"... The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades. Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all. ..."
"... Screw the war mongers and the MIC. ..."
"... If you read the article, it's obvious that [neo]liberals/whores are the apogee of hypocrisy. ..."
"... Perpetual war is about $$$. It knows no party. Never has and never will. ..."
Feral, yes; rabid, absolutely; smart... not so much. Why is anyone surprised?
The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated
to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves
that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades.
Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all.
Yup. It's always about the money. As Fitts would say, that screeching you hear is the cash flow drying up for the rentiers.
The murdering of women and children be damned. Hillary's demonic cackle is but the grotesque cherry on top:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y
Contemporary US politics in a nutshell is rule by the rich for the rich, and it's amazing
that 40 years in we are still debating whether or not neoliberal policies are benefiting the
majority (they clearly are not). The income gap continues to grow, economic growth continues
to be siphoned to the top, education and healthcare remain unaffordable for most people, and
the response of the current administration is...to cut taxes further for the wealthy??
In The Great Democracy, Ganesh Sitaraman shows us how both the left and the right have
embraced neoliberalism over the past four decades along with its emphasis on tax cuts,
deregulation, trade liberalization, and limited government. Neoliberalism's faith in the
market has narrowed our conception of democracy, replacing discussions about the common good
and general welfare with discussions about economic efficiency and profit maximization. The
ideology is so deep most people don't even realize that there could be another way.
Sitaraman does a better job than most diagnosing the problems and continually emphasizing
the point that economics cannot be separated from politics. Even if you don't believe that
income and wealth inequality necessarily contributes to a lower standard of living for the
majority -- and that people should earn whatever the market pays them -- the existence of
inequality is detrimental to democracy and skews legislation to favor the rich. The
wealthiest Americans and corporations spend massive amounts of money on elections and
legislation to get the politicians and regulations (or lack thereof) that benefit them the
most. If this wasn't the case, they would not consistently spend tens and hundreds of
millions of dollars on campaign financing and lobbying.
Forty years of neoliberalism is going to be tough to dig ourselves out from, and this
demands some bold and broad legislation. But it cannot be disjointed; it has to be part of a
larger philosophy with clear goals. In this respect, The Great Democracy provides a complete
political philosophy to replace neoliberalism and compete with oligarchic nationalism. It is
based on restoring the ideals of democracy, recognizing that the common good and general
welfare of the people means more than economic growth at all costs. It also recognizes that
political and economic fixes must be implemented together, and that massive discrepancies in
wealth threatens democracy.
Sitaraman goes much further than simply outlining the problems and proposing an overall
political philosophy. He provides several detailed economic and political reforms that seek
to reduce inequality, expand democracy, and improve the standard of living for the bottom 90
percent of the population. His suggestions range from mandatory voting requirements to
reinstating a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent to fundamentally reworking the structure of
the Supreme Court to make it less political. His reform agenda also includes getting money
out of politics, overturning Citizens United, mandating employee representation on corporate
boards, and restructuring executive compensation.
The bottom line is that more of the same will not work. Our political problems will not
solve themselves, and the market certainly won't solve them for us, mainly because it is the
market that has caused them. But we don't want to turn to nationalism either. Sitaraman
simultaneously provides us with a political philosophy that appeals to the ideals of
democracy -- to use as a guide for policy implementation -- while suggesting reforms that
will make our our society more equitable, engaged, and fair. Let's hope the next era of
politics follows this path.
Stop wondering why, "We can't just get along?" Ganesh Sitamaran explains the deep wounds
to our country that aren't going away with the application of civility. Neverthless this
isn't a pessamistic book; in fact it describes how to face the problems that are undermining
our country and start living up to the ideals that are our political birth right, a route
that will bring us better lives and better, more enduring communities. So get this
excellently reasoned and quite readable book. It will save you a shouting match or two at
extended family gatherings as you will then be able to spread some much needed light on the
divisions of the day with irrefutable arguments and a optimism about the future that has
escaped many another current thinker. One person found this helpful
Helpful
A nonpartisan review of the recent history that has hurt our democracy. An important part
of this history is that economics and politics can t be separated. Our government now serves
the rich, not the majority. This book is about how to restore representation of the majority.
Helpful 0 Comment Report abuse
Europe is willing to defy the U.S. on Nordstream to the point of forcing the U.S. to openly and nakedly destroy its reputation
with European contractors and governments to stop one pipeline in a place where multiple gas pipelines will be needed for future
growth.
This is the diplomatic equivalent of the nuclear option. And the neocons in the Senate just pushed the button. Europe understands
what this is really about, the U.S. retaining its imperial position as the policy setter for all the world. If it can set energy
policy for Europe then it can set everything else.
And it's clear that the leadership in Europe is done with that status quo. The Trump administration from the beginning has used
NATO as an excuse to mask its real intentions towards Europe, which is continued domination of its policies. Trump complains that
the U.S. pays into NATO to protect Europe from Russia but then Europe buys its energy from Russia. That's unfair, Donald complains,
like a little bitch, frankly, even though he right on the surface. But if the recent NATO summit is any indication, Europe is no
longer interested in NATO performing that function. French President Emmanuel Macron wants NATO re-purposed to fight global terror,
a terrible idea. NATO should just be ended.
But you'll notice how Trump doesn't talk about that anymore. He wants more billions pumped into NATO while the U.S. still sets
its policies. This is not a boondoggle for the MIC as much as it's a Sword of Damocles to hold over Europe's head. The U.S.'s involvement
in should be ended immediately, the troops brought home and the billions of dollars spent here as opposed to occupying most of Europe
to point missiles at a Russia wholly uninterested in imperial ambitions no less harboring any of them.
And Trump also knows this but thinks stopping Nordstream 2 is the price Europe has to pay him for this privilege. It's insane.
The time has come for Europe to act independently from the U.S. As much as I despise the EU, to untangle it from the U.S. on energy
policy is the means by which for it to then deal with its problems internally. It can't do that while the U.S. is threatening it.
Circling the wagons against the immediate threat, as it were.
And that means protecting its companies and citizens from the economic depredations of power-mad neoconservatives in the U.S.
Senate like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.
Allseas, the Swiss company laying the pipe for Nordstream 2,
has halted construction for now
, awaiting instructions from the U.S. Gazprom will likely step in to finish the job and Germany will green light any of the necessary
permits to get the pipeline done. Those people will be put out of work just in time for Christmas, turning thousands of people against
the U.S. Commerce drives people together, politics drives them apart.
But, at the same time, the urgency to finish Nordstream 2 on time is wholly irrelevant now because Ukraine and Russia came to
terms on a new five-year gas transit contract. This ensures Gazprom can meet its contractual deliveries to Europe that no one thought
could be done on time. But when the Nazi threat to Zelensky meeting with Merkel, Macron and Putin in Paris failed to materialize,
a gas deal was on the horizon.
And, guess what? U.S. LNG will still not have the marginal lever over Europe's energy policy because of that. Putin and Zelensky
outmaneuvered Cruz, Graham and Trump on this. Because that's what this boils down to. By keeping Russian gas out of Europe, it was
supposed to constrain not only Russia's growth but also Europe's. Because then the U.S. government can control who and how much energy
can make it into European markets at critical junctures politically.
That was the Bolton Doctrine to National Security. And that doctrine brought nothing but misery to millions.
And if you look back over the past five years of U.S./EU relations you will see this gambit clearly for what it was, a way to
continue European vassalage at the hands of the U.S. by forcing market share of U.S. providers into European markets.
Again, it gets back to Trump's ideas about Emergy Dominance
and becoming the supplier of the marginal erg of energy to important economies around the world.
The smart play for the EU now that the gas transit deal is in place is to threaten counter-sanctions against the U.S. and bar
all LNG shipments into Europe. Gas prices are at historic lows, gas supplies are overflowing thanks to fears of a deal not being
in place.
So, a three to six month embargo of U.S. LNG into Europe to bleed off excess supply while Nordstream 2 is completed would be the
right play politically.
But, in reality, they won't need to, because the U.S. won't be able to import much into Europe under current prices and market
conditions. And once Nordstream 2 is complete, LNG sales to Europe should crater.
In the end, I guess it's too bad for Ted Cruz that economics and basic human ingenuity are more powerful than legislatures. Because
Nordstream 2 will be completed. Turkstream's other trains into Europe will be built. Venezuela will continue rebuilding its energy
sector with Russian and Chinese help.
There is no place for U.S. LNG in Europe outside of the Poles literally burning money virtue signaling their Russophobia. Nordstream 2 was a response to the revolt in Ukraine, to replace any potential losses in market share to Europe. Now Russia will
have what it had before passing through Ukraine along with Nordstream 2. By 2024 there will be at least two trains from Turkstream
coming into Europe.
Iran will keep expanding exports, settling its oil and gas trade through Russian banks. And the U.S. will continue to fulminate
and make itself even more irrelevant over time. What men like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump refuse to understand is that when you go nuclear you can't ever go back. If you threaten
the nuclear option, there's no fall back position.
And when those that you threaten with annihilation survive they are made all the stronger for passing through the eye of the needle. Looking at Gazprom's balance sheet right now, that's my take.
Turkey, since 2011, has been waging a pro-Sunni proxy war in Syria, in the hope of one day
establishing in Damascus a pro-Turkey, Islamist regime. This ambition has failed, costing
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey violent political turmoil on both sides of
Turkey's 911-km border with Syria and billions of dollars spent on more than 4 million Syrian
refugees scattered across the Turkish soil.
In Egypt, in 2011-2012, Erdoğan aggressively supported the failed Muslim Brotherhood
government and deeply antagonized the incumbent -- then-general but now president -- Abdel
Fattah al-Sisi. Since Erdoğan's efforts in Syria and Egypt failed, his Sunni Islamist
ambitions have found a new proxy-war theater: Libya.
On December 10,
Erdoğan said he could deploy troops in Libya if the UN-backed Government of National
Accord (GNA) in Tripoli (which Turkey supports) requested it. Erdoğan's talks with GNA's
head, Fayez al-Sarraj, who is fighting a war against the Libyan National Army (LNA) of General
Khalifa Haftar, produced two ostensibly strategic agreements: a memorandum of understanding on
providing the GNA with arms, military training and personnel; and a maritime agreement
delineating exclusive economic zones in the Mediterranean waters.
Greece and Egypt protested immediately while the European Council unequivocally condemned
the controversial accords. Meanwhile, the deals apparently escalated a proxy competition
between Turkey's old (Greece) and new (Egypt and the United Arab Emirates) rivals.
With the al-Sarraj handshake, Erdoğan is apparently aiming to:
minimize Turkey's isolation in the Mediterranean, one which has gradually worsened since
2010, following one diplomatic crisis after another with Israel;
counter strategic cooperation between Cyprus, Greece, Egypt and Israel, including joint
diplomatic, energy and military initiatives;
cut into the emerging Cypriot-Greek-Egyptian-Israeli maritime bloc;
push back against Arab (Egyptian and UAE) pressure on al-Sarraj;
fill the European vacuum in Libya; and
emerge as a deal-breaker in the Mediterranean rather than a deal-maker.
All that ambition requires military hardware as well as diplomatic software. Since 2011, a
year after the Mavi Marmara incident ruptured relations with Israel, Turkey has been investing
billions of dollars in naval technologies, in an apparent effort to build up the hardware it
would one day require.
In the eight years since then, Turkey has built
four Ada-class corvettes; two Landing Ship Tank (LST) vessels; eight fast Landing Craft Tank
(LCT) vessels; 16 military patrol ships; two deep-sea rescue ships; one submarine rescue ship;
and four assault boats.
The jewel in the naval treasury box is a $1 billion Landing Platform Dock (LPD), now being
built under license from Spain's Navantia shipyards, to be operational in 2021. The TCG
Anadolu , Turkey's first amphibious assault ship, will carry a battalion-sized unit of
1,200 troops and personnel, eight utility helicopters and three unmanned aerial vehicles; it
also will transport 150 vehicles, including battle tanks. It also may be able to deploy short
takeoff and vertical landing STOVL F-35 fighter jets. Turkey will be the third operator in the
world of this ship type, after Spain and Australia.
Erdoğan's naval ambitions, however, are not limited just to an emerging fleet of
conventional vessels. In 2016, he said
that the LPD program would hopefully be the first step toward producing a "most elite" aircraft
carrier. He also said he "sees it as a major deficiency that we still do not have a nuclear
vessel."
On December 22, Turkey's first Type 214 class submarine, the TCG Piri Reis , hit the seas
with a ceremony attended by Erdoğan. "Today,"
he said , "we gathered here for the docking of Piri Reis . As of 2020, a submarine will go
into service each year. By 2027, all six of our submarines will be at our seas for
service."
Unsurprisingly the docking ceremony reminded Erdoğan of his Libyan gambit: "We will
evaluate every opportunity in land, sea and air. If needed, we will increase military support
in Libya."
Erdoğan seems to think that his best defense in the Mediterranean power game is an
offense. On December 15, Turkish Naval Forces
intercepted an Israeli research ship, the Bat Galim , in Cypriot waters and escorted it
away, as tension over natural resource exploration continued to rise in the region.
On December 16, Turkey dispatched a surveillance and reconnaissance drone to the
Turkish-controlled north of the divided island of Cyprus. A week before the drone deployment,
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said that Ankara could use its
military forces to halt gas drilling in waters off Cyprus that it claims as its own.
Libya is another risky proxy war theater for Turkey. Its deals with the al-Sarraj government
over troop deployment and maritime borders will become null and void if the Libyan civil war,
begun in 2014, ends with Gen. Haftar's victory. The chief of staff of the LNA, Farag
Al-Mahdawi,
announced that his forces would sink any Turkish ship approaching the Libyan coast. "I have
an order; as soon as the Turkish research vessels arrive, I will have a solution. I will sink
them myself," Al-Mahdawi warned, noting that the order was coming from Haftar. On December 21,
Haftar's forces seized
a Grenada-flagged ship with Turkish crew aboard, on the suspicion that it was carrying arms.
The ship was later released.
The European Union is another factor why Erdoğan, once again, is probably betting on
the wrong horse. Technically speaking, Turkey is a candidate for full EU membership, but it is
an open secret that accession talks have not moved an inch during the past several years, and
with no prospects of progress in sight. Making membership prospects even gloomier, EU foreign
ministers in November
agreed on economic sanctions for Ankara for violating Cyprus' maritime economic zone by
drilling off the island.
The Mediterranean chess game leaves Turkey in alliance with the breakaway Turkish Cypriot
statelet and one of the warring factions in Libya, versus a strategic grouping of Greece,
Cyprus, Egypt (and the UAE), Israel, and the other warring Libyan group.
One emerging power in Libya, however, is not a Western state actor. After controlling Syria
in favor of President Bashar al-Assad and establishing permanent military bases inside and off
the coast of the country, Russia has the potential to step into the Libyan theater with a
bigger proxy and direct force, to establish its second permanent Mediterranean military
presence. As in Syria, where divergent interests did not stop Turkey from becoming a
remote-controlled Russian player, Moscow can once again make use of the Turkish card to
undermine Western interests in Libya.
Also as in Syria, Turkey's Islamist agenda will probably fail in Libya, but by the time
Erdoğan understands that, it might be too late to get out of Moscow's orbit.
It can be argued that the state of US infrastructure - declining for literally decades -
is a sign of that.
The United States hasn't seen a major infrastructure package since the Eisenhower
administration. As a result, much of US infrastructure, from highways to waste treatment
facilities and energy grids, has approached the end of its useful life and is in desperate
need of upgrading.
Maintenance already accounts for over 60% of national infrastructure spending, and
total public spending on infrastructure maintenance and operations rose by $23.2 billion
between 2007 and 2017.
John Quiggin 12.29.19 at 10:07 pm @14
<blockquote>
As regards co-authorship, my Ph.D. students and postdocs are often keen to include me on the
theory that a paper with a more senior author will have a better chance of acceptance.
</blockquote>
This is an important point. I understand the difficulties of young researchers. And the fact
that sometimes brilliant papers from them are rejected. Nobody can abolish clan behaviors in
the academy.
I remember that while being a young researcher, I understood that certain journals are out
of my reach even in case my research is superior to the average quality of papers published.
Sometimes publishing oversees helps here, and young researchers should keep this in mind. It
helped me. For many foreign journals, just the fact that you are a foreigner from a prestigious
university is a plus that weights on the acceptance.
In this sense, young researchers from the USA are in a very advantageous position.
Still, I think that in most cases behavior that you mentioned above is somewhat dishonest on
both sides. Also too many cooks spoils the broth. But there is a substantial pressure to
publish a certain number of papers per year. It applies even if you have done nothing
substantial for a year. And here, the temptation to use your students become really strong.
I strictly avoided such publishing, but in retrospect, I think I put my students at a
disadvantage as such behavior was very common and can speed up getting the necessary number of
publications.
But when you are young, you do not understand the "academic kitchen" (which is pretty dirty)
well, and when you are old it's a bit too late ;-).
The take away quote
"
and overnight none other than Deutsche Bank joined the "truther" chorus, when in a report by
the bank's chief economist Torsten Slok, he writes what we pointed out several weeks back,
namely that "since QE4 started in October, a 1% increase in the Fed balance sheet has been
associated with a 1% increase in the S&P500, see chart below." Not that DB has absolutely
no qualms about calling what the Fed is doing QE4 for the simple reason that... it is
QE4.
"
You have to go to the link to see the chart.....
Being almost 100% sure that Israeli cornering East Mediterranean gas reserves was a done
deal
and after Cyprus gerrymandered its EEZ under UNCLOS -- and Greece signing up
as pipeline terminus in Europe -- Trump put this cart before horse -- and sanctioned
Nord Stream. Europe was to get Israeli gas. Then Turkey and Libya declared EZZ,
and pipeline cannot go!
Also. there will be other claimants to reserves -- Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza.
Nice try -- but Israel will not be supplying Germany gas any time soon.
"... "Today I say to Mr. Putin: We will not allow you to undermine American democracy or democracies around the world," Sanders said. "In fact, our goal is to not only strengthen American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe, including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win." ..."
"... And yet, Warren too seems in thrall to the idea that the world order is shaping up to be one in which the white hats (Western democracies) must face off against the black hats (Eurasian authoritarians). Warren says that the "combination of authoritarianism and corrupt capitalism" of Putin's Russia and Xi's China "is a fundamental threat to democracy, both here in the United States and around the world." ..."
"... The Cold War echoes here are as unmistakable as they are worrying. As Princeton and NYU professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen has written, during the first Cold War, a "totalitarian school" of Soviet studies grew up around the idea "that a totalitarian 'quest for absolute power' at home always led to the 'dynamism' in Soviet behavior abroad was a fundamental axiom of cold-war Soviet studies and of American foreign policy." ..."
"... Cold warriors in both parties frequently mistook communism as a monolithic global movement. Neoprogressives are making this mistake today when they gloss over national context, history, and culture in favor of an all-encompassing theory that puts the "authoritarian" nature of the governments they are criticizing at the center of their diagnosis. ..."
"... By citing the threat to Western democracies posed by a global authoritarian axis, the neoprogressives are repeating the same mistake made by liberal interventionists and neoconservatives. They buy into the democratic peace theory, which holds without much evidence that a world order populated by democracies is likely to be a peaceful one because democracies allegedly don't fight wars against one another. ..."
"... George McGovern once observed that U.S. foreign policy "has been based on an obsession with an international Communist conspiracy that existed more in our minds than in reality." So too the current obsession with the global authoritarians. Communism wasn't a global monolith and neither is this. By portraying it as such, neoprogressives are midwifing bad policy. ..."
"... Some of these elected figures, like Trump and Farage, are symptoms of the failure of the neoliberal economic order. Others, like Orban and Kaczyński, are responses to anti-European Union sentiment and the migrant crises that resulted from the Western interventions in Libya and Syria. Many have more to do with conditions and histories specific to their own countries. Targeting them by painting them with the same broad brush is a mistake. ..."
"... "Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these days," writes neoconservative-turned-Hillary Clinton surrogate Robert Kagan, "the one for which we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism." Max Boot also finds cause for concern. Boot, a modern-day reincarnation (minus the pedigree and war record) of the hawkish Cold War-era columnist Joe Alsop, believes that "the rise of populist authoritarianism is perhaps the greatest threat we face as a world right now." ..."
You can hear echoes of progressive realism in the statements of leading progressive
lawmakers such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Ro Khanna. They have put ending
America's support for the Saudi war on Yemen near the top of the progressive foreign policy
agenda. On the stump, Sanders now singles out the military-industrial complex and the runaway
defense budget for criticism. He promises, among other things, that "we will not continue to
spend $700 billion a year on the military." These are welcome developments. Yet since November
of 2016, something else has emerged alongside the antiwar component of progressive foreign
policy that is not so welcome. Let's call it neoprogressive internationalism, or
neoprogressivism for short.
Trump's administration brought with it the Russia scandal. To attack the president and his
administration, critics revived Cold War attitudes. This is now part of the neoprogressive
foreign policy critique. It places an "authoritarian axis" at its center. Now countries ruled
by authoritarians, nationalists, and kleptocrats can and must be checked by an American-led
crusade to make the world safe for progressive values. The problem with this neoprogressive
narrative of a world divided between an authoritarian axis and the liberal West is what it will
lead to: ever spiraling defense budgets, more foreign adventures, more Cold Wars -- and hot
ones too.
Unfortunately, Senators Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have adopted elements of the
neoprogressive program. At a much remarked upon address at Westminster College in Fulton,
Missouri, the site of Churchill's 1946 address, Sanders put forth a vision of a Manichean
world. Instead of a world divided by the "Iron Curtain" of Soviet Communism, Sanders sees a
world divided between right-wing authoritarians and the forces of progress embodied by American
and Western European progressive values.
"Today I say to Mr. Putin: We will not allow you to undermine American democracy or
democracies around the world," Sanders said. "In fact, our goal is to not only strengthen
American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe,
including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to
win."
A year later, Sanders warned that the battle between the West and an "authoritarian axis"
which is "committed to tearing down a post-Second World War global order that they see as
limiting their access to power and wealth." Sanders calls this "a global struggle of enormous
consequence. Nothing less than the future of the -- economically, socially and environmentally
-- is at stake."
Sanders's focus on this authoritarian axis is one that is shared with his intraparty rivals
at the Center for American Progress (a think-tank long funded by some of the least progressive
regimes on the planet), which he has pointedly criticized for smearing progressive Democrats
like himself. CAP issued a report last September about "the threat presented by opportunist
authoritarian regimes" which "urgently requires a rapid response."
The preoccupation with the authoritarian menace is one Sanders and CAP share with prominent
progressive activists who warn about the creeping influence of what some have cynically hyped
as an "authoritarian Internationale."
Cold War Calling
Senator Warren spelled out her foreign policy vision in a speech at American University in
November 2018. Admirably, she criticized Saudi Arabia's savage war on Yemen, the defense
industry, and neoliberal free trade agreements that have beggared the American working and
middle classes.
"Foreign policy," Warren has said, "should not be run exclusively by the Pentagon." In the
second round of the Democratic primary debates, Warren also called for a nuclear "no first use"
policy.
And yet, Warren too seems in thrall to the idea that the world order is shaping up to be
one in which the white hats (Western democracies) must face off against the black hats
(Eurasian authoritarians). Warren says that the "combination of authoritarianism and corrupt
capitalism" of Putin's Russia and Xi's China "is a fundamental threat to democracy, both here
in the United States and around the world."
Warren also sees a rising tide of corrupt authoritarians "from Hungary to Turkey, from the
Philippines to Brazil," where "wealthy elites work together to grow the state's power while the
state works to grow the wealth of those who remain loyal to the leader."
The concern with the emerging authoritarian tide has become a central concern of progressive
writers and thinkers. "Today, around the world," write progressive foreign policy activists
Kate Kinzer and Stephen Miles, "growing authoritarianism and hate are fueled by oligarchies
preying on economic, gender, and racial inequality."
Daniel Nexon, a progressive scholar of international relations, believes that "progressives
must recognize that we are in a moment of fundamental crisis, featuring coordination among
right-wing movements throughout the West and with the Russian government as a sponsor and
supporter."
Likewise, The Nation 's Jeet Heer lays the blame for the rise of global
authoritarianism at the feet of Vladimir Putin, who "seems to be pushing for an international
alt-right, an informal alliance of right-wing parties held together by a shared
xenophobia."
Blithely waving away concerns over sparking a new and more dangerous Cold War between the
world's two nuclear superpowers, Heer advises that "the dovish left shouldn't let Cold War
nightmares prevent them [from] speaking out about it." He concludes: "Leftists have to be ready
to battle [Putinism] in all its forms, at home and abroad."
The Cold War echoes here are as unmistakable as they are worrying. As Princeton and NYU
professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen has written, during the first Cold War, a "totalitarian
school" of Soviet studies grew up around the idea "that a totalitarian 'quest for absolute
power' at home always led to the 'dynamism' in Soviet behavior abroad was a fundamental axiom
of cold-war Soviet studies and of American foreign policy."
Likewise, we are seeing the emergence of an "authoritarian school" which posits that the
internal political dynamics of regimes such as Putin's cause them, ineffably, to follow
revanchist, expansionist foreign policies.
Cold warriors in both parties frequently mistook communism as a monolithic global
movement. Neoprogressives are making this mistake today when they gloss over national context,
history, and culture in favor of an all-encompassing theory that puts the "authoritarian"
nature of the governments they are criticizing at the center of their diagnosis.
By citing the threat to Western democracies posed by a global authoritarian axis, the
neoprogressives are repeating the same mistake made by liberal interventionists and
neoconservatives. They buy into the democratic peace theory, which holds without much evidence
that a world order populated by democracies is likely to be a peaceful one because democracies
allegedly don't fight wars against one another.
Yet as Richard Sakwa, a British scholar of Russia and Eastern Europe, writes, "it is often
assumed that Russia is critical of the West because of its authoritarian character, but it
cannot be taken for granted that a change of regime would automatically make the country align
with the West."
George McGovern once observed that U.S. foreign policy "has been based on an obsession
with an international Communist conspiracy that existed more in our minds than in reality." So
too the current obsession with the global authoritarians. Communism wasn't a global monolith
and neither is this. By portraying it as such, neoprogressives are midwifing bad
policy.
True, some of the economic trends voters in Europe and South America are reacting to are
global, but a diagnosis that links together the rise of Putin and Xi, the elections of Trump in
the U.S., Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, and Kaczyński in Poland with the
right-wing insurgency movements of the Le Pens in France and Farage in the UK makes little
sense.
Some of these elected figures, like Trump and Farage, are symptoms of the failure of the
neoliberal economic order. Others, like Orban and Kaczyński, are responses to
anti-European Union sentiment and the migrant crises that resulted from the Western
interventions in Libya and Syria. Many have more to do with conditions and histories specific
to their own countries. Targeting them by painting them with the same broad brush is a
mistake.
Echoes of Neoconservatism
The progressive foreign policy organization Win Without War includes among its 10 foreign
policy goals "ending economic, racial and gender inequality around the world." The U.S.,
according to WWW, "must safeguard universal human rights to dignity, equality, migration and
refuge."
Is it a noble sentiment? Sure. But it's every bit as unrealistic as the crusade envisioned
by George W. Bush in his second inaugural address, in which he declared, "The survival of
liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best
hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."
We know full well where appeals to "universal values" have taken us in the past. Such
appeals are not reliable guides for progressives if they seek to reverse the tide of unchecked
American intervention abroad. But maybe we should consider whether it's a policy of realism and
restraint that they actually seek. Some progressive thinkers are at least honest enough
to admit as much that it is not. Nexon admits that "abandoning the infrastructure of American
international influence because of its many minuses and abuses will hamstring progressives for
decades to come." In other words, America's hegemonic ambitions aren't in and of themselves
objectionable or self-defeating, as long as we achieve our kind of hegemony. Progressive
values crusades bear more than a passing resemblance to the neoconservative crusades to remake
the world in the American self-image.
"Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these
days," writes neoconservative-turned-Hillary Clinton surrogate Robert Kagan, "the one for which
we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism." Max
Boot also finds cause for concern. Boot, a modern-day reincarnation (minus the pedigree and war
record) of the hawkish Cold War-era columnist Joe Alsop, believes that "the rise of populist
authoritarianism is perhaps the greatest threat we face as a world right now."
Neoprogressivism, like neoconservatism, risks catering to the U.S. establishment's worst
impulses by playing on a belief in American exceptionalism to embark upon yet another global
crusade. This raises some questions, including whether a neoprogressive approach to the crises
in Ukraine, Syria, or Libya would be substantively different from the liberal interventionist
approach of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. Does a neoprogressive foreign policy
organized around the concept of an "authoritarian axis" adequately address the concerns of
voters in the American heartland who disproportionately suffer from the consequences of our
wars and neoliberal economic policies? It was these voters, after all, who won the election for
Trump.
Donald Trump's failure to keep his campaign promise to bring the forever wars to a close
while fashioning a new foreign policy oriented around core U.S. national security interests
provides Democrats with an opportunity. By repeatedly intervening in Syria, keeping troops in
Afghanistan, kowtowing to the Israelis and Saudis, ratcheting up tensions with Venezuela, Iran,
Russia, and China, Trump has ceded the anti-interventionist ground he occupied when he ran for
office. He can no longer claim the mantle of restraint, a position that found support among
six-in-ten Americans in 2016.
Yet with the exception of Tulsi Gabbard, for the most part the Democratic field is offering
voters a foreign policy that amounts to "Trump minus belligerence." A truly progressive foreign
policy must put questions of war and peace front and center. Addressing America's post 9/11
failures, military overextension, grotesquely bloated defense budget, and the ingrained
militarism of our political-media establishment are the proper concerns of a progressive U.S.
foreign policy.
But it is one that would place the welfare of our own citizens above all. As such, what is
urgently required is the long-delayed realization of a peace dividend. The post-Cold War peace
dividend that was envisioned in the early 1990s never materialized. Clinton's secretary of
defense Les Aspin strangled the peace dividend in its crib by keeping the U.S. military on a
footing that would allow it to fight and win two regional wars simultaneously. Unipolar
fantasies of "full spectrum dominance" would come later in the decade.
One might have reasonably expected an effort by the Obama administration to realize a
post-bin Laden peace dividend, but the forever wars dragged on and on. In a New Yorker profile
from earlier this year, Sanders asked the right question: "Do we really need to spend more than
the next ten nations combined on the military, when our infrastructure is collapsing and kids
can't afford to go to college?"
The answer is obvious. And yet, how likely is it that progressives will be able realize
their vision of a more just, more equal American society if we have to mobilize to face a
global authoritarian axis led by Russia and China?
FDR's Good Neighbor Policy
The unipolar world of the first post-Cold War decade is well behind us now. As the world
becomes more and more multipolar, powers like China, Russia, Iran, India, and the U.S. will
find increasing occasion to clash. A peaceful multipolar world requires stability. And
stability requires balance.
In the absence of stability, none of the goods progressives see as desirable can take root.
This world order would put a premium on stability and security rather than any specific set of
values. An ethical, progressive foreign policy is one which understands that great powers have
security interests of their own. "Spheres of influence" are not 19th century anachronisms, but
essential to regional security: in Europe, the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere.
It is a policy that would reject crusades to spread American values the world over. "The
greatest thing America can do for the rest of the world," George Kennan once observed, "is to
make a success of what it is doing here on this continent and to bring itself to a point where
its own internal life is one of harmony, stability and self-assurance."
Progressive realism doesn't call for global crusades that seek to conquer the hearts and
minds of others. It is not bound up in the hoary self-mythology of American Exceptionalism. It
is boring. It puts a premium on the value of human life. It foreswears doing harm so that good
may come. It is not a clarion call in the manner of John F. Kennedy who pledged to "to pay any
price, bear any burden." It does not lend itself to the cheap moralizing of celebrity
presidential speechwriters. In ordinary language, a summation of such a policy would go
something like: "we will bear a reasonable price as long as identifiable U.S. security
interests are at stake."
A policy that seeks to wind down the global war on terror, slash the defense budget, and
shrink our global footprint won't inspire. It will, however, save lives. Such a policy has its
roots in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inaugural address. "In the field of World policy,"
said Roosevelt, "I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor, the neighbor
who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others, the
neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a
World of neighbors."
What came to be known as the "Good Neighbor" policy was further explicated by FDR's
Secretary of State Cordell Hull at the Montevideo Conference in 1933, when he stated that "No
country has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another." Historian
David C. Hendrickson sees this as an example of FDR's principles of "liberal pluralism," which
included "respect for the integrity and importance of other states" and "non-intervention in
the domestic affairs of neighboring states."
These ought to serve as the foundations on which to build a truly progressive foreign
policy. They represent a return to the best traditions of the Democratic Party and would likely
resonate with those very same blocs of voters that made up the New Deal coalition that the
neoliberal iteration of the Democratic Party has largely shunned but will sorely need in order
to unseat Trump. And yet, proponents of a neoprogressive foreign policy seem intent on running
away from a popular policy of realism and restraint on which Trump has failed to deliver.
James W. Carden is contributing writer for foreign affairs at The Nation and a
member of the Board of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.
"... Twitter blamed a computer glitch after President Trump's retweet of a post containing the name alleged whistleblower Eric Ciaramella mysteriously disappeared from his timeline. After 'fixing' the issue and restoring the retweet, the user was simply banned from the platform so that nobody could see the tweet, which quickly went viral. ..."
Twitter blamed a computer glitch after President Trump's retweet of a post containing the name alleged whistleblower Eric Ciaramella
mysteriously disappeared from his timeline. After 'fixing' the issue and restoring the retweet, the user was simply banned from the
platform so that nobody could see the tweet, which quickly went viral.
" Rep. Ratliffe suggested Monday that the "whistleblower" Eric Ciaramella committed perjury by making false statements in his
written forms filed with the ICIG and that Adam Schiff is hiding evidence of Ciaramella's crimes to protect him from criminal investigations,"
read the tweet made by by now-banned @surfermom77, which describes herself as living in California and a "100% Trump supporter."
Ciaramella has been outed in several outlets as the 'anonymous' CIA official whose whistleblower complaint over a July 25 phone call
between Trump and with his Ukrainian counterpart is at the heart of Congressional impeachment proceedings.
Trump retweeted the post around midnight Friday. By Saturday morning, it was no longer visible in his Twitter feed.
When contacted by The Guardian 's Lois Beckett for explanation, Twitter blamed an "outage with one of our systems."
Some people reported earlier today that someone had deleted the alleged-whistleblower's name-retweet from Trump's timeline.
Others of us still see *that tweet* on Trump's timeline. When asked for clarification, Twitter said this:
https://t.co/Rftkg3nbus https://t.co/XREAvvxjhf
By Sunday morning, the tweet had been restored to Trump's timeline - however hours later the user, @Surfermom77, was banned from
the platform .
Running cover for Twitter is the Washington Post , which claims " The account shows some indications of automation , including
an unusually high amount of activity and profile pictures featuring stock images from the internet."
Surfermom77 has displayed some hallmarks of a Twitter bot, an automated account. A recent profile picture on the account, for
instance, is a stock photo of a woman in business attire that is available for use online.
Surfermom77 has also tweeted far more than typical users, more than 170,000 times since the account was activated in 2013.
Surfermom77 has posted, on average, 72 tweets a day, according to Nir Hauser, chief technology officer at VineSight, a technology
firm that tracks online misinformation. -
WaPo
Meanwhile, Trump retweeted another Ciaramella reference on Thursday, after the @TrumpWarRoom responded to whistleblower attorney
Mark Zaid's tweet calling for the resignation of Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) from the Senate Whistleblower Caucus after she made
"hostile" comments - after she tweeted in November that "Vindictive Vindman is the "whistleblower's" handler (a reference to impeachment
witness Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman.
"The watchdog group requested conversations between Ciaramella and special counsel Robert Mueller, former FBI agent Peter Strzok,
former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and former FBI attorney Lisa Page."
The most depressing feature of the current explosion in robot-apocalypse literature is that
it rarely transcends the world of work. Almost every day, news articles appear detailing some
new round of layoffs. In the broader debate, there are apparently only two camps: those who
believe that automation will usher in a world of enriched jobs for all, and those who fear it
will make most of the workforce redundant.
This bifurcation reflects the fact that "working for a living" has been the main occupation
of humankind throughout history. The thought of a cessation of work fills people with dread,
for which the only antidote seems to be the promise of better work. Few have been willing to
take the cheerful view of Bertrand Russell's provocative 1932 essay In Praise of
Idleness . Why is it so difficult for people to accept that the end of necessary labor
could mean barely imaginable opportunities to live, in John Maynard Keynes's words, "wisely,
agreeably, and well"?
The fear of labor-saving technology dates back to the start of the Industrial Revolution,
but two factors in our own time have heightened it. The first is that the new generation of
machines seems poised to replace not only human muscles but also human brains. Owing to
advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, we are said to be entering an era of
thinking robots; and those robots will soon be able to think even better than we do. The worry
is that teaching machines to perform most of the tasks previously carried out by humans will
make most human labor redundant. In that scenario, what will humans do?
The other fear factor is the increasing precariousness of wage labor – though this
concern is seemingly belied by headline statistics suggesting that unemployment is at a
historic low. The problem is that an economy at "full employment" now contains a large penumbra
of what economist Guy Standing calls the "precariat":
under-employed people who work less and for lower pay than they would like. A growing number of
workers, seeming to lack any kind of job (and pay) security, are thus forced to work well below
their ability.
It is natural that one would interpret the onset of precariousness as the first stage in a
broader trend toward workforce redundancy, especially if one pays attention to alarmist
predictions of the next category of "jobs at risk." But this conclusion is premature. The
penetration of robotics into the world of work has not yet been sufficient to explain the rise
of the precariat. So far, "cost cutting" in the West has largely taken the form of offshoring
to the East, where labor is cheaper, rather than replacing humans with machines. But
"onshoring" work that was previously offshored will offer cold comfort to workers if machines
get most of the jobs.
ROBO-RAPTURE
According to the first view – let us call it "job enrichment" – technology will
eventually create more, better human jobs than it destroys, as has always been the case in the
past. Simple, mundane tasks may increasingly be automated, but human labor will then be freed
up for more "interesting" and "creative" cognitive work.
In late 2017, the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) published
Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained , which claimed that as much as 50% of working hours in the
global economy could theoretically be automated; the authors suggested, however, that not more
than 30% actually would be. Further, they estimated that less than 5% of occupations could be
fully automated; but that in 60% of occupations, at least 30% of the required tasks
could be.
In line with the usual mainstream assessment, MGI believes that while there will be no net
loss of jobs in the long run, the "transition may include a period of higher unemployment and
wage adjustments." It all depends, the authors say, on the rate at which displaced workers are
re-employed: a low re-employment rate will lead to a higher medium-term unemployment rate, and
vice versa .
MGI's proposal for massive investment in education to lower the unemployment cost of the
transition is also conventional. The faster the labor reabsorption, the higher the wage growth.
Lower re-employment levels will cause wages to fall, with a greater share of the gains from
automation accruing to capital, not labor. But the authors hasten to add:
"Even if the particulars of historical experience turn out to differ from conditions today,
one lesson seems pertinent: although economies adjust to technological shocks, the transition
period is measured in decades, not years, and the rising prosperity may not be shared by
all."
This assessment is typical, and it has led many to call on governments to invest heavily in
so-called "upskilling" programs. In a
commentary for Project Syndicate , Zia Qureshi of the Brookings
Institution argues that, "with smart, forward-looking policies, we can ensure that the future
of work is a better job." In this view, automation is simply the continuation of the move
toward more, higher-quality jobs that has characterized capitalist growth since the Industrial
Revolution.
History is on the optimists' side. Mechanization has been the durable engine of productivity
and wage growth as well as reductions in working hours, albeit usually with a considerable lag.
Although the Roberts loom cost hundreds of thousands of handloom weavers their jobs in the
nineteenth century, the broader wave of new industrial technologies enabled a much larger
population to be maintained at a higher standard of living.
ROBO-REDUNDANCY
But, according to the second view – call it "job destruction" – this time is
different. The programming of machines to perform ever more complex tasks with ever-increasing
speed, accuracy, precision, and reliability will result in mass unemployment. In Rise of the
Robots , author and entrepreneur Martin Ford addresses the techno-optimists head-on.
"There is a widely held belief – based on historical evidence stretching back at least as
far as the industrial revolution – that while technology may certainly destroy jobs,
businesses, and even entire industries, it will also create entirely new occupations often in
areas that we can't yet imagine." The problem, Ford argues, is that information technology has
now reached the point where it can be considered a true utility, much like electricity.
It stands to reason that the successful new industries that will emerge in the years ahead
will have taken full advantage of this powerful new utility and the distributed machine
intelligence that accompanies it. That means they will rarely – if ever – be highly
labor-intensive. The threat is that as creative destruction unfolds, the "destruction" will
fall primarily on labor-intensive businesses in traditional areas like retail and food
preparation, whereas the "creation" will generate new industries that simply don't employ many
people.
On this view, the economy is heading for a tipping point where job creation will begin to
fall consistently short of what is required to employ the workforce fully. We will soon reach
the stage where the machine-driven destruction of existing human jobs far outpaces the creation
of new human jobs, resulting in inexorably rising mass "technological unemployment."
THE
UPSKILLING MIRAGE
Optimists' response to such concerns is that the workforce simply needs to be trained or
upskilled in order to "race with the machines." Typical of this outlook is the following
headline on a
commentary published by the World Economic Forum: "How new technologies can create huge
numbers of meaningful jobs." According to the author, concerns about "the looming devastation
that self-driving technology will have on the 3.5 million truck drivers in the US" are
"misdirected." Augmented-reality technology, we are told, can create loads of new jobs by
enabling people to work from home. All that will be needed is training of the kind offered by
"Upskill, an augmented reality company in the manufacturing and field services sectors," which
"uses wearable technologies to provide step-by-step instructions to industrial workers."
The author, himself the co-founder of an augmented-reality company, goes on to argue that,
"With the pace of technological progress only accelerating and with increasing specialization
becoming the norm in every industry, reducing the time necessary to retrain workers is pivotal
to maintaining the competitiveness of industrialized economies." There is no mention of the
wages that will be offered to these "upskilled" workers in their "meaningful" new jobs. We are
simply told that they will be relocated to "lower cost areas more in need of job creation."
Only at the very end of the commentary does the author acknowledge that, in fact, "Technology
is a force that has the potential to eliminate entire industries through robotics and
automation, and for that we should be concerned."
The retraining argument should give us pause. In portraying upskilling as the solution to
the labor displacement caused by new technologies, optimists rarely admit that if predictions
about "thinking robots" turn out to be anywhere near true, workers would need to be trained in
technical skills to an extent that is unprecedented in human history.
Moreover, the time it takes to upgrade the skills of the workforce will inevitably exceed
the time it takes to automate the economy. This will be true even if claims about an imminent
deluge of automation are greatly exaggerated. In the interval, there will be under- and
unemployment. In fact, this has already been happening. Although automation is not yet bearing
down on workers to the extent that has been predicted, it has nonetheless pushed more of them
into less-skilled jobs; and its mere possibility may be exerting downward pressure on wages.
There are already signs of the new class structure envisioned by the pessimists: "lovely jobs
at the top, lousy jobs at the bottom."
A more fundamental question is what we mean by upskilling, and what its consequences might
be. Often, heavy emphasis is placed on the importance of better technological education at all
levels of society, as if all people will need to succeed in the future is to be taught how to
write and understand computer code.
As the technology writer James Bridle has shown , this line of argument has a
number of limitations. While encouraging people to take up computer programming might be a good
start, such training offers only a functional understanding of technological systems. It does
not equip people to ask higher-level questions along the lines of, "Where did these systems
come from, who designed them and what for, and which of these intentions still lurk within them
today?" Bridle also points out that arguments for technological education and upskilling are
usually offered in "nakedly pro-market terms," following a simple equation: "the information
economy needs more programmers, and young people need jobs in the future."
THE MISSING
DIMENSION
More to the point, the upskilling discourse totally ignores the possibility that automation
could also allow people simply to work less. The reason for this neglect is twofold: it is
commonly assumed that human wants are insatiable, and that we will thus work ad
infinitum to satisfy them; and it is simply taken for granted that work is the primary
source of meaning in human lives. 1
Historically, neither of these claims holds true. The consumption race is a rather recent
phenomenon, dating no earlier than the late nineteenth century. And the possibility that we
might one day liberate ourselves from the "curse of work" has fascinated thinkers from
Aristotle to Russell. Many visions of Utopia betray a longing for leisure and liberation from
toil. Even today, surveys show that people in most developed countries
would prefer to work less, even in the workaholic United States, and might even accept less pay
if it meant logging fewer hours on the clock.
The deeply economistic nature of the current debate excludes the possibility of a
life beyond work . Yet if we want to meet the challenges of the future, it is not enough to
know how to code, analyze data, and invent algorithms. We need to start thinking seriously and
at a systemic level about the operational logic of consumer capitalism and the possibility of
de-growth.
In this process, we must abandon the false dichotomy between "jobs" and "idleness."
Full employment need not mean full-time employment, and leisure time need not
be spent idly. (Education can play an important role in ensuring that it is not.) Above all,
wealth and income will need to be distributed in such a way that machine-enabled productivity
gains do not accrue disproportionately to a small minority of owners, managers, and
technicians.
At the same time I respectfully disagree. Did not Lenin stated: "One of the
basic principles of dialectics is that there is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is
always concrete ." ?
I think that despite distractions and emotions involved, some posts discussing transgender
topic were quite informative and as such do not contribute to the hijacking of the tread.
They just illuminate a problem with your approach to this subject: it is completely static.
While the whole idea of "tolerance" makes most sense when the society transition from one state
to another and experience the drastic decline of the society cohesion marked by disagreements
over appropriate modes of behavior and conduct. Tolerance toward particular set of behaviors is
always the reference group based. For example, among street gangs stealing from "drunks" and
shoplifting are not considered inappropriate, while stealing from seniors is.
Anomie is the state when the current norms (including legal) do not enjoy consensus. This is
what we see in the USA today with the "identity wedge" as played by neoliberal Dems. It does
affect the larger group solidarity (the major argument for the suppression of the fringe
identity groups in the past)
As
Tamotsu Shibutani pointed out " Social change is not likely to occur without temporary
breakdown of consensus" (Ch 17, p569). In this case the main criteria become whether this
behavior constitutes a danger to the larger group. And famous Sen. John Cornyn "turtle" quote
very aptly illustrates this angle of analysis.
The desire by people to see themselves as a national community – even if many of the
bonds binding them together are fictional – is one of the most powerful forces in the
world
Patrick Cockburn | @indyworld |
Nationalism in different shapes and forms is powerfully transforming the politics of the
British Isles, a development that gathered pace over the last five years and culminated in the
general election this month.
National identities and the relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland are changing
more radically than at any time over the last century. It is worth looking at the British
archipelago as a whole on this issue because of the closely-meshed political relationship of
its constituent nations. Some of these developments are highly visible such as the rise of the
Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) to permanent political dominance in Scotland in the three
general elections since the independence referendum in 2014.
Other changes are important but little commented on, such as the enhanced national
independence and political influence of the Republic of Ireland over the British Isles as a
continuing member of the EU as the UK leaves. Dublin's greater leverage when backed by the
other 26 EU states was repeatedly demonstrated, often to the surprise and dismay of London, in
the course of the negotiations in Brussels over the terms of the British withdrawal.
Northern Ireland saw more nationalist than unionist MPs elected in the general election for
the first time since 1921. This is important because it is a further sign of the political
impact of demographic change whereby Catholics/nationalists become the new majority and the
Protestants/unionists the minority. The contemptuous ease with which Boris Johnson abandoned
his ultra-unionist pledges to the DUP and accepted a customs border in the Irish Sea separating
Northern Ireland from the rest of Britain shows how little loyalty the Conservatives feel
towards the northern unionists and their distinct and abrasive brand of British
nationalism.
These developments affecting four of the main national communities inhabiting the British
Isles – Irish, nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland, Scots – are easy to
track. Welsh nationalism is a lesser force. Much more difficult to trace and explain is the
rise of English nationalism because it is much more inchoate than these other types of
nationalism, has no programme, and is directly represented by no political party – though
the Conservative Party has moved in that direction.
The driving force behind Brexit was always a certain type of English nationalism which did
not lose its power to persuade despite being incoherent and little understood by its critics
and supporters alike. In some respects, it deployed the rhetoric of any national community
seeking self-determination. The famous Brexiteer slogan "take back control" is not that
different in its implications from Sinn Fein – "Ourselves Alone" – though neither
movement would relish the analogy.
The great power of the pro-Brexit movement, never really taken on board by its opponents,
was to blame the very real sense of disempowerment and social grievances felt by a large part
of the English population on Brussels and the EU. This may have been scapegoating on a
grandiose scale, but nationalist movements the world over have targeted some foreign body
abroad or national minority at home as the source of their ills. I asked one former Leave
councillor – one of the few people I met who changed their mind on the issue after the
referendum in 2016 – why people living in her deprived ward held the EU responsible for
their poverty. Her reply cut through many more sophisticated explanations: "I suppose that it
is always easier to blame Johnny Foreigner."
Applying life lessons to the pursuit of national happiness The Tories won't get far once
progressives join forces 22,000 EU nationals have left NHS since Brexit vote, figures show This
crude summary of the motives of many Leave voters has truth in it, but it is a mistake to
caricature English nationalism as simply a toxic blend of xenophobia, racism, imperial
nostalgia and overheated war memories. In the three years since the referendum the very act of
voting for Brexit became part of many people's national identity, a desire to break free,
kicking back against an overmighty bureaucracy and repelling attempts by the beneficiaries of
globalisation to reverse a democratic vote.
The political left in most countries is bad at dealing with nationalism and the pursuit of
self-determination. It sees these as a diversion from identifying and attacking the real
perpetrators of social and economic injustice. It views nationalists as mistakenly or malignly
aiming at the wrong target – usually foreigners – and letting the domestic ones off
the hook.
The desire by people to see themselves as a national community – even if many of the
bonds binding them together are fictional – is one of the most powerful forces in the
world. It can only be ignored at great political cost, as the Labour Party has just found out
to its cost for the fifth time (two referendums and three elections). What Labour should have
done was early on take over the slogan "take back control" and seek to show that they were
better able to deliver this than the Conservatives or the Brexit Party. There is no compelling
reason why achieving such national demands should be a monopoly of the right. But in 2016, 2017
and 2019 Labour made the same mistake of trying to wriggle around Brexit as the prime issue
facing the English nation without taking a firm position, an evasion that discredited it with
both Remainers and Leavers.
Curiously, the political establishment made much the same mistake as Labour in
underestimating and misunderstanding the nature of English nationalism. Up to the financial
crisis of 2008 globalisation had been sold as a beneficial and inevitable historic process.
Nationalism was old hat and national loyalties were supposedly on the wane. To the British
political class, the EU obviously enhanced the political and economic strength of its national
members. As beneficiaries of the status quo, they were blind to the fact that much of the
country had failed to gain from these good things and felt marginalised and forgotten.
The advocates of supra-national organisations since the mediaeval papacy have been making
such arguments and have usually been perplexed why they fail to stick. They fail to understand
the strength of nationalism or religion in providing a sense of communal solidarity, even if it
is based on dreams and illusions, that provides a vehicle for deeply felt needs and grievances.
Arguments based on simple profit and loss usually lose out against such rivals.
Minervo , 1 day ago
Bigger by far are two forces which really do have control over our country -- the
international NATO warmongers but even more so, the international banksters of the finance
industry.
Why no 'leftist' campaign to Take Back Control of our money? Gordon Brown baled out the
banks when they should have gone bankrupt and been nationalised.
Blair is forever tainted with his ill-fated Attack on Iraq. Surely New Liberals or
Democrats or Socialists would want to lock down on that fiasco?
The Nationalism of taking back control could be a leftist project too.
None of the kids wanted toys for Christmas this year, they just wanted cash.
Understandable, but cash as a gift, while practical, always feels impersonal, so I made
special packaging. Went over well pic.twitter.com/urXVCHtDyW
— Donnachaidha O'Chionnaigh (@TwoClawsMedia) December
26, 2019
Tech companies take your privacy seriously, and also use data from inside your home for
cutesy press releases about visits from carolers and people seeking cookie recipes.
https://t.co/o5Lk0G47QL
pic.twitter.com/QX6fvcCFAB
#2 This is known as "the season of giving", but one 65-year-old guy in Colorado decided it
would be more fun to do it
with other people's money : Just after noon on Monday, a 65-year-old man walked into a
downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado bank and stole thousands of dollars before running outside
and tossing the cash up into the air while yelling "Merry Christmas!"
#8 One rapper in Los Angeles decided that the best way to address the problem of
homelessness was to climb on top of a tall building and throw cash down on to the
homeless people living on Skid Row so they could fight over it: The 22-year-old rapper
known as Blueface climbed onboard a black Mercedes SUV in Skid Row before throwing money out of
a bag while dozens of people below scramble to catch the flying cash and pick it up from the
ground. The artist, whose real name is Jonathan Michael Porteris, is known for the Benjamin
Franklin tattoo on his cheek and a handful of hit tracks that reached viral status in recent
years.
BOMBSHELL: CIA Whistleblower Leaked Proof Trump Under "Systematic Illegal" Surveillance
Over Two Years Ago: FBI Sat On It by ZeroPointNow Wed, 03/22/2017 - 22:37 0
SHARES
The same day House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes gave a press conference
disclosing that President Trump had been under "
incidental surveillance ," Attorney and FreedomWatch Chairman, Larry Klayman, sent a letter
to the House Committee on Intelligence imploring them to pursue the claims and evidence
presented under oath at a Washington DC FBI Field Office by his client - CIA / NSA
Whistleblower Dennis Montgomery - who Klayman claims "holds the keys to disproving the false
claims... ...that there is no evidence that the president and his men were wiretapped"
When Montgomery attempted to deliver this information through the appropriate channels two
years ago , the former CIA and NSA contractor wasn't given the time of day:
[W]hen Montgomery came forward as a whistleblower to congressional intelligence committees
and various other congressmen and senators, including Senator Charles Grassley , Chairman of
the Senate Judiciary Committee, who, like Comey, once had a reputation for integrity, he was
"blown off;" no one wanted to even hear what he had to say.
As a result, Montgomery went to attorney and FreedomWatch founder Larry Klayman - who then
approached the FBI:
Under grants of immunity, which I obtained through Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Curtis,
Montgomery produced the hard drives and later was interviewed under oath in a secure room at
the FBI Field Office in the District of Columbia . There he laid out how persons like
then-businessman Donald Trump were illegally spied upon by Clapper, Brennan, and the spy
agencies of the Obama administration.
Montgomery left the NSA and CIA with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of
information , much of which is classified, and sought to come forward legally as a
whistleblower to appropriate government entities, including congressional intelligence
committees, to expose that the spy agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal
surveillance on prominent Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other
justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump , and even yours truly.
Working side by side with Obama's former Director of National Intelligence (DIA), James
Clapper, and Obama's former Director of the CIA, John Brennan, Montgomery witnessed "up close
and personal" this "Orwellian Big Brother" intrusion on privacy , likely for potential
coercion, blackmail or other nefarious purposes.
He even claimed that these spy agencies had manipulated voting in Florida during the 2008
presidential election , which illegal tampering resulted in helping Obama to win the White
House.
Given the fact that the FBI had Montgomery's testimony and evidence for over two years,
Klayman traveled to Washington DC last Thursday to meet with Committee Chairman Devin Nunes in
the hopes that he would ask FBI Director Comey why the FBI hadn't pursued Montgomery's
evidence. When Klayman arrived to speak with Nunes, he was "blown off" and instead shared his
information with committee attorney Allen R. Souza - who Klayman requested in turn brief Nunes
on the situation.
During my meeting with House Intelligence Committee counsel Allen R. Sousa I politely
warned him that if Chairman Nunes, who himself had that same day undercut President Trump by
also claiming that there is no evidence of surveillance by the Obama administration, I would
go public with what would appear to be the House Intelligence Committee's complicity in
keeping the truth from the American people and allowing the FBI to continue its apparent
cover-up of the Montgomery "investigation."
And, that is where it stands today. The big question: will House Intelligence Committee
Chairman Nunes do his job and hold FBI Director Comey's feet to the fire about the Montgomery
investigation?
Klayman has detailed all of this in a
NewsMax article , followed up with an official
letter to Chairman Nunes today, requesting that he question Comey on Montgomery's evidence.
Perhaps this explains Nunes' impromptu press conference today admitting that Trump's team was
under "
Incidental Surveillance " before making his way to the White House to discuss with the
President.
So - we know that evidence exists from a CIA / NSA contractor turned whistleblower,
detailing a massive spy operation on 156 judges, the Supreme Court, and high profile Americans
including Donald Trump. See the letter below:
'Silverstein walked out with close to $5bn in cash'
"So Silverstein got his contract from the Port Authority. He bought the entire Trade
Center on a 100-year lease. He only put down 15 million – with an m – millions of
his own money, along with a hundred million of his partners' and for that he got the Trade
Center for a hundred years," the commentator said.
"And had the Trade Center not been demolished, this would have been the worst real estate
investment in history. But because Silverstein doubled the insurance money from what the Port
Authority had held, and managed to get lucky on September 11, he walked out of this with
close to $5 billion in cash," he pointed out.
"He had negotiated it with the insurance company to give him the cash settlement
beforehand. And then he also claimed a double indemnity, that is he wanted to double the
money because he said there were two separate and unrelated terrorist attacks, namely the two
alleged airplanes," the researcher said.
"So he made a tremendous amount of money out of this. And the insurance company lost -- or
some insurance companies lost. The question is which insurance companies lost billions of
dollars to Larry Silverstein, Lewis Eisenberg and the deep state 9/11 insurance fraud crime,
which of course was also done for geopolitical reasons," he observed.
"It's very interesting. I think the important thing that people need to know about this is
why it's important, why there could be anything important in these insurance companies'
documents," Dr. Barrett said.
"So we need to go back to 2001 when the World Trade Center complex and especially the two
Towers were creating terrible problems for the Port Authority which is the city government
agency that owned these buildings," he added.
" The Twin Towers were riddled with asbestos fireproofing , which was illegal, and they
were under court order issued in January or early 2001 to remove the asbestos from the
Towers. This would have cost billions, perhaps double-digit billions of dollars –
economically a non-starter," he stated.
Larry Silverstein: WTC 7 "Pull It" from 2002 Interview
shhhhh... Larry PULLED the biggest INSURANCE SCAM MAYBE EVER?
...and it only cost 2,998 lives on 9/11, 7 Trillion in future generations debt spending
now lost due to an endless war on terror that can never be won... AS INTENDED. Our soldiers
and military were lied into mass murder... now presently over 22 Trillion in debt from the
STOLEN American treasure chest as (22 TRILLION NatDebt) and the utter destruction of millions
of lives murdered and families destroyed unaccountable.
Puh Puh Puh Pullit Larry! The single greatest insurance fraudster maybe ever to boot
Larry! Wow... what a title!
A real great guy? Ask Trump... he'll tell you all about his Zio-buddies he works for..
Sheldon.... Larry is one of them! Or... is this the case of keeping your friends close, and
your enemies closer? I'm thinking "the CLOSER is in the WH has been keeping the real enemies
VERY CLOSE". Let the chips fall where they may Mr. President. You know who did this, letem
swing in the wind sir.
THE MISSING TRILLIONS?
"No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made
by law; and a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money
shall be published from time to time." ~ Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, U.S.
Constitution
$21 Trillion dollars is missing from the US government. That is $65,000 per person - as
much as the national debt!
What's going on? Where is the money? How could this happen? How much has really gone
missing? What would happen if a corporation failed to pass an audit like this? Or a
taxpayer?
This means the Fed and their member banks are transacting government money outside the
law. So are the corporate contractors that run the payment systems. So are the Wall Street
firms who are selling government securities without full disclosure. Would your banks
continue to handle your bank account if you behaved like this? Would your investors continue
to buy your securities if you behaved like this? Would your accountant be silent?
This is the reason that there is such a strong push to change or tear up the US
Constitution. This is why members of the establishment say it is "old," "outdated!" This is
why there is such a push for gun control. Don't buy it! We can use the Constitution to get
our money and our government back. It is time to enforce the US Constitution.
The Solari Report has been covering the missing money since 2000 when Catherine Austin
Fitts began to warn Americans and global investors about mortgage fraud at the US Department
of Housing and Development (HUD), the engineering of the housing bubble that lead to
trillions more dollars in bailouts and funds missing from the US government starting in
fiscal 1998.
The mystery plane that everyone witnessed hovering at high altitude over WTC/NYC was this
plane. We were able to verify that this was no question the operational command post used to
direct the 9/11 Operation day of.
The Boeing E-4 Advanced Airborne Command Post, with the project name "Nightwatch", is a
strategic command and control military aircraft modified from Boeing 747-200 and operated by
the United States Air Force. The E-4B serves as the "National Airborne Operations Center" or
"NAOC" and is a key component of the National Military Command System for the President, the
Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In case of national emergency or
destruction of ground command and control centers, the aircraft provides a highly survivable
command, control, and communications center to direct U.S. forces, execute emergency war
orders, and coordinate actions by civil authorities.
As for the aircraft wreckage in Shanksville and the Pentagon, the simple answer is that
there was no plane crash in either location. All 100% manufactured.
THIS IS YOUR PENTAGON AIRCRAFT = AGM-86B Cruise Missile
I've seen actual stills of the Pentagon under 2 minutes after the impact of the cruise
missile attack. The Pentagon Staff was immediately disbursed from the DOD PR/Press core who
were dragging all sorts of debris out on to the lawn in order to stage the event.
Photo-ops!
What was the target of the Pentagon and who were the people to be disposed of? Why
naturally those who were on to the missing, stolen, THEN 2.5 Trillion Rumsfeld alerted
everyone to the day before on September 10th. 2001.
(ONI) Pentagon -DIRECT HIT and the office STAFF and the bean counters that were all
murdered that day of whom were directly targeted on 9/11 for uncovering the goings on within
the PNAC crowd, Bushes, Israel... they had it nailed.
The facts that many of you know of Israel's direct involvement of 9/11 and the operation
which also included the accounting aspects of the missing money that the ONI had uncovered
were all part of the disposal of those who were fighting the deep state even then.
REMEMBER PEOPLE - FOLLOW THE MONEY FOLLOW THE MONEY FOLLOW THE MONEY - Simple as that.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the collective net worth of the 500
wealthiest people on the planet soared by $1.2 trillion in 12 months, totaling $5.9
trillion.
Billionaires in the US alone added $500bn to their wealth, with Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg increasing his wealth by $27.3bn while Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates adding
$22.7bn.
As Trump once said, his government is the best time ever to fullfill the American
Dream...
--//--
@ Posted by: migueljose | Dec 29 2019 14:44 utc | 85
Most people here in this blog seem to be from First World countries, so it's important to
make this observation about the Latin American middle classes.
Latin American middle classes have a different societal and historical origin from the
First World middle classes. Instead of being highly specialized, highly skilled workers, the
middle classes from Latin America (or any other Third World country, for that matter) come
not from high education, but from the oligarchic State apparatus.
That's because the nation-State formation in Latin America was very different from the
nation-State formation of the USA, Canada or Western Europe. They became independent through
their oligarchies, mainly through negotiations from the top. As a result, what happened in
Latin America was simply a legal transformation of the colonial machine into an independent
nation-State machine.
As a result, the middle classes in Latin America are not doctors, engineers,
scientists, CEOs etc. etc., but judges, politicians, high officers of the government,
descendents of the old local oligarchies etc. etc. They are intrinsically connected and
dependent on the State to survive as middle classes.
This results in an extremely reactionary and parasitic middle class. They act as
legitimate shock troops of the bourgeoisie.
@William Gruff #40
The real world usage of AI, to date, is primarily replacing the rank and file of human
experience.
Where before you would have individuals who have attained expertise in an area, and who would
be paid to exercise it, now AI can learn from the extant work and repeat it.
The problem, though, is that AI is eminently vulnerable to attack. In particular - if the
area involves change, which most do, then the AI must be periodically retrained to take into
account the differences. Being fundamentally stupid, AI literally cannot integrate new data
on top of old but must start from scratch.
I don't have the link, but I did see an excellent example: a cat vs. AI.
While a cat can't play chess, the cat can walk, can recognize objects visually, can
communicate even without a vocal cord, can interact with its environment and even learn new
behaviors.
In this example, you can see one of the fundamental differences between functional organisms
and AI: AI can be trained to perform extremely well, but it requires very narrow focus.
IBM spend years and literally tens of thousands of engineering hours to create the AI that
could beat Jeapordy champions - but that particular creation is still largely useless for
anything else. IBM is desperately attempting to monetize that investment through its Think
Build Grow program - think AWS for AI. I saw a demo - it was particularly interesting because
this AI program ingests some 3 million English language web articles; IBM showed its contents
via a very cool looking wrap around display room in its Think Build Grow promotion
campaign.
What was really amusing was a couple of things:
1) the fact that the data was already corrupt: this demo was about 2 months ago - and there
were spikes of "data" coming from Ecuador and the tip of South America. Ecuador doesn't speak
English. I don't even know if there are any English web or print publications there. But I'd
bet large sums of money that the (English) Twitter campaign being run on behalf of the coup
was responsible for this spike.
2) Among the top 30 topics was Donald Trump. Given the type of audience you would expect
for this subject, it was enormously embarrassing that Trump coverage was assessed as net
positive - so much so that the IBM representative dived into the data to ascertain why the AI
had a net positive rating (the program also does sentiment analysis). It turns out that a
couple of articles which were clearly extremely peripheral to Trump, but which did mention
his name, were the cause. The net positive rating was from this handful of articles even
though the relationship was very weak and there were far fewer net "positive" vs. negative
articles shown in the first couple passes of source articles (again, IBM's sentiment analysis
- not a human's).
I have other examples: SF is home to a host of self-driving testing initiatives. Uber had
a lot about 4 blocks from where I live, for months, where they based their self driving cars
out of (since moved). The self-driving delivery robots (sidewalk) - I've seen them tested
here as well.
Some examples of how they fail: I was riding a bus, which was stopped at an intersection
behind a Drive test vehicle at a red light(Drive is nVidia's self driving). This intersection
is somewhat unusual: there are 5 entrances/exits to this intersection, so the traffic light
sequence and the driving action is definitely atypical.
The light turns green, the Drive car wants to turn immediately left (as opposed to 2nd
left, as opposed to straight or right). It accelerates into the intersection and starts
turning; literally halfway into the intersection, it slams on its brakes. The bus, which was
accelerating behind it in order to go straight, is forced to also slam on its brakes. There
was no incoming car - because of the complex left turn setup, the street the Drive car and
bus were on, is the only one that is allowed to traverse when that light is green (initially.
After a 30 second? pause, the opposite "straight" street is allowed to drive).
Why did the Drive car slam on its brakes in the middle of the intersection? No way to know
for sure, but I would bet money that the sensors saw the cars waiting at the 2nd left street
and thought it was going the wrong way. Note this is just a few months ago.
There are many other examples of AI being fundamentally brittle: Google's first version of
human recognition via machine vision classified black people as gorillas:
Google Photos fail
A project at MIT inserted code into AI machine vision programs to show what these were
actually seeing when recognizing objects; it turns out that what the AIs were recognizing
were radically different from reality. For example, while the algo could recognize a
dumbbell, it turns out that the reference image that the algo used was a dumbbell plus an
arm. Because all of the training photos for a dumbbell included an arm...
This fundamental lack of basic concepts, a coherent worldview or any other type of rooting
in reality is why AI is also pathetically easy to fool. This research showed that the top of
the line machine vision for self driving could be tricked into recognizing stop signs as
speed limit signs Confusing self driving
cars
To be clear, fundamentally it doesn't matter for most applications if the AI is "close
enough". If a company can replace 90% of its expensive, older workers or first world, English
speaking workers with an AI - even if the AI is working only 75% of the time, it is still a
huge win. For example: I was told by a person selling chatbots to Sprint that 90% of Sprint's
customer inquiries were one of 10 questions...
And lastly: are robots/AI taking jobs? Certainly it is true anecdotally, but the overall
economic statistics aren't showing this. In particular, if AI was really taking jobs - then
we should be seeing productivity numbers increase more than in the past. But this isn't
happening:
Productivity for the past 30 years
Note in the graph that productivity was increasing much more up until 2010 - when it leveled
off.
Dean Baker has written about this extensively - it is absolutely clear that it is outsourced
of manufacturing jobs which is why US incomes have been stagnant for decades.
Wells Fargo, Citigroup, PNC Financial Service Group, and CIT Group accumulated hundreds of
thousands of commodity hauling railcars in North America over the last decade. These banks
believed railcars carrying coal, grain, and other commodities were going to be highly
profitable but have recently turned out to be a major
headache as many cars are now in storage because of new regulations and demand woes brought
on by fluctuating commodity markets.
David Nahass, president of Railroad Financial Corp., which provides advisory services to
railroad firms, told
The Wall Street Journa l that "the industry is suffering, there are no two ways about it.
Lease rates are down, and there's not a source of hope about when it will start to
improve."
The Journal, citing the Association of American Railroads (AAR), said about 400,000 railcars
currently sit in storage with no use at all, and many are bank-owned.
Alligator Ed
on Wed, 12/25/2019 - 11:02pm After bravely contesting a nomination she knows she cannot
win, Tulsi Gabbard has and continues to exhibit a tenacious adherence to achievement of
purpose. What is that purpose? I believe it is evident if you only let your eyes see and your
ears hear. Listen to what she says. Looks at what she does.
What this does is obvious. However, please forgive me if I proceed to explain the meaning.
People see what apparently is her home milieu. I've been to Filipino homes for dinner as many
of my nurse friends were Filipino. Tulsi is so human. Despite Hindu belief, she is respectful
to the presence and perhaps the essence of Jesus, and does not sound pandering or
hypocritical.
Getting to know Tulsi at the beginning of her hoped-for (by me) political ascendancy. Get in
on almost the ground floor of what will become an extremely powerful force in future American
life.
Why? What's the hurry?
The more support and the earlier Tulsi receives it propel the campaign. That's what momentum
means: a self-generating growing strength.
One doesn't have to be a Tulsi supporter to hopefully receive some ideas which may not have
occurred to you. This essay does not concern any specific Gabbard policy. What I write here is
what I perceive of her character and thus her selected path. Mind-reading, perhaps. Arm-chair
speculation, possibly.
Tulsi has completed phase 2A in her career. The little that I know of her early life,
especially politically (such as how she voted in HI state legislature) limits a deep
understanding which such knowledge would provide. As the tree is bent, etc.
Phase 1A: youth, formative years, military
Phase 1B: state legislature
Phase 1C: Congress
Phase 2B and possibly subsequent: interim between Congress and Presidential campaigning with
realistic chance of victory.
We are in Phase 2B. Tulsi, as I wrote in another essay, is letting the tainted shroud of
Democrat corruption fall off her shoulders without any effort of her own. The Democrat party is
eating itself alive. It is all things to all people at once. That is a philosophy incapable of
satisfaction.
Omni Democraticorundum in tres partes est (pardon the reference to the opening of Caesar's
Gallic Wars, with liberal substitution by me).
The Dems trifurcate and the division will be neither pleasant nor reconcilable. Tribalism
will be reborn after Trump crushes whomever in 2020.
Tribe one: urban/techno/überkinden.
Tribe two: leftward bound to a place where no politician has ever ventured. Not socialism.
Not Communism. We could call it Fantasy Land, although I fear Disney owns that name.
Tribe three: progressive realists. By using such positive wording, you will correctly
suspect my bias as to which Tribe I belong to.
Once again, policy will not be discussed. Only strategy and reality. Can't have good
strategy without a good grasp of reality. This is why Establidems are bereft of thematic
variability. For the past 3.3 years, they have been singing from a hymn book containing but one
song. You know the title. Orange Man Bad. Yeah, that's it. If they don't like that
title, we establidems have another song for ya. It's called Orange Man Bad. Like that
one, huh? Wazzat, ya didn't like the song the first time. Hey, we thought the song would grown
on you.
Them Dems, noses up, can't see the sidewalk. Oops. Stepped in something there, huh? Oh, yeah
like the Impeachment.
But I digress: The latter part of Phase 2B is not clear. Tulsi will continue to accept small
donor contributions, even after not obtaining the nomination next year. Public appearances will
be important but should be low key with little press attention. Press attention is something
however that won't be available when most desirable. What else Tulsi will do may be to form a
nucleus of like-minded activists, thinkers, and other supporters to promote an agenda for a
more liberal, tolerant society.
If Sanders' candidacy continues to be taken seriously, he will eventually be subjected to
the scrutiny that Warren and Biden have faced for prolonged stretches. That includes an
examination of his electability. "That conversation has never worked well for anyone,"
Pfeiffer said.
What a bunch of hypocritical horseshit. Bernie not getting scrutiny? In 2016, when not
being derided for this, that or the other, Bernie was always scrutinized. There are only two
things voters have learned since the DNC 2016 convention:
1. Bernie had a heart attack
2. Bernie supported H. Rodent Clinton in the general election.
. . . and to the much noted "Bernie blackout" up until now this time around.
It's gotten to the point given the polls and the first primary in being held in about a
month where TPTB in conjunction with the MSM can no longer afford to turn a blind eye towards
Bernie. It's gonna get really nasty.
The most recent tropes on the twitters, probably in response to Brock talking point memos,
have been pushing Bernie as an anti-Semite and him purportedly triggering rape survivors. Of
course it's horsehit but it's the propagandistic method of the Big Lie.
I'm genuinely curious. How will you react if Tulsi endorses the Dem nominee and it ain't
Bernie? Bernie's endorsement of she-who-shall-not-be-named in 2016 seems to have pretty much
completely soured him to you. Endorsing Biden better? Or at least acceptable? Not for me.
Bernie doing so in 2016 I could understand and forgive. But this is my last go round absent a
Bernie miracle.
If Sanders' candidacy continues to be taken seriously, he will eventually be
subjected to the scrutiny that Warren and Biden have faced for prolonged stretches.
That includes an examination of his electability. "That conversation has never worked
well for anyone," Pfeiffer said.
What a bunch of hypocritical horseshit. Bernie not getting scrutiny? In 2016, when not
being derided for this, that or the other, Bernie was always scrutinized. There are only
two things voters have learned since the DNC 2016 convention:
1. Bernie had a heart attack
2. Bernie supported H. Rodent Clinton in the general election.
@Wally
She might back Yang--who won't get nominated. But I hope she doesn't do anything more than a
neutral statement, somewhat to the effect that "We must defeat Donald Trump", then not
campaign otherwise.
. . . and to the much noted "Bernie blackout" up until now this time around.
It's gotten to the point given the polls and the first primary in being held in about
a month where TPTB in conjunction with the MSM can no longer afford to turn a blind eye
towards Bernie. It's gonna get really nasty.
The most recent tropes on the twitters, probably in response to Brock talking point
memos, have been pushing Bernie as an anti-Semite and him purportedly triggering rape
survivors. Of course it's horsehit but it's the propagandistic method of the Big Lie.
I'm genuinely curious. How will you react if Tulsi endorses the Dem nominee and it
ain't Bernie? Bernie's endorsement of she-who-shall-not-be-named in 2016 seems to have
pretty much completely soured him to you. Endorsing Biden better? Or at least acceptable?
