Kerch Bridge info pack,” which laid out various plans to blow up the bridge built in 2018 to connect Crimea to the Krasnodar Region on the Russian mainland.

“One speculative plot involved detonating a vessel containing ammonia nitrate directly under the bridge,” according to Grayzone. The proposal “approvingly cited as an example to emulate” the August 2020 explosion in Beirut, which killed at least 214 people and devastated the Lebanese capital. According to Grayzone, the British advisers have also provided Kiev with assistance in targeting alleged “Russian collaborators” in territories under Ukraine’s control. Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, boasted to Western media in October 2022 that intelligence services were “shooting them like pigs.”

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This is how bad the equipment situation has become. Setting up repair shops.

• Repairing Damaged Ukrainian Military Hardware Would Be Nightmare for West (Sp.)

Hundreds of Western-made Ukrainian armored vehicles have already been damaged or destroyed by Russian forces amid Kiev’s counteroffensive, which continues to show no signs of succeeding. The US and its allies’ “main effort” for Ukraine is currently shifting from delivering military hardware to “repairing and sustaining” it, an American media outlet has reported. The outlet cited the Pentagon’s acquisition and sustainment chief, William LaPlante, as saying that the US Department of Defense (DoD) is now in the process of setting up repair facilities in Europe. “We’re translating [training and repair] manuals, we have to do much more together so there’s going to be more of a focus on that” by partner nations, LaPlante, who is also at the helm of a working group to deal with repairing damaged Ukrainian military equipment, added.

The outlet noted in this vein that “while the sustainment working group has made strides, the realities of national politics and government bureaucracy also have a say.” As an example, the outlet mentioned a botched plan by Berlin and Warsaw to create a joint repair center in Poland for Ukrainian Leopard 2 tanks. The plan reportedly fell apart due to disagreements over the cost of the work, “leaving some damaged tanks to sit unused as they await repair.” “There’s so much [damaged Ukrainian] equipment that is lying around on the battlefield that will probably be repaired on the one hand. And they’ve got stockpiles of it and they don’t know what to do with it,” Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst in the Office of the US Secretary of Defense, told Sputnik.

According to him, this reflects “the most obvious” problem that the US is “running low on new equipment to get to the destination.” “But I perceive that there will be other nightmares as a result of trying to come up with repair stations and moving the damaged equipment in and out of locations, the costs for repairs, [and] the availability of parts,” Maloof pointed out. He warned that tackling these issues might prove difficult given that “Ukraine relies almost entirely on different types of equipment from different countries coming into the country”. When asked how feasible for Western countries would be to synchronize all the processes related to repairing the damaged Ukrainian military equipment, the ex-NATO analyst said that “the process would be a nightmare.”

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Can’t use the Black Sea anymore. Looks like checkmate. And this was your own move. Maybe if you ask Putin nicely…

• Kuleba Urges EU To Expand Opportunities For Export Of Ukrainian Grain (Az.)

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called on the European Union (EU) members to urgently expand all available opportunities for the export of Ukrainian grain, Report informs via RBC-Ukraine. According to the minister, while Russia “destroys the grain initiative”, strikes at Ukrainian ports and tries to make money on rising food prices, Ukraine and the European Union should make every effort to simplify food exports from Ukraine. In particular, by maximizing the capacity of the alternative transport corridors “Ways of Solidarity”. Kuleba said that with such steps, the Russian side is trying to eliminate Ukraine from the market as a competitor, forcing end buyers, consumers in Asia and Africa, and “finance the Russian military machine.”


According to him, the ideal scenario would be a complete cessation of the naval blockade of Ukrainian ports. This will be possible when Ukraine receives the first F-16 squadron, which will be able to patrol the sky and sea lanes. Kuleba also expressed gratitude to those EU countries that are already making an active contribution to the aviation coalition, and called for the implementation of all procedures as soon as possible. “At present, Ukraine has proposed to the UN and Türkiye to continue the work of the grain corridor in a trilateral format, including ship inspections at the Joint Coordination Center. We are awaiting their response. I urge you to support our request in your engagement with the UN and the Secretary-General,” the minister noted.

Putin grain deal
https://twitter.com/i/status/1682032069206216704

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FD-1023

• Grassley Releases Bombshell FBI Doc Discussing $10MM Biden Bribe

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has released a bombshell FBI document dated July 30,2020, in which a respected confidential human source (CHS) alleged that then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden received $10 million in bribes. The document, a FD-1023 form, also alleges that the boss of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm which employed Hunter Biden to the tune of $80,000 per month, thought Hunter was a moron. Hunter Biden “was stupid, and his (Zlochevsky’s) dog was smarter,” but the Burisma boss “needed to keep hunter [sic] Biden (on the board) “so everything will be ok.”” As the Epoch Times notes, the CHS said he traveled to Burisma’s office in Ukraine in 2015 or 2016 with a man named Oleksandr Ostapenko.

During the meeting, Vadim Pojarskii, chief financial officer of Burisma, told the source that the company hired Hunter Biden “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.” Burisma contacted the source to seek assistance in buying an American company to merge with in the hope that it could go public in the United States. After an investigation of Burisma by Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was disclosed in 2016, the source told Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma , that the disclosure would have a negative impact on the prospective initial public offering. Mr. Zlochevsky replied that Mr. Hunter Biden “will take care of all of those issues through his dad,” according to the document. Mr. Zlochevsky was also cited as saying that it cost $5 million to pay one Biden, and $5 million to pay another Biden.


The source replied that payments to the Bidens would complicate matters and the Bidens did not have experience with the oil and gas sector, according to the document. Mr. Zlochevsky said his dog was smarter than Mr. Hunter Biden but that he needed to keep him on the board “so everything will be okay.” Both Mr. Hunter Biden and Mr. Joe Biden had told Mr. Zlochevsky that Hunter Biden needed to remain on the board, Mr. Zlochevsky said. Around the same time, Mr. Joe Biden, the U.S. vice president at the time, was pressuring Ukrainian officials to fire Mr. Shokin. “We’re leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Mr. Joe Biden said at a public event about the interaction, referring to a $1 billion loan guarantee he threatened to withhold. “Well, son of a [expletive]. He got fired.” Mr. Shokin has said that the threat was cited when he was ousted. He said in a sworn statement that then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “asked me to resign due to pressure from the U.S. presidential administration, in particular from Joe Biden.”

Poro

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“..most lawyers would have reversed engines out of troubled waters, but Goldman plowed full speed ahead..”

• Rep. Dan Goldman Demolishes Biden Defense in Whistleblower Hearing (Turley)

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) often goes where wiser members fear to tread. On this occasion, Goldman may have delivered one of the most damaging moments for the Democrats. In the course of just a few minutes, the freshman New York congressman seemed to demolish the defense of President Biden. Goldman was trying to get the witnesses to say that there is no evidence that President Biden was personally involved in the alleged felonies of his son. He raised the shocking WhatsApp message that Hunter had allegedly sent to a Chinese official with foreign intelligence contacts. In the message, Hunter wrote: “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

Most Democrats have avoided the message, which is incredibly damaging and seems to contradict the President’s long denial of any knowledge or involvement in his son’s dealings. Goldman pressed veteran IRS investigator Gary Shapley about his suggestion that Joe Biden discussed the foreign dealing with his son. Shapley eagerly said that he would be happy to explain but Goldman cut him off and said that he did not have time for such explanations. At this point, most lawyers would have reversed engines out of troubled waters, but Goldman plowed full speed ahead. He said that the references to Joe sitting next to his son does not mean that they actually discussed his business. Goldman then went even further and raised a “lunch where Joe Biden came to say hello at the Four Season’s hotel to a lunch that he was having with CEFC executives.”

He then reads from the record in how Biden associate Rob Walker described the origins of the meeting with the Chinese officials to get his dad to stop by: “Hunter told his Dad that ‘I may be trying to start a company or try to do something with these guys.’ “ Goldman then pounced and said slyly “Now let me ask you something, that doesn’t sound much like Joe Biden was involved in whatever Hunter was doing with the CEFC if Hunter Biden is telling him that he is trying to do business with them, does it?” That is when Shapley stated the obvious: “No, but it does show that he told his father that he was trying to do business and . . . ” Goldman finally hears the train whistle and tries to get off the track: “OK, well that is true that Hunter Biden does try to do business, that is correct.”

Too late. Goldman was citing the testimony of Walker that Joe Biden not only came to a lunch on Hunter’s foreign dealings, but did so after being told that Hunter wanted to lay the foundation for such a deal. This is the same Joe Biden who has repeatedly told the American people that he never discussed any of Hunter’s deals and had no knowledge of such deals. He has maintained that denial as evidence has mounted contradicting him. Even when he flew his son to China where Hunter cut lucrative deals, he insists that they never mentioned that deal.

Read more …

“..we are now looking at peak cheap energy at a time when asset markets are in bubble territory with debts and deficits at levels which can only result in an implosion..”

• A Catastrophic Debt Implosion Can Be Incredibly Quick (Von Greyerz)

Coming back to Dante’s Inferno, the 9 circles of hell are: 1. Limbo – where there is no god, 2. Lust, 3. Gluttony, 4. Greed, 5. Wrath, 6. Heresy, 7. Violence, 8. Fraud, and 9.Treachery. Many of the 9 sins in Dante’s Inferno apply to today’s world but maybe Gluttony is one of the more fitting to a self indulgent Western world. Cerberus, the three-headed beast of hell, guards the gluttons mauling and flaying them for eternity. (Sounds pretty horrible. A more modern version might be the song “Hotel California” by the Eagles – “You can check out any time but you can never leave”.) Also Homer wrote about Cerberus. What we do know is that in this final phase that probably started in 1913 with the foundation of the Fed and accelerated from 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window we have seen the required excesses or gluttony that inevitably lead to a severe punishment.

We have seen historical bubbles in all asset markets whether in Stocks, Bonds, Property and many others. We have also seen debt explode, especially since 1971. As always in the final stages of an empire, real growth first slows down and then stops. The primary driver of economic growth since the second half of the 1700s has been the discovery and use of energy on an industrial scale, starting with the industrial revolution. The growth of the economy is not driven by money but by energy. As Tim Morgan of Surplus Energy Economics states:“The economy is a surplus energy equation, not a monetary one, and growth in output (and in the global population) since the Industrial Revolution has resulted from the harnessing of ever-greater quantities of energy. But the critical relationship between energy production and the energy cost of extraction is now deteriorating so rapidly that the economy as we have known it for more than two centuries is beginning to unravel.”

The dilemma is that the Energy Cost of Energy is constantly increasing. In 1990 that cost was 2.6% of fossil fuels and is estimated to be 12% in 2025. According to Dr Morgan, with the current Energy Cost of Energy, the real economy as well as prosperity has started to decline and that trend will continue for several decades. Fossil fuels still represent 83% of all energy globally and renewable energy is unlikely to make any significant difference in the next few decades. So we are now looking at peak cheap energy at a time when asset markets are in bubble territory with debts and deficits at levels which can only result in an implosion. Again let me emphasise that cheap energy is a prerequisite for economic growth.

So, what are governments doing about this? They are clearly aware of the risks and this is why they invent all kinds of events that will enable them to control the people. This includes Covid lockdowns, forced vaccinations, climate control, CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies), wars and unlimited rules, regulations and laws. The US for example now has over 300,000 laws controlling all aspects of daily life and making everyone a likely daily felon.

Read more …

“..They do not want people to afford a home because then there would be no need for 15-minute cities..“

• Freedom Flyers (Martin Armstrong)

Have you ever noticed a decorative eagle plaque above a home in America? This was once a popular symbol back in the day to symbolize freedom from mortgage payments. Homeowners would adorn their houses with this symbol to indicate that they were free from the bank and owned their home free and clear. Around 40% of owner-occupied homes have been paid off, further adding to the housing inventory crisis. The 2022 Federal Housing Finance Agency reported in 2022 that 84% of outstanding mortgages locked in a rate below 5%, while 63% secured a rate at or below 4%. Mortgage rates surpassed 8% last week and those who own are unlikely to sell. While some point to double-digit mortgage rates in the past, it was not difficult for buyers to put down 40% upfront since housing prices were low in comparison to wages.


This was also a time when the cost of living supported a traditional lifestyle where only one partner was required to work. Although COVID and low rates created strong demand, the underlying issue is the Great Reset. Institutions are set to own 40% of all single-family rentals by 2030, precisely on time for Agenda 2030. Regular buyers have been outbid by institutions coming in with cash payments. BlackRock is now the largest landowner in America. This is all by design. They do not want people to afford a home because then there would be no need for 15-minute cities, and forever renters living in ADUs. The inventory issue will not recover because no one can outbid the institutions who do not need to borrow money.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Elijah

 

 

 

 

Mantis
https://twitter.com/i/status/1682018991781412866

 

 


Mercator projection

 

 

Raven

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle July 23 2022

Jul 232022
 
 July 23, 2022  Posted by at 8:31 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  44 Responses »


Salvador Dali Mme. Reese 1931

 

• Deal Between Ukraine And Russia Aims To Ease Global Food Crisis (NYT)
• Servant of the Corrupt (Gonzalez)
• Russia About To Run Out Of Steam In Ukraine – MI6 Chief (BBC)
• Western Currencies Will Fail (Vilches)
• IEA Chief: Europe Must Cut Gas Usage 20% To Survive Winter (OP)
• EU Debates Revised Plan To Reduce Gas Use After Opposition (R.)
• Triple/Quadruple Vaccinated Account For 91% Of All UK Covid Deaths (DE)
• Unvaccinated Fans Can Attend the U.S. Open. Why Can’t Novak Djokovic? (NW)
• The State of Banks in China (Balding)
• Trump ’25: A Radical Plan For Trump’s Second Term (Axios)
• Liz Cheney Said Trump Family and Aides Have Now Publicly “Confessed” (Turley)
• People, Get Ready (Jim Kunstler)

 

 

 

 

“Everybody that has an mRNA injection will die in 3 to 5 years.”

 

 

 

 

“If the research done on rats is applicable to humans we will see massive infertility in the next 5 years followed by death via various organ system failure and/or cancers.”

 

 

 

 

Bannon
https://twitter.com/i/status/1550527743565053953

 

 

 

 

Conflicting info.

• Deal Between Ukraine And Russia Aims To Ease Global Food Crisis (NYT)

Russia and Ukraine signed an agreement in Istanbul on Friday to free more than 20 million metric tons of grain stuck in blockaded Black Sea ports in Ukraine, a deal aimed at bringing down soaring grain prices and alleviating a mounting global hunger crisis. The breakthrough comes after months of talks and was brokered with the help of the United Nations and Turkey. The agreement provides a method for exporting Ukrainian grain through Turkey, and it comes after the United Nations gave Russia assurances that it can export its grain and fertilizers. If the agreement holds, it could help ease catastrophic food shortages that worsened when Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Ukraine is one of the world’s breadbaskets, and the invasion reverberated across the global economy, aggravating a growing food crisis, contributing to famine in Africa and threatening political unrest in some countries.