Not for me. Bernie doing so in 2016 I could understand and forgive. But this is my last
go round absent a Bernie miracle.
. . . to campaign in support of their candidacies.
Maybe Biden will accept her support. I've still never been able to figure why she never
and probably still won't take any shots at his warmongering and otherwise cruddy record
regarding domestic affairs.
#2.1.1.1.1 She might
back Yang--who won't get nominated. But I hope she doesn't do anything more than a
neutral statement, somewhat to the effect that "We must defeat Donald Trump", then not
campaign otherwise.
. . . to campaign in support of their candidacies.
Maybe Biden will accept her support. I've still never been able to figure why she
never and probably still won't take any shots at his warmongering and otherwise cruddy
record regarding domestic affairs.
@Alligator
Ed@Alligator
Ed be unfamiliar with the neutral position. Though I wonder if she would feel
comfortable dipping into that well again given how much grief she got the last time.
Of course, if she again puts it in Neutral, and doesn't support the D nominee (anyone but
Bloomberg), she will be finished as a Dem pol. She might as well go off and start a Neutral
Party.
#2.1.1.1.1 She might
back Yang--who won't get nominated. But I hope she doesn't do anything more than a
neutral statement, somewhat to the effect that "We must defeat Donald Trump", then not
campaign otherwise.
@wokkamile
Her dismissal papers will be submitted to her after she is barred entry into the DNC
convention, regardless of how many delegates she may have won.
#2.1.1.1.1.1
#2.1.1.1.1.1 be unfamiliar with the neutral position. Though I wonder if she would
feel comfortable dipping into that well again given how much grief she got the last
time.
Of course, if she again puts it in Neutral, and doesn't support the D nominee (anyone
but Bloomberg), she will be finished as a Dem pol. She might as well go off and start a
Neutral Party.
Don't forget that 15% state threshold for eligibility to be awarded delegates.
#2.1.1.1.1.1.2 Her
dismissal papers will be submitted to her after she is barred entry into the DNC
convention, regardless of how many delegates she may have won.
I will be surprised if Tulsi gets so much as one delegate.
More than a few knowledgeable people think he has a very good shot of winning California.
I am less optimistic about NYS but I think he will do well enough to get a good number of
delegates especially if he does well in the earlier primaries (NYS comes April 28).
I don't feel solidly about making any kind of predictions at this point but given the
nature of the Democratic Party, I don't see it as falling into oblivion anytime soon or in
our lifetimes.
As far as Bernie goes, I am not optimistic but I still have some hope. I still fervantly
believe that his candidacy is the best chance we will have in our lifetimes of bringing about
any substantial change -- and if he and his critical mass of supporters can't pull it off
this time around, we're all phluckled big time, even alligators, in terms of combating
climate change and putting a kabosh on endless wars. I wish you good future luck with Tulsi
though. I just don't see it. But I've been wrong on more than one occasion in my life.
The Deplorables are ascending in America, with Trump, in Britain with Brexit, in Hong Kong,
in much of Europe, in Latin America, in Iran.
...The Mandate of Heaven has been removed from the elitist establishment. It is passing to
the Deplorables.
The Deplorables are ascending in America, with Trump, in Britain with Brexit, in Hong Kong,
in much of Europe, in Latin America, in Iran. Deplorables are the antidote to arrogant
globalists.
Deplorables everywhere say "from now on we will make our own decisions."
What is it with
the Deplorables? What gives them such power?
Three things, I believe, are elevating them.
Deplorables are pragmatic . They are not wedded to any extreme ideology. Deplorables will
go with anything that works. It is no wonder that the Deplorables began in America. For, as
Americans we inherit the pragmatism of our pioneering ancestors.
The article incorrectly lumps the astro-turfed Hong Kong protests in with the "Deplorable"
populist movements in the USA and western Europe.
The Hong Kong protests are being backed by Soros and the Davos globalist elites as well
the the CIA, MIC, and the DC Uniparty. This same bunch of Swamp scum are enemies of the
"Deplorables".
More pure American establishment propaganda as if the globalist movement is essentially a
creature of the socialists, government bureaucracies, and the Asian block. The truth is that
it is a creature mainly of the Rothschild banking cartel and with the support of most Western
based multi-nationals, which have utilized the Rothschild & Soros backed international
socialists, the Western mainstream media, most Western governments, plus the Catholic Church
hierarchy, in order to bring about a world government. The Rothschild wet dream is control of
world finances just like they control those in the West, and their stated intentions are for
a One-World Bank with a one-world currency. However, the cartel cannot do that without a
world government with real enforcement powers for trade and protection with their world
currency. The multinonals mainly want borderless nations for freer access to resources and
markets.
Trump has been used to whump up US stature and ultimately will be seen as much an
instrument of the globalist cause as was Obama. Perhaps he was put in the game by his backers
to secure a higher return on the US dollar when they are cashed in for the proposed one-world
currency, and by the Zionists to secure more turf for Israel. Israel is getting very itchy
with the old trigger finger and we await in the New Year another false flag at least on the
scale of 9/11. It will likely have to involve a US city.
As we know, the term 'deplorables' came from Hillary in the last US presidential election
and was applied to people who amplified "hateful views and voices" about her, but later the
term was used to characterize mainly Trump supporters. The Hong Kong protesters as not
"deplorables" because their cause in not for Trump or for the US. It is for their own liberty
against the communist Chinese government usurping their basic legal and local rights, which
Trump could care less about. Aslo, he is not a populist. He is an elitist and he is totally
controlled by elitists with more money and power than even he every dreamed of.
Left or right, Democrat or Republican, the puppet masters are the same and run the show.
They are all global elites using their money and power to swing the public audiences left and
right with every pull at the strings of their dummy politicians. What they fear the most, is
the people in the middle uniting without their money or the media and taking control of their
lives and their nations.
(Translation of the article's title: Bellum omnium contra omnes and the Car Wash
Operation: the Brazilian crisis and cpt. Jair Bolsonaro's victory )
This articles indicates that what happened in Brazil was the disintegration of its State,
typical of Third World nations in the neocolonialist period. Another important factor the
article highlights is that this counter-revolution was spearheaded by the Brazilian middle
class, and not the capitalist class. This resulted in a chaotic counter-revolution where
short-term individual interests of the middle upper class members (mainly from the judiciary
power) predominate. The exact same modus operandi occured in Bolivia.
If this pattern repeats elsewhere in the Third World, then we would be witnessing a new
tactic chosen by the USA on its color revolutions in its backyard: use well-positioned middle
class members to act as a semi-military harmost, in order to fight on two fronts at the same
time - to destroy the bourgeoisie that's on the way of American interests while guaranteeing
the supression of working class uprisings.
That the USA is having to resort to the middle classes of the Third World countries to
quell revolts and guarantee anti-working class structural reforms is very revealing: it is a
clear sign of desperation by Washington, a sign that it is not being able to keep the
comprador elites of Latin American happy anymore.
This
site regularly discusses the rise of neoliberalism and its consequences, such as rising
inequality and lower labor bargaining rights. But it's also important to understand that these
changes were not organic but were the result of a well-financed campaign to change the values
of judges and society at large to be more business-friendly. But the sacrifice of fair dealing
as a bedrock business and social principle has had large costs.
We've pointed out how lower trust has increased contracting costs: things that use to be
done on a handshake or a simple letter agreement are now elaborately papered up. The fact that
job candidates will now engage in ghosting, simply stopping to communicate with a recruiter
rather than giving a ritually minimalistic sign off, is a testament to how impersonal hiring is
now perceived to be, as well as often-abused workers engaging in some power tit for tat when
they can.
But on a higher level, the idea of fair play was about self-regulation of conduct. Most
people want to see themselves as morally upright, even if some have to go through awfully
complicated rationalizations to believe that. But when most individuals lived in fairly stable
social and business communities, they had reason to be concerned that bad conduct might catch
up with them. It even happens to a small degree now.
Greg Lippmann, patient zero of toxic CDOs at Deutsche Bank, was unable to get his kids into
fancy Manhattan private schools because his reputation preceded him. But the case examples for
decades have gone overwhelmingly the other way. My belief is that a watershed event was the
ability of Wall Street renegade, and later convicted felon Mike Milken, to rehabilitate himself
spoke volumes as to the new normal of money trumping propriety.
Another aspect of the decline in the importance of fair dealing is the notion of the
obligations of power, that individuals in a position of authority have a duty to
The abandonment of lofty-sounding principles like being fair has other costs. We've
written about the concept of obliquity, how in complex systems, it's not possible to chart a
simple path though them because it's impossible to understand it well enough to begin to do so.
John Kay, who
has made a study of the issue and eventually wrote a book about it , pointed out as an
illustration that studies of similarly-sized companies in the same industry showed that ones
that adopted nobler objectives did better in financial terms than ones that focused on
maximizing shareholder value.
Our Brexit regulars wound up talking about these issues as part of a UK election post
mortem. Hoisted from e-mail. First from David:
Around the time of the cold dawn of Friday 13 December, I began to ask myself why the
whole grisly Brexit business had turned out so differently to what I, and many others, had
expected. Now it's true that politics is unpredictable, but in 2015, any satirist worthy of
their name would surely not have dared to imagine a sequence of events so bizarre as that
which actually happened. And of course we can all be wrong, but I was basing my judgements
not only on a lifetime of watching politicians at play, but also on the well-understood
general principles of how politics, and especially international politics, operates.
The conclusion I came to involves conceding that, yes, politics is unpredictable, yes we
all make wrong calls from time to time, but there's something more profound than that. Simply
put, the traditional rules and procedures of British politics have stopped applying. It's not
now possible to count on the British system for planning, forethought, rationality, strategy,
tactical sense, political sense, common sense or any other kind of sense.
Consider. Cameron's referendum promise was an error of judgement, but it could have been
handled very differently even so. I'd assumed that there would be some kind of threshold (55%
perhaps), and some provision for a later stage of reflection and time-wasting.
I assumed that the government would be wary of the possible result, and try to
de-dramatise the referendum campaign.
I assumed that Remain would do a reasonably competent job, underlining the positive
benefits of EU membership.
I assumed that the result, if it was "leave" would be the beginning of a long process of
reflection and discussion. A Royal Commission, or something, would be set up, with several
years to work out what kind of future relationship there should be with the EU. Bits of the
UK most affected (agriculture for example) would be consulted in depth. Discreet soundings
would be made throughout Europe to see what our partners might accept. Only after all this
was done would it be time to press the Art 50 button.
At that point, I assumed, the UK would be well prepared and, in the traditional manner,
have working papers and draft treaty language to propose as soon as the negotiations started.
All aspects (including NI) would have been at least thought of.
I assumed that the Cabinet would have agreed a fairly detailed set of objectives and
negotiating guidelines to give to the UK delegation, fine-tuned in the light of first
reactions from partners.
I assumed that the Cabinet would have agreed fallback positions and some idea of what the
Tories, and Parliament, would accept.
Literally none of this was true.
Now we're not talking rocket-science here. Yes, the UK system was once pretty Rolls-Royce,
but the kind of list I've given above would have seemed obvious to any middle-level
functionary of any medium-sized country. Actually achieving all of it is not necessarily
easy, but at least you can make a serious attempt: there are important stakes involved.
So what does this imply for the future?
Well, things are getting worse, not better. The Cabinet hasn't even begun to think yet
about the future relationship. Some of them probably think Brexit is all over. I don't think
there's any agreement even about the vaguest outlines of this future relationship, which
means that it could be months before any political objectives emerge, if they ever do.
Which is to say that we are in for another year of Keystone Cops diplomacy, with the
stakes if anything even greater.
From Clive:
Your thought-process sounds like my trains of thought. And when I think those sorts of
thoughts, I think that I'm a remnant or a bygone era. Which I am.
What disappeared from that world was playing fair. Everyone played fair, or, at least,
playing fair was a bedrock than you could drift away from, but, sooner or later, you fell
back on it.
There will be a lot of casualties until our societies get to the stage where they can
rediscover fairness. I bought a book from a second hand bookstore about the founding of the
EEC, from 1978 I think the copyright said it was. When I read it, it's like it was written by
some long-since vanished ancient civilisation. There were honourable intentions, strategies
to deliver them, honest evaluations of emerging problems and, above all, a shared shouldering
of responsibility to resolve them equitably. There was a sense of pride which leaps off the
pages not at what had been achieved, but at what the prevailing culture intended to achieve.
The book went on about the European ideal -- and didn't think it was in any danger of
naivety.
That world has vanished -- and it's not coming back any time soon.
Brexit was a reaction to that. We can't fix it, think a majority of the U.K. population,
and we're not even going to try. This is why Leave has progressed the way it has. The last
thing the Leave majority (or maybe the smidge over 50% who think Leave is the best option)
want to do is try to return to the failed common-cause based solutions. Johnson has no
intention whatsoever of anything other than the lightest of lightweight FTAs -- or even no
FTA. Anything more would be an anathema to the Thatcher-esque approach the Conservatives have
on remaking UK society by severing all EU ties. This isn't really Thatcherism -- a common
misconception. It's the sort of response which Thatcher would have devised, had she been
placed in the same position, so is easily confused.
So this isn't some unplanned, accidental stumbling along to an unexpected surprise
conclusion. It is, rather, a laser like focus on an intended destination.
Anyone expecting some great effort or thought-process to be applied by the U.K. to
salvaging a relationship with the EU will be disappointed. In effect, they'd be asking for
the U.K. to spend time and resources saving something that isn't, in the U.K.'s prevailing
worldview, worth saving. The EU has been nothing but a bother, so the thinking goes, what's
the point in trying to flog the dead horse that is the European ideal? What did it ever do
for us, anyway..?
Brexit is just a here's-one-we-made-earlier example of a long-term global trend. If
humanism -- or fairness as I reduced it to earlier -- makes a comeback, it might all be
fixable. In the meantime, prepare for an increasingly atomised, separatist world.
Vlade's response:
I'd like to agree with you. Except I believe you're idealising it. The world was never
playing fair – but it did cooperate more, because the US needed the Europe more in the
cold war than it does now (when it's more of a rival, definitely in Trumps' eyes). Hell, the
Soviet Block cooperated – except it didn't really, it did what the SU told it to. But
it definitely didn't play fair. It did follow the rules, because the cost of breaking them
was seen as too high (US was terrified I believe of France and Italy doing a deal with the
SU). At least to me, following the rules and playing fair are distinct.
It's possible that the western society was more fair before 90s, I can't know. But again,
I suspect that a lot of it was almost a self-protection against the SU and "communism", which
disappeared in the 80s., but possibly started disappearing even in 70s (when you live with
some danger for a while, you get oblivious to it).
I do think that the Brexit was a reaction to the word that was. But I disagree that it was
really the EU specific reaction, as in "the EU is the source of all this". It played the
part, but the underlying reasons were IMO much more varied than the EU – where I have
doubts many of the people there really understood in any way, except as an externality you
can rail against.
You get the crawing for the world-that-was in the US, and it doesn't have any EU. You get
it in Russia, and it has the EU and the US, or, if you want, "the West" which puts
conveniently both of them together.
The world as most people knew it is coming apart, and chances are it will get worse (and
who knows it it ever gets better). In times like those, people want the world-that-was.
Sometimes it can actually be a force for good, like after WW2 in "the west". Except even
there it wasn't the world-that-was, but more of the world-we-want (on both sides of the iron
curtain, there was a reason why the communist regimes were, at least initially, strongly
supported by the populace). But wanting the world-that-was was also what brought Nazis and
Fascist into the power.
And PlutoniumKun's:
A key casualty of neoliberalism was corporatism in its more benign form. It used to be
that policy was made in the early hours in those proverbial smoke filled rooms where
different groups at least made some type of attempt at compromise. This is still a feature of
many countries and sectors, but I think its significant that the rot is most advanced in the
neolib early adopters. It's not just the formal art of making compromises, it's the simple
force of human contact when people in the same room together. It's unfortunate I think that
the UK joined the EU just as it lost interest in being run by civil servants having endless
meetings with sectoral interest groups. This is a core reason I think why the UK never really
engaged with the EU, even if in the short term its engagement was quite effective
(essentially bullying other countries into getting its way on issues like agriculture and
competition policy).
But as we've discussed before, the long term destruction of the British civil service has
in many ways been just as stupid, and just as damaging, as the long term destruction of
Britain's manufacturing base. In both cases, the reasons have been ideological, not
pragmatic.
Outsiders I think see it more clearly. I was travelling in Asia for a while and I was
really surprised at how casually people would discuss what they see as the once admired
anglosphere fall apart. Most Asians in my experience viewed Britain with a mixture of
distrust and some awe and admiration. Now the commonest response seems to be a shrug of the
shoulder or just plain schadenfreude.
This bodes particularly badly for the UK's trade negotiators when they start face to face
meetings. They will be a little like late 19th Century Russia or Turkey -seen as a country
who's only right to be at the top table is due to history, not present circumstances. The
gradual retreat of the US from the eastern Pacific is pretty much seen as a done deal,
everyone is frantically scrambling to ensure they are not caught on the hop. I'm a great
believer that the true indicator of what a country sees as its future can be seen in what it
spends its military budget on. Every major Asian country is spending serious cash on
domestically sourced air superiority, long distance strike capability, in addition to A2AD
for its brown water coasts.
There are many parts of the world where the 'old ways' are still pretty much intact
– much of Europe still likes the EU and the way it works and vaguely corporatist/social
democratic ways of doing things. Its easy to get carried away with stories of austerity and
decay, but when I travel in Europe much of it (including countries like Spain and Portugal)
look pretty good and no more or less full of discontent than they ever were. Much of northern
Europe and individual countries like Portugal are doing very well indeed, and France has been
defying the naysayers for as long as I've been reading English language economics papers and
magazines. Its not clear to me that the foment in those countries – even in France
– is much worse than its been in any given post war decade. There are cycles within
cycles for these things. Ireland is, all things considered, booming economically and
culturally content, austerity a long forgotten problem for most people.
What we are seeing is the postponed breakdown of the traditional centre left and rights.
The wipeout of traditional left wing parties has been much commented upon, but less obvious
is the breakdown of the old Christian Democrat/centre right tradition in much of Europe and
other parts of the world in favour of a more libertarian/populist/nationalist form. It's just
that the change has tended to be more within parties, while the left is always more
fissiparous.
I think the left is slowly, very slowly, reformulating along lines closer to the older
anarchy tradition, as seen by the rise of Green Parties – but it will take time before
a more grassroots, collaborationist form of left wing politics really starts to make a
difference. I think the libertarian/neolib wing of the right is being well and truly wiped
out by the more ruthless nationalistic (I hate to use the F word) tradition. The
transformation of the Tory party into an English nationalist party with a focus on serving
its new working class/lower middle class base has been carried out with quite remarkable
speed. The Tory business class will come to deeply regret its silence over the internal
revolution that took place post the Brexit vote.
All this of course is within the context of slowing growth and a rapid climate
deterioration. All bets are off in significant parts of the world as the fires rage. The only
certainty about climate change is that there will be completely unforeseen negative
impacts.
Sorry, I forgot to say that this was one of these think-provoking posts that I like so
much.
In a loosing fairness world, what is the proper personal conduct one must follow? Go with the
trend, or try to keep the old-style way as much as you can?
I would expect the whole spectrum of answers to this question. Fortunately, there will
always be some people that put fairness forefront.
" Fortunately, there will always be some people that put fairness forefront "
Yes Ignacio but I do hope youngsters don't become embittered by a world that is certainly
a lot harsher for them than it was for me 40 odd years ago.
After a year of fighting to get money from those who have plenty of it, am now working on
a transatlantic commission for a wealthy guy from Colorado, who has actually shocked me with
his fairness – particularly as I was worried about the possible downsides of getting
into such a far flung relationship.
He has actually kept my head above water while am waiting for a large long overdue payment
from a public institution that I almost wish privatisation on for their lack of effort in
addressing the situation.
I had a great Christmas trying to play Santa without the suit, with the best bit being the
giant full facial smile received from one of those likely old beyond her years Roma women
selling " The Big Issue " as she sat as if clinging to the wall in the pouring rain.
I hope everyone at NC is having a fine Holiday can anyone post the link to some of the
videos explaining neoliberalism posted at NC a short while ago? Can't seem to find them.
Thanks
I've just tried, for the second time, to watch that video. For me, it is too quickly paced
to be effective, or even informative -- and mind you, like other NC regulars, I KNOW this
stuff. IMO, Nancy MacLean's "Democracy in Chains" does a much better job. Yes, it takes more
than 26 minutes to read -- but I think understanding what has happened to the world over the
last 75 to 80 years SHOULD take more than 26 minutes.
Yes, it is quick paced. I had to do the pause-rewind-replay this or that bit,
pause-rewind-replay steps several times to get what was being said. Too much condensed info
for me to take in all at once.
Thank you, Yves. This post is about exactly the sort of thing that keeps me up at night.
Frankly I spend a lot of time mourning for what our society used to be, and the notion that
nobody has the backbone to do the right thing regardless.
I spend my share of time in conversation with many people in the upper/middle class,
business leaders and Conservatives in particular. The entire thinking is, "Losers cry about
being fair, winners go home and bang the Prom Queen". [paraphrased]
I always ask them if this is the kind of society they want to live in, and raise their
kids in. It is lizard brain, writ large.
Anyway, I just want to say "thank you" for all your efforts as a beacon in the darkness.
It is comforting to know that someone else also can see.
They dont have the backbone as we are deep into the "time of the end" where the love of
the greater number will cool off, they will be lovers of money and themselves, and the list
goes on. This system of things is all Satans and its on the verge of being extinguished
forever.
What disappeared from that world was playing fair. Everyone played fair, or, at least,
playing fair was a bedrock than you could drift away from, but, sooner or later, you fell
back on it.
Was it "fair" or was it Because the Soviet Block offered an alternative, purportedly
Communism but what appears to me as totalitarianism. The alternative to the Communist block
had to appear more appealing for the players to gain advantage in the great game.
With the Communist block gone, do we now just see the reality, and whatever accommodation
was made to have the Western/US based system more appealing has now changed. How is the US'
system viewed in Latin America? As "fair?"
When the British Empire controlled much of the world, was it "fair"? I was a part of that,
and I could not describe it as "fair".
In the British Empire's demolition the US played a good part of being "fair," but it was
"fair" only if it advanced the US' interests. An example of this is the forgiveness of War
Loans. Germany, on the Soviet systems' door step had war debts forgiven. The UK, which paid a
huge penalty for fighting the wars received no such favor for its "special relationship" with
the US, coupled with a not-so-polite demand to dismantle the British Empire (aka Self
Determination).
I perceive the world's governing system not in terms of left and right, but as the surface
of a sphere, with the the horizontal axis being changing from "free" to "totalitarian" which
can be approached from the political left or the right, and the vertical axis varying from
market based (neoliberal) to centrally controlled, and any country is always being affected
by words or threats to slide from one point on the sphere along some rhumbh line to another
point.
The idea of "fairness" is one of those things that used to be a lot more clear in the past
than it seems to be today. In general, the rules were the rules, and anyone who decided to
play accepted them. A level and "fair" playing field, with the same rules for everyone, was
what determined the "winner," and made "winning" legitimate.
But lately society has apparently decided to determine the "winners" first, and change the
rules to match the desired outcome. That approach has wreaked havoc with the concept of
"fairness."
Everybody gets a trophy for "participation." Eliminate the electoral college
because hillary didn't win it. Pretend that biological males are actually women because
that's how they "self-identify," and let them "compete" against biological women instead of
those with the same chromosomes.
You can't have "fairness" without rules, and playing fast and loose with the rules means
you can never tell who the cheaters are.
Thanks for this post. It seems like many of the economic and democratic govt and even
social rules once reliably enforced by laws and custom have become mere suggestions. The idea
of rules or fair play that existed from, say, the 1930's – 1980's, in the US now seem
entirely overtaken by a sort of modern, re-invigorated, social Darwinism, a once rightly
discredited moral theory. imo.
Everything old is new again, unfortunately. Neoliberalism is like the old social Darwinism
dressed up in newer, erudite, clothes. Substitute today's words 'the market' for yesterday's
words 'the strongest and fittest' and you have a pretty close 1:1 match. Misapplying Darwin's
studies in biology to sociology.
The following text was written for school kids' history class. It's a quick read.
And way before Darwinianism, at the dawn of capitalism, we had the Puritans.
According to their doctrine, if you were wealthy it was because you were favoured by God.
If you weren't wealthy, God didn't intend you to be. In every era, the selfish and the greedy
have a justification.
Nothing to do with the fact that you stitched up your fellow countrymen by enclosing
common land and kicking those that had used it for generations off their means of self
subsistence.
Your comment about the courts role in eroding a sense of fairness and, by extension, trust
in the system called to mind the courts' role in maintaining the vast US prison system. The
Supreme Court was recently considering a case filed from a pro se prisoner and Justice
Sotomayor referenced a secret policy within the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals of denying all
petitions filed by pro se prisoners for thirteen years without even so much as glancing at
the briefs. The policy only came to light when an employee of the court referenced it in
their note before committing suicide, apparently out of guilt.
The Fifth Circuit happens to include Louisiana, which has the highest incarceration rate
of any state. Eventually the policy was reversed, but in practice I'm sure most filings from
pro se petitioners in prison are met with a similar lack of interest and consideration.
Perhaps there are good reasons to dismiss some filings quickly given the large backlogs and
legal rumors and nonsense that makes it way through prisons.
However, the courts remain the last best hope for prisoners in trying to overturn wrongful
convictions or address abuse at the hands of prison officials, at least for now. If the
courts are happy to deny these people fair consideration for efficiency's sake unless they
can secure outside counsel you can bet this abuse and neglect will continue. Maybe that
sounds like a fine trade-off to those in power now, but the long-term effect is the erosion
of trust and confidence in the system beyond just those directly affected.
Another consequence of the loss of fair play is a termination of the phenomenon that many
workers, especially white collar workers, wanted to believe that their employer was
trustworthy and, as a consequence, they trusted their employer at a higher level that is or
was warranted. This trust was mis-placed to some extent but served as a bulwark when
relationships between employee and employer became strained.
I wonder now, whether this is still the case. It seems not to be. Granted employers have
earned their employees distrust or, at a bare minimum, lack of trust that formerly was
granted (due to wishful thinking).
I know exactly what you're talking about. Before I was laid off, I watched as many
colleagues were shown the door. Oddly from a trust perspective, most of these people were
vastly more talented and experienced than the employees who continued to keep their jobs.
(Though, of course, from a strictly shareholder perspective, their high pay levels justified
their dismissal.)
So from the canned employees' point of view, after years of awards, high praise and
affirmation from management, the fact that they were being hustled out the door (sometimes
literally) amounted to a profound betrayal of trust. And you could see it in the look of
shock on many of their faces.
When my time came, I had absorbed the lesson and had completely detached my ego from my
work, no longer taking any pride in what I did for a living. And I never will again as long
as I'm working for someone else, even an employer who in the moment is kind and appreciative.
They can turn on you in a heartbeat, and for the flimsiest of reasons.
Just to add in impeachment (prexit?), it once was considered a big deal that Nixon lied
("the coverup is worse than the crime"). And lying was at the center of the Clinton
impeachment. But that's less true with the current dispute and perhaps that's because the
impeachers themselves are shamelessly lying. The truth no longer seems to matter to anyone as
long as a fairy tale "narrative" can be found to substitute. Perhaps it's not so much that
the world has become more evil or selfish but that modern society has a serious reality
problem. People still understand fairness but simply pretend they are being fair as long as
nobody is challenging their narrative (see Amazon post today). And that may be because we are
saturated with media that are all too willing to tell us what we want to hear.
Thank goodness for NC where some of us come–and for a long time–to find out
the truth. Perhaps it's not just a coincidence that many of those who hang out here seem to
be older–old enough to remember a time when truth mattered.
A little more patience, but not too much, is needed in awaiting the inevitable and
continuing sunlight disinfectant applied to so many top level employees of the FBI, DOJ,
their institutions and other malefactors in other branches. When, not if, that day arrives,
when perp walks, trials, sentencing, mea culpas and much feckless deflection and gnashing of
teeth occur, then will there be some perception of a symbolic return to the fairness that was
once felt by much of the country. The preponderance of evidence, not punditry or spin, points
to likely criminal convictions, ruined careers and discredited institutions. Repairing those
institutions, and regaining public trust will be difficult given the inertia and FUD residues
that have built up, but we do have a country at stake for all of us.
There are many other aspects of the justice system that need review and reform, as noted
by other commenters. Without some highly publicized changes to those institutions to restore
some initial and fundamental element of trust, then people both in the US and abroad will
have doubts about the Rule of Law. Most people do not want to have a country where that
statue of a blindfolded justice has to peek to see who is trying to tip the scales.
The main word used here is fairness but what we are really talking about is justice. It
does not matter what country or culture that we are talking about, we all know when we are
being treated fairly, or justly, and when we are suffering an injustice. An example? Two
people have a meal together when one reaches over and helps themselves to the food on the
other person's plate. That sort of unfairness can get you killed in some places. But likely
that feeling of unfairness or injustice is universal.
And here is the crux of neoliberalism. It picks sinners and losers – deliberately
– and abandons those they deem to be losers. But it does not do so on the basis of
worth but on what it perceives to be worth which is why a college sports coach or
administrator can earn millions while a professor earns peanuts. If anything, there is a
strong streak of Social Darwinism to this as a justification to who these "winners" are. But
most of us can think of people in business, sports, politics, etc. who in reality aren't
worth two bits based on their performance.
The result for the UK? Those designated the losers who were abandoned, policed and watched
by the winners saw their chance to strike back at them by picking Leave in the Brexit
campaign. Life was not good for them and it was not going to get any better and so they
decided to make a choice to deny the winners something that they valued – Remain. There
is not a doubt in my mind that if these people had not been abandoned but had been able to
share in the success of the country, then they too would have chosen Remain. You saw the same
with the Trump vote in 2016 in the US. And this is only the first installment.
I think the insight in your last paragraph, more than any other single factor, explains
Donald Trump's electoral success in 2016 and identifies who his "base" really are.
The court system is perhaps the best example of how Fair Play has been degraded in the
US.
For 20+ years we ran a small mom-and-pop consulting business for large companies, all
Fortune-500. We did highly technical work with such efficiency and economies of scale
providing industry standings and granular decision support, the companies themselves or
McKinsey-types could never come close to doing a similar product. At least until an industry
association, facilitated by a customer decided to steal misappropriate our
intellectual property and produce a knock-off product. This happened even though we offered
to collaborate with the industry association and had a "good" contract prohibiting
stealing misappropriation.
Let it suffice to say that a mom-and-pop consulting business is at serious disadvantage as
soon as you get a lawyer and file a lawsuit in federal court. The defense attorneys were
given a blank check by their members and spent high 7 figure sums trying to pulverize us. By
the time the thing was winding down, we were paying our attorneys our of our retirement
account. I understand that in the UK and EU things are even more stacked against
plaintiffs.
While 98% of federal civil cases and tossed out or settled, we ended up with a 3 week
trial. The defendants team had 3 partners, an IT person and paralegal from a national firm in
court at all times, plus 3 people working locally at rented office space. We had a mid-size
regional firm represent us -- it was not cheap.
What strikes us most is the defendants seemed to be on home turf from the get-go with the
court. There were YEARS of delays and all sorts of spurious filings and even a counterclaim
based on fiction. This is standard procedure. Further, it was a highly technical case and we
performed thousands of hours of work to refine the details for the lawyers and jury to
understand. The defendants had unlimited resources to obfuscate and confuse, which they did
masterfully. The majority of evidentiary ruling were in favor of the defendants. It was a
huge upward struggle.
What is even worse is there is zero incentive for defendants not to lie
mis-remember facts. Our lead attorney told us in 25 years of litigation practice he had never
seen or heard of a sanction, much less prosecution, for perjury. In fact some of these
liars were promoted and rewarded for their courtroom performance.
This whole process took 5 years. We "won"; the jury didn't buy the industry's arguments.
But our business was destroyed, we've been blacklisted and any residual value a business with
20+ years of stable income was destroyed. The industry group pays their staff handsomely (its
just added to your monthly bill) and while a few people were pushed aside, the main perps
remain and are well compensated. They plod along with a garbage imitation, but the
associations membership executives don't care -- there is no third party assessment of their
performance -- they grade their own performance now.
Needless to say, we are tired, disgusted and cynical. But glad we won and that it is over.
I would not do it again
It reminds me a bit of the Phone Hacking trial in the UK. Peter Jukes has a good book on
it – Beyond Contempt. The mismatch between the resources available to the News
International people and those available to the British Government was risible. As a result
News International was effectively in control of the proceedings almost from start to finish,
though the Crown was able to get Coulson as there was incriminating evidence against him in
writing.
Yes there may well have been perjury as well and the police seemed as I recall to have
been very slow to get to a farm where there were reports that major bundles of paper were
going on to a bonfire. Hugh Grant, when he taped a journalist, was told that 20% of
Metropolitan Police officers had been bribed by the press. Wonder if that had anything to do
with it?
And yet many Britons still think that the UK is a pretty straight place ..so much more
honest than those foreign countries.
Have recently watched series The Loudest Voice about Fox News. They make Murdoch look like
an avuncular figure in order to heighten the villainy of Ailes but of course you don't let
the organ grinder off the hook so as to blame the monkey. No Rupert no Fox News and perhaps
no current version of the NYT that acts like Fox News.
Thanks for the summary of the courts' action as a millstone around the neck of honest
commerce, and my sympathy for your loss.
It's worth remembering this kind of thing has consequences too. Fred Koch patented the
basic refining processes to turn crude oil into useful products, then the Rockefellers'
refineries essentially stole those processes (used them without paying patent royalties) in
their refineries. Koch sued .and *lost*! A few years later it came out that the Rockefellers
bribed the judge and Koch re-sued and won but at what cost? And ever after Koch and his
offspring came after the government whose courts were so corrupt.
The lament about declining standards is as old as the Pharaohs–read Howard Zinn's
People's History of the U.S. which exposes the New World's history of
venality–but recent events seem to be sounding the depths of the most profound
dishonesty. It's gotten bad enough that political economist Mark Blythe talks about the
positive impact a disaster like the Climate catastrophe would have in breaking up this cabal
of evil.
Your story reminds me of Florida inventor Steve Morton's case against copyright theft
being closed down and covered up by then-FBI Director Mueller and then-Attorney General Eric
Holder. Definitely a good example of unfairness at the top of the system.
For further information on Morton's case and story a good search engine for "Steve Morton"
, " Fincantieri ", " Mueller", " Holder" , "Comey" , ought bring up an outlet covering said
situation.
> The gradual retreat of the US from the eastern Pacific is pretty much seen as a done
deal,
> everyone is frantically scrambling to ensure they are not caught on the hop.
Not sure I understand this. Eastern Pacific? What retreat?
Wall*Street is often described as a casino, but in reality most every house of chance has
a security exchange commission of it's own, making sure that there is no cheating, and fair
play on both sides of the green felt jungle, and should a dealer in it's employ be caught in
an act of larceny, they'll be arrested toot suite.
When Wall*Street was paid off on losing wagers a dozen years ago, fair play lost it's
luster and has only become more meaningless in it's absence.
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble
for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption
in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its
reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few
hands and the Republic is destroyed."
-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
(letter to Col. William F. Elkins)
"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now
that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the
people's money to settle the quarrel."
speech to Illinois legislature, Jan. 1837.
I find your Lincoln quotes curious. I thought Lincoln that after splitting wood for rail
supports Lincoln made his name and money as a lawyer arguing cases for the large rail road
corporations. If so, the quote you provided seems much like Eisenhower's speech on the
Military Industrial Complex.
"Lincoln made his name and money as a lawyer "
How better to learn about the 'real' machinations of the ruling elites? What Lincoln did with
that 'education' was what made him famous, not the education itself.
The word 'multiculturalism' has a range of meanings, both sociological and political. You
need clearly define your meaning of the word. As it is, your assertion is vague, imo.
I imagine that the operative word in his or her comment is "imposed." That implies an
'authority' that can dictate to everyone else. Such a state of affairs would be the opposite
of what I grew up imagining "progressivism" was.
What are the conditions imposed?
Because as much of a problem as people have with the idea of "cancel culture" there still is
the flip side that people aren't going to continue to let themselves be treated like
garbage.
The ultimate 'problem' in all this is the perennial one of who controls the resources, or,
as Marx and Engels put it, the means of production.
People will be "treated like garbage" for as long as 'garbage' is all that is available to
them. In an extremely unequal society, as the modern Wast has evolved into, once some
threshold of resource 'ownership' is crossed, the only feasible method of redressing the
balance seems to be outright revolt and warfare. Except for the example of Cincinnatus in the
Roman Republic period, (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus
) who knows of a time when concentrated power ever voluntarily gave up any significant
portion of their powers?
Inequality is inherently unfair.
With the site admin's forbearance.
We encountered the 'ground level' fruits of the loss of the ethos of fairness yesterday.
Phyl was told to see the "Pain Management Practice," an independent section of the local
medical apparat in order to 'manage' her use of the pain meds she was prescribed for her
amputation. So far, so good. The appointment is for two o'clock. Show up at one thirty
o'clock to fill out paperwork. Due to a tight schedule and other impediments, we show up at
the office at a quarter to two o'clock. The receptionist nurses, who sit at a desk behind an
armoured glass partition, tell us that we are late and must reschedule the appointment for
two weeks later. At which time, Phyllis begins to argue. This is normal behaviour with her
when confronted with 'unfair' conditions. One of the receptionists relents somewhat and goes
back into the back room and consults with someone.
She returns and declares; "No exceptions are allowed. You are late and that is that."
Phyl replies: "You can see my problem. Are you going to be rigid?"
Receptionist; "The best I can do for you is two weeks off."
Phyl; "Is there anything sooner?"
Receptionist; "Do you want the appointment or not? We have work to do here!"
Me, sotto voice to Phyl; "We will get nowhere with this bunch. Take the next appointment and
we'll see what we can do later."
Phyl; "All right."
As we left the waiting room, one of the two patients sitting there was visibly trying not to
laugh. The other patient got up and helped open the large glass door so I could maneuver the
wheelchair out into the hallway.
The point of all this, (besides an apologetically admitted venting on my part,) is that this
medical establishment has opted for a rigid and formalized rules based imposition of
authority in place of any sort of fairness or flexibility in dealing with their clients. (I
use the word client in it's original [?] Roman sense.) Speaking with several of our neighbors
yesterday I have discovered that this sort of rigidity in scheduling is becoming more common
around here.
One of the main features of fairness, at the least in medical situations is the belief that
the patients deserve some leeway in their treatment at the hands of 'officials.' This new
experience of ours highlights the emerging ethos that the system is paramount now. The
patients are now there for the convenience of the providers, and their stockholders. Fairness
has now officially been banned.
I was going to make a remark about this system change being an example of late stage
capitalism, but just realized that formalism and inflexibility are hallmarks of late stage
anything.
'Fairness,' however one defines it is a function of flexibility. 'Fairness' shows the desire
and ability to think out complex situations and move to balanced outcomes. All 'actors' in
the social situation are considered and dealt with in some semblance of a socially supportive
ethos. Communitarian at root, this has been, as is mentioned several times above, replaced by
an atomistic and minimalist pseudo philosophy. The foregoing because a strategy of adherence
to a rigid and simplistic set of rules in social situations is a rejection of thought and
reflection. "I was just following orders." Does that sound familiar?
Alas, I fear that "things" are going to get much worse in the times ahead, for everyone.
Thanks for your indulgence.
Ambrit, I am so sorry you and Phyl have to deal with humans utterly lacking in compassion
and human decency. If think if this happened to me, I would argued forcefully –
screamed- which would have probably had me removed from the office or banished from the
practice. This kind of treatment from people who are dealing with patients who need help just
makes my blood boil. Unfortunately, I think this kind of treatment towards others is a side
effect of living in an unfair/unjust society. Many people's hearts become bitter and hardened
( like I'm suffering and I don't care if you suffer too). The dark world we live in now is
cold hearted and full of tears. My heart goes out to you and Phyl and all others who are
suffering because of this.
Thanks Elizabeth. The Home Health nurse this morning didn't want to believe our tale. She
finally suggested that we complain directly to the top level of the Medical Organization that
this practice is a part of. I'm going to try that Monday. As a side note, the Physical
Therapist this afternoon mentioned that the nurses are stymied because absolutely no pain med
scrips are written on Fridays. (I found it hard to credit, but reflection seemed to prove her
correct.) This is evidently not just a function of the doctors wanting Fridays off, but a
conscious policy on the part of the local medical establishment. [Your only recourse would be
to admit yourself in to the Emergency Room I was told. Hmmm . what's the most expensive part
of a Hospital practice? You guessed it!]
My favourite aspect of the "visit" to the Pain Management Office was the presence of the
armoured glass partition between the Lobby and the receptionist's desk. This assumes that
someone in the physical office planning stage anticipated a high potential for violence in
that office. {I wonder why?}
I was tempted to let Phyl scream her head off, but remembered the presence of a uniformed
'Security Person' in the building lobby. The two behind the glass partition looked like, and
acted like the sort who would love to smack an unruly 'client' down. /Bored and smug would be
how I summed up how the two women appeared.\
Luckily, Phyl is already tapering off her drugs usage, so, there is a small cushion with
which to maneuver around this unholy edifice of Mammon.
I wonder if Phyllis's doctor could refer her to another clinic, one a little more
compassionate to people in pain? (Couldn't they let you finish the paperwork while you wait
in that little room for the always late doctor?)
This story has me enraged for Phyllis and also you. I am so sorry. Two weeks. The
audacity. Making her wait even a day! (I am almost crying in frustration. So very sorry)
While I definitely agree that ruling classes have deteriorated remarkably over the last
few decades, I don't think the old days were very fair either. Fairness is of interest -- in
fact, it's crucially important -- in a society composed of people who are more or less equal
and autonomous. It's a way to get along without a lot of conflict and risk. In an highly
unequal society, like those of the US and the UK, it's much less valuable than access to the
levers of power. You don't have to get along with those you can crush or brush aside. As the
scene here in the US continues to deteriorate, I expect concepts like fairness and justice to
seem more and more quaint to the movers and shakers and fixers, until finally the general
system breaks down completely. It's anybody's guess what will succeed that.
I think this loss of fair play is partly because many have realized that fortunes can be
made simply by gaining exceptions to established rules and laws. There have always been
exceptions, here and there, but our situation now is there are exceptions to established
rules everywhere. Companies can now simply lobby for some exclusive benefit or to ignore some
law that everyone else must follow, and then collect a risk free guaranteed profit for
essentially doing nothing.
Many large firms use these exceptions in the form of legal protections not available to
their competitors to both attain and maintain their competitive advantage. These protections
include ignoring existing laws, profiting from illegal businesses where profits exceed fines,
and profiting from exclusive U.S. government subsidies not available to competitors. The
banking and drug industry are notorious for routinely engaging in illegal practices that
generate profits which far exceed the fines that regulators impose when these firms are
caught. Preferential government subsidies that benefit a single company in an industry are
now also acceptable business strategy as companies like Amazon can obtain confidential
agreements with the U.S. Post office to ship packages for at least half of what UPS and FedEx
would charge for the same deliveries. A subsidy like this contributes to the many reasons
that its competitors are driven into bankruptcy, and probably explains why Amazon's retail
business
loses money everywhere except in the U.S.
Many small firms, especially tech unicorns in their early days, use these exceptions in
the same way. Amazon started as a small company that would sell mail-order books in a way
that allowed it to avoid sales tax. Early Uber investors were probably attracted by a belief
that government will look the other
way while it made cab rides cheaper by ignoring local taxi regulation, then transferring
all its business costs to its drivers, and then collecting a substantial fee for each of taxi
fare. AirBnB started as a small company whose rent would also ignore local hotel regulations,
zoning laws, health laws to prevent public health hazards, and fire safety codes. Small drug
companies like Turing Pharmaceuticals can simply acquire patents for drugs with no substitute
and then raise prices by 5,456%.
The problem is that too many of these risk free 'rent seeking' opportunities can overwhelm
an economy filled with corporations who are all chasing the highest risk adjusted rate of
return. When there are too many of these rent seeking opportunities in an economy then its
companies will select only these risk-less rent seeking strategies, while abandoning all
riskier but socially productive profit strategies like the pursuit of new breakthroughs,
product innovations, design quality, superior service, and product reliability. A related
negative outcome which you hint at with 'fair play' is most of these rents offer particular
exclusions from laws designed to protect society like those prohibiting consumer or investor
fraud, prohibiting worker exploitation, ensuring consumer safety, and maintaining financial
market stability.
So an economy with systemic rent seeking often incentivizes its corporations to abandon
their socially productive profit strategies, and then replace them with risk-less 'rent'
strategies where profit comes from ignoring laws that protect our society from fraud,
exploitation, and economic disruption.
Jeff Bezos was the first thing that popped into my mind. The Technocracy –with no
room for humanity, where the masses serve as hosts for 24/7 parasites – the second.
In this neck of the woods,Silicon Valley, the infestation of unfairness reflects itself
everywhere, particularly in the homelessness. Cars, the way they're driven, and how they are
judged, are also a perfect example. You can see it in very pricey new model cars with
dangerously blinding LED lights as the norm (which an insane National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration has yet to address after over a decade of complaints); so called demon
light headlight adaptations which make the car appear like a predatory night stalker in
one's rearview mirror; and disturbing personalized license plates, saw one the other day that
said MALWARE. And then there's the judgment by vehicle. After having lived where I am for
over a decade, was asked by a new neighbor, in a brand new vehicle, if I needed directions,
as if I was lost, when I stopped to speak with another neighbor in my not clunker looking,
almost 20 year old car. It cut me to the bone, as words can.
Small businesses are increasingly losing their shirts and being shut down due to amoral
commercial property owners; Amazon; Google, Facebook and Apple Campuses ™; and
corrupt mayors and city council members' neighborhood planning ™.
The Silicon Valley CalTrain commuter line just had its 16th pedestrian fatality of the
year in early December (a thirty two year old female youth therapist), and a hospitalized,
attempted 17th fatality, 9 days later; despite ever increasing rail vigilance. Meanwhile the
Local News™ keeps alluding to track improvements versus addressing the now tangible
despair. It's all gut rending and no surprise that Santa Clara County led California in
negative migration between 2018 – 2019. Unfortunately many were left with no means to
even leave, and/or couldn't leave their loved ones who needed them..
The age old term walking in another person's shoes – implying looking beyond
oneself, treating others fairly, and not taking ones luck in life as an indicator that
they're worthier people – seems utterly lost on many who are doing well and wish the
millions of 'losers' would disappear from their sight.
Who will be the new Wright Patman?
Who will be the new Sal Pecora?
Prior generations provided guidance on how to identify and call out unfairness, and get
meaningful results, for the benefit of the citizenry.
With absolutely 100% respect to the original posters and their points, I'd side w/Vlade
and argue that there are some serious rose-tinted glasses being worn.
Yes, (in my opinion) there was an era of "fair play" .but this was a flash-in-the-pan
consequence of WWII. As rightfully the bottom 95% earned their just desserts after years of
sacrifice for their country and rescuing the elites from the literal existential threat of
authoritarianism.
Now we're merely reverting to the time immemorial-style of 'every person for themselves'
social ruthlessness. sadly.
As I recall, the elites were in no danger from authoritarianism in the 1900s. Au
contraire, they profited at every turn from the acts of authoritarianism. Prescott Bush and
other business leaders (sic) did business with the Nazis and Fascists, and even with the
Japanese imperium. These days, platforms and algorithms setvup by the Elites of this time
loot and pollute and accelerate the many races to the bottom.
Good thing for that "life force" that when the last Elite human (possibly the last human
of any sort) dies, there will be other species already carving out niches of precedence and
preference It hurts, a little, to know we won't be missed
This post is a tad deceptive. It sounds like a review of neoliberalism and all that has
happened since c. 1980 when in fact it is now The Question. What is fair play/ What is/was
fair play and how do we create it going forward. Now that there can be no growth, very little
manufacturing and no labor unions as we once knew them. Automation and an elite class of
oligarchs and their functionaries are taking over. States/Nations still have their
constitutions but they are creating internal conflict as the old ways disappear back into
what Varoufakis calls a new feudalism. Like upstart above, however, I have only experienced
fair play in the courts, never in economic situations. But then I'm old, b. 1946, and female.
So I'm keeping an open mind as best I can, like the above clips from David, Clive, Vlade and
PK. One thing to add from the FR24 Debate on good regulation – it was pointed out by
one panelist that regulations are stricter in the EU for going into business, but on a
"horizontal" basis. Whereas it is easy to go into Bz in the US, all you need are vertical
connections. I took this to describe the fact that many corporations are monopolies. But
connections are few and far between. And lurking in the wings, as we all know, is climate
change. The new discussion about societal collapse has started. Now would be an excellent
time to interject the concept of fair play. I am optimistic because there is a basic, rock
solid strength in fair play that might serve to make it a survivor.
I've mentioned before that my father, an investment manager who retired around the time
Yves started, made a similar point prospectively. Background: he ran a smallish private firm
in Indiana, but it gave him rather wide exposure, including in a large industrial firm, plus
direct investments, besides the stock market.. Plus, my mother inherited a (then) good-sized
farm that was operated by a tenant.
His comment was that a culture of honesty saved a lot of money, otherwise spent on
guarding your interests, watching the watchers, hiring lawyers, etc. His firm shied away from
investing in anything with a hint of shadiness.
This is merely confirmatory of Yves' point, but from a different point of view and from
before the cultural changes (aka crapification) her post goes over.
And come to think, a younger relative who is a corporate lawyer told us, from her
contemporary experience, that handshake agreements are NOT a good idea. They tend to lead to
her getting involved, and she ain't cheap, nor are the consequences predictable.
I would add that I think human institutions, like human beings, have a life cycle, so to a
great extent the vagaries of, say, Brexit are a result of predictable senescence. Not that
you want to experience the down side, as we seem to be doing.
Your word is your bond.
Another old-fashioned saying that might yet make a comeback, starting with some undergrad
research paper on forgotten sayings of, say, the mid-20th century.
On the opening mention of recruiters and employees ghosting I'd like to add a few thoughts
of how different things are in that regard.
We're now all supposed to be part of some social network or another because we need to get
our names out there and grow our networks. Those services then turn around and pelt you with
emails and phone calls non-stop if you're whatever flavor of the moment they deem desirable.
They also don't give you the time of day if they decide you're not. And those services have
tried to evolve new tools to prevent you turning them away or ignoring them. Emails with
"decision required" and polls and notices that seem to imply if you don't respond they'll
kick you off. That's problem since any boss can fire you for any reason at any time. And they
definitely mention that you're not being polite or fair by not responding to an email
conversation you didn't initiate for a job position you didn't inquire about on a service you
didn't ask them to use.
I have a job I like so I was really annoyed that one recruiter on Indeed couldn't take no
for an answer and demanded I tell them why I wasn't going to permit them to sell my resume to
a potential job opening. I don't understand why we're supposed to be at everyone else's beck
and call and they don't have to respond to even polite overtures from us.
So it's more than just fair play seems to be missing in our society right now. It's that
whatever echoes of fairness exist are used to abuse the people who believe in them. They
steal your time, your attention, your professional connections, anything they can. Then they
complain about you not responding. That's another facet of this that I really don't like.
There is so much one can say on this topic. Unfortunately, I am increasingly pessimistic
and of the view that nothing will really change until we suffer a true calamity as was the
case in the past.
An oversimplifying example. My father was a combat veteran from the Korean War, having
been just a little young to serve in WWII. There was a clear sense of inter-relationship in
this generation. They experienced the depths of the depression and the massive loss of life
and destruction of WWII. My dad eventually became the COO of one of the most powerful
financial services firms in the US. His generation of leaders would never have considered the
(1) levels of compensation relative employees as appropriate, (2) becoming predators on their
customers, they prized their customer relationships, (3) using the firms balance sheet to
gamble at the casino in a heads they win, tails you lose game. It simply wasn't in their DNA.
They had suffered too much to jeopardize shared prosperity and general welfare.
When my father took early retirement he had a unique resume and was offered very serious
positions of prestige and power, with high levels of compensation. He turned them all down,
as did his piers, as they violated an inherent code of ethics and fairness that they didn't
need to articulate it was just their from their shared sacrifices earlier in life.
In my experiences on Wall Street, both as a banker and as a CFO of firms, this would be
anathema.
My only source of hope is that our daughter's generation, she is 27, sees this for what it
is. They fully understand that our society is failing and eschew the loss of fairness on
multiple levels. They consciously avoid politics and participation, not out of laziness, but
because they see our leaders (both political and business) as fundamentally corrupt. She and
her friends have no interest in voting for a neo-liberal (e.g., Biden, Buttagieg, etc.) who
is just better behaved than Trump. They are well educated, have gone to excellent schools,
and want something more from life than a high paying Wall Street job.
We see so much goodness in them, yet worry that it will take a global war or financial
collapse leading to depression to reset our society.
Reagan pocketed a huge, at the time, $2,000,000 speaking fee. That provided the imprimatur
that cashing in was okey-dokey. Later grifters looked on with amusement pondering the blood,
sweat, toil and tears of others that led to their own book and speaking shakedown deals with
multiples of that fee in laundered money.
Two assertions in this post caught my eye:
Firms "that adopted nobler objectives did better in financial terms than ones that focused on
maximizing shareholder value."
I believe firms that adopted nobler objectives -- may -- have done better over the
long-term than firms that focused on maximizing shareholder value but next I wonder about how
well the managers did in the short-term [perhaps even the long-term after correcting for the
differences in the qualities and abilities of the management] in each type of firm. I suppose
mediocre managers did very much better when "focused on maximizing shareholder value". Before
engaging the relatively long read of the linked post discussing details of the study which
the main post refers to -- I also wonder how the referenced study deals with immoral acts
which are not quite clearly immoral -- like outsourcing. Over the long-run outsourcing is bad
for a country, bad for the resilience of a firm, and bad for the firm over the long-run
before we are dead. However, I believe many of the firms that "adopted nobler objectives" --
and remained steadfast to them -- were driven out of business by price competition.
The second assertion:
"Another aspect of the decline in the importance of fair dealing is the notion of the
obligations of power, [w]hat individuals in a position of authority have a duty to."
In regard to this assertion, I immediately recalled Machiavelli's "the Prince". Many of
the ideas of noblesse oblige were anchored in the power and authority of the Catholic
[Universal] Church. Though in conflict with a God Chosen Monarch -- noblesse oblige operated
to attach similar moral authority to the Aristocratic Classes. In my Youth I thought of
Machiavelli as completely unmoral. Later when I learned more about his life and actions I
realized his "Prince" unveiled the unmoral reality behind the operations of monarchical and
aristocratic actions. Neoliberalism has succeeded in stripping all moral coverings from power
and through the efforts of an extremely well-funded Thought-Collective and propaganda machine
it has divorced thinking about morality from power -- except as a thin fig-leaf. Most
significantly it has exalted Power and its co-worker Wealth to positions of 'moral goodness'.
Fair dealing in the Neoliberal moral universe is a slogan without content to fool those
unaware and/or unwilling to 'see'.
I also feel much of the nostalgia for noblesse oblige and critique of the Neoliberal Age
may originate from the residual conflicts and cross-envies between 'Old'-money and
'New'-money. Old-money has already forgotten the immoral origins of its wealth.
Much of this post is related to Brexit -- something I avoided study of or comment upon and
still little understand. I excuse myself as someone squeamish about traffic accidents and
train wrecks though powerful feelings of sadness overwhelm me.
The heart of this post resides in the ancient question of the tie between morality and its
enforcement -- the question for how you would act given a "cloak of invisibility" which is a
prop for posing concrete questions about how you might act without the constraints of dealing
with any of the moral consequences or implications of your acts. I may be a fool -- but I
believe most all of Humankind believes in Justice [and acts Justly] -- the Justice which I
believe The Rev Kev equates to 'fairness' -- which is a much weaker word. But I also believe
there are a certain number of individuals who do not care about Justice and the Neoliberal
Thought Collective has somehow transformed this indifference ['disregard' -- 'disdain for']
Justice into a moral imperative and belittled Justice as a throw-back to benighted times
past.
We live in DarkTimes when the very worst among us claim the most and worse still brand
themselves as praise-worthy while using their colossally disproportionate Power and Wealth to
squelch criticism and amplify their accolades often self-accolades through their wholly owned
Media.
"the injustices and oppression suffered by these minority groups."
You are way too "woke" for your own good ;-)
The problem here is where lies the proper measure of redress, because overdone it turns into
its opposite. Converting bathrooms in schools into gender neutral is one example here.
Moreover some groups are anti-social and need to be severely oppressed. One example is
financial oligarchy, especially financial oligarchy under neoliberalism. The other is neocons
as asocial group. I would love both of those groups oppressed, humiliated and ostracized.
Yet another is pedophiles as a social group, especially pedophiles that abuse the position
of authority (gay catholic priests, teachers which seduce/coerce students, etc).
The idea that each minority group is somehow entitled to compensation for the injustices
they suffered in the past or are suffering currently is probably a delusion. Much depends on a
larger picture: what particular group gives to a larger society. If the group contribution is
negative and the group resort to anti-social behavior then why the oppression is unjust ? It is
just an immune reaction of the society. After all one view is that "Justice is the advantage of
the stronger" (debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus.)
Also in some cases those groups are a minority for a reason.
"... Communist intellectual vanguards are the most glaringly obvious example of this, but it's certainly also present in modern Western essentialist identity politics, particularly within academia. ..."
"... As for the default identity including sexuality: I'm not sure it's necessary, just that it mostly goes that way. I have trouble in imagining a society in which the default identity does not exclude bestiality or trandgenderism (not that I'm equating the two). ..."
Members of the formerly dominant group may be willing to extend acceptance to others,
but they still expect a kind of deference in return.
[ ]
When that expectation of deference is not fulfilled, the choices are to accept the new
situation, or to support what might be called default identity politics.
There is at least one more option – carve out exceptions. A recurrent trend in
identity politics – both the modern essentialist variety and the older class identity
politics – is for some members of the dominant group to extract or reclaim their
threatened deference not in identitarian terms, but personally – namely, by positioning
themselves is-à-vis the identity-based movement as an ally or even leader and
then expecting their persons, ideas, and opinions be treated with deference or allowed
dominance as architects or commissars of the new flattened or inverted hierarchy. Communist
intellectual vanguards are the most glaringly obvious example of this, but it's certainly
also present in modern Western essentialist identity politics, particularly within
academia.
Good questions. I'm not sure there is a necessity for a default identity and dominant
groups; I merely observe that in most if not all stable, long-lived societies there has been
such. If you can think of exceptions, they would be very interesting.
As for the default identity including sexuality: I'm not sure it's necessary, just that
it mostly goes that way. I have trouble in imagining a society in which the default identity
does not exclude bestiality or trandgenderism (not that I'm equating the two).
Stephen 12.28.19 at 7:41 pm (no link)
Chetan Murthy@27
Oh dear, you are a very angry person. Cool down and think, please.
When I wrote "in Japan, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Scotland people of those groups
overwhelmingly expect that to be the default identity for their communities", you are going
far beyond the bounds of logic to conclude that I mean 'white cis-het people of traditionally
German ancestry are the only true Germans." I see no difficulty in someone believing both
that being German is the default identity for that community – you know, something that
one would believe to be normal, but not invariably so – and that people who do not meet
the default identity may still qualify as Germans. And I have known a few homosexual Germans
– there have been many in German history – who nobody would doubt qualify as true
Germans.
I quite agree that the situation of black Americans has been and is deplorable. I don't
think you can generalise from America to other countries.
Lastly, it would help if you could learn to distinguish between "some" and "all". You say,
indignantly, that the majority of Muslim-Americans are well assimilated, which I do hope is
true. But that does not at all mean that I am wrong in denying that "no members of minority
groups have ever felt hostility and derision against the majority." Some Muslim-Americans do,
surely, even if most don't.
Yours in the cause of genuine, reciprocal tolerance.
Communist intellectual vanguards are the most glaringly obvious example of this, but
it's certainly also present in modern Western essentialist identity politics, particularly
within academia.
With this quote I think we reached the point in this discussion when it might be
appropriate to discuss the appropriate scope of repression for deviant minority groups when
their demands conflict with the larger society or more powerful groups ethics and cultural
norms. The usual "woke" argumentation is very weak in issues outlined below and opposite
arguments have a real weight:
I would suggest that the Cheka style repression of the minority groups starts with pedophiles and financial oligarchy
especially vulture funds leadership such as Romney, Paul Singer, etc. But this is just
me.
IMHO insatiable "demanding" and proselytiting of transgender identity already brought us
very close to a strong corporate and community backlash against transgender rights and by
extension LGBT rights as a whole.
Of course transgender folk is just minor, expendable pawn in a bigger game of Dem Party
identity politics, but still.
The backlash is already reflected in recent attempts by the Trump administration to reduce
protections for transgender people under federal civil rights laws and prohibition of
transgender individuals in military.
Bathrooms craziness also face a very strong community and corporate backlash. It
essentially compromised the whole LGBT movement, which now is viewed more skeptically.
"We were able to successfully communicate the onerous threat the ordinance presented to
the privacy and safety of women and children in public facilities such as restrooms,
showers, locker rooms and changing rooms, as well as the threat to the freedom of religion
and speech in punishing individuals, business owners and employees who declined to provide
service for same sex 'weddings' or allow biological males into women's private facilities,"
said Welch.
President Barack Obama's directive for public schools demanding that they interpret
Title IX's measure against sex discrimination to include gender identity met several
defeats after its issuing.
The move was unpopular, with a May 2016 Rasmussen poll finding 51 percent of parents
opposed to it, 33 percent in favor, and 16 percent undecided.
Within a week of the directive being released, over 82,000 people signed a Family
Research Council petition denouncing the guidance.
"The Obama administration's overreach in bullying parents and local school districts by
threatening loss of federal dollars if they do not follow its guidance in allowing students
to use facilities such as restrooms, showers, and locker rooms of the opposite biological
sex is both unlawful and dangerous to our children," stated the petition in part.
The latest monthly indicators of economic activity in Japan, the Eurozone and Britain do
not make pleasant reading.
Japan's December manufacturing sector PMI, as it is called, fell to 48.8 from 48.9 in
November. Anything below 50 indicates a contraction. The services sector, however, picked
up slightly to 50.6 from 50.3. So the overall 'composite' PMI was unchanged at 49.8. That
means Japan is in recession (just).
The Eurozone manufacturing PMI slipped to 45.9, the lowest since October 2012 and
employment also fell at the fastest pace for more than seven years. New orders declined for
a fifteenth successive month, while input prices continued to fall sharply. The sector was
driven down mainly by Germany, where the manufacturing PMI hit 43.4, falling for the 12th
straight month.
However, as in Japan, there was a slight pick-up in the services sector, where Eurozone
PMI reached 52.4 from 51.9 in November. So the overall 'composite' PMI stood unchanged at
50.6. In effect, the Eurozone economy is standing still.
In the UK, the manufacturing sector took another dive to 47.4 (a sharp contraction).
Output fell the most since July 2012. The services sector was also down to 49.0, making the
overall composite PMI in negative territory at 48.5 - the deepest contraction since July
2016. The UK is in recession - but maybe the Conservative government election victory and
the ending of uncertainty over Brexit (the UK will now definitely leave the EU in 2020) may
encourage a recovery.
In sum, as we end 2019, Japan, the Eurozone and the UK are in recession or
stagnation.
Long story short: the EU is only not in outright recession because the "services sector"
(gig economy) is compensating for the collapse of its manufacturing sector - for now.
And no, the UK won't become "Singapore upon the Thames".
Lyttennburgh, I can think of a couple of reasons for Erdogan's Libyan adventure. First, he'd
rather have those battle tested jihadis in Libya than on his border or in his country.
Second, he may have his eyes on Mediterranean oil. Lastly, he may see a friendly Libyan
government as an ally or province of his Ottoman Empire dream. No matter what the reason,
he's setting himself up for another confrontation with Russia.
None of the kids wanted toys for Christmas this year, they just wanted cash.
Understandable, but cash as a gift, while practical, always feels impersonal, so I made
special packaging. Went over well pic.twitter.com/urXVCHtDyW
— Donnachaidha O'Chionnaigh (@TwoClawsMedia) December
26, 2019
Tech companies take your privacy seriously, and also use data from inside your home for
cutesy press releases about visits from carolers and people seeking cookie recipes.
https://t.co/o5Lk0G47QL
pic.twitter.com/QX6fvcCFAB
#2 This is known as "the season of giving", but one 65-year-old guy in Colorado decided it
would be more fun to do it
with other people's money : Just after noon on Monday, a 65-year-old man walked into a
downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado bank and stole thousands of dollars before running outside
and tossing the cash up into the air while yelling "Merry Christmas!"
#8 One rapper in Los Angeles decided that the best way to address the problem of
homelessness was to climb on top of a tall building and throw cash down on to the
homeless people living on Skid Row so they could fight over it: The 22-year-old rapper
known as Blueface climbed onboard a black Mercedes SUV in Skid Row before throwing money out of
a bag while dozens of people below scramble to catch the flying cash and pick it up from the
ground. The artist, whose real name is Jonathan Michael Porteris, is known for the Benjamin
Franklin tattoo on his cheek and a handful of hit tracks that reached viral status in recent
years.
NATO IS NOTHING more than an extension of George Soros' arm as it is also an extension of
the Rothschild arm! Most should have gleaned this by now, particularly recognizing the
radical Wahhabism that was included in this band of merry global thugs (Saudi Arabia) to do
the bidding of the globalist satanic cabal. Kind of sad hearing this kind of neive responses
from the gallery...sorry Mr. teolawki but you missed the forest for the trees.
That makes default identity politics a "double or nothing" bet. If it's political
successful, it's dragged further and further towards entrenched minority rule by members of the
dominant racial or religous group, and typically towards some form of personal dictatorship. If
it's unsuccessful, the divisions it creates risks a reversal of the previous order. Instead of
being accepted as one element of a diverse community, the formerly dominant group becomes the
object of hostility and derision. The signs of that are certainly evident, particularly in
relation to the culture wars around religion.
Alex SL 12.27.19 at 10:32 am
I am not really sure where a formerly dominant group has
ever become the object of hostility and derision, except maybe when colonial powers were
expulsed? It seems the formerly dominant religions and the "real XYZians" are still treated
with instinctive deference everywhere, even in societies that are now officially secular or
multi-cultural, and regardless of how terrible their dominance was before it was broken.
...It is true that there is now orientation away from tolerance because tolerance depends on
dominance.
Another way to look at this is that the more heated battles in identity politics (broadly
defined) are occurring now because the dominant group is having difficulty with the shift
from noblesse oblige 'granting' of equality to others to the insistence by these others on
complete and total equality.
To oversimplify, when people in whatever oppressed identity group come to ask themselves
'why can't I be on a completely equal footing with those who do well/benefit from, etc. the
current system?' they tend to lose patience with noblesse oblige, and are unwilling to behave
with deference. Deference might seem too much like internalizing one's inferiority or the
rightness of someone else's dominance.. This means that the groups are more likely to demand
things from others rather than wait to receive them.
These things are necessary for full social equality but there will be a lot of hostility
among some within dominant groups, and you're now seeing people commit to whatever version of
social hierarchy they think works best for them. They ignore or are blind to whatever
versions they'd be screwed by. They tend to make common cause on the naturalness of that
social hierarchy, and the importance of social hierarchy generally.
This is one reason why affinities between oppressed identity groups aren't merely
strategic. Having recognized the legitimacy of this type of demand for full equality for
themselves, people with certain identities are probably more likely to recognize it for
others. Certain subcultures within oppressed group develop a set of standard moral
responses–and these types of demands for full equality for others will seem par for the
course. They'll commit themselves to meeting them even for groups whose political interests
aren't clearly aligned with their own. Often though, the political interests are broadly
aligned but this process does create moral affinities, and general commitments to
egalitarianism that the far right ridicules but which follow logically from a broad
commitment for social equality.
Even so, there are fights among groups struggling for different types of social equality.
Sometimes they are actually in one another's way or are viewed as competition for
resources. Sometimes the concern seems more symbolic and maybe motivated by worries that
there isn't enough equality to go around.
The interesting consequence is maybe the only power some people making claims for equality
have is the power of moral suasion. They are depending on the broader acceptance of social
equality, and the logical extension to themselves. So naturally a backlash tries to undermine
their moral standing.
Peter Dorman 12.27.19 at 6:57 pm (no link)
The dynamic JQ describes does occur often, but it is not the whole story. I think two
distinctions can help in separating where it works from where it doesn't.
The first is between symbolic and concrete relative positioning. JQ is describing a realm
in which hierarchies are matters of symbolic exchange: do I relate to you as my inferior,
equal or superior? A lot of social interaction is like this. But there are also concrete
hierarchies in which people exercise power over others or gain relative advantage
irrespective of how their actions are displayed symbolically. In its pure form, for instance,
institutional racism is a hierarchy that is not visible at the individual level but shows up
through the structural dynamics of the institutions people are embedded in. I think of the
interaction between racial segregation in housing, unequal access to credit and the financing
of public schools through local property taxes as an example of this. No single individual
has to be racist in outlook or intent for the system as a whole to reproduce generation after
generation of extreme injustice.
The second is between zero-sum and positive-sum redistributions. Some inequalities are
largely zero-sum, in the sense that the benefits to those on the top are due to the
deprivations of those on the bottom. An example is the gender division of labor in housework,
where more chores for you means more freedom from them for me and vice versa. The Marxist
view of profit works that way too (but not necessarily other views). And then there are
inequalities in which the benefits of the better off group don't depend on the deprivation of
others, such as the risk of being arbitrarily abused or killed by the police. I'm white and
less likely to experience this abuse than someone who isn't, but ending this abuse for them
doesn't put me at any greater risk.
I think identity politics has been excessively divisive (more precise: has engendered
surplus divisiveness) because of the blurring of these two distinctions. Contests over
symbolic status, as JQ points out, have an inherent zero sum aspect, especially as we move to
the meta level of who should have the right to award respect in the first place. To some
extent, these contests are an unavoidable part of social change, and we just have to roll
with them. Unfortunately though, symbolic disputes have tended to crowd out concrete ones,
where it is often possible to find (ahem) Pareto improvements.
Meanwhile, there is very little awareness of the difference between zero and positive sum
situations, as shown by the tendency to call all relative advantages "privilege". A privilege
is an unjust, unearned benefit, typically based on the exclusion of others. (Membership has
its privileges because nonmembers don't get them.) Private equity billionaires who profit
from exorbitant surprise medical bills that bankrupt ordinary people drip with privilege. But
heterosexual couples who benefit from marriage laws did not gain at the expense of non-hetero
couples that were excluded, and changing the laws to benefit the latter does not harm the
former (except perhaps in the world of symbolic hierarchies).
We are awash in sloppy thinking about difference and hierarchy. (There's a lot more than
what I've brought up here.) Why we're in this mess is an interesting question.
I'm not sure that identity politics works this way.
This is the way identity politics would work if it was really a sort of philosophical
argument about the merits of this or that identity.
But what I see is more a sort of tribalism, where for example here in Italy many conservative
parties (especially the Lega) are big on how Italy is a Christian (catholic) country and
Muslim immigrants are going to destroy our culture, but then when the Pope says we should
welcome immigrants they say he should mind his own business, that is not what you would
expect from a firebrand catholic.
the idea of tolerance implies the existence of a dominant group that does the
tolerating
I'm not certain this is true; the history of religious tolerance seems to feature many
cases where no group was a majority, and "we'll argue but not fight, and the government won't
take sides" was designed to be the best available system when everyone was a minority. I'd
say a very key feature of US politics since the 1960's is that the elite have been
increasingly unwilling to tolerate, or provide equal protection of the law to, those who
disagree with them–so principles like "free speech doesn't include malicious
falsehoods" or "the government doesn't take sides between conceptions of the good" only last
until they would protect a previously-normative group that the elite has turned on.
I also think you are missing a key point in the discussion of deference: a normative
identity creates both a Schelling point and some incentive to assimilate, and so builds its
own majority; think of "white" identity in the US.
To be sure, race, gender, culture, and other aspects of social life have always been
important to politics. But neoliberalism's radical individualism has increasingly raised
two interlocking problems. First, when taken to an extreme, social fracturing into identity
groups can be used to divide people and prevent the creation of a shared civic
identity.
You quote from this guy, and others have written the same thing (e.g. Mark [spit] Lilla).
Their argument, simply put, is that "identity politics" is a fracturing of society into
smaller groups who don't/won't unite.
Having/continually constructing/renewing identities is an inescapable part of being human.
The issue is: what is to constitute the most salient identity? What bundle of markers are to
make up being "American" or "British" or "European"? These things are always contested, but
the pace of change is usually slow. We live in a time when the question is unusually
prominent, so more heavily contested. If, as Chetan says, lots of groups just want to be
"American", then by that want they change "American-ness". If they can't agree on some new
definition, then the US fractures.
CNN blasted Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Friday over contradictory stances regarding the
role of Senators during an impeachment.
In a
recent floor speech , Schumer blasted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for
describing himself as "not an impartial juror" when it comes to Trump's upcoming impeachment
trial.
"Let the American people hear it loud and clear, the Republican leader said, proudly, 'I'm
not an impartial juror. I'm not impartial about this at all.' That is an astonishing admission
of partisanship," said Schumer.
Yet, as CNN
's Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck note, Schumer said during Bill Clinton's 1998 - 1999
impeachment saga that the Senate was "not like a jury box," and that senators, who are not
impartial, had previously formed their opinions heading into the trial .
Schumer had attacked his Senate opponent Al D'Mato for not taking a position on
impeachment during their 1998 debate. D'Mato said he would not take a position until "the
proof is presented" at the Senate trial – calling it "inappropriate." https://t.co/nPMyvjZE6V
pic.twitter.com/tYAc6hkwzd
In fact, as "KFile" notes, Schumer was elected to the Senate in 1998 on the promise that a
vote for him would be a vote not to impeach Clinton .
We have a new story looking at past Chuck Schumer's comments on impeachment. Including
repeatedly arguing the Senate was not a jury in 1999 and him campaigning that he would not
support impeachment or convicting Clinton in 1998. https://t.co/nPMyvjZE6V https://t.co/LPr1BlfD4O
pic.twitter.com/87q7hxKLks
Speaking on CNN's "Larry King Live" in January 1999, Schumer said the trial in the Senate
was not like a jury box.
" We have a pre-opinion ," Schumer said, citing himself and two newly-elected Republican
senators who had voted on impeachment in 1998 as members of the House of Representatives who
said they would vote in the Senate. " This is not a criminal trial, but this is something
that the Founding Fathers decided to put in a body that was susceptible to the whims of
politics ."
" So therefore, anybody taking an oath tomorrow can have a pre-opinion; it's not a jury
box ," King asked Schumer.
"Many do," Schumer responded. "And then they change. In fact, it's also not like a jury
box in the sense that people will call us and lobby us. You don't have jurors called and
lobbied and things like that. I mean, it's quite different than a jury. And we're also the
judge."
A day later, the Republican National Committee attacked Schumer in a press release for
previous comments in the House saying there was no basis for impeachment. - CNN
Then-RNC chairman Jim Nicholson said of Schumer "No self-respecting jury would allow
somebody who's already formed an opinion on the guilt or innocence of the accused," adding "but
Chuck Schumer has loudly proclaimed that he's pre-judged the case. He's already announced that
he's decided the President shouldn't be impeached , much less removed from office."
Schumer responded days later, telling NBC 's "Meet the Press": "The Founding Fathers --
whose wisdom just knocks my socks off every day, it really does -- set this process up to be in
the Senate, not at the Supreme Court, not in some judicial body ."
"Every day, for instance, hundreds of people call us up and lobby us on one side and the
other. You can't do that with a juror," he added. "The standard is different. It's supposed to
be a little bit judicial and a little bit legislative-political. That's how it's been.
Meanwhile, Schumer said in a 1998 Op-Ed that he would be voting to acquit Clinton , and that
he'd made up his mind that September.
"My decision will not come as a surprise," Schumer
wrote . "I will be voting to acquit the president on both counts. I had to make my decision
in September as a member of the Judiciary Committee in the House, and while I was in the middle
of the campaign."
Responding to CNN 's recent report (yet failing to explain the 'impartial juror' hypocrisy),
Schumer's office said that his statements came after the conclusion of the Starr investigation,
"which included testimony from key witnesses including President Clinton, had concluded and
been made public for months and as Sen. Schumer was in the anomalous position of having already
voted on impeachment in both the House Judiciary Committee and on the House floor."
"As is reflected in these quotes, Schumer believed then and still believes now that all of
the facts must be allowed to come out and then a decision can be made -- in stark contrast to
the Republicans today in both the House and Senate who have worked to prevent all the facts and
evidence from coming out." 43 minutes ago (Edited) CNN is a CIA / Ziocon loudspeaker. I think
they are furiously backpedaling and trying to undo the Anti-Trump necromancy of the past few
years. Why? because they realize that Orange Donald is really Zion Don, and that MAGA is being
served up as a watery bone broth, meanwhile MIGA is prime rib and is being served up on a daily
basis from the White House.
Like it was earlier noted, the "New Detente" isn't perfect, as seen most recently by the US'
decision to impose sanctions on
the companies involved in Nord Stream II's construction, but once again, the state of relations
in general are still comparatively better than their nadir in mid-2014 immediately after the
EuroMaidan coup and Crimea's reunification with Russia. The US is still trying to "contain"
Russia with mixed success, while Russia is undertaking its best efforts to break out of this
"containment" noose and even "flip" some of the US' traditional partners such as Turkey, so the
New
Cold War probably won't end anytime soon. Nor, for that matter, did anybody reasonably
expect that it would, but just like during the Old Cold War, there comes a time when the
involved parties believe that it's in their best interests to proverbially take a break and
enter into a period of detente. It seems as though that phase is only now just beginning but
which has finally borne some fruit after Trump promised to pursue this outcome all throughout
the 2016 campaign.
One can argue over why that hasn't already happened to the extent that he promised (or even
if he was fully sincere in the first place), but the point to focus on in the here and now is
that some tangible progress has finally been made concerning the future of Russia's
trans-Ukrainian gas supplies to the EU. From the looks of it, all the relevant players --
Russia, Ukraine, the EU, and the US -- have concrete interests in seeing that this agreement is
upheld. It's convenient for Russia to continue using existing pipelines, Ukraine wants to get
paid for its transit role, the EU desires reliable but cheap gas imports, and the US recognizes
that this outcome perpetuates the geostrategic role of its Ukrainian proxy that it could then
leverage as a "bargaining chip" for reaching a more substantive "New Detente" with Russia
sometime next year or the one afterwards. That said, while each player has their interests,
they don't exactly trust one another for different reasons, which means that the "New Detente"
might still be offset if any of them decides to play the spoiler or is undermined by their
"deep states".
Imbecilization is a normal historical process where intellectual declines follows the
economic decline of a given empire. There's growing evidence the West is going through the
same process.
A with any composite, complex historical process, imbecilization doesn't happen in a
uniform and linear way. Economics was the first science that descended into pseudo-science in
the capitalist world (after Marx dismantled Classic Economics). Philosophy followed. Erudite
art degenerated after the fall of Modernism somewhere in the 1950s. Human sciences in general
became fragmented and little more than a constelation of esoterism and pseudo-sciences - a
condition they still enjoy today (e.g. the dismembering of History into Sociology, Behavioral
Economics and others).
Meanwhile, the so-called STEM or "Hard Sciences" continued to prosper for some decades,
until they also hit a ceiling in the 1990s. The fall of the profitability of the capitalist
world led it to resort to "financialization" to keep the system going, which resulted in the
most brilliant capitalist mathematicians to be hosed to Wall Street instead to the likes of
NASA. Those MIT mathematicians and rocket scientists created the algorithms Wall Street still
uses today, but they did not stop the 2008 meltdown.
Nowadays, those brilliant STEM minds are nothing more than fraudsters who keep their
careers going by creating meaningless experiments (because they need the funding) only to
publish articles and keep their production quotas or self-censuring bootlickers for Wall
Street and Big Pharma. When they get to work for a big corporation, they are mere architects
of planned obsolescence or patent renewing. There's a new book I strongly recommend all of
you to read:
The Deplorables are ascending in America, with Trump, in Britain with Brexit, in Hong Kong,
in much of Europe, in Latin America, in Iran.
...The Mandate of Heaven has been removed from the elitist establishment. It is passing to
the Deplorables.
The Deplorables are ascending in America, with Trump, in Britain with Brexit, in Hong Kong,
in much of Europe, in Latin America, in Iran. Deplorables are the antidote to arrogant
globalists.
Deplorables everywhere say "from now on we will make our own decisions."
What is it with
the Deplorables? What gives them such power?
Three things, I believe, are elevating them.
Deplorables are pragmatic . They are not wedded to any extreme ideology. Deplorables will
go with anything that works. It is no wonder that the Deplorables began in America. For, as
Americans we inherit the pragmatism of our pioneering ancestors.
The article incorrectly lumps the astro-turfed Hong Kong protests in with the "Deplorable"
populist movements in the USA and western Europe.
The Hong Kong protests are being backed by Soros and the Davos globalist elites as well
the the CIA, MIC, and the DC Uniparty. This same bunch of Swamp scum are enemies of the
"Deplorables".
More pure American establishment propaganda as if the globalist movement is essentially a
creature of the socialists, government bureaucracies, and the Asian block. The truth is that
it is a creature mainly of the Rothschild banking cartel and with the support of most Western
based multi-nationals, which have utilized the Rothschild & Soros backed international
socialists, the Western mainstream media, most Western governments, plus the Catholic Church
hierarchy, in order to bring about a world government. The Rothschild wet dream is control of
world finances just like they control those in the West, and their stated intentions are for
a One-World Bank with a one-world currency. However, the cartel cannot do that without a
world government with real enforcement powers for trade and protection with their world
currency. The multinonals mainly want borderless nations for freer access to resources and
markets.
Trump has been used to whump up US stature and ultimately will be seen as much an
instrument of the globalist cause as was Obama. Perhaps he was put in the game by his backers
to secure a higher return on the US dollar when they are cashed in for the proposed one-world
currency, and by the Zionists to secure more turf for Israel. Israel is getting very itchy
with the old trigger finger and we await in the New Year another false flag at least on the
scale of 9/11. It will likely have to involve a US city.
As we know, the term 'deplorables' came from Hillary in the last US presidential election
and was applied to people who amplified "hateful views and voices" about her, but later the
term was used to characterize mainly Trump supporters. The Hong Kong protesters as not
"deplorables" because their cause in not for Trump or for the US. It is for their own liberty
against the communist Chinese government usurping their basic legal and local rights, which
Trump could care less about. Aslo, he is not a populist. He is an elitist and he is totally
controlled by elitists with more money and power than even he every dreamed of.
Left or right, Democrat or Republican, the puppet masters are the same and run the show.
They are all global elites using their money and power to swing the public audiences left and
right with every pull at the strings of their dummy politicians. What they fear the most, is
the people in the middle uniting without their money or the media and taking control of their
lives and their nations.
So Turkey goes against Uncle Sam and Egypt. Interesting...
Notable quotes:
"... Erdogan's eyes set on defeating Benghazi-based General Khalifa Haftar, it appears this arms and jihadist rat line has conveniently been reversed . ..."
"... In a deepening proxy war, Turkey aims to send its Navy to protect Tripoli, while its troops train and coordinate forces of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, according to a senior Turkish official. Turkey recently signed a critical maritime deal with oil-rich Libya that serves energy interests of both countries and aims to salvage billions of dollars of business contracts thrown into limbo by the conflict . ..."
"... Remember when the CIA thought it was a good idea to train and fund jihadists in Syria to topple Assad? ..."
"... The conflict in Syria has become a rallying point for jihadists from around the world. More than 20,000 foreign fighters are fighting or have fought in Syria, and most are part of jihadist groups, including Jubhat al Nusra (JAN) and Islamic State (IS). North Africa has provided a large portion of these foreign fighters, from countries as diverse as Morocco and Libya. ..."
Bloomberg has confirmed on Friday the prior rumors that Turkey will be sending mercenaries
to Libya -- where it is propping up the UN-backed government in Tripoli (the GNA) -- are true.
"Turkey is preparing to deploy troops and naval forces to support the
internationally-recognized Libyan government, joining a planned push by Ankara-backed Syrian
rebels to defeat strongman Khalifa Haftar,"
reports Bloomberg .
Though Ankara has yet to confirm or deny the new reports, Erdogan's Turkey has for years
overseen a Libya-to-Turkey-to-Syria arms
"rat line" which saw both heavy weaponry and jihadists fighters transported for the purpose
of toppling Assad. But now with Erdogan's eyes set on defeating Benghazi-based General Khalifa
Haftar, it appears this arms and jihadist rat line has conveniently been reversed
.
This also as President Erdogan
in a speech on Thursday presented plans to send Turkish national troops bolster Tripoli as
well .
Possibly thousands from among the so-called Turkish Free Syrian Army (formerly the FSA),
with most of its fighters currently attacking Syrian Kurds in the ongoing 'Operation Peace
Spring', will now be sent into Libya.
There are reports suggesting Turkey is ready to pay $2,000 a month for each Syrian 'rebel'
willing to go to Libya .
TFSA source told me Turkey will be offering fighters from all TFSA factions $2,000/month
to go to Libya.
And akin to the current proxy war which has seen both the US, Kurds, and Sunni Islamists
backed by Turkey wrangle over Syria's oil rich eastern region, Libya is heating up to be the
latest 'oil and gas prize' -- but with immensely more at stake. As Bloomberg notes:
In a deepening proxy war, Turkey aims to send its Navy to protect Tripoli, while its
troops train and coordinate forces of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, according to a senior
Turkish official. Turkey recently signed a critical maritime deal with oil-rich Libya that
serves energy interests of both countries and aims to salvage billions of dollars of business
contracts thrown into limbo by the conflict .
As we
predicted earlier , Libya and the southern Mediterranean is on its way to becoming the next
big Middle East conflict of 2020 , also with Egypt and even Russia warning of further
involvement to block Turkey's increasing role on the ground.
And as the mainstream media finally stops ignoring the looming catastrophe for north Africa
and the region (still in denial as to the fruits of US-NATO "liberated" Libya after Gaddafi was
overthrown and killed), it
must be remembered that in another ironic plot twist, the CIA trained the very FSA 'rebel'
fighters now on their way to Libya .
Gee who would have ever predicted? It's the foreign fighter 'rat line' in reverse.
Remember when the CIA thought it was a good idea to train and fund jihadists in Syria to
topple Assad? Via a 2015
military study :
The conflict in Syria has become a rallying point for jihadists from around the world.
More than 20,000 foreign fighters are fighting or have fought in Syria, and most are part of
jihadist groups, including Jubhat al Nusra (JAN) and Islamic State (IS). North Africa has provided a large portion of these
foreign fighters, from countries as diverse as Morocco and Libya. Who are these North African fighters, and why are they
going to Syria? What do they hope to accomplish there, and do they want to return to their home countries?
Considering the tens of thousands of foreign fighters which poured into Syria starting in
2011 and 2012 in the first place, many of them from Libya, perhaps many are now simply headed
"home" -- ready to further the proxy war chaos at Erdogan's bidding.
NATO IS NOTHING more than an extension of George Soros' arm as it is also an extension
of the Rothschild arm! Most should have gleaned this by now, particularly recognizing the
radical Wahhabism that was included in this band of merry global thugs (Saudi Arabia) to do
the bidding of the globalist satanic cabal. Kind of sad hearing this kind of neive
responses from the gallery...sorry Mr. teolawki but you missed the forest for the
trees.
What is naive is not understanding that Turkey is the current NATO nations gateway for
all manner of illicit and illegitimat activity to foment and perpetuate the forever wars in
the ME. This has been going on since well before Benghazi and has only gotten worse under
Erdogan.
If you have a way to snap your fingers and solve every problem simultaneously, then
please do so. Otherwise it must be undertaken one step at a time. Closing that Turkish
gateway permanently is an excellent start.
The Deplorables are ascending in America, with Trump, in Britain with Brexit, in Hong Kong,
in much of Europe, in Latin America, in Iran.
...The Mandate of Heaven has been removed from the elitist establishment. It is passing to
the Deplorables.
The Deplorables are ascending in America, with Trump, in Britain with Brexit, in Hong Kong,
in much of Europe, in Latin America, in Iran. Deplorables are the antidote to arrogant
globalists.
Deplorables everywhere say "from now on we will make our own decisions."
What is it with
the Deplorables? What gives them such power?
Three things, I believe, are elevating them.
Deplorables are pragmatic . They are not wedded to any extreme ideology. Deplorables will
go with anything that works. It is no wonder that the Deplorables began in America. For, as
Americans we inherit the pragmatism of our pioneering ancestors.
The article incorrectly lumps the astro-turfed Hong Kong protests in with the "Deplorable"
populist movements in the USA and western Europe.
The Hong Kong protests are being backed by Soros and the Davos globalist elites as well
the the CIA, MIC, and the DC Uniparty. This same bunch of Swamp scum are enemies of the
"Deplorables".
More pure American establishment propaganda as if the globalist movement is essentially a
creature of the socialists, government bureaucracies, and the Asian block. The truth is that
it is a creature mainly of the Rothschild banking cartel and with the support of most Western
based multi-nationals, which have utilized the Rothschild & Soros backed international
socialists, the Western mainstream media, most Western governments, plus the Catholic Church
hierarchy, in order to bring about a world government. The Rothschild wet dream is control of
world finances just like they control those in the West, and their stated intentions are for
a One-World Bank with a one-world currency. However, the cartel cannot do that without a
world government with real enforcement powers for trade and protection with their world
currency. The multinonals mainly want borderless nations for freer access to resources and
markets.
Trump has been used to whump up US stature and ultimately will be seen as much an
instrument of the globalist cause as was Obama. Perhaps he was put in the game by his backers
to secure a higher return on the US dollar when they are cashed in for the proposed one-world
currency, and by the Zionists to secure more turf for Israel. Israel is getting very itchy
with the old trigger finger and we await in the New Year another false flag at least on the
scale of 9/11. It will likely have to involve a US city.
As we know, the term 'deplorables' came from Hillary in the last US presidential election
and was applied to people who amplified "hateful views and voices" about her, but later the
term was used to characterize mainly Trump supporters. The Hong Kong protesters as not
"deplorables" because their cause in not for Trump or for the US. It is for their own liberty
against the communist Chinese government usurping their basic legal and local rights, which
Trump could care less about. Aslo, he is not a populist. He is an elitist and he is totally
controlled by elitists with more money and power than even he every dreamed of.
Left or right, Democrat or Republican, the puppet masters are the same and run the show.
They are all global elites using their money and power to swing the public audiences left and
right with every pull at the strings of their dummy politicians. What they fear the most, is
the people in the middle uniting without their money or the media and taking control of their
lives and their nations.
I'm finding it hard to think of examples where the formerly norm-giving group becomes
derided or humiliated.
You can probably try to look at the situation in (now independent) republics of the former
USSR. Simplifying previously oppressed group, given a lucky chance, most often strive for
dominance and oppression of other groups including and especially former dominant group. This
is an eternal damnation of ethno/cultural nationalism.
And not only it (look at Mutual Help and The State in Shantytowns.) In them ethnic
comminutes often own protection markets, offer services that hire people and replace the state,
pay off gang leaders. they also provide some community support for particular ethnic group,
enforce the rules of trade within themselves, etc. In GB the abuse of children by ethnic gangs
was sickening ( https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/sep/30/abuse-children-asian-communities
)
In many cases of ethnic/cultural nationalism this looks more like a competition for
resources with the smoke screen of noble intentions/human rights/past oppression/
humiliations/etc
Or you can look at the language policy in the USA and the actual situation in some
areas/institutions of Florida and California and how English speakers feel in those
areas/institutions. Or in some areas of Quebec in Canada.
That actually suggests another meaning of famous Randolph Bourne quote " War is the health
of the state " (said in the midst of the First World War.) It bring the unity unachievable in
peace time or by any other methods, albeit temporarily (from Ch 14. Howard Zinn book A People's
History of the United States ):
the governments flourished, patriotism bloomed, class struggle was stilled, and young men
died in frightful numbers on the battlefields-often for a hundred yards of land, a line of
trenches.
In the United States, not yet in the war, there was worry about the health of the state.
Socialism was growing. The IWW seemed to be everywhere. Class conflict was intense. In the
summer of 1916, during a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco, a bomb exploded, killing
nine people; two local radicals, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, were arrested and would
spend twenty years in prison. Shortly after that Senator James Wadsworth of New York
suggested compulsory military training for all males to avert the danger that "these people
of ours shall be divided into classes." Rather: "We must let our young men know that they owe
some responsibility to this country."
The supreme fulfillment of that responsibility was taking place in Europe. Ten million
were to die on the battlefield; 20 million were to die of hunger and disease related to the
war. And no one since that day has been able to show that the war brought any gain for
humanity that would be worth one human life. The rhetoric of the socialists, that it was an
"imperialist war," now seems moderate and hardly arguable. The advanced capitalist countries
of Europe were fighting over boundaries, colonies, spheres of influence; they were competing
for Alsace-Lorraine, the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East.
Neo-McCarthyism now serves a somewhat similar purpose in the USA. Among other thing (like
absolving Hillary from her fiasco to "deux ex machine" trick instead of real reason -- the
crisis and rejection of neoliberalism by the sizable strata of the USA population) it is an
attempt to unify the nation after 2016.
"... Sorry to burst your bubble, but since the end of the Soviet System (with Western criminal thieving BILLIONAIRES who rushed in to plunder Russia (Yeltsin Years) ---- Russians now live longer than the degraded, and impoverished Americans with what the Junk Food Nation serves in the US of A. ..."
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4777 Washington's Unmasked Imperialism Towards
Europe And Russia by Tyler Durden Sat, 12/28/2019 - 07:00 0
SHARES
Washington must think the rest of the world is as stupid as many of its own politicians are.
Its passing into law – signed by President Trump this week – of sanctions to halt
the Nord Stream-2 and Turk Stream gas supply projects is a naked imperialist move to bludgeon
the European energy market for its own economic advantage.
US sanctions are planned to hit European companies involved with Russia's Gazprom in the
construction of the 1,225-kilometer pipeline under the Baltic Sea which will deliver natural
gas from Russia to Germany and elsewhere across the European Union. The €9.5 billion
($11bn) project is 80 per cent complete and is due to be finished early next year.
It is quite clear – because US politicians have openly acknowledged it – that
Washington's aim is to oust Russia as the main natural gas exporter to the giant EU market, and
to replace with more expensive American-produced gas.
What's hilarious is the way American politicians, diplomats and news media are portraying
this US assault on market principles and the sovereignty of nations as an act of chivalry.
Washington claims that the sanctions are "pro-European" because they are "saving Europe from
dependency on Russia for its energy". The American hypocrisy crescendoes with the further claim
that by stopping Russia earning lucrative export revenues, then Moscow will be constrained from
"interfering" in European nations. As if Washington's own actions are not interference on a
massive scale.
European politicians and businesses are not buying this American claptrap. The vast
overstepping by Washington into European affairs has prompted EU governments to question the
nature of the trans-Atlantic relation. About time too. Thus, Washington's hubris and bullying
are undermining its objective of dominating Europe for its own selfish interests.
Russia, Germany and others have defiantly
told Washington its weaponizing of economic sanctions will not halt the Nord Stream nor the
Turk Stream projects.
As German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas
said earlier this month, "it is unacceptable" for the US to brazenly interfere in European
and Russian energy trade. The American pretext of supposedly "protecting" the national security
of its purported European allies is frankly laughable.
The American agenda is a blatantly imperialistic reordering of the energy market to benefit
US economic interests. To pull off this audacious scam, Washington, by necessity, has to
demonize and isolate Russia, while also trampling roughshod over its European allies. Europe
has partly aided this American stitch-up of its own interests because it has foolishly indulged
in the US antagonism towards Russia with sanctions due to the Ukraine conflict, Crimea and
other anti-Russia smears.
The legislation being whistled through the American Congress by both Republicans and
Democrats (collectively dubbed the War Party) is recklessly fueling tensions between the US and
Russia. In trying to gain economic advantages over Europe's energy, Washington is wantonly
ramping up animus towards Moscow.
Apart from the sanctions against Russian and European companies partnering on Nord Stream,
the US Congress passed separate legislation which seeks to boost American oil and gas
production in the East Mediterranean.
A Radio Free Europe
report this week was headlined: 'Congress Passes More Legislation Aimed At Curbing Russia's
Energy Grip On Europe'.
The headline should more accurately have been worded: 'Congress Passes More Legislation
Aimed At Bolstering America's Energy Grip On Europe'.
The RFE report states: "The bipartisan Eastern Mediterranean Security and Energy Partnership
Act, which was approved on December 19, is the latest piece of US legislation passed this year
that aims to diversify [sic] Europe's energy sources away from Kremlin-controlled
companies."
Again, the American double-think is jaw-dropping. Such is the arrogance of a flailing,
delusional empire when it can publicly justify with a straight face an energy-market-grab with
a veneer of virtue.
US oil and gas giants are moving into the East Mediterranean. Exxon Mobil
announced the discovery of a major natural gas field off Cyprus in February this year.
American firms are also
partnering with Israeli companies to begin gas production in the Leviathan Field located
off the coast at Haifa.
There is no doubt that the US sanctions targeting Nord Stream and Turk Stream are part of a
bigger concerted pincer movement by Washington to corner the EU energy market of 500 million
consumers (more than double the US population).
Colin Cavell, a US professor of political science, commented to Strategic Culture
Foundation: "What should be hammered down in this continuing debate over which country will be
able to deliver oil and natural gas to Europe is the fact that neither the United States nor,
and especially, the Republican Party, stand for so-called free trade."
Free-trade capitalism is supposed to be an ideological pillar of the US. In this ideology,
governments should not interfere with market supply and demand. But paradoxically as far as
US-imposed sanctions on Russian-European energy companies are concerned the American Congress
is "quintessentially anti-free market", notes Cavell.
In its shameless profiteering, Washington is acting aggressively towards Russia and Europe
while flouting its own supposed economic principles and relying on brute force to win its
arguments. America's imperialist agenda towards Europe and Russia is how world wars are
instigated.
"You will buy our more expensive, less efficient, non-market solution, you will pay for it
with King Dollars, and by gawd, YOU WILL LIKE IT, now shuddup, Vassals!" -- Uncle Scam and
the Reloonicans
I live in Denmark, a country Nord Stream 2 is going through. We are (used to be?) one of
the strongest allies to the US. But recent developments have alienated a lot of danes to the
US.
First Trump publicly announced he wanted to buy the isle of Greenland from Denmark.
Greenland is the largest isle in the world and of strategic importance. But you don't just
buy a part of another country, and this offer was firmly refused. As response to the refusal
Trump cancelled a previously planned official visit to Denmark. This was seen by most danes
as an insult.
Denmark was the last country holding out on permissions needed to build Nord Stream 2, but
after this incident we allowed the project to go forward. I believe the Greenland incident
caused the change making Denmark approve Nord Stream 2.
After this we have had other incidents. One is on the Faroe Islands (a part of Denmark),
where both US and Chinese ambassadors interfered in our internal affairs trying to influence
if Huawei could be used for 5G in this self-governing part of our country. Another is a
follow-up to the Greenland incident mentioned, where the US now wants to open a diplomatic
mission on the island, probably in an attempt to influence the local government to accept
that the US buys the island.
During the last year I have seen sentiment among my fellow citizens going from "the US is
great, let us support and follow them" to "we have to be careful of these guys, they
interfere in our internal affairs and try to break up our country".
I believe the US government is underestimating how much they are alienating the Europeans
with this line of foreing policy.
Its a guess but I think there are other hidden issues here nobody wants to talk about. Of
course, Trump idea of buying the island was stupid but I believe it arouse out of
frustration. You see, US wants to build huge military base there. Danes won't permit that.
The reason US wants to do it is because sea between Iceland and England/Norway is a
chokepoint aimed against Russian subs. This is the only place where they can be reasonably
stopped. It is nothing new, the same thing happened during WWII war at so called "war of
Atlantic" where the most of the fighting happened between German U-boats and alliance
marines.
You most certainly can buy land from other countries. Thomas Jefferson purchased the
entire center of N. America from the French and for pennies. We also purchased Alaska from
the Russians for next to nothing as well. Both land masses are much larger than all of
Europe.
You guys don't need Greenland so give it to us for pennies.
Russia has the largest proven reserves of easily recoverable oil and natural gas on Earth.
The US has about a decade to choke Russia to death. Economic sanctions, regime change, cyber
attacks...whatever it takes. If the US doesn't utterly break Russia soon, Russia will become
the next, (and last) empire on Earth. NeoConThink.
"The US has about a decade to choke Russia to death. "
Actually you are absolutely wrong on this. It is the other way around. Russia has to get
out of US chokefold NOW or it will likely disintegrate.
Why? In short, economy, geogaphy and even more importantly demographics.
Today there are about 110 million native Russians there. Next to them are about 40 million
muslims living there. Muslims have about twice as big reproduction rate as Russians do. It is
estimated that in 30 years if current trends stand it will be 50/50. Worse, in ten years
there will be only about 90 million Russians living there.
There are other issues as well. About 25 percent of Russian men die before the age of 55.
The reason? Alcoholism and drug abuse. Have you ever heard about cheap Rusian drug called
Krokodil?
It kills you slowly first then fast. Your body just ROTS AWAY and falls off. Literally!
Like you have bare bones instead of feet. No kidding. Just check on you tube.
Another problem is soldier materiel. It is estimated that only about 30 percent of males
between the age of 18-25 are healthy enough to join military. As of today it is barely
sufficient to fill the ranks. In 10 years Russian military will have to shrink by 20 percent.
From that perspective it is do or die for Russia right now. This is most likely the peak of
their military power, then it will slowly deteriorate. Putin knows that, hence he lashes out
at its neighbours, most notably Poland. Economy shrinks, military is on vane, hence he needs
an enemy to rally his people around. Or else!
Then there is China. Make your best bet what they will do in the far east when Russia lies
prostate.Remember, Russia took over a lot of Chinese territory in late XIX century there.
Yep, the area around Vladivostok and other nearby territories, the size close to that of
today's France..There are millions of Chinese already living there.In the Asian south Chinese already took controll of the former
Russian stans. They rule there, not Putin. You didn't know that?
"There are other issues as well. About 25 percent of Russian men die before the age of 55.
The reason? Alcoholism and drug abuse. Have you ever heard about cheap Rusian drug called
Krokodil?
It kills you slowly first then fast. Your body just ROTS AWAY and falls off. Literally!
Like you have bare bones instead of feet. No kidding. Just check on you tube."
Sorry to burst your bubble, but since the end of the Soviet System (with Western criminal
thieving BILLIONAIRES who rushed in to plunder Russia (Yeltsin Years) ---- Russians now live
longer than the degraded, and impoverished Americans with what the Junk Food Nation serves in
the US of A.
" Washington must think the rest of the world is as stupid as many of its own
politicians are"
No, washington thinks no such thing. It doesnt really understand how stupid its own
politicians are. Nor DOES IT CARE!.
Did anyone watch the impeachment proceedings? Now, THAT was stupid, stupid for the
whole world to watch. And then there is the chocoate cake diplomacy of Trump, the elegance
and sophistication of Pompeo, Bolton, and the digniity of Nikki Haley. Putting Raytheon to
run our Pentagon is a magical touch.
Comment from a friend of mine concerning the statement below. He has excellent security
credentials:
"Our President has made the world far more dangerous by withdrawing from treaties without
attempting to negotiate new ones. No country is well served by this. The situation is very
destabilizing."
The Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Sergey Shoigu:
- I hope that a full-scale war is not a question today. And all the risks and consequences
that such a full-scale war entails are obvious to everyone.
Regarding the third world war, there are a very large number of different statements. The
most accurate and adequate of them seems to me: "I do not know exactly what the third world
war will be. But I know for sure that she will be the last. "
However, if we talk about the number of threats to our country, then they do not become
less. The United States has already withdrawn from two important nuclear arms control
treaties. So far, the START-3 treaty remains, which is also under discussion in the USA: to
renew it or not to renew it?
As a result of this approach, the world is becoming more unpredictable and less secure. At
the current level of informatization and automation, there is a high probability of errors in
the weapons control system.
That is why recently issues of ensuring information security have come to the fore. When
you are aware of your vulnerability and are interested in maintaining balance and universal
equal security, it makes you turn on your head.
And when you think how the United States continues to believe by inertia that a balance of
power has developed in your favor, a variety of ideas may come to your head, including not
the most reasonable ones. It is in this situation that I see the main threat now, and not
only for Russia, "the minister replied.
It's good cop/bad cop nonsense. Europe is occupied territory, and American huffing and
puffing at Russia is just meant to get Europe "better deals" for their projects with Russia.
The only ones who don't get it are spooks and Neo-Libs/Cons
What is not expected is rational discussion on what I have described here. But since facts
contrary to my expose here are missing I doubt it will happen.
" But remember also that todays Russia is ruled by a Tsar named Putin"
Im amazed at how long this silly meme can be maintained.
Putin is NOT and autocrat, he has to struggle with a delicate balance. between the Atlantic integrationists and Eurasiaon soveriigntists. The oligarchy installed by the US is still strong in Russian. They have not won their
soveriignty yet.
Then-RNC chairman Jim Nicholson said of Schumer "No self-respecting jury would allow
somebody who's already formed an opinion on the guilt or innocence of the accused," adding "but
Chuck Schumer has loudly proclaimed that he's pre-judged the case. He's already announced that
he's decided the President shouldn't be impeached , much less removed from office."
Schumer responded days later, telling NBC 's "Meet the Press": "The Founding Fathers --
whose wisdom just knocks my socks off every day, it really does -- set this process up to be in
the Senate, not at the Supreme Court, not in some judicial body ."
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"Every day, for instance, hundreds of people call us up and lobby us on one side and the
other. You can't do that with a juror," he added. "The standard is different. It's supposed to
be a little bit judicial and a little bit legislative-political. That's how it's been.
Meanwhile, Schumer said in a 1998 Op-Ed that he would be voting to acquit Clinton , and that
he'd made up his mind that September.
"My decision will not come as a surprise," Schumer
wrote . "I will be voting to acquit the president on both counts. I had to make my decision
in September as a member of the Judiciary Committee in the House, and while I was in the middle
of the campaign."
Responding to CNN 's recent report (yet failing to explain the 'impartial juror' hypocrisy),
Schumer's office said that his statements came after the conclusion of the Starr investigation,
"which included testimony from key witnesses including President Clinton, had concluded and
been made public for months and as Sen. Schumer was in the anomalous position of having already
voted on impeachment in both the House Judiciary Committee and on the House floor."
"As is reflected in these quotes, Schumer believed then and still believes now that all of
the facts must be allowed to come out and then a decision can be made -- in stark contrast to
the Republicans today in both the House and Senate who have worked to prevent all the facts and
evidence from coming out."
Another term unlimited parasite shows that he has become an utter hypocrite, if he wasn't
one in the first place. Praising the wisdom of the founding fathers is such a rookie move,
the kind of thing you say to get elected. Like all other politicians he picks and chooses the
parts of the Constitution that are conducive to his hold on power. The Democrats do not have
a leg to stand on, and for that reason they are going down. What Trump will do with his
second term terrifies me. I still cannot believe this dissembling confidence artist, former
NYC liberal, arch Zionist, Rothschild beneficiary has the best interests of America in
mind.
The idea we have members of the House or Senate still serving who participated in the last
impeachment should be a warning to us all. Yet the number is surprisingly high.
but the larger issue is the money favoring...reducing that will be complic
Never happen. People are ****, and everybody has their price. Term limits would probably
make it worse; if you know you're only getting one or two terms you'll be trying to maximize
your take.
The whole thing is scripted. I've been waiting for stuff exactly like this, actually.
They're not really trying to get rid of Trump; in fact they NEED him in office next term.
Another term unlimited parasite shows that he has become an utter hypocrite, if he wasn't
one in the first place. Praising the wisdom of the founding fathers is such a rookie move,
the kind of thing you say to get elected. Like all other politicians he picks and chooses the
parts of the Constitution that are conducive to his hold on power. The Democrats do not have
a leg to stand on, and for that reason they are going down. What Trump will do with his
second term terrifies me. I still cannot believe this dissembling confidence artist, former
NYC liberal, arch Zionist, Rothschild beneficiary has the best interests of America in
mind.
Then-RNC chairman Jim Nicholson said of Schumer "No self-respecting jury would allow
somebody who's already formed an opinion on the guilt or innocence of the accused," adding "but
Chuck Schumer has loudly proclaimed that he's pre-judged the case. He's already announced that
he's decided the President shouldn't be impeached , much less removed from office."
Schumer responded days later, telling NBC 's "Meet the Press": "The Founding Fathers --
whose wisdom just knocks my socks off every day, it really does -- set this process up to be in
the Senate, not at the Supreme Court, not in some judicial body ."
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THAT MATTERS MOST
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Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
"Every day, for instance, hundreds of people call us up and lobby us on one side and the
other. You can't do that with a juror," he added. "The standard is different. It's supposed to
be a little bit judicial and a little bit legislative-political. That's how it's been.
Meanwhile, Schumer said in a 1998 Op-Ed that he would be voting to acquit Clinton , and that
he'd made up his mind that September.
"My decision will not come as a surprise," Schumer
wrote . "I will be voting to acquit the president on both counts. I had to make my decision
in September as a member of the Judiciary Committee in the House, and while I was in the middle
of the campaign."
Responding to CNN 's recent report (yet failing to explain the 'impartial juror' hypocrisy),
Schumer's office said that his statements came after the conclusion of the Starr investigation,
"which included testimony from key witnesses including President Clinton, had concluded and
been made public for months and as Sen. Schumer was in the anomalous position of having already
voted on impeachment in both the House Judiciary Committee and on the House floor."
"As is reflected in these quotes, Schumer believed then and still believes now that all of
the facts must be allowed to come out and then a decision can be made -- in stark contrast to
the Republicans today in both the House and Senate who have worked to prevent all the facts and
evidence from coming out."
Another term unlimited parasite shows that he has become an utter hypocrite, if he wasn't
one in the first place. Praising the wisdom of the founding fathers is such a rookie move,
the kind of thing you say to get elected. Like all other politicians he picks and chooses the
parts of the Constitution that are conducive to his hold on power. The Democrats do not have
a leg to stand on, and for that reason they are going down. What Trump will do with his
second term terrifies me. I still cannot believe this dissembling confidence artist, former
NYC liberal, arch Zionist, Rothschild beneficiary has the best interests of America in
mind.
The idea we have members of the House or Senate still serving who participated in the last
impeachment should be a warning to us all. Yet the number is surprisingly high.
but the larger issue is the money favoring...reducing that will be complic
Never happen. People are ****, and everybody has their price. Term limits would probably
make it worse; if you know you're only getting one or two terms you'll be trying to maximize
your take.
The whole thing is scripted. I've been waiting for stuff exactly like this, actually.
They're not really trying to get rid of Trump; in fact they NEED him in office next term.
Another term unlimited parasite shows that he has become an utter hypocrite, if he wasn't
one in the first place. Praising the wisdom of the founding fathers is such a rookie move,
the kind of thing you say to get elected. Like all other politicians he picks and chooses the
parts of the Constitution that are conducive to his hold on power. The Democrats do not have
a leg to stand on, and for that reason they are going down. What Trump will do with his
second term terrifies me. I still cannot believe this dissembling confidence artist, former
NYC liberal, arch Zionist, Rothschild beneficiary has the best interests of America in
mind.
Legislators have begun to hold hearings on impeaching Santa Claus after an overheard
conversation seemed to imply he was offering a quid pro quo: gifts in exchange for good
behavior. FBI agents spied on Claus at various malls as he repeatedly said things like, "Sure,
I'll get you a pony. But first, I need you to do something for me... be a good little boy!"
The FBI was able to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Claus, because it's easier to get a FISA
warrant than to get a Costco membership.
"Ho ho noooooo!" Santa Claus cried as investigators leaped out and cuffed him at a Dayton,
OH mall. "Not good! Sad!"
I don't think Warren is a stalking horse for neoliberalism or whatever, but her inability
to fight back against bad press (combined with her occasional baffling decisions to give
herself bad press) is a big mark against her candidacy. There will be bad press for either of
them.
A
beautiful public performance today by the Paris Opera's striking ballet dancers & orchestra. France's strike vs. austerity is
bringing art back into the streets.
Legislators have begun to hold hearings on impeaching Santa Claus after an overheard
conversation seemed to imply he was offering a quid pro quo: gifts in exchange for good
behavior. FBI agents spied on Claus at various malls as he repeatedly said things like, "Sure,
I'll get you a pony. But first, I need you to do something for me... be a good little boy!"
The FBI was able to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Claus, because it's easier to get a FISA
warrant than to get a Costco membership.
"Ho ho noooooo!" Santa Claus cried as investigators leaped out and cuffed him at a Dayton,
OH mall. "Not good! Sad!"
When doing GDP-PPP comparisons there is one very important thing your guys do not take into
account at all and that's a given country's infrastructure.
I mean what each and every citizen "own" just because he lives in that country : roads,
highways, schools, hospitals etc etc.
If you take that into account then the US is in a worse shape then many many third world
countries....
I don't have the exact numbers in head right now but for example, having a kid in the US
costs 10s of thousands of USD (like 40 or 50.000 USD) that you have to pay from your own
pocket.
The same thing in Russia costs more like 3-5.000 USD.
In most of the European countries (guess it's the same thing in Russia), if you want to go
to school, you'll have to pay a few hundred USD a year to enroll and that's it (of course you
have to pay for housing and food just like anybody else). Schools are free and payed by the
state, so every citizen "own" them.
If you add up all the things that are private (i.e. that you have to pay for) in the
States, compared to what is just "given" to you, I guess, just with school & healthcare,
you'll end up easily with 1/2 million dollars per citizen (think about old age healthcare...
mamamia, I'm glad I'm not american).
Which means that every Russian is 500.000$ richer that every american at birth...
Then you can start bitching about the few thousand dollars more or less that someone makes
in this or that country...
Joe diGenova has been talking about the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election for at
least a year, maybe longer. Unlike a lot of the people commenting on this in the mass media, he
is not using it to sell books or boost his cable career. He also knows how the FBI and DOJ
works from a practical matter. Being knowledgeable makes him a rare guy in the commentariat.
Most of the people brought on as experts for the cable chat shows know very little about their
alleged areas of expertise.
Regardless, he has been one of the most hawkish people on the Barr investigation, claiming
that it is a real investigation with real criminal targets. In this recent radio interview he goes into the details of both
the Barr investigation and the ongoing impeachment fiasco. He is a Trump partisan, so his
opinions on impeachment are predictable, but his thoughts on the conspiracy are interesting. He
probably has access to information from the Trump White House.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/BpTvjkTsaCQ
The interesting thing about all of this is just how widespread the conspiracy was during the
2015-2016 period. In that interview he talks about former NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers, who
is allegedly cooperating with Barr and Durham. What makes the Rogers issue interesting is that
he was the original whistle-blower. He is not treated as such, because the media hates Trump
and anyone associated with him, but Rogers was the guy who blew the whistle on the spying to
the Trump people.
What's also interesting about Rogers is he seems to have been a good guy, who decided to put
an end to the shenanigans with regards to access to top-secret data by FBI contractors. He
closed off their access at some point in 2016, which put him in bad odor with the Obama
administration. He was eventually pushed out, which suggests the conspiracy has roots into the
Obama inner-circle. That may explain why the easy cases to be made against the FBI conspirators
are on hold.
That's the other thing about the Rogers case. As
CTH explains in that post , his addition to the story reveals that the use of the NSA
database by political contractors working for the Democrats goes back to at least 2012. It is
an axiom of white-collar crime that the practice always goes back much further than the
evidence initially reveals. Anyone who has done forensic accounting knows this. You find the
first evidence of a crime, but it turns out that the pattern goes back much further.
That may be what lies beneath all of this. The great puzzle thus far has been the lack of
prosecutions, despite ample evidence. The FBI agents are all guilty of crimes that have been
detailed in public documents and the IG reports. There is now proof that Comey perjured himself
many times. Just from a public relations perspective alone, rounding up these guys and charging
them with corruption seems like a no-brainer. Almost a year into his tenure and Barr has
charged no one with a crime.
One obvious explanation is that Barr is running a long con on Trump and the rest of the
country, on behalf of the inner party. Robert Mueller was supposed to use his investigation to
hoover up all the data so it could not be made public, in addition to harassing the Trump White
House. His incompetence meant Barr took over the job and is now hoovering up all the
information on the various parties. That way, everyone has an excuse for not doing anything
about plot.
One bit of evidence in support of this is the handling of the James Wolfe issue. He was the
Senate staffer caught leaking classified information to one of the prostitutes hired by the
Washington Post. Big media hires good looking young women to sleep with flunkies like Wolf in
order to get access to information. Wolf was caught and charged, but instead of getting a
couple years in jail,
he got two months . He will come out and land into a six-figure job as a reward for being a
good soldier.
An alternative explanation is that what started as a straight forward political corruption
case bumped into a long pattern of behavior. In the course of investigating that pattern, the
trail went much further back than the 2016 election. If there is evidence of abuse going back
to 2012, maybe it goes back further. It was the Bush people, after all, who pushed for the
creation of secret courts and secret warrants. Maybe Dick Cheney was listening to your phone
calls after all.
It is not just the linear aspect of this. The sheer number of people involved in just the
FBI scandal is phenomenal. There are at least 20 FBI people named and dozens of bit players in
the media and DOJ. So far, the "contractors" with access to the NSA database have not been
revealed, but that could be hundreds of people, given that it seems to have been a
free-for-all. The corruption may not only go back a long time, but cover a wide swath of
official Washington.
That may be the answer to the great cover up. That's what we are seeing. This is a great
cover up of the biggest scandal in American history. To date, no one has been charged with a
crime, despite hundreds of crimes being documented. Many of the principals are now enjoying
high six figure lives, based on the fact they were part of the seditious plot to overturn the
2016 election. Instead of the scandal of the century, it is the celebration of the century for
the inner party.
One of the signs of ruling class collapse is when they can no longer enforce the rules that
maintain them as a ruling class. When the Romans started making exceptions to republican
governance, it was a matter of time before someone simply decided the rules no longer applied
to them. Perhaps the robot historians will consider Obama our Marius or Sulla. Maybe that
person is in the near future. Either way, the rule of law is over and what comes next is the
rule of men.
Trump can be impeached as a war criminal just for his false flag Douma attack (along with
members of his administration). But Neoliberal Dems and frst of all Pelosi are war criminals too,
with Pelosi aiding and abetting war criminal Bush.
So this is a variation of the theme of Lavrentiy Beria most famous quote: "Show me a
man and I will find you a crime"
I think tose neolib Dems who supported impeachment disqualified themselves from the running.
That includes Warren, who proved to be a very weak, easily swayed politician. It is quote
probably that they increased (may be considerably) chances of Trump reelection, but pushing
independents who were ready to abandon him, back into Trump camp. Now Trump is able to present
himself as a victim of neoliberal Dems/neocons witch hunt.
The only real check left is impeachment. It is rarely invoked and (until very recently) has
atrophied as a credible threat. But that doesn't make it any less
indispensable.
The problem was exacerbated by the Clinton impeachment fiasco, which history has proved
foolhardy. (I supported it at the time, but I was a government lawyer then, not a public
commentator.) Republicans were sufficiently spooked by the experience that they seemed to
regard impeachment as obsolete. Faithless Execution countered that this was the wrong
lesson to take from the affair. Clinton's impeachment was a mistake because (a) his conduct,
though disgraceful and indicative of unfitness, did not implicate the core responsibilities of
the presidency; and more significantly, (b) the public, though appalled by the behavior,
strongly opposed Clinton's removal. The right lesson was that impeachment must be reserved for
grave misconduct that involves the president's essential Article II duties; and that because
impeachment is so deeply divisive, it should never be launched in the absence of a public
consensus that transcends partisan lines.
This is why, unlike many opponents of President Trump's impeachment, I have never questioned
the legitimacy of the Democratic-controlled House's investigations of misconduct allegations
against the president. I believe the House must act as a body (investigations should not be
partisan attacks under the guise of House inquiries), and it must respect the lawful and
essential privileges of the executive branch; but within those parameters, Congress has the
authority and responsibility to expose executive misconduct.
Moreover, while egregious misconduct will usually be easy to spot and grasp, that will not
always be the case. When members of Congress claim to see it, they should have a fair
opportunity to expose and explain it. To my mind, President Obama was the kind of chief
executive that the Framers feared, but this was not obvious because he was not committing
felonies. Instead, he was consciously undermining our constitutional order. He usurped the
right to dictate law rather than execute it. His extravagant theory of executive discretion to
"waive" the enforcement of laws he opposed flouted his basic constitutional duty to execute the
laws faithfully. He and his underlings willfully and serially deceived Congress and the public
on such major matters as Obamacare and the Benghazi massacre. They misled Congress on, and
obstructed its investigation of, the outrageous Fast and Furious "gun-walking" operation, in
connection with which a border patrol agent was murdered. With his Iran deal, the president
flouted the Constitution's treaty process and colluded with a hostile foreign power to withhold
information from Congress, in an arrangement that empowered (and paid cash ransom to) the
world's leading sponsor of anti-American terrorism.
My critics fairly noted that I opposed Obama politically, and therefore contended that I was
masquerading as a constitutional objection what was really a series of policy disputes. I don't
think that is right, though, for two reasons.
First, my impeachment argument was not that Obama was pursuing policies I deeply opposed. I
was very clear that elections have consequences, and the president had every right to press his
agenda. My objection was that he was imposing his agenda lawlessly, breaking the limitations
within which the Framers cabined executive power, precisely to prevent presidents from becoming
tyrants. If allowed to stand, Obama precedents would permanently alter our governing framework.
Impeachment is there to protect our governing framework.
Second, I argued that, my objections notwithstanding, Obama should not be impeached in the
absence of a public consensus for his removal. Yes, Republicans should try to build that case,
try to edify the public about why the president's actions threatened the Constitution and its
separation of powers. But they should not seek to file articles of impeachment simply because
they could -- i.e., because control of the House theoretically gave them the numbers to do it.
The House is not obliged to file impeachment articles just because there may be impeachable
conduct. Because impeachment is so divisive, the Framers feared that it could be triggered on
partisan rather than serious grounds. The two-thirds supermajority requirement for Senate
conviction guards against that: The House should not impeach unless there is a reasonable
possibility that the Senate would remove -- which, in Obama's case, there was not.
I also tried to focus on incentives. If impeachment were a credible threat, and Congress
began investigating and publicly exposing abuses, a sensible president would desist in the
misconduct, making it unnecessary to proceed with impeachment. On the other hand, a failed
impeachment effort would likely embolden a rogue president to continue abusing power. If your
real concern is executive lawlessness, then impeaching heedlessly and against public opinion
would be counterproductive.
I've taken the same tack with President Trump.
The objections to Trump are very different from those to Obama. He is breaking not laws but
norms of presidential behavior and decorum. For the most part, I object to this. There are lots
of things about our government that need disruption, but even disruptive presidents should be
mindful that they hold the office of Washington and Lincoln and aspire to their dignity, even
if their greatness is out of reach.
That said, impeachment is about serious abuse of the presidency's core powers, not behavior
that is intemperate or gauche. Critics must be mindful that the People, not the pundits, are
sovereign, and they elected Donald Trump well aware of his flaws. That he turns out to be as
president exactly what he appeared to be as a candidate is not a rationale for impeaching
him.
The president's misconduct on Ukraine is small potatoes. Democrats were right to expose it,
and we would be dealing with a more serious situation if the defense aid appropriated by
Congress had actually been denied, rather than inconsequentially delayed. If Democrats had
wanted to make a point about discouraging foreign interference in American politics
(notwithstanding their long record of encouraging it), that would have been fine. They could
have called for the president's censure, which would have put Republicans on the defensive.
Ukraine could have been incorporated as part of their 2020 campaign that Trump should be
defeated, despite a surging economy and relative peace.
Conducting an impeachment inquiry is one thing, but for the House to take the drastic step
of impeaching the president is abusive on this record. Yes, it was foolish of Trump to mention
the Bidens to President Zelensky and to seek Ukraine's help in investigating the Bidens. There
may well be corruption worth probing, but the president ought to leave that to researchers in
his campaign. If there is something that a government should be looking into, leave that to the
Justice Department, which can (and routinely does) seek foreign assistance when necessary. The
president, however, should have stayed out of it. Still, it is absurd to posit, as Democrats
do, that, by not staying out of it, the president threatened election integrity and U.S.
national security. Such outlandish arguments may make Ukraine more of a black eye for Democrats
than for the president.
But whoever ultimately bears the brunt of the impeachment push, I have to ask myself a hard
question: Is this the world I was asking for when I wrote a book contending that, for our
system to work as designed, impeachment has to be a credible threat? I don't think so . . . but
I do worry about it.
Back to the Clinton impeachment. I tried to make the point that that impeachment effort --
against public opinion, and based on misconduct that, while dreadful, was not central to the
presidency -- has contributed significantly to the poisonous politics we have today. Democrats
have been looking for payback ever since, and now they have it -- in a way that is very likely
to make impeachment more routine in the future.
I don't see how our constitutional system can work without a viable impeachment remedy. But
I may have been wrong to believe that we could be trusted to invoke the remedy responsibly. I
used to poke fun at pols who would rather hide under their desks than utter the dreaded I-word.
Turns out they knew something I didn't.
For the second year in a row, Art Cashin, the head of UBS's floor operations at the NYSE,
was spot-on with his market calls in 2019.
Last December, Cashin told CNBC that he expected the Federal Reserve wouldn't raise interest
rates during the coming year. In fact, Cashin said late last year that he felt there was now
"an outside chance" that the Fed would cut rates in 2019. At the time, many scoffed at that
call. But Cashin turned out to be correct.
He was also correct about whether the US and China would manage to strike a long-term trade
deal. "I don't believe so," Cashin said. "I think we will get something that approximates it,
and you'll get perhaps in midyear a relaxation rally, but - with - with the problems of -
political sequencing, whatever, I don't think it works out."
As for whether the US would succeed in striking a lasting trade deal with Beijing before the
end of the year, Cashin insisted that the answer was 'most likely no'.
"I don't believe so. I think we will get something that approximates it, and you'll get
perhaps in midyear a relaxation rally, but - with - with the problems of - political
sequencing, whatever, I don't think it works out."
So, Cashin sat down with CNBC's Bob Pisani at Bobby Van's Steakhouse, across from the NYSE,
to discuss what Cashin sees coming down the pipe for markets in 2020.
Cashin offered three predictions - that's fewer predictions than usual: His first prediction
was that there will be no Fed hikes over the coming year. His second is that the market's
winning streak will continue, and that the big US stock indexes will finish the year
higher.
Finally, although Cashin expects stocks to rise next year, their ascent will be punctuated
by several periods of extreme volatility, particularly during the months of January, March and
July.
Prediction one: Despite a still-strong U.S. economy, there will be no Fed rate hikes in the
next year.
"I think the Fed is somewhat intimidated by the market... And the market, if anything,
thinks the Fed is ahead of itself on higher rates."
Prediction two: The market winning streak will continue and the broader indexes will be up
in 2020.
"Eight out of nine times that we've had an up year like we had this year, it's followed by
another decent up year. Not quite as strong, but still strong, and so I'll go with
history."
Prediction three: Stocks may be up, but there will be several periods of volatility,
particularly in January, March and July.
"In late January, we'll get to see if there's going to be a Brexit now that [Prime
Minister Boris] Johnson got a sweeping move in Parliament . And will he, in fact, push
through a no-deal Brexit? That could make the markets very volatile and jumpy. The next thing
will be the U.S. election. Number one, in early March, we will get Super Tuesday, and
one-third of the U.S. populace will vote. And we'll get to find out where [Democat Mike]
Bloomberg's strategy is. Who looks to be the leader? Has anybody locked it up? If not, then
it could be a brokered convention, and that date would be in the middle of July, when the
convention will be."
The truth is that the one-percenters got a $1.5 trillion tax cut, another trillion in
military industrial complex spending, continued suppression of workers' wages, more imperialist
war (even as we now know that Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan were all lies and fraud that cost
the American people trillions of dollar), more big pharma raping the **** out of us all,
totally ignoring of climate change that will destroy humanity, etc. The 99% got nothing. That's
why Trump can only talk about how great his trade deal is going to be for you one day. And how
great it will be when there one day are no more "illegals" (which nobody noticed at all being
removed from society when Obama set the "illegals" deportation record (which still stands
today).
No, we the 99% have gotten ****. Trump, the billionaire president (who's paid zero taxes
over the past decade) has done nothing but **** the **** out of the American people for the
benefit of himself and his one-percenter BFFs. No right-wing member of the base can point to
even one tiny thing that Trump has done that personally benefited them. That is not true for
the 1%. Remember, even the Democrat/liberal 1% have done fabulously well under Trump. But
regardless of how much the Trump base loves him, he's done absolutely nothing of any substance
for them. NOTHING! That's why Trump has to try to tell you what to say to your relatives.
"... My hunch is that a lot of Pentagon defence spending already props up communities throughout the US. Private defence companies set up factories in towns that would otherwise be ghost towns to manufacture armaments or parts for planes or ships in programs funded by the US Department of Defense, in states across the country ..."
"... Part of the reason is to lobby politicians representing the electorates where their factories are located for more Pentagon funding to finance more contracts. Politicians willingly support more defense funding because they know these companies provide jobs and keep unemployment down. ..."
My hunch is that a lot of Pentagon defence spending already props up communities
throughout the US. Private defence companies set up factories in towns that would otherwise
be ghost towns to manufacture armaments or parts for planes or ships in programs funded by
the US Department of Defense, in states across the country .
Part of the reason is to lobby politicians representing the electorates where their
factories are located for more Pentagon funding to finance more contracts. Politicians
willingly support more defense funding because they know these companies provide jobs and
keep unemployment down.
The issue then is how to keep those jobs and keep those factories but change what
engineers are designing and workers are making from machines of destruction into machines
that sustain life and communities.
Yes, the absolute truth. Defense spending is spread over as many states and regions as
possible to keep strong political support. It seems every month the state is sponsoring
seminars aimed at educating small/medium manufacturers on how to bid on defense contracts.
Even small mom-and-pop machine shops get their share of defense business. One small shop in
our region makes compressor blades for cruise missiles. Every time the US fires off a barrage
of missiles, they probably get an order; everybody is happy except those in the target area.
Many American communities also depend on the Military-Industrial Complex to educate their
children. I personally know several families who had children enlist in the military in order
to get a free college education; one that their families could otherwise not afford. The
parents put their kids in the army and navy, and then just cross their fingers and hope they
won't be deployed to a war zone.
The system is actually perfect. The odds of any one of these young people actually getting
killed in a war, is actually quite low. The vast majority get a good education with lots of
perks, all expenses paid including housing, they do their time, and never see a bullet. All
at the taxpayers expense.
Please acknowledge the difference between Democrats/Liberals and Progressives.
Establishment Democrats like to call themselves Progressives, because they want to gain
popularity.
The real Progressives like Jimmy Dore, Status Coup, Michael Tracy, and anti-war real
Jewish activists/journalists like "The Gray Zone" Max Blumenthal, Arron Matte, The Real News,
Glen Greenwald have been against this fake #RussiaGate/ Muller/ Impeachment scandals.
"Jimmy Dore: until we fix Democratic Party elites' corruption, we won't defeat Trump's"
https://youtu.be/ufduP0bLfAY
"Aaron Maté: from Russiagate to Ukrainegate, liberals enlist in self-defeating Cold
War: https://youtu.be/M9ZzERen_U8
"Max Blumenthal on how corporate media manufactures consent for war and regime change":
https://youtu.be/oOV-RYnpQH4
Despite the latest Sino-American phase one deal to ease tensions over trade, one former top
US official is now calling for a decoupling between both economies, reported the
South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Former US ambassador to India Ashley Tellis explains in a new book titled Strategic Asia
2020: US-China Competition for Global Influence -- that the world's two largest economies have
entered a new period of sustained competition.
Tellis said Washington had developed a view that "China is today and will be for the
foreseeable future the principal challenger to the US."
"The US quest for a partnership with China was fated to fail once China's growth in economic
capabilities was gradually matched by its rising military power," he said.
Tellis said Washington must resume its ability to support the liberal international order
established by the US more than a half-century ago, and "provide the global public goods that
bestow legitimacy upon its primacy and strengthen its power-projection capabilities to protect
its allies and friends."
He said this approach would require more strategic cooperation with allies such as
Australia, Japan, and South Korea.
"The US should use coordinated action with allies to confront China's trade malpractices
should pursue targeted decoupling of the US and Chinese economies, mainly in order to protect
its defense capabilities rather than seeking a comprehensive rupture."
The latest phase one deal between both countries is a temporary trade truce -- likely to be
broken as a strategic rivalry encompasses trade, technology, investment, currency, and
geopolitical concerns will continue to strain relations in the early 2020s.
A much greater decoupling could be dead ahead and likely to intensify over time, as it's
already occurring in the technology sector.
Tellis said President Trump labeling China as a strategic
competitor was one of "the most important changes in US-China relations."
The decoupling has already started as Washington races to safeguard the country's
cutting-edge technologies, including 5G, automation, artificial intelligence, autonomous
vehicle, hypersonics, and robotics, from getting into the hands of Chinese firms.
A perfect example of this is blacklisting Huawei and other Chinese technology firms from
buying US semiconductor components.
Liu Weidong, a US affairs specialist from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told SCMP
that increased protectionism among Washington lawmakers suggests the decoupling trend between
both countries is far from over.
The broader shift at play is that decoupling will result in de-globalization ,
economic and financial fragmentation, and disruption of complex supply chains.
If Boeing and the FAA are still at loggerheads in six months, with still no date for the 737
Max going into service, it isn't just that pressure on Boeing's suppliers and customers will
become acute, perhaps catastrophic for some. Boeing's practice of booking future, yet to be
earned, profits as current income means persistent negative cash flow could lead to an
unraveling. The last time we saw similar accounting was how supposedly risk free future income
from CDOs was discounted and included in the current earnings of banks. Remember how that movie
ended? 1
Now hopefully we are just being unduly worried, since the downside of the 737 Max remaining
grounded with no date as to when it will go into service is more considerable than the press
seems to appreciate.
But a big red flag is the lack of any specifics about where the FAA and Boeing are, and I
don't mean just dates. For instance, if the FAA and Boeing were not all that far apart on a
remedy and the FAA just needed Boeing to satisfy the agency on a few more issues, you'd expect
both sides to be making cautiously positive noises. The absence of anything like that is a bad
sign.
Muilenburg Ouster: Too Little, Too Late
Muilenburg left under duress. It appears that the shock of Boeing needing to suspend 737 Max
production to conserve cash flow roused the board out of its complacency.
Even though Boeing issued a tart statement showing an intent to chart a better course, and
Mr. Market obligingly gave the stock a 3% pop, there's every reason to regard the shift as too
little, too late. 2 We were hardly alone in saying early on that Boeing was totally
botching how it was handling the grounding.
From a March post :
Boeing is breaking the rules of crisis management and making what may well prove to be a
bad "bet the company" wager .
It is important to recognize that the global grounding of the 737 Max is the result of
trying to compensate for questionable, profit-driven engineering choices by adding a safety
feature (the MCAS software system) and then going cheap on that, in terms of selling planes
not kitted out fully and acting as if it was perfectly fine to install software that could
take control of the plane and barely tell pilots about it. Two paragraphs more than 700 pages
into a manual does not qualify as anything approaching adequate disclosure.
Boeing is taking steps that look designed to appear adequate, when given the damage done
to the 737 Max and its brand generally, this isn't adequate. No one has any reason to give
Boeing the benefit of the doubt. The scale of this failure is so large that it's called the
adequacy of FAA certifications into question. Until this fiasco, aviation regulators deferred
to the judgment of regulator in the country where the manufacturer was headquartered. But
with China embarrassing the FAA by (correctly) being the first to ground the 737 Max, foreign
regulators will make their own checks of Boeing's 737 Max fixes .and that practice may
continue with other US-origin planes unless Boeing and the FAA both look to have learned a
big lesson. So far, Boeing's behavior says not.
Some other posts explained the need for a Muilenburg defenestration, starting in March:
The fact that Muilenburg remained long past his sell by date is a sign of how deeply
disconnected the Boeing board is. It seemed reminiscent of the way Wells Fargo chairman and CEO
John Stumpf held on, trying to maintain the pretense that institutionalized unrealistic sales
goals that virtually required employees to cheat customers were the doing of 'a few bad
apples". The Wells directors may have rationalized their head-in-the-sand posture by the fact
that Stumpf had long been a key driver of Norwest Bank and later Wells' acquisition and growth
strategies, which then became his downfall. After Stumpf left, the bank was caught out in even
more abuses, such as unwarranted car repossessions and force placing home insurance.
Even the complacent Boeing board should have been jolted out of its stupor in November.
Then, FAA director Steve Dickson pushed back on Boeing pressure to recertify the 737 Max by
year end via his weekly video to the troops, which was guaranteed to be picked up by the press.
The bit about the 737 Max starts at 0:59:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/N71s4_Q3Fe4
This message should have alarmed the Boeing board, since Dickson made clear he was not
committing to any timetable. But apparently Boeing continued to pressure the FAA privately,
leading Dickson to make an even more pointed statement earlier this month. Even so, the Boeing
top brass seemed incapable of recognizing that it wasn't anywhere near having the plane back in
business until Muilenburg initiated the production halt, sending shock waves through Boeing's
supply chain.
Boeing Still Not Taking the Crisis Seriously Enough
There isn't much reason to be optimistic about the installation of the Boeing chairman David
Calhoun as CEO effective January 13. On paper, he looks credible: former executive from GE's
jet engine operation; a seasoned "corporate fixer,"
according to the Wall Street Journal , with a turnaround at Nielsen to his credit; and a
Blackstone executive.
But being an executive at a top parts maker isn't the same as leading a regulated business
and one in deep trouble. And the depiction of Calhoun as a fixer suggests that his strong suit
is behind-the-scenes cleanups and talking customers and money people out of trees.
Mr. Calhoun and Boeing finance chief Greg Smith, who will serve as interim CEO, face the
same challenges as Mr. Muilenburg: winning back the confidence of government officials,
suppliers, airlines and the traveling public. Mr. Calhoun spent much of Monday phoning some
of those constituents, including lawmakers, a Boeing spokesman said.
This is completely and utterly backwards. Yes, as a matter of ritual, a new CEO calls key
constituents ASAP and he needs to call more people and do more listening if he's inheriting a
big mess.
But Boeing has a massive immediate and longer-term problem and they are reality problems,
not perception, aka "confidence" problems.
The 737 Max needs to be fixed . The fact that the FAA hasn't accepted the software patches
that Boeing has attempted and that the FAA is having to tell Boeing to drop its pressure is a
strong tell that whatever Boeing-submitted remedies the agency is looking at now may not do
either, or at best, they will require simulator training, something Boeing has fiercely
resisted.
If our reading of the tea leaves is correct, and Boeing is still not close to satisfying the
FAA and foreign regulators, who have no reason to cut the US manufacturer any slack, all of
this confidence building is besides the point.
In fact, as a gander through the Wall Street Journal's comment section shows, even more
readers are saying they won't get on the plane until it has been in the air for quite a while.
Now those sentiments may not translate into action. If you are coming home and you find to your
surprise that your plane is a 737 Max, will you really refuse to board and go on a later
flight? The flip side is serious refusniks can make a point of booking as often as possible on
737 Max-free Delta. And the longer the plane's grounding continues, the more the bad press will
feed passenger fears.
Boeing needs a fundamental turnaround . Quite a few journalists have described how Boeing's
once vaunted engineering prowess went out the window as a result of the reverse takeover by
McDonnell Douglas. The decision to go cheap and expedient with a 737 product extension in the
form of the Max, as opposed to biting the bullet and building a new fuel-efficient narrow-body
that would presumably be the first in a new long-lived model family, typifies the short-termism
that has brought Boeing to this sorry juncture. Its bean-counters-masquerading-as-leaders have
bizarrely shed what even MBAs ought to recognize as its core competence, namely its engineering
prowess. The production problems with the 787 Dreamliner and the embarrassment of an aborted
"Starliner" space capsule demo are further evidence of institutional rot.
Troublingly, Calhoun has been a Boeing director since 2009, so he participated in the board
approval of the 737 Max in August 2011. In other words, he's never had a problem with the
long-term gutting of Boeing's engineering chops; there's no reason to think he has adequate
perspective on how bad things have gotten.
A former Boeing senior leader, who asked for anonymity to speak freely, admitted doubts
about whether Calhoun is the one to revive the company's historic culture of engineering
prowess that's been eclipsed for years by a focus on financial performance.
"If it's just more cost cutting, that's not what we need," he said. "We have to restore
the culture of engineering excellence that has served us so well for over a century."
In an interview, Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis at aviation consulting firm
Teal Group, offered similar concern that Calhoun may have "the wrong skill-set to change
Boeing."
"He's been on Boeing's board for 10 years, coming from the private equity industry and
from GE in the Jack Welch era," Aboulafia said. "This is the kind of résumé
that Boeing has not been lacking and it's not as if he's bringing a fresh perspective."
He said Boeing needs a leader now with not only a firm grip of the jetliner market but
also with "a strong understanding and appreciation for engineering."
"That's what's been lacking at Boeing, and that's what this company really needs," he
said.
Analyst Rob Stallard at Vertical Research Partners argued that Calhoun won't be at the helm
all that long, that his job will be to get the 737 Max flying and choose a successor. But as we
suggested, our sense remains that Boeing is not all that close to having the 737 Max approved
as safe. It's not clear what happens if the crisis were to drag on, say, for another six
months, and still have no timetable for resolution. And given how much of an overhaul Boeing
needs, a more engineering-minded CEO, even in the unlikely event Calhoun would recommend one to
the board, would only be a first step on the airplane maker's road to recovery. The company
needs an executive-level housecleaning, but Calhoun and this board are unlikely to back a
radical course change.
We thought our take on Boeing's managerial rot was grim, but a fresh edition of the highly
regarded industry newsletter Leeham News if anything says we haven't been caustic enough.
From yesterday's release :
Boeing needs to take bold steps -- and I mean, really bold steps -- to recover from the
worst crisis in its 103 year history.
I outlined in an Oct. 7 column why the top executives and half the Board of Directors need
to go. This was limited to the MAX crisis.
Things only got worse since then
As noted in the Oct. 7 column, the Boeing board is entrenched.
It also fails to include a pilot of high stature -- someone like a Chesley Sullenburger or
the late Al Haynes. Given what's happened, a former investigator from the National
Transportation Safety Board or a former member of the EASA regulatory agency might be a good
addition.
The GE cost-cutting culture in the executive ranks and the Board that's been prevalent for
20 years needs to go.
Crucial is a Board that has fresh perspective and is not married to "shareholder value" as
the No. 1, 2 and 3 priorities.
Shareholder value is important, of course. But not at the expense of safety and investing
in new airplanes rather than derivatives of a 50-year old design (the 737) or a band aid (the
777X).
While I agree wholeheartedly that Boeing needs to get rid of most of its C-Suite and a lot
of its board, I don't see how this happens any time soon. Board directors have staggered terms.
It is hard to see what deus ex machina could force half of the board out in short order. And
only a new board would be sufficiently ruthless about the current executives.
As with Wells Fargo, the most likely source for root and branch reform at Boeing will be
outside pressure, but absent a bona fide crisis, again it is hard to see big enough changes
soon. Even so, Boeing's suppliers and its 737 Max customers are already at their wits' end.
Many of them are powerful companies in their own right, either nationally or in Congressional
districts. If Boeing does not get its act together on the 737 Max in relatively short order,
the knock-on effects will only get worse.
Boeing is one of the few companies that uses a technique called program accounting. Rather
than booking the huge costs of building the advanced 787 or other aircraft as it pays the
bills, Boeing -- with the blessing of its auditors and regulators and in line with accounting
rules -- defers those costs, spreading them out over the number of planes it expects to sell
years into the future . That allows the company to include anticipated future profits in its
current earnings. The idea is to give investors a read on the health of the company's
long-term investments.
As we indicated above, the last time we saw anything remotely like this booking
not-yet-earned future profits on a current basis was with CDOs, and that very abuse was a major
driver of the financial crisis. The idea that Boeing could unravel seems far fetched. But the
idea that AIG could fail would have been dismissed as fantastical in 2006.
Again, it's easy to dismiss these concerns as a tail risk. But those tails are fatter than
you think.
___
1 We have way more detail on how this scheme worked in ECONNED and past posts,
but here is the short version: The links between the demand for CDOs and the "negative basis
trade" that was arguably a widespread form of bonus fraud. When a AAA instrument, in this case
the AAA tranche of CDOs, was insured by an AAA guarantor (think AIG or the monolines), internal
reports typically treated it as if all the expected income in future years was discounted to
the present. As we know now, in the overwhelming majority of cases, bonuses were paid on income
that was never earned. This mechanism was THE reason many banks would up holding so much AAA
CDO inventory – it was more lucrative for the traders to retain and "hedge" it than sell
it.
2 We see
via Leeham News that this appears to be a widely-shared take; for instance, Lion Air used
the same expression in a letter commemorating the Muilenburg exit.
Re: Boeing's fierce resistance to simulator training:
This has been portrayed, no doubt correctly, as a cost-containment agenda to make the
Max-8 more appealing to customers.
The thought occurs that avoiding simulator training might also have a "conceal the
behavior" agenda, in that if the simulator were to actually train pilots on the new
"features", they would have the privilege of memorable experiences of trying to override MCAS
and correct the stabilizer trim (with the 'too-small' manual trim wheel) while plummeting
toward earth.
Simulator training for MCAS would IMO have been "anti-marketing" for this aircraft.
Which suggests a marketing chicken-and-egg catastrophe, in that MCAS was supposed to avoid
the need for retraining, but having implemented MCAS, retraining remains undesirable as it
might disincentivize customers whose pilots, having experienced simulated MCAS emergencies,
might be, quite reasonably, chary of flying this craft.
Boeing was selling the MAX as requiring almost no retraining to save airlines expense and
lost pilot time. Southwest in particular insisted on it.
Canada has called for removing MCAS, the trigger of this whole problem, from the MAX. Am I
correct that modifications required to get the MAX back in the air at some point void
common-type recertification and lead to the need for a ground up certification like a clean
sheet design? It seems in that case Boeing would be truly screwed.
The comment from the Canadian source was the view of someone at the regulator, and not a
formal position. So it isn't clear how widely his opinion is shared.
No MCAS = permanent grounding of the plane. The hardware would have to be redesigned,
which would take the better part of a decade.
Have no idea about the issue of re- versus de novo certification.
I have the impression that without MCAS, the 737 Max-8 cannot safely ascend steeply on
takeoff; the AoA is too high and the tendency is to pitch up, risking a stall. I think that
means a significantly shallower and slower ascent to cruising altitude.
The cynic in me wonders if the retirement fund should be short the parent company, rather
than long.
I posited previously that the MCAS solution, with dual AoA sensors was the best design
Boeing could find for the bad flight characteristics, a hardware problem, for the 727
Max.
And that now Boeing is trying to invent a better than best solution.
Software cannot compensate for bad hardware. Or one cannot fix a hardware problem with
software.
One did wonder about the wisdom, the risk, of continuing to build a flawed plane for
inventory when it could not fly safely.
It appears to be throwing good money after bad with a plan based on "then a miracle
occurs."
Nowhere have I read how much money Boeing saved by using single AOA sensors rather than
dual sensors. Not sure that the polling would have corrected the MCAS software, but supposing
it did:
If x = cost savings / plane, y = # of planes, and -$7bn equals return on the investment,
then wouldn't ROI = -$7bn / (x*y) * 100%.
Which whatever figures x and y represent, this decision would seem to me to result in one
of the most astonishing ROIs in history. Operation Barbarossa probably doesn't even come
close.
An aside, interesting how many people are treating the 737 Max crashes as Black Swans when
in fact they are the inevitable result of allowing MBAs to make engineering (and many other)
decisions.
From a number of sources (my first notice of this was at the Moon of Alabama 'blog), the
737 flight control computer, which is based on a 286-class CPU, is at the thresh-hold of
overburdened with the current software.
It's conceivable to me that the single-AoA data input was related to limitations on how
much additional number crunching the FCC could deal with.
It seems likely that improvements to the software or the cockpit user interfaces, if
possible, would add to the computing burden, and if the FCCs are already near their limit,
the fix may be very difficult to realize.
Those tens of billions of dollars spent on share buy-backs are looking very poorly
spent.
I've spent (wasted?) years of my early IT career developing real-time software in
286-based environments. These things are not really processing powerhouses, but there is
more. When you design hardware around them, the options for channeling interrupts, I/O,
accessing memory etcetera are limited. In short, the whole hardware package puts severe
constraints on what you can do.
If the developers effectively did run into FCC capacity problems forcing them to
oversimplify MCAS implementation, the only ways out that I can see are either leaving out
MCAS completely (the "Canadian option") or replacing the 286-based FCC with something
significantly more powerful, with the latter option probably required in the future
anyway.
If the FCC indeed needs to be redone and replaced on all 737max planes, don't expect them
to fly anytime soon. I would wager a rough guess of a few years at least not to speak of
what's needed to re-certify the thing, or the plane.
From what I have seen elsewhere, mainly Moon of Alabama, replacing the FCC would be such a
major change as to require re-certifying the entire aircraft. There are also issues of the
existing software being written within the limitations of 286-based CPU's as another
commentator has mentioned. Boeing really has boxed themselves in.
Fired? No way. He and the rest of the directors officers C-suiters current and former and
their family members should be in the jump seats on every flight.
Same goes for GM's coverup delay on Cobalt ignition switches and Ford Focus locking
transmission in drive.
As a software engineer with many decades experience I can say that (a) this is generally
true, but (b) it doesn't stop people from trying it on every project!
"We'll fix it in software" is a punch line at almost every tech company.
From my experience in embedded software controlling hardware, fixing hardware "problems"
depends on what the hardware issues (problems) are.
For example stable and predictable non-linear behavior in a sensor may appear to be a
problem, but may it be easily compensated for by software that compensates for the sensor's
behavior.
If the hardware "problem" does not have stable and predictable behavior, then one can't
fix it in software. For example, one can't compensate for a completely failed or unstable
sensor.