“This agreement did not come easy,” António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, said at the signing ceremony, calling the deal a “beacon in the Black Sea.” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to block food exports to gain international leverage has led to some of the gravest global consequences of Moscow’s attack on Ukraine, undermining a global food distribution network that was already strained by pandemic-related disruptions and climate change. Senior U.N. officials said that the first shipments of grain out of Odesa, Ukraine, and neighboring ports were only weeks away and would quickly bring 5 million metric tons of Ukrainian grain and other foodstuffs to the world market each month. That would also free up storage space in Ukraine’s silos for freshly harvested grain, the officials said.

Ukraine and Russia have agreed on very little since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began Feb. 24. Peace talks held in Belarus that month and in March went nowhere, largely because Russia insisted on a change of government in Kyiv, Ukraine. Later in March, talks in Turkey were also ultimately fruitless. Negotiators have been able to reach agreements on prisoner exchanges and on the evacuation of a steel plant in Mariupol where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians were holed up for 80 days. But Friday’s pact was the first time that representatives from the warring countries have publicly signed an agreement.

“It’s a big step forward,” said Stephen E. Flynn, founding director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University, crediting the Turks with an “elegant approach.” But he warned that it will be difficult to speedily deliver food to where it is most needed. The mechanics of transporting grain through the Black Sea under wartime conditions with little or no trust between the warring sides are extremely complex. “It will not move quickly,” he said.

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“It might be hard to believe now, but revelations from documents in the Pandora Papers [..] sent Zelensky reeling last year, threatening to end his political career.”

• Servant of the Corrupt (Gonzalez)

In February 2021, by order of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine shut down three domestic television channels, accusing them of spreading Russian “propaganda.” Three months later, Zelenksky arrested Viktor Medvedchuk, who was at the time leading the second-biggest party in Ukraine’s national parliament, the pro-Russia and Eurosceptic Opposition Platform for Life (OPZZh). Zelensky didn’t have trouble incinerating vaunted democratic norms well-before Russia crossed the Rubicon into Ukraine this year. So it was no surprise when he did it again amid the war in late March, invoking emergency powers under martial law to nationalize TV channels and ban 11 opposition parties, including OPZZh — all supposedly done in the name of combatting Russian misinformation and Russian sympathizers, even though OPZZh’s then-chairman, Yuriy Boyko, denounced the war and called for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.

Zelensky, however, wouldn’t miss another opportunity to clip the wings of political opposition in his country, certainly not now that Western media rationalizes and glorifies his every move. The portrait of the Ukraine president as a democratic paragon whitewashes the real Zelensky and conceals a vast web of corruption and international skullduggery of which Ukraine is situated in the center. Understanding the real Zelensky, requires seeing him as a creation of Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. He is, in truth, a puppet of intrigue. It might be hard to believe now, but revelations from documents in the Pandora Papers — millions of files from offshore service providers leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around the world — sent Zelensky reeling last year, threatening to end his political career. Though the actor-turned-politico campaigned as an anti-corruption reformer, the Pandora Papers showed him to be just as crooked as his predecessors.

Of more than 300 politicians and public officials, including several current and former national leaders, in more than 91 countries and territories to whom the documents were linked, Ukraine was home to more secret offshore holdings than any other, including Russia. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which contributed to the investigation, found that just before Zelensky was elected president, “he gifted his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to his business partner — soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of giving up his shares, the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his wife.”

Read more …

Spooks never lie.

• Russia About To Run Out Of Steam In Ukraine – MI6 Chief (BBC)

Russia will struggle to maintain its military campaign and Ukraine may be able to hit back, the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service says. MI6 chief Richard Moore said Russia had seen “epic fails” in its initial goals; removing Ukraine’s president, capturing Kyiv and sowing disunity in the West. He was speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, in a rare public appearance. He called the invasion “the most egregious naked act of aggression… in Europe since the Second World War.” He said recent Russian gains were “tiny” and that Russia was “about to run out of steam”. “Our assessment is that the Russians will increasingly find it difficult to find manpower and materiel over the next few weeks,” Mr Moore told the conference in Colorado. “They will have to pause in some way and that will give the Ukrainians the opportunity to strike back.”

That view may be seen as optimistic and Ukraine’s ability to counter-attack may well depend on greater supplies of Western weaponry, which its officials say has often been too slow in arriving. The MI6 chief said some kind of battlefield success would be an “important reminder to the rest of Europe that this is a winnable campaign” – particularly ahead of a winter which was likely to see pressure on gas supplies. “We are in for a tough time,” he said. A further reason to maintain support to help the Ukrainians win, or “at least negotiate from a position of significant strength”, he said, was because China’s leader Xi Jinping was “watching like a hawk”.

[..] On China, he said MI6 had “never had any illusions whatsoever about Communist China”. He revealed MI6 now devoted more effort to China than to any other single subject – the effort in this field having just moved past that devoted to counter-terrorism. He said it was “too early to tell” what lessons China would draw from Putin’s actions in Ukraine, but there were lots of signs officials in Beijing were going into overdrive to work out what they thought. “It is quite difficult to read at the moment,” he said. He said it was “important” to remind China’s leadership of how an invasion of Taiwan could go wrong. He said China’s leadership underestimated US resolve and power and this might lead them to miscalculate. “I don’t think it is inevitable,” he said when asked about a major conflict.

Read more …

“Russia does not need, care to have, or find a valid use for dollars or euros which are strictly Western nonsense, not Russia’s..”

• Western Currencies Will Fail (Vilches)

As Prof. Michael Hudson has repeatedly explained, printing humongous ´money´ specially for the FIRE rentier sector (Finance Insurance Real Estate) and beyond anyone else has tremendously increased Western GDPs… but did not increase at all its effective, real-life tangible products and services economy that would benefit flesh & blood human beings. The GDP formula and its 4 terms by themselves are clear evidence of such a problem. So today Western central banks have painted themselves into a far away “false GDP” corner with no effective tools, space, or time left to maneuver with or issue yet “new” forward guidance (lip service) for their “financial policies” to change such outcome.

Per multi-billionaire and Bill Gates’ partner Warren Buffett — a.k.a. the ´Omaha Oracle´ — derivatives are a weapon of Financial Mass Destruction which today would sum up a notional sum exceeding USD $ 2 quadrillion. Of these, the central bank-induced and managed “paper gold chimera” could be as high as 30%. Flat-footed as they now are, central bankers can thus awkwardly run around in circles, but they can’t ever effectively hide. They might still be kings for a little while longer but they wear no clothes. And so back to the 2022 world, Russia now says “it´s our products so you pay in our Rubles, okay?” Why euros or dollars? The West plain robs them anyways, so Russia cannot give away something for nothing. Russia does not need, care to have, or find a valid use for dollars or euros which are strictly Western nonsense, not Russia’s.

This includes oil + nat-gas + LNG + refined products + wheat + everything else. And the Chinese may also start gradually doing something equivalent until a new, stable, fairer, BRICS-non-NATO monetary system is developed, installed, and accepted. How the transition will unfold is not yet very clear other than that it´d probably be a bumpy road and that it will take time. Of course, physical gold would work as perfect money so recall that the Global South has plenty of gold — and highly valuable silver — buried deep in the ground but still environmentally recoverable with adequate mining practices. This might turn out to be a game-changer both for these Global South regions of the world and for the Russian and Chinese investments to be made especially if the countries in question belong to BRICS and/or the BRI – Belt and Road Initiative.

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No, Europe must make peace.

• IEA Chief: Europe Must Cut Gas Usage 20% To Survive Winter (OP)

After calling on all member states to reduce gas consumption by 15% in the face of the threat of a complete Russian gas cutoff, the IEA says the European Union will need to cut even more in order to get through the winter. “Even if there is no single accident… #Europe still needs to reduce its gas consumption about 20% compared to today in order to have safe and normal winter months,” IEA chief Fatih Birol said, issuing what he called a “red alert” for energy markets. The short-term issue with the Nord Stream 1 pipeline may have been resolved, Birol told CNN, but “it’s too early to be happy about this”. The amount Europe is receiving now from Russia is only about one-third of what it was receiving prior to the force majeure, and the IEA chief warned that even that reduced flow “can be cut anytime”.

After a 10-day pause for regular maintenance, Russian gas flows via Nord Stream resumed on Thursday morning, with orders for gas set at around 40% of Nord Stream’s capacity, the level from before the maintenance after Russia slashed flows in mid-June. Flows early on Thursday were at around 21.5 GWh, compared to 30GWh prior to the start of maintenance on July 11th, and compared to 70 GWh before Russia reduced supplies by 60% on June 13th. On Wednesday, the European Commission unveiled measures for the bloc to conserve gas to pre-empt a Russian cutoff, asking member states to reduce consumption by 15% until next spring.

According to Birol, this won’t be enough to ensure a smooth winter for Europe, and there is no alternative to consumption reductions. Even assuming that the current Russian gas flow is maintained, and considering all the LNG Europe is getting from the United States and elsewhere, plus other natural gas sources, and even if there are no accidents that hamper supply, Europe still needs to reduce more, starting now, Birol said. There is not enough gas around the world for Europe to rely on, the IAE chief said, and there is no choice but to reduce consumption to avoid shortages and rationing this winter.

Read more …

Whistled back.

• EU Debates Revised Plan To Reduce Gas Use After Opposition (R.)

European envoys debated revisions on Friday to a proposal by the EU executive that all bloc members cut natural gas use to prepare for potential Russian supply cuts, hoping for a compromise by next week after some governments, including in Greece, balked at the plan. The European Commission proposed on Wednesday that all EU countries should cut their gas use from August to March by 15%. The target would initially be voluntary, but would become mandatory if the Commission declared an emergency. But from the outset, the proposal met criticism from a range of countries. Spain, Portugal and Greece are among the most openly hostile, while diplomats say Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands and Poland also have reservations about giving the Commission the power to order cuts.

Under a proposal put forward by the Czech Republic, which holds the rotating EU presidency, EU governments would have to approve any proposal by the Commission to make the cuts mandatory, EU diplomats said. The revised text would also cut the time period for which the system would apply from two years to one, to emphasize the emergency nature of the measure. Some countries complain that a uniform 15% cut would inflict more pain than necessary on householders in some parts of the bloc, to protect gas-hungry industrial users in other regions. Envoys will discuss possible further revisions on Monday before energy ministers meet for an emergency session designed to forge an agreement. “It’s not just fine-tuning. There is still more work to be done,” an EU diplomat said.

Spanish Energy Minister Teresa Ribera said in a letter to the Commission on Friday that Spain shared the final goal of the EU executive’s proposals, but believed there were more effective measures than a uniform and mandatory gas demand cut. “It is essential that the European response to this situation not be perceived as unfair and economically damaging for our citizens and industry,” she wrote, adding Spain was committed to engage constructively. The Commission said on Friday the need for gas consumption cuts was clear and that an energy issue could quickly become a broader economic problem. “It’s based on the fact that there is a serious risk of cut-off of supply of gas from Russia and we need to prepare for this eventuality,” a spokesperson said. “This is not the first time that we are having fierce debates…. on crucial subjects.”

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And not because that many people went for the boosters.

• Triple/Quadruple Vaccinated Account For 91% Of All UK Covid Deaths (DE)

In January, the vaccinated accounted for 85% of Covid-19 deaths, whilst the unvaccinated accounted for 15%. By March, the vaccinated accounted for 93% of Covid-19 deaths, whilst the vaccinated accounted for just 7%. And by May, the vaccinated accounted for 94% of Covid-19 deaths, whilst the vaccinated accounted for just 6%. Many people may believe that this is simply because, according to data published by the UK Health Security Agency, 50% of the population of England refused the third jab, and those vaccinated deaths are among the double vaccinated and partly vaccinated. But unfortunately, those people are wrong.

[..] Overall, there were 15,113 Covid-19 deaths by 31st May 2022, and a shocking 13,666 of those deaths were among the vaccinated population. But what’s even more shocking than this is that 12,442 of those deaths were among the triple/quadruple vaccinated population. This means the triple/quadruple vaccinated population have accounted for a frightening 91% of all Covid-19 deaths among the vaccinated since the beginning of 2022.

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Because he’s a symbol for failed policies.

• Unvaccinated Fans Can Attend the U.S. Open. Why Can’t Novak Djokovic? (NW)

While Djokovic’s absence undoubtedly would be bad for the game, it also makes no sense from the standpoint of public health. First, it’s noteworthy that Djokovic had COVID-19 in December. Many sporting organizations—including the NCAA—recognize prior infection as a form of immunization, and rightly so. An abundance of scientific evidence shows that natural immunity offers as much protection as vaccination alone, if not more. A recent Cornell University-led study, for example, found that people with prior infection saw “little decline in protection even a year after their prior infection.” Their level of protection was higher than that of people who had received two Pfizer shots and a booster. Importantly, the study found that both vaccines and natural immunity offer “strong and durable protection” against COVID-related hospitalization and death.

These findings and others point to a simple reality: both natural immunity and vaccination offer significant protection against COVID, especially against a severe symptomatic reaction. Second, it’s worth noting that spectators are allowed to attend the Open regardless of their vaccination status. “At this time, ticket holders will not be required to show proof of COVID vaccination for admission into the US Open,” the event’s official website states. In other words, fans can attend the U.S. Open even if they haven’t had the shot—but the world’s greatest tennis star will not be able to set foot in the country. How we arrived here is not a mystery. Vaccination has become one of the most partisan and politicized issues in the world today.

People around the world (not just Americans) were divided over vaccines—not over whether they should be available or even whether they are safe and effective, but over whether it was okay to force people to take them. Coerced vaccination was always problematic because it violates a basic human right: bodily autonomy. But in light of abundant research showing the strength and durability of natural immunity, vaccine mandates don’t just look morally dubious; they look senseless. This helps explain why efforts to coerce vaccination are failing all around the world.

Tucker Harvey Risch

Read more …

“Chinese banks have significantly less capital to absorb losses and less cash on hand for withdrawal by depositors.”

• The State of Banks in China (Balding)

The state of banks in China dominates concerns about the economy and global growth. With pictures of angry crowds outside banks and tanks on the street in one city to quell discontent about being unable to withdraw funds, it bears asking what the true state of Chinese banks is. Officially, Chinese banks are in fine shape. Nonperforming loans are low and are disposed of in a controlled manner. Banks remain comfortably within their regulatory limits of loan growth, and deposits continue to rise. However, as with all things China, a look behind the official statistics gives cause for concern. First, loan classifications in China fail to capture the true level of risk of defaults. Loan classification in China is notoriously pliable, so Chinese banks can set standards for loans being classified as nonperforming that would not pass regulatory scrutiny in other countries, a fact they openly acknowledge.

While an interest payment in most jurisdictions that was overdue by 90 days would change the classification, some Chinese banks have said they do not change the classification of the loan to doubtful until “the operations of the borrower have been suspended for at least half a year.” The cessation of a company’s operations would make any outstanding loans dubious. Second, Chinese banks are highly leveraged and short on capital. The weighted reserve rate for all banks in China is now just 8.4 percent of all capital. This is a drop from over 21 percent a decade ago. This means Chinese banks have significantly less capital to absorb losses and less cash on hand for withdrawal by depositors. These reserve figures are the official numbers, so even small changes to the bad loan numbers, an issue as just noted is highly suspect, can rapidly make that 8.4 percent even smaller.