One can view data corrupting noise in information channels as a "hardware problem" that
has been extremely well compensated for by software for many years in computer networks and
hardware.
The success of the computer hard drive depends on recorded cyclic redundancy codes that
are used to verify that data read back is indeed "good", otherwise a re-reading of the drive
is launched.
Effectively this software compensation for noise in communications channels traces back to
Claude Shannon's 1948 work on information theory.
The masters of fixing hardware problems with software have to be in NASA, the people who
care for space probes that develop glitches over the years. It's amazing how they can work
around one device after another breaking down, using computers with the processor power of a
microwave oven.
Not that those fixes would pass FAA, but when you don't have a choice you can do a lot
with software.
I'm still unclear about why the MAX hardware is "bad", other than it doesn't respond to
pilot input the same way the earlier 737 hardware did. They therefore added MCAS as a type of
compatibility layer. That seems like a reasonable idea to me except that 1) the pilots should
know that it is there, and 2) there has to be a way to turn it off if things get weird! And
of course 3) Both 1 and 2 require additional pilot training which was a no-go the way the MAX
program was sold.
Now that everyone knows about MCAS though, the above all seem fixable. The MAX has other
problems as well that might further delay re-certification. I see mention of the FAA pushing
back at Boeing, so I guess we will see whether the FAA is really out of Boeing's pocket this
time.
MCAS was not well documented and past flight envelope protection systems had less
authority and could be physically overidden as the flight crew went through the process to
turn off the system. In the past main trim and autopilot stabilizer trim had cutout
switches.
Airbus uses three sensors, each feeding a different make computer. The three results are
compared, consensus among at least two determine the truth. So to equal this, Boeing needs
two more sensors, not one more. But as noted, their ancient computer chip might be maxed out.
IMO they need to emulate airbus, but maybe that costs too much takes too long? How costly to
retrofit the existing fleet?
At least it would avoid activating the Frankenstein Mcas unnecessarily.
Almost. For an A320 series aircraft there are three Angle Of Attack (AOA) sensors and
three Air Data Inertial Reference Units (ADIRU). The sensors and the ADIRUs come from the
same vendor and no intermix is allowed between vendors or often even mod level. Each ADIRU
gets AOA information from channels in two AOA sensors and information is compared internally
between the two channels in the ADIRU and then also cross checked with the other two ADIRUs
calculations. With three units each flight crew display has two sources to choose from as
well as a standby fourth system with limited functions. Also, all systems using ADIRU data,
such as the two Flight Augmentation Computers (FAC), will fault mismatched inputs. All of
these systems have been refined over the thirty years of service of this type of
aircraft.
One of the features of the 1980/90s Airbus A320 avionics architecture is that trend
monitoring of air data systems (Pitot, Static, AOA) and inertial systems is on the horizon.
This will speed up the refinement process of the systems. In the past flight test aircraft
and operator's aircraft equipped with special add on data logging equipment was needed to
refine the systems.
I wouldn't be surprised if Boeing either went back to a SMYD type computer with two AOA
channels to remove the MCAS function from the FCC or added a boat-load of aerodynamic add-ons
to correct the pitch fault.
(See the Beechcraft 1900 airliner or a McDonnell Douglas MD-90 as an example of
aerodynamic patches.)
I understand that Airbus even had independent teams program the software for each AOA
sensor so as to make it impossible for a software bug to be replicated across sensors.
I don't believe that is true. An airframe manufacturer (Airbus) will often offer several
vendor supplied units that meet specifications. So there may be two or three AOA sensor
suppliers to choose from and two or three ADIRU suppliers. The AOA vane only supplies
position information, the ADIRU then takes the input and determines how to use the position
information while also comparing the calculations the other two ADIRUs come up with. Some
tolerance between inputs is allowable and wild information such as when airspeed is too low
it make the AOA track correctly (Take off and landing roll) is a function located inside the
ADIRU. A few years ago an A320 operator reported problems from the three AOA sensors freezing
due to water in the bearing area which led to the ADIRUs not being able to discriminate
between bad inputs so a Service Bulletin was issued to replace that model/mod level units.
(It's a very dynamic environment and depending on what regulating authority an operator is
under controls how the operator updates their aircraft. FAA and EASA are usually very
strict.)
The independent team approach is usually used in flight control and flight guidance, where
you would want one team to determine flight command and the other team to determine
monitoring due to the same input. The two systems have different architecture and if a
disagree occurs the computer drops out and the next in the chain of control takes over. Early
on control would be Intel architecture and monitoring would be Motorola, which led to a lot
of "I'm a PC/I'm a MAC" jokes when troubleshooting in service faults.
>added a boat-load of aerodynamic add-ons to correct the pitch fault.
Thanks *very much* for this full comment. From this lookie-loo's seat the above really
seems to be the least-bad option, but it'll be interesting to see what shakes out from the
OEM, the FAA, and other regulators.
Quite a climb-down involved with that proposed solution, though.
Adding: aerodynamic fixes for the MAX's issues would almost certainly
reduce fuel efficiency, and airlines would not be happy with that.
That could be partly why that approach (which the MAX's first
chief test pilot recommended, IIRC) was not approved by
management.
This reminds me of the apocryphal quote attributed to a Spanish admiral before the Armada
sailed "we have the confident hope of a miracle (to beat the English)."
What I'm wondering about is the current administration is (correctly) letting the FAA put
safety first in this instance at the expense of business and growth.
They cannot do otherwise since the EU and China, especially China, keeps them honest.
If it were a purely inside-US problem, the plane would already be in the air again is my
guess. However, they cannot sign off on Boeing when China has legitimate reasons not to.
As for the article's outlook of a possible AIG-type disaster, I sort of agree this is
likely. Tho it will more be a GM like disaster and rescue plan since Boeing is in
manufacturing. There is no way in gehenna (family blog) Boeing will fail. Boeing is certainly
much more too big to fail than any other manufacturing business in the US. The US government
must and certainly will step in when, probably not if, Boeing's C-suite is incapable. This
kind of rescue is also the only realistic way imho, how this totally incapable board can be
fired for incompetence and a back to engineering roots leadership installed. If the US
government has the will to do this of course. In the name of national security even, which
this is, for once, actually sort of, is. Boeing has a military business side as well, which
needs the civilian one and vice versa.
So I see a "it has to get a lot worse before it can better" scenario for Boeing, since
there have obvious problems at the whole Boeing board-level, not just with Muilenburg. The
govenment on the other side will only be allowed to step in if actual bankruptcy looms, which
is still quite a bit away.
Having worked for the gov and seen many directors come and go, I ask that too! He doesn't
fit in any of the categories that the pols usually pick for those positions, i.e.,
politically well connected, good looking, yes men with MBA's and with little knowledge of the
agency they are supposed to direct.
And how is he keeping that job – the pressures on him must be enormous. He must have
a backbone of steel.
Isn't it obvious? The FAA is well and truly screwed if they don't improve their
credibility with their foreign counterparts as quickly as possible. That credibility will not
come from being acquiescent–it will come from visibly demonstrating that they are
willing to cause severe pain to the industry they regulate when it is necessary to act in
such a manner.
I would be absolutely astonished if it turns out that the FAA was not significantly
responsible for Muilenburg's very justified firing. And whatever Calhoun's shortfalls, I
suspect that he has learned the lesson and will not be stupid enough to pressure the FAA
going forward (at least not publically).
He was appointed in August. Someone in the Trump Administration must have been
uncharacteristically alert enough to realize that getting the FAA seen to be credible again
with other regulators was a necessary if not sufficient condition for saving Boeing's hide.
The US losing its ability to have its certifications accepted by other regulations is deadly
to US aviation.
We said in our November post we thought Dickson was the real deal. Glad you agree.
You could easily be right, but I didn't see it similarly.
"Straight talk from Steve" sounds like more PR-concocted spin to me, from the title on
down. Telling staff to take their time (privately) is good, for sure, but publicly pointing
it up feels like "Reassure Investors™ 101", to me.
Dickson came from Delta Airlines where he had experienced the transition to good
management, leadership and the development of a strong safety culture. He also has experience
with flying Airbus and Boeing aircraft.
I think they're pretty well hosed. My understanding is they tried to fix a physics (or
physical) problem with software. The engine is simply too big for the plane. Until they
replace the engine or resize the plane, the Max is a no-fly for me. It's hard enough to
accept fly by wire when the plane is engineered correctly. To make it so the plane doesn't
want to stay aloft by design and then patch with a single, non-redundant sensor/system is
lunacy.
I could see Boeing splitting into three parts: defense, commercial air, and parts/service.
Much like when the financial services guys were caught, they will attempt to "bad bank" the
commercial air division.
This will be a case study one day. Hopefully the MBA/managerial class will learn the right
lesson from this. Absolute tragedy.
Seems like an opportunity for an Airbus only Southwest knock-off
If they were capable of learning this wouldn't have happened in the first place. The
reason they are not capable is pride and arrogance. It isn't the first time in history that a
company was endangered or destroyed by short-sightedness and hubris. Examples abound:
GM
LTV
GE
HP
Bethlehem Steel
Sears Roebuck
The list goes on and on and on .
In each case, the downfall happens after the "financialization" of the makeup of the board
of directors. Simply put, when they make [money] instead of [product], they whole thing
eventually tanks. The best years at Bethlehem was when it was run by steel men. The best
years at GM was when it was ran by car people. The best years at HP was when it was run by
engineers.
Failure is an easily observable and repeatable, historic pattern of activity.
I am wondering if this fiasco along with the others exposes some psychological fault of
humans. It's like taking a moderately intelligent person -> modern business school
education -> functional idiot that couldn't find his way out of a paper bag -> company
is destroyed.
Boeing seems to be merely collateral damage of the particular path the American Empire has
chosen to take to die. Is there anything that can arrest this trajectory? Anyone, anyone?
Making stock buybacks illegal would certainly help – if done ten years ago. But now?
And I found out recently that in 2017 Boeing had its own employee pension plan invest in its
own stock. No one could possibly think that was anything than a stock buyback. A board that
does that might as well be in private equity. But then they are. Jesus.
> If they were capable of learning this wouldn't have happened in the first place. The
reason they are not capable is pride and arrogance.
I am not sympathetic to Boeing's plight (and in fact very much hope that criminal charges
will be laid in this instance, which in fact may be required for credibility reasons), but if
you want to understand the situation rather than polemize, you need to understand the
double-bind that "they" are in. Arrogance (especially to pre-conceived political views) was
likely a factor, but the point is that if they did not choose to prioritize short-term
earnings, they would have likely lost their jobs in favour of someone who pursued more or
less the same strategies that was eventually followed.
The system-wide incentives/penalties cannot be emphasised enough–this is not limited
to Boeing.
"The system-wide incentives/penalties cannot be emphasised enough–this is not
limited to Boeing."
Indeed, as I said, there is a long list of failure..
However, I do not buy the argument of "The competition made me do it". Dong something
provably wrong and risking everything because of what competition * might * do is
flawed logic at best.
The game is dirty because the payers are dirty, and that is an individual choice that they
make. These are the same class of people who have been lecturing us all for decades about
"personal responsibility" while concurrently doing everything possible to evade said
responsibility. See: regulatory capture, FAA.
"Waah waahh mommy the market made me do it!!" is BS, and those who disclaim responsibility
should not have any, nor should they have the rewards when things go right.
That is not true. Costco has for two decades stared down analyst pressure to pay their
store employees less. Costco understands that having well paid employees (by retail
standards) is important and in the end helps insure better margins by:
1. Making affluent people feel better about shopping at Costco, since they get cheap
prices without abusing the help. The guilt reduction factor is apparently non-trivial in
where they choose to shop
2. Reducing shrinkage. Way less employee theft at Costco
3. More motivated and cheerful employees, which pays off per #1 (making Costco less
unpleasant as a big box crowded store) and probably other ways.
Boeing is vastly more powerful than Costco. It is in a much better position to sell a "we
need to focus on engineering to compete with Airbus" story than Costco to make an analogous
pitch in retail.
Former proud HP employee here. I left the company before the fiasco that was Carly
Fiorina–why do the 'business' TV shows still trot her out?–but my BFF was there
and saw how the reverse takeover by Compaq she engineered nearly destroyed the company. The
collegial HP employees were no match for the hardened Compaq infighters.
> Failure is an easily observable and repeatable, historic pattern of activity.
Oops–this comment was actually what originally had me wanting to reply.
Failure in *any* system is actually the norm, which is why it is so "easily observabel and
repeatable" and so historic. Competitive advantages are difficult to come by and tend to be
very fleeting, and complex systems (e.g. current sociological, business, economic, political,
etc. environment and the interactions between them) are inherently hazardous and failure
prone **by their very nature**.
There is no way to remove thie failure-prone aspect of the system indefinitely–it is
endemic to the nature of the system itself. Any organization (or human, for that matter)
almost always has to ride the line between profits (revenues and costs) and other factors
such as safety. Inevitably, they eventually make the wrong decisions, but it is statistically
inevitable that they eventually do so.
The trick is to structure things such that failure on a single decision or two does not
threaten survival of the individual or entity. That requires truly understanding the key
aspects of the system and the impacts of any decision, which is probably impossible
Happy Holidays to every one! And especially to Jules for rescuing so many of my comments
from spam. This new laptop has the world's worst mousepad – I never know if I am
left-clicking or right clicking or double clicking – so it's no surprise that Skynet
thinks I'm spamming.
'Boeing's practice of booking future, yet to be earned, profits as current income means
persistent negative cash flow could lead to an unraveling.'
Is it to late to re-adopt that old maxim again that it is not a profit until it goes into
the bank? After reading this excellent article, I am betting for sure that there will be not
return to the skies for this bird in 2020 and it is Boeing's fault. Will Trump be persuaded
to bail out Boeing down the track? Hard to say.
Came across an article a long time ago which talked about Boeing having so much of the
plane built under contract. I think that Japan got a lot of these contradicts. But Boeing was
even willing to have the wings built by foreign countries which was a good as giving their
technology away which would be a long-term disaster for Boeing but excellent for short -term
executive bonuses.
Bonus points too for PK in pointing out that for Ryanair, that this plane is as good as a
petard.
The problem is that aviation is long term affair. So if Boeing starts new plane now and
even if everything goes more or less accordig to plan, it will be more than decade before
they will be selling the pieces for more than it costs them to manufacture. And if the plane
is success, it will become reliable cash cow somewhere in its second decade.
You can count profit only after the money is in your bank, but that means it's like first
ten years you are digging multibilion hole, next ten years you are trying to get out of it
and after that you start to show profit.
I don't think it's possible to make any sense of such programs without guessing into far
future.
What if the process of building a new plane would reveal yet another deep problem within
the company? What if that is a bigger part of their reluctance, even bigger than the brain
dead greed?
Interesting point. Do they even have the capabilities in designing, testing, and
certifying an entirely new plane anymore? Looking at the other botches in engineering, not
just the MAX. one wonders.
A small but still important issue may be that, even though Boeing seems to have 'captured'
the regulators, consider the pressure on any regulator that recertifies the 737 max. There
has been so much publicity, that if ANYTHING happens to a 737 max in the year after it
restarts flying, the government employee that signed off on it will be toast there is likely
a very powerful administrative conservatism at this point that may be very hard to overcome.
These are planes, remember, and flying at 560 mph at 35,000 feet is a very difficult regime
and things can go wrong even on 'perfect' planes Who wants to bet their career and reputation
that NOTHING will happen to any 737 MAX?
As regards the comment by "Summer," yes, another thing to consider. What if Boeing is no
longer capable of competently designing a modern cutting-edge airliner? What if it has
outsourced and downsized its core engineering capacity so much that it just can't do it any
more? That's the sort of ability you can't rebuild by just hiring another 100,000 foreign
nationals on H1B visas – talented though they may be as individuals, they don't have
the collective experience needed. Look at how hard it has been for other countries to make
competitive jetliners, not even Japan has succeeded yet.
Boeing has captured the FAA but not necessarily Canadian and European regulators. The
Canadians are still pissed about the forced sale of Bombardier to Airbus while the Europeans
have Airbus. Then there are the Asian regulators .
I think Boeing has pushed the 737 one plane model too far. They should have bit the bullet
several years ago and designed a new plane. By now they would probably be getting it
certified by the FAA with glowing comments from the airlines.
With regards to revamping an existing plane vs. designing a new plane from scratch, from
my experience as a design engineer retrofitting something is almost always header to get
right than something purpose built from the start, as long as the specifications and wish
list are rational (the F-35 had too many competing wishes to be an efficient program and
would have been better as 2-3 separate planes) . Retrofits sound good at the beginning
(especially to accountants), but you are always end up trying to shoehorn something into
somewhere where it doesn't fit, which is what happened to the 737 MAX.
You missed that the FAA under new director Steve Dickson is standing up to Boeing. He and
they realize the worst thing for the FAA (and US aviation) would be for other regulators to
reject its certification if and when it approves the 737 Max. The Chinese may do so out of
cussedness. but they need the Europeans and the Canadians to agree pretty pronto for
credibility's sake and to reassure passengers.
All of our regulators–FAA, FTC, SEC, etc.–have to feel under siege after more
than 50 years of the GOP convincing everybody that 'government is the problem' and
regulations, ALL OF THEM, are bad*. The loyal civil servants who hang in there and do their
level best in spite of declining funding and morale have my gratitude and respect.
* Unless, of course, a 'conservative' is harmed, then it's "Why didn't the government DO
SOMETHING?!"
Clinton appointee Arthur Levitt had only modest regulatory goals, that of protecting
retail investors. He was nevertheless under almost constant attack from the Senator from
Hedgistan, Joe Lieberman, who threatened to and if memory serves correct, actually did cut
the SEC's budget to hamstring the agency.
Just to add that the fact that some regional airlines are heavily into the 737 is likely
one reason Boeing didn't make an all new airplane. With a largely similar plane parts can be
shared, mechanic retraining less necessary etc.
Boeing and Airbus have systematically improved flight safety significantly over the last
40 years. The industry is facing a serious challenge with degrading pilot skills,
globalization and the demand for more automation to further improve safety. These are the
most complex vehicles made by mortals. The best engineers use to go into aerospace, now they
go into other industries. So, increased demands as we take safety from 5 sigma to 6 sigma,
and increased competition for the best engineers.
People are simply wrong to attribute this to MBAs, McDonnell Douglas, accounting and the
like. It is frankly laughable to call McDonnell an MBA culture. The challenge is to engineer
better in a tougher competitive market. Boeing has the capacity to continue doing great
things. People in the cheap seats maybe need to change their view on how they value these
markets.
A fair question to ask is why did Boeing use its free cash flow to buy back stock, rather
than invest in 737 replacement? The answer to that question is important to the Boeing story
and US innovation generally. Answer that question, and we can fashion a better strategy for
US technology competitiveness.
Isn't that decision to use free cash flow for stock buybacks rather than investing in
product or processes itself evidence of financialization and "an MBA culture?"
If there are degrading pilot skills, why did Boeing skimp on pilot training, obscure the
MCAS system in the pilot manual, and focus more on "shareholder value" than passenger safety?
Talented engineers (like most talent) are attracted to pay and working conditions and a
challenge: Boeing offered none of that. It seems an MBA culture pushed the talented engineers
aside.
Boeing chose not to challenge its engineers to build a truly modern aircraft to drive
profits into the future. It chose to jury-rig an old air-frame to maximize current profits;
at the expense of 346 living souls.
In large part the degrading of pilot skills is in the developing countries. There is a
vast difference between a trained-by-rote pilot and an airman. The earlier flight of the Lion
air MAX had a pilot that brought it in with a defective angle of attack sensor. Subsequently
the airline installed a junky rebuilt angle of attack sensor, then a much less capable pilot
took off and crashed the same plane.
The developed countries have their own concerns with adequate pilot training and a
generation of experienced pilots nearing retirement age as the industry grows.
"It is laughable to call McDonnell an MBA culture." Make shit up much?
What planet are you from? Numerous press accounts based on insider views say the reverse.
Start with Moe Tkacik's widely lauded report at the New Republic:
This New Yorker account similarly provided specific incidents from after the reverse
takeover of how Boeing prioritized its financials over engineering, and how its executives
abandoned practices like process improvement that were both pro-safety and pro-long term
profits:
Very good article, IMO. The board is still invested in the beast that might turn the giant
company to its knees. I foresee the application of MMT ideas to the rescue of both shale oil
drillers and Boeing. B-bonds and Oily-bonds combined make Boiled Bonds.
One aspect of this fiasco is that it is a systemic problem rather then an isolated one;
the bad practices that led to this situation are supposed to be due to importing the business
practices of the military side of the company to the civilian side. This means that the same
practices that led to the 737 MAX are operating elsewhere– in the military side, and
likely causing problems there as well. Of course, the existence of bad practices in the MIC
isn't exactly news, which may be why little is said about it, because everyone already knows
this.
The same can be said about the FAA role in this mess.
Yah, let's see if "we" can parse what went wrong with the 737MAX as supposedly being the
next dependable (safe and profit-generating -- discounting externalities) Boeing aircraft
wafting millions of people off on vacations or junkets or to those terribly important
business meetings. Got to be a fix in there somewhere, right? Some combination of change of
leadership and re-institution of some set of corporate values, maybe undoing some of the
outsourcing (though there you have another set of claimants for bailouts,) whatever.
I see only one bit of notice given to a really much bigger failure here: It takes a huge
amount of petroleum extraction and combustion, with those "knock-on effects" like what is
happening in Australia. Looks to me that people are so wedded to their own immediate
gratification that a big swath of the planet will eventually be stripped of most species,
including our own, as ambient conditions become "untenable."
Of course the French and Chinese and even the evil Russians are going to keep building
their jet fleets to use or sell on to lesser places, all aiming at "growth" and profit. Fun
to project and speculate what might or will be happening to the seeming juggernaut known as
Boeing. Also perversely fun to project and speculate on the fate of the biosphere, which
suffers because of MCAS-class and MBA thinking. But the PR tells us that Boeing is
indispensable to life as we know it, having settled parasitically into its niches in commerce
and war.
"Fix" Boeing? That's like nursing back to health the sociopathic guy who has sworn to rob
and kill you.
Is there any analysis, or perhaps it was included in Congress questioning that never made
it on air, that shows whether the performance of the MAX in the conditions that MCAS was
designed to counteract (i.e. increased likelihood of stalls while turning during a steep
climb vs. other 737-rated designs) was objectively not allowed (meaning the flight envelope
can't pass even under a new type certification) or just relatively not allowed in order to
keep the 737 type cert?
This to me is the key to understanding how the FAA is proceeding. If it's just an issue
relative to keeping the 737 certification, then seems like there are more paths forward here
to get the plane back in the air, albeit still painful for Boeing. Just take out MCAS and
call the plane a Boeing 740 or something under a certification different than the 737. That
seems to be what that Canadian engineer is implying can be done when he asked about whether
it makes sense to just remove MCAS.
But if the FAA would never approve the performance of any plane, even under a new type
cert, that operates like the MAX would without MCAS, then this is a more severe problem. It
really seems like the hardware and cockpit design issues raised as Boeing iterates their
"software solution" overwhelm the baseline design, and there is no way to certify this
airframe.
This blog, by an engineer who has worked for Boeing in the past is the best source I have
found on the matter. As yet I have not found any source definitively stating the extent of
the handling characteristics of the MAX without the MCAS active. Without the MCAS the
documents I have been able to find say only that the sick force/g does not progressively
increase in two flight regimes (the higher speed range wind up turn and at lower speed with
the flaps retracted) but I haven't seen any statement about whether it meets the
certification requirements for handling characteristics of a transport category aircraft if
the MCAS is not installed. We do know that without the MCAS it couldn't be sold as requiring
very little in the way of type specific training for pilots of earlier versions of the 737
and this was the main driving force behind the design. I have also read that implementing
input from multiple AOA sources and giving a disagree warning when they don't say the same
thing would have required enough type specific training that this would have resulted in the
aircraft failing to meet the guarantees Boeing had made to customers about transition
training needs and associated costs.
We have posted repeatedly that the 737 Max is dynamically unstable to a degree that is
unprecedented in a passenger airplane. MCAS was intended to compensate for that. No MCAS or
fix that accomplishes the same end, no recertification.
And a recertification of the 737 Max a new model would take even longer even if that were
possible.
We are saying this looks like a serious problem. If Boeing were able to fix MCAS
sufficiently to satisfy the FAA and other regulators, it probably would have happened by now.
At least the FAA and Boeing would be making more positive noises about making progress.
Boeing could well be the next AIG. If the 737 Max is not certified to carry passengers in
four or five months, the negative cash flow will hit the fan. The only way it can fly safely
in the near term without a new flight control system is to require extensive training and
washing out pilots who can't stay out of high angle of attack stall conditions and resolution
of the confusing cockpit warnings. It will cost lots of money.
Everything is coming together. Neoliberalism and neutering government do not work. Worse
the media propaganda avoids mentioning that the world has changed and has gone multi-polar.
Russia has cut itself off of the internet. Donald Trump has wandered off into impeachment
anger and know nothingness. Professionals are required to design, build, maintain and fly the
737 Max safely. Boeing profited from short changing them. If this is finally the start of the
"haute" middle-class revolt against the profit driven exploitative aristocracy, not just
Boeing will be restructured.
"..A senior Boeing executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the new Forkner
documents contain the same kind of "trash talking" about the FAA as in the October
messages.
He said he doesn't think they will be explosive but that they will generate headlines and
continue to be a problem for Boeing. He added that there might be additional documents he is
unaware of.
Forkner poses a continuing problem for the company, because he hired his own high-powered
criminal defense attorney instead of lawyers retained by Boeing, and the company doesn't know
what he's doing, the executive said.
While Forkner invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid
turning over records to DOJ, Boeing doesn't know if he might cut a deal with prosecutors in
exchange for his cooperation, he said.."
Interesting phrasing in this Seattle Times piece on this Christmas Eve docu-dump.
Placing financials over engineering at Boeing has put one of the crown jewels of US
capitalism at risk. This affects the entire economy. A functional ruling class would not have
let this happen or at least would be moving fast to correct it if it had happened.
"Still, Muilenburg, 55, is in line to receive $26.5m in cash and stock as part of his exit
package.
His payout could reach as high as $58.5m, depending on how it is structured, according to an
SEC filing, including a pension of $807,000 annually and Boeing stock worth another $13.3m"
– Reported in The Guardian
Cult of The CEO – a strange cult to me. As a regular schnook reading about this
mess, I can't fathom these friggin contracts given to corporate executives. This guy signed
off on what was a fatal disaster. The bucks evidently don't stop here
Why is there no sward to impale himself on? Instead, this crazily opulent goodbye gift,
pre-arranged, in a no-skin-in-the-game world $58.5 million. Something to do with
Capitalism?
I'd always argue the Romans were the most effective in ancient times. Even they struggled
to control Gaul it was still ahead of it's time technologically and administratively. The
British were exceptional at extracting resources in modern times but couldnt even control the
Irish and Scottish. Great philosophical discussion at the end of the day with no clear
winner. I'd say the Mongols were amateur at best compared to the afore mentioned
The British Empire never really fell. It simply mutated into Anglo-American empire. Teddy
Roosevelt and Edward VII should be credited for forging the coalition (With Redshield pulling
the strings from behind).
You can thank these three entities for total takeover of USA and for warming the seat for
Woodrow Wilson (the patsy who ushered in Income Tax, Federal Reserve and America's entry in
WW-1).
Yes. I don't know why the US Empire isn't counted. After all, what is an empire? It's a
central government that controls other countries. By that measure - and I think it's a fair
one - the US Empire includes most of the world that isn't controlled (one way or another) by
China and Russia. What does it not control? A few squabbling little places that
struggle for independence - but every empire has those. Remember that the US of A began as an
empire, in 1789. ( See link below for a brief summary I wrote a few years ago .) Just
because America's is not ordinarily referred to as an empire doesn't deny the reality. When
the USSR existed, we didn't deny its status as an empire; we didn't pretend that Poland and
Bulgaria weren't controlled from Moscow.
Leftist revolutionaries have long been in the habit of reworking the calendar so as it
make it easier to force the population into new habits and new ways of life better suited to
the revolutionaries themselves.
The French revolutionaries famously abolished the usual calendar, replacing it with a
ten-day week system with three weeks in each month. The months were all renamed. Christian
feast days and holidays were replaced with commemorations of plants like turnips and
cauliflower.
The Soviet communists attempted major reforms to the calendar themselves. Among these was
the abolition of the traditional week with its Sundays off and predictable seven-day
cycles.
That experiment ultimately failed, but the Soviets did succeed in eradicating many
Christian traditional holidays in a country that had been for centuries influenced by popular
adherence to the Eastern Orthodox Christian religion.
Once the communists took control of the Russian state, the usual calendar of religious
holidays was naturally abolished. Easter was outlawed, and during the years when weekends
were removed, Easter was especially difficult to celebrate, even privately.
But perhaps the most difficult religious holiday to suppress was Christmas, and much of
this is evidenced in the fact that Christmas wasn't so much abolished as replaced by a
secular version with similar rituals.
Emily Tamkin writes at Foreign Policy :
Initially, the Soviets tried to replace Christmas with a more appropriate komsomol
(youth communist league) related holiday, but, shockingly, this did not take. And by 1928
they had banned Christmas entirely, and Dec. 25 was a normal working day.
Then, in 1935, Josef Stalin decided, between the great famine and the Great Terror, to
return a celebratory tree to Soviet children. But Soviet leaders linked the tree not to
religious Christmas celebrations, but to a secular new year, which, future-oriented as it
was, matched up nicely with Soviet ideology.
Ded Moroz [a Santa Claus-like figure] was brought back. He found a snow maid from
folktales to provide his lovely assistant, Snegurochka. The blue, seven-pointed star that
sat atop the imperial trees was replaced with a red, five-pointed star, like the one on
Soviet insignia. It became a civic, celebratory holiday, one that was ritually emphasized
by the ticking of the clock, champagne, the hymn of the Soviet Union, the exchange of
gifts, and big parties.
In the context of these celebrations, the word "Christmas" was replaced by "winter."
According to
a Congressional report from 1965 ,
The fight against the Christian religion, which is regarded as a remnant of the
bourgeois past, is one of the main aspects of the struggle to mold the new "Communist man."
the Christmas Tree has been officially abolished, Father Christmas has become Father Frost,
the Christmas Tree has become the Winter Tree, the Christmas Holiday the Winter Holiday.
Civil-naming ceremonies are substituted for christening and confirmation, so far without
much success.
It is perhaps significant that Stalin found the Santa Claus aspect of Christmas worth
preserving, and Stalin apparently calculated that a father figure bearing gifts might be
useful after all.
And Christmas replaced the celebration of the winter solstice, the sun was "reborn" on
the 25th when it appeared to be heading north again from those viewing it in the northern
hemisphere, hence why so many gods were "born" on the 25th of December, and is why
Christianity was influenced by pagan traditions like the winter solstice and spring
equinox.
Exactly. The Bolsheviks were Jewish. The real Russians are Orthodox and celebrate
Christmas on the sixth, when the three wise men followed the star and found Jesus Christ.
And why should all the Christians in the world follow Western style Christmas? Christians
in the rest of the world have different cultures, they don't need the tree. However they
still use the tree, same in the Middle East!
Mother Russia is back with Christmas, the symbolic birthday of the Son of God visiting
His creation as the Son of Man, offering men eternal life, advising them to keep faith in
the Father and treat all men, the Fathers children, as brothers. He was murdered for His
troubles and that murder was interpreted to be a blood sacrifice to appease a vengeful
Father who needed appeasement for the wayward ways of His dark, primitive, confused and
often innocent children. To this day all Christian denominations adhere to this barbaric
blood sacrifice inspired interpretation carried forward from global ancient superstitions.
Much of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is admixed with the superstitions of
men, and mischaractetizes the nature of the Father as it was represented by the Son on
earth.
In the meantime in America the same Bolsheviks who wrecked Russia are busy trying to
remove God from the country and turn his Sons symbolic birth rememberance into "Happy
Holidays" and the Son Himself into some kind of ****** rebel human. They are after all the
antichrist, it is evident in their adoption and rekindling of the once extinct temple of
Caiaphas that murdered Christ and in the adopters present day legacy.
They will not succeed for the Truth is that we are all the children of the Father under
the management of the Son. The Father of all existence will not be challeged by mere men
some who follow the legacy of His fallen child Lucifer, that elevated angel who thought too
much of himself. Earth is a spirit rebellion sphere whose lifeforms obtain energy via
various forms of predation arising out of its primitive animal evolution. We must learn to
tame this via sentient evolution by applying our free will to this purpose. The Son is
still here to gently suggest the way without inpinging on our individual sovereign free
will. Suggesting ways to leave behind many of our natural predatory animal ways and lean
towards more spiritual methods of love, brotherhood and ever evolving win/win cooperation.
We are spirit animals who will evolve towards the spirit, it is our destiny as ordained by
the Father, and whether you know him or not you will pass towards the Father through the
guidance and watchcare of the Son, our King. This us the fundamental true Christian
message, the Fatherhood of God over ALL men and His desire that we recognize all men as the
brothers we are because all have the same Father and each is valued by the Father as if he
were the only one.
Putin whether a Christian or an atheist gets political reality and meaning of commonly
shared culture for stabilizing a nation. The same happened during Roman Empire, when
Constantine the Great converted into Christianity 313 AC and used the faith skillfully to
unite a crumbling empire. Does anybody believe he was a devoted Christian or is Putin now
one.
The U.S. as the Global Cop Gorilla calls the shots. The Gorilla would never allow a value
added technology to be utilized by its client states no matter how benign unless it itself
was selling it. E.g., the Nord Stream 2 strong arm of Germany is the Gorilla doing its Mafia
henchman schtick at its best.
A floating nuke plant is actually a very clever idea. The U.S. Navy has been powering
aircraft carriers (floating cities) for decades. I wonder why no one has thought about
developing a floating Nuke plant before.
It's official: "Freedom gas" is the Worst Phrase of the Year, according to the Plain
English Foundation. But where does the expression come from? EURACTIV did not have to look
far to get the answer
So where does the whole story come from?
On 1 May, EURACTIV's energy and climate reporter Frédéric Simon attended
a briefing with US energy secretary Rick Perry in Brussels. He recalls the events
below.
The four journalists in the room had spent about an hour asking Perry a basic question:
why would Europeans choose to pay for expensive LNG imported from the US when they have
access to cheap Russian gas?
"But my surprise soon turned to dismay when Perry suddenly took a grave face and
started talking about the Normandy landings during WWII for which commemorations were planned
days after."
Here's what Perry went on to say: Seventy-five years after liberating Europe from Nazi
Germany occupation, "the United States is again delivering a form of freedom to the European
continent," the US energy secretary told reporters that day.
"And rather than in the form of young American soldiers, it's in the form of liquefied
natural gas," he added. "So yes, I think you may be correct in your observation," he said in
reference to Fred's suggestion about 'Freedom gas' .
####
Quite instructive about the mindset (f/king nuts) they are over in the States. They really
do live in their own universe where no-one picks up their dogs' (and their own) crap. They
neither notice the smell nor link to the slipperyness underfoot to their own actions. They
don't care either.
They like to talk about the European "blood-debt" to the USA.
I don't know what they think a large number of unfortunate young men were doing on Gold,
Juno and Sword beaches in June, 1944, or indeed that there were such beaches. Even moreso,
they are apparently unaware of the over 22 million Soviet citizens who died 1941-1945 during
what is known as "The Great Patriotic War for the Fatherland, 1941-1945"..
Analysts have identified a way to increase the export of Gazprom to bypass the Ukraine The
Eugal pipeline built to deliver gas from "Nord Stream-2 " to end users, will be operating
in 2020, despite US sanctions. "Gazprom" will redirect gas to this pipeline from "Northern
stream-1", experts say
The capacity of the Eugal onshore gas pipeline, built specifically for delivering gas from
the Nord Stream-2 offshore gas pipeline to end users, may allow Gazprom to increase supplies to
Europe bypassing the Ukraine, despite the fact that the United States has imposed sanctions
against laying the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline. , said experts interviewed by RBC.
The Gascade Gastransport operator,
controlled by Gazprom and the German Wintershall Dea , will commission the first of two Eugal
pipelines with a capacity of 30.9 billion cubic metres per year from January 1, 2020 (total
pipe capacity should be 55 billion cubic metres), which will go from German Greifswald on the
Baltic Sea to the south to the border with the Czech Republic, the Eugal press service said on
December 20. And the next day it became known that the European pipe-laying company Allseas had
suspended the construction of Nord Stream-2 (which should pump 55 billion cubic meters per
year) in the Baltic Sea.
Eugal will lay another 36 billion cubic metre capacity OPAL landline, built to pump gas from the first
Baltic gas pipeline of Gazprom and partners, Nord Stream-1, which achieved at full capacity 55
billion cubic metres per year back in October 2012. Since 2013, Gazprom could only use 50% of
OPAL capacity because of restrictions, and in 2016, the company received permission to connect
to 90% of the pipeline capacity. However, in September 2019, Gazprom was forced to reduce gas
pumping through OPAL, and then through Nord Stream-1, because of a decision of the European
Court of Justice, which, in lawsuit filed by Poland, limited supply by almost half – from
90 to 50% of capacity , or up to 18 billion cubic metres per year.
"The launch of Eugal will ensure a full load of Nord Stream-1. About 20 billion cubic
metres of gas per year can be delivered via a new land gas pipeline, which volume was lost
because of restrictions imposed as a result of Poland's victory in court", said Mikhail
Korchemkin, director of East European Gas Analysis, to RBC. The remaining 17–20 billion
cubic metre Gazprom can pump through a second branch from the offshore gas pipeline
NEL , which runs only through
Germany to the west of Greifswald, so Poland could not achieve restrictions on its
capacity.
At the peak of capacity, OPAL pumped up to 103 million cubic metres of gas per day owing to
a decision of the European Court to decrease transit to 50 million cubic metre. Last week, it
fell to 12 million cubic metres per day. This is due to an increase of 115 million cubic metres
per day in supplies to the NEL gas pipeline, as well as an increase in transit to Europe
through the territory of the Ukraine, Korchemkin points out.
"Now most of the gas from Nord Stream-1, which continues to operate at its design capacity,
is sent to the markets of northwestern Europe through NEL, that is, the limitation of the use
of OPAL by the decision of the European Court has practically had no affect on the load of Nord
Stream", added Deputy General Director of the National Energy Policy Fund, Alexey Grivach.
According to him, after the introduction of Eugal, part of the gas can go to Central Europe
through a new onshore gas pipeline, depending on the current market needs and the optimization
of Gazprom's export portfolio.
Despite the impending U.S. sanctions, the possibility of using Eugal to pump Gazprom's gas
was recognized in November by Arno Bux, chief commercial officer of gas transmission operator
Fluxys, which is a minority shareholder in Gascade. According to him, since 2020, from 80 to
90% of the Eugal capacity has already been booked for 20 years at auctions. "Since the
transportation facilities are reserved on a ship-or-pay basis (" transport or pay "), the
potential delays of the Nord Stream-2 project do not affect Eugal's revenues", he told
Interfax, noting that the flows from the gas pipeline Nord Stream 1 can be routed through
Eugal.
"We cannot predict the volumes that will be transported through Eugal, because it
depends on requests from transport customers", Gascade spokesman Georg Wustner told RBC on
December 23, declining to specify whether gas supplies from Nord Stream-1 will begin on
January 1 through a new onshore pipeline. A representative of Gazprom Export declined to
comment; the press service of Nord Stream AG (operator of the Nord Stream-1 project) did not
respond to a request from RBC.
Lavrov on the 22nd appeared on what looks to be an interesting program on Russia's Channel
One--
"The Great Game Show" with a transcript at the link. Most of the questions deal with
Lavrov's recent trip to the Outlaw US Empire and his meetings with Trump and Pompeo. I found
Lavrov's remarks about Congress most revealing as they're very similar to what he says about
the tiny Russophobic nations other NATO nations seem to feel they can't break with the
overall consensus despite its being idiotic. His response is related to the illegal sanctions
laid against the construction of Nord Stream 2:
"They are threatening it. I said it will be built, no matter what, despite all these
threats. First, I am convinced that the Europeans understand their commercial interest.
Second, this implies an interest in the context of maintaining long-term energy security.
Third, they were, of course, humiliated. The statements were, nevertheless, made, including
those from Berlin which shows that our European partners still retain a sense of dignity.
"I am confident that, just like the TurkStream project, Nord Stream 2 will be implemented,
and TurkStream will start operating some two or three weeks from now.
"US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo want to expand trade, but
the US Congress continues to bombard our relations with sanctions. A situation that has now
shaped up in the United States shows that, in their striving to revise election results and
the will of the American people, these Congressmen are ready to do anything, including
absolutely reckless things that, I would say, are not worthy of serious politicians."
As you read the transcript, you'll realize that this is a very serious program where the
truth of the overall situation is being revealed and remarked upon in a manner that would be
unimaginable here within the Outlaw US Empire, and I presume the program is viewed by a
majority of Russians. It should certainly be read in relation to what Putin said at
his presser on
the topics covered and at the Informal CIS Summit .
Many are busy with their plans for the holidays, and the combined transcripts will take
4-6 hours to read, so perhaps bookmark them to read before New Year when more time's
available.
"... It would have been simpler and much cheaper to supply the gas through land pipelines via Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland. But the undersea pipelines had to be built because the Levantine dual nationals parachuted in by the State Department to rule over Ukraine and the Baltics on Washington's behalf have shown themselves to be totally unreliable economic partners. Ukraine refused to pay for gas that was supplied and stole gas intended for European countries. The rabid Levantines in the Baltics and Poland were equally hostile. They could have made billions in transit fees, but they always insisted on cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Bulgaria blocked South Stream on Washington's instructions and lost a reliable source of cheap gas and $400 million a year in transit fees. A lot of money and a lot of jobs for a poor country. US satellites pay a high price to kowtow to Uncle Sam. Russia developed its own port facilities in the Baltic and Riga is now a ghost town. ..."
"... Its surprising how history repeats itself. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Napoleon achieved dominance over continental Europe. Only Britain stood against him. Napoleon tried to bring Britain to heel through economic warfare, the Continental System, ordering European countries not to trade with his sole remaining enemy. His orders were ignored all the way from Spain to Russia, and this lucrative trade continued. The invasion of Russia and the debacle at Moscow were an attempt to enforce the Continental System. In a similar fashion, Washington's hubris and unbridled arrogance are now alienating even its most abject, cringing, servile satraps like Macron, Merkel, and Erdogan. With the same result. ..."
"... Uncle Sam sees Nord-2 as an energy superpower challenge to energy supremacy which equates to American supremacy & hegemonic supremacy writ large across the world. If the pinko commie bastards in the Russian Federation make inroads by unilaterally making massive energy deals with the entire EU we will see American interests clamoring for market inroads & market share so that the pinko commie bastards in the Russian Federation don't make a dime. ..."
"... Uncle Sam is in actuality a waning ex-superpower thug that is yesterday's man but can't stand being taken out of the limelight being the narcissist nation it is. ..."
"... Zackarova is bang on in that the USA is wholly incompetent to govern their own business interests let alone other sovereign interests. Nord-2 is necessary infrastructure that the USA wants to thwart for their own monetary benefit. ..."
"... Stepping aside from the geopolitics for a moment. In terms of economics the US is attempting to push Russia out of natural gas markets. ..."
"... Greenpeace is yet another "NGO" that is heavily influenced by the National Endowment for Democracy a CIA front that supports US Imperialism. ..."
"... One wonders if the invertebrates of the EU will ever tire of being bullied by the Global Bullying Thug in Chief? The clerico-fascists of priest-ridden Poland one can understand, and the phony 'greens' of Greenpeace the sell-out specialists, but the others are just like mongrel dogs-the more you kick them, the more they lick your boots. ..."
What would Dr Kampmark consider to be an ecologically cleaner alternative to Nordstream I and 2? The US proposal to supply LNG
via an endless conga line of tankers across the North Atlantic would be an ecological nightmare, to say nothing of the specialised
port facilities that need to be built to accommodate the tankers, the extra pipelines needed to pipe the gas to areas of Europe
away from the Atlantic and the potential for accidents and disasters during annual hurricane season. Europe needs the best energy
supply solution possible from a sustainability POV and other POVs and while Nordstream I and 2 may not be perfect, other solutions
are either worse, more expensive or less certain and stable in the long term.
Shale gas is also poop. Only someone totally corrupt or totally insane would buy such junk from the USA.
The collapse of an empire brings up such interesting stuff.
I am of course a Russian troll for stating the obvious, so a merry Christmas from the Kremlin.
Let nuclear bombers fly, baby. Who wants another Christmas. The majority of the present American government (including Trump) are evangelical Christians who believe in
the Rapture . You wouldn't put such people in charge of a
car park, let alone put them in charge of the biggest nuclear weapons arsenal on the planet.
I find this a bit of a strange piece, for reasons that many others have pointed out here in the comments.
With regard to the environmental angle, I should perhaps point out that by far the biggest polluter on the planet is the US
military.
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
The US Military pollutes everything under the sun far past Internet & the over 900 worldwide bases it occupies. Heck, the US MIC
pollutes all sports venues with their propagandistic parades of adherence to state & flag military shows.
In the USA they make you stand in honour of the military at sports events.
I'm glad I don't go down to the USA for the USA Grand National Drag Racing events just because of the MIC pollution at events.
Their propaganda pollution is all over the Internet and that is toxic waste that we all have to sift through on our way to real
news aside from institutional American killing of the third world.
GI-Joe turned out to be anything but a good hippie in my book.
MOU
ttshasta ,
The article mentions Rex Tillerson, yet fails to mention Qatar. Exxon Mobil & Exxon Mobil Qatar, that Tillerson worked for, want
to run an LP pipeline from the Norths Pars gas field, the worlds largest, and Qatar owns 2/3 of,through Saudi Arabia, through
Jordan, Syria, through Alleppo then through Turkey on to Europe. Thus Qatar, S.A. and Turkey have sponsored the foreign invasion
of Syria that the the dolts at NPR to this day call a civil war. The US's Al Udeid air base in Qatar is the largest in the region,
Cheney has been to Qatar many times as have Barack and Michele Obama, John Ashcroft was paid $2.5 million to defend Qatar from
post 911 terrorism charges.
Does it seem the article misses the elephant in the room? US Qatari investments must profit?
Never forget the Clintons, Qatar donates to Clinton Foundation, State Dpt. sells weapons to Qatar (diverted to Syria?), candidate
Clinton to declare no fly zone over Syria as POTUS.
In 2016 Thierry Messan's Voltairenet dot org translated an article from Petra the official Jordanian press paper that S.A. financed
20% of Clinton's campaign, which is illegal under US law. Subsequently, and conveniently, Saudi Prince M.B.S. declared Petra had
been hacked and the report was false. I rely on Thierry's translations, and his voluminous site.
Excellent comment. As always, one should follow the money trail.
paul ,
I've never understood the argument that buying Russian gas is a threat to the security of European countries. Russia doesn't supply
the gas out of altruism, it does so because it wants their money. They are dependent on Russian gas. Russia is dependent on their
money. Mutual dependence, mutual gain.
During the Cold War, Russia always supplied every last gallon of oil and every cubic foot of gas that contracts obliged it
to deliver. It did so, again because it wanted their money. Simple as that.
It would have been simpler and much cheaper to supply the gas through land pipelines via Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland. But
the undersea pipelines had to be built because the Levantine dual nationals parachuted in by the State Department to rule over
Ukraine and the Baltics on Washington's behalf have shown themselves to be totally unreliable economic partners. Ukraine refused
to pay for gas that was supplied and stole gas intended for European countries. The rabid Levantines in the Baltics and Poland
were equally hostile. They could have made billions in transit fees, but they always insisted on cutting off their noses to spite
their faces. Bulgaria blocked South Stream on Washington's instructions and lost a reliable source of cheap gas and $400 million
a year in transit fees. A lot of money and a lot of jobs for a poor country. US satellites pay a high price to kowtow to Uncle
Sam. Russia developed its own port facilities in the Baltic and Riga is now a ghost town.
Uncle Sam is now waging economic warfare and imposing sanctions on its previously most loyal and obedient satellites, Canada,
Mexico, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Turkey.
Its surprising how history repeats itself. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Napoleon achieved dominance over
continental Europe. Only Britain stood against him. Napoleon tried to bring Britain to heel through economic warfare, the Continental
System, ordering European countries not to trade with his sole remaining enemy. His orders were ignored all the way from Spain
to Russia, and this lucrative trade continued. The invasion of Russia and the debacle at Moscow were an attempt to enforce the
Continental System. In a similar fashion, Washington's hubris and unbridled arrogance are now alienating even its most abject,
cringing, servile satraps like Macron, Merkel, and Erdogan. With the same result.
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
Uncle Sam sees Nord-2 as an energy superpower challenge to energy supremacy which equates to American supremacy & hegemonic supremacy
writ large across the world. If the pinko commie bastards in the Russian Federation make inroads by unilaterally making massive
energy deals with the entire EU we will see American interests clamoring for market inroads & market share so that the pinko commie
bastards in the Russian Federation don't make a dime.
Uncle Sam is in actuality a waning ex-superpower thug that is yesterday's man but can't stand being taken out of the limelight
being the narcissist nation it is.
Can you imagine being dependent on the usa for anything never mind fracked gas at twice the price.no doubt brave new worlder boris
will go for it.gb inc looks over and done with.
Guy ,
"Can you imagine being dependent on the usa for anything"
Yes I can .I live in Canada and they basically own our country, for all intent and purposes .
They did not conquer us militarily but they so corporately.
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
Zackarova is bang on in that the USA is wholly incompetent to govern their own business interests let alone other sovereign interests.
Nord-2 is necessary infrastructure that the USA wants to thwart for their own monetary benefit.
The USA is anachronism, insolvent, and lacks common sense as well as entrepreneurial spirit & business acumen.
MOU
padre ,
How very concerned about environment we are, when somebody else is "destroying" it!
paul ,
The US certainly showed how concerned it was about the environment with the North Dakota pipeline.
Francis Lee ,
Stepping aside from the geopolitics for a moment. In terms of economics the US is attempting to push Russia out of natural gas
markets. If a company did this it would be attempting to construct a monopoly and be subject to anti-competitive laws. If the
US becomes the sole supplier in Europe then it has a stranglehold, both economic and political, on Europe. That's the strategy,
and it seems blatantly obvious.
But the construction being put on this sordid little play by the Anglo-American MSM is that the
US frackers – who never make a profit – are doing Europe a really big favour by enabling them not to become dependent on Russian
gas. The Europeans should there for be grateful for US LNG since it will enable to diversify away from Russian gas.
The reality is, however, that once you become dependent on a single overseas crucial energy source you have been unceremoniously
grabbed by the short and curlies.
Antonym ,
Simply connect more European harbors to the existing gas pipeline network and choose the LNG supplier you want.
Not rocket science but Dutch PM Rutte was sold on abolishing natural gas because of CO2, while trees from North America for burning
in power plants was fine.
Neighbour PM Merkel Germany wants gas but not nuclear (a scientist!). France wants nuclear but rely on a new unproven expensive
design.
Political inmates are running the EU madhouse.
John Deehan ,
In this article, it misses the whole point of why the USA wants to impose sanctions, rather late in the day, on companies involved
in its construction. Namely, the continued attempts by it to isolate The Russian Federation and its its long term strategy of
preparations for war. Moreover, the omission of the reasons why Russia built the gas pipeline could not be more striking. The
coup in the Ukraine made the transit of Russian gas to western Europe via its territory open to pressure from the USA. Hence why
the Russians built the pipeline in the first place. It's the same reasons why the USA is attempting to prevent other Russian gas/oil
pipelines in other parts of the world.
Francis Lee ,
If anything illustrates the reality of the EU-NATO 'alliance' it is this. The US to Germany – and by extension the rest of the
EU – 'You will take expensive US LNG gas and like it' Me Tarzan you Jane. This brazen realpolitik illustrates the true nature
of the vassalised EU. And of course Poland, Romania – please station your inter-mediate range missiles here – and the Baltic uber-Petainist
elites come chiming in 'America the Beautiful.' More than anything this explodes the idea of the EU as a third geopolitical bloc.
It is an occupied region always has been and is composed of countries which can't actually defend their own interests whilst privileging
the US.
Gutless and spineless!
George Cornell ,
Indeed. And as reluctant as I am to entertain it, the Brutish ( spellcheck wants it to be British, no irony there) US is forcing
any vertebrate in the EU to crave armed forces.
Why poor EU countries buy the bollocks that is the relentless pressure or requirement from NATO to buy American and Israeli arms
is beyond me. They should be much more frightened of the Americans than the imaginary bogeymen to the East.
You mean like the Azov Battalion, Right Sector and C-14?
Those bogeymen Tim? Some of whom are now in Hong Kong helping Joseph Wong and his mates fight for 'freedom and democracy' with
some help from people in, er, Langley Virginia. Oh, and Nancy Pelosi.
Well, I support the right of all peoples to self-determination as a universal right and oppose imperialism/neo-imperialism regardless
of who does it, so your false dichotomy does not apply to me.
I thought you were referring to the neo nazi thugs in Ukraine that sprung up like weeds after rain following the overthrow of
Yanukovych by you know who. No, it wasn't Putin. And no, I'm not a fan either.
All bullshit pushed by Mr Hopey Changey that has put the world in grave peril.
In fact the changes of nuclear war are greater than any time in history.
And what happened when the Berlin Wall came down Tim?
Bush solemnly promised Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch eastward.
And where are NATO now?
paul ,
Then no doubt you support the right of the Crimea and Donbas to self determination from the CIA installed Fascist Coup Regime.
George Cornell ,
Oh for Chrissake! And where were you about Gitmo? And Iraq, and Yemen, and Syria, and Libya? And the lithium in Afghanistan makes
it morally justified? Put the photo of Kissinger on a bearskin rug in your drawer and tell me about how the 95% of Crimeans who
wanted to be part of Russia invalidates what happened there.
Come back to me about the sandbars in the South China Sea. Now there's a place to increase your debt.!
lundiel ,
Russia isn't occupying any of Ukraine. There are Russian volunteers and Russia is giving them some weapons and no doubt finance
but the Russian army isn't at war with Ukraine.
Jay ,
If they were, the war would have been on Kiev's doorstep.
Francis Lee ,
The only people 'taking' seven percent of the Ukraine are those who already live in the Donbass and Crimea are the Russian-speaking
inhabitants who have lived there for generations and who are defending their homeland against the Ukie Army and its Waffen SS
look-alikes in the Azov Battalion and various other neo-nazi outfits like Praviy Sektor, and the Tornado Battalion and Dnipro1
and other charming little outfits such as 'Patriots of the Ukraine' – backed by right-wing fanatics in the Ukrainian Rada namely
Biletsky and Parubiy.
These people are the direct descendants of the scum of the murderous Banderist pro-Nazis who were responsible for mass extermination
of Russians, Jew, and above all, Poles in Volhynia in the far west of the Ukraine between 1943-45. The Ukrainian Insurgent army
(UPA – led by Shukeviych) was the military wing of Bandera's OUN-B (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). Unfortunately for
for Mr B, he had an unfortunate rendezvous with a KGB hit-man in Munich in 1955. RIP.
Long live the heroic resistance of the Peoples Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.
Frank Speaker ,
Exactly Francis.
Some of my family were massacred by these bastard who were their neighbours: a woman cut upon at the front, a woman with a
wooden stake driven through her head, two children thrown down a well. That NATO aided and abetted these same evil scum to overthrow a democratically elected government and re-start their murderous
ways – this time around upon the ethnic Russians in the wast of the country – I cannot forgive my political leaders who have done
this.
That our MSM completely ignore this situation, I cannot forgive them, and that's why I am here.If there's a place called hell, I hope there's a special place reserved for our leaders and media owners who have done this.
eddie ,
They are occupying Jacque Schitt, but their 93rd aid convoy to the Donbas in November, consisting of 45 trucks, was not imaginary.
Greenpeace is yet another "NGO" that is heavily influenced by the National Endowment for Democracy a CIA front that supports US
Imperialism.
I'm ambivalent on the issue of pipelines ( see Keystone XL Pipeline being driven through Indian Land in total violation of
the Laramie Treaty) since they are environmentally destructive but the fact is that this is all about politics and has nothing
to do with protecting the environment.
If "Russia's" Greenpeace was so concerned about the environment they'd worry about their backyard first such as the network
of pipelines being run through Siberia.
richard le sarc ,
One wonders if the invertebrates of the EU will ever tire of being bullied by the Global Bullying Thug in Chief? The clerico-fascists
of priest-ridden Poland one can understand, and the phony 'greens' of Greenpeace the sell-out specialists, but the others are
just like mongrel dogs-the more you kick them, the more they lick your boots.
Boats of LNG floating across the Atlantic to Poland is not energy security. Whatever the politics of Nord Stream 2 we may be assured
the US has not got our back in Europe on this.
We may also be in need of energy sooner than we think, as professor Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University suggests.
Unlike the Guardian her catastrophe theory goes in the other direction where in the next few years Earth will enter into a cooling
phase. That will set off a series of events leading to a mini ice age as happened with the Maunder Minimum of the 17th Century.
"Gazprom has purchased a pipe-laying ship which would allow the company to build undersea
pipelines despite sanctions. The new vessel may be used to build the Nord Stream-2 gas
pipeline to Europe."
Apparently the Russians think several steps ahead of the Americans.
This article has all one
needs to know about Russia/Gazprom's ability to finish the job abandoned by the Swiss
cowards, although their ships are apparently still on station. Yes, there'll be a delay, but
that won't matter much. Pissing off the Germans was the absolute wrong move!
@80 Jen It is much too late for the Danes to step in and stop Nord Stream 2.
Their permission was required because the pipe enters their economic zone, but once that
permission was given then the pipelaying started on the basis of "good faith". If the Danes
attempted to renege then I would imagine that it would be Russia and Germany who would tie up
Denmark in legal red-tape, not the other way around, and by the time this got to court the
pipeline would be completed and the gas would be flowing.
The USA's only hope now is that its sanctions scare off companies like Allseas, but that
hope relies on the western conceit that Russia is too technologically backward to be able to
take over and finish the job.
But the Russians are very capable, and extremely wily: if you look at my original post you
will see a link from 2016 where the Russians are already spelling out exactly what they
intend to do.
They acquired a suitable pipeline-laying ship at last three years. They admitted at the
time that they acquired it that it made no economic sense for them to acquire such a
ship.
Economics be damned. They bought it because they had to consider the possibility that the
USA is run by a bunch of duplicitous shits.
As I'm following the case closely, a few supplements.
The problem with the high tech Russian pipelaying vessel is that it is deployed in the Far
East and would need months to get to the scene. The Russian Fortuna lacks the technical
permission from the Danes to work in their waters, but it is suspiciously idling at the
German Coast. NorthStream 2 could ask Denmark to get a special allowance for the Fortuna to
work, and that is not so far-fetched as it seems because Denmark has a new government since
last June.
The Fortuna will at least finish the German part of the pipeline. A German court yesterday
has turned down a complaint by environmentalists who are worried about wintering birds.
The sanctions are a huge strategical blunder of the USA. Yes, the Germans are pissed off,
from the bosses of the chemical industry to the "ordinary people". You can almost hear the
tectonic subterranean crack that moves Germany away from the Anglosphere towards Russia.
In German politics, the Transatlanticians are now in the defensive. The most powerful
transatlantic institutions are IMO the various intelligence services, BND, BfV and so on.
They have certainly initiated the "scandal" about the murdered Georgian djihadist (you
remember, two Russian diplomats were expelled immediately) in order to sabotage the Normandy
talks and NordStream 2 and push Merkel to distance herself from Russia. This has failed,
obviously. Stupid white men.
An excellent show from last week. However still relevant with some reminders from the 80s
that are quintessential irony. Sanchez's journalistic delivery is impressive.
Rapoza's latest effort, for Forbes, is his review of the Russia/Ukraine gas deal that
everyone is talking about. His take, in summary, is that Russia did not really have to give
up very much, it would be to Ukraine's advantage to stop fucking around and concentrate now
on the issues, that Ukraine dropped a very large amount in claims in return for not very much
money (although he does not say how likely Ukraine would have been to win them in court, and
my personal opinion is not very), that Nord Stream II will be completed with not a
significant amount of delay, and that Russia can implement the same no-gas-through-Ukraine in
five years if it does not like the way things are going.
As usual, the range of interpretations of gas agreements is wide and full of water. Most of them have hidden recognition of
groundlessness, because even a simple reading of the document requires above average schooling.
Here is this document, where it is written in black and almost white that the parties agreed on such and such conditions:
All talk about a Ukrainian victory or a Russian victory should be left to politicians for domestic consumption, although,
to be fair, it is worth noting: Ukrainian functionaries immediately claimed it is a victory for Ukraine. This sounded against
the background of the absence of fanfare in Russia, which, in the face of the most difficult negotiations, would be extremely
inappropriate.
Why?
Because
Gazprom
is Gazprom, not Russia. Confusion in concepts is a very characteristic phenomenon for immature structures and
individuals on both sides. So talk of Russia allegedly forgiving Ukraine $3 billion in credit has nothing to do with the topic
at all. There is no word in the document about this, which is natural, because, I will repeat: Russia is not Gazprom.
However, the
Naftogaz
fanfare coming from Vitrenko's mouth is also understandable on the other hand: the board (8 people) will not have
to return millions of dollars already distributed to their pockets as part of the prize according to the results of the
Stockholm Arbitration
. Moreover, now, if Gazprom pays the claim amount, the premium will increase significantly.
As for the amount Gazprom has pledged to pay – about $3 billion – it is less than 1% of the assets of the Russian gas giant
(not to be confused with capitalisation). Few will notice this drop in the ocean. And for Naftogaz? In the absence of
up-to-date information about the assets of this structure, I believe that the figure is comparable to all assets, especially
since, according to the current reform, the Ukrainian gas transit system, the market value of which is no more than $1.5
billion (according to the Chairman of the Board
Kobolev
), leaves from under Naftogaz in general.
Conclusion: tactically Naftogaz and its board benefited from a contract with Gazprom. Strategically, as it seems, Gazprom
at least did not lose, firstly, significantly reducing the term of the contract and the volume of pumping on the gas transit
system of Ukraine, taking into account the forthcoming and inevitable implementation of "
Nord
Stream-2
" and, secondly, leaving itself the right to disagree with transit tariffs, which remain the subject of
negotiations:
Point 2.2.3 The organising company [Naftogaz] will contact LLC "Operator of gas transit system of Ukraine" for the
reservation of capacities of the gas transit system of Ukraine
Provided that at the time of reservation by NCSREPU [National Commission for State Regulation of Energy and Public
Utilities] a
competitive tariff
recognised by the Organising Company and corresponding to the level of gas
transportation tariffs applied in the countries of western and central Europe will be established.
Point 3.2 The Ukrainian side
will take all necessary measures
(create all necessary conditions) by
29.12.19:
for ensuring reliable legal protection of the interests of the client of services [Gazprom] on transit,
predictability, transparency, economic validity, and stability of tariff formation
;
What went on behind the scenes went almost unnoticed:
1. Ukraine's demand for imported gas, which is still falling due to the decline in production capacity, will be covered
from the volumes approved by the agreement (65 billion m3 in 2020 and 40 billion m3 in the following 4 years). The volume of
imports according to various estimates remains at about 20 billion m3 per year. Tariffs will not be applied on all the Russian
gas that Ukraine will consume from pumping on the gas transit system and will be implemented on the territory of Ukraine at
its own expense. The volume subject to a transit tariff will be determined by the difference between the entrance to the
Ukrainian gas transit system and the exit to Europe.
2. All preliminary talk about gas discounts for Ukraine was not included in the agreement. Thus, the price of gas remains
the subject of bargaining and is inevitably dependent on the transit tariff: the higher the price of transit – the higher the
price of gas and, accordingly, vice versa.
3. In fact, the issue of direct gas supplies to Ukraine is not worth discussing at all. I.e., in the event of a
non-agreement on the price, all gas will come to Europe, Ukraine will earn from transit, but these earnings will be offset by
the increased price of gas on the reverse. Thus, even in the event of pumping all gas to Europe, earnings from transit,
according to experts, will not even cover the cost of servicing the Ukrainian gas transit system.
Lastly, Gazprom – which is not Russia, but behind whose back Russia certainly stands, and was opposed by both Ukraine and
the European Union, represented by the European Commission, as well as the United States with its global interests – managed,
at a minimum, to minimise its tactical losses and preserve strategic Russian interests.
The gas war appears to have retreated, but the most interesting thing is yet to come.
I linked a Russian newspaper article above which analysed the deal and in which it was
pointed out that the $3 billion that Gazprom coughed up is 1% of the annual turnover of that
company. And another thing that the article pointed out was that the deal is between Gazprom
and Naftogaz notRussia and the Ukraine. In return for that $3 billion,
which will be pocketed by many Yukitard bastards, I am sure, Gazprom's never ending
altercations with the Yukie gas outfit over compensation and claims and counter-claims have
had a line drawn under them. I suppose that's really why the Porky bloc in the rada is taking
action against the deal: they fear that their nice little earner is being stifled, in that
penalties imposed by arbitration courts against Gazprom have seemingly ended.
All talk about a Ukrainian victory or a Russian victory should be left to politicians
for domestic consumption, although, to be fair, it is worth noting: Ukrainian functionaries
immediately claimed it is a victory for Ukraine. This sounded against the background of the
absence of fanfare in Russia, which, in the face of the most difficult negotiations, would be
extremely inappropriate.
Why?
Because Gazprom is Gazprom, not Russia. Confusion in concepts is a very characteristic
phenomenon for immature structures and individuals on both sides. So talk of Russia allegedly
forgiving Ukraine $3 billion in credit has nothing to do with the topic at all. There is no
word in the document about this, which is natural, because, I will repeat: Russia is not
Gazprom.
However, the Naftogaz fanfare coming from Vitrenko's mouth is also understandable on
the other hand: the [Naftogaz] board (8 people) will not have to return
millions of dollars already distributed to their pockets as part of the prize
according to the results of the Stockholm Arbitration. Moreover, now, if Gazprom pays the
claim amount, the premium will increase significantly.
As for the amount Gazprom has pledged to pay – about $3 billion – it is
less than 1% of the assets of the Russian gas giant (not to be confused with
capitalisation). Few will notice this drop in the ocean. And for Naftogaz? In the absence of
up-to-date information about the assets of this structure, I believe that the figure is
comparable to all assets, especially since, according to the current reform, the Ukrainian
gas transit system, the market value of which is no more than $1.5 billion (according to the
Chairman of the Board Kobolev), leaves from under Naftogaz in general.
Conclusion: tactically Naftogaz and its board benefited from a contract with Gazprom.
Strategically, as it seems, Gazprom at least did not lose, firstly, significantly reducing
the term of the contract and the volume of pumping on the gas transit system of Ukraine,
taking into account the forthcoming and inevitable implementation of "Nord Stream-2" and,
secondly, leaving itself the right to disagree with transit tariffs, which remain the subject
of negotiations
Japan Proposes Dumping Radioactive Waste Into Pacific As Storage Space Dwindles by
Tyler Durden Tue,
12/24/2019 - 23:30 0 SHARES
As the decade comes to an end, the future of nuclear power in the west remains in doubt.
Almost nine years ago, a powerful underwater earthquake triggered a 15-meter tsunami that
disabled the power supply and cooling at three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
power plant.
The accident caused the nuclear cores of all three damaged reactors to melt down, prompting
the government to issue evacuation orders for all people living within a 30 kilometer radius of
the damaged reactors, a group that included roughly 100,000 people.
And the evacuation zone:
Now, the
Epoch Times reports that Japan's Economy and Industry Ministry has proposed that TEPCO
gradually release, or allow to evaporate, massive amounts of treated but still radioactive
water being stored at the power plant. TEPCO, or the Tokyo Electric Power Co, is the owner of
the Fukushima plant, and is also responsible for leading the clean-up of the damaged
reactors.
But as regulators have stepped in to try and guide TEPCO as it struggles to dispose of all
the contaminated water, one ministry has offered a proposal that is almost guaranteed to anger
the fishermen who have resisted all of TEPCO's other plans for dumping the contaminated
water.
In its Dec. 23 proposal, the ministry suggested a "controlled release" of the contaminated
water into the Pacific. Offering another option, the ministry also suggested allowing the water
to evaporate, or a combination of the two methods.
But the ministry insisted that the controlled release of the contaminated water into the sea
would be the best option because it would "stably dilute and disperse" the water from the
plant, while also allowing the government and TEPCO to more easily monitor the operation.
And as
we have reported , the Japanese fishing industry isn't the only party that objects to the
government's plan. South Korea has also complained to the IAEA about TEPCO's plans to dump the
radioactive water.
The project is expected to take years to fully dispose of the water.
Still, the fishermen are bound to be skeptical because of one radioactive element that TEPCO
has been unable to remove from the contaminated water: It's called tritium.
Fukushima fishermen and the National Federation of Fisheries Co-operative Associations
have strongly opposed past suggestions by government officials that the water be released to
the sea, warning of an "immeasurable impact on the future of the Japanese fishing industry,"
with local fishermen still unable to resume full operations after the nuclear plant
accident.
The water has been treated, and the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., states that
all 62 radioactive elements it contains can be removed to levels not harmful to humans except
for tritium. There is no established method to fully separate tritium from water, but
scientists say it isn't a problem in small amounts . Most of the water stored at the plant
still contains other radioactive elements including cancer-causing cesium and strontium and
needs further treatment.
Tritium is routinely found in nuclear explosions and other nuclear accidents, including the
meltdown at Three-Mile Island back in 1979. But experts at the IAEA recommend that the
controlled release of the tritium-laced water at Fukushima into the sea is probably the best
option for handling the situation - even if the Japanese decide to wait until after the Summer
Olympics in 2022.
The ministry noted that tritium has been routinely released from nuclear plants around the
world, including Fukushima before the accident. Evaporation has been a tested and proven
method following the 1979 core meltdown at Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the United
States, where it took two years to get rid of 8,700 tons of tritium-contaminated water.
TEPCO says it is currently storing more than 1 million tons of radioactive water and only
has space to hold up to 1.37 million tons, or until the summer of 2022, raising speculation
that the water may be released after next summer's Tokyo Olympics. TEPCO and experts say the
tanks get in the way of ongoing decommissioning work and that space needs to be freed up to
store removed debris and other radioactive materials. The tanks also could spill in a major
earthquake, tsunami, or flood.
Experts, including those at the International Atomic Energy Agency who have inspected the
Fukushima plant, have repeatedly supported the controlled release of the water into the sea
as the only realistic option.
On Dec. 22, some experts on the panel called for more attention to be given to the impact
on the local community, which already has seen its image harmed by accidental leaks and the
potential release of water.
"A release to the sea is technologically a realistic option, but its social impact would
be huge," said Naoya Sekiya, a University of Tokyo sociologist and an expert on disasters and
social impact.
Other possible strategies for disposing of the contaminated water have included injecting
the water deep into the Earth's crust. Another strategy, which called for storing the nuclear
waste in large industrial tanks outside the plant, was ruled out because of fears that leaks in
the tanks could contaminate some of Japan's most important fishing waters.
@ Danny 16
Yah, the "numbers" do not show the quality of life. Rarely mentioned for the US is that half
the adult population makes $30K or less and cannot afford simple emergencies under $500.
Russia now was better maternal survivor rates than the United States. Looks like Canada is
suffering the same problem with homelessness. (Homeless problem will get worse as the US
Supreme Court ruled that the homeless have a right to camp on sidewalks if no shelters. While
maybe compassionate sounding, it removes from local governments the ability to regulate
homeless camps.)
By contrast, around 17% of Americans don't have enough to eat (about 24x higher than the
Russian figure). But, as the US has a larger middle class, we can assume there's a higher
percentage of families there with disposable income beyond essentials.
Erelis , Dec 23 2019 20:58 utc | 47
I agree with you. It's impossible to live in the USA with USD 30,000.00. You're literally a
homeless person if you have that wage level.
Nowadays, you can live in the USA with a USD 50,000.00-60,000.00 household wage. But you
live badly and one cyclical business crisis or minor heath problem away to be completely
bankrupt. And forget about retiring: you'll work until you drop dead.
If you want to consider yourself "middle class" in America, you're probably talking about
USD 120,000.00 household earnings. Hence the term "six figure wage/salary" you hear so often in
the USA: this is a codename for middle class wage. Americans don't like to describe
themselves as a class-based society, for historical reasons that go since its very foundation,
so they avoid the word "class" whenever they can.
To be in the "solid" American middle class, you need to be earning (by household) around USD
300,000.00. That generally means both husband and wife are middle class (i.e. earn the famous
"six-figure"). In that band of earnings, the family is in a secure position and will be able to
send up to two children to a top college. Only a major financial crisis or a catastrophic
health tragedy (one of the breadwinners dying prematurely) would be able to knock this family
out of the middle class.
From USD 720,000.00 up, you're already in the "upper" middle class territory. At this level,
we're probably talking about a household located in downtown New York and Los Angeles, plus
second houses to spend the summer, winter or both. These are the households who have a
participation (albeit minor) on the Wall Street pie, and who get richer and richer (albeit on a
lower pace and smaller scale) as inequality rises. Only a series of very unfortunate events
could knock an upper middle class family off its class. The upper middle class also makes up
most of the Ivy League elites (in number terms) and serve as a genetic reserve for the American
capitalist class (the elite per se), since they are essentially the only
And as liberal family members arrive packing a battery of Maddow-approved, Media Matters
talking points beamed directly into their outrage cortex, conservatives may find themselves ill
equipped to handle the firehose of vitriol pouring out of their loved ones.
In anticipation of holiday triggerings, the 2020 Trump campaign reserved the website "
snowflakevictory.com " two weeks
ago, filling it with all sorts of facts and logic that can be deployed to "win an argument with
your liberal relatives," which can also be viewed in short video clips set to patriotic
background music.
51 minutes ago (Edited)
I read this earlier on ZH, but it was priceless. Just tell your liberal and Democratic relatives that since the House of Representatives
impeached Trump, he is now eligible for two more terms as President. Thanks GunnyG for posting this earlier in this thread.
41 minutes ago (Edited)
If Trump had actually done anything for the American masses, we
would all know it and no list of talking points issued from the Trump administration would be
necessary.
adding: I listened to part of an NPR report on the French strikes. It was a first person
account by the young US reporter (judging from her voice) living in Paris about how the
strike was affecting her. She started out well enough, then complained that the strike makes
it hard for her nanny to travel to-from her apartment, making it a terrible hardship on the
nanny, and upsetting her childcare arrangement. Then her real complaint about the strikes was
aired: it's making it ever so much harder for her, the intrepid reporter, to travel to all
the upscale holiday parties she's been invited to. (Oh, the humanity!)
NPR foreign correspondents today; "My nanny is inconvenienced. I am inconvenienced.
Workers' pensions are all well and good, but what is that compared to my inconvenience?!"
Not exactly Eric Sevareid reporting from London during the blitz
Tulsi had the sense to see impeachment for what it is, a farce that only helps Trump, and
look how she is treated by the party for refusing to go along with it.
Transgenders are the new saints of the alt-left. No one dare criticize them, everyone
wants their child to be one, no expense must be spared in glorifying them.