Third, banks are facing a wave of stressed borrowers right as their capital is at historic lows, and they have been fudging the data for some time. Local governments have seen revenue plunge from lower economic activity from COVID-19 and real estate. The property sector, which is responsible for around 30 percent of GDP, is under enormous pressure, with buyers and developers alike feeling the pressure. In other words, right when banks need that capital most, they have the lowest capital levels in years. The bad news is that the choices available to Beijing are limited due to the years of pushing rapid expansion in fiscal and monetary policy to support growth. Recapitalizing the banks would require vast sums of money that would require significant inflation or devaluation of the Chinese yuan against the U.S. dollar.

Read more …

Drain the Deep State.

• Trump ’25: A Radical Plan For Trump’s Second Term (Axios)

Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his “America First” ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios. The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say. During his presidency, Trump often complained about what he called “the deep state.”

The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election. The reporting for this series draws on extensive interviews over a period of more than three months with more than two dozen people close to the former president, and others who have firsthand knowledge of the work underway to prepare for a potential second term. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive planning and avoid Trump’s ire. As Trump publicly flirts with a 2024 comeback campaign, this planning is quietly flourishing from Mar-a-Lago to Washington — with his blessing but without the knowledge of some people in his orbit. Trump remains distracted by his obsession with contesting the 2020 election results.

But he has endorsed the work of several groups to prime an administration-in-waiting. Personnel and action plans would be executed in the first 100 days of a second term starting on Jan. 20, 2025. Their work could accelerate controversial policy and enforcement changes, but also enable revenge tours against real or perceived enemies, and potentially insulate the president and allies from investigation or prosecution. They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda.

The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition. These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6-3 Supreme Court.

Trump
https://twitter.com/i/status/1550704392315310080

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“Can a President who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of January 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?”

Cheney’s losing bigtime in the polls. Trump is not.

• Liz Cheney Said Trump Family and Aides Have Now Publicly “Confessed” (Turley)

Cheney ended the hearing this week by calling for more officials to come forward and noting that Trump family members and former officials have now come forward with their own public “confessions.” As with past hearings, the summation included a direct call by Cheney for voters to oppose Donald Trump in the coming election: “Can a President who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of January 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?” It is the type of pitch that is as unnecessary as it is counterproductive. Many voters tuned out the hearings weeks ago due to the absence of any balance in the presentation of evidence. To add direct political pitches only reduces the audience further. The result is that it is left telling largely Democratically aligned voters not to vote for Trump.

Tucker Bannon
https://twitter.com/i/status/1550645124824186887

The alternative was to secure a larger audience by allowing more balance. It would not have altered the power of these accounts. It would have simply added greater credibility to the proceedings. It could have changed minds rather than just reaffirm preexisting views. Instead, once again, the Committee simply edited out conflicting evidence. For example, the Committee again edited out the line of Trump where he said “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” That line does not exonerate the former president. However, it is illustrative of the Committee’s refusal to hold these hearings for investigative rather than persuasive purposes.

What was particularly bizarre was Cheney’s effort to dismiss the need for any opposing views in the hearings. In one of the most counterintuitive and forced claims, Cheney said that such balance would not have made a difference: “And for those of you who seem to think the evidence would be different if Republican Leader McCarthy had not withdrawn his nominees from this committee, let me ask you this. Do you really think Bill Barr is such a delicate flower that he would wilt under cross-examination? Pat Cipollone, Eric Herschmann, Jeff Rosen, Richard Donoghue?” No one is suggesting that Barr would have changed his testimony. Rather, the argument is that there were questions not being asked for the witnesses and evidence not being presented. For example, when the two former members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers testified, members carefully avoided a host of countervailing questions, including any direct contacts with Trump or the White House.

However, it was the true confessions moment that stood out in the closing summation. Cheney said that more people will be called to come forward. She then added: “The case against Donald Trump in these hearings is not made by witnesses who were his political enemies. It is instead a series of confessions by Donald Trump’s own appointees, his own friends, his own campaign officials, people who worked for him for years, and his own family. They have come forward. And they have told the American people the truth.”

Dick Morris

Read more …

“We enter the new frontier of the Green New Deal and Build Back Better. In other words, the USA completely collapses.”

• People, Get Ready (Jim Kunstler)

My political fantasy du jour: Thus, Kamala accedes to greatness! She must then appoint a new vice-president. That would be… wait for it… California governor Gavin Newsom — who else? (He was recently captured on video skulking into a back door of the West Wing while “Joe Biden” was out-of-town schmoozing up the honchos of Saudi Arabia.) Gov. Newsom is easily confirmed in the House and narrowly in the Senate when Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski vote with the Party of Chaos. Kamala soon resigns, citing “anxiety problems.” Now president, Mr. Newsom proceeds to accelerate the wrecking of the old USA along the lines of his recent work in California. All D.C. gas stations are ordered shut to promote the transition to renewables. The D.C. Mall is declared the National Homeless Camp….

I called it a fantasy, but this may be their only move left as the nation utterly loses its patience with the “Joe Biden” fiasco and the escalating disorders of Western Civ take us into August. The mid-term election must be revamped at all costs, they’ll say, “to save our democracy.” A new pandemic is declared in early October, complete with lockdowns, while Google partners with Facebook to roll out a new vote-by-phone app. By some miracle, then, the Democrats add thirty more seats to their house majority and five in the Senate. We enter the new frontier of the Green New Deal and Build Back Better. In other words, the USA completely collapses.

A dark scenario, I confess, but doesn’t that seem exactly where things are going? An epic crackup is upon us. Every place in the world is primed for meltdown, and a few lands in the periphery are already sinking. Sri Lanka is broke and out of gas after being set up as a WEF / Schwabenklaus low-carbon eco-state experiment. Panama is in revolt over extreme government corruption, food scarcity, and the after-effects of an especially severe two-year-long Covid lockdown that the rest of the world hardly heard about — perhaps because China has operational control over the vital Panama Canal and the CCP has operational control over the World Health Organization, which set up Panama as a lockdown lab project.

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Vicky Spit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle January 11 2019

Jan 112019
 
 January 11, 2019  Posted by at 10:16 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


Hieronymous Bosch The Haywain Triptych c.1516 (click to enlarge)

 

• The Stock Market Just Got Off To Its Best Start In 13 Years (MW)
• 78% of US Workers Live Paycheck To Paycheck (CNBC)
• Fed’s Powell Says He Is ‘Very Worried’ About Growing Amount Of US Debt (CNBC)
• Trump Digs In As Shutdown Continues (BBC)
• Michael Cohen To Testify Publicly Before Congress In February (G.)
• China Set To Lower GDP Growth Target In 2019 (R.)
• Can The Chinese Consumer Be Resurrected? (Jim O’Neill)
• Why I Asked May If She Is On The Side Of Putin Or The People (Moran)
• May’s Brexit Deal ‘Threat To National Security’ – Former MI6 Chief (Ind.)
• May Begs Unions To Help Salvage Her Brexit Deal (Ind.)
• US Defenses No Match For Russian Hypersonic Missiles – Retired US General (RT)
• Bases, Bases, Everywhere… Except in the Pentagon’s Report (Turse)
• Oceans Warming Faster Than Expected, Set Heat Record In 2018 (R.)
• Julian Assange’s Living Conditions Deteriorate (Cassandra Fairbanks)

 

 

And there’s still people who claim the stock market reflects the economy.

• The Stock Market Just Got Off To Its Best Start In 13 Years (MW)

Things are coming up roses in the stock market, lately. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 index and Nasdaq Composite Index are off to their best starts to a year since 2006 after a powerful series of gains. The Dow closed up 0.5% on Thursday, pushing its year-to-date gain to 2.89%, which would mark the best first seven days to a year since 2006, when stocks burst 3.04% higher over the same period. The S&P 500 rose 0.5% on the day and has returned 3.58% thus far this year, its best start since a 3.68% gain 13 years ago, while the Nasdaq Composite booked a 0.4% gain, enough for a 5.3% year-to-date advance, representing its best seven-session to kick off a year since its 5.72% rise also in 2006.

A late-session rally helped to solidify Thursday’s gains, coming after investors digested comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who pronounced at the Economic Club in Washington on Thursday afternoon that the economy is in good health, while adding that the central bank would be cognizant of stresses to financial markets amid rate hikes. The comments were a reiteration of Powell’s remarks last week during a broad panel discussion of current and former Fed bosses that helped to placate anxious investors and reverse what was shaping up to be another dismal year.

Read more …

Why is everybody quoting a 2017 report?

• 78% of US Workers Live Paycheck To Paycheck (CNBC)

The partial government shutdown, which began Dec. 22, has now stretched well into the new year. President Donald Trump said Friday that it would continue for “months or even years” until he receives the requested $5 billion in funding for a border wall. The shutdown has left approximately 800,000 federal workers in financial limbo. Around 420,000 “essential” employees are working without pay, while another 380,000 have been ordered to stay home, according to calculations provided to CNBC by Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University. In some cases, the furloughs have forced government employees to tap into their savings, rely on credit cards or crowdsource funds to make ends meet.

Government workers are far from alone in feeling stressed about not getting paid. Nearly 80% of American workers (78%) say they’re living paycheck to paycheck, according to a 2017 report by employment website CareerBuilder. Women are particularly vulnerable: 81% of them report living paycheck to paycheck, compared with 75% of men. Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, tells CNBC that the group has heard from hundreds of frantic federal employees. “They’re scared,” he says. “They don’t know how they’re going to put food on the table.” Various #ShutdownStories making that point have gone viral on Twitter.

It’s not merely those earning low wages who are struggling. CareerBuilder reports that nearly 10% of Americans with salaries of $100,000 or more live paycheck to paycheck as well. That means that many workers aren’t able to put anything significant into savings. More than 50% of respondents say that they save less than $100 per month. And a comparable 2017 survey from GOBankingRates found that 61% of Americans don’t have enough money in an emergency fund to cover six months’ worth of expenses. [..] more than 70% of all respondents say that they’re in debt, and a quarter of workers say they weren’t able to make ends meet at the end of every month of the past year.

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Which his own Fed has encouraged like nobody else could.

• Fed’s Powell Says He Is ‘Very Worried’ About Growing Amount Of US Debt (CNBC)

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is concerned about the ballooning amount of United States debt. “I’m very worried about it,” Powell said at The Economic Club of Washington, D.C. “From the Fed’s standpoint, we’re really looking at a business cycle length: that’s our frame of reference. The long-run fiscal, nonsustainability of the U.S. federal government isn’t really something that plays into the medium term that is relevant for our policy decisions.” However, “it’s a long-run issue that we definitely need to face, and ultimately, will have no choice but to face,” he added. The Fed chief’s comments came as the annual U.S. deficit reaches new sustained highs above $1 trillion, a fact many economists worry could spell trouble for future generations.

Annual deficits have topped $1 trillion before, but never during a time of sustained economic growth like now, raising concern about what would happen if a recession hits. Total U.S. debt is about $21.9 trillion, of which $16 trillion is owed by the public. In part because of continued rate increases under Powell, the interest cost on that debt could start to become a bigger and bigger burden. Wall Street’s “bond king” and respected financial prognosticator Jeffrey Gundlach said in December that the Fed seems to be on a “suicide mission,” raising rates while the government deficit increases as a share of GDP. Normally when the deficit is expanding, the Fed would be lowering interest rates.

Read more …

View from the MSM: Trump digs in, not the Dems.

• Trump Digs In As Shutdown Continues (BBC)

US President Donald Trump has threatened again to declare a national emergency to fund a border wall without Congress’s approval. “I have the absolute right to declare a national emergency,” he told reporters. The White House has denied reports it is looking at diverting funds set aside for reconstruction projects. A political row over funding the wall has left the US government partially shutdown for 20 days, leaving about 800,000 federal employees without pay. President Trump has refused to sign legislation to fund and reopen the government if it does not include $5.7bn for a physical barrier along the US-Mexico border.

But budget talks have come to a standstill as Democrats – who control the House of Representatives – refuse to give him the money. Republican leaders insist the party stands behind the president, although some Republican lawmakers have spoken out in favour of ending the shutdown. On Thursday, Mr Trump visited a border patrol station in McAllen, in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. He said that if Congress did not approve funding for the wall, he would “probably… I would almost say definitely” declare a national emergency to bypass lawmakers. But such a move is likely to face legal challenges. The money would also have to come from funds allocated by Congress for other purposes – which some Republicans would also oppose.

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Planning a huge media spectacle. Imagine all the readers and viewers… Trump keeps on giving. Bread and circuses it is.

• Michael Cohen To Testify Publicly Before Congress In February (G.)

Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer and aide Michael Cohen says he has accepted an invitation from a top House Democrat to testify publicly before Congress next month. His testimony before the House oversight and reform committee on 7 February will be the first major public oversight hearing for Democrats, who have promised greater scrutiny of Trump after winning control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections. Cohen said in a statement: “I look forward to having the privilege of being afforded a platform with which to give a full and credible account of the events which have transpired.”

The New Yorker, who is to begin a three-year prison sentence in March, is a pivotal figure in investigations by the special counsel Robert Mueller into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, and by federal prosecutors in New York into campaign finance violations related to hush-money payments to two women who say they had sex with Trump. Elijah Cummings, the committee’s chair, said the panel would avoid interfering with Mueller’s investigation. “We have no interest in inappropriately interfering with any ongoing criminal investigations, and to that end, we are in the process of consulting with Special Counsel Mueller’s office,” Cummings said in a statement.

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But not to the 1.67% predicted by professor Xiang Songzuo, I’m sure.

• China Set To Lower GDP Growth Target In 2019 (R.)

China plans to set a lower economic growth target of 6% to 6.5% in 2019 compared with last year’s target of “around” 6.5%, policy sources told Reuters, as Beijing gears up to cope with higher U.S. tariffs and weakening domestic demand. The proposed target, to be unveiled at the annual parliamentary session in March, was endorsed by top leaders at the annual closed-door Central Economic Work Conference in mid-December, according to four sources with knowledge of the meeting’s outcome. Data later this month is expected to show the Chinese economy grew around 6.6% in 2018 — the weakest since 1990. Analysts are forecasting a further loss of momentum this year before policy support steps begin to kick in.

“It’s very difficult for growth to exceed 6.5% (this year), and there could be trouble if growth dips below 6%,” said one source who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. As the world’s second-largest economy loses steam, China’s top leaders are closely watching employment levels as factories could be forced to shed workers amid a trade war with the United States, despite a more resilient services sector, policy insiders said. Growth of about 6.2% is needed in the next two years to meet the ruling Communist Party’s longstanding goal of doubling gross domestic product and incomes in the decade to 2020, and to turn China into a “modestly prosperous” nation. [..] Local governments could be allowed to issue up to 2 trillion yuan worth of special bonds in 2019, up from 1.35 trillion yuan last year, they said.

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Goldman Sachs to the -image- rescue.

• Can The Chinese Consumer Be Resurrected? (Jim O’Neill)

Last week, Apple published a letter to shareholders revising down its expected revenues for the first quarter of 2019, citing an economic slowdown in China, which has become an increasingly important market for iPhone, Mac, and iPad sales. Though tech industry analysts are debating whether internal dynamics at Apple might also explain the change, the company’s new guidance nonetheless adds to the evidence that Chinese consumption is slowing. A sustained decline in Chinese consumption would be even more worrying than the current US-China trade dispute.

Given that US trade policies and other external influences should not have much effect on domestic Chinese spending, the problem may be more deeply rooted in China’s economic model. To understand what is at stake, consider all that has changed just within the past decade. At the end of 2010, domestic consumption accounted for around 35.6% of Chinese GDP, according to official Chinese data. That was remarkably low compared to most other economies, not least the US, where consumption accounted for almost 70% of GDP. In nominal dollar terms, China’s domestic consumption thus was around $2.2tn, or almost five times lower than that of the US ($10.5tn).

Yet China’s high overall growth rate meant that Chinese consumers could potentially play a much larger role, with far-reaching benefits for global brands such as Apple, BMW, Burberry, Ford, and many others. As of 2017, Chinese consumption as a share of GDP had risen to 39.1%, representing just over $5tn in nominal dollar terms. That is an increase of almost $3tn in just seven years. And though Chinese consumer spending still lagged far behind that of the US ($13.5tn in 2017), the gap has narrowed. If China were to continue on the same trajectory in terms of nominal GDP growth and domestic consumption, its consumer spending could increase by another $2tn by 2020, putting it at around half that of the US. Chinese consumers would be more relevant to the global economy than anyone except Americans.

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From time to time you wonder what’s more hysterical, the Brexit mayhem or the UK’s fabricated Russophobia. This is pretty unbelievable, but it’s become normal.

Layla Moran is a Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon.

• Why I Asked May If She Is On The Side Of Putin Or The People (Moran)

For all the farcical invoking of Blitz spirit, Brexit isn’t merely an absurdist experiment in English nationalist nostalgia – it is the most audacious example yet of a futuristic Russian nationalism that seeks to divide and rule Europe. If we can be judged by our friends then Brexit has no stauncher ally than Vladimir Putin. After all, Donald Trump has proved unreliable. But Putin? It is hard to think of anyone who has done more for the cause (and that is not to take anything away from the years of Brexit monologues by Tory MP Bill Cash). Russian bot farms have been exposed as having supported the Leave campaign. This comes on top of allegations of iffy Russian money funding Brexit campaigns, and Arron Banks’ almost comical inability to explain his donations to Leave.

Comical, that is, if his scarcely thought through Brexit wasn’t driving Britain to what Hilary Clinton has called the single biggest act of deliberate self-harm a nation has ever committed. As if Russian interference in the original referendum was not shocking enough, it is still going on. The Channel 4 drama Brexit: The Uncivil War might have relegated Russian involvement to the briefest postscript, but in reality Putin is still in the trenches fighting for a hard Brexit. At a recent press conference Putin attacked the idea of a referendum on the deal, claiming the original result should be respected. Oh, the irony! Putin, the arch kleptocrat, giving advice on democracy. “Don’t steal Brexit,” he seemed to demand, while probably stealing (sorry, being gifted) another superyacht.

It should have been sufficiently chilling to make even Boris Johnson pause for thought. And all while using the Brexiteer message script of delivering the will of the people. As any student of Russian history could tell you, “the people” are often invoked by the Kremlin, including when justifying the mass murder of innocent people. But rarely does the Kremlin actually ask “the people” for anything so radical as an opinion. For Putin, “the people” are to be manipulated and even killed for his own ends. And Putin’s ends are clear. He wants a weak and divided EU. Ultimately, he seeks to break it up, with the Eastern bloc – brought into the European fold by Margaret Thatcher’s single market – dragged back into the lair of the Russian bear.

Read more …

And why not? If all else fails, scare them.

• May’s Brexit Deal ‘Threat To National Security’ – Former MI6 Chief (Ind.)

The former head of MI6 has warned Theresa May’s Brexit deal will “threaten the national security of the country”, in a call for Tory MPs to reject it. The agreement would “place control of aspects of our national security in foreign hands”, claims Sir Richard Dearlove, in an extraordinary letter to Conservative associations. It has also been signed by Lord Guthrie, a former chief of the defence staff, in a bid to stiffen grassroots resistance, ahead of next Tuesday’s vote.= Sir Richard and Lord Guthrie, who are both prominent Leave supporters, write: “Please ensure that your MP votes against this bad agreement.” The prime minister, a former home secretary, has insisted her agreement would protect national security by retaining existing cooperation arrangements during the 21-month transition.

However, she was forced to acknowledge the UK was likely to lose direct access to vital EU security databases after 2012, under the proposed long-term arrangements. In their letter, the ex-security chiefs argue the deal is dangerous because it would weaken membership of Nato and existing “close” defence and intelligence ties with the US. “This withdrawal agreement, if not defeated, will threaten the national security of the country in fundamental ways,” it says. Downing Street hit back immediately, insisting the letter was “completely wrong” and that the Brexit deal offered the broadest security agreement the EU has with any of its partners. But both sides of the Brexit divide seized on the intervention, arch-Brexiteer Owen Paterson calling it a “devastating warning”.

Read more …

After Tuesday all bets are off.

• May Begs Unions To Help Salvage Her Brexit Deal (Ind.)

Theresa May has called the leaders of Britain’s biggest unions for the first time since becoming prime minister in a desperate bid to find backing for her Brexit deal. The calls to Unite leader Len McCluskey and the GMB’s Tim Roache – whose unions are Jeremy Corbyn’s biggest financial backers – mark just how far she is being forced to go in the hope of finding support for the deal expected to be rejected by MPs next week. She was scorned by second referendum-backing Mr Roache, who joked after his call that he was “glad the prime minister finally picked up the phone”. The unprecedented move came as she also sought to convince Labour MPs to back her by promising new commitments to maintain workers’ rights in line with EU standards after Brexit.

But expectations that she is heading for a heavy defeat on Tuesday simply grew further, with some estimates suggesting that opposition has actually grown since she delayed the vote on her deal in December. Capitalising on the deep Tory divisions, Mr Corbyn instead invited Conservative MPs to back a motion of no confidence in the government which he is promising to table if Ms May’s plans are defeated. Downing Street confirmed the calls to Mr Roache, whose union has 620,000 members, and Mr McCluskey, representing more than 1.4 million, and admitted it was the first time she had spoken to either of them since her arrival at No 10. The Independent understands the prime minister also attempted to call Dave Prentis, leader of Unison which also has some 1.4 million members, but could not get through because Mr Prentis was travelling.

Read more …

Click here for the original Hill article.

• US Defenses No Match For Russian Hypersonic Missiles – Retired US General (RT)

A retired general and chief of staff has warned that the US’ missile defense systems are “simply incapable” of stopping the latest generation of Russian hypersonic missiles – some of which fly at 27 times the speed of sound. Now retired, Maj. Gen. Howard ‘Dallas’ Thompson was once Chief of Staff at US Northern Command in Ohio. In a column published by The Hill on Thursday, Thompson argues that military leaders have neglected to develop proper defenses against the hypersonic threat. There have been some calls for the US to pursue hypersonic weapons in defense policy circles, but America has lagged behind China – which conducted more tests in the last year than the US has is a decade – and Russia, which successfully tested such a missile in December. The ‘Avangard’ missile flew at Mach 27, and will be deployed in 2019.

At present, the US Missile Defense Agency’s sensors and radars are designed for one purpose: to counter an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired by an adversary like Iran or North Korea. ICBMs have a predictable flight path, and the US’ Patriot and Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries stand a reasonable chance of intercepting and destroying any incoming missiles. Not so with hypersonics. Missiles like ‘Avangard’ fly low and fast, evading radar detection. They can also engage in evasive maneuvers to dodge surface-to-air rockets or missiles, further lowering the chances of a successful interception.

“The stark reality is that our current missile defense systems, as well as our operational mindset, are simply incapable versus this threat,” Thompson wrote. The retired General’s words are backed up by a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, which concluded that there are “no existing countermeasures” against the threat. Thompson claims that a massive collaborative program between the Department of Defense and arms companies is needed to counter Russian and Chinese advances. “Countering this threat will require U.S. investment in an extensive defensive architecture,” he wrote. “…a highly robust ‘family of systems’ that nonetheless must be envisioned, designed, developed and deployed in a completely holistic manner.”

Read more …

800 bases, of which 300 are unreported?!

• Bases, Bases, Everywhere… Except in the Pentagon’s Report (Turse)

Within hours of President Trump’s announcement of a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, equipment at that base was already being inventoried for removal. And just like that, arguably the most important American garrison in Syria was (maybe) being struck from the Pentagon’s books — except, as it happens, al-Tanf was never actually on the Pentagon’s books. Opened in 2015 and, until recently, home to hundreds of U.S. troops, it was one of the many military bases that exist somewhere between light and shadow, an acknowledged foreign outpost that somehow never actually made it onto the Pentagon’s official inventory of bases. Officially, the Department of Defense (DoD) maintains 4,775 “sites,” spread across all 50 states, eight U.S. territories, and 45 foreign countries.

A total of 514 of these outposts are located overseas, according to the Pentagon’s worldwide property portfolio. Just to start down a long list, these include bases on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, as well as in Peru and Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. But the most recent version of that portfolio, issued in early 2018 and known as the Base Structure Report (BSR), doesn’t include any mention of al-Tanf. Or, for that matter, any other base in Syria. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Niger. Or Tunisia. Or Cameroon. Or Somalia. Or any number of locales where such military outposts are known to exist and even, unlike in Syria, to be expanding.

[..] According to David Vine, author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, there could be hundreds of similar off-the-books bases around the world. “The missing sites are a reflection of the lack of transparency involved in the system of what I still estimate to be around 800 U.S. bases outside the 50 states and Washington, D.C., that have been encircling the globe since World War II,” says Vine

Read more …

The reporting on the issue seems broken.

• Oceans Warming Faster Than Expected, Set Heat Record In 2018 (R.)

The oceans are warming faster than previously estimated, setting a new temperature record in 2018 in a trend that is damaging marine life, scientists said on Thursday. New measurements, aided by an international network of 3,900 floats deployed in the oceans since 2000, showed more warming since 1971 than calculated by the latest U.N. assessment of climate change in 2013, they said. And “observational records of ocean heat content show that ocean warming is accelerating,” the authors in China and the United States wrote in the journal Science of ocean waters down to 2,000 metres (6,600 ft). Man-made greenhouse gas emissions are warming the atmosphere, according to the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, and a large part of the heat gets absorbed by the oceans.

That in turn is forcing fish to flee to cooler waters. “Global warming is here, and has major consequences already. There is no doubt, none!” the authors wrote in a statement. Almost 200 nations plan to phase out fossil fuels this century under the 2015 Paris climate agreement to limit warming. [..] Data due for publication next week will show “2018 was the warmest year on record for the global ocean, surpassing 2017,” said lead author Lijing Cheng, of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He told Reuters that records for ocean warming had been broken almost yearly since 2000. Overall, temperatures in the ocean down to 2,000 metres rose about 0.1 degree Celsius (0.18F) from 1971-2010, he said.

Read more …

Another issue on which reporting seems broken. We’re not getting anywhere.

• Julian Assange’s Living Conditions Deteriorate (Cassandra Fairbanks)

I last visited Assange in March, days before the Ecuadorians placed the award-winning journalist in isolation for allegedly violating a draconian ban on all public political comments. [..] In order to visit the publisher last year, I simply organized it with him and his lawyer and went. This time I was required to provide details about my social media, my employer, and my reason for visiting in advance of my arrival and hope to be approved. If I wanted to bring my cell phone, I would have had to provide the brand, model, serial number, IMEI number and telephone number. Providing these details to a foreign nation with extreme surveillance seemed unwise, so I left it behind.

[..] Currently, Assange cannot even have a simple visit with a friend without it being monitored by some shadowy state actor. It’s like a scene from the Stasi spy drama The Lives of Others. While Ecuador presents this surveillance operation as a mission to “protect and support” Assange, this is contradicted by the fact that he isn’t even allowed to confidentially speak with a reporter and friend without being recorded. In May, the Guardian reported that there are “extraordinary reports” from these spies that include daily logs of Assange’s activities inside the embassy, even noting his “general mood.”

As John Pilger pointed out after his visit with Assange on New Year’s Eve, it could be any newspaper publisher or editor stuck in that embassy. For the crime of publishing journalism, Assange has not only had to give up his freedom, but also any semblance of privacy. It’s impossible to overstate how unsettling it feels to have multiple lenses pointed at you wherever you stand. Unable to speak privately, even with a noise machine attempting to muffle the microphones from picking up conversations, we resorted to passing notes. Assange is not only barred from sharing his views online under the new regulations — thanks to the constant surveillance, he can’t even do so among his friends in the embassy where he is arbitrarily detained.

If we value the principle of the freedom of speech — we must do something to stop this madness. While we do not know what Assange has been charged with by the U.S. as it remains under seal, we do know that it is related to his work as a publisher, the only publisher with a record of 100% accuracy. His dedication to truth is so profound that he has never once had to issue a correction or retraction.

Read more …

The ‘End of Dreams’, and the Saving of Appearances

Nov 252017
 
 November 25, 2017  Posted by at 1:48 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Zao Wu-Ki The red sun 1950

 

Once again, to my delight, we’re back with former British diplomat and MI6 ‘ranking figure’ Alastair Crooke and his Conflicts Forum organization. We posted a few of his articles this year and last. This time, Alastair writes a reaction to one of his own articles posted at Consortium News, which I included in the November 18 Debt Rattle at the Automatic Earth. My short comment then: “Former (and current?!) TAE contributor Alastair Crooke draws his conclusions.” This morning, the Conflicts Forum reached out again:

Dear Raul, We took the hint on a recent posting your site that referred to one of Alastair’s articles! …. and below is a comment piece he has done. It is an attempt to be strategic at where we’re going.

Anytime, guys! My first reaction to that piece was that Alastair makes Donald Trump and Jared Kushner’s role in the Saudi crackdown seem very large, which makes the role played by deep state America look small in comparison. And I’m not so sure about that. The riddle of ‘who’s playing who?’ is not a straightforward one. But that’s by no means a criticism (I ain’t criticizing no MI6!). It’s a question.

First, here are two paragraphs of that article to ‘get in the mood’:

 

Trump’s Saudi Scheme Unravels

Aaron Miller and Richard Sokolsky, writing in Foreign Policy, suggest “that Mohammed bin Salman’s most notable success abroad may well be the wooing and capture of President Donald Trump, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.” Indeed, it is possible that this “success” may prove to be MbS’ only success. “It didn’t take much convincing”, Miller and Sokolski wrote: “Above all, the new bromance reflected a timely coincidence of strategic imperatives.” Trump, as ever, was eager to distance himself from President Obama and all his works; the Saudis, meanwhile, were determined to exploit Trump’s visceral antipathy for Iran – in order to reverse the string of recent defeats suffered by the kingdom.