I read JHK's post-apocalypse 4 book series. Don't remember any trannies. A word of advice
to Jim. If you want the establishment media's seal of approval you better put some drag
queens in volume 5. Tough ones who read library stories and practice kung-fu on the bad guys.
Some real role models for the young kids.
As I recall, the critics said your female characters were too feminine. So include some
butchie bitches next time. The New York Times might finally have a kind word.
Considering there are three billion Muslims determined to rule the planet with their
Sharia Law and forcing everyone to face Mecca five times a day to "pray" while waiting for
Mahamed to return, adding to that millions of Christians, many nutty enough to believe we
need a nuclear war destroying Israel in order to save it and cause Jesus to return on a
cloud, plus good luck converting the billions of Chinese to ANY of this! Destroy the planet
in order to save it! Light a candle, take off your shoes and burn some incense! The end is
nigh!!!
Human beings on this planet, I have come to believe, are all just batshit crazy and
delusional regarding their various "beliefs".
Just look at what that nut editor of "Christianity Today" did to President Trump!
For God's sake! (cough), Trump and his GOP crew are against abortion, going so far as to
stop ALL funding of abortions with federal money, they hate the Commies and on and on.
Probably the fact that neither Trump nor his wife have set foot in a church on a Sunday
morning in four years toting his well-worn Bible, was what really did him in! No regular
photo-ops like with Jimmy and Rosalind or Bill and Hillary. Tsk, tsk
Seriously. I am almost 70 years old and have lived in Los Angeles for the past ten years.
This place has no soul. My friend and I want to leave and buy a small house in a nice town
with normal people. The only problem is that any of these towns that might exist are filled
with depressed people, some slumped over their steering wheels dying of heroin overdoses
while their toddler children sit in the back seats of the cars freezing, screaming and
starving.
Starving for food, warmth and affection.
Too old to fight the snow and frozen roads and sidewalks. Wish I had a pretty lake to swim
in Spring, Summer and Fall with a nice mild Winter.
And the quaint town of my childhood back again.
I wish it wasn't so, but I will probably die here in this hell hole with nothing but my
memories of swimming lakes and pretty gardens with bluebirds and robins and cardinals
singing.
And in my memories I can hear my grandma saying, "If wishes were horses, beggars would
ride".
I think the Democrat establishment has decided to throw Mayor Pete under the bus. This is
why Warren went after him and some donors appear to be stabbing him in the back. A
fascinating situation to watch.
Just read the same article a few minutes ago and thought of what Yves had said today of
those hired by Mckinsey, "the firm tries very hard to hire individuals who are very insecure
and want badly to do well, including at the firm."
Was driving cross country on debate day listening to NPR as much as I could stand. More
than the combined total of the last fifteen years. They played up Pete as if he were a sports
star about to wipe every opponent off the playing field. And they never mentioned Sanders by
name but included a clip of his voice saying something along the line of "of course taxes
will have to go up" at least a hundred times.
And their impeachment Dem/Donald derangement syndrome made me wonder just what kind of
drugs have they put in the coffee/water cooler.
Intentional dumbing-down of all who listen without question or nausea.
Mayor Pete's base is upper-middle-class, middle-aged, moderate-to-liberal-leaning, white
people. Which is pretty much NPR's core donor base. Their Buttimania could just be fan
service, like the most recent Star Wars movie.
It's painful for me to agree that the early efforts of so many journalists of integrity
have evolved into what you noticed today. I trusted Noah Adams despite him never pleading to
be my trusted news friend or emotional support in hard times.
so much of the bare language–nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and their linking
language is replicated by varying 'personalities' that I find it difficult to believe that
talking points are not circulated by NPR Editors hourly.
I am also increasingly agitated in my listening by being force fed soooo many stories about
Pop Culture 'hooked' to a 'news' item–like Hanukah Shopping events filed under
Religion.
Sympathy, Eureka Springs. We listen to NPR on long trips; usually the choices are
Religion, Country or NPR. Or Sports Talk Call-Ins. I invariably end up banging my head on the
dashboard (not while it is my turn to drive!) and/or screaming into thin air.
Yikes! You could get an old mp3 player and fill it up with your favorite music and
podcasts. It would completely transform your car travel experience. If you don't have a hook
up for the player to the stereo, you can get great FM transmitters for 20 dollars or so. Good
luck!
yeah.
i got out of the habit of listening to the radio a long while ago. we're in an in between
major markets place where if the wind is out of the north, we get stations from abilene and
san angelo out of the south, san antonio.
none very good reception.
only local stations(2, in different towns) are porter wagoner fans that at least have live
coverage of the ball games(for wife,lol. i can't stand it)
so i just got used to having music in my head when on the road, and literally forget that
there's a thing called "radio"..
When I was bicycling around the country, I carried a harmonica. Didn't play it while I was
riding, but boy, would I pull that thing out in campgrounds.
Never became a good player, but gawd, that little Hohner was fun!
Well when we drive the 2 hours each way to San Diego, usually at least once a week, my
wife reads the NC links and commentary. Sometimes she'll save the comments for the trip home
and get so excited when she refreshes the page and , "There are 243 comments, that should
keep us."
A two pack of Buttigieg stories, showing that all the Atlantic should be asking for
Christmas is a clue
First, they're confused about why
people in the Democratic pre-primary season aren't flocking to Mayo Pete when he's
enthusiastic about maintainjng establishment power and welcoming "former republicans" to the
fold. As if "Radical Centrism" hasn't passed its sell by date yet.
And then, they're confused about
why young people don't like Mayo Pete. Clearly it's jealousy for his success and not his
noxious ideas mixed bland centrism.
It's pretty clear Mayor Pete is running for President for two reasons. His own
gratification and to receive big payouts from donors after his time in office. He has nothing
substantial to offer to anyone. People in Indiana don't even like him enough to support him
for a state office. He hasn't done anything worthwhile in little South Bend to show any
promise for higher office either. His history and accomplishments vary between meritocratic
box checking and crude virtue signaling. He's the political equivalent of a bunch of old rich
men trying to create a boy band out of whole cloth. There's nothing there. And the people at
the Atlantic can't figure out why voters don't like him???
My interpretation of Mayo Pete is: identity politics for white, middle-aged,
middle-to-upper-class Americans.
NC linked to a poll the other day that showed that 97% of his supporters were white,
compared to around 47% for Bernie and around 70% for Klobuchar, the next highest after the
Mayor.
Most Democrats hate Republicans (true technically any vote will do when it comes to an
election, but it's often more emotional than rational and not going to be much of a selling
point to Dems, that you are attracting the other tribe they hate and kumbaya).
There is the problem of him not being qualified of course, and not likely to win. The
annoying part is centrists seem to have picked the least promising centrist candidates ever,
so if we are stuck with a centrist, it's going to be one that seems to have little shot of
winning.
Democrats hating republicans? Evidently not when they are DINOs, like Senator Peters
(MI).
But, seriously, I am tired of those in the grip of Trump derangement who say that they
will vote blue no matter who the nominee is. I just wish they would sit out the Democratic
primaries and leave the selection to people who actually follow and mull over issues.
I saw where some celebrity was defending him and his donors and described him as
"guileless ". I was flummoxed. Guileless? He may be over his head as mayor and as candidate,
but there is nothing real there.
I do look at records, but Buttigieg has always struck me as the smart kid B*ll Sh*tting
their way through an assignment when ever I hear him speak. Donors buying a Trojan horse I
get but I don't know how anyone sees sincerity.
I'd like to see a list of his accomplishments in office. What? There isn't one. Oh, wait,
apparently he was really good on fixing the potholes in the roads.
Kind of like Obama, when I encounter the faithful, I pretend to go along, and then ask
"what do you think were Obama's best three things he accomplished while in office?"
Squirming in chair, followed by vague platitudes, followed by "he would have done a lot if
he wasn't blocked by Republicans
I caught a TV news piece over the weekend that claimed Buttgag had been voted "most likely
to become president" (or something to that effect) when he was a senior in high school. That
got me thinking "Why does this not surprise me?"
Well because I had encountered exactly this type of person in some advanced placement
classes in my HS senior year who claimed that his goal was to one day become president of the
US. The word that comes to mind when I recall that guy is "insufferable". I had never
encountered anyone before that proudly displayed such naked ambition. I hadn't really thought
much about that fellow since then – until Buttgag came on the scene and I was
immediately reminded
Yes, the new Netflix series "The Politican" is exactly about one of these types (student
at a rich high school who plans to be president). Not sure yet exactly what angle they take
since I've only watched the pilot and other random bits, but it's at least interesting. As
with any good writing they seem to want to show complexities of the character.
That spec screenplay was considered one of the greatest unproduced films for many years
before it was finely shot.
Read it sometime, there are plenty of copies in circulation. It's simply brilliant.
The film differs slightly from the script, I suppose it was hard to do it exactly. There
are two different endings that I've seen. Neither is the one from the original script.
On my current tangent about proper language. I like that we are able to make fun of his
name and turn it into new nicknames. The guy's name has "butt" in it, after all. Let's free
our inner 12-year olds.
As a gay man, I call him Butt****, with all the derision normally associated with that
term. Theoretically that should be offensive to me.
Booty judge is a spook, Obama the phony pseudo-endorses Warren – the Democrat party
is going to nominate a Republican whether the plebes like it or not!
"The letter is interesting for what it says about Buttigieg's increasingly conventional
and hawkish foreign policy and the preferences of many Democratic foreign policy
experts."
And as liberal family members arrive packing a battery of Maddow-approved, Media Matters
talking points beamed directly into their outrage cortex, conservatives may find themselves ill
equipped to handle the firehose of vitriol pouring out of their loved ones.
In anticipation of holiday triggerings, the 2020 Trump campaign reserved the website "
snowflakevictory.com " two weeks
ago, filling it with all sorts of facts and logic that can be deployed to "win an argument with
your liberal relatives," which can also be viewed in short video clips set to patriotic
background music.
51 minutes ago (Edited)
I read this earlier on ZH, but it was priceless. Just tell your liberal and Democratic relatives that since the House of Representatives
impeached Trump, he is now eligible for two more terms as President. Thanks GunnyG for posting this earlier in this thread.
41 minutes ago (Edited)
If Trump had actually done anything for the American masses, we
would all know it and no list of talking points issued from the Trump administration would be
necessary.
There is nothing wrong with hierarchy in and of itself. After all, is seniority to mean
nothing? Is demonstrated competence meaningless? Should an individual's efforts to build
skill sets be treated as equivalent to the couch potato's efforts to build up an epic Body
Mass Index (BMI)? Should notions of winners and losers be banned from athletic competitions
and sporting events, along with any associated prizes? Everybody gets a trophy whether they
run the race or not?
As I understand it there were plenty of routes through life in the Soviet Union in which
people could distinguish themselves, perhaps more than in the West. There were plenty of ways
to rise in society's hierarchy. None of those routes resulted in fabulous and opulent wealth,
but if some did then the society would necessarily be able to afford fewer such routes.
The only problems with hierarchy in society is if the process of rising in it is corrupt
(being born into wealth, for instance) or if the span between the bottom and the top of that
hierarchy is larger than what the population considers fair.
"...The only problems with hierarchy in society is if the process of rising in it is
corrupt (being born into wealth, for instance) or if the span between the bottom and the top
of that hierarchy is larger than what the population considers fair."
That is true, the only problem being (for the lower classes) that by the time the gap
becomes evident to all, mechanisms of 'law' and power (plus bread and circuses) have been set
in place to prevent or repress the necessary changes from happening from below. This is
evident to the US populace as the few who saw it coming and protested could not rouse enough
support when it could have mattered. We looked and still look for helpers among the children
of the hierarchs because those are the only ones who can work within the current system. So
far, such are few, if they exist at all. But we saw with FDR it only takes one or two. (I
don't know if you saw my previous post that finance was not the governmental powerhouse it
has become in FDR's time. First they came for the legislators!!)
I still have hope that the system in the US will of its own weight become unweildly. There
are already signs of that happening in the increasing inability of US powermongers to have
their way on the world stage, and in their search for ephemeral 'boltholes'. And while they
are still able to inflict harm on others and do so with reckless abandon, I do not believe
they are ready to risk their own skins or those of their near and dear - or the fortunes they
have staked everything to gain. My hope is that even that damaging ability will peter out as
climate change necessities force a refocus on what actually threatens said skins and
fortunes.
"80% sure that Mifsud is dead". What has become of the Russiagate professor? InsideOver
(Furzy Mouse).
When is a CIA asset not an asset?
When the asset is made up out of thin air.
Somebody should make a movie out of this. Yes, Ghost Writer comes close and I highly
recommend it if you've not seen it. But this takes it a big set forward.
Of course, the director will have to be especially attentive to character development.
That could be difficult unless it's thought thru.
Top recommendation, Polar Socialist. Alec Guinness by way of Graham Greene makes for an
excellent combination to poke fun at the whole world of state-sponsored spycraft.
timbers: The story posted today is bizarre indeed. So the university consortium (Agrigento
doesn't have its own university and the plan is to continue to sponsor a branch of the
University of Palermo) wants a leader and ends up with Mifsud?
From Italian Wikipedia, entry Agrigento:
Agrigento, oltre ad essere sede di varie scuole medie superiori (alle quali sono iscritti
anche studenti provenienti dalla provincia), ospita una sede distaccata
dell'Università degli Studi di Palermo. Il polo universitario della provincia di
Agrigento nell'anno accademico 2008/2009 contava 3.613 studenti iscritti, così
suddivisi nelle 6 facoltà attivate nella sede decentrata
Mifsud, head of a small branch of a major university? Odd. And then he starts
grifting.
Yet Agrigento is the home turf of Andrea Camilleri and, supposedly, one of the models for
his city of Vigàta. This story is definitely something for Inspector Montalbano.
Background: Il Giornale was founded by Indro Montanelli, who was a "classic" Italian
conservative. He was notoriously stubborn. Kneecapping didn't stop him. One of the products
of Il Giornale is Marco Travaglio, who founded Il Fatto Quotidiano. So the source is
legitimate. I can't find an Italian version of the article, which is strange.
But the oddities of the obviously dodgy Mifsud and the hapless Papadopoulos are just part
of the whole saga of the current palace coup.
No wonder Nancy Pelosi can't figure out to send the charges to the Senate.
In March 2016, Papadopoulos first met Mr. Mifsud impromptu at Link Campus University, a
for-profit college in Rome that instructs NATO intelligence personnel.
Link Campus instructs NATO intelligence personnel[2] and the US intelligence and law
enforcement officials are also involved with Link.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have
sent their officers to lecture at Link.
Regarding "the mysterious audio file sent to the editors of Adnkronos and Il Corriere
della Sera", that was found to be fake by the "expert in forensic sciences, one of the most
important in Italy working in the field", it is interesting to note that NATO-aligned
propaganda outlet Bellingcat
claims the voice in the recording is authentic (i.e. Mifsud).
Bellingcat deciding to "investigate" something is always a giant red flag.
"... we have sent the factories to distant lands and eliminated your jobs, and all the meaning and purpose in your lives -- and cheap stuff from Asia is your consolation prize. Enjoy ..."
"... Homelessness in America runs way deeper than just the winos and drug addicts living on the big city sidewalks. ..."
All the people of America, including the flyovers, are responsible for the sad situation
we're in: this failure to reestablish a common culture of values most people can subscribe to
and use it to rebuild our towns into places worth caring about. Main Street, as it has come to
be, is the physical manifestation of that failure. The businesses that used to occupy the
storefronts are gone, except for second-hand stores. Nobody in 1952 would have believed this
could happen. And yet, there it is: the desolation is stark and heartbreaking.
Even George Bailey's "nightmare" scene in It's a Wonderful Life depicts the
supposedly evil Pottersville as a very lively place, only programmed for old-fashioned
wickedness: gin mills and streetwalkers. Watch the movie and see for yourself.
Pottersville is way more appealing than 99 percent of America's small towns today,
dead as they are.
The dynamics that led to this are not hard to understand. The concentration of retail
commerce in a very few gigantic corporations was a swindle that the public fell for.
Enthralled like little children by the dazzle and gigantism of the big boxes, and the free
parking, we allowed ourselves to be played.
The excuse was "bargain shopping," which actually meant we have sent the factories to
distant lands and eliminated your jobs, and all the meaning and purpose in your lives -- and
cheap stuff from Asia is your consolation prize. Enjoy
The "bones" of the village are still standing but the programming for the organism of a
community is all gone: gainful employment, social roles in the life of the place, confidence in
the future. For a century starting in 1850, there were at least five factories in town. They
made textiles and later on, paper products and, in the end, toilet paper, ironically enough.
Yes, really.
They also made a lot of the sod-busting steel ploughs that opened up the Midwest, and cotton
shirts, and other stuff. The people worked hard for their money, but it was pretty good money
by world standards for most of those years.
It allowed them to eat well, sleep in a warm house, and raise children, which is a good
start for any society. The village was rich with economic and social niches, and yes, it was
hierarchical, but people tended to find the niche appropriate to their abilities and
aspirations -- and, believe it or not, it is better to have a place in society than to have no
place at all, which is the sad situation for so many today.
Homelessness in America runs way deeper than just the winos and drug addicts living on
the big city sidewalks.
It seems there's a major political party exactly working against a common American
culture. They jeer at the thought of it. It seems to be the main platform, above all
else.
It is a major party alright BRH, but it is no so much political as it is economic and
socially stratified. They are opulent, self consumed and greedy as hell (literally). There
can only be so many parasites sucking the lifeblood out of any herd of servant beasts, and
they can only suck so long on their hosts before the poor beasts fall over and die. And that
is the tipping point, where we lose enough life blood that we can no longer stand upright,
but drop to the deck and are consumed. It is the classic Goose that laid the Golden Egg fairy
tale being acted out in real life and coming to a neighborhood near you soon.
Log in to Reply
Beautiful, thoughtful post Jim, yet to be honest it fills me with a sense of anxiety, and
this is simply because the catastrophic events you forecast, although for the better in the
long run (as they will compel a return to a world made by hand, or the recovery of human
scale) will nonetheless bring much suffering to a lot of people ( including my own family). I
would personally like to believe there is another way a more sustainable civilization could
be attained than on the heels of societal collapse. I do believe the world is full of
mystery, and that life itself is a series of unfolding miracles we lack the capacity to
comprehend due to our limited perspective. Yet perhaps you are right and some type of
collapse is inevitable before a new beginning can be made. If such be the case, as
individuals we will be compelled to tap into inner potentials that will needed to meet the
approaching apocalypse, potentials which currently lie dormant and undeveloped. Maybe in the
process of doing so we will recover our wholeness as well.
I caught a TV news piece over the weekend that claimed Buttgag had been voted "most likely
to become president" (or something to that effect) when he was a senior in high school. That
got me thinking "Why does this not surprise me?"
Well because I had encountered exactly this type of person in some advanced placement
classes in my HS senior year who claimed that his goal was to one day become president of the
US. The word that comes to mind when I recall that guy is "insufferable". I had never
encountered anyone before that proudly displayed such naked ambition. I hadn't really thought
much about that fellow since then – until Buttgag came on the scene and I was
immediately reminded
Yes, the new Netflix series "The Politican" is exactly about one of these types (student
at a rich high school who plans to be president). Not sure yet exactly what angle they take
since I've only watched the pilot and other random bits, but it's at least interesting. As
with any good writing they seem to want to show complexities of the character.
That spec screenplay was considered one of the greatest unproduced films for many years
before it was finely shot.
Read it sometime, there are plenty of copies in circulation. It's simply brilliant.
The film differs slightly from the script, I suppose it was hard to do it exactly. There
are two different endings that I've seen. Neither is the one from the original script.
On my current tangent about proper language. I like that we are able to make fun of his
name and turn it into new nicknames. The guy's name has "butt" in it, after all. Let's free
our inner 12-year olds.
As a gay man, I call him Butt****, with all the derision normally associated with that
term. Theoretically that should be offensive to me.
Booty judge is a spook, Obama the phony pseudo-endorses Warren – the Democrat party
is going to nominate a Republican whether the plebes like it or not!
"The letter is interesting for what it says about Buttigieg's increasingly conventional
and hawkish foreign policy and the preferences of many Democratic foreign policy
experts."
I think the Democrat establishment has decided to throw Mayor Pete under the bus. This is
why Warren went after him and some donors appear to be stabbing him in the back. A
fascinating situation to watch.
Just read the same article a few minutes ago and thought of what Yves had said today of
those hired by Mckinsey, "the firm tries very hard to hire individuals who are very insecure
and want badly to do well, including at the firm."
Was driving cross country on debate day listening to NPR as much as I could stand. More
than the combined total of the last fifteen years. They played up Pete as if he were a sports
star about to wipe every opponent off the playing field. And they never mentioned Sanders by
name but included a clip of his voice saying something along the line of "of course taxes
will have to go up" at least a hundred times.
And their impeachment Dem/Donald derangement syndrome made me wonder just what kind of
drugs have they put in the coffee/water cooler.
Intentional dumbing-down of all who listen without question or nausea.
Mayor Pete's base is upper-middle-class, middle-aged, moderate-to-liberal-leaning, white
people. Which is pretty much NPR's core donor base. Their Buttimania could just be fan
service, like the most recent Star Wars movie.
It's painful for me to agree that the early efforts of so many journalists of integrity
have evolved into what you noticed today. I trusted Noah Adams despite him never pleading to
be my trusted news friend or emotional support in hard times.
so much of the bare language–nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and their linking
language is replicated by varying 'personalities' that I find it difficult to believe that
talking points are not circulated by NPR Editors hourly.
I am also increasingly agitated in my listening by being force fed soooo many stories about
Pop Culture 'hooked' to a 'news' item–like Hanukah Shopping events filed under
Religion.
Sympathy, Eureka Springs. We listen to NPR on long trips; usually the choices are
Religion, Country or NPR. Or Sports Talk Call-Ins. I invariably end up banging my head on the
dashboard (not while it is my turn to drive!) and/or screaming into thin air.
Yikes! You could get an old mp3 player and fill it up with your favorite music and
podcasts. It would completely transform your car travel experience. If you don't have a hook
up for the player to the stereo, you can get great FM transmitters for 20 dollars or so. Good
luck!
yeah.
i got out of the habit of listening to the radio a long while ago. we're in an in between
major markets place where if the wind is out of the north, we get stations from abilene and
san angelo out of the south, san antonio.
none very good reception.
only local stations(2, in different towns) are porter wagoner fans that at least have live
coverage of the ball games(for wife,lol. i can't stand it)
so i just got used to having music in my head when on the road, and literally forget that
there's a thing called "radio"..
When I was bicycling around the country, I carried a harmonica. Didn't play it while I was
riding, but boy, would I pull that thing out in campgrounds.
Never became a good player, but gawd, that little Hohner was fun!
Well when we drive the 2 hours each way to San Diego, usually at least once a week, my
wife reads the NC links and commentary. Sometimes she'll save the comments for the trip home
and get so excited when she refreshes the page and , "There are 243 comments, that should
keep us."
A two pack of Buttigieg stories, showing that all the Atlantic should be asking for
Christmas is a clue
First, they're confused about why
people in the Democratic pre-primary season aren't flocking to Mayo Pete when he's
enthusiastic about maintainjng establishment power and welcoming "former republicans" to the
fold. As if "Radical Centrism" hasn't passed its sell by date yet.
And then, they're confused about
why young people don't like Mayo Pete. Clearly it's jealousy for his success and not his
noxious ideas mixed bland centrism.
It's pretty clear Mayor Pete is running for President for two reasons. His own
gratification and to receive big payouts from donors after his time in office. He has nothing
substantial to offer to anyone. People in Indiana don't even like him enough to support him
for a state office. He hasn't done anything worthwhile in little South Bend to show any
promise for higher office either. His history and accomplishments vary between meritocratic
box checking and crude virtue signaling. He's the political equivalent of a bunch of old rich
men trying to create a boy band out of whole cloth. There's nothing there. And the people at
the Atlantic can't figure out why voters don't like him???
My interpretation of Mayo Pete is: identity politics for white, middle-aged,
middle-to-upper-class Americans.
NC linked to a poll the other day that showed that 97% of his supporters were white,
compared to around 47% for Bernie and around 70% for Klobuchar, the next highest after the
Mayor.
Most Democrats hate Republicans (true technically any vote will do when it comes to an
election, but it's often more emotional than rational and not going to be much of a selling
point to Dems, that you are attracting the other tribe they hate and kumbaya).
There is the problem of him not being qualified of course, and not likely to win. The
annoying part is centrists seem to have picked the least promising centrist candidates ever,
so if we are stuck with a centrist, it's going to be one that seems to have little shot of
winning.
Democrats hating republicans? Evidently not when they are DINOs, like Senator Peters
(MI).
But, seriously, I am tired of those in the grip of Trump derangement who say that they
will vote blue no matter who the nominee is. I just wish they would sit out the Democratic
primaries and leave the selection to people who actually follow and mull over issues.
I saw where some celebrity was defending him and his donors and described him as
"guileless ". I was flummoxed. Guileless? He may be over his head as mayor and as candidate,
but there is nothing real there.
I do look at records, but Buttigieg has always struck me as the smart kid B*ll Sh*tting
their way through an assignment when ever I hear him speak. Donors buying a Trojan horse I
get but I don't know how anyone sees sincerity.
I'd like to see a list of his accomplishments in office. What? There isn't one. Oh, wait,
apparently he was really good on fixing the potholes in the roads.
Kind of like Obama, when I encounter the faithful, I pretend to go along, and then ask
"what do you think were Obama's best three things he accomplished while in office?"
Squirming in chair, followed by vague platitudes, followed by "he would have done a lot if
he wasn't blocked by Republicans
"Change we can believe in" the second series ? That's a real warning sign ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... A few weeks ago I read in this spot that while Clinton people hate Sanders and like Warren, Obama was pushing Buttigieg because Warren was such a pain in his ass. Seems he's finally given his signal. Hopefully it's the kiss of death for both Warren and Buttigieg. ..."
"... as the neoliberal corporate Democrats which she is aligning herself with are a sinking ship .. ..."
So, the fact that Obama is willing to put in a good word for Warren on behalf of the
wealthy elite should give you a clue as to which side Warren is really on. While many
non-political "normies" look upon the Obama years with rose-tinted glasses, I wonder if the
disillusionment that many people had in retrospect with Obama has sunk in to mainstream
political consciousness yet. If that is the case, an Obama endorsement might actually
backfire among progressives, seeing as how it has become evident that Obama was basically a
silver-tongued neoliberal in the same mold as Clinton and Pelosi.
I know that Warren is a political careerist at heart, but I was willing to give her the
benefit of the doubt when she first launched her 2020 presidential campaign. However, it has
become increasingly clear that she has hitched her wagon to the wrong horse as the neoliberal
corporate Democrats which she is aligning herself with are a sinking ship. I honestly do not
think that she would even be fit to be Sander's vice presidential pick at this point
considering how wide the political gulf between Warren and Sanders actually is. A better
choice would be Nina Turner as Sander's running mate, with Tulsi Gabbard as his Secretary of
State if he gets that far.
My guess is that this is why he's working behind the scenes, minimizing the chances of a
backfire on the left. Of course, how behind-the-scenes is it if it's reported by Politico?
Still.
I'm actually undecided on Warren. There was that story last week about her supposedly
pushing Hillary in 2016 to name decent people to her cabinet if elected. But then you have to
ask why that particular story surfaced at the particular time when Warren was sinking in the
polls.
If true, though, and if what the new Politico story says about her clashes with Obama are
true, maybe Warren isn't quite as objectionable as we tend to think. Then again, she came
right out last week (I believe) and said Medicare for All would be a matter of choice under
her plan, emphasizing that "choice" factor.
So I'm confused. But maybe that's what she, her campaign and various surrogates want at
this stage.
It starts with an ambitious goal: consistent with the objectives of the Green New Deal,
the Pentagon should achieve net zero carbon emissions for all its non-combat bases and
infrastructure by 2030.
having the pentagon 'lead the fight' against climate change is akin to appointing prince
andrew as head of the global task force against pedophilia and child trafficking.
A few weeks ago I read in this spot that while Clinton people hate Sanders and like
Warren, Obama was pushing Buttigieg because Warren was such a pain in his ass. Seems he's
finally given his signal. Hopefully it's the kiss of death for both Warren and
Buttigieg.
A few weeks ago I read in this spot that while Clinton people hate Sanders and like
Warren, Obama was pushing Buttigieg because Warren was such a pain in his ass. Seems he's
finally given his signal. Hopefully it's the kiss of death for both Warren and
Buttigieg.
Buttigieg takes no votes from Sanders. While Warren does on the margins. I think Obama's
calculation is simple as that. She also has special appeal to the virtue signaling liberals
that are Obama's base.
as the neoliberal corporate Democrats which she is aligning herself with are a sinking
ship ..
Bingo. Trump's letter goes right to the heart of it. These clowns are completely exposed
and Obama hawking Warren to donors while the blob talks up a gay McKinsey/CIA Indiana Mayor
shows just how far they have fallen.
"... This character development and ad-libbing/a b testing is then always in use when dealing with the media and when tweeting. Since the President is a caricature his followers aren't bothered by his incorrect statements and when the Democrats/media point out his mis-statements it doesn't register because everyone knows wrestling is fake. A rhetorical analysis of Trump's letter shows that he will be a formidable opponent in 2020, and that he's crazy like a fox. Make America Great Again. Trump trademarked that saying 1 week after the 2012 election. He isn't crazy he's sly like a fox. ..."
"... I hear you, Chuck. I'm of the same generation and vaguely remember Ike. I recall, in particular, the U2 incident. Didn't Eisenhower himself deny to the world that the US did spy flights, even while the Soviets were displaying wreckage and parading Capt. F. G. Powers? It was a major embarrassment. ..."
Lambert describes President Trump's style as schtick but another way is to consider it as
a wrestling character named "President Trump." Remember President Trump was involved with the
WWE and had the owners wife Linda McMahon in his cabinet and she is now running a pro-Trump
super PAC.
Having grown up watching professional wrestling President Trump's campaign rallies are
exactly like a wrestling show. He is playing a character and has to be quick thinking and
able to ad-lib to manipulate the crowd's emotions. The crowd also has to become part of the
show as well and overreact to signal to the performer (in this case who happens to be the
President) they are engaged with the show. The baby face (Trump) is cheered loudly and the
heels (Democrats/media) are booed in an exaggerated manner.
This character development and ad-libbing/a b testing is then always in use when
dealing with the media and when tweeting. Since the President is a caricature his followers
aren't bothered by his incorrect statements and when the Democrats/media point out his
mis-statements it doesn't register because everyone knows wrestling is fake.
A rhetorical analysis of Trump's letter shows that he will be a formidable opponent in
2020, and that he's crazy like a fox.
Make America Great Again. Trump trademarked that saying 1 week after the 2012 election.
He isn't crazy he's sly like a fox.
I've been around for a while and my attitude is that all of these "prexies", with the
exception maybe of Ike, have been lying sacks of shit. Now while they all facilitated mass
thievery by their friends and associates (as the mob would say), they could have at least had
the good form to be funny. But no! They were all so earnest and sanctimonious. Kind of like
my parish priest handing out the wafers.
I probably spent way too many hours warming various bar-stools next to a variety of
knuckleheads, so I'm going to give Trump his due, OK? The guy has given me more chuckles,
laughs, guffaws and all around hilarity than six decades worth of well dressed socio-paths.
And as a bonus, a big bonus, he has greatly discomforted all of the smartest grifters in the
room. Whenever I see the guy, Im in the Catskills.
> all of these "prexies", with the exception maybe of Ike, have been lying sacks of
shit.
I hear you, Chuck. I'm of the same generation and vaguely remember Ike. I recall, in
particular, the U2 incident. Didn't Eisenhower himself deny to the world that the US did spy
flights, even while the Soviets were displaying wreckage and parading Capt. F. G. Powers? It
was a major embarrassment.
Editor's Note: Last month, Foreign Policy ran an article, "Open Borders Are a
Trillion-Dollar Idea," which advocated for Open Borders. So for all those who say, "Oh, no
one supports Open Borders," here it is in writing! Every point made by author Bryan Caplan,
an economics professor, is refutable, and, while the piece is long, we believe it's important
"for the record" to counter all of his points.
As I first read Bryan Caplan's "Open Borders Are a Trillion-Dollar Idea" in Foreign
Policy, besides disbelief, my thoughts were that this person must not get out much or must
not read much. A quote from writer Upton Sinclair came to mind as well: "It is difficult to
get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." https://progressivesforimmigrationreform.org/open-borders-trillion-dollar-mistake/
Re Bill Mitchell–his theme is that the Labour disaster is all due to the failure of
the party to follow their working class base–if that is their base–and support
Brexit. I believe that was Clive's theme as well. This is definitely not my topic but any
Remainers care to rebut?
It is interesting how the situation in Britain seems to mirror the political situation
here and the dilemma of the Dems–aka our Blairites. People like Hillary denounce the
deplorables and Obama calls them bitter clingers but these verbal targets were once the
backbone of a party that stood in opposition to the party of the bankers and finance.
The problen for the DemoRats is that their new, hoped for diversity base isn't large
enough to replace the former great unwashed base. Perhaps that's Labour's problem too. We
have a party of the people whose leaders are (in secret when not in public) batting for the
other team.
All polls indicated that around 40% of Labour supporters were Brexiters, 60% Remainers (of
course the intensity of support might be different). Those were mostly the older working
class 'old Labour' types along with some ideological left wingers. Doing what Mitchell
suggested would certainly have shored up Labours working class bases. It would also have lost
Labour its base in the major metropolitan areas and most voters under 40. In short, it would
have been politically suicidal.
In the months after the referndum, people like Owen Jones tried to convince the Remainer
Labourites that they had to accept the result of the referendum and fight for the "softest"
Brexit possible (I remember because he was bringing that up in his post-mortems after the
election). And of course, most Remainers were having none of it. They came up with "The
People's Vote" and eventually Jones and the rest of the Labour bigwigs got on board.
But objectively, Brexit will be, and can only be, a disaster for Britain and most
pro-Brexit voters are badly misinformed, so what were Labour leaders supposed to do?
It looks undemocratic to stop people from shooting themselves (and you too!) in the foot, but
are you supposed to just let them pull the trigger?
The constituency where I canvassed, the divide was very clearly generational – the
old were Tory, the young were Labour or Libdem. It was very stark. I have not seen any
national data on this – has anyone else?
Yep, chechout the 3rd chart on this post. Very generational split moving from Labour to
Tories with age. 18-24 yos voted 19% Tory, 67% Labour, and it virtually reversed when looking
at 65yo+ which voted 62% Tory, 18% Labour, with an almost linear movement inbetween. I think
someone linked to this a few days ago
> Doing what Mitchell suggested would certainly have shored up Labours working class
bases. It would also have lost Labour its base in the major metropolitan areas and most
voters under 40. In short, it would have been politically suicidal.
I would say that what Labour ended up doing was suicidal, quite evidently. Labour (and
Corybn's) problem was existential, the fractured base (not merely by age, but geographically
and by class) bequeathed to them by Blair. I would say that Mitchell's proposal is not like
suicide, but like an animal caught in a trap chewing off a leg to escape -- the leg, in this
case, being PLP. Of course, if Labour wants to be the party of London professionals, that's
fine, but rebranding from "Labour" might be in order.
Richard North has been running some interesting material recently, including today,
raising the question to what extent the traditional working class still exists in England in
the sense it was once understood. I have no real insights into what is clearly a very large
topic but I found todays piece especially interesting.
I am doubtful Labour wants to be the party only of London professionals – there are
far too few of them to win elections. At present it is clearly the party of the young. Any
strategy for its future needs to take this into account. Although I am old myself I know a
fair number of the young in the UK through my children and their friends. They are having a
very hard time of it as their jobs are very insecure and their prospects of owning their own
homes/better quality housing are far poorer than those enjoyed by the boomers. They also face
a high risk of being made redundant at 40.
Rather than a class-based analysis of UK politics I wonder if a generational analysis
– boomers v the rest – would not be more fruitful at present. Though of course
you can see this as a rich/old versus young/poor struggle.
Labour lost biggest among the pensioners, who by definition, are not labouring. The reason
they lost all those Northern towns was that they had so many pensioners.
Doing deliveries on a bicycle, teaching children, and keeping the elderly alive,
meanwhile, are all labour, even if they don't take place in a factory or a mine. Certainly
not "professional" in the traditional sense.
Labour's error was failing to build a legacy media operation (print, TV, radio) to reach
the pensioners, and not turning out the younger vote.
This comment on Muilenburg's departure from Boeing found at Leeham News, seems about right
to me:
"Old Tart
December 23, 2019
Muilenburg's departure is WAY overdue, but Calhoun is not the answer. He will be a
continuation of the GE/McDonnell Douglas cancer that has metastasized through Boeing since
1997. He was part of the decision making process that approved a $20 billion stock buyback
almost exactly a year ago (after the first MAX crash), following his approval of more than
$40 billion in buybacks the 5 years prior to that. Boeing could have launched at least two
new airplane programs with that cash. And as long as all Boeing managers are cycled through
the Harry Stonecipher charm school in St. Louis, that culture will continue to trickle down
throughout the company."
Adding: As I see it the 737 MAX situation is a bellwether event, and the corporatists
really
don't, so far, get it.. "labor force" issues will be coming to the fore, and soon, IMO.
The CEO takes the fall for the board. Replacing him with David Calhoun is the exact
opposite of what they need. Like PG&E stocking their board with wall st types as a way to
get out of bankruptcy. Doubling down on their mistakes as Yves or Lambert would say.
Hopefully, Calhoun and the whole board will be gone to Hell within a year.
"Netanyahu calls ICC war crimes probe anti-Semitic"
In breaking news, the International Criminal Court (ICC) today accused Netanyahu of being
anti-Gentile and intend to lay charges against him for this. Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Iran,
Jordan and several other countries offer to bear witness against him while Saudi Arabia &
the Gulf States say they will offer character references in his defense.
Government imposes gag on ICC controversy
Dec 22, 2019 @ 15:47
The Israeli government in its weekly session on Sunday classified as secret all references to
the decision of the International Crimes Court in the Hague to probe Israel for offences in
"Palestinian areas." The ministers passed the subject over to the security-policy cabinet. PM
Binyamin Netanyahu again denounced the Hague court: "While we are moving forward in new areas
of hope and peace with our Arab neighbors, the ICC in The Hague has taken a step backwards.
On Friday, it finally became a weapon in the political war against the State of Israel."
It's rare that I read something on the Washington Post that I don't find highly biased, even
repugnant. But with
their recent article on the Afghanistan Papers, they truly knocked the ball out of the
park.
The facts they shared should have every American protesting in the streets.
Trillions of dollars have been spent on a war that the Pentagon knew was unwinnable all
along. More than 2300 American soldiers died there and more than 20,000 have been injured. More
than 150,000 Afghanis were killed, many of them civilians, including women and children.
And they lied to us constantly.
Congress just proved that the truth doesn't matter, though. A mere 22 hours after the
release of this document, the new National Defense Authorization Act that breezed through the
House and Senate was signed by the President. That bill authorized
$738 billion in military spending for 2020 , actually increasing the budget by $22 billion
over previous years.
So, how is your representation in Washington, DC working out for you?
What are the
Afghanistan Papers?
The Afghanistan Papers are
a brilliant piece of investigative journalism published by the Washington Post and the
article is very much worth your time to read. I know, I know – WaPo. But believe me when
I tell you this is something all Americans need to see.
This was an article that took three years of legal battles to bring to light. WaPo acquired
the documents using the Freedom of Information Act and got more than 2000 pages of insider
interviews with "people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid
workers and Afghan officials." These documents were originally part of a federal investigation
into the "root failures" of the longest conflict in US history – more than 18 years
now.
Three presidents, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, have been involved in this
ongoing war. It turns out that officials knew the entire time this war was "unwinnable" yet
they kept throwing American lives and American money at it.
Here's an excerpt from WaPo's report. Anything that is underlined is taken verbatim from the
papers themselves – you can click on them to read the documents.
In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went
wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of
warfare.
With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints,
frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.
The important thing to note about these interviews is that the interviewees never expected
their words to become public. They weren't "blowing the whistle." They were answering questions
for a federal investigation. So they didn't hold back. These aren't "soundbites." It's what the
real witnesses are saying.
The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has
spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.
Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International
Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an
inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and
co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the
Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded
veterans.
"What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?" Jeffrey Eggers, a
retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers.
He added, "After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in
his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan." (
source )
The US government deliberately misled the American people.
What's more, if you officials, up to and including three presidents, knew they were throwing
money at something that could never be achieved. They did it anyway and they lied to our faces
about it.
The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents,
military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making
progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.
Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S.
government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military
headquarters in Kabul -- and at the White House -- to distort statistics to make it appear
the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.
It's been an epic 18-year-long exercise in CYA. (Cover Your A$$). I don't see how anyone
could fail to be outraged by this. And what I've cited here is just the crap icing on the
maggot cupcake. It's a festering mess and I urge you, if you really want to know the truth, to
read this article on WaPo and click on these links.
How was all this money spent?
A lot of it went to building infrastructure in Afghanistan. It was flagrantly and
frivolously used there while we live in a place where people are going bankrupt at best and
dying at worst because they
can't afford medical care and there are places in our country without clean running
water or toilets.
The defense industry certainly reaped rewards and it's highly likely a lot of people who had
the power to allow it to go on made some "wise investments" that have paid off for them. But
for the rest of us, this conflict has done nothing except ensure that our tax dollars are not
here improving our infrastructure or helping Americans lead better and more productive
lives.
Dr. Ron Paul refers to this as the crime of the century.
It is not only members of the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations who are guilty of
this massive fraud. Falsely selling the Afghanistan war as a great success was a bipartisan
activity on Capitol Hill. In the dozens of hearings I attended in the House International
Relations Committee, I do not recall a single "expert" witness called who told us the truth.
Instead, both Republican and Democrat-controlled Congresses called a steady stream of neocon
war cheerleaders to lie to us about how wonderfully the war was going. Victory was just
around the corner, they all promised. Just a few more massive appropriations and we'd be
celebrating the end of the war.
Congress and especially Congressional leadership of both parties are all as guilty as the
three lying Administrations. They were part of the big lie, falsely presenting to the
American people as "expert" witnesses only those bought-and-paid-for Beltway neocon think
tankers.
What is even more shocking than the release of this "smoking gun" evidence that the US
government wasted two trillion dollars and killed more than three thousand Americans and more
than 150,000 Afghans while lying through its teeth about the war is that you could hear a pin
drop in the mainstream media about it. Aside from the initial publication in the Washington
Post, which has itself been a major cheerleader for the war in Afghanistan, the mainstream
media has shown literally no interest in what should be the story of the century. (
source )
And it's most likely that nobody will ever face punishment for this deception. If this is
not the very definition of the term "war crimes" I can hardly imagine what is. Dr. Paul
continues:
We've wasted at least half a year on the Donald Trump impeachment charade – a
conviction desperately in search of a crime. Meanwhile one of the greatest crimes in US
history will go unpunished. Not one of the liars in the "Afghanistan Papers" will ever be
brought to justice for their crimes. None of the three presidents involved will be brought to
trial for these actual high crimes. Rumsfeld and Lute and the others will never have to fear
justice. Because both parties are in on it. There is no justice . (
source )
The response? Silence and a budget increase.
The people in government don't care that we know about all this. Sure, it's mildly
inconvenient but "whatever."
How do I know this?
Simple. Less than a full day after the story broke, the new NDAA ended up on President
Trump's desk and was signed, authorizing an additional 22 billion dollars for next year's
defense spending. And all anyone can talk about is, "Oooohhhh Space Force!!!"
Government: "Merry Christmas. We're going to blow through more of your tax money and you
won't get a damned thing for it."
I couldn't make this up if I tried. In a notable, must-read op-ed ,
Darius Shahtahmasebi cited some horrific incidents and concluded:
We can't let this recent publication obscure itself into nothingness. The recent reaction
from Congress is a giant middle finger designed to tell you that (a) there will never be
anything you can do about it and (b) they simply don't care how you feel. Democracy at its
finest from the world's leading propagator of democratic values. ( source )
When is enough going to be enough? Why are we not enraged en masse? Why haven't we recalled
these treasonous bastards and taken our country and our budget back?
For a country that is ready to take up arms and waste countless hours "impeaching" Trump
over something he said on a phone call, it sure says a lot about those same people ignoring 18
years of treasonous behavior by three separate administrations.
Why isn't the media raising hell over this? Why aren't these lives important? Why isn't
sending trillions of our dollars to be frittered away an outrage?
People love to say "America First" and "impeach Trump for treason" and all that jazz. They
love to call anti-war people "un-American" and recommend a quick, one-way trip to Somalia if we
don't "support our troops." However, I think is far more evidence of supporting our troops to
want out of there, not risking their lives based on a castle of lies that further enriches
powerful and wealthy people who have nothing to lose.
Most people love to be outraged about frivolous matters. But when a report like this and its
following insult are met with resounding silence, it's pretty obvious that hardly anybody is
really paying attention.
So, cut funding for prisons; cut necessary levels, to insure safety, prison guard
staffing; watch as prison violence escalates; then print a story where the Union leader,
trying to protect his remaining too small workforce from the rising violence, sounds like an
inhuman bad guy in the story. Neolibs gotta love that angle.
I'm seeing the same thing in my US state over the past several years. The politicians'
answer is not to increase staffing of unionized prison guards or spend more on safety for
state prisons, but to outsource prisoner housing to the private sector. Neolibs love that
angle.
Tulsi had the sense to see impeachment for what it is, a farce that only helps Trump, and
look how she is treated by the party for refusing to go along with it.
Considering there are three billion Muslims determined to rule the planet with their
Sharia Law and forcing everyone to face Mecca five times a day to "pray" while waiting for
Mahamed to return, adding to that millions of Christians, many nutty enough to believe we
need a nuclear war destroying Israel in order to save it and cause Jesus to return on a
cloud, plus good luck converting the billions of Chinese to ANY of this! Destroy the planet
in order to save it! Light a candle, take off your shoes and burn some incense! The end is
nigh!!!
Human beings on this planet, I have come to believe, are all just batshit crazy and
delusional regarding their various "beliefs".
Just look at what that nut editor of "Christianity Today" did to President Trump!
For God's sake! (cough), Trump and his GOP crew are against abortion, going so far as to
stop ALL funding of abortions with federal money, they hate the Commies and on and on.
Probably the fact that neither Trump nor his wife have set foot in a church on a Sunday
morning in four years toting his well-worn Bible, was what really did him in! No regular
photo-ops like with Jimmy and Rosalind or Bill and Hillary. Tsk, tsk
Seriously. I am almost 70 years old and have lived in Los Angeles for the past ten years.
This place has no soul. My friend and I want to leave and buy a small house in a nice town
with normal people. The only problem is that any of these towns that might exist are filled
with depressed people, some slumped over their steering wheels dying of heroin overdoses
while their toddler children sit in the back seats of the cars freezing, screaming and
starving.
Starving for food, warmth and affection.
Too old to fight the snow and frozen roads and sidewalks. Wish I had a pretty lake to swim
in Spring, Summer and Fall with a nice mild Winter.
And the quaint town of my childhood back again.
I wish it wasn't so, but I will probably die here in this hell hole with nothing but my
memories of swimming lakes and pretty gardens with bluebirds and robins and cardinals
singing.
And in my memories I can hear my grandma saying, "If wishes were horses, beggars would
ride".
adding: I listened to part of an NPR report on the French strikes. It was a first person
account by the young US reporter (judging from her voice) living in Paris about how the
strike was affecting her. She started out well enough, then complained that the strike makes
it hard for her nanny to travel to-from her apartment, making it a terrible hardship on the
nanny, and upsetting her childcare arrangement. Then her real complaint about the strikes was
aired: it's making it ever so much harder for her, the intrepid reporter, to travel to all
the upscale holiday parties she's been invited to. (Oh, the humanity!)
NPR foreign correspondents today; "My nanny is inconvenienced. I am inconvenienced.
Workers' pensions are all well and good, but what is that compared to my inconvenience?!"
Not exactly Eric Sevareid reporting from London during the blitz
Easier to demonize Putin than to have long boring articles about how different countries
have different national interests, and how he works for Russia not us. To say nothing about
discussing who exactly is it that decides what national interests are anyway
I very much enjoy watching or reading Putin's speeches. No doubt he's lying in the same
way all politicians do. Yet, when he castigates the West he is right on target and I like him
for it.
The "Afghanistan Papers" are not the "secret history" the Post says they are. What
struck me as I read them, was how drearily familiar it all was The real problem is not that
bureaucrats and politicians lied to the public, but that the institutional incentives of our
foreign policy often encouraged them to lie to themselves.
And why would they "lie to themselves?" The article doesn't dig deep enough. Rather than
accept that the Afghanistan war was a failure, viewed from the trillion dollars plus dollars
spent over 18 years, maybe it was a resounding success. Maybe instead of the WaPo doing a
retaliatory "expose" it really is just running cognitive interference.
Yes, if it was a failure, lessons can be learned, but what if it went all according to
plan, what if there really never was a desire to stamp out the poppy trade or root out the
terrorist, what if there are more nefarious forces at work? Or, maybe I've come to a point in
when I read any MSM story my first instinct is what's their angle, where do these bread
crumbs they are dropping for me lead to, or away from?
An English fellow I knew was the master of understatement, and when he related that he
made "a small but useful profit' on something, it meant he caught a whale, but claimed it was
a minnow.
'Bread crumbs' is a nice way of describing making money on a war you really don't want to
ever see the ending of, as it's just too profitable and to quit cold turkey would doom the
bottom line.
The article is basically right. My own experience with the subject and in the country is a
lot less than that of the author, but this accords with what I saw and heard. In fact it was
worse than that, because this series of stories is confined to the US, but many other nations
were involved as well, as was a complete alphabet soup of international organizations from
the UN and the EU downwards, with almost no real coordination and often conflicts of
objectives and interests.
In spite of many attempts, there never was an agreed strategy, and
within a couple of years people who'd been involved were saying basically what these articles
are saying now.
Why? Well two reasons in my experience. First is the sunk costs problem. The longer an
operation like this goes on, the longer it will go on, because it becomes
progressively more difficult to explain why you are pulling out when all this money and all
these lives have been apparently wasted. So the temptation is to stay and just hope that next
year things will get better. There are also lots of mega-political reasons for the US not to
pull out which have nothing to do with the country itself – NATO leadership, image vs
Russia etc. etc. These things are important for some people. As a result, rather than asking
yourself what you are trying to accomplish, you wind up trying to accomplish what you think
you can do – destroying poppy, for example, was never part of the original plan, but
became so because in theory it could be measured.
In addition, the military in every society are very mission oriented, and, whilst they are in
the field, will try their best to make whatever the politicians want them to do work. It's
later that they start to have doubts. After all, nobody will follow a General who tells his
men that the whole thing is a waste of time, whatever they may privately think. This is a
well-known problem in all counter insurgency wars.
So no, it's not the Pentagon Papers 2 – all this has been known to anybody interested
for a good fifteen years, and I've heard many people, military and civilians, say these sorts
of things when they come back from the front, even if they tend to be professionally
optimistic when they are there.
Now nobody wants to be the one who "lost" Afghanistan, negotiating the terms of America's
surrender to the Taliban will have awful optics.
I like what the Chinese did with the Uighur concentration camps: they declared that all of
the Uighurs had now "graduated".
Maybe get one of the Taliban guys to lose the headcovering and robes, put him in a suit
and tie and have a "historic" signing of a "peace deal".
(They won't have footage of helicopters being pushed off the decks of aircraft carriers
but maybe they can drive multi million dollar tanks off a cliff or something)
I keep hearing John Kerry's question "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a
mistake?" on Vietnam.
Wonderful isn't? 48 years since then and 44 years since the last helicopter flew off the
embassy's rooftop in Saigon and we haven't learned anything except being better
propagandists, crooks, liars, and credulous fools.
Speaking of officers encouraging the troops, "leading," I recall a scene in one of the
several Notagainistan documentaries quite a few years ago, where a colonel in the US Marines
(going from memory, I did not bookmark the video) was heating up his troops for a New Push
into I believe Wardak Province,, or maybe Kandahar. Telling the Troops to keep in their
fighting hearts the knowledge that this was going to be the operation that broke the back of
The Enemy, that they should remember every moment of it so they could tell their
grandchildren that they were part of the great victory in this noble effort.
Quite the locker room speech, as I recall it -- late enough in "the war" that his delivery
was pretty insincere, and the growled responses from the Troops made it unclear what muddled
motivations they might have, after a couple of "deployments" getting blown up by IEDs and
"kicking in doors in Kandahar " And in the rest of the world: http://vvawai.org/archive/wot/kicking-doors.html
The documenters were good enough to point out that said colonel had helicoptered in to the
marshaling area for the Big Push, then hopped back into his nicely appointed personal
Blackhawk and flown away. Leading from the rear
"Professional optimism," indeed. All of a piece with today's discussion of CEO
compensation (aka "looting.")
Correct me if I am wrong, but prior to our invasion of Afghanistan there was no poppy
problem because the Taliban did not permit it to be grown. Poppy growing for cash crops only
began after the insurgency to pay for weapons to fight the US forces there. So that is more a
measure of blowback than an initial aim of the invasion.
Further, I distinctly remember the Taliban saying that they did not have the ability to
root out AQ themselves, and just before the invasion they actually invited GWB to send in the
troops to get them. The fact that GWB ignored this invitation in favor of an invasion makes
the entire process a measure of blowback rather than progress.
It just strikes me that this was always just an excuse to start a war that accreted yet
more excuses to stay in one.
Right up there with going without a plan. By refusing the hard choice to keep all the
competing factions out of power (Taliban, Northern Alliance, Warlords) and refusing to have
new deal/bottom up extensive reconstruction plans for rebuilding they guaranteed Afghanistan
would not recover but remained mired in conflict and corruption.
Instead they went placeholder revenge war until they could get the ill conceived invasion
they wanted.
The hubris is endless. All that was required to ensure "a good outcome" would have been to
have that plan "to keep all the competing factions out of power (?Taliban, Northern Alliance,
Warlords," and then to have a "NewDeal.bottom up rebuilding ([sic -- one can't "rebuild" what
was never built in the first place]." Just "keep them out of power." Say what?
Then, that land of "tribes with flags" would somehow "recover" (from what -- the invasion
and destruction of all that "war" stuff?) and "democratically" avoid all the conflict and
corruption that are endemic to the terrain. A War College pipe dream, as in opium pipe? That
somehow a Middle Class and Constitutional Rule of Law and Chambers of Commerce and all that
would grow out of the rocks and brambles?
Choosing to empower warring factions and rebuild the opium trade which that did wasn't
hubris? We already know that it did little or nothing for the majority of the population. If
you are going to kick out a ruling party maybe not pick the successors especially when your
choice is based on who will take bribes to traffic guns and disruption to neighboring
areas.
We have never really tried a real hearts and minds operation. Seeds, farm equipment,
tools, schools, roads, building supplies and providing the time and space to use them.
I don't think there was a chance of there being no military response. Saner and better
respected leadership might have been able to do something limited and directed, but not one
better idea between doing nothing and what we did appears to have ever been considered.
It was not long before 9/11 that Cheney and crew had the Taliban in the US and took them
around to Disneyland, I kid you not. I have no idea what they thought that would do for
religious fundamentalists.
They always had big plans for the Middle East. In lots of areas.
Never forget that Cheney had barely gotten sworn in before he was on a diplomatic junket to
The ME and Europe to try to drum up a coalition to address the problem of Iraq. Funnily
enough saner people tried to tell him the problems were Israel, Palestine and yes terrorists
fixated on those areas. That didn't stop them from having plans for an invasion of Iraq on
Rumsfeld's desk seven months later on 9/11.
Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iraq and Syria are exactly like South Vietnam. If American Elite and
Technocrats admitted that the US Army was middle of a Civil War, invaders, and on the side of
warlords; they'd admit that it is pointless except to profit from the death and chaos. None
of the wars are in Americans' best interests. That realization ends the money flow.
Corruption is the applicable term.
It would be like Boeing admitting it killed 346 people and will kill more unless they have
a cultural change and spend money for the right people and rebuild an organization that works
together to build and fly airliners safely.
Yeah that article was just another " but we had good intentions" riff. As you suggest, the
reason people keep " failing" in these spectacular ways is that there is a lot of money to be
made in " failure", especially when accountability amounts to people saying " but we meant
well -- we just didn't understand".
what if there really never was a desire to stamp out the poppy trade
When the US began arming the Mujahiddin back in '79, it was accepted that opium smugglers
were ideally suited to smuggling weapons into Afghanistan. And when the US invaded in 2001,
it was in support of the Northern Alliance, well known for their involvement in the opium
business.
Since then, one of the few areas of development in the country has been the refining of opium
into heroin domestically, rather than exporting it raw.
No, there never was a desire to eradicate poppy.
The whole Afghanistan campaign (after the first year which was generally successful at
achieving its limited goal) has reminded me of the Tet offensive in Vietnam where entire
divisions of North Vietnamese soldiers infiltrated areas, including major cities, and no
locals would tell anybody. If you have that little support of the local population, then
there is no way you can "win a war" without simply simply creating a police state where
everybody's every move is monitored or committing genocide and wiping everybody out.
If the US couldn't identify partners that could get the population support, then the whole
"nation-building" exercise (a tacked-on goal) was doomed to failure. If the police and
soldiers aren't willing to fight for their government, then there isn't much purpose in
creating one.
I think the biggest US foreign policy failure is generally the assumption that everybody
wants to be just like the US. The Marshall Plan and Cold War were able to create stable
democracies in Western Europe and Japan where there weren't ones before. But these are the
exceptions to the rule. Most other countries have started with or reverted to strongmen or
simply devolved into chaos.
Then there is the installing the corrupt and often very partisan leadership to run the
countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and South Vietnam while pushing away any honest, or at
sincerely patriotic, leadership. It seems that being good for business is more important than
being good for a country, forget about winning a war.
It would be impossible for Trump to re-energize his base in any other way. Pelosi acts as
covert agent for Trump re-election? Peloci calculation that she can repar "Mueller effect" of
2018 with this impeachment proved to be gross miscalculation.
Warren who stupidly and enthusiastically jumped into this bandwagon will be hurt. She is such
a weak politician that now it looks like she does not belong to the club. Still in comparison
with Trump she might well be an improvement as she has Trump-like economic program, which Trump
betrayed and neutered. And her foreign policy can't be worse then Trump foreign policy. It is
just impossible.
I am convinced that the Dems are not actually interested or focused on defeating Trump, or
they would adopt an effective strategy. The question I keep wrestling with is, what is the point
to the strategy that is so ineffective?
Notable quotes:
"... The fact that the impeachment is dead in the water, by Pelosi's own admission , is evident in Trump's being adamant that indeed it must be sent to the Senate – where he knows he'll be exonerated. But even if it doesn't go to the Senate, what we're left with still appears as a loss for Democrats. Both places are his briar patch. This makes all of this a win-win for team Trump. ..."
"... fake impeachment procedure ..."
"... For in a constitutional republic like the United States, what makes an impeachment possible is when the representatives and the voters are in communion over the matter. This would normally be reflected in a mid-term election, like say for example the mid-term Senatorial race in 2018 where Democrats failed to take control. Control of the Senate would reflect a change of sentiment in the republic, which in turn and not coincidentally, would be what makes for a successful impeachment. ..."
"... Nancy Pelosi is evidently extraordinarily cynical. Her politics appears to be 'they deserve whatever they believe'. ..."
"... little else can explain the reasoning behind her claim that she will 'send the impeachment to the Senate' as soon as she 'has assurances and knows how the Senate will conduct the impeachment', except that it came from the same person who told the public regarding Obamacare that we have to 'We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.". ..."
"... "We have been attacked. We are at war. Imagine this movie script: A former KGB spy, angry at the collapse of his motherland, plots a course for revenge – taking advantage of the chaos, he works his way up through the ranks of a post-soviet Russia and becomes president. ..."
"... He establishes an authoritarian regime, then he sets his sights on his sworn enemy – the United States. And like the KGB spy that he is, he secretly uses cyber warfare to attack democracies around the world. Using social media to spread propaganda and false information, he convinces people in democratic societies to distrust their media, their political processes, even their neighbors. And he wins." ..."
"... We'll say we impeached him, because we did, and we'll say he was impeached. We'll declare victory, and go home. This will make him unelectable because of the stigma of impeachment. ..."
And so it came to pass, that in the deep state's frenzy of
electoral desperation, the 'impeachment' card was played. The hammer has fallen. Nearly the
entirety of the legacy media news cycle has been dedicated to the details, and not really
pertinent details, but the sorts of details which presume the validity of the charges against
Trump in the first place. Yes, they all beg the question. What's forgotten here is that the use
of this process along clearly partisan lines, and more – towards clearly partisan aims
– is a very serious symptom of the larger undoing of any semblance of stability in the US
government.
The fact that the impeachment is dead in the water,
by Pelosi's own admission , is evident in Trump's being adamant that indeed it must be sent
to the Senate – where he knows he'll be exonerated. But even if it doesn't go to the
Senate, what we're left with still appears as a loss for Democrats. Both places are his briar
patch. This makes all of this a win-win for team Trump.
Only in a country that produces so much fake news at the official level, could there be a
fake impeachment procedure made purely for media consumption, with no real or tangible
possible victory in sight.
For in a constitutional republic like the United States, what makes an impeachment
possible is when the representatives and the voters are in communion over the matter. This
would normally be reflected in a mid-term election, like say for example the mid-term
Senatorial race in 2018 where Democrats failed to take control. Control of the Senate would
reflect a change of sentiment in the republic, which in turn and not coincidentally, would be
what makes for a successful impeachment.
Don't forget, this impeachment is fake
Nancy Pelosi is evidently extraordinarily cynical. Her politics appears to be 'they
deserve whatever they believe'. And her aim appears to be the one who makes them believe
things so that they deserve what she gives them. For little else can explain the reasoning
behind her claim that she will 'send the impeachment to the Senate' as soon as she 'has
assurances and knows how the Senate will conduct the impeachment', except that it came from the
same person who told the public regarding Obamacare that we have to 'We have to pass the bill
so that you can find out what is in it.".
In both cases, reality is turned on its head – for rather we will know how the Senate
intends to conduct its procedure as soon as it has the details, which substantively includes
the impeachment documents themselves, in front of them, and likewise, legislators ought to know
what's in a major piece of legislation before they vote either way on it. Pelosi's assault on
reason, however, isn't without an ever growing tide of resentment from within the progressive
base of the party itself.
We have quickly entered into a new era which increasingly resembles the broken political
processes which have struck many a country, but none in living memory a country like the US.
Now elected officials push judges to prosecute their political opponents, constitutional crises
are manufactured to pursue personal or political vendettas, death threats and rumors of coups
coming from media and celebrities being fed talking points by big and important players from
powerful institutions.
This 'impeachment' show really takes the cake, does it not? We will recall shortly after
Trump was elected, narrator for hire Morgan Freeman made a shocking public service
announcement. It was for all intents and purposes, a PSA notifying the public that a military
coup to remove Trump would be legitimate and in order. Speaking about this PSA, and recounting
what was said, would in any event read as an exaggeration, or some allegorical paraphrasing
made to prove a point. Jogging our memories then, Freeman spoke to tens of millions of viewers
on television and YouTube
saying :
"We have been attacked. We are at war. Imagine this movie script: A former KGB spy,
angry at the collapse of his motherland, plots a course for revenge – taking advantage of
the chaos, he works his way up through the ranks of a post-soviet Russia and becomes
president.
He establishes an authoritarian regime, then he sets his sights on his sworn enemy
– the United States. And like the KGB spy that he is, he secretly uses cyber warfare to
attack democracies around the world. Using social media to spread propaganda and false
information, he convinces people in democratic societies to distrust their media, their
political processes, even their neighbors. And he wins."
This really set the tone for the coming years, which have culminated in this manufactured
'impeachment' crisis, really befitting a banana republic.
It would be the height of dishonesty to approach this abuse of the impeachment procedure as
if until this moment, the US's own political culture and processes were in good shape. Now
isn't the time for the laundry list of eroded constitutional provisions, which go in a thousand
and one unique directions. The US political system is surely broken, but as is the case with
such large institutions several hundreds of years old, its meltdown appears to happen in slow
motion to us mere mortals. And so what we are seeing today is the next phase of this
break-down, and really ought to be understood as monumental in this sense. Once again revealed
is the poor judgment of the Democratic Party and their agents, tools, warlords, and
strategists, the same gang who sunk Hillary Clinton's campaign on the rocks of hubris.
Nancy Pelosi also has poor judgment, and these short-sighted and self-interested moves on
her part stand a strong chance of backfiring. Her role in this charade is duly noted. This
isn't said because of any disagreement over her aims, but rather that in purely objective terms
it just so happens that her aims and her actions are out of synch – that is unless she
wants to see Trump re-elected. Her aims are her aims, our intention is to connect these to
their probable results, without moral judgments.
The real problem for the Democrats, the DNC, and any hopes for the White House in 2020, is
that this all has the odor of a massive backfire, and something that Trump has been counting on
happening. When one's opponent knows what is probable, and when they have a track record for
preparing very well for such, it is only a question of what Trump's strategy is and
how this falls into it, not whether there is one.
Imagine being a fly on the wall of the meeting with Pelosi where it was decided to go
forward with impeachment in the House of Representatives, despite not having either sufficient
traction in the Senate or any way to control the process that the Senate uses.
It probably went like this: ' We'll say we impeached him, because we did, and we'll say
he was impeached. We'll declare victory, and go home. This will make him unelectable because of
the stigma of impeachment. '
Informed citizens are aware that whatever their views towards Trump, nothing he has done
reaches beyond the established precedent set by past presidents. Confused citizens on the other
hand, are believing the manufactured talking points thrown their way, and the idea that a US
president loosely reference a quid pro quo in trying to sort a corruption scandal in dealings
with the president of a foreign country, is some crazy, new, never-before-done and
highly-illegal thing. It is none of those things though.
Unfortunately, not needless to say, the entirety of the direct, physical evidence against
Trump solely consists of the now infamous transcript of the phone call which he had with
Ukrainian president Zelensky. The rest is hearsay, a conspiracy narrative, and entirely
circumstantial. As this author has noted in numerous pieces, Biden's entire candidacy rests
precisely upon his need to be a candidate so that any normal investigation into the wrongdoings
of himself or his son in Ukraine, suddenly become the targeted persecution of a political
opponent of Trump.
Other than this, it is evident that Biden stands little chance – the same polling
institutions which give him a double-digit lead were those which foretold a Clinton electoral
victory. Neither their methods nor those paying and publishing them, have substantively
changed. Biden's candidacy, like the impeachment, is essentially fake. The real contenders for
the party's base are Sanders and Gabbard.
The Democratic Party Activist Base Despises Pelosi as much as Clinton
The Democratic Party has two bases, one controlled by the DNC and the Clintons, and one
which consists of its energized rank-and-file activists who are clearer in their populism,
anti-establishment and ant-corporate agenda. Candidates like Gabbard and Sanders are closest to
them politically, though far from perfect fits. Their renegade status is confirmed by the
difficulties they have with visibility – they are the new silent majority of the party.
The DNC base, on the other hand, relies on Rachel Maddow, Wolf Blitzer, and the likes for their
default talking points, where they have free and pervasive access to legacy media. In the
context of increased censorship online, this is not insignificant.
Among the important reasons this 'impeachment' strategy will lose is that it will not
energize the second and larger base. Even though this more progressive and populist base is
also more motivated, they have faced – as has the so-called alt-light – an
extraordinarily high degree of censorship on social media. Despite all the censorship, the
Democrats' silent majority are rather well-informed people, highly motivated, and tend to be
vocal in their communities and places of work. Their ideas move organically and virally among
the populace.
This silent majority has a very good memory, and they know very well who Nancy Pelosi is,
and who she isn't.
The silent majority remembers that after years of the public backlash against Bush's war
crimes, crimes against humanity, destruction of remaining civil liberties with the Patriot Act,
torture, warrantless search – and the list goes on and on – Democrats managed to
retake the lower house in 2006. If there was a legitimate reason for an impeachment, it would
have been championed by Pelosi against Bush for going to war using false, falsified,
manufactured evidence about WMD in Iraq. At the time, Pelosi squashed the hopes of her own
electorate, reasoning that such moves would be divisive, that they would distract from the
Democrats' momentum to take the White House in '08, that Bush had recently (?) won his last
election, and so on. Of course these were real crimes, and the reasons not to prosecute may
have as much to do with Pelosi's own role in the war industry. Pelosi couldn't really push
against Bush over torture, etc. because she had been on an elite congressional committee
– the House Intelligence Committee – during the Bush years in office which starting in
2003 was dedicated to making sure that torture could and would become normalized and
entirely legal.
It seems Pelosi can't even go anywhere with this impeachment on Trump today, and therefore
doesn't even really plan to submit it to the Senate for the next stage .
The political stunt was pulled, a fireworks show consisting of one lonely rocket that sort of
fizzled off out of sight.
Trump emerges unscathed, and more to the point, we are closer to the election and his base
is even more energized. Pelosi spent the better part of three years inoculating the public
against any significance being attached to any impeachment procedure. Pelosi cried wolf so many
times, and Trump has made good on the opportunities handed to him to get his talking points in
order and to condition his base to receive and process the scandals in such and such way. This
wouldn't have been possible without Pelosi's help. Thanks in part to Pelosi and the DNC, Trump
appears primed for re-election.
Trump energizes his base, and the DNC suppresses and disappoints theirs. That's where the
election will be won or lost.
This may be a good time to pull on my yellow waters, and take a look at Trump's letter to
Pelosi, since his letter is simultaneously a parting shot as the House votes impeachement, and
--
assuming impeachment doesn't die in the House -- the opening gun not only for his trial in
the Senate but for election 2020.
Here is the letter ; if you have time, it's worth reading it to form your own opinions.
One tip to make reading Trump more tolerable is to hear him as a borscht belt comedian like
Rodney Dangerfield or Henny Youngman.
Clifford A. Rieders , who grew up with enduring memories of the borscht belt, commented in
2016:
The humorists spanned the spectrum from Yiddish-speaking Brooklynites to Midwestern
Protestants. Each comedian had a shtick. What exactly is a shtick? A "shtick" was an
approach, an act, a way of relating to people that could be funny, serious, entertaining or
crass, but always memorable in some way. Donald Trump is surging in the polls because he has
a shtick. He is very much like a borscht belt entertainer, memorable because of how he speaks
and the way he presents himself, rather than his content. The experts will have to parse the
substance of Trump's message, if any, but his entertainment value should not be
underestimated. He is making people sit up and take notice, whether he is hated, loved, or
whether he just makes people shrug their shoulders and giggle.
... ... ...
Even more amazingly, the Times leaves this passage, which occurs immediately before the
passage they corrected, uncorrected:
Before the Impeachment Hoax, it was the Russian Witch Hunt. Against all evidence, and
regardless of the truth, you and your deputies claimed that my campaign colluded with the
Russians -- a grave, malicious, and slanderous lie, a falsehood like no other.
One must assume that the Times does not correct what it believes to be true. Therefore,
RussiaGate -- which the Times assiduously propagated, to its great profit -- is "a grave,
malicious, and slanderous lie"? Alrighty then.
Similarly:
What the Times is looking at is a blueprint for Trump's case to the voters in 2020. And yet
the Times can find only two corrections to make? If I were a liberal Democrat, I would be very,
very worried about 2020.
I'm not going to make an armchair diagnosis of Trump's mental state, or shoot fish in a
barrel with factchecking. Rather, I'm going to look at Trump's letter through the lens of his
schtick , or, using the seventy five-cent word, his rhetoric. (I will be the first to
say that Trump is not a superb technician; for an analysis of an orator who is, see NC
here on Julia Gillard .) First, I will show that Trump's letter falls naturally into two
parts: His defense against the indictment, and his 2020 case against the fitness of Democrats
to govern). Given that the text has such a structure, it's simply not tenable to call it an "
unhinged rant ," which disposes of the first mainstream response. Nor it is especially
useful to fact-check it, especially when the facts are so disputed[1], which disposes of the
second. Unfortunately, I cannot annotate the entire six-page letter, but I will comment on the
rhetoric used in each part. Now let's look at the two parts.
Here is the division point between the two parts. Using direct address (" inter se pugnantia "),
Trump writes:
There is nothing I would rather do than stop referring to your party as the Do-Nothing
Democrats. Unfortunately, I don't know that you will ever give me a chance to do so.
There are two reasons this paragraph marks a division. First, it's the first and only joke (
irony ). Second, it's
the first use of one of Trump's favorite figures: paralipsis , here saying something while pretending that one
does not wish to say it ("unfortunately," my sweet Aunt Fanny).
So, let us turn to the first part, Trump's defense. After some hyperbole about the
Constitution , Trump addresses each claim in the House indictment in turn. On (1) "Abuse of
Power," Trump responds that (A) "I had a totally innocent conversation with the President of
Ukraine," (B) "You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an
impeachable offense", (C) "you are trying to impeach me by falsely accusing me of doing what
Joe Biden has admitted he actually did," and (D) "President Zelensky has repeatedly declared
that I did nothing wrong." On (2), "Obstruction of Congress," Trump responds, (A) "if you make
a high crime and misdemeanor out of going to the courts, it is an abuse of power," (B) "you
have spent three straight years attempting to overturn the will of the American people and
nullify their votes," (C) "Congressman Adam Schiff cheated and lied all the way up to the
present day", and (D) "You and your party are desperate to distract," followed by the
accomplishedments listed in the second Times "correction" above." I've lettered and numbered
the responses because the structure is perfectly clear to those who are willing to look for it.
(There is a minor Twitter controversy over whether Trump wrote the letter himself, but I would
say he, like any President, has people for that. I think that Trump, for whatever reason, had a
lot more input into part two, for reasons I will show.)
A second feature of the first part is that it's virtually devoid of rhetorical devices:
Tricolon and
anaphora are the
only ones used frequently ("[1] no crimes, [2] no misdemeanors, and [3]
no offenses"; "[1] you are violating your oaths of office, [2] you
are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and [3] you are declaring
open war on American Democracy"; "[1]misquoted, [2]mischaracterized, and [3]fraudulently
misrepresented").
Now let's turn to the second part. Unlike the first part, it can't be represented with an
outline structure. Indeed, it might be considered to be grist for Trump's improvisations and
A/B testing on the trail. From
my post describing Trump's visit to Bangor :
I want to focus on how [Trump] made [his] points: He didn't just emit them in
bulleted-list form. Rather, he treated them as waypoints. He'd state the point, clearly and
loudly, and then begin to move away from it in ever-widening circles, riffing jazzily on
anecdotes, making jokes, introducing other talking points ("We're gonna build the wall"),
introducing additional anecdotes, until finally popping the topical stack and circling back
to the next waypoint, which he would then state, clearly and loudly; rinse, repeat. The
political class considers or at least claims Trump's speeches are random and disorganized,
but they aren't; any speech and debate person who's done improvisation knows what's going
on.
You can just see Trump cutting up bits of part two, revising some, discarding others,
re-arranging them, and so on.
The primary rhetorical device in the second part is tu quoque , colloquially "The pot calling the
kettle black." Here it is combined with anaphora (and a dash of tricolon and alliteration ):
You are the ones interfering in America's elections. You are the
ones subverting America's Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice.
You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish
[1] p ersonal, [2] p olitical, and [3]p p artisan gain.