So compelling seemed the prize (that MbS seemed to promise) of killing three birds with one stone (striking at Iran; “normalizing” Israel in the Arab world, and a Palestinian accord), that the U.S. President restricted the details to family channels alone. He thus was delivering a deliberate slight to the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments by leaving official channels in the dark, and guessing. Trump bet heavily on MbS, and on Jared Kushner as his intermediary. But MbS’ grand plan fell apart at its first hurdle: the attempt to instigate a provocation against Hezbollah in Lebanon, to which the latter would overreact and give Israel and the “Sunni Alliance” the expected pretext to act forcefully against Hezbollah and Iran.

Since the crackdown seems to have had limited success so far on an international level, this is certainly an interesting issue to delve deeper into. MbS has reportedly, assisted by US mercenaries, hung members of his own family upside down from ceilings in posh hotels and palaces to break them into submission and steal their fortunes, but if the international part of his plan falls short, this becomes a very unpredictable story.

But this new article has a much broader scope. I’ve often said that the falling apart of the American, European and global political systems is caused one-on-one by deteriorating economies (even if 90% of media and politicians stick the recovery narrative). Alastair agrees, and even quotes me again.

 

 

Alastair Crooke: Robert Kagan first called attention to the fact that America would need to awake from its ‘dream’ a decade ago in End of Dreams: The Return of History, and would have to manage the rise of ‘other’ powers, (some greater than others), with adroitness, if it were to avoid a bad road-crash as emerging competitors clashed with the waning dominant power.  

This meant that the US no longer would be able to assert its will everywhere, and on everything – and would have to give ground – especially to China and Russia.  “There’s going to have to be some very painful horse trading”, historian Sir Max Hastings suggests, adding that its pain will be none the less traumatic, since – like Germany after WW1 – America, does not feel itself defeated: Quite the converse, it sees itself having emerged from the Cold War wholly vindicated: in terms of its societal, governmental and capitalist models.

The American-shaped globalist order, in which three American generations have been steeped, had seemed so naturally to flow out from the Cold War, that the onset of world ‘order’ dissolution seems – shockingly, for many – to have struck out of the blue – as it were – with Brexit, and the election of Mr Trump. 

Commentators speak of America needing to be wary of the Thucydides’ Trap (when the then aspiring power, Athens, threatened the primacy of the established hegemon, Sparta, leading to war). But ‘the trap’ today is not simply just about who’s rising ‘up’, and who’s heading ‘down’, in the great-power stakes – for, as Josh Feinman, chief economist for Deutsche Bank, last year  warned, the problem is not just great power competition. But rather: “We’ve seen this movie before. The first great globalization wave, in the half-century or so before World War I, sparked a populist backlash too, and ultimately came crashing down in the cataclysms of 1914 to 1945.”  In short, the two world wars were not just about Germany challenging British hegemony, but were also about globalization ‘backlash’ too – something that is often overlooked. 

In other words, in the wake of WW2, America has been backing itself into the corner of an ‘American-shaped’ (imposed), second wave ‘globalisation’, and that is the major risk posed today (as much as rising China), with ‘populism’ again markedly on the up. And ‘second wave globalisation’ is again yielding predictable political volatility (i.e. in ‘unexpected’ election results).  However, as Max Hastings  suggests, (quoting former UK politician Michael Howard), “we must recognize that the élites, of which he [Howard] himself freely admits to having been a part, have failed to sustain the consent of electorates for this [Euro-centralisation and for globalisation]. This ignoring the need to sustain the consent of the electorate, bears a considerable responsibility for getting us into this mess”.

Further, as Andrew Bracevich underlines globalism has its distinct social ‘flipside’: “[A] war [has been waged] on (genuine) culture: Under whatever guise, liberal-market globalism is hostile to tradition, community, established norms, and the very idea of a common culture – all of which impinge [adversely] upon the operation of the market, or claims of radical individual autonomy”.

 

 
The Thucydides’ Trap for America, rather, as Professor Lears of Rutgers writes, then, is not just the rising of Russia and China, but that of Americans being backed into the corner of not recognizing “that ‘they’ [the liberal globalists] are no longer defending either liberalism or democracy; [these] forms of élite rule – that provoke [such] popular anger – are merely the husk of liberal democracy: The once-vital discourse of liberal democracy has been hollowed out, and transformed into a language of managerial technique … Within this discourse, freedom has been reduced to market behaviour; citizenship to voting; and, efficiency for the public good to efficiency for profit. The rich civic culture that gave rise to popular American politics in the past—unions, churches, local party organizations—has been largely replaced, in both parties, by élites who have benefited from the ‘technocratic turn’”.

“As long as prosperity continued to increase as it has since 1945, western electorates were willing to give élites a very considerable measure of discretion about what they did, [whether in creating the EU], or whatever it might be. They were willing to acquiesce. Now, prosperity is being squeezed, wages are stagnant, and for many people unlikely to rise much in real terms.   It is going to be much more difficult to sustain the consent of Western electorates for purposes which the élites might consider as [somehow] ‘enlightened and unselfish’”. (Hastings again – with emphasis added).

And here lies the real ‘trap’: it is not that “prosperity is being squeezed” as per Hastings, but that the economy has rather, been divaricated into the ‘squeezed 60%’ and the asset-holding, and enriched 40% (as Ray Dalio describes it). Last month Dalio, the billionaire founder of top hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, posted a new article, “The Two Economies: The Top 40% and the Bottom 60%”.  He believes it is a serious mistake to think you can analyze or understand “the” economy because we now have two of them. The wealth and income levels are so skewed between top and bottom that “average” indicators no longer reflect the average person’s experience or living conditions. Dalio explains with this chart:

 

 

The red line is the share of US wealth owned by the bottom 90% of the population, and the green line is the share held by the top 0.1%. Right now they are about the same, but notice the trend. The wealthiest 0.1% has been increasing its share of wealth since the 1980s, while the bottom 90% has been losing ground. But it would be a mistake to understand this phenomenon – ‘populism’ as it is labelled in Dalio’s chart – or, the push to recover national culture and sovereignty – as simply a gripe about inequity. It has become since 2009 much more than that: it has become a matter of survival for a major segment of the American and European population (especially, as it coincides with a pensions crisis, which will leave many impoverished in their old age): 

“Prior to 2009, debt was able to support a rising standard of living…”, Raúl Ilargi Meijer says, “but less than a decade later, [personal debt], can’t even maintain the status quo. That’s what you call a breaking point.” (Alastair: Or, even, a precursor to civil violence?)

“To put that in numbers, there’s a current shortfall of $18,176 between the standard of living and real disposable incomes. In other words, no matter how much people are borrowing, their standard of living is in decline. 

“Something else we can glean from the graphs is that after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-9, the economy never recovered. The S&P may have, and the banks are back to profitable ways and big bonuses, but that has nothing to do with real Americans in their own real economy. 2009 was a turning point, and the crisis never looked back”.

 

 

And Max Hastings’ point is that with austerity gone, early popular acquiescence has turned to anger against the élites – for having so taken them for granted in their utopian globalist projects.

Now the wider point: what we have here is the intersection of geo-politics with geo-finance. Both are now wholly contingent on the ‘saving of appearances’.  One co-constitutes the other.  One is the saving of appearance that America is not losing ‘respect’, or being disdained in the international arena, as it attenuates its global commitments (that is the Thucydides ‘syndrome’), and two, saving the appearance that ‘recovery’ and ‘prosperity for all’, are continuing to unfold nicely in the economy (the world converging globally to western values ‘syndrome’). 

Both these aspects to the dissolution of today’s western ‘modernity’ are intertwined, and co-constituting, and therefore likely to march in tandem – at least for now:  western ‘prosperity’ underwrites the global order, and the global order underwrites American ‘prosperity’.  The American and European élites therefore find themselves painted into a globalised ‘rules-based order’ corner, geo-politically, just as the Central Bankers have been backed into their QE, low or negative interest rate corner – from which there is no easy escape, either. 

The term ‘globalisation’ has been used to paint a landscape that is both inevitable, and beneficent: “free trade floats all boats; everywhere” is the meme. Devotees of globalisation however, never examine rigorously whether David Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory still holds good in the contemporary world (Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, however, being a notable exception). There just has been no point in asking the fundamentally political (as opposed to technical) question: Has the resulting off-shoring of supply lines, truly been in our interest – politically, as well as financially?  And has the concomitant – globalist disembedding of humans from national culture, community and sovereignty, and the rise of the apolitical, neo-liberal, chameleon-identity ‘Self’, been in the general political and societal interest, too?

It may be objected that Trump is not a globalist.  Whilst it is true that he does not favour America shouldering the claims of a world order; he – himself – protests loudly that he is a globalist – but it is just that he is a hard-nosed, New York businessman, type of globalist: that’s all.  Globalisation (in the neo-liberal mode), remains as a western totem, rightly, or not, according to political taste.

 

Where now? In the domestic field, the Central Banks’ easy ‘group think’ on QE, low or negative interest-rates, and ballooning public and private debt, has been pursued now for so long and so extensively, that it has both given us Dalio’s Two Economies, and no way back.   It has become a vicious circle: as high debt, to GDP ratios, low-interest zombification of entities and shrinking personal disposable income in the 60%, have depressed growth. Yet, paradoxically, never has the need for more of the same – QE, low or negative interest rates, or even ‘helicopter’ income – been so widely extolled — and, at the very moment when their drawbacks have become so widely identified, even by central bankers, themselves.

So here we are: there is a messy, and bitter, divorce taking place in our societies between the 60% and the 40% ‘tribes’. Asset valuations indeed have never been higher. Yet growth by contrast, has, on average, been ratcheting down, decade by decade – and for some, the situation has become truly existential (those for whom even additional debt cannot sustain their non-discretionary outgoings).

Where do we go from here?  A continuation of the existing financial paradigm is what everyone believes; what everyone expects (wants) – and is what we likely will get.  It might even be deepened a little, in the wake of a market hiccough (S&P down by more than 2%).  And in the case of a financial black swan, we may witness the system literally ‘hosed down’ with newly created ‘money’.  But essentially, the business and trade cycle will continue to be heavily repressed – volatility slammed down – and the S&P be the metric of national well-being.

Not only do the markets ‘believe it’, President Trump needs it: geo-politically he likes to do his style of negotiating from a position of strength (and not from one of economic crisis); and internally, he is at ‘war’ with the Establishment.  With the S&P touching records daily, he is immune from taunts of incompetence (regardless of whether not the highs have anything to do with the President).  His base likes it too: their meagre retirement portfolios at least are rising in value. And in any event, it is not surprising if Trump is a low interest, plentiful liquidity, expanding balance sheet, man globally:  It is how he made his billions, personally.

 

Of course, the flip side to continuing the ‘easing’ paradigm is the ongoing hidden transfer of wealth from general taxpayers (the 60%) to the 40%: more populism; more unexpected election outcomes in Europe; more fake-ness; quicker dissolution of the glue holding society together; more political process, less outcome; less ability to address the needs of collective purpose, etcetera — rising rancour and push-back, in a word. This is the implication.

In parallel, the saving of appearance in geo-politics seems to require its slamming down of volatility too (and in the EU, not least – i.e. Catalonia).  People want to believe it (in American power); important sectors of the economy want it, (need it): the appearance of America’s global standing must be preserved.  Repressing North Korea, ‘slamming down’ Iran can save appearances (America is strong), but the flip-side is the increased danger of war – whether inadvertently triggered, or by the US cornering itself into it.  Actually, ebbing power is something that you smell: false bravura only heightens the odour of weakness.

So, continuance of the paradigms (financial and geopolitical), and the continuance of ‘populist push-back’ (i.e. volatility) seem set. Is Josh Feinman of Deutsche Bank then right when he says: “We’ve seen this movie before. The first great globalization wave, in the half-century or so before World War I, [it] sparked a populist backlash too, and ultimately came crashing down in the cataclysms of 1914 to 1945.” Is a financial crisis inevitable – ultimately?  Is war – a confrontation with either Russia, China or N. Korea – unavoidable?

Who can say, for sure?  But the repeating of history is not inevitable.  Financial re-set at some point, has become inevitable, it would appear. It has taken time for the old meme to fade, and weaken its hold sufficiently. Hemingway famously said about bankruptcy (his), that it starts only very slowly, but ends lightningly fast.  The political impulse for a change in the social and cultural paradigm however does seem to be unfolding at an accelerating pace. ‘Populism’ and ‘unexpected’ election results are acting as its accelerant. And the intellectual context for a seismic economic policy shift, is in place too:  monetary policy is seen to be bust, and the economic ‘models’ have been seen to be plain wrong. TINA (there is no alternative) is wobbling on her pedestal, and seems poised to topple over.

Of course there are alternatives.  But will they arrive in time?  Perhaps the existing paradigms are destined to endure a while yet … ’til Hemingway’s observation about bankruptcy sliding unstoppably fast towards the end is further proven as a truism?  In the meantime: we wait; shackled by inertia, and backed into a corner.
 

 

 

Manchester, or Innocence Long Lost

May 272017
 
 May 27, 2017  Posted by at 5:41 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  13 Responses »


Herbert Draper Lament for Icarus 1898

 

There are times when you have to talk about things when it appears most inopportune to do so, because they’re the only times people might listen. Times when people will argue that ‘this is not the right moment’, while in reality it’s the only moment.

A solid 99% of people will have been filled, and rightly so of course, with a mixture of disgust, disbelief and infinite sadness when hearing of yet another attack on civilians in Europe, this one in Manchester. An equally solid 99% will have failed to recognize that while the event was unique for the city of Manchester, it was by no means unique for the world, not even at the time it happened.

Though the footage of parents desperately trying to find their children, and the news that one of the dead was just 8 years old, touches everyone in more or less the same place in our hearts, by far most of us miss out on the next logical step. In a wider perspective, it is easy to see that parents crying for missing children, and children killed in infancy, is what connects Manchester, and the UK, and Europe, to parents in Syria, Libya, Iraq.

What’s different between these places is not the suffering or the outrage, the mourning or the despair, what’s different is only the location on the map. That and the frequency with which terror is unleashed upon a given population. But just because it happens all the time in other places doesn’t make it more normal or acceptable.

It’s the exact same thing, the exact same experience, and still a vast majority of people don’t, choose not to, feel it as such. Which is curious when you think about it. In the aftermath of a terror attack, the mother of a missing, maimed or murdered child undergoes the same heartbreak no matter where they are in the world (“I hope the Russians love their children too”). But the empathy, the compassion, is hardly acknowledged in Britain at all, let alone shared.

Not that it couldn’t be. Imagine that our papers and TV channels would tell us, preferably repeatedly, in their reports in the wake of an attack like the one in Manchester how eerily similar the emotions must be to those felt in Aleppo, Homs and many other cities. That would change our perception enormously. But the media choose not to make the connection, and the people apparently are not capable of doing it themselves.

None of that changes the fact, however, that British lives are not more valuable than Syrian and Libyan ones. Not even when we’ve gotten used to ‘news’ about bombings and drone attacks executed for years now by US-led coalitions, or the images of children drowning when they flee the area because of these attacks.

The overall theme here is that 99.9% of people everywhere in the world are innocent, especially when they are children, but their governments and their societies are not. That doesn’t justify the Manchester attack in any shape or form, it simply lays equal blame and condemnation for western terror attacks in the Middle East and North Africa, perpetrated by the people we elect into power.

This is something people in the west pay no attention to. It’s easier that way, and besides our media with great enthusiasm pave the way for our collective ignorance, by calling some other group of people ‘terrorists’, which while they’re at it is supposed to justify killing some other mother’s child.

There’s another thing that is also different: they didn’t start. We did. The British and French terrorized the region for many decades, since the 19th century, even way before the Americans joined in. The presence of oil, and its rising role in our economies, caused them to double down on that terror.

Yes, it’s awkward to talk about this on the eve of a deadly attack, and it’s easy to find arguments and rhetoric that appear to deflect responsibility. But at the same time this truly is the only moment we can hope that anyone will listen. And lest we forget, the UK carries an outsized share of the responsibility in this tragedy, both historically and in the present.

You can say things about the city coming together, or the country coming together, or “not allowing terrorists to affect our way of life”, but perhaps it should instead really be all the mothers who have children missing or dying, wherever they live, coming together. They all see their ways of life affected, and many on a daily basis.

Those mothers in Syria and Libya, who have been through the same hellhole as those in Manchester, are a lot closer to you than the politicians who send out jet fighters to bomb cities in the desert, or sell arms to individuals and organizations to control these cities for their own narrow personal gain, such as the governments of Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

The traumatized mothers in the desert are not your enemies; your enemies are much closer to home. Still, most of you will tend to react to fear and panic by looking for protection in exactly those circles that are least likely to provide it. The UK government under Theresa May, like those of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron before, is as cynically eager as their predecessors to send bombers into the desert, and sell arms to those living there.

We can illustrate all this with a few bits of news. First, the US-led coalotion, of which the UK is a substantial part, killed more civilians in Syria than at any time since they started bombing the country almost 3 years ago. They keep saying they don’t target civilians, but to put it mildly they don’t appear to go out of their way not to hit them. For instance, a single attack on Mosul, Iraq in March killed over 105 civilians. ‘Collateral damage’ in these cases, and there are hundreds by now, is a very disrespectful term. Moreover, the files released by Chelsea Manning show US soldiers killing people ‘with impunity’.

Deadliest Month For Syria Civilians In US-Led Strikes

US-led air strikes on Syria killed a total of 225 civilians over the past month, a monitor said on Tuesday, the highest 30-day toll since the campaign began in 2014. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the civilian dead between April 23 and May 23 included 44 children and 36 women. The US-led air campaign against the Islamic State jihadist group in Syria began on September 23, 2014. “The past month of operations is the highest civilian toll since the coalition began bombing Syria,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. “There has been a very big escalation.” The previous deadliest 30-day period was between February 23 and March 23 this year, when 220 civilians were killed, Abdel Rahman said.

And it’s not as if the British didn’t or couldn’t know what was going on. That was clear as early as 2003, when Tony Blair couldn’t wait to join the Bush coalition to invade Iraq on the false premise of weapons of mass destruction. Before Libya was invaded, which led to Hillary’s disgusting ‘we came we saw he died’, Gaddafi, the one who did die, warned Blair about what would happen. It indeed did, which makes Blair a guilty man.

Gaddafi Warned Blair His Ousting Would ‘Open Door’ To Jihadis

Muammar Gaddafi warned Tony Blair in two fraught phone conversations in 2011 that his removal from the Libyan leadership would open a space for al-Qaida to seize control of the country and even launch an invasion of Europe. The transcripts of the conversations have been published with Blair’s agreement by the UK foreign affairs select committee, which is conducting an inquiry into the western air campaign that led to the ousting and killing of Gaddafi in October 2011. In the two calls the former British prime minister pleaded with Gaddafi to stand aside or end the violence. The transcripts reveal the gulf in understanding between Gaddafi and the west over what was occurring in his country and the nature of the threat he was facing.

In the first call, at 11.15am on 25 February 2011, Gaddafi gave a warning in part borne out by future events: “They [jihadis] want to control the Mediterranean and then they will attack Europe.” In the second call, at 3.25pm the same day, the Libyan leader said: “We are not fighting them, they are attacking us. I want to tell you the truth. It is not a difficult situation at all. The story is simply this: an organisation has laid down sleeping cells in north Africa. Called the al-Qaida organisation in north Africa … The sleeping cells in Libya are similar to dormant cells in America before 9/11.”

Gaddafi added: “I will have to arm the people and get ready for a fight. Libyan people will die, damage will be on the Med, Europe and the whole world. These armed groups are using the situation [in Libya] as a justification – and we shall fight them.” Three weeks after the calls, a Nato-led coalition that included Britain began bombing raids that led to the overthrow of Gaddafi. He was finally deposed in August and murdered by opponents of his regime in October.

What they are guilty of is no more and no less than Manchester. No hyperbole, but a warning from Blair’s own intelligence services back in 2003. The real weapons of mass destruction were not in Iraq, but in the White House and Downing Street no. 10. The CIA issued warnings similar to this.

British Intelligence Warned Tony Blair Of Manchester-Like Terrorism If The West Invaded Iraq

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq led by the U.S. and U.K., he was forcefully and repeatedly warned by Britain’s intelligence services that it would lead to exactly this type of terrorist attack — and he concealed these warnings from the British people, instead claiming the war would reduce the risk of terrorism. We know this because of the Chilcot Report, the seven-year-long British investigation of the Iraq War released in 2016. The report declassifies numerous internal government documents that illustrate the yawning chasm between what Blair was being told in private and his claims in public as he pushed for war.

On February 10, 2003, one month before the war began, the U.K.’s Joint Intelligence Committee — the key advisory body for the British Prime Minister on intelligence matters — issued a white paper titled “International Terrorism: War With Iraq.” It began: “The threat from Al Qaida will increase at the onset of any military action against Iraq. They will target Coalition forces and other Western interests in the Middle East. Attacks against Western interests elsewhere are also likely, especially in the US and UK, for maximum impact. The worldwide threat from other Islamist terrorist groups and individuals will increase significantly.”

And it concluded much the same way: “Al Qaida and associated groups will continue to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat will be heightened by military action against Iraq. The broader threat from Islamist terrorists will also increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-US/anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West.”

Not long behind Blair came David Cameron, a man after Tony’s heart:

Cameron Brags Of ‘Brilliant’ UK Arms Trade As EU Embargoes Saudi Arabia

European ministers have embarrassed David Cameron by voting to impose an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia on the same day the British prime minister praised the UK for selling “brilliant” arms to the country. Speaking at a BAE Systems factory in Preston, the prime minister said the UK had pushed the sale of Eurofighter Typhoons to countries in the Middle East, including Oman and Saudi Arabia. [..] Cameron’s speech in Preston came at the same time the European Parliament voted to impose an EU-wide ban on arms exports to Saudi Arabia, citing criticism from the UN of its bombing in Yemen.

Asked at the talks how he was helping to export the planes, Cameron said: “With the Typhoon there is an alliance of countries: the Italians, Germans and ourselves. We spend a lot of time trying to work out who is best placed to win these export orders. We’ve got hopefully good news coming from Kuwait. The Italians have been doing a lot of work there. The British have been working very hard in Oman.” The vote will not force EU members to comply with the ban, but will force the government to examine its relationship with Saudi Arabia.

In the last year the British government has sold £3 billion (US$4.18 billion) worth of arms and military kit to the Gulf state, as well as providing training to Saudi forces. A report released by Amnesty International on Friday called the ongoing trade with Saudi Arabia “truly sickening,” and urged governments to attend meetings in Geneva on Monday to discuss the implementation of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). The report names the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the US as having issued licenses for arms to Saudi Arabia worth more than £18 billion in 2015.

The arms sold include drones, bombs, torpedoes, rockets and missiles, which have been used by Saudi Arabia and its allies for gross violations of human rights and possible war crimes during aerial and ground attacks in Yemen, the campaign group said. Control Arms Director Anna Macdonald said: “Governments such as the UK and France were leaders in seeking to secure an ATT – and now they are undermining the commitments they made to reduce human suffering by supplying Saudi Arabia with some of the deadliest weapons in the world. It’s truly sickening.”

British MPs from Cameron’s own party didn’t like it either, but what meaning does that have if it takes 5 years to issue a report, and moreover he can simply refuse to give evidence?

MPs Deliver Damning Verdict On David Cameron’s Libya Intervention

David Cameron’s intervention in Libya was carried out with no proper intelligence analysis, drifted into an unannounced goal of regime change and shirked its moral responsibility to help reconstruct the country following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, according to a scathing report by the foreign affairs select committee. The failures led to the country becoming a failed a state on the verge of all-out civil war, the report adds. The report, the product of a parliamentary equivalent of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, closely echoes the criticisms widely made of Tony Blair’s intervention in Iraq, and may yet come to be as damaging to Cameron’s foreign policy legacy.

It concurs with Barack Obama’s assessment that the intervention was “a shitshow”, and repeats the US president’s claim that France and Britain lost interest in Libya after Gaddafi was overthrown. Cameron has refused to give evidence to the select committee. In one of his few reflections on his major military intervention, he blamed the Libyan people for failing to take their chance of democracy.

The committee, which has a majority of Conservative members, did not have Chilcot-style access to internal papers, but took voluminous evidence from senior ministers at the time, and other key players such as Blair, the chief of the defence staff, Lord Richards, and leading diplomats. The result of the French, British and US intervention, the report finds, “was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of Isil [Islamic State] in north Africa”.

It seems obvious that if there were an impartial international body with the power to prosecute, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Cameron, Hillary etc. etc. (don’t forget France) would be charged with war crimes. And Obama too: his ‘shitshow’ comment must be seen in light of the ‘we came we saw he died’ comment by Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State. Think he didn’t know what was happening?

Another person who should be charged is Theresa May, Cameron’s Home Secretary from May 2010 till July 2016, and of course Britain’s present PM, who sells as much weaponry to Saudi Arabia as she possibly can while the Saudi’s are shoving the few Yemeni’s they leave alive back beyond the Stone Age. And then May has the gall to talk about humanitarian aid.

Theresa May Defends UK Ties With Saudi Arabia

Theresa May has defended her trip to Saudi Arabia, saying its ties with the UK are important for security and prosperity. The prime minister is facing questions about the UK’s support for the Saudi-led coalition which is fighting rebels in neighbouring Yemen. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said UK-made weapons were contributing to a “humanitarian catastrophe”. [..] Mrs May said humanitarian aid was one of the issues she would be discussing on her trip. “We are concerned about the humanitarian situation – that’s why the UK last year was the fourth largest donor to the Yemen in terms of humanitarian aid – £103m. We will be continuing with that,” she told the BBC.

[..] Mr Corbyn called for the immediate suspension of UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia. He criticised the “dictatorial Saudi monarchy’s shocking human rights record” and said the PM should focus on human rights and international law at the centre of her talks. “The Saudi-led coalition bombing in Yemen, backed by the British government, has left thousands dead, 21 million people in need of humanitarian assistance and three million refugees uprooted from their homes,” he said. “Yemen urgently needs a ceasefire, a political settlement, and food aid, not more bombing. “British-made weapons are being used in a war which has caused a humanitarian catastrophe.”

The one person who would probably not be in front of such a court is Jeremy Corbyn, opponent of May’s in the June 8 elections. Though there is the issue that he never protested in much stronger terms as an MP. Still, if you have to pick one of the two, what is not obvious?

Theresa May Claims Selling Arms To Saudi Arabia Helps ‘Keep People On The Streets Of Britain Safe’

Theresa May has staunchly defended selling arms to Saudi Arabia despite the country facing accusations of war crimes, insisting close ties “keep people on the streets of Britain safe”. Jeremy Corbyn called on the Prime Minister to halt those sales because of the “humanitarian devastation” caused by a Saudi-led coalition waging war against rebels in Yemen. The Labour leader spoke out after the Parliamentary committee charged with scrutinising arms exports said it was likely that British weapons had been used to violate international law.

The Saudis stand accused of bombing multiple international hospitals run by the charity Médecins Sans Frontières, as well as schools, wedding parties and food factories. In the Commons, Mr Corbyn linked weapons sales to the ongoing refugee crisis, which he said should be Britain’s “number one concern and our number one humanitarian response”. He added: “That is why I remain concerned that at the heart of this Government’s security strategy is apparently increased arms exports to the very part of the world that most immediately threatens our security.

The British Government continue to sell arms to Saudi Arabia that are being used to commit crimes against humanity in Yemen , as has been clearly detailed by the UN and other independent agencies.”

But, in response, Ms May pointed out she had called on Saudi Arabia to investigate the allegations about Yemen when she met with the kingdom’s deputy crown prince at the recent G20 summit in China. The Prime Minister dismissed Mr Corbyn’s suggestion that “what happened in Saudi Arabia was a threat to the safety of people here in the UK”. Instead, she said: “Actually, what matters is the strength of our relationship with Saudi Arabia. When it comes to counter-terrorism and dealing with terrorism, it is that relationship that has helped to keep people on the streets of Britain safe.”

May’s, and Britain’s, utterly mad stance in this is perhaps best exemplified, in one sentence, by her comments during the speedy trip she made to Turkey, again to sell more arms to an at best highly questionable regime. Why do it, why drag your entire nation through the moral gutter for $100 million or a few billion? The military industrial complex.

Theresa May Signs £100m Fighter Jet Deal With Turkey’s Erdogan

Theresa May issued a stern warning to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan about respecting human rights yesterday as she prepared to sign a £100m fighter jet deal that Downing Street hopes will lead to Britain becoming Turkey’s main defence partner.

And once again, no, none of this justifies the Manchester bombing. Neither a government nor an extremist movement has any right to kill innocent people. But let’s make sure we know that neither does.

There’s another aspect to the story. MI6 had close links to the Libyan community in Manchester.

‘Sorted’ by MI5: How UK Government Sent British-Libyans To Fight Gaddafi

The British government operated an “open door” policy that allowed Libyan exiles and British-Libyan citizens to join the 2011 uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi even though some had been subject to counter-terrorism control orders, Middle East Eye can reveal. Several former rebel fighters now back in the UK told MEE that they had been able to travel to Libya with “no questions asked” as authorities continued to investigate the background of a British-Libyan suicide bomber who killed 22 people in Monday’s attack in Manchester.

Salman Abedi, 22, the British-born son of exiled dissidents who returned to Libya as the revolution against Gaddafi gathered momentum, is also understood to have spent time in the North African country in 2011 and to have returned there on several subsequent occasions. Sources spoken to by MEE suggest that the government facilitated the travel of Libyan exiles and British-Libyan residents and citizens keen to fight against Gaddafi including some who it deemed to pose a potential security threat.

One British citizen with a Libyan background who was placed on a control order – effectively house arrest – because of fears that he would join militant groups in Iraq said he was “shocked” that he was able to travel to Libya in 2011 shortly after his control order was lifted. “I was allowed to go, no questions asked,” said the source. He said he had met several other British-Libyans in London who also had control orders lifted in 2011 as the war against Gaddafi intensified, with the UK, France and the US carrying out air strikes and deploying special forces soldiers in support of the rebels.