And here Trump combines tu quoque with straight up [A] ad hominem plus [B] mesarchia , [C] tricolon, [D] hyperbole , and [E]
ad populum .
(I have to change the notating system for this one because the devices are so numerous and
interlocked.)
Perhaps most insulting of all is [A]your false display of solemnity. You apparently have
so little respect for the American People that you expect them to believe that [B] you
are approaching this impeachment [C]somberly, reservedly, and reluctantly. [D]No
intelligent person believes what you are saying. Since the moment I won the election, the
Democrat Party has been possessed by Impeachment Fever. There is no reticence. This is not a
somber affair. [B] You are making a mockery of impeachment and you are
scarcely concealing [C]your hatred of me, of the Republican Party, and tens of millions of
patriotic Americans. [E]The voters are wise, and they are seeing straight through this
[C]empty, hollow, and dangerous game you are playing.
Now, tu quoque is indeed a logical fallacy with respect to claims . But is it
a fallacy with respect to the right to govern, which is one way for Trump to structure the 2020
campaign?[1]
...A rhetorical analysis of Trump's letter shows that he will be a formidable opponent in
2020, and that he's crazy like a fox. Trump has form. His schtick has worked, and may well work
again.
It will come as a great shock to the dem establishment, a shock i tell you, that the
reporting they ignored coming from aaron mate and the other tinny (to their ears) voices to
their left was the
revealed truth
and could be wielded like a mighty club against them by trump
only not in the people's interest, because of course not, he's a republican
but anyway, who could have known? /s
as to Trump's charge of Do Nothing Democrats, the Democratic House has passed an entire
agenda of good things that the Senate has not acted upon. Also, is there ANY evidence to
suggest that African American unemployment is at an all time low? A favorite Trump technique
is to issue an obviously false statement as if it were true.
Overall rate, and rates by ethnicity have been declining since 2011, so record or near
record lows are recorded during the Trump years. YMMV as to how much Trump economic policies
have contributed to and/or not impeded the trend.
They have passed a few interesting bills. But how much time have they spent talking about
those bills, and other issues on which they want to move ahead for the people? Compared to
the media time sucked up by TrumpRussia, Impeachment, and the rest of the sh*tshow. I don't
watch any TV news, but to judge from headlines and other coverage I'll guess very little.
Thanks for the analysis. I'm not sure that the bit about the false display of solemnity is
an ad hominem. It seems to me that it would count as a fallacy if he were arguing that the
case against him is flawed for the reason that those making that case are bad people (people
who feign solemnity). But that's not how I read it.
I read it as an attempt to work up anger against his accusers. At one point in the
Rhetoric, Aristotle claims that people become angry with someone when they think they have
been slighted by that person. One way of slighting people is to take them for fools. This is
an insult. If Trump were right and Democrats really were feigning solemnity while gleefully
engaged in a narrowly self-interested effort to overturn an election, then Democrats would be
taking voters for fools. Many voters would find this insulting. Also, Aristotle thought that
angry people are moved to take revenge. This amounts to a desire to bring the insulting party
low. Bringing low, in this case, would surely involve voting against Democrats, punishing
them by keeping them out or throwing them out of high office.
I suppose, then, that this particular passage looks to me like good rhetoric as opposed to
fallacious argument. Or at least partly good. He seems to know what he's doing where pathos
is concerned.
Lambert describes President Trump's style as schtick but another way is to consider it as
a wrestling character named "President Trump." Remember President Trump was involved with the
WWE and had the owners wife Linda McMahon in his cabinet and she is now running a pro-Trump
super PAC.
Having grown up watching professional wrestling President Trump's campaign rallies are
exactly like a wrestling show. He is playing a character and has to be quick thinking and
able to ad-lib to manipulate the crowd's emotions. The crowd also has to become part of the
show as well and overreact to signal to the performer (in this case who happens to be the
President) they are engaged with the show. The baby face (Trump) is cheered loudly and the
heels (Democrats/media) are booed in an exaggerated manner.
This character development and ad-libbing/a b testing is then always in use when dealing
with the media and when tweeting. Since the President is a caricature his followers aren't
bothered by his incorrect statements and when the Democrats/media point out his
mis-statements it doesn't register because everyone knows wrestling is fake.
A rhetorical analysis of Trump's letter shows that he will be a formidable opponent in
2020, and that he's crazy like a fox.
Make America Great Again. Trump trademarked that saying 1 week after the 2012 election. He
isn't crazy he's sly like a fox.
I've been around for a while and my attitude is that all of these "prexies", with the
exception maybe of Ike, have been lying sacks of shit. Now while they all facilitated mass
thievery by their friends and associates (as the mob would say), they could have at least had
the good form to be funny. But no! They were all so earnest and sanctimonious. Kind of like
my parish priest handing out the wafers.
I probably spent way too many hours warming various bar-stools next to a variety of
knuckleheads, so I'm going to give Trump his due, OK? The guy has given me more chuckles,
laughs, guffaws and all around hilarity than six decades worth of well dressed socio-paths.
And as a bonus, a big bonus, he has greatly discomforted all of the smartest grifters in the
room. Whenever I see the guy, Im in the Catskills.
I am convinced that the Dems are not actually interested or focused on defeating Trump, or
they would adopt an effective strategy. The question I keep wrestling with is, what is the
point to the strategy that is so ineffective?
They are perhaps infiltrated by malicious actors, or positioning for something bigger? The
clarity of the critique mentioned above by Aaron Mate to me isn't mysterious or difficult to
find.
How about this:they are preparing for election 2024? I'm not joking.
Rodney Dangerfield? Don Rickles? Our political culture has truly been debased by popular
culture into a stand-up competition. Trump's base knows that he's channeling New Wave/Punk
comedians Sam Kinison and Bobcat Goldthwait.
Whose schtick eventually erased Kinison and the Bobcat's out-of-control nihilism from the
popular culture? The laid-back Jerry Seinfeld as written by Larry David -- yet another reason
to support Bernie Sanders over the other wooden Dem contenders. Did you see the "debate" on
SNL last weekend? Get them on a stage together and Bernie's schtick will slay Trump's
As the days go by I become more convinced that the impeachment drama was used to cover up
the passing of the usmca and axing of the venture capital in health care bill and containing
surprise medical billing https://khn.org/news/investors-deep-pocket-push-to-defend-surprise-medical-bills/
FTA "We've started to realize it's not us versus the hospitals or the doctors, it's us versus
the hedge funds," said James Gelfand, senior vice president of health policy at ERIC, a group
that represents large employers.
From the KHN article on surprise billing
"surprise medical bills, which generally arise when an insured individual inadvertently
receives care from an out-of-network provider."
How did "inadvertently" get in there when it is a revenue generation model? Asymmetry of
information is always how profits are made.
I like to invert the model and estimate the outcomes for a lot of these fictions: if
working class people controlled the upward distribution of wealth, how would society be
different?
In China's history when the largest landowners, the wealthiest individuals connived or
bribed their way out of paying taxes and the burden shifted down the income scale, the result
sooner rather than later was an uprising that ended with a new dynasty.
Why is there always more money than is even asked for for the "defense budget", but social
security and medicare are budget problems?
This is a constant in Chinese history, even the French Revolution was set up by the
exclusive taxation of the poor and middle classes. Eviscerating one's sources of income while
weakening the overall economy including the general population does not make for a strong
state able to withstand an unanticipated emergency. Somehow people keep doing the same thing
over and over.
in the US pols are still making masssive tax cuts for billionairs and big
corporations – 60 of America's largest corporations in the US
paid no federal taxes last year.
At the same time, both parties say there isn't enough money to continue Social Security, as
we know it, because of deficits. They say Social Security is the budget problem. right .
France's govt is doing the economic same trick, imo.
The USA government acts as a gangster and should expect that other power will behave equally
bad toward the USA. That's a very bad, disastrous calculation, even in view of the current USA
technological superiority (which might shrink in the future)
Pride goeth before a fall. Washington is proud of itself, but a day will come when it will
count the cost, and mutter, "What the fuck was I thinking?" It was not ever going to actually
interrupt, and then seize for itself, Russia's share of the European gas market – that
was just another example of its addled belief in exceptionalism and its ability to overcome
any and all limiting factors, including distance and capacity.
What it HAS done is reveal itself as a petulant global child who will break anything that
does not please it, and therefore a dangerous and unpredictable business partner.
Thus spake the official Washington arsehole in Germany:
The American Ambassador in Berlin Richard Grenell, about whom it has already been
requested in Germany that he be recognized as persona non grata because of his
repeated attacks against the German leadership, has said that the sanctions imposed by
Washington against the pipeline "Nord Stream-2" had been introduced in the interests of the
EU and many countries of Europe are grateful for them.
"Seriously: from 15 European countries, the European Commission and the European
Parliament have all expressed their concerns about the project. We have long heard from our
European partners that the United States should support their efforts. Therefore, sanctions
represent a very Pro-European solution", said Grenell to the publication
Bild am Sonntag . [A German arsewipe publication of the first magnitude -- ME]
According to him, European diplomats have allegedly already repeatedly expressed their
gratitude for the measures taken by Washington.
Recall that the United States, which from time to time has opposed the emergence in
Europe of a strong competitor for its gas, imposed sanctions against the pipelines "Nord
Stream-2" and "Turkish Stream", requiring that the companies involved in their laying
immediately stop construction. In response, the German government has said it "rejects such
extraterritorial sanctions" directed "against German and European companies.
Just two events that occurred during Saturday night have turned into one of the main news
stories in recent months and years: Russia, the Ukraine and the European Commission signed a
trilateral agreement on the transit of gas over the coming years from Russia to the EU via
the Ukrainian GTS, and President Trump signed a law on the defence budget, in which US
parliamentarians have written separate clauses concerning sanctions against companies
involved in the construction of the pipeline "Nord stream – 2″
If anyone has forgotten, allow me to remind you that Vladimir Putin has never talked about
the categorical refusal as regards the transit to Europe via the Ukraine of Russian gas.
Always, he has only stressed that it is a question exclusively of a commercial nature,
without any political overtones, and that such transit be carried out on favourable terms.
Vice-Premier of the Russian government Dmitry Kozak has said about the new contract to be
signed before the New Year that he parties had agreed on favourable terms. In addition to
this, the Ukrainian side said that "Gazprom" had agreed to pay "Naftogaz" $3 billion,
according to the decision of the Stockholm arbitration. So, can the Ukraine celebrate a
"victory"?
So far, only Kiev has stated this figure of $3 billion. On the Russian side, there has
been no confirmation of this yet, but even if the Kiev figure is correct, I do not see much
reason to celebrate "victory", for if Russia has paid this money to the Ukraine ($2.6 billion
+ penalties), then the Ukraine is obliged to return $4.5 billion to Russia (3 billion
Eurobonds + penalties). The balance is not in favour of Kiev. In addition, the Ukraine has
pledged to stop all legal disputes on gas issues. Yes, in one case there is a dispute between
economic entities, and in a second case there is a dispute about sovereign debt. However,
since both Naftogaz and Gazprom are budget-forming state companies, to a certain extent this
difference in debt statuses is leveled.
Now on transit. There is no denying that for Russia it is not only important but necessary
to transit gas through the Ukraine at the moment, since under long-term contracts with
Europe, Gazprom is obliged to supply the volumes of gas stipulated in them, regardless of the
circumstances. Otherwise, the Russian company would have to pay heavy fines and penalties. By
concluding the contract, Gazprom has once again proved its reliability as a supplier, which,
by the way, was has already been emphasized by the European Commission following the
negotiations.
The only thing currently known about the transit contract is that it has been concluded
not for 10 years as Kiev had wanted, but for 5 years. Apparently, a longer term is not
relevant, chiefly because of complete uncertainty about the future of the Ukraine -- by the
way, in the next few days Kiev is likely to start an active struggle against the agreements
already reached, and if something threatens them at the moment, it is only Ukrainian
instability. According to data received from the Russian company, the volume of transit
through the Ukraine next year will be about 65 billion cubic metres. This is certainly a very
significant figure, but it is significantly less than the 90 billion cubic metres pumped
through the Ukrainian GTS in 2017. In 2021-2024, the annual transit volume will drop to 40
billion cubic metres. This volume allows the Ukrainian GTS to operate at a plus rather than a
minus, but Kiev will not receive any significant financial gain through it.
By the way, a certain demand for Ukrainian transit will remain after the Nord Stream-2 gas
pipeline has reached its design capacity, as European gas demand grows annually and a number
of fields operated in the EU countries are decommissioned in the coming years. As for NS-2
itself, by the time the sanctions are imposed, less than 50 kilometres will have been left on
one pipeline and about 70 kilometres on the other. Even if the Swiss company gathers up its
belongings, Russian pipe-laying ships will finish the job, and even though they lay pipes 3
times slower, they have absolute immunity from American sanctions. One of them is now located
in the area of Indonesia, and the second pipe-laying ship, "Fortuna", which, by the way, has
already participated in the implementation of "NS-2", is in a German port and is ready to
start working within a few days. [My stress! See that Finnish troll? -- ME]
So, by and large, the question is only one of time. But in any case "SP-2" will be
completed in terms of installation, testing and commissioning, and can be put into operation,
at most, at the end of the first half of 2020.
I really really doubt that the US military will attack overtly or covertly. The US already
announced that it will sanction other Russian energy projects if North Stream is placed in
operation.
I don't imagine that will be necessary. Be pretty hard to argue then that they were not
acting solely in their own interests, wouldn't it? It would make a hell of a thriller novel,
though – the pipeline is on the seabed, so any American efforts to tamper with it would
probably have to be from underwater. A submarine has no business being there, so its mission
would have to be super-secret and plausibly deniable. And in that scenario, if it simply
disappeared, the Americans would have to just proceed as if it never existed. There you go,
Karl; a great book idea, you should write it. But I want 20%; 30% if I have to proofread it
before publication to take out all the rhapsodizing about freedom and democracy, and rewrite
the ending where the Americans blow up the pipeline and miraculously escape, sailing home to
a ticker-tape parade and leaving Putin with angry tears running down his face.
Bulgaria is an instructive example here. Remember when it stopped South Stream in its
tracks, and was the hero of America and the EU? And Bulgaria strutted and swaggered, and was
pretty proud of itself while it waited for the rewards of its bravery. And then the USA built
them a Middle School or a new fence or something, I forget, and there were lots of 'well
done, old chap!' compliments, and and then that was it. Bulgaria did not become everyone's
preferred business partner and the destination of enormous foreign investment. And then,
gradually, everybody stopped talking about what a great and brave thing Bulgaria did, and it
just sort of sat there with its mouth half-open, trying to take in how skillfully it had been
creampied, and evidently all for nothing.
And eventually, Bulgaria repented, and went back to Russia and Putin, cap in hand. And
Russia received it warmly, like a brother who fell in with a bad crowd but was not really, at
heart, bad himself. It did not say that Bulgaria must prove itself by repudiating its former
friends. It seemed willing to let bygones be just that.
It is not even too much of a stretch to imagine that might one day be Ukraine as well,
although it certainly could not be under the current conditions. The nationalists would have
to be purged, hard. And there would have to be a completely new political administration. But
there's time, and lots of it. The west is not going to make a prosperous paradise of Ukraine,
it is only interested in stripping it of anything of value, and in the meantime it will go
down and down, because nobody wants to put any money into it. Except, ahem; Russia.
Party Poroshenko initiates sanctions against the supply of gas from Russia
The faction of "European solidarity" in the Ukrainian Parliament initiates sanctions
against the Russian gas supplies directly, reports RIA "Novosti".
As stated by the ex-President and leader of the faction of Petro Poroshenko, the
political force will require the convening of the national security Council on this issue,
and "implementation of sanctions" against the gas supplies from Russia
The people who elected Zelensky expected him to put Porky behind bars. But, surprise
surprise, Zel is a wimp who couldn't bring himself to buck his American overlords.
Said Overlords like Porky and want to keep him around, as the new leader of the Opps, with
hope he gets back into power some day.
Porky is the Ukrainian version of Saakashvili, there is simply no getting rid of him!
What if Germany, angered by American high-handedness, decided to move away from the US
dollar. Could that happen?
It could. Analysts caution that it would be unwise for Washington to laugh at efforts by
nations to make themselves less dependent on the dollar, because it also makes those nations
less susceptible to American sanctions. The world outside America is getting fed up with the
USA's sanctions-happy punishments, which have mushroomed from 5 targeted countries at the
start of the George W. Bush administration to 22 targeted countries at the end of 2018.
One of the ways Russia has hardened its economy against American tampering is in
increasing its use and accumulation of gold as a hedge, which is immune to 'freezing' by the
USA, so long as the gold is held in Russian vaults. That's the key, and momentum is slowly
gathering in other countries. Hungary repatriated all its gold from the Bank of England in
October of this year, and increased its holdings tenfold as well. Romania has submitted a
bill to parliament which mandates that only 5% of the country's gold can be stored abroad.
Currently about 60% of its 103 tonnes is stored at the Bank of England. In 2017 Germany
repatriated around $31 Billion worth of gold which had been stored in New York and Paris.
This week, Poland and Slovakia called for a return of their gold, which is being held by, you
guessed it, the Bank of England. The lesson of Venezuela's stolen gold was not lost on
anyone, and the less foreign gold the Bank of England has in its vaults, the less useful it
is to Washington and its 'freeze' orders.
Germany was chafing at US bullying back in 2018, and talking up policies to pull away from
the US dollar. Would this latest example of American meddling make them more, or less
inclined to pursue financial policies which did not include the United States as a partner,
do you think?
"According to S&P Global Platts Analytics, Nord Stream 2 would have to seek
alternative vessels and contractors to complete the remaining section of pipe in Danish
waters if the sanctions are enacted.
"While the most challenging parts of Nord Stream 2 have been laid in water depths of
around 200 meters, the remaining section in Danish waters at 90 meters depth remains
complicated," it said.
Russian companies operate capable offshore pipe-lay vessels, which have completed projects
in challenging Arctic conditions, including the MRTS Defender, which worked on the offshore
stretch of the Bovanenkovo-Ukhta pipeline.
Platts Analytics believes MRTS Fortuna could be used to complete Nord Stream 2, but is
capable of laying just 1 km/d.
A further obstacle, according to Platts Analytics, is that the Danish permit application
states that it is assumed that the vessels used to complete the Danish section will have
dynamic positioning capabilities (such as those of the Allseas vessels) which are not present
on MRTS Fortuna.
A Russian pipelaying vessel that already has dynamic positioning capabilities, Akademik
Cherskiy, could be used, but it would take up to two months to arrive to Danish waters as it
is currently stationed in Russia's Far East."
It is surprising that the Gazprom management didn't prepare for this situation! If this
article is correct the only Russian vessel that can be used to finish the project is
currently stationed in Vladivostok, and it will take about two months for it to arrive to
Danish waters.
The sanction threat has been looming for months, but it seems that Gazprom did not prepare
for it in any meaningful way.
I would be pleasantly surprised if this project is finished in 2020.
Karl, this is no attitude for the Christmas season – don't be so dour and pessimistic.
It takes two years to build a specialized ship, at a minimum, and that's just a regular
design like an LNG tanker – should Gazprom have built two or three, only to have the
Americans laugh and not impose sanctions? Then you would have chuckled ruefully over how
foolish Gazprom was to waste its money; there's no pleasing you. Only two days ago you were
moaning over how the entirety of the funds spent so far would be wasted; the pipeline could
not be completed, America is just too strong. You can go back and look. Now it looks as if it
can be completed, just the remainder will be done at about a third the speed it could have
been. But the money which would have gone to Allseas will be saved, and really there's no
hurry now; they have 5 years if they need it. In 2 months the worst of the winter weather
should be over, and any further slowdowns between now and completion can be blamed on the
Americans, whose fault of course it is. It would have been done now but for American pressure
on Denmark to hold out.
I wouldn't say it couldn't have turned out better, but all things considered the results
are not that bad for Russia and not very good for the USA, which has incurred a lot of
resentment and ill-will in exchange for really nothing. It is not going to stop the pipeline
from completing, but it has made a lot of enemies, and even the Poles have stopped yapping
and do not appear to be celebrating too loudly, lest they anger other Europeans.
""While the most challenging parts of Nord Stream 2 have been laid in water depths of around
200 meters, the remaining section in Danish waters at 90 meters depth remains complicated,"
it said."
Norwegian divers welded pipelines at 900 meters depth (And, yes they had some
problems).
Let me guess – the United States has threatened to confiscate the assets in the USA of
any company which sells dynamic-positioning systems to the Soviets (oops! I mean the
Russians!), and so now they will have to develop the technology themselves. Why not just
threaten to slap sanctions on anyone giving 'aid and comfort' to the Russians? I mean,
they're the enemy, right? Right?? So nobody sell them boots or warm clothes, or anything. See
how they like laying pipe in their skivvies, barefoot.
Say, I'll bet that attitude is good for market share for the remaining American businesses
still operating in Russia. And speaking of that, here's another example – gosh, there
are so many – of America's love affair with sanctions; CAATSA, the Countering America's
Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. According to an analyst at the Foreign Policy Research
Institute,
it's a failure , because it did not prevent Turkey from buying the S-400 system from
Russia when they were supposed to buy the Patriot from the USA, or
prevent Egypt from buying the Sukhoi S-35 from Russia when they were meant to buy the
F-35. Oh, but they were frustrated in that because Israel did not want them to have it.
Washington never misses an opportunity to show Israel it still loves it despite all the
actions Israel makes it take against its own best interests.
"Egypt turned to Moscow for the Su-35 aircraft after being frustrated in repeated
attempts to get a foothold in the F-35 program, a move closely watched in Israel, which
remains the only country in the region to receive the fifth-generation aircraft."
America threatened Egypt with – you guessed it – sanctions if it continued
with plans to buy Russian fighters worth $2 Billion in sales, but Egypt basically ignored
them, only not laughing because it would be impolite to laugh.
"The Egyptian leadership views the US threats as not credible, based on a long history
of Egyptian/US relations where the US has made threats and even withheld assistance, but in
the end has always capitulated," said Andrew Miller, who was director for Egypt and Israel
military issues in the Obama administration's National Security Council."
Egypt also bought the two MISTRAL class light assault carriers that Washington made France
cancel the sale of when Russia had already paid a security deposit, which had to be returned.
Egypt quickly purchased helicopters from Russia to outfit its new ships.
In fact, America seems to be losing its grip on the Middle East and Africa. And its
newly-discovered and somewhat childlike faith in sanctions as a cure-all is ruining its
traditional alliances and eroding its global reach. Much less-powerful countries now
routinely ignore its threats to impose sanctions and more sanctions. The fewer foreign
businesses interested in locating significant assets in the United States – so as to
prevent their being seized in a fit of pique – the less influence Washington can bring
to bear through sanctions. Its most loyal toady, the UK, will soon no longer be a part of the
EU, while nations jostle one another in eagerness to get their gold back from the Bank of
England where the United States cannot slap a 'hold' order on it through its devoted
proxies.
Russian dolts just don't have the technology, isn't that right ?
From the Finnish naysayer:
In retrospect the biggest mistake Russia did was to start the Nord Stream 2 project
without possessing the technology to complete the project and relying on the Western
technology. This made Nord Stream 2 and Russia vulnerable for the sanctions and this
vulnerability was exploited.
Will Russia learn and not start any major project in the future without having the
means to complete the project itself without relying on the West? I doubt it.
As mentioned earlier, commercial contracts normally include provisions for frustration
– supervening illegality can prevent performance of obligations contracted under
different circumstances and no one would expect a company to commit suicide. It's just a
business problem. But a business problem which, as Mark states, leaves the instigator –
the USA – diminished by its own actions.
Every contract has Force Majeure provisions to address factors beyond the control of the
supplier. The list includes of acts of God (weather, for example), civil unrest, labor
disputes, etc. "US sanctions" need to be added.
According to ME they were within 50 kilometers of landfall. According to Karl the replacement
vessel can lay pipe at a 1km/day rate. The resulting calculation isn't rocket science
mathematics. Ribbons will be cut and valves will be turned on in a few months to the clink of
vodka and champagne glasses.
Peskov did not say a fuckin' thing about "hope" that the pipeline will be completed. He
stated that the sanctions will NOT work to bring about substantial delay.
Two pipelines are being laid in parallel. One line , if I rightly recall, has 50 kms left to
be laid, the other 75 kms. The Russian pipelayers, again if I rightly recall, lay at one
third of the speed as did the Allseas vessel. The Russians are also aware of the
geopositioning requirement that the Danes may impose. Only one Russian pipelayer, the one at
present in the Far East, has this capability. from here
"Pioneering Spirit" and" Solitaire" crossed the border of Swedish and Danish waters on
27 and 28 November, respectively, since which time the former has covered 89 km, the latter
-- a little less than 70 km, i.e. they move at a speed of 3.5–4.5 km per day. This
means that they should be able to complete the construction within a month. But maintaining
this momentum depends on the weather conditions.
There was only 1 month's worth of laying left when Allseas fucked off.
The Russians are seemingly, from the troll's point of view, faced with such insurmountable
odds that he is coming in his pants. They'll never finish the job.
Like when they said they would never finish that bridge, across the petersburg-Simferopol
train crosses for the first time this coming Christmas Day?
From same source as above, namely Moskovskiy Komsomolets :
According to a representative of one of the contractors involved in the creation of the
offshore section of "Nord Stream – 2", Gazprom began to insure against sanctions
against companies involved in laying the pipeline in October. The Fortuna pipe-laying barge,
built in 2010 at a Russian shipyard and later upgraded at Chinese shipyards, has been used.
This vessel has been based for about two months in the German port of Mukran, where the pipes
required for the gas pipeline construction are shipped.
According to an MK interlocutor who wished to remain anonymous, despite the fact that
Fortuna is the most powerful domestic vessel in its class, it is unlikely that it can fully
replace Allseas pipelayers. "Fortuna" is able to do such works, but the speed of the project
will be slowed down. "Fortuna specializes in laying infield and linear pipelines on land,
while Gazprom charters vessels with foreign registration for offshore sections.
At the same time, Fortuna has experience working in deep water areas. As part of the
Sakhalin-3 project, the barge was deploying an underwater production facility in the
Kirinskoye field at a depth of 100 meters. The depth of the sea in the Danish section of the
NS-2, which remains to be completed by Gazprom, does not exceed this mark, while Fortuna has
a depth limit of 200 meters", explains the MK interlocutor.
Yeah, according to the Troll:
it is surprising that the Gazprom management didn't prepare for this situation! If this
article is correct the only Russian vessel that can be used to finish the project is
currently stationed in Vladivostok, and it will take about two months for it to arrive to
Danish waters.
The sanction threat has been looming for months, but it seems that Gazprom did not
prepare for it in any meaningful way.
I would be pleasantly surprised if this project is finished in 2020.
For "pleasantly surprised" above, read: "bitterly disappointed".
The United States is less concerned with matters green. Nord Stream 2 poses a security
threat.
Trump's former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson,
saw it as "undermining Europe's overall energy security and stability."
US energy secretary Rick Perry
argues that "Russian gas has strings attached." The claim is that Germany will be come too
reliant and Ukraine further weakened. Ukraine had been the premier gatekeeper for Russian gas
supply, with 40 percent of Europe's total amount transiting through Ukrainian soil. A
slump in gross domestic product occasioned by an end to transit fees is considered
imminent.
Other European states have been crankily concerned about the prospect of Gazprom's deepening
involvement in the continent's energy market. Poland's anti-monopoly body UOKiK showed a
measure of that opposition
by fining France's Engie Energy (ENGIE.PA) 40 million euros in proceedings against
Gazprom.
In February, EU ambassadors agreed that the project be subjected to greater scrutiny. A
Franco-German compromise was struck : Nord Stream 2 would be placed
"under European control".
The Trump administration's actions against Gazprom and Russia's energy influence, found in a
provision of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), can hardly be seen as noble
endeavours.
The provision threatens
sanctions and the freezing of assets against entities laying down the pipeline unless their
activities cease "immediately". The United States has its own energy interests in Europe, and
wishes to frustrate the effort. Market share is at stake.
The suspension of laying activities on the part of Allseas, a Swiss company, suggests that
Trump's announcement is already biting.
"In anticipation of the enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA),"
went a
company statement , "Allseas has suspended its Nord Stream 2 pipelay activities." The
company would "proceed, consistent with the legislation's wind down provision and expect
guidance comprising the necessary regulatory, technical and environmental clarifications from
the relevant US authority."
The angle taken by the European Union, Germany and Russia can hardly surprise. Themes of
energy security are reiterated. The Nord Stream 2 consortium makes the claim that, "Completing the
project is essential for European supply security." Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman
Maria Zakharova spikily condemned the
sanctions measure. "A state with a $22 trillion national debt prohibits creditworthy countries
to develop the real sector of their economies!"
For a EU spokesman, this
constituted "the imposition of sanctions against EU companies conducting legitimate
business." A German government spokesman suggested that such actions "affect German and other
European businesses, and we see the move as meddling in our internal affairs." Finance Minister
Olaf Scholz has sees
it as an infringement of sovereignty. "It is up to the companies involved in the
construction of the pipeline to take the next decisions."
Nothing is quite so simple. Gas pipeline politics has always been contentious. One state's
sovereign promise is another's weakening. Concessions made to corporate monopolies are risky,
capable of fostering insecurity as much as reassurance. Those who control the tap control a
country's future.
But the imposition of any sanctions regime signals another bout of economic violence. In
the international market, where governments operate as ready gangsters for corporate interests,
prompted by such motivations as seeking more natural resources, tools of state become
handmaidens of economic self-interest...
Let that sink in for a moment. Over the same period, the CPI for new vehicles (green
line, right scale in the chart below) rose just 22%:
Note that from 1990 through 1998, the CPI for new vehicles closely tracked the price
increases of the F-150. But this surge in CPI was too disturbing, apparently, and so the CPI
methodology was enhanced with aggressive hedonic quality adjustments and other methods to
bring CPI down, and it actually fell from 1997 through 2009, even as new vehicle prices were
soaring.
Note the inherent class warfare aspect of the dynamic here: Technological advances are
inherently deflationary, in that they allow a manufacturing worker to produce ever-more
value-add per hour. In a fair world, said workers would share in that increased value-add via
salary gains, which would largely offset the price increases of the higher-value-add products
they and others produce.
"Note the inherent class warfare aspect of the dynamic here: Technological advances are
inherently deflationary, in that they allow a manufacturing worker to produce ever-more
value-add per hour. In a fair world, said workers would share in that increased value-add via
salary gains, which would largely offset the price increases of the higher-value-add products
they and others produce."
I entered the workforce in ~1984, and I have yet to see the workers get a share in
anything.
In Eric Weinstein's podcast with Tyler Cowen they have an argument about the CPI and the
hedonic adjustment. Cowen claims that the finance markets are totally cool with CPI as is and
if you think it is messed up then you have the basis for an investment play that will make
you a ton of profits if you are correct.
This is the kind of argument that has given rhetoric a bad name for 2500 years.
If you do not have the patience to listen all the way to the end (I am not proud to say
that I did) you will learn that Cowen and Weinstein are sure that they have impeccable taste
in music. They sound like one of those cartoon characters like Phineas Whoopie the man who
knows everything.
Trump weighed in on the saga Sunday, suggesting that Democrats have realised they are
driving off a cliff:
Crazy Nancy wants to dictate terms on the Impeachment Hoax to the Republican Majority
Senate, but striped away all Due Process, no lawyers or witnesses, on the Democrat Majority
House. The Dems just wish it would all end. Their case is dead, their poll numbers are
horrendous!
Trump weighed in on the saga Sunday, suggesting that Democrats have realised they are
driving off a cliff:
Crazy Nancy wants to dictate terms on the Impeachment Hoax to the Republican Majority
Senate, but striped away all Due Process, no lawyers or witnesses, on the Democrat Majority
House. The Dems just wish it would all end. Their case is dead, their poll numbers are
horrendous!
This was a reply to the jarhead Mattis who mentioned the possibly of a preemptive strike on
Russia because of allegations they are violating a missile treaty.
"We have no concept of a preemptive strike," Putin told a forum of international experts
in the southern city of Sochi in response to a question from the audience.
"In such a situation, we expect to be struck by nuclear weapons, but we will not use them"
first, he said.
"The aggressor will have to understand that retaliation is inevitable, that it will be
destroyed and that we, as victims of aggression, as martyrs, will go to heaven.
"They will simply die because they won't even have time to repent,"
Bobbie
last year Russia is a Christian nation since the Soviet Union fell. They believe in the
10 Commandments one of which is do not murder. E D
last year Yup a reply to the jarhead Mattis who mentioned the possibly of a preemptive
strike on Russia because of allegations they are violating a missile treaty.Yup should start
showing the movies 'Fail Safe' New Bedford Incident', 'The Day After', 'Dr Strange Love, '
Missiles of October' now on TV prime time spots. No JFK or RFK to hold the generals in check
this time.and God indeed will judge them for the billions that die.
Reply
last year If it had not been for one brave Soviet officer during the Cuban missle crisis
it is likely few of us would be reading how "unlikely" the communists are to launch a first
strike. I consider Vasili Arkhipov to be a hero but he was not necessarily viewed that way in
Russia. He probably prevented a nuclear world war III. Please read his story... https://www.warhistoryonline.com/cold-war/vasili-cuban-missile-crisis.html
Vasili Arkhipov was a Soviet naval officer who, upon making a split second decision, prevented
the Cuban Missile Crisis from escalating into a nuclear Vasili Arkhipov was a Soviet naval
officer who, upon making a split second decision, prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis from
escalating into a nuclear www.warhistoryonline.com wootendw
last year Just a warning to nutjobs in the US who believe Russia won't use nukes because
they know they'll be destroyed. Even if there isn't a heaven, what happened to Libya and
Qaddafi was WORSE than nuclear war. Having lost 20m in WWII, Russia will certainly use nukes in
defense EVEN IF THE WEST ONLY ATTACKS THEM WITH CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS Bond000000007
last year Russia is obviously not the evil society or culture that the evil west is
drumming propaganda against at every opportunity It is unfortunate the western world has
evolved very negative socially; surviving at the cost of lies, murder, cheating, beliefs in the
cultural superiority of the Anglo-Saxons, domination of the world and name it! If it is true
that Russia has achieved the military advances that Russia has publicly made known and if that
was the western world, then they would have most likely planned for a schedule of striking
Russia and China in order to bring the world to the level of subjugation that was existing in
the colonial era and even practically now where they are telling countries which community
should lead a country at the national level and which ones and which ones should work on
cohesion of the nation etc. Without any pretence, a one world government will bring the world
to subjugation which will be more less comparable to the era of slavery! Alex
last year
One correction: Putin didn't say "our enemies will just die", he said "our enemies will
croak" , he used an informal word 'сдохнут' -
zdokhnut.
It was interesting watching the impeachment vote on the House floor. Several House Democrats
got up and spoke of how impeachment was like the civil rights movement. I guess they forgot
it was the Democratic Party who defended slavery, founded the clan, imposed segregation, and
fought against the civil rights acts of the 1950s and 1960s.
Buttigieg presents himself as having had little to no impact . Buttigieg presents his
initial work, on a cost-cutting study for Blue Cross Blue Shield, as being about "rent, travel
costs, mail, and printing." Perhaps his little corner of data crunching focused on that, but
Buttigieg is being disingenuous in averting voter attention from the fact that the study was
almost certainly about cutting headcount.
In my day, McKinsey only reluctantly took on what it called "activity value" or "overhead
value" studies, which were its lingo for cost reduction assignments, because there was no way
to make much of a dent unless you got rid of bodies. 70% of most firm's costs are
employment-related and most costs, like rent, key off headcount. In other words, those
"overhead expenditures" that Buttigieg's team was tasked to reduce included employees.
McKinsey didn't like getting people at clients fired because it recognized it might be
creating future enemies, via axed professionals who eventually landed well and would likely do
what they could to prevent McKinsey from getting hired at their new home. And consultants hated
those studies too. They followed a cookbook, which meant they didn't allow the consultants to
develop or show off problem-solving skills, plus it was just plain depressing to go to client
when the people in the corridors correctly saw you as an executioner. 2
Buttigieg is proud of the monster data-crunching pricing exercise he did on his second study
for the Canadian store Loblaw's. There's a bizarre grandiosity in how he presented his role as
a still-wet-behind-the-ears consultant in the Atlantic interview: " .brought him in to figure
out how to do it in a way that would actually help the bottom line." Structuring the analysis
falls to the engagement manager. That isn't to say Buttigieg didn't improve considerably upon
the initial ideas, but it seems wildly implausible that someone who presents himself as having
to be taught spreadsheeting and doesn't have a degree in math, engineering, hard sciences, or
at least a solid knowledge of statistics, would be "brought in" as if he had pre-existing
expertise.
And oddly, he never says this big exercise was valuable to the client. There are acceptable
in McKinsey-speak ways of taking credit without violating the norm of giving the glory to the
client.
This part from the Atlantic interview is also grandiose:
By the time of the Loblaws project, Buttigieg was becoming known within the company for
being a particularly good McKinsey consultant..
This is ludicrous. He's merely nine months into the firm and he has yet to demonstrate any
client-related or project management skills. At most, Buttigieg might have gotten noticed
within the Chicago and/or Toronto offices as being a good number cruncher and quantitative
analyst.
Buttigieg also tries to depict his getting a foreign assignment as a badge of honor. In
reality, when an office can't staff a project from its own team (and Buttigieg was sent from
the Chicago office to work on an Iraq/Afghanistan project staffed out of the Washington
office), nearly all of the time, this is the project everyone else in the office turned down.
Only once in a great while is an office so busy that it can't even staff the good projects
internally. I made this mistake in accepting a London project. I got to the the office in St.
James and discovered that the partner to which I was now assigned was widely despised.
Mind you, Buttigieg no doubt learned a lot from this gig, even if it may not be want he
wanted to learn. But getting put on it didn't mean he was special.
Buttigieg doesn't adequately explain the anomaly of his bugging out to work on a campaign
.
How do we explain this?
I stepped away from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time
with a Democratic campaign for governor in Indiana, returning after the election.
This is sufficiently unusual that I suspect those who have taken notice of it are likely to
have drawn the wrong inferences, so indulge me for a bit.
McKinsey, high-power professional firms, and most employers do not take well to employees
saying they want to take a disruptive break to pursue personal interests.
McKinsey is even less good about making accommodations for women partners who have children
than other top consultants; Bain by contrast has developed a reputation for being enlightened
on this front, so there's no reason to think they are habituated to being accommodating in
general .particularly for someone who has only been there a bit over a year.
Keep in mind that unlike other types of professional firms, where a young hire might join a
particular department, like the bankruptcy practice, and those partners could have the power to
run their own business and cut "their" staffers some slack, McKinsey non-partners are in a pool
and a assignment specialist (who even when not a partner has a lot of clout) negotiates with
partners as to who goes on what study. Even though the partners' interests are important, the
assignment specialist also pays attention to the so-called "development needs" of the
associates and managers, as well as other issues (like they were just on an out of town study
in a terrible location and putting them on another might result in them quitting).
Shorter: for the purpose of keeping peace among the partners, individual partners do not get
to act as godfathers with respect to associates or even engagement managers. 3
So how to make sense of this? Look at the timeframe again: Late summer-fall 2008.
The only thing I can fathom is that enough McKinsey clients saw the crisis unfolding and
stopped signing up for new work so as to create a lot of underutilization. The firm might have
let it quietly or not so quietly be known that it would consider requests for short-term leaves
of absence.
McKinsey was badly hit in the dot-bomb era and wound up reducing its staffing in North
America by nearly 50% in two years. With the benefit of hindsight, the firm might have come up
with other ways to reduce payroll when faced with sudden slack besides cutting hiring and
getting more aggressive about pushing weak performers out the door (both of which take time to
implement).
Why did Buttigieg leave? Buttigieg strongly suggests he was never serious about McKinsey,
that he was there to get his ticket punched. While that may be true, the firm tries very hard
to hire individuals who are very insecure and want badly to do well, including at the firm. And
if you really aren't that serious about your long-term career at the firm, it is hard to put up
with the indignities of being an associate, like insecure managers wanting you to do analysis
that is obviously a waste of time or who nag associates thinking that that will motivate them,
or alternatively the stereotypical bad consulting gig of being on the road all the time, worse
mainly in locations with not-good hotels and restaurants. 4
When I came to McKinsey, I was ambivalent but willing to be persuaded. I wasn't. I saw too
little evidence that McKinsey actually added value, to use its pet expression. Most clients
didn't seem to get better. Now it is true they might have gotten worse without McKinsey, but
that's hard to establish.
One fellow 'Zoid who left around when I did had these observations:
The problem with consulting is you are hired by the problem.
The most profitable clients are the most diseased.
So consulting seemed to me to be a lot like therapy, in a bad way, in that I knew too many
people who were in therapy, were convinced therapy was helping, yet there wasn't much objective
evidence that their lives were getting better (they didn't seem less anxious, or to be having
more success in their relationships or with whatever their presenting problem seemed to be).
5 At my remove, it looked as if in too many cases, the therapist had done a good job
of creating patient dependence. And I saw the same phenomenon at McKinsey.
By contrast, Buttigieg is he exhibits no reservations about what McKinsey does generally,
just some specific bad acts. From the
Atlantic interview :
He said he's disappointed in some of the work the company has done. "Since I've left," he
said, "there are at least four cases that I can think of where someone at McKinsey has done
something upsetting."
Of course, McKinsey partners have turned out to be important funding sources for Buttigieg,
so he has mercenary reasons for avoiding offending members of the firm. Nevertheless, it would
seem more genuine to come up with some reason why consulting wasn't a fit for him, even if that
reason wasn't the operative truth. But Buttigieg doesn't do genuine.
1 I don't consider Kennedy having worked for one month as a correspondent thanks
to his father arm-twisting William Randolph Hearst as "private sector experience." LBJ briefly
taught in public schools, again not a private sector position. Clinton decided at age 16 that
he wanted to be a public servant. He worked on some political campaigns and was a law professor
at the University of Arkansas (public school!) before he won his first race, for governor, at
the age of 32.
3 The dynamic can change later when a consultant has worked regularly on a core
client team. Then the client might actually start asking for a particular consultant to manage
or lead a study. The firm views that positively since consultants that get known at a client
will be contenders to take over the account later. But the earliest when clients start asking
for a specific person is at the engagement manager level, when Buttigieg was a mere
associate.
4 I was exceptionally lucky in getting way less of that than most associates
did.
5 Admittedly New York is very competitive and few people have friends that aren't
part of their professional circle. So the therapist might have filled an important role by
being a safe sounding board/sanity check.
Thanks Yves. In a few paragraphs you summed up the entire world of the big consulting
firm. It can be fun but there's a heck of a lot of misery, especially for the associates and
more junior managers. Getting assigned to a bad MD can set a career back for years and I've
seen at least a dozen times where it led to illness or leaving the firm. Or both.
The odd thing that I noticed about Buttigieg was that at times he sounds like he's trying
to oversell a flimsy resume of consulting experience and at other times sort of clumsily
hiding what he really worked on. I agree with you that he was probably told that his part of
the firm was "taking a break" before he went off to do campaign work. Otherwise it makes no
sense to lose
My basic feeling is that Buttigieg is a creation of the media. Some candidates, like Tulsi
Gabbard, Mike Gravel, or Sanders, are diminished by the press. Others, like Buttigieg, are
promoted. The hype about Buttigieg reminds me of the hype about George Bush giving Michelle
Obama some candy, or about Alito's wife crying during his confirmation hearing.
Here's a post on mgt consulting from awhile back that this post reminded me of. James Kwak
helped place the proper role of consulting projects into the right frame.
I think it helps compliment Yves' very valid questions.
The larger takeaway I'm getting is that Buttigieg doesn't come across as particularly
honest about much of anything on his resume. I know the elites of media and team dem really
want to push this guy, but he's really struggling to catch on with voters, not least because
he's hopelessly unqualified. There's no scenario where you can say:
"I was a low man on the totem pole at McKinsey" and then say, "I'm qualified to be
president" in the next breath.
The same is true with his record as Mayor of South Bend. He's admitted he's not understood
the black community and not represented them all that well, and yet, he wants a big
promotion.
This kind of resume-based critique seems appropriate to me because he's running as the
candidate who's trying to persuade the elite, PMC (prof mgr class) within the democratic
party that he's the man for the job (and tell the larger working class base of the democratic
party that they should just jump on board because he's electable) and he's not even qualified
from their own frame of reference.
What seems to me telling about Buttigieg is that he worked for the occupation and seems to
have bought the imperial cool-aid, which indicates to me that he is not that smart. Some
people, like Gabbard, have enlisted in the military, but were able to think independently and
critically about the wars.
Buttigieg presents himself as having had little to no impact . Buttigieg presents his
initial work, on a cost-cutting study for Blue Cross Blue Shield, as being about "rent, travel
costs, mail, and printing." Perhaps his little corner of data crunching focused on that, but
Buttigieg is being disingenuous in averting voter attention from the fact that the study was
almost certainly about cutting headcount.
In my day, McKinsey only reluctantly took on what it called "activity value" or "overhead
value" studies, which were its lingo for cost reduction assignments, because there was no way
to make much of a dent unless you got rid of bodies. 70% of most firm's costs are
employment-related and most costs, like rent, key off headcount. In other words, those
"overhead expenditures" that Buttigieg's team was tasked to reduce included employees.
McKinsey didn't like getting people at clients fired because it recognized it might be
creating future enemies, via axed professionals who eventually landed well and would likely do
what they could to prevent McKinsey from getting hired at their new home. And consultants hated
those studies too. They followed a cookbook, which meant they didn't allow the consultants to
develop or show off problem-solving skills, plus it was just plain depressing to go to client
when the people in the corridors correctly saw you as an executioner. 2
Buttigieg is proud of the monster data-crunching pricing exercise he did on his second study
for the Canadian store Loblaw's. There's a bizarre grandiosity in how he presented his role as
a still-wet-behind-the-ears consultant in the Atlantic interview: " .brought him in to figure
out how to do it in a way that would actually help the bottom line." Structuring the analysis
falls to the engagement manager. That isn't to say Buttigieg didn't improve considerably upon
the initial ideas, but it seems wildly implausible that someone who presents himself as having
to be taught spreadsheeting and doesn't have a degree in math, engineering, hard sciences, or
at least a solid knowledge of statistics, would be "brought in" as if he had pre-existing
expertise.
And oddly, he never says this big exercise was valuable to the client. There are acceptable
in McKinsey-speak ways of taking credit without violating the norm of giving the glory to the
client.
This part from the Atlantic interview is also grandiose:
By the time of the Loblaws project, Buttigieg was becoming known within the company for
being a particularly good McKinsey consultant..
This is ludicrous. He's merely nine months into the firm and he has yet to demonstrate any
client-related or project management skills. At most, Buttigieg might have gotten noticed
within the Chicago and/or Toronto offices as being a good number cruncher and quantitative
analyst.
Buttigieg also tries to depict his getting a foreign assignment as a badge of honor. In
reality, when an office can't staff a project from its own team (and Buttigieg was sent from
the Chicago office to work on an Iraq/Afghanistan project staffed out of the Washington
office), nearly all of the time, this is the project everyone else in the office turned down.
Only once in a great while is an office so busy that it can't even staff the good projects
internally. I made this mistake in accepting a London project. I got to the the office in St.
James and discovered that the partner to which I was now assigned was widely despised.
Mind you, Buttigieg no doubt learned a lot from this gig, even if it may not be want he
wanted to learn. But getting put on it didn't mean he was special.
Buttigieg doesn't adequately explain the anomaly of his bugging out to work on a campaign
.
How do we explain this?
I stepped away from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time
with a Democratic campaign for governor in Indiana, returning after the election.
This is sufficiently unusual that I suspect those who have taken notice of it are likely to
have drawn the wrong inferences, so indulge me for a bit.
McKinsey, high-power professional firms, and most employers do not take well to employees
saying they want to take a disruptive break to pursue personal interests.
McKinsey is even less good about making accommodations for women partners who have children
than other top consultants; Bain by contrast has developed a reputation for being enlightened
on this front, so there's no reason to think they are habituated to being accommodating in
general .particularly for someone who has only been there a bit over a year.
Keep in mind that unlike other types of professional firms, where a young hire might join a
particular department, like the bankruptcy practice, and those partners could have the power to
run their own business and cut "their" staffers some slack, McKinsey non-partners are in a pool
and a assignment specialist (who even when not a partner has a lot of clout) negotiates with
partners as to who goes on what study. Even though the partners' interests are important, the
assignment specialist also pays attention to the so-called "development needs" of the
associates and managers, as well as other issues (like they were just on an out of town study
in a terrible location and putting them on another might result in them quitting).
Shorter: for the purpose of keeping peace among the partners, individual partners do not get
to act as godfathers with respect to associates or even engagement managers. 3
So how to make sense of this? Look at the timeframe again: Late summer-fall 2008.
The only thing I can fathom is that enough McKinsey clients saw the crisis unfolding and
stopped signing up for new work so as to create a lot of underutilization. The firm might have
let it quietly or not so quietly be known that it would consider requests for short-term leaves
of absence.
McKinsey was badly hit in the dot-bomb era and wound up reducing its staffing in North
America by nearly 50% in two years. With the benefit of hindsight, the firm might have come up
with other ways to reduce payroll when faced with sudden slack besides cutting hiring and
getting more aggressive about pushing weak performers out the door (both of which take time to
implement).
Why did Buttigieg leave? Buttigieg strongly suggests he was never serious about McKinsey,
that he was there to get his ticket punched. While that may be true, the firm tries very hard
to hire individuals who are very insecure and want badly to do well, including at the firm. And
if you really aren't that serious about your long-term career at the firm, it is hard to put up
with the indignities of being an associate, like insecure managers wanting you to do analysis
that is obviously a waste of time or who nag associates thinking that that will motivate them,
or alternatively the stereotypical bad consulting gig of being on the road all the time, worse
mainly in locations with not-good hotels and restaurants. 4
When I came to McKinsey, I was ambivalent but willing to be persuaded. I wasn't. I saw too
little evidence that McKinsey actually added value, to use its pet expression. Most clients
didn't seem to get better. Now it is true they might have gotten worse without McKinsey, but
that's hard to establish.
One fellow 'Zoid who left around when I did had these observations:
The problem with consulting is you are hired by the problem.
The most profitable clients are the most diseased.
So consulting seemed to me to be a lot like therapy, in a bad way, in that I knew too many
people who were in therapy, were convinced therapy was helping, yet there wasn't much objective
evidence that their lives were getting better (they didn't seem less anxious, or to be having
more success in their relationships or with whatever their presenting problem seemed to be).
5 At my remove, it looked as if in too many cases, the therapist had done a good job
of creating patient dependence. And I saw the same phenomenon at McKinsey.
By contrast, Buttigieg is he exhibits no reservations about what McKinsey does generally,
just some specific bad acts. From the
Atlantic interview :
He said he's disappointed in some of the work the company has done. "Since I've left," he
said, "there are at least four cases that I can think of where someone at McKinsey has done
something upsetting."
Of course, McKinsey partners have turned out to be important funding sources for Buttigieg,
so he has mercenary reasons for avoiding offending members of the firm. Nevertheless, it would
seem more genuine to come up with some reason why consulting wasn't a fit for him, even if that
reason wasn't the operative truth. But Buttigieg doesn't do genuine.
1 I don't consider Kennedy having worked for one month as a correspondent thanks
to his father arm-twisting William Randolph Hearst as "private sector experience." LBJ briefly
taught in public schools, again not a private sector position. Clinton decided at age 16 that
he wanted to be a public servant. He worked on some political campaigns and was a law professor
at the University of Arkansas (public school!) before he won his first race, for governor, at
the age of 32.
3 The dynamic can change later when a consultant has worked regularly on a core
client team. Then the client might actually start asking for a particular consultant to manage
or lead a study. The firm views that positively since consultants that get known at a client
will be contenders to take over the account later. But the earliest when clients start asking
for a specific person is at the engagement manager level, when Buttigieg was a mere
associate.
4 I was exceptionally lucky in getting way less of that than most associates
did.
5 Admittedly New York is very competitive and few people have friends that aren't
part of their professional circle. So the therapist might have filled an important role by
being a safe sounding board/sanity check.
Thanks Yves. In a few paragraphs you summed up the entire world of the big consulting
firm. It can be fun but there's a heck of a lot of misery, especially for the associates and
more junior managers. Getting assigned to a bad MD can set a career back for years and I've
seen at least a dozen times where it led to illness or leaving the firm. Or both.
The odd thing that I noticed about Buttigieg was that at times he sounds like he's trying
to oversell a flimsy resume of consulting experience and at other times sort of clumsily
hiding what he really worked on. I agree with you that he was probably told that his part of
the firm was "taking a break" before he went off to do campaign work. Otherwise it makes no
sense to lose
My basic feeling is that Buttigieg is a creation of the media. Some candidates, like Tulsi
Gabbard, Mike Gravel, or Sanders, are diminished by the press. Others, like Buttigieg, are
promoted. The hype about Buttigieg reminds me of the hype about George Bush giving Michelle
Obama some candy, or about Alito's wife crying during his confirmation hearing.
Here's a post on mgt consulting from awhile back that this post reminded me of. James Kwak
helped place the proper role of consulting projects into the right frame.
I think it helps compliment Yves' very valid questions.
The larger takeaway I'm getting is that Buttigieg doesn't come across as particularly
honest about much of anything on his resume. I know the elites of media and team dem really
want to push this guy, but he's really struggling to catch on with voters, not least because
he's hopelessly unqualified. There's no scenario where you can say:
"I was a low man on the totem pole at McKinsey" and then say, "I'm qualified to be
president" in the next breath.
The same is true with his record as Mayor of South Bend. He's admitted he's not understood
the black community and not represented them all that well, and yet, he wants a big
promotion.
This kind of resume-based critique seems appropriate to me because he's running as the
candidate who's trying to persuade the elite, PMC (prof mgr class) within the democratic
party that he's the man for the job (and tell the larger working class base of the democratic
party that they should just jump on board because he's electable) and he's not even qualified
from their own frame of reference.
What seems to me telling about Buttigieg is that he worked for the occupation and seems to
have bought the imperial cool-aid, which indicates to me that he is not that smart. Some
people, like Gabbard, have enlisted in the military, but were able to think independently and
critically about the wars.
This was an objective and readable history of libertarian economics (sometimes called
neo-liberal economics) especially in the United States beginning in the 50s. It will be
highly influential book especially if the next recession is as terrible as 2007 and a strong
reform movement develops. Whether you support libertarian ideas of the free market or you
support the reform and regulation of our current form of capitalism the book is informative.
If you are an ideologue you will not be satisfied and the book offers no solutions. One
reviewer seems to think book is pro-Democratic but the book gives ample evidence that the
elites of both parties have bought in to libertarian economic ideas. Whether you watch CNBC
or follow politics this book will help you understand the buzz words used by some
commentators and what they really mean. The personal history of economists was interesting
too.
When the economy was booming after WWII, economists were found primarily in academia, but
as the economy slowed and solutions were sought, the economists came out of hiding. Starting
with Milton Friedman, economists entered the political arena, and their ideas began to shape
the economy not just of the United States, but of the world.
The author tells the story of how these economists came to the forefront of political
thought with their belief that the economy given the impetus of free markets would bring
prosperity and did not need so much government intervention. The author tells the stories of
Walter Oi, whose calculations persuaded President Nixon to end conscription, and Thomas
Shelling who made value assessments of human life to underpin his suggested policies.
This book is very readable. It focuses on the stories of individual economists, their
ideas, and how the ideas impacted the lives of people. I enjoyed the book very much. It tells
you a lot about policy and economics, but isn't preachy or dry. The author uses his focus on
individuals and episodes in their lives to bring this rather deep discipline to life. I
highly recommend it.
I think less then a century is more plausible forecast. The end of "plato oil" means the
crumbling of the USA centered neoliberal empire and nothing can prevent this.
Very interesting and candid testimony by an American that lived through the transition
period between the End of History era (1991-2008) and the Multipolar (?) Rise era
(2008-):
Contrary to my perception, he considers the Invasion of Iraq as the end of the End of History
era, and not the 2008 meltdown, as is my perception. Also interesting - which coincides with
my own perception - is that he saw the whole process as a disease that spread quickly among
the American people, i.e. it was a very quick process of descent. His metaphor of a virus,
pandemia or disease never crossed my mind: from my point of view - a person from the "rest of
the world" the metaphor that arose was that of a big house or big structure collapsing from
its base, but not completely: it still resembles the old structure, but it clearly isn't the
same as the old structure.
And, in fact, in the 1990s, me and the people I talked to in Latin America saw the USA as
definitely invincible. We could easily see it lasting forever, like if it really was the End
of History: the only debate left was if it was better to invest in a career in our native
countries or try to immigrate to the USA.
I remember talking to an American at the time (it was already the 21st Century, don't
remember the exact year), and, although he agreed that every empire ends, he said the USA
could take at least more 830 years to fall. Maybe his prophecy turns out to be true, maybe
the USA really pulls out another miracle like the one it pulled off in 1941-1945 - but it
certainly doesn't look like that right now, and there is solid evidence it won't ever recover
the status it enjoyed in 1992-2003.
No,vk @ 38, "America" didn't all turn bone mean on that horrible day. There were plenty of
people demonstrating against that illegal war; plenty writing letters, townships passing
resolutions against it. There was an ongoing protest movement worldwide as well. We all,
including young people, had a brief moment of sheer joy - I remember it vividly - when Obama
was elected. Because he was going to be the presider over change we could believe in, as was
his Democratic party - and they were elected overwhelmingly as the anti-Bush remedy.
He had the chance then and there, with the people behind him, to bring us all back to
peaceful times. He chose not to. And yes, that was a choice - only look at where he is now.
He chose money; he chose to be one of the rich guys. He was so shallow as to betray his own
chance to be one of the greats, and all so he could have millions and live like a king.
That's when the real rot, which had been festering under Clinton, though the Supreme Court
started the ball rolling in the election of 2000 -- oh yes -- that's when the real rot set
in.
You are interested in history. Get that straight. Those who were first time voters in 2008
weren't infected with any rabies. All they wanted was to stop that illegal rush to war, and
they campaigned their hearts out and they voted their hearts out and they cheered their
hearts out when he won.
It was interesting watching the impeachment vote on the House floor. Several House Democrats
got up and spoke of how impeachment was like the civil rights movement. I guess they forgot
it was the Democratic Party who defended slavery, founded the clan, imposed segregation, and
fought against the civil rights acts of the 1950s and 1960s.
This was a reply to the jarhead Mattis who mentioned the possibly of a preemptive strike on
Russia because of allegations they are violating a missile treaty.
"We have no concept of a preemptive strike," Putin told a forum of international experts
in the southern city of Sochi in response to a question from the audience.
"In such a situation, we expect to be struck by nuclear weapons, but we will not use them"
first, he said.
"The aggressor will have to understand that retaliation is inevitable, that it will be
destroyed and that we, as victims of aggression, as martyrs, will go to heaven.
"They will simply die because they won't even have time to repent,"
Bobbie
last year Russia is a Christian nation since the Soviet Union fell. They believe in the
10 Commandments one of which is do not murder. E D
last year Yup a reply to the jarhead Mattis who mentioned the possibly of a preemptive
strike on Russia because of allegations they are violating a missile treaty.Yup should start
showing the movies 'Fail Safe' New Bedford Incident', 'The Day After', 'Dr Strange Love, '
Missiles of October' now on TV prime time spots. No JFK or RFK to hold the generals in check
this time.and God indeed will judge them for the billions that die.
Reply
last year If it had not been for one brave Soviet officer during the Cuban missle crisis
it is likely few of us would be reading how "unlikely" the communists are to launch a first
strike. I consider Vasili Arkhipov to be a hero but he was not necessarily viewed that way in
Russia. He probably prevented a nuclear world war III. Please read his story... https://www.warhistoryonline.com/cold-war/vasili-cuban-missile-crisis.html
Vasili Arkhipov was a Soviet naval officer who, upon making a split second decision, prevented
the Cuban Missile Crisis from escalating into a nuclear Vasili Arkhipov was a Soviet naval
officer who, upon making a split second decision, prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis from
escalating into a nuclear www.warhistoryonline.com wootendw
last year Just a warning to nutjobs in the US who believe Russia won't use nukes because
they know they'll be destroyed. Even if there isn't a heaven, what happened to Libya and
Qaddafi was WORSE than nuclear war. Having lost 20m in WWII, Russia will certainly use nukes in
defense EVEN IF THE WEST ONLY ATTACKS THEM WITH CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS Bond000000007
last year Russia is obviously not the evil society or culture that the evil west is
drumming propaganda against at every opportunity It is unfortunate the western world has
evolved very negative socially; surviving at the cost of lies, murder, cheating, beliefs in the
cultural superiority of the Anglo-Saxons, domination of the world and name it! If it is true
that Russia has achieved the military advances that Russia has publicly made known and if that
was the western world, then they would have most likely planned for a schedule of striking
Russia and China in order to bring the world to the level of subjugation that was existing in
the colonial era and even practically now where they are telling countries which community
should lead a country at the national level and which ones and which ones should work on
cohesion of the nation etc. Without any pretence, a one world government will bring the world
to subjugation which will be more less comparable to the era of slavery! Alex
last year
One correction: Putin didn't say "our enemies will just die", he said "our enemies will
croak" , he used an informal word 'сдохнут' -
zdokhnut.
Trump weighed in on the saga Sunday, suggesting that Democrats have realised they are
driving off a cliff:
Crazy Nancy wants to dictate terms on the Impeachment Hoax to the Republican Majority
Senate, but striped away all Due Process, no lawyers or witnesses, on the Democrat Majority
House. The Dems just wish it would all end. Their case is dead, their poll numbers are
horrendous!
Trump weighed in on the saga Sunday, suggesting that Democrats have realised they are
driving off a cliff:
Crazy Nancy wants to dictate terms on the Impeachment Hoax to the Republican Majority
Senate, but striped away all Due Process, no lawyers or witnesses, on the Democrat Majority
House. The Dems just wish it would all end. Their case is dead, their poll numbers are
horrendous!
President Trump also had words for Pelosi on Monday after the Speaker called for "fairness"
in a Senate trial.
"Pelosi gives us the most unfair trial in the history of the U.S. Congress, and now she is
crying for fairness in the Senate, and breaking all rules while doing so," Trump tweeted,
adding "She lost Congress once, she will do it again!"
Pelosi gives us the most unfair trial in the history of the U.S. Congress, and now she is
crying for fairness in the Senate, and breaking all rules while doing so. She lost Congress
once, she will do it again!
Pelosi says she will only transmit the impeachment articles to the Senate after Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announces the process they will use for Trump's
trial.
AG Barr Blasts Soros For Stoking Hatred Of Police by Tyler Durden Sun, 12/22/2019 - 21:00 0
SHARES
"They have started to win in a number of cities and they have, in my view, not given the
proper support to the police. "
That is the warning that Attorney General William Barr has for Americans, as he told
Fox News' Martha MacCallum in a recent interview that liberal billionaire George Soros has
been bankrolling radical prosecutor candidates in cities across the country .
"There's this recent development [where] George Soros has been coming in, in largely
Democratic primaries where there has not been much voter turnout and putting in a lot of
money to elect people who are not very supportive of law enforcement and don't view the
office as bringing to trial and prosecuting criminals but pursuing other social agendas, "
Barr told Martha MacCallum.
Specifically, Barr warned that if the trend continues, it will lead to more violent crime ,
ading that the process of electing these prosecutors will likely cause law enforcement officers
to consider whether the leadership in their municipality "has their back."
"They can either stop policing or they can move to a jurisdiction more hospitable," he
said.
"We could find ourselves in a position that communities that are not supporting the police
may not get the police protection they need."
https://www.youtube.com/embed/UnnnpiYQODk
The Washington Post recently reported that while two Virginia prosecutorial candidates -
funded by Soros' Justice and Public Safety PAC - have never prosecuted a case in a state court,
they beat candidates with more than 60 years of experience between them .
This month, the energy consulting firm Wood MacKenzie gave an
online presentation that basically debunked the whole business model of the shale industry.
In this webinar, which explored the declining
production rates of oil wells in the Permian region , research director Ben Shattuck noted
how it was impossible to accurately forecast how much oil a shale play held based on estimates
from existing wells.
" Over the years of us doing this, as analysts, we've learned that you really have to do it
well by well," Shattuck explained of analyzing well performance. "You cannot take anything for
granted."
For an industry that has raised hundreds of billions of dollars promising future performance
based on the production of a few wells, this is not good news. And particularly for the
Permian, the nation's most
productive shale play , located in Texas and New Mexico.
Up until now, the basic premise of the fracking business model has been for a company to
lease some land, drill until finding a high-volume well, hype to the press this well and the
many others it plans to drill on the rest of its acreage, and promise a bright future, all
while borrowing huge sums of money to drill and frack the wells.
Throughout the seminar, Wood MacKenzie analysts emphasized that companies can't reliably
predict future oil production by "clustering" wells, that is, estimating volumes of many future
wells based on the performance of a small number of nearby existing wells, and described the
practice as potentially "misleading."
Shattuck called out how the old business model of firms borrowing money from investors while
hoping for future payouts on record-breaking wells no longer works. He summed up the
situation:
" We're transitioning to a point in time, where the investment community was enamored of
the next well and how big it might be. That has changed for a variety of reasons. One very
important reason is the next well might not be bigger. It might be smaller."
The fracking industry is now being asked to produce positive financial results -- not just
promises of new
super wells, or cube development, or artificial intelligence. And yet the industry couldn't
deliver profits while drilling all the best acreage over the last decade. Now, shale companies
need to do that with oil wells that may not produce as much.
Seven years ago, Rolling Stone referred to the fracking industry as a "
scam " while profiling the "Shale King" Aubrey McClendon, the man generally credited with
inventing the business model the shale industry has used the past decade. Today, McClendon's
old company Chesapeake Energy is
in danger of going bankrupt .
Perhaps investors are finally catching on.
Are Child Wells the New Normal?
Last year I covered the issue of
child wells , or secondary wells drilled close to an existing "parent" well, and the risk
they posed to the fracking industry. Child wells often cannibalize or damage parent wells,
leading to an overall drop in oil production.
At the time, I cited a warning about this situation from Wood MacKenzie, which said,
"Closely spaced child well performance presents not only a risk to the viability of the ongoing
drilling recovery but also to the industry's long-term prospects."
Over a year later, has the shale oil industry abandoned this approach or are child wells
still an issue?
During this month's webinar, Ben Shattuck answered that question, making a statement that
should strike fear in the heart of shale investors and the owners of all this shale
acreage:
" We know we're on the cusp of a child-well world."
One of the biggest problems with fracked oil well production is child wells, and according
to Shattuck, that looks like the new normal. When the bug in an unprofitable business becomes
the main feature of the business model, its future is definitely at "risk."
In the Eagle Ford shale, average production per foot of well length and per pound of
"proppant" has been falling steadily. Mr Kibsgaard blamed the decline on a rising proportion
of child wells, which are now up to about 70 per cent of all new wells drilled https://t.co/uG58KcNNJp
As long as shale firms could keep borrowing and losing money to drill new wells, producing
more oil was simple. When profits weren't a concern, the debt-heavy business model worked. But
similar to the dot com boom and bust, the fracking industry is learning that if you want to
stay in business, you need to make a profit.
Without a doubt, drilling and fracking shale can produce a lot of oil and gas in the right
geological regions. It just usually costs more to get the oil and gas out of the rock than the
fossil fuels are worth on the free market. Now, however, the much-lauded "shale revolution" is
facing two big issues -- the best rock has been
drilled and few are eager to
loan money to drill the remaining acreage.
E&E News recently highlighted
what this reality means for Texas's Eagle Ford shale play, where production is now 20 percent
lower than at its peak in early 2015. For an oil basin that's only been producing oil via
fracking for
just over a decade , that is a pretty grim number. However, an analyst quoted by E&E
News highlights the secret to making money while fracking for oil: Simply stop fracking.
"Generating free cash is easy: Stop spending on new wells," said Raoul LeBlanc, vice
president for North American unconventionals at IHS Markit. "The catch is that production will
immediately move into steep decline in many cases."
# IHSM arkit
forecasts capital spending for shale drilling & completions to fall by 10% to $102
billion this year. By 2021, we'll see a near $20 billion decline in annual spending. What's
causing this? Raoul LeBlanc comments- https://t.co/7q1QTiWZVs @HoustonChron
Ah, the catch. To generate cash while fracking requires companies to stop fracking and sell
whatever oil they have left from rapidly declining wells. Because fracked wells decline quickly
even when everything goes perfectly, if a producer isn't constantly drilling new wells, then
the oil production of a field drops off very quickly -- the "steep decline" noted by
LeBlanc.
That's exactly what happened in the Eagle Ford shale, an early darling of the fracking
industry, and most of the top acreage
in the Bakken shale play in North Dakota and Montana has already been drilled, and will
likely see similar declines.
LeBlanc emphasizes this point again in the Journal of Petroleum Technology
, where he is recently quoted saying that the decline rates in the Permian region have
"increased dramatically" for new fracked wells.
A year and a half ago, DeSmog launched a special series exploring the finances
of the fracking industry , putting a spotlight on its financial failings. At the time,
optimism about the future of fracking was still filling the pages of the financial press.
Hughes told DeSmog that with the finances of fracking, "Ultimately, you hit the wall. It's
just a question of time."
With the industry on the cusp of a "child-well world," that wall appears to be approaching
quickly -- unless you still believe the industry promises that fracking's big money is right
around the corner.
As the article says, the key scary thing for investors and the industry about fracking is
that fracked wells don't tail off over years like conventional ones – they stop
producing quite abruptly. Once the sweet spots are sucked dry, the drop off in production
will be calamitous with all sorts of potential impacts through both the oil/gas and the
finance world. It will probably happen far too quickly for most investors to jump off the
carousel in time. It will be a game changer when it happens (and probably, sadly, quite good
news for the Gulf States).
In past years, whenever I've expressed scepticism about the finances of fracking, the
usual response is 'but those guys wouldn't be putting in billions unless they knew there was
lots of oil and gas there'. What they don't seem to grasp is that making money from oil and
gas exploration is not the same as making money from oil production. Its not about selling on
the fuel. Its about first of all extracting money from investors for the exploration (and
getting your cut), then its about developing a prospect and selling it on for a big profit.
They don't really care if the well is profitable in the long term or not. I know of at least
one oil company (not in fracking, mostly off-shore), which has made millions for its owners
over the 40 years of its existence, despite the fact that it has never sold one barrel of
oil, nor ever found a field which could be brought to full production. All their profits have
come from their cut in selling on prospective fields, not one of which has ever come to
production.
===Its about first of all extracting money from investors for the exploration (and getting
your cut)==
==All their profits have come from their cut in selling on prospective fields, not one of
which has ever come to production===
What that tells me is there are a lot of investors that have soo much idle money floating
around the world and can literally throw huge sums of money at some venture and if the
venture fails oh well.
Many authors (Susan Strange, etc.) have used the term Casino Capitalism and this seems to
fit that.
It's like taking millions of dollars and making an idle bet at the roulette wheel and if
you lose oh well it was just pocket change or I'll just make up the losses on some other
scam. Meanwhile millions of people are homeless, without healthcare, hungry, etc. It's is
long past time to storm the castles! Pitchforks Up!!
I predict a nightmare of numerous abandoned wells as the many unprofitable fracking
companies go belly up, leaving the public with an expensive environmental mess to clean
up.
Just another example of western cronie capitalism where you privatise all profit, and
socialise all losses including both monetary and environmental.
The only way to stop this is to make shareholders personally responsible for such losses
including environmental clean up, even after a company goes belly up. Only then will
shareholders demand long term viability and more sustainable environmental practices, instead
of only short term profits.
A much simpler way is to simply insist that any license to drill can only be granted if it
is tied to a certified insurance bond for correct capping and abandonment. It would be
interesting to see just how many insurance companies would be willing to take on that
risk.
This should be the norm for all resource extraction permits: mining, logging, drilling,
whatever. A "restoration bond" has to be in place to finance the restoration of the site
after the valuable resources have been carted away.
This would be cheap in some cases, and very expensive in others (e.g., uranium mining). It
would be a way of factoring the externalities (as economists like to call them) into the
overall cost of the project, as well as decreasing the odds that fly by night operators will
trash the planet.
"You wouldn't know you were near an uranium mine any more ."
Alas, the residents of Red Shirt, South Dakota, a tiny Lakota community on the fringes of
the Pine Ridge Reservation, know about uranium mining. Past uranium mining
activity has resulted in the leaching of radioactive materials into their ground water
and wells. Even the nearby Cheyenne River has been contaminated. They can't drink the water.
Or use it for irrigation or fishing. The entire region is an official National Sacrifice
Area. Just a bunch of poor Indians.
The Defenders of the Black Hills are now fighting efforts to mine uranium using in-situ
leach mining. In this process, holes are dug, water and solvents injected to dissolve the
uranium, then the waste water is brought to the surface and temporarily stored in mud waste
ponds. Sounds like 'fracking?' Concerns are for the spread of contaminants in ground water
and aquifers. Where you can't see it.
Granted, no type of mining is without its problems.
But you could live in an area like mine where well water has to be tested routinely for
the high levels of uranium that occurs naturally in our water. No uranium mines around
here.
I'm going to be polite and ignore the tone of your comment. I was merely pointing out that
uranium mining is not the only reason for high uranium levels in ground water. There is a lot
of uranium in the earth's crust and it is dissolvable in water. All well water should be
checked for uranium levels but it is rarely done.
I'd favor forcing the investors and executives that want to erect these horrors to
personally (along with their family members) do the on-site labor of closing and cleanup,
while breathing the air and drinking the water that locals do. Still, of course, possible to
game even that by capturing the regulatory process of setting cleanup standards and
requirements, a la the federal and state Superfund programs.
Malum prohibitum vs. malum in se
" Latin referring to an act that is "wrong in itself," in its very nature being illegal
because it violates the natural, moral or public principles of a civilized society. In
criminal law it is one of the collection of crimes which are traditional and not just created
by statute, which are "malum prohibitum." Example: murder, rape, burglary and robbery are
malum in se, while violations of the Securities and Exchange Act or most "white collar
crimes" are malum prohibitum." https://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=1201
The public won't be asked to fund the cleanup because there will be no cleanup. The
responsible parties aren't interested, and our government is no longer interested either.
It's another one of those issues in which communities without power will insist on government
action, and they will be ignored.
I wonder if could it be the case that some government considers strategically important to
keep production from free-falling, no matter if the economics are not sound, and shifting the
cost to the Treasury. MMT to the rescue of shale plays and financiers.
If the article is correct, calling for a plateau as soon as in 2021, the shale boom will
prove more transient than expected.
I can't keep up with all the interlocks and back-scratches. But Banksters are getting
rich, the intermediators in exploration and production are getting rich, the petroleum Bigs
are getting rich and using the notional global competition and Market to damage one
"nation's" comparative advantage to their own ends. And as with all the behaviors leading to
the conclusion that humanity is a failed, and maybe more honestly a plague species, all the
incentives and flows of power are in the direction of what I believe it was a Reagan
appointee offered as the moral underpinning of globalization and ruination: "God gave us
dominion over the planet, and Jesus is coming back real soon and if we have not used up the
whole place in accordance with His Holy Word as i read it, He is going to be really pissed
"
As with all the stuff we NCers read here, everything seems to drive the truly awake soul
in the direction of despair and that sense of vast futility, and that mindset of "Eat, drink
and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die " And screw future generations – past
generations said that to us, so why should we, or some small elite among us, who now are in a
position to have all our pleasure centers fully engaged and satiated to the max, behave
"Responsibly?" "Responsible people maximize shareholder value (and executive looting)!"