“They didn’t have passports, they were looking for fakes or a way to smuggle themselves across,” said the source. But within days of their control orders being lifted, British authorities returned their passports, he said. Many Libyan exiles in the UK with links to the LIFG [Libyan Islamic Fighting Group ] were placed on control orders and subjected to surveillance and monitoring following the rapprochement between the British and Libyan governments sealed by the so-called “Deal in the Desert” between then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Gaddafi in 2004.

According to documents retrieved from the ransacked offices of the Libyan intelligence agency following Gaddafi’s fall from power in 2011, British security services cracked down on Libyan dissidents in the UK as part of the deal, as well as assisting in the rendition of two senior LIFG leaders, Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, to Tripoli where they allege they were tortured.

Torture one day, passports the other. Lovely. And it still gets better: MI6 didn’t just have close contacts with Libyans in Manchester, it knew the alleged perpetrator’s family, and used his father multiple times as on operative:

Manchester Attack as MI6 Blowback

According to Scotland Yard, the attack on the crowd leaving the Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena, 22 May, has been perpetrated by Salman Abedi. A bankcard has been conveniently found in the pocket of the mutilated corpse of the ‘terrorist’. This attack is generally interpreted as proof that the United Kingdom is not implicated in international terrorism and that, on the contrary, it is a victim of it.

[..] In 1992, Ramadan Abedi [Salman’s father] was sent back to Libya by Britain’s MI6 and was involved in a British-devised plot to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi. The operation having been readily exposed, he was exfiltrated by MI6 and transferred back to the UK where he obtained political asylum. He moved in 1999 to Whalley Range (south of Manchester) where there was already resident a small Libyan Islamist community. In 1994, Ramadan Abedi returned again to Libya under MI6’s direction. In late 1995 he is involved in the creation of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a local branch of Al-Qaeda, in conjunction with Abdelhakim Belhadj.

The LIFG was then employed by MI6 again to assassinate Gaddafi, for a payoff of £100,000. This operation, which also failed, provoked heated exchanges within British Intelligence, leading to the resignation of one David Shayler. Other former members of the LIFG have also lived at Whalley Range, including Abedi’s friend Abd al-Baset-Azzouz. In 2009, this last joined Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and became a close associate of its chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In 2011, al-Baset-Azzouz is active on the ground with the NATO operation against Libya.

On 11 September 2012, he directs the operation against the US Ambassador in Libya, Christopher Stevens, assassinated at Benghazi. He is arrested in Turkey and extradited to the US in December 2014, his trial still pending. Nobody pays attention to the fact that Ramadan Abedi has linked LIFG members to the formation of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and, in 2011, he takes part in MI6’s ‘Arab Spring’ operations, and in LIFG’s role on the ground in support of NATO. In any event, Abedi returned to Libya after the fall of Gaddafi and moves his family there, leaving his older children in the family home at Whalley Range.

According to the former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar, Abdelhakim Belhadj was involved in the assassinations in Madrid of 11 March 2004. Later, he is secretly arrested in Malaysia by the CIA and transferred to Libya where he is tortured not by Libyan or American functionaries but by MI6 agents. He is finally freed after the accord between Saif al-Islam Gaddafi [Gaddafi’s son] and the jihadists.

Luckily, perhaps the Brits are not that stupid:

Half of Britons Blame UK’s Foreign Wars for Terror Attacks at Home

Slightly over a half of people in the UK agree that the nation’s involvement in wars abroad has increased the terror threat to the country, a poll out Friday has showed. The survey found that 53% of 7,134 UK adults sampled by YouGov said they believed wars the UK supported or fought were in part responsible for terror attacks at home. [..] Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who made a speech earlier in the day to mark his return to general election campaigning, said UK’s war on terror had not worked. He cited intelligence experts who said foreign wars, including in Libya, threatened the country’s security.

If that is true, Theresa May obviously should have no chance of winning. May can and will try to use the horror of Manchester, and the subsequent pause in the campaign, to strengthen her position in the upcoming election, by playing on people’s fear and making them believe she’s in control. Even if the very attack itself makes clear that she’s not. The Tories have already attacked Corbyn for saying their policies have failed; it was the wrong time to say that, according to them.

But it’s not. It’s the very best time. This is when people pay attention. And having this discussion doesn’t disrespect the victims of Manchester. If anything, it shows more respect than not having the discussion. Because you want to make sure this doesn’t happen again, neither here nor there. And to achieve that, you have to look at why these things happen.

An 8-year old child in Manchester, just like one in Mosul or Aleppo, is innocent. Yourself, perhaps not so much. The politicians you vote into power, and the media you read and watch to inform you, not a chance. Guilty as hell.

 

 

Debt Rattle July 7 2016

Jul 072016
 
 July 7, 2016  Posted by at 9:59 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle July 7 2016


Harris&Ewing Childs Restaurant, Washington, DC 1918

• The Eurozone Is Ersatz Deutschland (David McWilliams)
• I’m in Awe at How Fast Deutsche Bank is Coming Unglued (WS)
• “When Deutsche Bank Goes To Single Digits People Will Start To Panic” (ZH)
• To Save Italian Banks, The EU Will Have To Bend Some Rules (BBG Ed.)
• Populist Politicians Take On Italy’s Massive Debt Pile (BBG)
• Italy May Spur Systemic Bank Crisis: SocGen (BBG)
• Italy’s Bad Loan Woes Tiny Compared To Europe’s Derivative Problem – Renzi (R.)
• From Brexit to the Future (Stiglitz)
• Finance Insiders: The UK Won’t Really Go (Pol.)
• China’s Innovation Economy A Real Estate Bubble In Disguise? (R.)
• Bill Gross Calls Sovereign Bonds Too Risky (BBG)
• Voodoo Central Banking Is A Bad Idea (BBG)
• US June Truck Orders Down 34% vs Year Ago (R.)
• The Rock Movie Plot ‘May Have Inspired MI6 Source’s Iraqi Weapons Claim’ (G.)
• Putin Warns of War: ‘I Don’t Know How to Get Through to You People’ (RI)
• Crazy – A Story Of Debt (Grant WIlliams)

 

 

Williams points out what I have many times: the EU’s problem -and the one that will undo it- is that Germany gets to call the shots every time and all of the time, and “the rest of the countries are little more than policy eunuchs..”

• The Eurozone Is Ersatz Deutschland (David McWilliams)

Of course, the main player in all this will be Germany. Germany calls the shots. Over the past five years, the pretence of a European Germany has given way to the reality of a German Europe. This is the new deal. As a result of this, the Eurozone is Ersatz Deutschland, where the rest of the countries are little more than policy eunuchs, emasculated by German fiscal straightjackets and German creditor obsessions. Again, if you doubt this, watch the ongoing implosion of the Italian banking system, which will dwarf even the great Irish banking crisis. Italy wants to recapitalise its banks using government money because it fears a complete collapse of its crippled economy. Germany is saying no. As always, German decisions reflect the interest of German industry.

This is entirely understandable. It means that the interests of German carmakers that sell tens of thousands of cars to the UK every year will influence the attitude of German politicians towards the deal that Britain gets. Already Angela Merkel is urging the Commission to back off and give the British time to sort themselves out. So because of German industrial interests, Italy, the friend with the broken banking system, will be treated harshly by Germany, while the UK, now the putative political enemy, will be treated more favourably. In short, the anti-EU Brits will get a better hearing from the Germans than the pro-EU Italians. It is this apparent mistreatment of so-called allies that initially drove Brexit and is driving Marine Le Pen’s support in France and will determine the background noise to the Italian general election later this year.

All this also puts Germany on a collision course with the EU institutions that are seeking to punish the UK for the temerity of Brexit. Germany will look to get the Brits the most access to EU market in the same way as Germany shouted loudly about Vladimir Putin’s annexation of bits of Ukraine but still took Russia’s oil and gas. This is Realpolitik – and the Commission had better get used to it.

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Will Germany prop up Deutsche even when it won’t allow Italy to prop up its banks?

• I’m in Awe at How Fast Deutsche Bank is Coming Unglued (WS)

Deutsche Bank – “the most important net contributor to systemic risks,” as the IMF put it last week after a lag of several years – is having a rough time. Shares dropped 4.2% today to close at a new three-decade low of €11.63, down 48% since July 31 last year, lower even than the low during the doom-and-gloom days of the euro debt crisis and the Global Financial Crisis. It’s not the only European bank in trouble. Credit Suisse dropped 1.7% today to CHF 9.92, another multi-decade low, down 63% since July 31. Other European banks are getting mauled too. The European Stoxx 600 banking index dropped 3% today to 117.69, approaching the Financial Crisis low of March 2009.

If July 31, 2015, keeps showing up, it’s because this was the propitious day when Draghi’s harebrained experiment with negative interest rates and massive QE came unglued, when European stocks, and particularly European bank stocks began to crash. Deutsche Bank is so shaky that German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble found it necessary to stick his neck out and explain to Bloomberg in February that he has “no concerns about Deutsche Bank.” Finance ministers don’t say this sort of thing about healthy banks. At the time, CEO John Cryan – whose main job these days is propping up Deutsche Bank with his rhetoric – explained ostensibly to frazzled employees that the bank’s position was “absolutely rock-solid, given our strong capital and risk position.”

Days later, he followed up his rhetoric with a stunning ruse: On February 12, the bank announced that it would buy back $5.4 billion of its own bonds, including some issued only a month earlier. “The bank is using market conditions to buy back these bonds at attractive prices and to cut debt,” CFO Marcus Schenck said at the time. “By buying them back below their issuance value, the bank is making a profit. The bank is also using its financial strength to provide liquidity to bond investors in a difficult market environment.” Shares soared 12% on the spot! Its bonds rocketed higher. Even its contingent convertible bonds, the infamous CoCo bonds, though they weren’t part of the buyback plan, bounced.

For example, its €1.75 billion of 6% CoCo notes soared from a record low of 70 cents on the euro on February 9 to 87 cents by March – a 24% move! The ruse had worked! During the miracle rally, short sellers got their heads handed to them. But it was one of the silliest, most desperate ways to prop up shares and bonds. And now the bond-buyback miracle-nonsense rally has collapsed, with shares at a new multi-decade low, and with bonds swooning. This is what these 6% CoCo notes did: they plunged 5.7% today to 75 cents on the euro. Nearly the entire bond-buy-back miracle-nonsense rally has re-collapsed…

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“..you’ll see someone say, ‘Someone is going to have to do something’.”

• “When Deutsche Bank Goes To Single Digits People Will Start To Panic” (ZH)

Following today’s Fed minutes release, Jeff Gundlach had a far less “uncertain” message: “Things are shaky and feeling dangerous,” Gundlach told Reuters in a telephone interview. It’s not just stocks that Gundlach was not too excited about, he also had some choice words about buying Treasuries here. “You’re seeing people who hated the ‘2%’ 10-year suddenly loving it at a 1.38-1.39% revisit of the all-time low closing yield,” Gundlach said. “If you buy 10-year Treasuries now, I would say, it is a terrible trade location. In fact, it is the worst trade location in the history of the 10-year Treasury.”

True, just like buying stocks less than 2% from all time highs, however what Gundlach failed to mention is that those who are buying Treasurys here are not doing it for the yield (or lack thereof on more than $11 trillion in notional), they are simply doing so to frontrun even more central bank purchases now that the monetary spigots have once again been activated as “confused” central banks around the world have just one trick left up their sleeve – to monetize even more debt in hopes of pushing every last investor into risk assets. The DoubleLine bond king also had some choice words about Europe’s banking crisis: “Banks are dying and policymakers don’t know what to do,” Gundlach said. “Watch Deutsche Bank shares go to single digits and people will start to panic… you’ll see someone say, ‘Someone is going to have to do something’.”

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But it can’t bend rules only for Italy, that’s another Pandora’s box.

• To Save Italian Banks, The EU Will Have To Bend Some Rules (BBG Ed.)

Italy’s slow-motion banking crisis is getting worse, and if it isn’t stopped, it could cause system-wide damage across the euro area and beyond. To contain this danger, the European Union must be willing to bend some rules. Shares in Italy’s third-largest lender, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, are down about 75% this year and trading at one-tenth of book value. A ban on short-selling the bank’s stock was imposed on Wednesday. Monte dei Paschi is only one of a group of Italian banks beset with 360 billion euros ($398 billion) of nonperforming loans; that’s some 20% of Italy’s GDP. Banking crises in Spain and Ireland were rooted in real-estate bubbles, but Italy’s stems from a culture of cronyism, poor governance and shoddy lending.

The banks’ sickness has hurt the broader economy, too: As borrowers defaulted, banks withheld credit, dragging down growth. Reforming Italy’s banking culture is the job of years, but short-term action is needed right now to halt the panic. The simplest approach would be to sequester impaired loans in a state-supported “bad bank” – along the lines of the ones used by Spain and Ireland. A stabilized banking industry could then resume its vital economic function of supporting investment. After Greece’s financial debacle, though, the EU adopted rules requiring a failing bank’s shareholders and creditors to shoulder much of the cost of any rescue – to be “bailed in,” as it’s called. That’s a good idea in principle. In Italy, it’s close to impossible politically, because a third of bank bonds are held by households.

The result has been a characteristic EU muddle of half-baked answers and hoping for the best. A scheme to attract private capital and securitize bad loans has been tried but hasn’t worked. Confidence kept on deteriorating. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is doubtless looking to save his political skin, but he’s right that Italy needs more freedom of action than EU rules allow. Renzi has staked his job on an October referendum on constitutional reform, one that polls show he could lose. If that happens, the euroskeptic, populist Five Star Movement might take the country in a new direction not to Europe’s liking – least of all now, coming on the heels of Brexit.

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The use of the word ‘populist‘ is up there with ‘migrant’ in trying to paint a picture that is not real. Beppe Grillo has nothing to do with Farage or Le Pen or any of these people, other than he wants Italy out of the eurozone (and EU). Populist could simply mean: for normal people, but that’s not the connotation it gets, it’s utilized in a much more sinister way. On purpose.

• Populist Politicians Take On Italy’s Massive Debt Pile (BBG)

The Rome Olympics of 1960 marked the rebound of the Italian capital after years of war and reconstruction, an affirmation of the country’s renaissance and the city’s emergence as a symbol of dolce vita insouciance. Rome is still paying the bill, and the new mayor, Virginia Raggi, is sick of it. The city has roughly €13.6 billion ($15.2 billion) in debt and more than 12,000 creditors—though the pile is so complex no one really knows how much is owed to whom. Rome faces outstanding bills for operating its 61-year-old metro system, hauling trash, and running a network of unprofitable pharmacies that compete with private shops. The courts are grappling with hundreds of lawsuits over unpaid debts going back 50 years for land expropriated to build hospitals, streets, and other city projects—including some debts connected to the 1960 games, former Mayor Ignazio Marino has said.

The average interest rate: 5%, at a time when the Italian government is issuing 10-year bonds at 1.5% annually. “We can’t keep paying such high interest just because nobody bothered to renegotiate the debt,” Raggi, who was elected on June 19, told the RAI television network. Raggi, a 37-year-old lawyer and Rome’s first female mayor, has ridden a wave of frustration with Italy’s old guard—especially its handling of the economy—to one of the country’s most powerful political jobs. Her rise mirrors the growing strength of her party, the Five Star Movement, founded in 2009 by Beppe Grillo. Five Star (the stars are meant to represent water, environment, transport, development, and energy, though the party mostly focuses on fighting corruption and cutting regulations) has grown into a formidable rival to the Democratic Party of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

[..] Few would argue that Italy doesn’t desperately need a solution to its debt woes. The country owes creditors €2.2 trillion, or more than 130% of GDP—a ratio higher than any EU country’s other than Greece. High taxes aimed at paying down the debt stifle growth, which reduces the government’s ability to fund new programs. At the same time, Italy’s banks hold more of their country’s sovereign debt than lenders in any other euro area nation, and they’re burdened with €360 billion in bad loans, more than a quarter of the total held by euro area financial institutions. Government attempts to load these assets into a “bad bank” have foundered because of European rules against state aid to banks. As a result some institutions could face insolvency.

Read more …

No, no no, I kid you not: in this Bloomberg video, the reporter asks SocGen Chairman Bini Smaghi: “Do you get a sense that markets are orderly, that markets are rational at the moment?” And he responds: “I mean, you have uncertainty, you don’t know what’s going to happen…”

Orderly and rational? You f**king kidding me? There are no markets, you bleeding doodles. And you’re not supposed to know beforehand what’s going to happen either. But you f**king do anyway, because central banks keep on feeding losers like you and there is no price discovery anywhere to be found. It’s insane to see how fast the new normal becomes normal. But these wankers make their present profits at the cost of you and me. Let’s put a halt to that. These people have no connection to us. But they should.

• Italy May Spur Systemic Bank Crisis: SocGen (BBG)

Italy’s banking crisis could spread to the rest of Europe, and rules limiting state aid to lenders should be reconsidered to prevent greater upheaval, Societe Generale SA Chairman Lorenzo Bini Smaghi said. “The whole banking market is under pressure,” the former ECB executive board member said. “We adopted rules on public money; these rules must be assessed in a market that has a potential crisis to decide whether some suspension needs to be applied.” With Italian banks weighed down by about €360 billion in soured loans, the government has been sounding out regulators on ways to shore up lenders amid a renewed selloff in the wake of the British vote to leave the EU.

The government would invoke an EU rule allowing temporary state aid if regulatory stress tests uncover a shortfall at Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, a person with knowledge of the discussions said Tuesday. European banking stocks resumed their descent as policy makers disagreed and sometimes issued contradictory statements about what may come next. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest lender, slid 6.1% to its lowest level since at least 1989. Societe Generale, France’s second-biggest bank, which Bini Smaghi has chaired for just over a year, fell 1.8% as of 2 p.m. in Paris. Italian Finance Undersecretary Pier Paolo Baretta said in an interview on RAI radio Wednesday morning that a “technical solution” on Monte Paschi could be hours away, before issuing a statement an hour later that said “no intervention is expected in the next few hours.”

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, speaking at a news conference in Berlin hours later, said his Italian counterpart Pier Carlo Padoan told him that Italy intends to stick to the banking-union rules.

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He’s talking about Deutsche. Renzi’s desperate to save his skin. And he WILL challenge Berlin to do it. They will respond by making Italy Greece Redux.

• Italy’s Bad Loan Woes Tiny Compared To Europe’s Derivative Problem – Renzi (R.)

The difficulties facing Italian banks over their bad loans are miniscule by comparison with the problems some European banks face over their derivatives, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said on Wednesday. Italian bank shares have tumbled in recent days and are the worst performers among European lenders this year on investor concerns over how they will handle some €360 billion of bad and non-performing loans. Speaking at a joint news conference with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, Renzi said other European banks had much bigger problems than their Italian counterparts. “If this non-performing loan problem is worth one, the question of derivatives at other banks, at big banks, is worth one hundred. This is the ratio: one to one hundred,” Renzi said.

Read more …

Stiglitz doesn’t have much. Disappointing?!

• From Brexit to the Future (Stiglitz)

Digesting the full implications of the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” referendum will take Britain, Europe, and the world a long time. The most profound consequences will, of course, depend on the European Union’s response to the UK’s withdrawal. Most people initially assumed that the EU would not “cut off its nose to spite its face”: after all, an amicable divorce seems to be in everyone’s interest. But the divorce – as many do – could become messy. The benefits of trade and economic integration between the UK and EU are mutual, and if the EU took seriously its belief that closer economic integration is better, its leaders would seek to ensure the closest ties possible under the circumstances.

But Jean-Claude Juncker, the architect of Luxembourg’s massive corporate tax avoidance schemes and now President of the European Commission, is taking a hard line: “Out means out,” he says. That kneejerk reaction is perhaps understandable, given that Juncker may be remembered as the person who presided over the EU’s initial stage of dissolution. He argues that, to deter other countries from leaving, the EU must be uncompromising, offering the UK little more than what it is guaranteed under World Trade Organization agreements. In other words, Europe is not to be held together by its benefits, which far exceed the costs. Economic prosperity, the sense of solidarity, and the pride of being a European are not enough, according to Juncker.

No, Europe is to be held together by threats, intimidation, and fear. That position ignores a lesson seen in both the Brexit vote and America’s Republican Party primary: large portions of the population have not been doing well. The neoliberal agenda of the last four decades may have been good for the top 1%, but not for the rest. I had long predicted that this stagnation would eventually have political consequences. That day is now upon us.

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Hey, their jobs depend on it…

• Finance Insiders: The UK Won’t Really Go (Pol.)

Finance industry insiders still don’t think a full Brexit will actually happen. Only 37% of participants in POLITICO’s Economic Caucus, which surveyed an elite group of 63 business and economic leaders, said that Britain will exit the European Union following the June 23 referendum. An overwhelming majority said the U.K. won’t cut its ties altogether — a finding that reflects the finance community’s optimism, delusion or a little of both. Britain will suffer much more than the rest of the Continent and will fall into recession following the referendum, said the caucus, which includes EU ambassadors, European Commission Vice President Kristalina Georgieva, former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, and OECD and European Central Bank economists.

More than three-quarters of those surveyed said the U.K. should brace itself for a major economic slowdown as uncertainty hits “confidence, consumer spending and investment,” whereas they predicted the wider European economy will fare much better. Britain scored “an astonishingly avoidable own goal,” said one member of the caucus, all of whom spoke on condition their remarks not be individually attributed. “The uncertainty [while exit negotiations take place] will particularly hit the British services market, which is the strong point of the U.K. economy at the moment,” said one caucus member, adding that “anti-foreigner sentiment, if not kept in check, might persuade many skilled workers to leave the U.K.” Reports of hate crime in London are up by more than 50% since Britons voted by a margin of 52-48% to leave the EU, police figures show.

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Bubbles are all China has left. Nothing new there.

• China’s Innovation Economy A Real Estate Bubble In Disguise? (R.)

The Chinese government’s call to the nation to build an innovation-driven economy from the top down has sparked a rush by local governments to construct new buildings in the name of supporting creativity. Innovation centers have been popping up around the country and are set to more than double to nearly 5,000 in the next five years, according to internet research firm iiMedia. The only problem for local governments; entrepreneurs are not moving in. Many centers are in small Chinese cities or towns, not ideal locations for attracting startups. There is no local market for their product, no local ecosystem of suppliers and fellow entrepreneurs and centers generally provide only basic amenities, such as a desk and a telephone. They lack the financial, technical or marketing expertise that many startups need.

Most incubators have occupancy rates of no more than 40%, iiMedia says. The result: like steel mills, theme parks and housing before them, the country now faces a glut of innovation centers as another top-down policy backfires to leave white-elephant projects and a further buildup of debt. “The risk of a bubble is extremely large,” said Shi Jiqiang, a partner at Leilai Management, which runs day-to-day operations at a startup base in the city of Tianjin, near Beijing. “This is both a test for government and for the managers of startup spaces … there aren’t enough entrepreneurs.” [..] Beijing argues its development model that worked so well for infrastructure and real estate, powering the country through the global financial crisis, can build successful, high-tech startups.

Read more …

Supernova revisited.

• Bill Gross Calls Sovereign Bonds Too Risky (BBG)

Bill Gross said sovereign bond yields at record lows aren’t worth the risk. “The sovereign bonds are not up my alley,” Gross, who built the world’s biggest bond fund at PIMCO and is now at Denver-based Janus Capital, said on Bloomberg Television Wednesday. “It’s too risky.” Low yields mean bonds are especially vulnerable because a small increase can bring a large decline in price, he said. Yields in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia pushed to all-time lows Wednesday, while those in Germany and Japan dropped to unprecedented levels below zero. The average yield on the bonds in Bank of America’s World Sovereign Bond Index this week dropped below 1% for the first time, based on data going back to 2006.

Bonds are rallying on speculation the British vote to leave the European Union will damp global economic growth, driving demand for the safest assets. The Federal Reserve is losing confidence in its need to raise interest rates as officials face rising uncertainty about the outlook for growth at home and abroad, the minutes of its most recent meeting issued Wednesday indicate. [..] Gross warned almost a month ago central bank policies that pushed trillions of dollars into bonds with negative interest rates will eventually backfire violently. “This is a supernova that will explode one day,” he wrote on Twitter.

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But it’s all they have left.

• Voodoo Central Banking Is A Bad Idea (BBG)

Desperate times, we’re told, demand desperate measures, and there may be no more desperate country anywhere in the world than Japan. Even as policymakers struggle to boost growth and inflation, post-Brexit turmoil has caused the yen to strengthen, slamming Japanese exporters. BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda is coming under more and more pressure to expand his already crazy-loose monetary policy. With few options available, he might be forced to push key interest rates even deeper into negative territory when the BOJ meets later this month. Proponents of Kuroda’s negative-rate policy, introduced in January, contend that the strategy is transferring profits from big banks to needy households, lowering borrowing costs for companies, encouraging more risk-taking in investment and propping up real estate values.

Kuroda in June proclaimed that negative rates were “having a positive impact on the real economy.” Yet there are already ample indications that negative rates are failing to achieve their main goals of spurring growth and inflation. And more broadly, the fact that central bankers have resorted to negative rates at all is a signal of just how narrow-minded and counterproductive the approach to restoring global growth has become. Contrary to Kuroda’s optimistic words, Japan sunk even deeper into deflation in May. The IMF has slashed its 2016 forecast for Japan’s GDP growth to 0.5%. Perhaps Japan’s negative-rate policy needs more time to work its magic. Maybe Japanese companies and consumers, knowing how desperate Kuroda is, are holding out for even lower borrowing costs in coming months.

Yet Europe’s experience suggests otherwise. Even though the ECB introduced negative rates two years ago, growth in the euro zone looked to be slowing even before Brexit. Inflation is barely expected to inch back into positive territory in June, at 0.1%. It’s at least as likely that the entire strategy is flawed. The purpose of loose monetary policy is to stimulate economies by encouraging greater borrowing. That, however, assumes that investors see sound economic opportunities that make taking on debt worthwhile. Apparently, not many Japanese feel that way. [..] In the first quarter, according to a recent report by Capital Economics, bank lending to Japan’s private sector grew at the slowest pace since 2014, while the amount of corporate bonds outstanding actually shrank.

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But we’ll bury that under blubber like: “”The Class 8 market is stuck in a holding pattern, at the bottom end of this cycle…”

• US June Truck Orders Down 34% vs Year Ago (R.)

U.S. orders for heavy duty trucks in June were down 34% from the same month last year to a four-year low as trucking firms were holding off on buying new 18-wheelers amid a weak freight environment, according to preliminary data released by a freight transportation forecaster on Wednesday. “The Class 8 market is stuck in a holding pattern, at the bottom end of this cycle,” Don Ake, vice president for commercial vehicles at FTR said in a statement. “Fleets are cautious as freight demand has cooled off this year,” he said. Preliminary data showed 13,000 units ordered in June, the lowest monthly total since July 2012 and the worst June since 2009. FTR said that all truck manufacturers were equally affected by the month’s weak order numbers.

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Your first reaction is ‘you can’t make this up’. But then you realize that’s exactly what somebody did. And MI6 actually discussed the movie and its plot in 2002, but Britain went on to help kill 600,000 Iraqi’s anyway.

• The Rock Movie Plot ‘May Have Inspired MI6 Source’s Iraqi Weapons Claim’ (G.)

An allegation in an MI6 report about Iraq’s supposed chemical weapons capability before the 2003 war to remove Saddam Hussein appeared to have been lifted from a Hollywood film, according to the Chilcot report. A section of the inquiry’s findings about the build-up to the conflict in the autumn of 2002 found that MI6, formally known as the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS, feared a source might have taken inspiration from The Rock, a 1996 thriller starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage. The report details how MI6 sent information to “a small number of very senior readers”, including Tony Blair and the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, on 11 and 23 September 2002. Based on what MI6 called “a new source on trial with direct access”, this alleged that Saddam’s government had accelerated the production of chemical and biological agents, and in particular that chemical agents might be carried in glass containers.

After some discussion on the reliability of the new source, in early October MI6 was questioned directly about this idea. The report says: “It was pointed out that glass containers were not typically used in chemical munitions; and that a popular movie [The Rock] has inaccurately depicted nerve agents being carried in glass beads or spheres.” MI6 accepted this possible flaw to the intelligence, the report adds: “The questions about the use of glass containers for chemical agents and the similarity of the description to those portrayed in The Rock had been recognised by SIS. There were some precedents for the use of glass containers but the points would be pursued when further material became available.”

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“The World Is Being Pulled In An Irreversible Direction..”

• Putin Warns of War: ‘I Don’t Know How to Get Through to You People’ (RI)

Vladimir Putin has finally taken the kid gloves off. The Russian president was meeting with foreign journalists at the conclusion of the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 17th, when he left no one in any doubt that the world is headed down a course which could lead to nuclear war. Putin railed against the journalists for their “tall tales” in blindly repeating lies and misinformation provided to them by the United States on its anti-ballistic missile systems being constructed in Eastern Europe. He pointed out that since the Iran nuclear deal, the claim the system is to protect against Iranian missiles has been exposed as a lie. The journalists were informed that within a few years, Russia predicted the US would be able to extend the range of the system to 1000 km.

At that point, Russia’s nuclear potential, and thus the nuclear balance between the US and Russia, would be placed in jeopardy. Putin completely lost patience with the journalists, berating them for lazily helping to accelerate a nuclear confrontation by repeating US propaganda. He virtually pleaded with the western media, for the sake of the world, to change their line: We know year by year what’s going to happen, and they know that we know. It’s only you that they tell tall tales to, and you buy it, and spread it to the citizens of your countries. You people in turn do not feel a sense of the impending danger – this is what worries me. How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction? While they pretend that nothing is going on. I don’t know how to get through to you anymore.

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Must watch.

• Crazy – A Story Of Debt (Grant WIlliams)

This is a story about debt – 2008 was the crystallization of that, the years since have been the denial of it, and the years to come will be the resolution. Grant Williams, founder & publisher of the ‘Things That Make You Go Hmmm…’ research service, and co-founder of Real Vision TV, brings us an eye-opening presentation titled Crazy, where he puts into perspective the extraordinary levels of global debt and unprecedented monetary policy, and reminds us that the many factors that led to the ‘08 crisis are still very much present.

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