5 million EV takes inevitably back to nuclear energy. Without nukes you can anticipate
losing your residential AC for several hours/day. PG&E is the future.
The Forbes article is crap. Any analysis of electricity costs coming from renewable power
that does not include the costs of the energy storage systems required at high
penetration levels will underestimate the costs. Badly. The solar panels and wind turbines
are the easy part. The energy storage systems will easily cost 10X as much (and take 10X as
much time). Because of this, we've seen renewable energy deployment efforts stall out in
Germany, Spain, China, Denmark, and elsewhere, as they bumped into grid stability issues that
require storage to mitigate. And the storage costs too much.
Using "batteries" also produces a 10%* net loss to charge the batteries right off the bat.
You need 110% of the electricity to get to same 100% you were getting before the battery.
Rather than batteries helping, they actually end up using more electricity. That's also
before counting the electricity to make the battery.
* that's best case, theoretical, scenario.
Batteries are net users of electricity. The do not make it.
The Forbes article talks about balancing the grid so that variable energy sources can be
incorporated reliably. To whit:
Actually, battery storage, though often cost-effective today, is rarely needed to "firm"
the output of variable renewables (photovoltaics and windpower), because there are eight
ample cheaper methods.
I believe the author's thesis is for the electricity from renewables to be fed into the
grid when it is available, not to store it.
Do you think nuclear power plants run continuously and are never taken off the grid? Do
you think we use huge storage batteries when they are down?
Both your quote, and the pdf 'talk about' that. That's all they do. The forbes author
really is a treat. "There are 8 ample, cheaper methods" What are those eight methods? why
only 8? No further details.
"I believe the author's thesis is for the electricity from renewables to be fed into the
grid when it is available, not to store it."
It seems you noticed it too. No details, just numbers spelled out as words and asserted as
evidence.
Well, unfortunately the link that explains his 8 methods is behind a paywall.
But I think we are talking apples and oranges here.
The author of the Forbes article is talking about how a grid works. When a power plant is
taken off the grid, energy is moved in from some other area to take up the slack as long as
that power plant is offline. He expects that should be done with renewable energy also.
If you are depending on only one form of renewable energy, then of course you would need
batteries when that form of energy is not available. But batteries are an added cost and not
as efficient as moving energy via the grid. A better method would be to have many types of
renewable energies available so that you can switch between them as necessary. It is what he
means when he is talking about needing to firm the output of variable renewables.
So for example, in my area, the winds kick up when the sun goes down so it makes sense to
switch from solar to wind power at dusk.
I'm don't buy Amory Lovins' thesis. Bob's criticism is correct. The other 8 methods aren't
listed. The required sizes and associated costs aren't listed. It is impossible to judge the
viability of the scheme he envisions when the relevant information is missing.
A real plan would list nameplate GW for all types of generation assets and GW and
GWh for all energy storage assets. In other words, full details.
The only "plan" I've seen for supplying US energy needs with 100% renewable power that
actually contained full details came from Mark Jacobson of Stanford University: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf
. To his credit, he did the time-domain analysis necessary to determine the amount of
load-sharing and energy storage necessary to keep the lights on through even extended periods
of unfavorable weather.
Unfortunately, his "solution" required two things: (1) expanding US hydro capacity by a
factor of 10, and (2) deploying a stupendous 541 TWh of energy storage. Neither is feasible.
The first would cause massive flooding and ruin river ecosystems if ever run at full power,
and the second would cost over $100 trillion at today's energy storage costs of $200/kWh. His
plan was so wildly unrealistic (and yet popular with Democrats) that a team of scientists and
engineers issued a formal rebuttal: https://www.pnas.org/content/114/26/6722 .
Jacobson's plan has been debunked .
The South Koreans deployed their nuclear fleet for approximately $3000/kW. At this cost,
we could completely de-carbonize the US electrical system for less than $2.5 trillion. It
would be quite the bargain in comparison.
The South Koreans do have one of the lowest costs for nuclear energy production – a
LCOE of about $2021/kWe compared to the US of $4100/kWe and the world average of $4702/kWe
– but the way they do that is by having much looser regulations and by severely
underestimating the decommissioning, waste management, and accident compensation costs. Is
that what you want for nuclear energy in the US?
I think it's kind of dangerous to just throw numbers around unless you understand what
they actually mean.
Ah, the wonderful "Heaters". They are situated outside EBR-1, just south of ID-20, west of
Idaho Falls, and east of Arco.
The whole of the area around there is a fascinating place to visit for a nuclear nerd like
me, plus you have the wonderful Craters of the Moon NM there too.
Other interesting places to visit are Atomic City, which has a population of around 25,
and is a weird time capsule from the '60s, plus Big Southern Butte, which is a, er, big
butte.
You can also find a gate leading off ID-20 to the north, into INL (Idaho National
Laboratory), which used to be the access road to the army's SL-1 reactor, which underwent a
steam explosion due to a core excursion in 1961, and is (as far as is admitted) the only
nuclear accident that led to immediate deaths in the US.
For a really interesting review of nuclear history read the three books by James Mahaffey.
He was a nuclear plant operator for a while, and describes the little pastime of "reactor
racing", which was seeing who could get a reactor up to nominal operating capacity in the
shortest time.
I guess that this means that Trump and his crew will make another run at Venezuela –
before the fracking industry goes down the gurgler. All of Venezuela's oil fields are like a
big box of chocolates in America's backyard. But if they try to take it, like life, you never
know what you are going to get.
Am I right in guessing that this will significantly impact forecasts of aggregate US
domestic oil production? Do we remain the global "swing" producer?
As PlutoniumKun says above, the collapse of the shale field production will be great news
for the Gulf Coast's petroleum industry. Not only is the Gulf a proven reserve, but with the
inevitable higher prices for crude oil, many more of the offshore wells will become
profitable.
The American shale collapse will also be good news for other world producers of petroleum.
OPEC will regain some of it's lost political influence.
On the down side; all forms of shipping and transportation will have a spike in per unit
costs. A canny politician could use this factor to push an onshoring of lost industrial and
manufacturing capacity. Put Americans back to work in America. That will be a winning
strategy.
Yes, well, I generally assume that the definition of "profitable" in use in the board
rooms of the giant conglomerates 'rules the day.' Until some method of 'regulating' the
actions of the board rooms of industry are brought into play, I'm afraid we are stuck with
some version of the status quo.
Just as the German usual suspects moved nations into 'Realpolitik' after the War, so too have
the modern Austrian usual suspects moved the world into 'Realeconomik.' Both have led our
best of all possible worlds into a Neoliberal Paradise.
Didn't Chesapeake Energy declare bankruptcy a good ten years ago? And then restructured
itself into a shale fracking company with the extreme help of the Obama administration? When
Obama "pivoted" away from KSA he went straight to US drillers. Allowing any hype necessary to
get the needed investments. Obama was clearly panicked. I wonder if it is possible that that
is when he learned that Aramco's reserves were only a fraction of the Saudi hype? Bin
Sawbones was subsequently allowed to provide the estimate of the worth of KSA's oil reserves
at 2 Trillion. The IPO went forward at that estimate and just today there is an article in ZH
about Aramco's actual value being much less. It looks to me like we just up and left KSA. Why
on earth would we do that unless they were running dry? And why would they have fought that
obscene war with Yemen unless they (the Saudis) were getting desperate? Secure people
generally don't do things that stupid. And the next logical question might be, How long will
Russian reserves hold up as they supply both China and the EU? The simple answer is it is all
just a question of time. We need to envision a lifestyle that is far more compatible with the
planet. Fracking was just a distraction. A farce. It would be better to own warm sox than oil
shares. And electricity is not going to help us out if we do not aggressively restrict our
use. I'd just like to know why we can't all come together and admit this one elemental
fact.
Drainage! Draaaainage, Eli, you boy! Drained dry. I'm so sorry.
Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is,
that's a straw, you see? You watching? And my straw reaches acroooooooss the room, and starts
to drink your milkshake.
I drink your milkshake! slurp I drink it up! Every day I drink the Blood of Lamb from
Bandy's tract.
The last man standing might be profitable.
Not so long ago gas was much higher I think the peak during a pre fracking cold winter was
$15 now under $3. Plus we're exporting the stuff bc us price is so far below Eu price. But us
price is clearly unstable Bc it's too low for frackers to break even, much less make
money.
It's the large fracking production that's driven price down to sub $3. Maybe foolish
investors and banks will soon stop burning $, after which price will rise towards $10 as this
happens utilities will really jump on solar bc gas will be increasingly non competitive.
Ca should refuse all utility requests to build more gas-fired generating plants existing ones
will be shut over the next decade as solar plus storage price continues falling and gas price
rises.
From graphs 2 and 3, you can see that half or more of the national oil production comes
from about 50,000 high producing wells (out of roughly 1mm total). These are of course on the
treadmill of decline and need continuous investment to be renewed.
Anyway after 2014 the national production responded to the price collapse within about a
year. This is what is somewhat different about fracking -- the short time horizon and the
outsize contribution of the "top" wells -- constant depletion and investment -- results in a
fairly fast response to the price environment.
Factor in pipeline capacity shortages come and go, affecting the share of $$ taken by the
midstream. In any case, they're losing money when the WTI price is in the $50-$60 range. What
does that mean? Great question.
So, the shale/fracking industry has ~$200bn in debt, god only knows how much market cap is
at risk on Shale and fracking alone, and it's COMPLETELY UN PREDICTABLE. And people buy
shares in this snake oil on the market? SEC sleeping? what a crock.
I suspect that shale plays like OXY, with marketwatch assigning a "beta" of (get this!)
0.99 to this stock, are fundamental misallocations of capital. In a political sense, it's a
red state SOE type play that doesn't pass snuff. I saw the entire Wood MacKenzie webinar
linked in Lambert's article, and even THEY themselves are amazed at the range of valuations
in the shale sector. No two wells can be compared truly. The webinar references when Ben
Shattuck asked a wall street analyst for their comps on some company, and Wood MacKenzie's
analysis using on the ground depletion knowledge, was 40% lower, versus a higher paid wall
street "comps" analysis!
This entire sector is SNAKE OIL, imho, not to mention the environmental degradation not on
the balance sheets. But it is politically privileged, so we must zip it.
Earlier this week, the Observer reported on a spat that had broken out between a
division of the giant Samsung empire and the American hedge fund Elliott Management. The
most newsworthy feature of the dispute involved a series of articles on Korean business
sites that pointedly criticized Elliott's CEO Paul Singer and directly attacked him for
being Jewish, noting that "Jewish money has long been known to be ruthless and merciless"
and claiming "It is a well-known fact that the US government is swayed by Jewish
capital."
"Do the Jews Really Control America?" asked one Chinese newsweekly headline in 2009. The
factoids doled out in such articles and in books about Jews in China -- for example: "The
world's wealth is in Americans' pockets; Americans are in Jews' pockets" -- would rightly
be seen to be alarming in other contexts. But in China, where Jews are widely perceived as
clever and accomplished, they are meant as compliments. Scan the shelves in any bookstore
in China and you are likely to find best-selling self-help books based on Jewish knowledge.
Most focus on how to make cash. Titles range from 101 Money Earning Secrets From Jews'
Notebooks to Learn To Make Money With the Jews.
Does productivity explain income? I asked this question in a
previous
post
. My answer was a bombastic
no
. In this post, I'll dig deeper into the reasons that
productivity doesn't explain income. I'll focus on wages.
The Evidence
Let's start with the evidence trumpeted as proof that productivity explains wages. Looking across firms, we
find that sales per worker correlates with average wages. Figure 1 shows this correlation for about 50,000 US
firms over the years 1950 to 2015.
Figure 1: The correlation between a firm's average wages and
its sales per worker.
Data comes from Compustat. To adjust for inflation, I've divided wages and sales
per worker by their respective averages (in the firm sample) in each year. I've shown stock tickers for select
firms.
Mainstream economists take this correlation as evidence that productivity explains wages. Sales, they say,
measure firms' output. So sales per worker indicates firms' labor productivity. Thus the evidence in Figure 1
indicates that productivity explains (much of) workers' income. Case closed.
The Problem
Yes, sales per worker correlates with average wages. No one disputes this fact. What I dispute is that this
correlation says anything about productivity. The problem is simple. Sales per worker
doesn't measure
productivity
.
To understand the problem, let's do some basic accounting. A firm's sales equal the unit price of the firm's
product times the quantity of this product:
Sales = Unit Price × Unit Quantity
Dividing both sides by the number of workers gives:
Sales per Worker = Unit Price × Unit Quantity per Worker
Let's unpack this equation. The 'unit quantity per worker' measures labor productivity. It tells us the
firm's output per worker. For instance, a farm might grow 10 tons of potatoes per worker. If another farm grows
15 tons of potatoes per worker, it unambiguously produces more potatoes per worker (assuming the potatoes are
the same).
The problem with using sales to measure productivity is that
prices
get in the way. Imagine that
two farms, Old McDonald's and Spuds-R-Us, both produce 10 tons of potatoes per worker. Next, imagine that Old
McDonald's sells their potatoes for $100 per ton. Spuds-R-Us, however, sells their potatoes for $200 per ton.
The result is that Spuds-R-Us has double the sales per worker as Old McDonald's. When we equate sales with
productivity, it appears that workers at Spuds-R-Us are twice as productive as workers at Old McDonald's. But
they're not. We've been fooled by prices.
The solution to this problem seems simple. Rather than use sales to measure output, we should measure a
firm's output
directly
. Count up what the firm produces, and that's its output. Problem solved.
So why don't economists measure output directly? Because the restrictions needed to do so are severe. In
fact, they're so severe that they're almost never met in the real world. Let's go through these restriction.
1: Firms must produce identical commodities
To objectively compare productivity, you have to find firms that produce the same commodity. You could, for
instance, compare the productivity of two farms that produce (the same) potatoes. But if the farms produce
different things, you're out of luck.
Here's why. When firms produce different commodities, we need a common dimension to compare their outputs.
The problem is that the choice of dimension affects our measure of output.
To see the problem, let's return to our two farms, Old McDonald's and Spuds-R-Us. Suppose that Spuds-R-Us
produces 10 tons of potatoes per worker. Tired of growing potatoes, Old McDonald's instead grows 5 tons of corn
per worker. Which workers are more productive?
The answer depends on our dimension of analysis.
Suppose we compare potatoes and corn using mass. We find that Spuds-R-Us workers (who produce 10 tons per
worker) are more productive than Old McDonald's workers (who produce 5 tons per worker).
Now suppose we compare potatoes and corn using energy. Furthermore, imagine that corn has twice the caloric
density of potatoes. Now we find that workers at Spuds-R-Us (who produce half the mass of food at twice the
caloric density) have the same labor productivity as Old McDonald's workers.
The lesson? Unless two firms produce the same commodity, productivity comparisons are subjective. They
depend on the choice of dimension.
Restriction 2: Firm output must be countable
When you read economic textbooks, it's clear that the discipline of economics is stuck in the 19th century.
Firms, the textbooks say, produce
stuff
.
But what about all those other firms that don't produce stuff? What is their output? What, for instance, is
the output of Goldman Sacks? What is the output of a high school? What is the output of a hospital? What is the
output of a legal firm?
Yes, these institutions do things. But it defies reason to give these activities a 'unit quantity'. In other
words, it defies reason to quantify the output of these institutions.
Restriction 3: Firms must produce a single commodity
Complicating things further, we can objectively measure output only when firms produce a single commodity.
If a firm produces two (or more) commodities, its output is affected by how we add the commodities together.
To see the problem, let's return to Old McDonald's and Spuds-R-Us. Suppose that both farms have diversified
their production. Spuds-R-Us produces 5 tons of potatoes and 1 ton of corn per worker. Old McDonald's produces
1 ton of potatoes and 5 tons of corn. Which workers are more productive?
The answer depends on our dimension of analysis. In terms of mass, both farms produce 6 tons of food per
worker. So labor productivity appears the same. But suppose we measure the output of energy. Again, we'll
assume that corn has double the caloric density of potatoes. Suppose corn contains 2 GJ (gigajoule) per ton,
while potatoes contain 1 GJ per ton. Now we find that Old McDonald's workers are about 60% more productive than
workers at Spuds-R-Us. Here's the calculation:
Spuds-R-Us:
5 tons potato × 1 GJ / ton + 1 ton corn × 2 GJ / ton = 7 GJ
Old McDonald's:
1 ton potato × 1 GJ / ton + 5 ton corn × 2 GJ / ton = 11 GJ
This 'aggregation problem' is why the neoclassical theory of income distribution assumes a single-commodity
world -- a world in which everyone produces and consumes the same thing. In this one-commodity world, we can
measure productivity unambiguously. In the real world (with many commodities) productivity depends on our
choice of dimension.
The Severity of the Problem
Let's take stock. If we want to measure productivity objectively, the restrictions are severe:
Firms must produce the same commodity
This commodity must be countable
Firms must produce only one commodity
These conditions are so stringent that they're rarely met in the real world. This is a bit of a problem for
neoclassical theory. It proposes that everyone's income is explained by their productivity. But only in the
rarest of circumstances can we measure productivity objectively.
It's hard not to laugh at this predicament. It's like Newton proclaiming that gravitational force is
proportional to mass. But in the next sentence he realizes that mass can be measured only in the rarest of
circumstances.
The Neoclassical Sleight of hand
Neoclassical economists don't think of themselves as Newtons who can't measure mass. Instead, economics
textbooks don't even mention the problems with measuring productivity. In these textbooks, all seems well in
neoclassical land.
But all is not well. Neoclassical economists perpetuate their fantasy by relying on a sleight of hand.
Here's what they do.
First, economists argue that the purpose of all economic activity is to give consumers
utility
. Buy
a potato and you get utility. Buy a cigarette and you get utility. Utility, economists say, is the universal
dimension of output. By measuring utility, we can compare the output of any and all firms (no matter what they
produce).
After proclaiming that utility is the universal dimension of output, economists pull their trick. Utility,
they say, is
revealed through prices
. So a painting worth $1000 gives the buyer 1000 times the utility
as a $1 potato.
With this thinking in hand, economists see that a firm's sales measure its output of utility:
Sales = Unit Price × Unit Quantity
Sales = Unit Utility × Unit Quantity = Gross Utility
So sales become a universal measure of utility, and utility is the universal measure of output. Now, when we
compare sales per worker to wages (as in Figure 1), economists proclaim that we're comparing productivity to
wages.
Except we're not.
The problem is that this whole operation is circular. The idea that prices reveal utility is a
hypothesis
.
And as every good scientist knows, you can't use your hypothesis to test your hypothesis. But that's what
neoclassical economists do. They assume that one aspect of their theory is true (the link between prices and
utility) to test another aspect of their theory (the link between productivity and income). This is a big no
no.
Why do economists use this circular reasoning? Probably because they don't know they're doing it. Economists
take as received wisdom the idea that prices reveal utility. But this is just a hypothesis. In fact, it's a bad
hypothesis. Why? Because we can never measure utility independently of prices.
Why are Sales Related to Wages
Whenever I go through the logic above, mainstream economists will retort: "But look at the correlation
between wages and sales! How can this not show that productivity explains wages?" Their reasoning seems to be
that, absent an alternative explanation, this correlation must support their hypothesis.
In
No,
Productivity Does Not Explain Income
, I gave an alternative explanation. The correlation between wages and
sales per worker, I argued, follows from accounting principles.
Sales isn't a measure of output. It's an
income
stream. Once earned, this income gets split by the
firm into different categories. Some of it goes to workers. Some of it goes to other firms (as non-labor
costs). And some of it goes to the firm's owners as profit.
Figure 2: Dividing a firm's income stream.
Accounting
principles dictate that a firm's sales get divided into profits and wages.
By
definition, the terms on the left must sum to the terms on the right. So it's not surprising that we find a
correlation between wages and sales. They're related by an accounting identity.
In comments on
No,
Productivity Does Not Explain Income
(and on other sites), some economists pounced on this argument, saying
it was fatally flawed. And in hindsight, I admit that I wasn't clear enough about my reasoning. I was thinking
about the real world. But the economists who critiqued my reasoning were thinking in terms of pure mathematics.
To frame the debate, let's think about something more concrete than income. Let's think about volume. In
rough terms, the volume of an object is the product of its length, width and height:
V = L × W × H
Now, let's pick a dimension -- say length. Will the length of an object correlate with its volume? In general
terms, no. I can make an object with any volume using any length. I just have to adjust the other dimensions
appropriately. By doing so, I can make a cube have the same volume as a box that is long and thin.
So in pure mathematical terms, the accounting definition of volume doesn't lead to a correlation between
length and volume.
But when we look at real-world objects -- like animals -- we
will
find a correlation. If we took all
the species on earth and plotted their length against their volume, we'd expect a tight correlation. A bacteria
has a small length and a small volume. A blue whale has a big length and a big volume. Fill in the gaps between
and we should get a nice tight line.
The reason for this correlation is that animals cannot take any shape. You'll never find an animal that is a
mile long and a few micrometers wide. Such a beast doesn't exist. Yes, the shapes of animals vary. But in the
grand scheme, this varation is small. As a first approximation, animals are roughly cubes. Or, if you're a
physicist,
they're
spheres
.
With this shape restriction, it follows from the definition of volume that animal length should correlate
with animal volume. We'd be astonished if it didn't.
So too with the correlation between sales per worker and wages. True, this correlation doesn't follow purely
from accounting principles. It follows jointly from accounting principles, and the fact that firms can't take
any form. We don't find firms that pay their workers nothing. That's slavery and its illegal. Similarly, we
don't find (many) firms that pay their workers the entirety of sales. That leaves no room for profit.
So in the real world, there are restrictions on how firms can divide their income stream. Here's what these
restrictions look like. In Figure 3, I've plotted the distribution of firms' payroll as a portion of sales.
This is the portion of sales that goes to workers. Across all firms, it's a pretty tight distribution,
clustered around 25%.
Figure 3: The distribution of firm payrolls as a fraction of
sales.
Data is for US firms in the Compustat database over the years 1950–2015.
Yes, it's theoretically possible for a firm to give any portion of its sales to workers. But this isn't what
happens in reality. In the real world, most firms give between 10% and 50% of their sales to workers. Just like
with the shape of animals, there are real-world restrictions on the 'shape' that firms can take.
Given these restrictions, it's not surprising that we find a correlation between sales per worker and wages.
When a firm's income stream grows, so does the amount going to workers.
None of this has anything to do with productivity. It's all about income. Sales are the firm's income. And
wages are the portion of this income given to workers.
Prices The Elephant in the Room
Let's conclude this foray into neoclassical thinking. The reason that sales don't measure firm output is
because they mix unit prices with unit quantities. Yes, sales per worker correlates with wages. But the
elephant in the room is prices. Greater sales may be due to greater output. But it can also be due to greater
unit prices.
In many cases, price differences are
everything
.
Imagine that a lawyer and a janitor both work 40 hours a week as self-employed contractors. The lawyer
charges $1000 per hour, while the janitor charges $20. At the end of the week, the lawyer has 50 times the
sales as the janitor. This difference comes down solely to price. The lawyer charges 50 times more for their
hourly services than the janitor.
The question is
why
?
Neoclassical economists proclaim they have the answer. The lawyer, they say, produces 50 times the utility
as the janitor. Ask economists how they know this, and they'll answer with a straight face: "Prices revealed
it."
It's time to recognize this sleight of hand for what it is: a farce. The reality is that we know virtually
nothing about what causes prices. And we will continue to know nothing as long as researchers believe the
neoclassical farce.
Further Reading
The Aggregation Problem: Implications for Ecological and Biophysical Economics.
BioPhysical Economics
and Resource Quality
. 4(1), 1-15.
SocArxiv
Preprint
.
Economists are always prepared for yesterday's problems.
Inflation was a big problem in the Keynesian era and every effort has been made to ensure that it doesn't
return.
Exceptionally intelligent Chinese economists have been looking at today's problems.
Davos 2018 – They know financial crises come from the private debt-to-GDP ratio and inflated asset prices
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WOs6S0VrlA
The PBoC know how to spot a Minsky Moment coming, unlike the FED, BoE, ECB and BoJ.
The black swan flies in under our policymaker's radar.
Our policymakers are always looking in the wrong direction.
They fixate on public debt, and so don't see the problems emerging in private debt
The central banks look at consumer price inflation, while the problems are emerging in asset price inflation.
Your salesperson might negotiate higher prices on every deal, and that might correlate with their higher
productivity in a regulated and truly competitive market.
What does sales at higher prices in a (de facto) deregulated and increasingly monopolist market space
point to? Not to greater productivity, imo, but to deregulated monopoly. It too oftern points to unregulated
rentier-ism, or price gouging. Why has the cost of, say, insulin
tripled
over
the past decade? Not because of greater productivity. How can these price increases in this deregulated
market environment possibly point to real productivity? It points to price gouging. Since there is more
rentier-ism in the market, the old idea that prices/wages can be reliably equated with productivity becomes
meaningless, imo.
Do your other employees building widgets become "less productive" suddenly when your salesman catches a
cold? (You can come up with a bunch of these showing that productive can not be precisely equal to money
earned, because they exist on different time scales measuring different firm aggregates).
Is the salesman "more productive" if he kidnaps the children of a client and blackmails him into buying
more product? What would "productive" mean in any useful sense if there's no independent definition of
utility? Not every dollar earned is a measure of "productive" -- unless you redefine productive to mean
"every dollar earned by any measure".
When the US invaded Santo Domingo to extract debts, was that "productive" in any meaningful sense? That
would seem to be an abuse of language, rather than saying what you mean.
The problem here is that "productive" is a
moral
justification -- and so it must continue to mean
something more than simply money earned in order to morally justify the order. That's the goal of the use of
the word productive -- that thus the results are
just
.
"It's time to recognize this sleight of hand for what it is: a farce. The reality is that we know
virtually nothing about what causes prices. And we will continue to know nothing as long as researchers believe
the neoclassical farce."
This is what I don't understand, I think its obvious why there are prices. The whole idea of business, and
capitalism generally, is to charge as much as possible while spending as little as possible.
Beyond a certain point I do believe greed drives inflation -- companies will charge whatever they think they
can get away with long before there is wage pressure. Wage pressure in my experience is a reaction to
inflation, not a driver of it. For some reason many people of the conservative persuasion seem to get this
backwards.
Absolutely. The use of "we" here is problematic. What needs to be made clear is the fundamental
distinction between those who study capitalism, where the fundamental driver is the search for profit, and
those who study "the economy," for whom profit either doesn't exist or is the "marginal productivity of
capital," a concept which has been shown over and over to be nonsensical, and the fundamental drivers are
things we can't explain – individual wants and preferences and various completely unpredictable "shocks."
There is no collective "we." It's them against us.
It is obvious that prices are seriously out of kilter with actual value of products & services but is this a
result of all that extra money that was created to save the banks after 2008? And what about the vital function
of price discovery then. How does that work out? I do believe that there is something missing from this article
and that is a break-out of "wages". I suppose you could break it down to wages, salary & management which may
be more instructive. How does productivity relate to management then, both internally and externally? By
externally I mean when consultants are called into a company to do management's job. If you think that this
cannot be a serious concern, then reflect that the UK's NHS paid out between $350 million and $600 million
worth of taxpayer money on management consultancy in 2014 alone. What effect did that have on the NHS's
productivity then?
It sounds like the sure path to higher productivity is to encourage monopolies and oligopolies that can
raise prices pretty much at will while reducing the number of workers. The question becomes: why hasn't US
productivity surged as its markets became increasingly concentrated?
Blair Fix touches on an important issue behind the layers of terminology, concepts and policies that have so
impacted our everyday lives. So if labor productivity doesn't explain wages, income or prices, then what are
the true factors influencing prices and stagnant real wages?
Pricing power, labor cost, and profit margins of large transnational corporations have benefitted from their
increasingly monopolistic control of markets to suppress competition, use of global labor arbitrage, enjoyment
of very low and even negative real interest rates, tax policies and use of tax havens, hidden subsidies,
automation, neutering of organized labor, and purchased political influence. The productivity of labor in the
West has essentially been made irrelevant in many cases. Important stuff in so many ways.
Still appreciate the famous EPI chart that shows how the wealthy have captured the entire differential
between stagnant real wages and the rising productivity of labor since neoliberal capitalism made its
appearance on the world stage four decades ago. Trillions:
Hence 'private equity' is a euphemism for cannibalizing any source of equity for a quick profit. We have
an entire paradigm that is a farce. Based on value (equity) which in turn is based subjectively on whatever
you can snooker. It is one step forward and two steps backwards at this point. The Chinese have a beautiful
view of our debacle. No wonder they can tease out the contradictions. But it's not like we, places like NC,
haven't been screaming about all this loud and clear. (Steve Keen for starters.) The thing the aptly named
Mr. Fix is saying resides beneath the surface: If we are ever in so desperate a position to raise prices too
much nobody will buy and the system will collapse. And because of our horror-at-the-thought we have avoided
pricing oil where it belongs. Instead we have burned it with abandon, devastating the environment while we
were at it. A very expensive abandonment. It was an unrecognized consequence; an unavoidable one for the
sake of profit – whereas the other accounting anomalies are more "discretionary". When you are desperate
nothing is discretionary. If price ever comes to equal "utility" aka value, then there will be very little
commerce. It makes Richard Murphy's advocacy for Oil Bankruptcy a very rational suggestion. Mitigate the
devastation – that's about all we'll be able to do.
Even Adam Smith admitted that the economic value of something has no relation to its intrinsic utility, but
only to the relative balance of supply and demand for it.
If there are more workers than jobs, wages will be driven down and productivity gains will decouple from
wages – although with low wages, there will be little incentive to invest in making workers more productivity
so productivity may decline as a second-order effect.
If there are more jobs than workers, wages will be bid up, and productivity gains will be largely captured
by workers because it is the limiting factor in any economy that captures the profits. At the same time, high
wages will tend to spur higher productivity because there will be strong incentive to make efficient use of
relatively expensive labor.
At the base of Niagara Falls, water is cheap and it is not used efficiently. Using water efficiently in
Niagara Falls will not increase its price. In the Gobi desert, water is expensive and it is used efficiently.
Not using water efficiently in the Gobi desert will not make it cheaper.
The core of modern macroeconomics is to take what is fundamentally simple and confuse the heck out of it.
then what are the true factors influencing prices and stagnant real wages?
That would be the human factor. Greed, honesty, and desires and conscious acts. Economics cannot capture the
human factor.
Every human on Earth is capable of affecting markets dramatically by one act. Humans making multiple
decisions every day. All 7.5 billion. One person can change markets and history with one act. Gavrilo Princip,
for instance. Or by using an Internet post to affect markets.
To accurately model economics? All decisions made by each and every person on the planet would have to be an
input into any model. Each person's actions would have to have a solid, predictable outcome with no deviations.
A person becomes depressed, then A and B and C can ONLY happen.
Which would rule out occurrences such as Malaysia Flight 370 and quite a few other possibilities.
Economics and economists are in no way, shape, or form capable of accounting for the human factor. Which is
why there should be no laws of economics. More like, guesswork and observing trends in a general and gross
manner. Only to pray for accuracy.
LTCM was an example of economics and economists over-stepping their intellect. LTCM employed the
observations from John Nash (the subject of the move, A Beautiful Mind) and his Nobel prize winning work. Their
system worked until it didn't. Other humans made decisions that trashed.
People chose not to play the game. For LTCM? Such decisions by others outside of LTCM's control were fatal.
The issue with game theory, etc? For it to work, one has to have enforcers or project power to force people to
play by a set of rules. One could call this, the basis of American foreign policy – financial in nature.
The "Law of Supply and Demand"? Routinely violated. A person can decide arbitrarily to put items on sale.
The Human Factor.
Trends in economics are like trends on Twitter. You just never know. Economists are trend chasers. Having
more in common with Internet "influencers" trying to convince people that a $5 pair of shoes is actually worth
$400, than with actual science. THAT being an example of how prices are determined, in part.
Neoliberal economics is a case study of a select group (economists) influencing politicians and others, to
support their version of economics.
Economics and economists are in no way, shape, or form capable of accounting for the human factor.
Which is why there should be no laws of economics.
+1000
Great post DF! This whole discussion reminds me of the shortest job I ever had – selling crappy stereo
speakers out of the back of a white van for a day.
I'd answered an ad not knowing what I'd be getting into. The people who were "training" me would drive up
to an unsuspecting person in a mall parking lot and try to sell these speakers. They had a set dollar amount
per day there were supposed to sell to get a bonus, so if they could sell a speaker for $200 they would and
if at the end of the day they needed $25 to meet their sales quota, the last speaker would go for $25. The
whole thing depended on two very big human factors – greed and gullibility.
I'm sure an economist could come up with productivity figures for this operation, but what it really was
was a scam.
The job you describe reminds me of Eastern European bazaars back in the day where items being sold
"fell off" the back of a truck. Or Hoboken, NJ market on a certain block. :)
Thank you NC for yet another article exposing the sham of neoclassical economics. Here's a paragraph from a
book I happen to be reading yesterday
"..the neoclassical economic perspective is
the
ideology par excellence of capitalist political
economy. It is a theory that explains nothing more than how to assure that capitalism remains capitalism. That
is, neoclassical economics demonstrates how wealth and resources may continue to function to the advantage of
the minority that controls wealth and the immediate access to political power. It is an ideology because it
depicts as "rational" only economic behavior that seeks the "utility maximization" characteristic of market
exchange. That other motives and values might deserve priority in our action as economic agents is either
unthinkable (ruled out by definition) or, worse, held to be economically "irrational." Neoclassical economic
theory is itself a system of morality- and theology and ethics – masquerading as "science." Yet those who
dissent from this hidden morality have a difficult task before them. For this debate concerning the ethics of
economics is consistently suppressed in public discourse. Reigning economic theory makes calls for the
substantive realignment of existing economic power appear as madness. Dissenters are
by definition
"unrealistic," "utopian," or "irresponsible.""
And
this was written almost 30 years ago
in the book 'God and Capitalism – A Prophetic
Critique of Market Economy'. The excerpt is from chapter three – 'The "Fate" of the Middle Class in Late
Capitalism' by Beverly W. Harrison.
Can we please get an SEC or FASB ruling requiring the explicit breakout of salary payroll on the income
statement of EVERY public listed company?
Capitalism has ALL manner of enumeration of uses of capital, but nowhere is labor listed! I don't care for
labor hidden inside direct/indirect "costs of goods sold", "SG&A", "R&D" etc. Just put a payroll expense (minus
payroll taxes, minus the healthcare and whatnot, straight payroll) line item somewhere in the 10-k. Is it a
crime to ask?
Forgive me if this has been discussed previously. It's from a September Atlantic article on
economics I happened upon, a review of a book by Applebaum written by Sebastian Mallaby:
"...Applebaum opens his book with the observation that economics was not always the
imperial discipline. Roosevelt was delighted to consult lawyers such as Berle, but he
dismissed John Maynard Keynes as an impractical 'mathematician'. Regulatory agencies were
headed by lawyers, and courts dismissed economic evidence as irrelevant. In 1963, President
John F. Kennedy's Treasury secretary made a point of excluding academic economists from a
review of the international monetary order, deeming their advice useless. William McChesney
Martin, who presided over the Federal Reserve in the 1950s and '60s, confined economists to
the basement.
Starting in the l970s, however, economists began to wield extraordinary influence..."
I know all who are discussing financial matters here know this - it was just good for me
to see it spelled out. I see, however, the rest of the review is very economist oriented and
no mention of Michael Hudson whatsoever; it is, after all, the Atlantic. Yay for Roosevelt
and Kennedy though!
"... Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon pulled no punches in an interview with Fox Business Network's Trish Regan saying that the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump will be the "trial of the century." ..."
"... Bannon said Republicans ought to "turn the tables" on Democrats and demand a full trial that will force it to go into the Democratic presidential primary. ..."
"... "I think you ought to demand a full trial, where to get witnesses -- and, hey, if it takes too long, it's the Democrats to force this constitutional crisis over the Christmas holidays. If this trial goes on for a month or two into the Democratic primary, that's a tough break for them. They're the ones that forced this. One of the reasons they forced it is their field is so weak going in there. Nobody cares. Like I said, witness protection program. Nobody cares about their debate. They're the ones that force this. " ..."
"... "... this is the managed decline of the United States. This is about the Washington consensus. The Washington Post published the Afghanistan papers last week. Two trillion dollars. 2,400 dead. Tens of thousands wounded. What's that? That's the inter-agency consensus in 18 years that betrayed our country. That's what betrayed our countries. With Brennan, that's what betrayed our country, not Donald Trump. Donald Trump has stood up. The reasons people cheer for him, it's their sons and daughters that have died in Afghanistan. It's their lives, their kids' lives being thrown away, and their tax dollars. " ..."
Having blasted the liberal elites earlier in the week for
"not giving a f**k" about the average joe in America:
"Look, this is what drives me nuts about the left. All immigration is to flood the zone
with cheap labour, and the reason is because the elites don't give a fuck about African
Americans and the Hispanic working class . They don't care about the white working class
either. You're just a commodity" .
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon pulled no punches in an interview with
Fox Business Network's Trish Regan saying that the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald
Trump will be the "trial of the century."
" I think this trial is going to be the trial of the century, a nd the mainstream media is
going to be all over it," Bannon said.
"That's why I think it's so important not just for his legacy, but for his presidency and
his second term. He's got to engage in this. He's got to take them on. He's got to have the
whistleblower; we have to have the Bidens in front of the nation and the world. They're going
to have to stand and deliver under oath. And we're going to get to the bottom of this . And I
think that's going to lead to an exoneration, not just an acquittal, but an exoneration of
President Trump."
Bannon said Republicans ought to "turn the tables" on Democrats and demand a full trial
that will force it to go into the Democratic presidential primary.
"I think you ought to demand a full trial, where to get witnesses -- and, hey, if it
takes too long, it's the Democrats to force this constitutional crisis over the Christmas
holidays. If this trial goes on for a month or two into the Democratic primary, that's a
tough break for them. They're the ones that forced this. One of the reasons they forced it is
their field is so weak going in there. Nobody cares. Like I said, witness protection program.
Nobody cares about their debate. They're the ones that force this. "
Bannon went on to reiterate his belief that Hillary Clinton will "inevitably" be the
Democratic Presidential nominee... but will lose... again:
" Hillary Clinton comes in at the moment that she feels that she can step in to save the
Democratic Party and try to convince people that a rematch with President Trump is the best
way that they have to try to defeat President Trump," Bannon said.
"They won't beat him. Right now, there's nobody, including Hillary Clinton out there, that
can beat Donald Trump. But they're going to get desperate here because look at tonight.
Nobody cares about this debate, this debate's in Los Angeles."
Finally, the former strategist raged against "the Washington Consensus":
"... this is the managed decline of the United States. This is about the Washington
consensus. The Washington Post published the Afghanistan papers last week. Two trillion
dollars. 2,400 dead. Tens of thousands wounded. What's that? That's the inter-agency
consensus in 18 years that betrayed our country. That's what betrayed our countries. With
Brennan, that's what betrayed our country, not Donald Trump. Donald Trump has stood up. The
reasons people cheer for him, it's their sons and daughters that have died in Afghanistan.
It's their lives, their kids' lives being thrown away, and their tax dollars. "
And that, Bannon exclaimed, is why we need a trial in the Senate to expose the swamp.
"And they understand that Donald Trump is fighting that. That's why we need a trial, a
real trial and Senate with witnesses. So, before the world, Donald Trump could get his day in
court. "
Trish Regan: I do believe the president heard that she wants to run again from this show,
from none other than Mr. Stephen Bannon here on set with me, who talked about Hillary Clinton
getting back in potentially again. And also, you called Bloomberg as well. So, Bloomberg's in,
is Hillary going to join?
Steve Bannon: I think it's inevitable. They had a poll out today that showed Biden at like
28, Bernie 21, Elizabeth Warren in the high teens. It looks like something that's going to get
to a -- particularly with Super Tuesday, when Biden drops the nuclear weapon of his money on
these in these big states. It's going to lead to a brokered convention. Hillary Clinton, I
think, is going to come in when it's evident that none of the radical left of the Democratic
Party can beat the President Trump --
[cross talk]
Steve Bannon: -- A brokered convention. I think Hillary Clinton comes in at the moment that
she feels that she can step in to save the Democratic Party and try to convince people that a
rematch with President Trump is the best way that they have to try to defeat President Trump.
They won't beat him. Right now, there's nobody, including Hillary Clinton out there, that can
beat Donald Trump. But they're going to get desperate here because look at tonight. Nobody
cares about this debate, this debate's in Los Angeles.
Trish Regan : They should be watching you.
Steve Bannon: Well, I'm talking about on MSNBC and CNN and their networks. They're not
they're not running around saying, this thing is great. They understand these people, not just
are boring, it's not just about their star quality, it's what they're talking about is so off
the mainstream, it's not connecting with people. And they're going to start getting desperate.
Remember, their number one thing is that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the
Democratic Party, to the established order and to the mainstream media, and they will do
anything to take him down and destroy him. In particular, you saw last night what he's talking
about to the people; hey, they're trying to come after you, they're trying to come after me to
get to you. We are in this together. And he saw people respond to that. That response of that
audience last night for two hours, that stood out for hours in, what, 15- or 17-degree cold is
quite remarkable.
Trish Regan: What I find remarkable and, you know, we can say this is a couple Irishmen --
or Irishman and an Irishwoman. You think about traditional Democrats, right? And I think about
my family and how my dad's family was, historically, big Irish Catholic family and you were a
Democrat like you're Catholic. Like, it was part of your religion, right? And, you know, my --
and if you were lucky enough, you got a job in the union. And so, there was a feeling that you
always voted blue, and that has changed.
Steve Bannon: Last night you saw that. He's connected with working class -- listen to this.
It's the reason he won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa. States they never thought
we'd win again. And altogether because he went and he got, you know, Democrats, blue collar
Democrats to vote for it and they believe in it. And they're seeing -- here's the thing they're
seeing, the manifestation of his actions are making their lives better. You know, the Zogby
poll today said that 53 percent of Democrats think that their party is spending too much time
on impeachment instead of getting things done legislatively. It is so --
Trish Regan: And they got that right. And it's not just, you know, we talk about Irish
Americans. I mean, I look at the African American population right now and you look at some of
the poll numbers there. And he's doing extremely well in a way that you wouldn't really think
he would with that particular population, given the media.
Steve Bannon: Well that's what the immigration policy -- remember everything was to make
sure that wasn't more labor pressure on African Americans and Hispanics. That's why you seen
the approval rate -- I think it's 34 percent of African Americans approve now by Pew, and 36
percent of Hispanics. Because you're seeing wages starting to rise. People -- unemployment's at
historic lows, wages starting to rise. That's why I think it's so important, since they've
smeared him in this process. He didn't get to call any witnesses in this trial. And I think
this trial will be -- it's going to be the trial of the century, and the mainstream media is
going to be all over it. That's why I think it's so important not just for his legacy, but for
his presidency and his second term. He's got to engage in this. He's got to take them on. He's
got to have the whistleblower; we have to have the Bidens in front of the nation and the world.
They're going to have to stand and deliver under oath. And we're going to get to the bottom of
this. And I think that's going to lead to an exoneration, not just an acquittal, but an
exoneration of President Trump.
Trish Regan: The trial of the century. Wow. You know, a lot of people are worried, well, you
get John Bolton. What is he going to do? What is John Bolton going to say? And what is this one
going to say? What is that one going to say? What do you say to those concerns?
Steve Bannon: The president -- the call was perfect. He looked at everything that led up to
it. This is why the American people heard him. And you just saw the bureaucrats that were in it
that were testified. This is because that is the managed decline of the United States. This is
about the Washington consensus. The Washington Post published the Afghanistan papers last week.
Two trillion dollars. 2,400 dead. Tens of thousands wounded. What's that? That's the
inter-agency consensus in 18 years that betrayed our country. That's what betrayed our
countries. With Brennan, that's what betrayed our country, not Donald Trump. Donald Trump has
stood up. The reasons people cheer for him, it's their sons and daughters that have died in
Afghanistan. It's their lives, their kids' lives being thrown away, and their tax dollars. And
they understand that Donald Trump is fighting that. That's why we need a trial, a real trial
and Senate with witnesses. So, before the world, Donald Trump could get his day in court.
Trish Regan: And you call them all. Disruption, right? It is the decade of disruption, and
you're one of the main disruptors there, according to The Wall Street Journal. In fact, one of
the most powerful people here in Washington, the power players. Can we see that? So, you're in
some pretty significant company, there Mr. Bannon.
Steve Bannon: Well, I got the disrupt look on President Trump. As President Trump says, I'm
his top student and that's where the top student got for being the top student. I got my
slot.
Trish Regan: Well, listen, we appreciate you being here tonight for that.
Steve Bannon: Thank you for having me, Trish.
Trish Regan: Very interesting insight, as always, Steve Bannon. I do want to point out to
everyone they can listen to you every day. You can tune into a syndicated radio show and
podcast on iTunes, War Room: Impeachment. Well, that's aptly named. It airs seven days a week.
Forgive me, I was thinking weekdays. Seven days a week, you're on the case.
Steve Bannon: Got to do it. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaking of Steve Bannon, here's what he had to say about Trump and conspiracy theories he
(Bannon) cooked up to distract the rubes and yahoos. From a review of Michael Wolff's book,
Siege: Trump Under Fire:
" . . . Wolff’s guide, the major-domo of Trump’s 2016 campaign who became a
White House adviser until he wasn’t, enjoys tweaking his former boss. Bannon volunteers
that he helped concoct the story that the Mueller investigation was the demon spawn of the
“deep state”, and says there was never much substance to it.
As Wolff tells it, “among the nimblest conspiracy provocateurs of the Trump age,
Bannon spelled out the … narrative in powerful detail”. But then Bannon’s
voice pierces his own self-generated din: “You do realize … that none of this is
true.” Allow that one to sink in.
Wolff also has Bannon calling the Trump Organization a criminal enterprise and
predicting its downfall : “This is where it isn’t a witch-hunt – even
for the hardcore, this is where he turns into just a crooked business guy … Not the
billionaire he said he was, just another scumbag.” Allow that to sink in, too.
Expect Bannon to be quoted by Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Nadler, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the
eventual Democratic candidate. Also look for the Democratic National Committee to send
chocolates to Bannon, once head of Breitbart and a partner in Cambridge Analytica, next
Easter."
Bannon is trying to save the now compromised and degenerated system throughout the West by
reversing the trend line, the social basis for determining a self-reform is there but the
opposing forces are those that manage real power.
Readers at the international-news site South Front tend to be technologically far more
knowledgeable about the internet than most people (including myself) are, and so their
responses to a news-report that I did on December 17th, titled
"Former NSA Tech Chief Says Mueller Report Was Based on CIA-Fabricated 'Evidence'" ,
explaining some technological details which enable a deeper understanding of how the CIA had
perpetrated the 'Russiagate' hoax that Robert Mueller in his report as the U.S. Special Counsel
had asserted to be a "Russiagate" fact (i.e., Mueller's allegations that the Russian Government
had hacked computers of the Democratic National Committee). Especially informative there was
this reader-comment, which comes from one of the world's leading
experts on cyber technology, Luke Herbert-Hansen :
Well FAT may not [be] a common OS file system anymore, but it is still widely used on
various removable media such as a USB sticks.
As everyone knows who has been closely following the most-reliable evidence regarding the
question of how DNC emails had been copied and supplied to Wikileaks, there has been much
credible, soundly-sourced, speculation that the DNC employee Seth Rich had physically copied
the data from a computer there onto a thumb drive (or "USB stick"), which then was picked up in
the U.S. by a Wikileaks agent, who physically delivered it to Julian Assange at London's
Ecuadorean Embassy .
The great independent investigative journalist (virtually barred since 2007 from being
published in the U.S. anymore), Seymour Hersh, personally investigated the records of the
murder of Seth Rich , both at the Washington DC police and at the FBI, and this is from
the transcript I had made of his statement in a Web-posted phone-call [my boldfaces for
emphasis]:
(2:50-) At some time in late spring, which we're talking about in June 21st, I don't know,
just late spring early summer, he makes contact with Wikileaks , that's in his computer, and
he makes contact. Now, I have to be careful because I met Julian [Assange] in Europe ten
twelve years [ago], I stay the fuck away from people like that. He has invited me and when I
am in London, I always get a message, 'come see me at the Ecuadorean' [Embassy], and I am
fucking not going there. I have enough trouble without getting photographed. He's under total
surveillance by everybody.
They found, what he had done, he [Seth Rich] had submitted a series of documents, emails
from DNC -- and, by the way, all this shit about the DNC, you know, was it a 'hack' or wasn't
it a 'hack' -- whatever happened, it was the Democrats themselves wrote this shit, you know
what I mean? All I know is that, he offered a sample , he sends a sample, you know, I am sure
dozens of emails, and said ' I want money' . Later Wikileaks did get the password [SETH RICH
DID SELL WIKILEAKS ACCESS INTO HIS COMPUTER.] He had a drop-box, a [password-]protected
drop-box, which isn't hard to do. I mean you don't have to be a whiz at IT [information
technology], he was not a dumb kid. They got access to the drop-box. This is all from the FBI
report . He also let people know with whom he was dealing, I don't know how he dealt, I'll
tell you all about Wikileaks in a second, with Wikileaks the mechanism, but according to the
FBI report, he shared his box with a couple of friends, so 'If anything happens to me, it's
not going to solve your problem', okay? I don't know what that means. But, anyway, Wikileaks
got access. And, before he was killed, I can tell you right now, [Obama's CIA Director John]
Brennan's an asshole. I've known all these people for years, Clapper is sort of a better guy
but no rocket-scientist, the NSA guys are fuckin' morons, and the trouble with all those guys
is, the only way they'll get hired by SAIC, is if they'll deliver some [government]
contracts, it's the only reason they stayed in. With Trump, they're gone, they're going to
live on their pension, they're not going to make it [to great wealth]. I've gotta to tell
you, guys in that job, they don't want to live on their pension. They want to be on
[corporate] boards like their [mumble] thousand bucks [cut].
I have somebody on the inside, you know I've been around a long time, somebody who will go
and read a file for me, who, this person is unbelievably accurate and careful, he's a very
high-level guy, he'll do a favor, you're just going to have to trust me, I have what they
call in my business, long-form journalism, I have a narrative, of how that whole fucking
thing began.
(5:50-) It's a Brennan operation. It was an American disinformation, and the fucking
President, at one point when they even started telling the press -- they were
back[ground]-briefing the press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, the
fucking cocksucker Rogers, telling the press that we [they] even know who in the Russian
military intelligence service leaked it. All bullshit.
In other words, besides the information from Bill Binney, who was an NSA whistleblower who
took early retirement so he wouldn't have to continue doing what people such as John Brennan
demanded, Seymour Hersh there provided yet additional confirmation to this account from the
also-early-retired whistleblowing UK Ambassador Craig Murray -- a close friend of Assange --
who claimed that he had "met" the person in DC who
supplied the thumb drive (USB stick), which then was delivered (he didn't say how) to
Assange :
Murray received the Hillary-campaign information on September 24th. Little over a week
later, on October 7th, Wikileaks published documents from the computer of Hillary's Campaign
Chairman John Podesta, and politico announced it headlining " The
most revealing Clinton campaign emails in WikiLeaks release" . That same day, Politico
also bannered " Podesta: 'I'm
not happy about being hacked by the Russians'," and the legend that 'Russia hacked the
Clinton campaign' started immediately to compete in the day's 'news' stories, and diminish
focus on, the contents of that information which had been 'hacked'.
However, the information from the DNC itself had been published much earlier, on July 22nd , and so this could not
have come from the September 24th leak. Whether it came from the same person, or through the
same courier (i.e., Murray), isn't yet known. [But it is now, from
what Binney has just said , and the answer is "yes."] The Obama Administration has made
no distinctions between those two data-dumps, but charges that all of the leaks from the
Obama-Clinton-DNC conspiracy -- both the anti-Sanders campaign during the primaries, and the
anti-Trump campaign during the general-election contest -- came from 'Russian hacking'. The
reason why the emphasis is upon the anti-Trump portion is that the conspirators now are
trying to smear Trump, not Sanders, and so to make this a national issue, instead of only an
internal Democratic-Party issue. They are trying to de-legitimize Trump's Presidency -- and,
at the same time, to advance Obama's aim for the U.S. ultimately to
conquer Russia . The mutual hostility between Obama and Trump is intense, but Obama's
hatred of Russia gives had Russia in his gunsights well before he, as a cunning politician,
made political hay out of Mitt Romney's statement that "Russia, this is, without question
America's number one geopolitical foe."added impetus to his post-Presidential campaign here.
This Nobel Peace Prize winner
Only a fool trusts the U.S. government (and the U.S. 'news'media) after ' Saddam's
WMD' (which despite all the lies to the
contrary, didn't exist). Like Craig Murray said , "I used to be the head of the FCO
unit that monitored Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and I know for certain, I can tell
you, they knew there weren't any."
In my records, the politically progressive Craig Murray was the first individual to post to
the Web a clear case that Russiagate was a U.S. Deep-State hoax: He headlined, on 31 December
2016,
"Exit Obama in a Cloud of Disillusion, Delusion and Deceit" , and discussed the case which
now is commonly called "Russiagate." In fact, I had never found any evidence that anything he
has said was false, and -- especially considering the sheer number of his postings at
his blog -- this was a remarkable
record of truthfulness (100%), which is attained by very few journalists, none of whom are
publishable in the United States. These reporters are too honest, and too careful about the
quality of the documentation they cite, to be publishable in the United States. They refuse to
intentionally deceive their readers; and, to the exact contrary, they take great care never to
deceive them. (However, I unfortunately did finally see
a posting from him that included some false allegations.)
As to whom the individuals are who are America's Deep State, that's discussed here . In
other words: the operatives (such as mainstream American journalists) are only agents for those
individuals -- they are not the Deep State itself. They can easily be replaced, but the Deep
State is a far more deep-seated infection, in the American body-politic, and maybe cannot be
removed, at all, without replacing the entire system.
More-drastic measures than "reform" would therefore be needed, in order to eradicate the
Deep State and restore whatever degree of democracy the United States formerly did have. (It's
now a dictatorship . In
fact, that's even been scientifically
proven .) My research indicates that the Deep State took control of America starting on
26 July 1945 .
Trump is expected to sign into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2020
which mandates the imposition of sanctions on companies involved in Nord Stream II's
construction, but while this crafty move isn't expected to seriously impede the project since
it's already in its final stages, its importance derives in the fact that it signals extremely
strong support for the interests of the US-backed "Three Seas Initiative" whose Polish leader
has objected to this game-changing pipeline on geopolitical grounds.
***
The US Senate's
approval of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2020 means that Trump will likely
sign it into law very soon, which is troublesome for Trans-Atlantic relations because it
mandates among its many sometimes unrelated provisions the imposition of sanctions on companies
involved in Nord Stream II's construction. This crafty move isn't expected to seriously impede
the project since it's already in its final stages after Russia
secured Denmark's permission back in October to construct a crucial segment of this
pipeline through its maritime territory, which will facilitate the project's completion and
thus strengthen Russia's strategic partnership with EU-leader Germany. That outcome will likely
accelerate the ongoing rapprochement between Russia and the bloc's Western European members
that became obvious to all after Macron's successful visit
to Moscow in late August, but which is in turn compelling the US to double down on its
commitment to the Polish-led " Three
Seas Initiative " (TSI) that it envisages functioning as its wedge for retaining influence
in the strategic Central European space between those two.
The impending NDAA 2020-connected sanctions should therefore be seen as an extremely strong
signal of support for this trans-regional integration structure because they satisfy the
demands of its Polish leader for the US to impose costs upon Germany for its reinvigorated
strategic partnership with Russia. Barely reported on at the time, it's significant to mention
that a bipartisan
resolution was submitted to the House of Representatives at the end of October shortly
after Russia secured Denmark's support for Nord Stream II mandating that Congress prioritize
its support for the TSI in the aftermath of that development, with a specific focus on energy
and physical connectivity projects. The grand strategic goal that the US is aiming to achieve
is to create a so-called "cordon sanitaire" that would serve to divide Russia from Western
Europe by exploiting the preexisting animosity that the many states between them have towards
Moscow, and it will likely end up being one of the main drivers of American foreign policy
towards the continent for the foreseeable future.
In pursuit of that objective, the US is also making strategic outreaches to
Belarus , knowing very well that its wily leader Lukashenko is more than willing to
"balance" between the West and Russia in a risky attempt to extract more (mostly economic)
"concessions" from each of them. It goes without saying that this policy will probably ramp up
now that Nord Stream II is a fait accompli and the "cordon sanitaire" is more significant than
ever in the current context. That former Soviet Republic, however, is unlikely to engage in a
decisive "pivot" against Russia, though from a zero-sum standpoint, the gradual moves that it's
making towards the West can indeed be interpreted as being "mildly" against Russia's long-term
interests. Still, there isn't much that Russia can do since it must avoid the perception that
it's putting overwhelming pressure on Belarus or even plausibly considering doing so since that
notion would only accelerate the very same trend that Moscow wants to reverse. Minsk, it must
be said, recognizes how geostrategic its position is for both the Russian-led Eurasian Union
(EAU) and the Polish-led TSI, so it'll try to play them off against the other, all with the US'
passive support.
The US isn't the only Great Power spreading its influence through the TSI, as China is also
rapidly on the ascent there too. The Balkans are becoming more important of a destination for
Chinese foreign direct investment than ever through the Belt & Road
Initiative (BRI), most visibly manifesting itself in Beijing's plans to construct a
high-speed railway from the Hungarian capital of Budapest to the Greek port of Pireaus (the
"Balkan Silk Road"). It also holds yearly meetings with the leaders of the TSI countries and
others in this region through the 17+1
format that was recently expanded to include Greece (having been the 16+1 previously). In
addition, Belarus is a key node on the Eurasian Land Bridge, with China investing in the "
Great Stone " industrial
park that it envisages becoming a major export center along that route. None of this is to
imply whatsoever that China is "teaming up" with the US to "contain" Russia in Central &
Eastern Europe, but just to point out that China's infrastructure investments will greatly help
to connect the region along the north-south axis, after which the US will likely exploit these
apolitical and purely economic projects for its strategic ends vis-a-vis Russia.
Even so, while the TSI space is certainly geostrategic, its economic importance pales in
comparison to Western Europe's. The German economy alone is larger than all of those states'
combined, so Russia isn't exactly losing out in the economic sense as a result of the US' TSI
plans. It is, however, at risk of this "cordon sanitaire" being used as its rival's
trans-regional platform for putting military pressure upon it, which has already been happening
ever since most of its states joined NATO and then doubled down on their commitment to it after
the onset of the New
Cold War in 2014 following Crimea's reunification with Russia in response to the US-backed
coup in Ukraine. Poland and increasingly Greece
bookend this pro-American military structure, while Ukraine and possibly soon even Belarus
could ultimately become its eastern-most appendages by proxy. Russia still has instruments of
influence that it can leverage in an attempt to keep this trend under control, though it's
seemingly on the defensive in recent years and appears unable to gain any successes on this
front, instead choosing to concentrate on Western Europe through Nord Stream II and other
measures.
Looking forward, the rise of the TSI as the US' preferred continental proxy is all but
assured, though it's unclear whether or not it'll succeed with its fundamental purpose of
keeping Russia and Western Europe apart. Classical geopolitical thought suggesting that it
would doesn't take into consideration the much more complex nature of contemporary
International Relations whereby a conventional military clash between the TSI states and Russia
is unlikely for reasons of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) stemming from many of the
former's memberships in NATO, and their other memberships in the EU mean that a successful
EU-Russian detente would force them to facilitate trade between Western Europe and Russia if
even a single state vetoes the continuation of sanctions in the future. Altogether, it can
therefore be said that Russia's successful completion of Nord Stream II would flip the
strategic dynamics by once again returning Moscow to a position of strength whereas Washington
would then be the Great Power on the defensive instead. Still, the TSI's potential shouldn't be
underestimated either since it might lead to some surprises for both Western Europe and Russia
if its American patron has a few tricks up its sleeve that it's wiling to teach its regional
partners.
Further depth on all these subjects can be realised by perusing the collected sayings of
P.T. Barnum... he created the meme for the modern media perversion of reality in accordance
with their Usury Empire masters' wishes.
FISA Court Refuses Review Of FBI Deception by Tyler Durden Sun, 12/22/2019 - 11:30 0
SHARES
Submitted by anonymous attorney and journalist Techno Fog ( @Techno_Fog ), emphasis ours
This week, Presiding Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) Judge Rosemary Collyer,
released two stern Orders taking the FBI to task for its repeated failures, omissions, and
misrepresentations in its application and subsequent renewals to surveil Carter Page.
And while one FBI employee has received a criminal referral for doctoring evidence in the
scheme to defraud the court, key players with oversight responsibilities - under penalty of
perjury - have been given a pass.
Judge Collyer's December 17, 2019 Order, written after the publication of Inspector General
Michael Horowitz's long-awaited report on FISA abuse, emphasized the role the FBI plays when it
makes its assessment on whether probable cause exists to a warrant. In particular, FISC
requires the FBI agent swearing to the application fully and accurately provide "information in
its possession that is material to whether probable cause exists."
FISC Judge Collyer responds to the IG Report.
Court orders remedial measures.
There is also a December 5 FISC Order - currently pending classification review -
discussing the court's "concerns"
She noted that the IG Report revealed "troubling instances in which FBI personnel provided
information to NSD which was unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession."
Judge Collyer also expressed concerns about the FBI Office of General Counsel attorney,
reported to have been Kevin Clinesmith, who altered evidence to mislead about Carter Page
acting as a source for the CIA.
That Order required:
(1) The government to inform the Court in a sworn written submission of what it has done,
and plans to do, to ensure that the statement of facts in each FBI application accurately and
completely reflects information possessed by the FBI that is material to any issue presented by
the application. (A January 10, 2020 deadline was given for this submission and left the
government with room to maneuver if it needed more time.)
On December 20, FISC released Judge Collyer's mostly unredacted December 5, 2019 Order to
the United States. This was apparently prepared in response to letters filed with FISC by the
government relating to the issues found with the Carter Page application and renewals during
the course of the Inspector General's investigation. She ordered the United States inform FISC
by writing of the following:
(1) Identify all other matters currently or previously before this Court that involved the
participation of the FBI OGC [Clinesmith] attorney whose conduct was described in the
Preliminary Letter and Supplemental Letter;
(2) Describe any steps taken or to be taken by the Department of Justice or FBI to verify
that the United States' submissions in those matters completely and fully described the
material facts and circumstances; and
(3) Advise whether the conduct of the FBI OGC [Clinesmith] attorney who has been referred to
the appropriate bar association(s) for investigation or possible disciplinary action.
This is a serious Court that deals with serious matters of national security and
counterintelligence. The secret nature of FISC requires the United States to be in strict
compliance with all certification and verification requirements. It's a matter of trust. As
Judge Collyer observed: "FISC expects the government to comply with its heightened duty of
candor in ex parte proceedings at all times. Candor is fundamental to the Court's effective
operation."
This trust was broken by the FBI agents and officials whose factual assertions to FISC were
inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, and unsupported by the evidence. The duty of candor was
breached in the continued reliance on Christopher Steele via DOJ official Bruce Ohr (after they
represented to FISC that he had been terminated as a source) and the omission of material facts
and exculpatory evidence that undercut their now-debunked representation that Carter Page was
operating as a Russian agent.
You'll hear a lot about "omissions" in the upcoming IG Report.
To put those omissions into context as you read:
There is a duty under the FISC Rules to include material facts and to correct a
"misstatement or omission of material fact" pic.twitter.com/g3V70D14g3
While it's laudable that Judge Collyer has ordered the government to double-check their
submissions in the prior FISA applications that involved Clinesmith, what about the previous
FISA applications verified by the FBI agents who lied – under penalty of perjury, we
might add – in the Carter Page applications and renewals?
The IG Report found that under Pientka's supervision and approval, there were incorrect
factual assertions in the 1st FISA app.
In other words, whether an FBI lawyer changes an e-mail about a target's history of
cooperation with the CIA or an FBI agent lies about the underlying intelligence, the goal is
the same: secure the warrant through deception. Both these acts are criminal. Why is only one
deserving of review?
The abuses are apparent. The FISC needs to determine whether they're pervasive. That starts
with reviewing all applications verified by the FBI agents involved in the Carter Page
hoax.
***
Related: A Techno_Fog thread on Joe Pientka , and the FBI's efforts to keep him out of the
spotlight (click a tweet to read the rest):
IF SSA 1 is Pientka (who participated in Flynn interview)...
He knew "the information from Steele's reporting about a Russian consulate being located
in Miami was inaccurate" pic.twitter.com/azwql8kcmR
In the FISA Court who represents the Accused? Is the Accused allowed to produce evidence
to declare themselves innocent? So the Accused is Guilty till proven innocent. The people
producing evidence to get the warrent are unlikely to come back and have evidence that make
them look bad.
Bill Priestap would be the person to approve of arranging, paying, or reimbursing,
Christopher Steele for the Russian Dossier used in their counterintelligence operation and
subsequent FISA application.
Without Bill Priestap involved, approvals, etc. the entire Russian/Trump
Counterintelligence operation just doesn't happen. Heck, James Comey's own March 20th
testimony in that
FISA court is COMPLICIT IN THE COUP.........................The FISA court needs to be
REVIEWED BY THE HIGHER AUTHORITY. If that is God, then this crap court needs to be TAKEN
DOWN.........The fisa JUDGES WERE COMPLICIT IN THE ONGOING COUP AND ELECTION MEDDLING.
That's if they cared, I bet you're right but doubt anything will be done. As scapegoat
indeed but little else if even that. Perhaps after Trump gets re-elected, if not, then
never.
This is all as expected... the "one rotten apple" dodge... the only hope for some sort of
Justice is Barr-Durham... but don't hold your breath... one reason the Deep State survives is
the Mutually Assured Destruction/ Blackmail built into the system. Going hard against the
earlier leaders from the predecessor party, including the former President, means that when
the other party takes power, in retaliation, they go after THEIR predecessors in office, who
are the incumbents today. Real banana republic stuff
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 to oversee requests for surveillance
warrants against foreign spies inside the United States by federal law enforcement and
intelligence agencies.
Isikoff is a part of conspiracy to depose Trump. and it shows.
OK. Let's assume that will drag the trial all the
January. Then what ?
If we believe polls it is amazing how brainwashed US public is: to assume that
marionette government has any say in what to do is the upper level of naivety: " Removing Trump from office (a step beyond impeachment) had the support of just under half
(49 percent) of registered voters
in the Yahoo News/YouGov poll . On the factual basis for the two articles of impeachment,
53 percent of registered voters said Trump abused his power in demanding help from Ukraine;
only 40 percent said he did not. Fifty-one percent said the president obstructed Congress;
again, only 40 percent said he did not."
Notable quotes:
"... Michael Isikoff was involved with Clinton and the Russian Dossier. ..."
A House Democrat who played a key role in the impeachment of President Trump says the House
should not "roll over" and quickly present the articles of impeachment to the Senate for a
trial that would amount to a "farce."
"We're not going to participate in a process that makes a mockery out of the Constitution,"
said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the House Judiciary Committee, who presented the
panel's case for impeachment to the House Rules Committee. Raskin has been widely mentioned as
a candidate to be one of the House managers to prosecute the case in an impeachment trial in
the Senate. "We are not gonna roll over and say, yeah, you can give us some drive-through
justice with one afternoon where everything is dealt with on a motion to dismiss and no
evidence is heard.
"My position is that, so long as they do not make the most minimal provisions for a fair
trial, then we should not participate in a farce."
Although Raskin emphasized he was speaking for himself, his comments on the Yahoo News
"Skullduggery" podcast illustrate the competing pressures House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is under
from her own caucus in the aftermath of the historic vote to impeach the president, which was
supported by virtually all House Democrats -- and not a single Republican. Public opinion among
registered voters shows a narrow (50-45)
plurality favoring impeachment , according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.
After the passage of the two articles of impeachment on Wednesday evening -- one for abuse
of power, the other for obstruction of Congress -- Pelosi has held off presenting them to the
Senate, citing doubts that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will permit a "fair" trial.
McConnell has said he will coordinate his efforts with the White House and has made up his mind
not to vote for conviction. Removal of the president requires a two-thirds majority in the
Senate, which Republicans control by a 53-47 margin.
Pelosi's move -- as the House adjourned for a two-week holiday break on Thursday -- has
created a new layer of uncertainty over when, or even if, the Senate will actually try the
president. Republicans have already jumped over Pelosi's tactics, accusing her of political
gamesmanship that undermines the solemnity with which Democrats presented the case against the
president.
But Raskin, one of the House's more progressive members, says it is McConnell's own comments
-- vowing to work with White House lawyers to ensure the acquittal of the president -- that
have made a mockery of impeachment.
"To say that you're not going to look at the evidence or the facts would get you
disqualified from every jury pool in the United States of America," Raskin said. "If you were
in a voir dire and the judge said to you, 'Will you pay attention to the facts? Will you pay
attention to the evidence? Will you pay attention to the law?' and you say, 'No. I've already
made up my mind,' you would be dismissed immediately."
Bolton, Mulvaney and Pompeo were blocked from appearing before the House during its
impeachment hearings by a White House claim that any conversations they had with the president
were shielded by executive privilege. Trump's defenders say the House could have tried to
compel their testimony by subpoena. But the certainty that White House lawyers would have
fought those subpoenas all the way up to the Supreme Court would have put off action until well
into next year, Raskin said.
"It just takes a very long time."
Raskin acknowledged that impeachment by its nature is both a judicial and political process
-- and that Pelosi's maneuvering is intended at least in part to put public heat on McConnell
to accede to the demand for witnesses.
"We want the country to put serious pressure on the Senate to conduct the trial with
seriousness," Raskin said. "And the polls show, for example, on the question of witnesses, that
even though I think only 51 percent or 52 percent of the people are declaring themselves right
now in favor of impeachment and removal, like 70 percent of the people are saying, 'Yes, the
president should make all witnesses available.'"
Removing Trump from office (a step beyond impeachment) had the support of just under half
(49 percent) of registered voters
in the Yahoo News/YouGov poll . On the factual basis for the two articles of impeachment,
53 percent of registered voters said Trump abused his power in demanding help from Ukraine;
only 40 percent said he did not. Fifty-one percent said the president obstructed Congress;
again, only 40 percent said he did not.
How effective Pelosi's strategy will be is far from clear. While President Trump is seeking
a quick Senate trial in January so he can proclaim vindication as he runs for reelection,
McConnell has suggested he is happy to forget the whole thing. "Do you think this is leverage,
to not send us something we'd rather not do?" he said to reporters this week. And with those
words, noted New York Times reporter Carl Hulse, the Senate majority leader " cracked a
broad smile outside the Senate chamber in a departure from his usual dour expression."
yesterday
Michael Isikoff was involved with
Clinton and the Russian Dossier. ThisSkullduggeryGroup is
another TokyoRoseYellowJournalistic attempt at presenting
propagandist commentaries as news articles.
Isekoff has replaced Marrissa Mayer
at Yawho News that's all.
There are many fake posters on the
message boards. They are not really fellow U.S.Citizens
and can easily be recognized by their one line insults
that have nothing to do with debate and only to do with
creating a hostile environment between so called liberals
and so called conservatives who I prefer to call
U.S.Citizens. Our differences are not that far apart but
there are Globalist, Anarchist, and other forces in this
country and outside of this country that would love to
see our country collapse and that we also discard our
Constitution and our freedoms protected under that
document.
Cass Sunstein
ObolaCzar proposed government
'infiltrate' social network sitesCassSunstein wants
agents to 'undermine' talk in chat rooms, message boards.
Published: 01/12/2012 at 10:56 PM
Just prior to his appointment as
President Obama's so-called regulatory czar,CassSunstein
wrote a lengthy academic paper suggesting the government
should "infiltrate" social network websites, chat rooms
and message boards.Such "cognitive infiltration,"Sunstein
argued, should be used to enforce a U.S. government ban
on "conspiracy theorizing."
Major Obama donor and former Google
executive Marissa Mayer will take the helm at Yahoo! as the
company's new CEO Tuesday In May, Neilsen listed
theYahooABC NewsNetwork as the leading news site on the
Web in the U.S., makingMayer the head of the
largest news site on the Web.
She
is also a major donor to both PresidentBarackObama and
the DemocraticParty.According to the Center for
ResponsivePolitics; in April 2011Mayer donated two
separate amounts of $2,500 dollars to Obama, and one
large sum of $30,800 to the Democratic National
committee.
Data from political data firm Aristotle, as
reported by the HuffingtonPost, reveals that, in the
second quarter of 2011,Mayer also contributed $35,800 to
Obama Victory Fund 2012.
Asked whether Mayer's political
leanings would not affect the editorial direction ofYahoo!, Yahoo nor Mayer returned The DC's request for
comment by the time of publication. [Full
Disclosure:TheDCandYahoo! have an editorial partnership.]
Well, maybe if Nancy used her
position to actually help the American economy instead of
using her political position to line the pockets of
herself, her husband and their cronies, she might have
remained Speaker.
Why do I say that ? Since Nancy has been "serving" the
nation in D.C., she has increased her personal wealth by
$100 MILLION. Not a typo. How did she do that ? According
to various bios, "good investing". What that really means
is insider trading. You, I and Martha Stewart go to jail
if we get caught doing that, but it was perfectly okay
for members of congress until exposed and the passing of
S.T.O.C.K ( Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge ) Act
in April 2012. The Act prohibited the use of non-public
information for private profit, including insider trading
by members of Congress and other government employees.
But, thanks to Nancy's piggish greed and abuse of her
position, she bought stocks in at least 8 Initial Public
Offerings (IPOs), with insider knowledge. If you have any
friends in the securities industry, ask them how
difficult it is to get in on even one IPO, let alone
eight. Pelosi’s husband’s purchase of shares in the 2008
initial public offering by Visa Inc as Congress was
considering new credit card regulations. Within two days
of the Visa offering, the 5,000 shares purchased by Paul
Pelosi had risen $20 each.
Nancy's greed led to the addition of the "Pelosi
Provision" to the S.T.O.C.K. Act.
The Pelosi provision prohibits members of Congress,
executive branch officials and their staffs from
receiving special access to initial public offerings
because of their position.
So, Nancy "led" a House that was in power during 10%
Unemployment. Lost control of the House while a Democrat
was in the White House and Democrat majority in the
Senate.
Meanwhile, Nancy was looking out for #1, big time.
"... Are the security forces loyal to him to the extent that he could realistically counted on them to carry out a crackdown on
the "Nazis"? ..."
"... I am sympathetic to a lot of what Putin has felt it necessary to do, but I must say, I don't buy the incessant use of the term
"Ukronazi." Sounds propagandistic. ..."
"... What about the Ukrainian people? A large majority of them voted for some sort of reconciliation with the separatists and Russia.
They did so twice: once for Zelenskii, and once again for his party. Does that count for nothing? ..."
"... I think the plan is to wait until Russia collapses from Western sanctions, and then invade Crimea and Donbass. They didn't
give up on the territory by any means, which is why I don't think that any ceasefire in Donbass will hold. It is going to remain a slow-burning
conflict, the regime will continue to complain about "Russian invasion" and international investors will continue to avoid the Ukraine.
..."
The recent Paris summit and the few days following the summit have brought a lot of clarity about the future of the Minsk Agreements.
Short version: Kiev has officially rejected them (by rejecting both the sequence of steps and several crucial steps). For those interested,
let's look a little further.
First, what just happened
First, here are the key excerpts from the Paris Conference and from statements made by "Ze" and his superior, Arsen Avakov right
after their return to Kiev:
The Minsk agreements (Minsk Protocol of 5 September 2014, Minsk Memorandum of 19 September 2014 and the Minsk Package of Measures
of 12 February 2015) continue to be the basis of the work of the Normandy format whose member states are committed to their
full implementation ( ) The sides express interest in agreeing within the Normandy format (N4) and the Trilateral Contact
Group on all the legal aspects of the Special Order of Local Self-Government – special status – of Certain Areas of the Donetsk
and Luhansk Regions – as outlined in the Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements from 2015 – in order
to ensure its functioning on a permanent basis .They consider it necessary to incorporate the "Steinmeier formula" into the Ukrainian
legislation, in accordance with the version agreed upon within the N4 and the Trilateral Contact Group.
President 'Ze' statement on Ukrainian TV: (unofficial, in-house, translation) source
" The most difficult question is the question of the transfer of the border control to Ukraine. It's very funny, because
its our border and the transfer of the control to us. But, it's a weak sport, the Achilles' heel of the Minsk Agreement." "It's
what was signed by us, unfortunately. We can discuss this for a very long time. Possibly, the conditions were as such." "But we
signed that we will get the control over our border only after the elections on the temporarily occupied territories." "We dedicated
a very long time to this question, we discussed it in details, we have a very different positions with the president of
Russia ." "But this is the Minsk position, we have to understand this. I only like one thing, that we started talking about
this. We agreed that we will continue talking about this in details and with the different variations during our next meeting."
"This is also a victory, because we will have a meeting in four months."
Q. What do you think, is it possible to change the Minsk Agreement? source
" This will be very difficult to do, but we have to do it. We have to change it . First, we have to understand
that it's been over four years since the Minsk Agreement was signed. Everything changes in our life. We have to understand that
it wasn't my team that signed the Minsk Agreement, but we as a power have to fulfill the conditions that our power at the time
agreed back then. But? I am sure that some things we will be able to change. We will be changing them." "Because the transfer
of the Ukraine's border after our control only after the elections, – it's not our position. I said about this don't know how
many times, but this is the final decision ."
Arsen Avakov's statement on Ukrainian TV: (unofficial, in-house, translation):
" The philosophy of the border control the part of the border that we don't have control over is 408 kilometers. It's not that
easy to take it over, to equip it, even to get there across the enemy territories. It's a procedure. As a compromise, we offered
the following scheme: we will start taking the border under our control stating with the New Year, little by little, reducing the
length of the border that is not controlled by us, and a day before the local election we will close the border, we will close this
bottleneck. And this way will get the control over the border. Why isn't this a good compromise? Considering, that at the same time
according to the Steinmeier Formula, they have to disarm all the illegal armed formations of this pseudo-state DNR. This is how we
see the compromise."
In other words, both the official President and real President of the Ukraine agree: the Ukraine will not implement the Minsk
Agreements as written, made law by the UNSC and clarified by the so-called Steinmeier Formula.
Ukrainian propagandists on Russian TV (yes, Urkonazi and hardline nationalist propagandists do get air time on Russian TV on a
daily basis – for an explanation why, see here and here ) went into damage
control mode and explained it all away by saying " these are only words, what matters is what Zelenskii signed in Paris ".
They are wrong. First of all, statements made in their official capacity by the President or the Minister of Internal Affairs do
represent OFFICIAL policy statements. Second, this explanation completely overlooks the reason why Ze and Avakov said these things.
That reason is very simple: Ze caved in to the Urkonazis, completely. He now uses EXACTLY the same rhetoric as Poroshenko did, in
spite of the fact that the only reason he was elected is that he presented himself as the ultimate anti-Poroshenko. Now all we see
is Poroshenko 2.0.
So in the behind-the-scenes (but very real) struggle between the Zionist camp (Kolomoiskii and Zelenskii) and the Urkonazi camp
(Avakov and Poroshenko), the latter have successfully taken control of the former and now the chances for saving a unitary Ukraine
are down to, maybe not quite zero, but to something like 0.0000001% (I leave that one under the heading "never say never" and because
I have been wrong in the past).
So what happens next?
That is the interesting question. In theory, the Normandy Four will meet again in 4 months. But that assumes that some progress
was made. Well, it is possible that in a few sections of the line of contact there will be an OSCE supervised withdrawal of forces.
But, let's be honest here, the people have seen many, many such promised withdrawals, and they all turned out to be fake. Either
the Ukronazis return to the neutral zone (claiming huge victories over the (sic) "Russian armed force"), or they resume bombing civilians,
or they never even bother to change position. Any withdrawal is a good thing if it can save a single life! But no amount of withdrawals
will settle anything in this conflict.
Second, there are A LOT of Ukrainian politicians who now say that the citizens of the LDNR have to "return" to Russia if they
don't like the Urkonazi coup or its ideology. They either don't realize, or don't care, that there are very few Russian volunteers
in Novorussia and that the vast majority of the men and women who compose the LDNR forces are locals. These locals, by the way, get
the Ukie message loud and clear: you better get away while you can, because when we show up you will all be prosecuted for terrorism
and aiding terrorists, that is ALSO something the Urkonazis like to repeat day after day. By the way, while in Banderastan all Russian
TV channels are censored, and while they also try to censor the Russian language Internet, in Novorussia all the Ukrainian (and Russian)
TV stations are freely available. So as soon as some Nazi freak comes out and says something crazy like "we will create filtration
camps" (aka concentration camps) this news is instantly repeated all over Novorussia, which only strengthens the resolve of the people
of the LDNR to fight to their death rather than accept a Nazi occupation..
I said it many times, Zelenskii's ONLY chance was to crackdown on the Nazis as soon as he was elected. He either did not have
the courage to do so, or his U.S. bosses told him to leave them unmolested. Whatever the case may be, it's now over, we are back
to square one.
The most likely scenario is a "slow freezing" of the conflict meaning now that Kiev has officially and overtly rejected the Minsk
Agreements, there will be some minor, pretend-negotiations, maybe, but that fundamentally the conflict will be frozen.
That will be the last nail in the coffin of the pro-EU, pro-NATO so-called "Independent Ukraine", since the most important condition
to try to salvage the Ukrainian economy, namely peace, is now gone. Furthermore, the political climate in the Ukraine will further
deteriorate (the hated Nazi minority + an even worse economic crisis are a perfect recipe for disaster).
For the Novorussians, it's now clear: the rump-Ukraine* does not want them, nor will Kiev ever agree to the Minsk Agreement. That
means that the LDNR will separate from the rump-Ukraine and, on time, rejoin Russia. Good bye Banderites and Urkonazis!
The rump-Ukraine will eventually break-up further: Crimea truly was the "jewel of the Black Sea" and its future appears to be
extremely bright while the Donbass was the biggest source of raw materials, energy, industry, high-tech, etc. etc. etc.). What is
left of the Ukraine is either poor and under-developed (the West) or needs to reopen economic ties with Russia (the South).
Besides, Zelenskii and his party are now trying to rush a new law through the Rada which will allow the sale of Ukrainian land
to private interests (aka foreign interests + a local frontman). As a result, there is now a new "maidan" brewing, pitting Iulia
Timoshenko and other nationalist leaders against Zelenskii and his party. This could become a major crisis very fast, especially
now that is appears that Zelenskii will also renege on this promise to call for a national referendum on the issue of the sale/privatization
of land .
As for the Russians, they already realize that Ze is a joke, unsurprisingly so since he is a comic by trade, and that the Ukrainians
are "not agreement capable". They will treat him like they did Poroshenko in the last years: completely ignore him and not even take
his telephone calls. Right now, there is just a tiny bit of good will left in Moscow, but it is drying up so fast that it will soon
totally disappear. Besides, the Russians really don't care that much anymore: the sanctions turned out to be a blessing, time is
on Russia's side, the Ukronazis are destroying their own state and, finally, the important stuff for Russia is happening in Asia,
not the West.
The Europeans will take a long time to come to terms with two simple facts:
Russia was never a party to this conflict (if she had, it would have been over long ago). The Ukronazis are the ones who won't implement
the Minsk Agreements
This means that the politicians who were behind the EU's backing of the Euromaidan (Merkel) will have to go before their successors
can say that, oops, we got our colors confused, and white is actually black and black turned out to be white. That's okay, politicians
are pretty good at that. The honeymoon between Kiev and Warsaw on the one hand and Berlin on the other will soon end as bad times
are ahead.
Macron looks much better, and he will probably pursue his efforts to restore semi-normal relations with Russia, for France's sake
first, but also eventually the rest of the EU. The Poles and the Balts will accuse him of "treason" and he will just ignore them.
As for Trump, he will most likely make small steps towards Russia, but most of his energy will be directed either inwards (impeachment)
or outwards (Israel), but not towards the Ukrainian conflict. Good.
Conclusion
It's over. Crimea and the Donbass are gone forever, the first is de jure , the latter merely de facto . The rump-Ukraine
is completely unconformable (barring some kind of coup followed by a government of national unity supported Moscow – I consider this
hypothesis as highly unlikely).
If you live in the West, don't expect your national media to report on any of this. They will be the LAST ones to actually admit
it (journos have a longer shelf life than politicians, it is harder for them to make a 180).
PS: to get a feeling for the kind of silly stunts the "Ze team" is now busying itself with, just check this one: they actually
tried to falsify the Ukrainian version of the Paris Communique. For details, see Scott's report here: https://thesaker.is/kiev-attempted-to-change-the-letter-and-meaning-of-paris-summit-communique/
. If the Ukraine was a Kindergarten, then "Ze" would be a perfect classroom teacher or visiting entertainer. But for a country
fighting for its survival, such stunts are a very, very bad sign indeed!
(*rump-Ukraine: In broad terms, a "rump" state is what remains of a state when a portion is carved away. Expanding on the "butcher"
metaphor, the rump is what is left when the higher-value cuts such as rib roast and loin have been removed.)
I said it many times, Zelenskii's ONLY chance was to crackdown on the Nazis as soon as he was elected. He either did not
have the courage to do so, or his U.S. bosses told him to leave them unmolested.
Are the security forces loyal to him to the extent that he could realistically counted on them to carry out a crackdown
on the "Nazis"?
For the Novorussians, it's now clear: the rump-Ukraine* does not want them, nor will Kiev ever agree to the Minsk Agreement.
So what is the Ukrainian thinking here -- that they are better off simply cutting bait on the east and letting Russia deal
with the headache of the Donbass's antiquated infrastructure? And that a truncated Ukraine would at least be mostly free of internal
pro-Russian sentiment?
I am sympathetic to a lot of what Putin has felt it necessary to do, but I must say, I don't buy the incessant use of the
term "Ukronazi." Sounds propagandistic.
What about the Ukrainian people? A large majority of them voted for some sort of reconciliation with the separatists and Russia.
They did so twice: once for Zelenskii, and once again for his party. Does that count for nothing?
I think the plan is to wait until Russia collapses from Western sanctions, and then invade Crimea and Donbass. They didn't
give up on the territory by any means, which is why I don't think that any ceasefire in Donbass will hold. It is going to remain
a slow-burning conflict, the regime will continue to complain about "Russian invasion" and international investors will continue
to avoid the Ukraine.
"That reason is very simple: Ze caved in to the Ukronazis, completely. He now uses EXACTLY the same rhetoric as Poroshenko did,
in spite of the fact that the only reason he was elected is that he presented himself as the ultimate anti-Poroshenko. Now all
we see is Poroshenko 2.0."
This is interesting. It implies z actually meant what he said in order to gain votes to get elected. In fact, he is very similar
to trump in this respect. Lied about desiring an end to the conflict (conflicts in the case of trump), but once in office continued
the aggressive policies (and expanded them in the case of trump). Actually, if one considers poroshenko as the ukraine version
of obama/clinton and zelinsky as trump, it looks like the ukrainian regime is following in the footsteps of the american regime.
It's not just Minsk that has been abandoned by the Kiev junta. Kiev itself has been abandoned by the EU, which now looks to Nordstream-2
for its energy supplies from Russia, thus bypassing the thieves in Ukraine. Even sanctions from the Supreme Sanctioner in DC is
not going to persuade the Germans to shiver in the winter.
So disturbing, and this problem is only going to increase in the US as people realize they
can no longer afford to rent anywhere, and there are millions of Boomers who rent, with no
available affordable housing to move into, and no livable wage jobs (despite education) for
those who would gladly continue working – due to an as yet to be headlined age
discrimination which started during the dot.com boom Clinton/Gore ushered in, and exploded
during Obama's reign. Sickeningly, in Silicon Valley, 35 year olds feel over the hill.
None of the candidates want to even address this rental housing issue (for all ages) with
Federal Tax Policy even? Renters are the only ones who invest major sums of money into
housing, with no equity whatsoever?
Yes, it is the canary growing fainter and struggling for life in the dark gloom of the
coal mine. The most basic human requirement for survival is shelter, after food and water.
Clothing is also in that category. The poor and homeless ( absolutely including the working
poor) at first , when attention started to be given to the " national crisis and (in some
people's minds) and national disgrace", was just, you know, the usual suspects. From hobos (
whom many saw as romanticized free spirits or stubborn old guys) to including the abandoned
mentally ill, drug addicts, criminals, people with "something to hide", teens on the run from
neglect or abuse to? The numbers of people who are essentially w/o shelter is not going to
remain out of sight, out of mind. Now, we know that mothers, fathers, grandparents, children
and grandchildren are homeless. And, if they are not, many are living in what , once upon a
time, poor or desolate housing. Many are living in ,what was once called a boarding house, in
a room with their kids. They supposedly have access to "common areas". This is not people who
often even have more than a casual aquaintanceship with their "landlords". This is not the
"Golden Girls" living the high life in sunny Florida with the owner, who is an adorable
rascal. No doubt, some examples of older, single women housing together is a good fit for
some.
Most older people on limited incomes don't live in a golden fantasy world. Besides young
people not being able to afford outrageous rents, now include the older people. Couple this
with the "reports" that there are people hungry in this country. Age has become no restrictor
on this tragic fact. This can not stand. Trickle down the ,as was mentioned , breads and
circuses in all of their guises. Cheap, junk fast food will become not so cheap when in dire
poverty. Housing is just cold, hearted cash for the owners. Who gets to watch the circuses
and gladiators ? Got cable tv( even if you personally choose not to not the point)? Afford
the cost of any pro sports tickets ? Attend any cultural events that include paying for
tickets? Yep, am not going to include the all American past time of watching a game at the
local pub. Many people can not afford the luxury of the food and drinks OK, it's time to stop
now with my pov. I am fortunate to not be in the above circumstances. Too many are,
though.
God knows what's being planned behind closed doors for this increasing tragedy, the
reality is too clear for Congress not to be aware of it. Meanwhile, I'm fully sure that
amoral predators who are investing in those areas they're betting the homeless will be forced
to dwell and die in, or choose to be euthanized at.
Meanwhile, Congress does absolutely nothing about putting a stop to obscenely biased,
corrupted and deadly in its blatant discrimination AI, which is increasingly decimating
millions of jobs, and virtually tagging people with social scores they'll never get
out from under, no matter how false. This, ever since Obama glibly announced there would be
many jobs lost, and some pain, due to technologyThe Technocracy . A
Bipartisan, Horrid Congress accepted it as a necessary reality.
The only thing missing was a police officer going in after with a drawn gun. When millions
of people were being kicked out of their homes about a decade a go, I saw a photo that won an
award at the time. It showed a cop, with pistol drawn, going into a house that had the family
kicked out from it. Surrounding him was all the left overs from a family's life and it was
very sad.
It is heart rending. Even watching renters who leave before being evicted is heart
rending, they're forced to throw away many belongings, like perfectly good mattresses and
basic necessities. Lived at an apartment complex turned into ratty ass condos for mostly
foreign property 'flippers' who continued renting them out, then 'flipping' them. The
despair, fear, and loss during a huge job downturn was horrid to witness, as many had lived
there over ten years. I was lucky to be on my feet somewhat at the time, no longer.
Every fricking sign, particularly in Silicon Valley, that advertises Apartment
Homes ™ should be torn down and destroyed. The average US renters have
always been treated as second class leechers, I've witnessed it my entire adult life, now
they're being treated even worse.
Thanks Clinton/Gore, Obomber/Biden,
Nanny Pelosi , et al; and we thought that was only the mark of Republicans busy at
work.
Thinking on this subject even more, it occurs to me why the powers that be are so invested
in pitting each generation against the other. An empowered US renters' 'lobby' could be
enormous. It would cross all age – along with race, gender, religion, and geographic
– spectrums. Renters, along with the homeless are increasing in vast numbers of all
ages. The last thing the powers that be would want, is for those vast millions to stick
together against them, and age is the easiest barrier for the powers that be to keep renters
separated by.
From "A Decade of Liberal Delusion and Failure" by Alex Pareene: If liberals want to get
the next decade right, after the previous one in which we repeatedly failed to save the world
while telling ourselves we were doing so, we will need to stop nudging and begin
fighting.
Big Bill Haywood : A liberal is the guy that leaves the room when the fighting starts.
Where is AOC in all this? She was the prime mover on impeachment, specifically impeachment
over a phone call rather than concentration camps and genocide.
And now with impeachment she gave Pelosi cover to sell the country out again.
I was wondering why many libreral centrists were expreasing admiration for her, a
socialist. Maybe they recognized something?
"Prime mover"? What planet are you from? They were Schiff, Nadler, and Pelosi. Did you
miss that Russiagate was in motion while AOC was still tending bar? AOC isn't even on any of
the key committees (Judiciary and Intel).
I shouldn't have said THE prime mover, but ONE OF the prime movers in the House in
actually pushing it over the line against Pelosi's opposition. It seems like the House Dem
consensus ever since Russiagate was just to tease their base with it and milk the suspense
for all it was worth, until AOC, among others, rallied the base.
There were other reps who pushed for impeachment, but AOC has one of the biggest platforms
and crucially, expanded popular support for impeachment outside the MSNBC crowd. So yes, a
key figure in the political/PR effort to move from conspiracy theories to actual
impeachment.
"AOC is one of the highest-profile members of Congress and she blasted Pelosi for
resisting impeachment since May."
Liz Warren is the one who made it a part of her campaign before anyone else. Rashida
Tlaib was the one who made t-shirt with her "impeach the mf'er" quote on it. A lot of them
were "blasting" Pelosi for dithering. AOC also "blasted" her for giving ICE more money and a
lot of their things .
Your central focus on AOC for the impeachment fiasco while ignoring her active role in
spotlighting so many other issues of importance which no one else speaks about is
interesting. Did you catch any of her speaking at the Sanders rally in LA today? Any other
"high profile" Dems pushing such important issues and campaigns?
Thanks for this comment. I don't trust *any of them* except Sanders, but AOC has been
making more good noises than bad, and to claim that it was she who's been driving Pelosi to
impeachment is quite a stretch. Poor, helpless/hapless Rep. Pelosi sure.
Pelosi has repeatedly stared down the progressives in the House. The overwhelming majority
of the freshmen reps are what used to be called Blue Dogs, as in corporate Dems. AOC making
noise on this issue would not move Pelosi any more than it has on other issues.
IMHO Pelosi didn't try to tamp down Russiagate, and that created expectations that
Something Big would happen. Plus she lives in the California/blue cities bubble.
What Dem donors think matters to her way more than what AOC tweets about. If anything,
Pelosi (secondarily, I sincerely doubt this would be a big issue in her calculus) would view
impeachment as a way to reduce the attention recently given to progressive issues like single
payer and student debt forgiveness.
It turns out that the US military hires more shills and clowns and runs more "news"
worldwide than all the real news agencies, combined.
For Soetoro to turn this $hit loose on us exposes his truly sinister intent. Here you all
are, thinking the bull$hit on TV is remotely relevant other than exposing the gangsters who
direct it and rob us to pay for it against our will.
All these High Crimes on Pelosi and Schumer's watch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
was shut down in 2003 by Congress after dinosaur exposed mass surveillance abuses
establishing "Total Information Awareness" over all US citizens. The program was continued in
overt defiance of Congress through Trillions in black funding.
Or you could just point to the massive expansion of debt and reduction of freedoms signed
by Trump last night while the whole government was telling you "nothing up my sleeve!"
The Washington Post has, after more than two years of investigation,
revealed that senior foreign policy officials in the White House, State and Defense
departments have known for some time that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was failing
.
In other words, government officials have been
lying .
Few people are shocked. That's a stark contrast to 1971, when the Pentagon Papers , a classified study of
decision-making about Vietnam, were leaked and published. The explosive Pentagon Papers showed
that the U.S. government had systematically lied about the reality that the U.S. was losing the
Vietnam War.
The failure of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan has been known for years. Virtually
none of the U.S. goals have been met . These goals included a strong, democratic, uncorrupt
central government; the defeat of the Taliban; eliminating the poppy fields that contribute to
the world's heroin problem; an effective military and police and creating a healthy,
diversified economy.
The Inspector General has repeatedly documented the reality in its widely available (and
widely reported)
audits .
Despite this public record of failure, officials continued to trumpet political
and military gains on the ground, even that the U.S. could prevail.
Privately, they have been wringing their hands.
Shades of Vietnam.
Public confidence in government was shaken by the publication of the Pentagon Papers in
1971.
AP/Jim Wells
Sad history of Vietnam
The Pentagon
Papers revealed that senior officials asserted in the 1960s that the Viet Cong were dying
in record numbers, enemy leadership was decapitated and there was "light at
the end of the tunnel ." Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his commanders, who knew the
reality, continuously called for even more force from 1961 to 1969.
H.R. McMaster, in his classic study of
Vietnam decision-making , excoriated the military for not bringing the truth to President
Lyndon Johnson, for presenting Johnson with the "lies that led to Vietnam."
Now we learn, courtesy of The Washington Post, that, when interviewed in 2015 as part of
Special Inspector General's " Lessons Learned " project,
Lute said , "We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan we didn't have
the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."
While Afghanistan is clearly not Vietnam, Washington is still
Washington.
The U.S. secretly plotted and carried out the overthrow of the democratically elected leader
of Iran, Mohammad Mossadeq, in 1953. Here, an Iranian protests U.S. involvement in the coup.
Pahlavi Dynasty, public domain
But
Vietnam was the big lie , permanently exposing the gap between myth – the government
knows everything better – and reality – that policy is failing.
Since Vietnam, the media and congressional, think-tank and scholarly investigators have
suspected something with every intervention.
To the public , the truth about Afghanistan has been clear; public opinion has been way
ahead of what The Washington Post revealed.
Good reasons for lies
Lies are an integral part of national security operations. They seek credibility for
government policy. They mislead adversaries, cover up mistakes and failures.
Above all, they are intended to secure public support for policy and defeat opposition at
home. Political scientist John Mearsheimer has noted
that governments don't often lie to their allies and adversaries, "but instead seem more
inclined to lie to their own people."
In particular, secrecy and deception convey power. As philosopher Sissela Bok says ,
"Deception can be coercive. When it succeeds, it can give power to the deceiver."
Secrecy allows policies to be tweaked outside public view . Insiders gain influence
arguing for new approaches to the same goals. Even the goals can shift as interventions
deteriorate. The political consequences of failure may be avoided.
It is rare for an official to acknowledge failure and reverse policy; personal, political
and national credibility may be at stake. President Johnson insisted that he was not going to
be the "first
president to lose a war." Bush, Obama and even Trump did not want to "lose"
Afghanistan.
Nonetheless, lying about military interventions carries a serious risk.
The Pentagon Papers eroded public faith in the credibility of our democratic government.
That erosion was later reinforced by the Watergate scandal. As
Bok, the philosopher, wrote , "deception of this kind strikes at the very essence of
democratic government."
British leader Winston Churchill said , "In
war-time truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."
Deception aimed at the public and the Axis was an essential part of Churchill's war
strategy.
The Afghanistan papers reveal yet again that statesmen still believe the truth should be
concealed. But the credibility of statecraft and leadership itself were seriously eroded by the
Vietnam lies, weakening the fabric of democracy.
The mild reaction to lying in plain sight about Afghanistan suggests the U.S. may be well
down the road to unravelling government's credibility and our democracy altogether.
The first video is an excellent introduction to Neoliberalism even for someone who has been
reading about it for a few years. It takes all the facts and makes an informative, easy to
follow, clear documentary.
This speech on neo-liberalism omits fundamental questions. Economic system begin XX
century from military dominion of England on world commerce, concreted in social elites
over the world that are fitted to this dominion. Description of this dominion was clear by
America independence fighters. who signal hard taxes on artisan, farmers and manufactures
and low prices in prime matter. English supremacy was continuation of Napoleon Bonaparte
defeat in 1815 and US-England war in 1820 stalemate. Like Persian and another empires,
England submit defeated countries and make war using France and her army to submit other
countries
England dominion system causes in all countries unsupportable misery and hungry states.
England speak of free trade when was necessary to sustain her oppression system but several
times, England don't need to speak, deplorable states were sustained by France or other
countries like Brazil in wars as Brazil Triple Alliance war against Paraguay 1864-70.
England system suffers a defeat in France-Prussian war 1871.
American industry was colonized by England capitals and begin a monopoly system on
beginning manufactures. This one was battled by American manufacturers opposition what
produces anti-monopolies laws and corresponding control organs. This fight counter
monopolies was triumph after 1929 great depression that Roosevelt develops a state
intervention in economy. Roosevelt limits monopolies but no eliminate that at all. Several
monopolies must to accept business as normal and not to put monopoly price to they
merchandise. For example oil industry,That is England capitals and standard-oil capitals
dominated. Much economists made a cover-up of Roosevelt politics, a societal reality, and
give credits to John Maynard Keynes. Of this guy only remember what a functionary of
British East India Monopoly Company was.
Here we can to consider video on Neo-liberalism, Roosevelt as govern was result of a
long fight between American people and they manufacturers against monopolies.
Partisans of international monopolies defeated remain in hibernation state. This was the
Neo-liberalism seedbeds.
Economic crisis were maintained faraway by anti monopolies politics but causes were not
suppressed. Too many countries were obliged to consume few merchandise and this originates
crisis., By 1974 economic crisis explode. And to skip some consequences Kissinger China
accords were signed..Main question resolved was low profit in manufacture.
Monopolies augment their power and appears Neo-liberalism as reality triumphant first an
after as triumphant speech.
Big production in China first was competitions in all markets but after appear a jam in
in merchandise , neo-liberalism attacks state institutions that protect local markets from
dumping coming from China bring by old monopolies. Political financial and military power
was exerted on local elites to suppress manufacture support, and old assemble factories
were suppressed. Free market speech was cover up of these military and political driven
actions.
Fight counter neo-liberalism must to base in anti monopoly criteria, but sufficiently
informed of history of monopolies that is not said in video referenced.The only one exit to
defeat misery and Neo-liberalism is to disrupt power concentration that fall in monopolies
practices with exclusion of monopolists of economic activity and condemns to prison to
violators.
Despite the handwringing otherwise, there are quite a few well-off people outside the
coast who like decorating in gold and even being so tacky as to have cars that match.
At what point up the socio-economic ladder do these sorts of concerns become manifest? And
how does one know? I'm an upper lower-class "coastal," and I'm mostly concerned with eating
properly and keeping my dilapidated 50s rambler from leaking. Years ago, when my children
were at home, and our family was solidly upper middle-class (at least that's what I thought),
I still didn't consider what other people thought of my cars, nor did I think much about
decorating colors.
Honestly, I think I find simple survival more interesting.
All of my life, those with immense, some might claim obscene amounts of wealth have been
celebrated in these United States, but you can sense a backlash is coming to them & showy
displays that come with the territory.
Well there was that period–late 60s, early 70s–when people like Leonard
Bernstein dressed in jeans and conspicuous wealth was very un-hip. Tom Wolfe wrote an article
about it,
I really think the turning point came around 1975 when the first pro athletes got million
a year contracts, and you can just imagine the jealousy of Ivy League types on Wall*Street as
the pros started making moon money.
By the time we got around to Reagan, high finance figured out how to hit the long ball via
Milken, etc.
I mentioned a week or 2 ago in regards to a pitcher who inked a nearly 1/3rd of a Billion
$ contract, contrast that with the $125k 1 year deal that Sandy Koufax signed in 1966.
Koufax and Don Drysdale (1965 World Series heroes) asked, together, for a $1 million, 3
year deal. That equated to a yearly salary of $166,000 for each of them for 3 years. (The
highest paid player in MLB at the time was Willie Mays at $105,000.) The Dodgers, with by far
the highest game attendance in baseball, offered Koufax $120k and Drysdale $105k. I believe
that was the salary that they accepted.
Much has changed since then. TV has made MLB a 7-8 $Billion a year enterprise. The LA
Dodgers as a team are now worth billion$. Marvin Miller wrenched union power for the players.
And remember, players have a very short earning window; Koufax retired at the age of 30 due
to an elbow worn out from throwing curve balls. (Sandy was a condo neighbor of mine when I
lived in Sun Valley, ID. A very special man.)
I graduated from college in 1979. Women wore (depending on the season), T-shirts,
sweatshirts, and jeans. Only the women from the the colleges that were seen as matrimonial in
orientation (one was called "Pine Mattress") wore makeup.
2 years after that, I was part of the group that did campus recruiting. Just walking
around, you could see a significant % of women wearing makeup, skirts, and hose, just to go
to class. Gah.
I think you are missing the point of my comment, that of all the things to get upset about
re Trump, it's his taste? Really? IMHO this is another manifestation of the fact that a
significant amount of the upset about him is his being so flagrantly nouveau riche and not
caring.
And you managed to miss the status signaling from the bourgeois on up? Women who color
their hair feel unkept if their roots grow in. Cars are huge status symbols, up and down the
line. Try driving an early 2000s car, even if in fine shape, and watch the reactions if
someone you've first met walks you to it. People look at the quality of leather in shoes,
tailoring and fabric as other status markers. Being thin is another status marker, as are
teeth ..
If you are really rich, the signals include flying on private jets, what charities you
support, what art you collect, if you own a vineyard (or have your name on a hospital wing or
building at a school .)
I read that Nixon acquired his hatred step by step and it was only really baked in after
about the 20000th time he got snubbed. For a long time he wanted to be one of them and he
could hardly believe it that it wasn't ever going to happen.
That was my take as well.
Snobbery is snobbery, and I thought Yves was pointing that out in a forceful manner, not
criticizing R.V.'s comment.
In any event, I find R.V.'s comments a welcome point of view adding depth to the larger
economic picture and its effects.
"because the bourgeois flavor of this corner of the Internet just doesn't suit my
proletariat tastes"
I think you completely misunderstood her point. She wasn't defending Trump's tastes in any
way, but pointing out that ALL the wealthy share similar tastes and singling Trump out as
some kind of singular aberration leaves out that this is standard of our ruling class.
None of us here support this kind status consumerism, and many of us likely share your
'proletarian tastes', its just that around here notions that Trump is some unique monster
different from the rest of his class hold little water.
I can't relate to a world where what you wear, what you drive and what you drink and the
conveyance which moves you around, really means anything.
That said, it's all part of the pecking order on high, and I get it. If Trump was seen in
a 2007 Toyota Matrix with 136k miles, his world would come undone.
Added to what the others have said; don't cut off your nose to spite your face. It takes a
thick skin to comment anywhere on the internet.
Also, so what if this blog commenteriat skews a bit bourgeois? Do you want to lock yourself
in an echo chamber? What good would that do for your understanding of the 'reality' on the
ground? I and others admit to frequenting conservative blogs. It doesn't mean we fully agree
with the reigning philosophies on those blogs, but we do tend to learn much of a substantive
nature that is not displayed on the "standard" MSM 'news' sources.
The entire lesson of the internet is that "Knowledge Is Power." Control the 'knowledge' or
it's accessibility, and you "rule" the society. Thus, a wide range of sources of information
is required. Locking yourself away in the anarchist sphere of the internet is going to stunt
your knowledge set, and limit your range of options for action. To effectively fight one's
enemies, one must understand them. So, to discommode the bourgeois, you first must get to
know them.
Finally, class has always been "..an unbridgeable chasm in western society." Else why all the
revolts and movements on the part of the working classes?
Anyway, don't leave in a huff. You are better than that.
This particular line of attack on Trump is exactly the line that used to be taken by the
old rich and New England rich against the new rich. (And the ethnic rich)
If you've ever wanted to understand what neoliberalism is, this is
the series for you.
Neoliberalism is an economic ideology that exists within the framework of capitalism. Over
four decades ago, neoliberalism become the dominant economic paradigm of global society.
In this video series, we'll trace the history of neoliberalism, starting with a survey of
neoliberal philosophy and research, a historical reconstruction of the movement pushing
for neoliberal policy solutions, witnessing the damage that neoliberalism did to its first
victims in the developing world, and then charting neoliberalism's infiltration of the
political systems of the United States and the United Kingdom. Learn how neoliberalism is
generating crises for humanity at an unprecedented rate.
Our "education" system has raised generations of useful idiots, unable to fight back
or even recognize the threat of the establishments breakaway civilization.
Good video. Reminded me of this bit I saved from Twitter some time ago:
"Probably
no man in history has had so little understanding of the workings of his own society
– and hence so little power to effect change – as liberal democratic man. We talk
about this with regard to capitalism – we're (supposedly) buffeted by impersonal and
unaccountable 'market forces' – but not with liberal democratic politics, although
it's fundamentally the same thing. Even if you could organize an angry mob, whose
residence would you march on? The serf knew, the slave knew. You do not. You have no
idea who your masters are or where they live. A 'liberal democracy' is a political
system where you have no idea who's in charge, no idea what they're planning, no
idea why they have the policies they have, and no idea of how to change any of it."
"free traders mistake money for wealth, wealth is derived from making things, money
is just a medium of exchange: any government that prints money with no regard to its
material basis in commodity production risks disaster."
"Whenever you hear the words "a country has to be competitive," it's not more
competition among businesses, it's that every country has to do whatever it can to
make available the closest thing to slave labor as possible. Period. No wishy-washy
jargon needed to cover the basic fact"
Excellent vid. Really puts it all together well. The Neoliberals are sucking as much
money and work out of us folks as they can get away with before they kill us all off
and use robots.
I love the content, just not the pacing. If you listen to most documentaries, you
will notice the is a pacing or cadence in the spoken narrative. Speak a little, then
give some time to absorb. This series would be a lot easier to listen to with some
added space... thanks. Look forward to this series.
"one of the main reasons why even sophisticated societies fall into this suicidal
spiral is the conflict between the short-term interests of decision-making elites
and the long-term interests of society as a whole, especially if the elites are able
to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. the reason why even
sophisticated societies fail is because the elites are never made to pay a price for
their follies"
What's not mentioned is this second phase of "liberalism" is the most dangerous
because we are more dependent on capitalist production than ever before. People
exist on a razors edge.
"All this is contrary to what classical economists urged. Their objective was for
governments elected by the population at large to receive and allocate the economic
surplus. Presumably this would have been to lower the cost of living and doing
business, provide a widening range of public services at subsidized prices or
freely, and sponsor a fair society in which nobody would receive special privileges
or hereditary rights. Financial sector advocates have sought to control democracies
by shifting tax policy and bank regulation out of the hands of elected
representatives to nominees from world's financial centers.
The aim of this planning
is not for the classical progressive objectives of mobilizing savings to increase
productivity and raise populations out of poverty.
The objective of finance
capitalism is not capital formation, but acquisition of rent-yielding privileges for
real estate, natural resources and monopolies. These are precisely the forms of
revenue that centuries of classical economists sought to tax away or minimize. By
allying itself with the rentier sectors and lobbying on their behalf – so as to
extract their rent as interest – banking and high finance have become part of the
economic overhead from which classical economists sought to free society.
The result
of moving into a symbiosis with real estate, mining, oil, other natural resources
and monopolies has been to financialize these sectors. As this has occurred, bank
lobbyists have urged that land be un-taxed so as to leave more rent (and other
natural resource rent) "free" to be paid as interest – while forcing governments to
tax labor and industry instead. To promote this tax shift and debt leveraging,
financial lobbyists have created a smokescreen of deception that depicts
financialization as helping economies grow. They accuse central bank monetizing of
budget deficits as being inherently inflationary – despite no evidence of this, and
despite the vast inflation of real estate prices and stock prices by predatory bank
credit.
Money creation is now monopolized by banks, which use this power to finance
the transfer of property – with the source of the quickest and largest fortunes
being infrastructure and natural resources pried out of the public domain of debtor
countries by a combination of political insider dealing and debt leverage – a merger
of kleptocracy with the world's financial centers. The financial strategy is capped
by creating international financial institutions (the International Monetary Fund,
European Central Bank) to bring pressure on debtor economies to take fiscal policy
out of the hands of elected parliaments and into those of institutions ruling on
behalf of bankers and bondholders. This global power has enabled finance to override
potentially debtor-friendly governments." Excerpt From Killing the Host Michael
Hudson
16:23
"Chile experienced a peaceful democratic rule for 41 years, that now has
violently come to an end. Pinochet and his followers described the coup as 'a war'.
It definitely looked that way. It was a Chilean example of 'instilling shock and
awe'. The days thereafter saw 13000 opposers arrested and locked up ." may be too
much of a literal translation but Dutch isn't my first language. (edited the time
stamp)
This, in turn, has led to young men coming together around their identity, trying to find
empowerment in all the wrong places -- in movements like the alt-right and incel forums, where
they find mutual solace in their sense of shared victimhood.
It's hard to blame them when the
media and Big Tech bombards them with messaging that extol the evils of their demographic.
"... The problem with an unseen stimulus is that no one thinks it's helping them. Obama provided tax relief for nearly every working American, but instead of sending citizens a check, as George W. Bush had done, his economists decided to structure it as a payroll tax cut, subtly increasing the size of everyone's paycheck. The administration then intentionally did not advertise the fact that it had given nearly every working American a tax cut , in the hopes that people would be nudged into spending, rather than saving, that extra cash. Predictably, in 2010, one poll showed that only 12 percent of Americans believed they'd received a tax cut; 24 percent thought Obama had raised their taxes. ..."
"... A program that was supposed to help underwater homeowners turned down 70 percent of those applying for permanent loan modifications , even as over six million families lost their homes. The point of the program was never actually to help people stay in their homes, of course; it was to preserve the finance industry by spacing out foreclosures. In the end, it achieved its aim: The banks today are as profitable as ever, while more households are renting than in 50 years . ..."
"... The individual mandate, similarly designed to force the healthiest young invincibles to enter the market to bring down costs, is equally dead. And a decade into the ACA, it has become more apparent than ever that the best way to reduce America's absurd health care costs would simply be a single-payer program. ..."
"... The political scientist Suzanne Mettler coined the term "the submerged state" in 2010 to refer to the jungle of hidden government "programs" designed not to call attention to themselves, often perpetuated not because they are still helping the neediest, but because they are lucrative to the finance, insurance, and/or real estate industries. ..."
Welcome to The Decade From Hell , our look
back at an arbitrary 10-year period that began with a great outpouring of hope and ended in a cavalcade of despair.
As 2009 ended, the editors of this magazine at the time
took their measure of the first year of Barack Obama's
presidency and declared it, with some reservations, a modest success. "All of this might not exactly place him in the pantheon next
to Franklin Roosevelt," they said of his major domestic achievements (the stimulus package, primarily, as the Affordable Care Act
had not yet been signed). "But it's not a bad start, given all the constraints of the political system (and global order) in which
he works."
That was the broad consensus of American liberals at the time, ranging from nearly the most progressive to nearly the most neoliberal.
Over the ensuing years, that consensus would crack and eventually shatter under the weight of one disappointment after another. The
story of American politics over the past decade is that of a political party on the cusp of enduring power and world-historical social
reform, and how these once imaginable outcomes were methodically squandered.
The bulk of that unsigned New Republic editorial in 2009 was dedicated to Obama's foreign policy, specifically the question
of whether he was waging enough war. The conclusion: He was. The editors praised "the escalation of the war in Afghanistan" as "the
most consequential action of the first year of his presidency," even though it
offended the base of his party and possibly injured his future political prospects. On strategic grounds, we believe he made
the right choice. But the thoroughness and logic of the process by which he arrived at this decision double our confidence in
that choice. The is exactly the type of pragmatism and non-ideological policymaking that sentient humans have craved after the
Bush years.
(Sure, escalate the endless wars -- but for God's sake, please do it non-ideologically .)
In December of this year, The Washington Post
obtained thousands of pages of documents from a government oversight project called "Lessons Learned," which included interviews
with more than 600 people involved in the war in Afghanistan at some point over its 18-year history. An interview with a National
Security Council official described, according to the Post , "constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to
produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary." Nearly every piece of
data used over the last decade to try to convince Americans that the war was going well, or even going according to any sort of coherent
logic or reason, was phony or meaningless.
"I don't want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years," Obama
reportedly said in 2009 , as he struggled
with the decision to escalate the war. The president and his closest advisers were determined to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam. Since
then, overwhelmed by billions
in U.S. "aid," the country has sunk into kleptocracy. Last year, according to the United Nations, was the single deadliest year
of the war for Afghan civilians. Today, around 13,000 American service members remain in Afghanistan. The Trump administration is
attempting to negotiate a peace with the Taliban that would leave it in charge of the country, just as it was prior to America's
invasion. The war in Afghanistan may finally end, but not before the close of this decade that began with that oh-so-carefully considered
decision to escalate it.
"We Are All Socialists Now," Newsweek declared on its cover in early 2009, when
it was still part of the prestige press (it is currently run by
a different sort of cult ).
Editor Jon Meacham, evincing the usual historical and political amnesia of airport bookstore historians, justified the claim by writing
that "for the foreseeable future Americans will be more engaged with questions about how to manage a mixed economy than about whether
we should have one." A mixed economy run according to Keynesian principles was, you may recall from reading slightly more rigorous
historians, the primary alternative to socialism on offer in the West throughout the twentieth century. The stimulus had been
large (if not large
enough ), but with $288 billion of it dedicated to tax credits and incentives for individuals and businesses, it scarcely resembled
socialism. Indeed, rather than giving Americans a greater hand in managing the economy, much of it was designed to be almost invisible.
This was intentional. In the May 6, 2009, issue of The New Republic , Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber
described Obama's "Nudge-ocracy," a belief, inspired
by behavioral economics, that the best way for the government to create good outcomes for the people was not through "heavy-handed
market interventions" but via technocratic attempts to change the behavior of individuals and the incentives of market actors.
The problem with an unseen stimulus is that no one thinks it's helping them. Obama provided tax relief for nearly every working
American, but instead of sending citizens a check, as George W. Bush had done, his economists decided to structure it as a payroll
tax cut, subtly increasing the size of everyone's paycheck. The administration then
intentionally did not advertise the fact that
it had given nearly every working American a tax cut , in the hopes that people would be nudged into spending, rather than saving,
that extra cash. Predictably, in 2010,
one poll showed
that only 12 percent of Americans believed they'd received a tax cut; 24 percent thought Obama had raised their taxes.
The flaw in this strategy was apparent to another author at this magazine. In late 2009, John B. Judis
foresaw a presidency in serious political trouble, because
Obama's fortunes were tied not just to the state of the economy, or even economic trends, but to people's perceptions of the
state of the economy. Noting how Roosevelt "dramatized the New Deal's contribution to the economy" by creating "colorful new agencies,"
thereby "ensuring that Roosevelt was given credit for the rise in employment," Judis called on Obama to "introduce programs that
provide jobs and capture the public's imagination." He also suggested the president
turn a deaf ear to those who are calling for fiscal responsibility. He should keep pouring money into jobs and into the pockets
of people who will spend until the unemployment rate begins going down and wages begin going up.... And, whatever he does to try
to mend the economy, Obama should never stop loudly trumpeting his efforts -- so that he is able to reap the credit when improvements
occur.
Roosevelt liked to wrestle his enemies in public, and Team Obama preferred to be above it all.
What Judis didn't consider, though, was that Obama didn't want to do any of those things. The president, along with economists
who worked for him such as Austan Goolsbee and Tim Geithner,
all pointedly rejected comparisons to
Roosevelt , based in part on a seemingly inaccurate understanding of the history of his first term but also seemingly based on
aesthetics: Roosevelt liked to wrestle his enemies in public, and Team Obama preferred to be above it all. It's hard to remember
now how wise everyone made it sound that the president and his team intentionally avoided doing things they worried would be too
popular, but there would not be another New Deal. Indeed, instead of ostentatious acts of helping people, the administration almost
preferred being seen standing athwart attempts to provide relief. A program that was supposed to help underwater homeowners
turned
down 70 percent of those applying for permanent loan modifications , even as over six million families lost their homes. The
point of the program was never actually to help people stay in their homes, of course; it was to
preserve the
finance industry by spacing out foreclosures. In the end, it achieved its aim: The banks today are as profitable as ever, while
more households are renting than in 50 years .
By far the most effective part of the Affordable Care Act, in terms of helping Americans get care, was simply expanding Medicaid.
But what many Democrats and liberals were most excited about was the bill's many experimental and technocratic attempts to "bend
the cost curve" -- reduce costs without price controls -- and "improve quality," mainly by encouraging insurers, with incentives,
to strive for outcomes that market forces alone weren't incentivizing them to aim for. The signature example of this may be the "Cadillac
tax," which was designed to nudge companies to force employees onto cheaper insurance plans with greater cost sharing -- a tax built
on the belief that one of the primary drivers of health care cost inflation was people taking advantage of their too-generous employers
and greedily consuming more health care than they needed. The tax never went into effect.
The individual mandate, similarly designed to force the healthiest
young invincibles to enter the market to bring down
costs, is equally dead. And a decade into the ACA, it has become more apparent than ever that the best way to reduce America's absurd
health care costs would simply be a single-payer program.
That is not to say that the ACA did not end up having the significant long-term political ramifications its drafters promised
it would. The primary non-Medicaid structure of the ACA, with its means-tested subsidies to purchase private insurance, had the predictable
effect of convincing some of its beneficiaries
that Obama and the Democratic Party had nothing to do with the government assistance they weren't sure they were getting. Then, as
costs rose and rose over the decade, that structure also
had the predictable effect of making people
who receive partially subsidized private care resentful of those poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.
Much of the decade we have just endured has shown how the Democratic addiction to dispensing benefits through the tax code in
complicated, indirect ways -- combined with the usual insufficiency of these benefits -- was nearly perfectly designed to foment
mass resentment of others, imagined or not, who might secretly be getting the Good Benefits.
The political scientist Suzanne Mettler coined the term "the submerged state" in 2010 to refer to the jungle of hidden government
"programs" designed not to call attention to themselves, often perpetuated not because they are still helping the neediest, but because
they are lucrative to the finance, insurance, and/or real estate industries.
One of her illustrations
of the effect of the submerged state is a graph showing how many people who used particular government programs admitted so only
after first telling researchers they'd received no assistance. That nearly 40 percent of people on Medicare claimed this is likely
attributable to ideology (and the fact that Medicare, like Social Security, was designed to make retirees feel like they had "paid
into it").
But when 60 percent of people who used tax-advantaged higher education savings accounts claim they received no government benefits,
as they did in Mettler's study, it's probably because tax-advantaged savings accounts are wholly inadequate to the problem of higher
education costs. Now combine this with a persistent belief (memorably
described by Ashley C. Ford a few years ago) that minorities -- black kids in particular -- get to go to college for free by
default, and stir in the rise of tuition costs and other expenses due to cutbacks in state investment in education. The result of
this cocktail of ignorant biases and inadequate solutions might look something like the year 2019.
Looks like both Douma and Skripals have the same authors and were carefully pre-planned false
flag operations.
Notable quotes:
"... "The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing" ..."
"... "I have always expected the OPCW to be a true paradigm of multilateralism. My hope is that the concerns expressed publicly by the Panel, in its joint consensus statement, will catalyse a process by which the Organisation can be resurrected to become the independent and non-discriminatory body it used to be." ..."
"... Click this hyperlink to read a BBC article dated five days before the Douma incident, describing how the Syrian government "appears poised to regain control" of the town and how Jaysh al-Islam fighters were already evacuating. The battle was won. Assad would have stood absolutely nothing to gain from tempting a retaliation from western powers (which could have been far more severe than it ended up being) all to drop a couple of cylinders of chlorine gas, which incidentally is a highly ineffective weapon that ordinarily takes a very long time to kill. ..."
"... "The jihadists and the various opposition groups who've been fighting against Assad have much greater motivation to launch a chemical weapons attack and make it look like Assad was responsible," the ex-SAS and Parachute Regiment commander added. "Their motivation being that they want to keep the Americans involved in the war -- following Trump saying the US was going to leave Syria for other people to sort out." ..."
"... Admiral Lord West made similar comments on the BBC around the same time, prompting BBC host Annita McVeigh to flip into frantic narrative management mode suggesting that he's "muddying the waters" during an "information war with Russia". ..."
"... "If I were advising some of the Islamist groups, many of whom are worse than Daesh," West said, "I would say look, we've got to wait until there's another attack by Assad's forces, particularly if they've got a helicopter overhead or something like that and they're dropping barrel bombs, and we set off some chlorine. Because we'll get the next attack from the allies. And there's no doubt that if we believe he's done a chemical attack we should do that. And those attacks will get bigger, and it's the only way they've got, actually, of stopping the inevitable victory of Assad." ..."
There have been many US military interventions that were based on lies. This is not a
conspiracy theory. It is not some kooky blogger's opinion. It is an extensively documented and indisputable fact .
Nothing has ever been done to address this extensively documented and indisputable fact. No
laws were ever changed. No war crimes tribunals were ever held. No policies or procedures were
ever revised. No one was ever even fired. No changes were implemented to prevent the Iraq
deception from happening again, and, when it happened again, no changes were implemented to
prevent the
Libya deception from happening again.
When you make a mistake, you take measures afterward to ensure that you never make the same
mistake again. When you do something on purpose, and you intend on doing it again, you do not
take any such measures.
I don't claim to know exactly who would have been involved in such a staging and to what
extent. It is technically possible, as the UK's Admiral Lord West speculated at the time , that it was perpetrated
independently by the vicious
al-Qaeda-linked Jaysh al-Islam forces who'd been occupying Douma, a last-ditch attempt to
provoke a western military response that might save them from the brink of defeat at the hands
of the surging Syrian Arab Army. Jaysh al-Islam has
an established record of deliberately massacring civilians , and of using civilians as
military leverage by locking them in
cages on rooftops in strategic Douma locations to prevent airstrikes. The narrative management operation known as
the White Helmets
would also have been involved to some extent, and it's very possible that Saudi Arabia,
who backs Jaysh al-Islam , was involved as well.
Any number of other allied intelligence agencies could have also been involved to some
degree (perhaps with the more expanded goal of ensuring continued US military commitment in
Syria during an administration that is vocally opposed to it), and it's unknown if anyone
involved would have had direct contact with any part of any US government agency regarding any
of this. All we know for sure is that there's a growing mountain of evidence that the Syrian
government was not involved, and that this raises extremely important questions about (A) who
really killed those civilians in Douma and (B) how seriously any future demands for military
action should be taken from the US power alliance.
That mountain of evidence includes the following 12 items. Taken individually they are
reason enough to be skeptical of the narratives that are being promoted by a government with a
known history of using lies, propaganda and false flags to advance preexisting military
agendas. Taken together, and looked at with intellectual honesty, they are enough to obliterate
anyone's trust in what we've been told about Douma.
1. A leaked OPCW Engineering
Assessment concluded that the gas cylinders on the scene were manually placed there.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/2l4X3XImy4w
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is a purportedly neutral and
international watchdog group dedicated to eliminating the use of chemical weapons around the
world. In May of this year, a leaked internal OPCW document labeled " Engineering Assessment
of Two Cylinders Observed at the Douma Incident " was
published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. The Engineering Assessment
was signed by a South African ballistics expert named Ian Henderson, whose name is seen listed
in expert leadership positions on OPCW documents from as far back as 1998 and as
recently as
2018 , and its authenticity was quickly confirmed by the OPCW in a statement sent to
multiple journalists that it was "conducting an internal investigation about the
unauthorised release of the document in question."
Henderson ran some experiments and found no scientifically grounded theory for how the
cylinders could possibly have been dropped vertically from the air while being found in the
condition and locations that they were found in, concluding instead that they were manually
placed on the scene. This is a huge difference, since the Assad coalition was the only side
with aircraft and Jaysh al-Islam were the only forces on the ground.
"The dimensions, characteristics and appearance of the cylinders, and the surrounding scene
of the incidents, were inconsistent with what would have been expected in the case of either
cylinder being delivered from an aircraft," Henderson wrote. "In each case the alternative
hypothesis produced the only plausible explanation for observations at the scene."
"In summary, observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent
analysis, suggest that there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed
at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft," Henderson concludes.
This is unsurprising, since the hypothetical physics of the empire's airdrop narrative make
no sense to anyone with any understanding of how material objects move. To get a simple
explanation of this, watch the breakdown in this three-minute animation . For a more in-depth look,
check out this long Twitter thread
by Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre.
The existence of Henderson's report was kept secret from the public by the OPCW, which might
make more sense after we get through #2 on this list.
2. US officials reportedly
pressured the OPCW to find evidence of Assad's guilt.
Journalist Jonathan Steele met with second OPCW whistleblower, who detailed the doctoring
of the report on Douma to conform to the phony US/NATO version of events.
In addition to whoever leaked the Henderson report in May, a second whistleblower going by
the pseudonym of "Alex" emerged in October
to give a presentation before the whistleblower's advocacy group Courage Foundation
exposing far more plot holes in the official Douma narrative. This same whistleblower also
spoke with award-winning British journalist Jonathan Steele, who
published a bombshell report on Alex's revelations in CounterPunch last month.
Among the most stunning revelations in Steele's article was Alex's report that US officials
attempted to pressure OPCW inspectors during the Organisation's drafting of its Interim Report
on their Douma investigation in July 2018, and that this intercession was facilitated by an
OPCW official named Bob Fairweather.
"On July 4 there was another intervention," Steele writes. "Fairweather, the chef de
cabinet, invited several members of the drafting team to his office. There they found three US
officials who were cursorily introduced without making clear which US agencies they
represented. The Americans told them emphatically that the Syrian regime had conducted a gas
attack, and that the two cylinders found on the roof and upper floor of the building contained
170 kilograms of chlorine. The inspectors left Fairweather's office, feeling that the
invitation to the Americans to address them was unacceptable pressure and a violation of the
OPCW's declared principles of independence and impartiality."
It's unknown what forces were at play that enabled the US government to insert itself into
into an ostensibly impartial OPCW investigation with the help of an OPCW official, but it
wouldn't be the first time the US government leveraged the Organisation into facilitating
preexisting regime change agendas against a disobedient Middle Eastern nation. In 2002
Mother Jones
reported that the US government, spearheaded by John Bolton, had used the threat of
withdrawing its disproportionately high percentage of funding from the Organisation if it
didn't oust its then-Director General Jose Bustani. The popular Bustani, who'd previously been
unanimously re-elected to his position, had been hurting the case for war with his successful
negotiations with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In March 2018, after Bolton was selected as Trump's
National Security Advisor, The Intercept
revealed that the campaign to remove Bustani had also included Bolton personally
threatening his children.
Bolton was operating at the highest levels of the Trump White House throughout the entire
duration of the OPCW's Douma investigation. He was Trump's National Security Advisor from April
9, 2018 to September 10, 2019. The OPCW's Fact-Finding mission didn't arrive in Syria
until April 14 2018 and didn't begin its investigation in Douma until several days after
that, with its final report being released in March of 2019.
3. Levels of chlorinated
organic chemicals didn't indicate any chlorine gas attack took place.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/ojItF6MGL-0
"The main point is that chlorine gas degrades rapidly in the air,"
Jonathan Steele told Tucker Carlson last month detailing what was told to him by Alex. "So
coming in two weeks later, you wouldn't find anything. What you would find is that the gas
contaminates or affects other chemicals in the natural environment. So-called chlorinated
organic chemicals [COCs]. The difficulty is they exist anyway in the natural environment and
water. So the crucial thing is the levels: were there higher levels of chlorinated organic
chemicals found after the alleged gas attack than there would have been in the normal
environment?"
"When they got back to the Netherlands, to The Hague where the OPCW has its headquarters,
samples were sent off to designated laboratories, then there was a weird silence developed,"
Steele continued. "Nobody told the inspectors what the results of the analysis was. It was only
by chance that the inspector found out through accident earlier the results would come in and
there were no differences at all. There were no higher levels of chlorinated organic chemicals
in the areas where the alleged attack had happened where there is some suspicious cylinders had
been found by opposition activists. So it didn't seem possible that there could have been a gas
attack because the levels were just the same as in the natural environment."
"[Alex] got sight of the results which indicated that the levels of COCs were much lower
than what would be expected in environmental samples," Steele
reported in CounterPunch . "They were comparable to and even lower than those given in the
World Health Organisation's guidelines on recommended permitted levels of trichlorophenol and
other COCs in drinking water. The redacted version of the report made no mention of the
findings."
"Had they been included, the public would have seen that the levels of COCs found were no
higher than you would expect in any household environment", Alex told Steele.
This inconvenient fact was omitted from both the OPCW's Interim Report in July 2018 and its
Final Report in March 2019.
4. Many signs and symptoms of alleged chlorine gas poisoning
weren't consistent with chlorine gas poisoning.
"It is not possible to precisely link the cause of the signs and symptoms to a specific
chemical", but it was definitely chlorine because we said so. No you can't see the evidence,
just trust us. pic.twitter.com/2KguY4Lbyu
The OPCW's
Final Report on Douma in March 2019 assures us that the team found "reasonable grounds that
the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic chemical contained reactive
chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine." A leaked internal OPCW
email , featuring an inspector voicing objections to the aforementioned Bob Fairweather
over vital information being omitted from the developing Interim Report on Douma, contradicts
this assurance, saying observed symptoms weren't consistent with chlorine gas poisoning.
"In this case the confidence in the identity of chlorine or any choking agent is drawn into
question precisely because of the inconsistency with the reported and observed symptoms," the
email reads. "The inconsistency was not only noted by the FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] team but
strongly noted by three toxicologists with expertise in exposure to CW [Chemical Weapons]
agents."
So the OPCW's investigative team as well as three toxicologists said what was observed
didn't match chlorine gas poisoning symptoms. This information was, of course, hidden from us
by the OPCW.
A leaked first draft of
the Interim Report on Douma, before OPCW officials started cutting out chunks which didn't suit
the US narrative, gives more detail. Here are some excerpts (emphases mine):
"Some of the signs and symptoms described by witnesses and noted in photos and video
recordings taken by witnesses, of the alleged victims are not consistent with exposure to
chlorine-containing choking or blood agents such as chlorine gas, phosgene or cyanogen
chloride. Specifically, the rapid onset of heavy buccal and nasal frothing in many victims, as
well as the colour of the secretions, is not indicative of intoxication from such
chemicals."
"The large number of decedents in the one location (allegedly 40 to 45), most of whom were
seen in videos and photos strewn on the floor of the apartments away from open windows, and
within a few meters of an escape to un-poisoned or less toxic air, is at odds with intoxication
by chlorine-based choking or blood agents , even at high concentrations."
"The inconsistency between the presence of a putative chlorine-containing toxic chocking or
blood agent on the one hand and the testimonies of alleged witnesses and symptoms observed from
video footage and photographs, on the other, cannot be rationalised. The team considered two
possible explanations for the incongruity:
a. The victims were exposed to another highly toxic chemical agent that gave rise to the
symptoms observed and has so far gone undetected.
b. The fatalities resulted from a non-chemical-related incident ."
5. A doctor in Douma
told journalist Robert Fisk that there was no gas poisoning.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/jNIp1lZwJts
Shortly after the Douma incident a video was circulated online and
redistributed on news media around the world featuring people being hosed down with water in a
hospital and an infant receiving a respiratory treatment. A doctor who worked in the hospital
Assim Rahaibani
gave the following account to journalist Robert Fisk days after the incident, saying those
in the video were actually just suffering from hypoxia due to dust inhaled after a conventional
bombing:
"I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the
night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government
forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night -- but on this night, there was wind and
huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People
began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a 'White
Helmet', shouted 'Gas!', and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other.
Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from
hypoxia -- not gas poisoning."
Lest anyone accuse Fisk of having any special loyalties to the Syrian government, in this
same report he says it "is indeed a ruthless dictatorship."
6. A BBC reporter said he has
proof that the hospital scene was staged.
After almost 6 months of investigations, i can prove without a doubt that the #Douma
Hospital scene was staged. No fatalities occurred in the hospital.
All the #WH , activists and
people i spoke to are either in #Idlib or #EuphratesShield
areas.
Only one person was in #Damascus .
The BBC, another establishment that can hardly be accused of Assad loyalism, saw its Syria
producer Riam Dalati claiming earlier this year that he had proof beyond a doubt the
aforementioned hospital scene was staged. While holding to the establishment line that the
attack did happen, Dalati expressed uncertainty as to what if any chemical would have been used
and said "everything else around the attack was manufactured for maximum effect." Emphases
mine:
"The ATTACK DID HAPPEN, Sarin wasn't used, but we'll have to wait for OPCW to prove Chlorine
or otherwise," Dalati tweeted . However, everything
else around the attack was manufactured for maximum effect . After almost 6 months of
investigations, i can prove without a doubt that the Douma Hospital scene was staged ."
"No fatalities occurred in the hospital," Dalati continued. "All the White Helmets,
activists and people i spoke to are either in Idlib or Euphrates Shield areas. Only one person
was in Damascus. Russia and at least one NATO country knew about what happened in the hospital.
Documents were sent. However, no one knew what really happened at the flats apart from
activists manipulating the scene there . This is why Russia focused solely on discrediting the
hospital scene."
In other words, Russia knew that these "activists" were staging the scene for the news
media, and understandably focused on discrediting their work.
"I can tell you that Jaysh al-Islam ruled Douma with an iron fist," Dalati added . "They
coopted activists, doctors and humanitarians with fear and intimidation."
Dalati
set his account to private for an extended period after these extremely controversial
statements got him a flood of attention, but the thread is up on Twitter as of this writing (
here's an archive
in case they vanish again).
7. More evidence the Douma scene was knowingly staged for
media.
Pro-rebel activists appear to have staged "Last Hug" photo. It went viral claiming to show
young victims of the Douma gas attack in their "last embrace".
Victims can be clearly seen on 2 separate floors in aftermath footage. Placed in position at
collection/identification point. pic.twitter.com/9kyGQEtO8p
Riam Dalati also tweeted evidence after the
attack that people had staged the corpses of two children to make it appear as though they died
hugging each other for the purpose of emotional manipulation. If you've got a strong stomach
(seriously think hard about whether this is something you want in your head before diving in),
Stephen McIntyre also compiled some disturbing
proof of dead infants being physically placed on top of other corpses in between video
shoots of the Douma incident's aftermath.
Whoever was positioning these bodies for the cameras clearly had a goal of generating an
emotional response from the outside world. Which would be precisely the goal of staging a false
chemical weapons attack.
8. Witness testimony at The Hague.
It seems the UK govt launched strikes on #Syria - bringing us
into potential conflict with nuclear-armed Russia-in response to a CW attack that witnesses
(speaking at The Hague), say didn't happen. If that's not a resigning offence, then what on
earth is? https://t.co/TMitqbvAQ6
Seventeen Syrian civilians
, including medical personnel and some of the "victims" seen in the aforementioned hospital
footage, spoke at the OPCW headquarters in The Hague saying that no chemical weapons attack
took place. RT reports :
"There were people unknown to us who were filming the emergency care, they were filming
the chaos taking place inside, and were filming people being doused with water. The
instruments they used to douse them with water were originally used to clean the floors
actually," Ahmad Kashoi, an administrator of the emergency ward, recalled. "That happened for
about an hour, we provided help to them and sent them home. No one has died. No one suffered
from chemical exposure."
The briefing was boycotted by the
US and 16 of its allies and was smeared as an unconscionable Russian hoax by media outlets
ranging from
Sky News to
Al Jazeera to
The Guardian to
The Intercept , apparently for no other reason than that what these Syrians were saying
didn't match the unsubstantiated claims being promoted by the political/media class of the
US-centralized empire. If you want to just listen to what the Syrians themselves say and make
up your own mind, RT has an English translation video here :
https://www.youtube.com/embed/NVnfUeZ3lp4
9. The first OPCW Director General finds the
glaring irregularities and omissions from the OPCW's Douma report "very disturbing".
After the aforementioned Courage Foundation presentation given by Alex this past October,
the aforementioned former OPCW Director General Jose Bustani (the one whose kids John Bolton
threatened) had this to say :
"The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged
Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of
what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed
incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing"
"I have always expected the OPCW to be a true paradigm of multilateralism. My hope is that
the concerns expressed publicly by the Panel, in its joint consensus statement, will catalyse a
process by which the Organisation can be resurrected to become the independent and
non-discriminatory body it used to be."
10. This OAN reporter literally just walking
around asking people in Douma what they saw.
12. Common sense: Assad stood nothing to
gain from launching a chemical attack, while Jaysh al-Islam fighters stood everything to gain
by faking one.
This is the initial reason why critical thinkers were so skeptical of the establishment
Douma narrative: from the very beginning, it made no sense at all.
Click this
hyperlink to read a BBC article dated five days before the Douma incident, describing how
the Syrian government "appears poised to regain control" of the town and how Jaysh al-Islam
fighters were already evacuating. The battle was won. Assad would have stood absolutely nothing
to gain from tempting a retaliation from western powers (which could have been far more severe
than it ended up being) all to drop a couple of cylinders of chlorine gas, which incidentally
is a
highly ineffective weapon that ordinarily takes a very long time to kill.
Jaysh al-Islam (and whoever else they may have been working with), on the other hand, would
have stood everything to gain by murdering a few of the civilians they had been holding captive
in the town they'd invaded in the hopes that western forces would become their airforce for a
bit and hold off the Syrian Arab Army from reclaiming Douma.
"Why would Assad use chemical weapons at this time? He's won the war," Major General
Jonathan Shaw
told The Mail on Sunday at the time. "That's not just my opinion, it is shared by senior
commanders in the US military. There is no rationale behind Assad's involvement whatsoever.
He's convinced the rebels to leave occupied areas in buses. He's gained their territory. So why
would he be bothering gassing them?"
"The jihadists and the various opposition groups who've been fighting against Assad have
much greater motivation to launch a chemical weapons attack and make it look like Assad was
responsible," the ex-SAS and Parachute Regiment commander added. "Their motivation being that
they want to keep the Americans involved in the war -- following Trump saying the US was going
to leave Syria for other people to sort out."
"President Assad is in the process of winning this civil war, and he was about to take over
Douma, all that area," West said. "He'd had a long, long, long slog slowly capturing that area
of the city, and there just before he goes in and takes it all over, apparently he decides to
have a chemical attack. It just doesn't ring true. It seems extraordinary, because clearly he
would know that there's likely to be a response from the allies. What benefit is there for his
military? Most of the rebel fighters, this disparate group of Islamists, had withdrawn, there
were a few women and children left around. What benefit was there militarily in doing what he
did? I find that extraordinary."
"Whereas we know that in the past some of the Islamo groups have used chemicals, and of
course there'd be huge benefit in them labeling an attack as coming from Assad, because they
would guess quite rightly that there would be a response from the US as there was last time,
and possibly from the UK and France," West added.
"If I were advising some of the Islamist groups, many of whom are worse than Daesh," West
said, "I would say look, we've got to wait until there's another attack by Assad's forces,
particularly if they've got a helicopter overhead or something like that and they're dropping
barrel bombs, and we set off some chlorine. Because we'll get the next attack from the allies.
And there's no doubt that if we believe he's done a chemical attack we should do that. And
those attacks will get bigger, and it's the only way they've got, actually, of stopping the
inevitable victory of Assad."
These are not Assad sympathizers or Kremlin assets saying this. These are not a bunch of
hippie dippie anti-imperialists. These are lifelong military men, thinking in military terms,
describing what they were seeing. And what they were seeing is the thing that a false flag
is.
The @OPCW
concealing that #Douma was likely
staged is a big story.
But perhaps a bigger story is this: if staged, how did the victims (mostly children) die?
And what role if any in their deaths did US UK backed #WhiteHelmets
'rescuers' who appear to have staged the attack play? https://t.co/BDY1lSqfmz
This isn't just some idle philosophical question. People died. A massive war crime occurred
and the more minutes tick by before a legitimate investigation is launched -- with full
transparency and accountability this time -- the less available evidence there will be. Which
is why establishment narrative managers on Syria go full dead-weight
when asked if they support a full criminal investigation into what happened. They don't
actually believe it will go their way, and rightly so.
Meanwhile the illegal occupation of Syria drags on, perhaps until Trump can be replaced with
a more compliant puppet, and we're all basically just sitting around waiting to be deceived
again.
Further depth on all these subjects can be realised by perusing the collected sayings of
P.T. Barnum... he created the meme for the modern media perversion of reality in accordance
with their Usury Empire masters' wishes.
Pedantic point Феликс
Эдмундович
Дзержинский
Feliks (Felix) Edmundovich (son of Edmund) Dzerzhinskiy
is the Russianised version of the Polish
Feliks Dzierżyński
And just to show how how small the world is, he was a school with Piłsudski (and
Kerenskiy's father was the teacher of the young Lenin)
(In fact the Bolshevik world seems to have been as small as the conspirators' world.
Anybody know a Russian woman we can put in the same room as Flynn so we can create the story
that Putin has set a honey trap? Yeah says Halper, there's one right here in Cambridge.
Anybody know a Russian we can put in the same room as Trump junior? Yeah says Simpson,
there's this Russian lawyer who's part of our lobbying efforts. Anybody got Putin's niece?
Yeah, says Mifsud, I've got a student who can be her.)
An interesting article 2012 in the 'Baltic Times', headlined 'Dialogues between Dzerzhinsky
and Pilsudski' reports on a play by Arvydas Juozaitis, who is apparently a 'Riga-based
Lithuanian philosopher, writer and former Lithuanian diplomat'.
In it, apparently, the pair renew what was probably an early acquaintance when they both
attended the same Russian school in Vilnius, in Purgatory, and attempt to justify the very
different courses they followed to each other.
It is interesting that Juozaitis portrays both as having started out as what one might
call 'Polonised Lithuanians.' According to the report:
'Both were born into the families of Lithuanian nobility. Both families, as is custom,
possessed picturesque coats of arms of the family. Both families were of Lithuanian origin:
Dzerzhinsky, rather historically (he was born near Minsk) due to his noble roots, while
Pilsudski could be called ethnic Lithuanian (he was born in Zalavas, not far from Vilnius),
but both of them chose to be Poles.'
Even more interesting, to my mind, is the fact that we see an – obviously
intelligent – Lithuanian nationalist suggesting that Dzerzhinsky's adoption of
Bolshevism may have been underpinned by agendas not so different from those of Pilsudski.
What appears at first sight to be a radical gulf between the two men, Juozaitis appears to
suggest, was essentially about the most promising means of implementing what might be
described as a 'Polish-Polish Lithuanian revanchist' agenda.
The 'Baltic Times' report makes crystal clear the view of the play's author that this was
a dispute over means, not ends. It also appears to suggest that ultimately both men were more
Lithuanian than either Bolshevik or Polish:
'The performance by Juozaitis presents dialogues between Dzerzhinsky and Pilsudski in
Purgatory, which was placed by Juozaitis, in the drama, under the foundation of the building
of Gate of Dawn, the Vilnius Catholic shrine with its miraculous painting of St. Mary.
'Theater actors Gediminas Storpirstis and Aleksas Kazanavicius played the roles of
Pilsudski and Dzerzhinsky, presenting some pieces of the "The Heart in Vilnius."
'"I wanted to conquer Moscow and to create Rzeczpospolita [the Polish word meaning
'republic' and referring to the historical commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania] with you,
not with Lenin and Stalin," Kazanavicius-Dzerzhinsky said, talking further about "the Vilnius
empire," and adding, "I was lonely in the sea of Slavs."
'"And Poles are not Slavs?" Storpirstis-Pilsudski asked.'
If there was anyone who should have been impeached, it was George Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin
Powell and George Tenet, who was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, for assisting
Cheney in the Iraq WMD lies.
But...what did Nancy say then?
Nancy Pelosi: I Knew Bush Jr Was Lying About WMD To Start War, But Didn't See It As
Impeachable
"... My paranoid fear is that Pelosi or McConnell might try to time the proceedings so as to take Bernie and Warren off the campaign trail at a crucial moment, helping Biden. ..."
"... Amfortas the hippie , December 21, 2019 at 5:40 pm ..."
"... that, and sucking the air out of the room for the primaries. When's super tuesday, again? surely they can engineer it so that their "high drama" coincides. ..."
"... "let's talk about universal material benefits" " ok, Vlad trying to distract us from whats really important " ..."
"... Hepativore , December 21, 2019 at 6:49 pm ..."
"... Happy winter Solstice, everyone! ..."
"... Anyway, the funny thing is, that Biden himself has said that he only wants to be a one-term president. It makes me wonder if he knows that he has neither the energy or presence of mind to hold the office, and that he is merely doing so because of establishment pressure to stop Sanders at all costs. ..."
Please bone up on US procedure. It's not good to have you confuse readers.
The Senate can't do anything until the House passes a motion referring the impeachment to
the Senate. The House ALSO needs to designate managers as part of that process.
Michael
Tracey argued that it's only Senate rules that require that the House formally transmit
the impeachment verdict. The Constitution says that the Senate has to try an impeached
president, and the Constitution trumps the Senate's rules. Logically, then, the Senate could
just modify its rules to try the president.
But the whole delay is weird and impeachment has only been done twice before, so not a lot
of precedent.
My paranoid fear is that Pelosi or McConnell might try to time the proceedings so as
to take Bernie and Warren off the campaign trail at a crucial moment, helping Biden.
that, and sucking the air out of the room for the primaries. When's super tuesday,
again? surely they can engineer it so that their "high drama" coincides.
"let's talk about universal material benefits" " ok, Vlad trying to distract us from
whats really important "
Anyway, the funny thing is, that Biden himself has said that he only wants to be a
one-term president. It makes me wonder if he knows that he has neither the energy or presence
of mind to hold the office, and that he is merely doing so because of establishment pressure
to stop Sanders at all costs. Plus, if the Democrats get the brokered convention they
are after, he can bow out, satisfied that he helped the DNC protect the donor class from the
Sanders threat.
The impeachment, what it means, panic in the establishment, as justice continues to creep
ever closer, biting at their heels. They can feel the heat of the reformation is closing in
on them, real justice, real trials and real convictions. They have good reason to fear and
panic, the deep state is apparently quite shallow at the end of the day, those seeking
justice for outweighing the corrupt political appointees and their falsely promoted minions
and they will pursue the shadow government for the chaos, loss of life, loss of wealth and
for the coming collapse as a result of shallow pathetic insatiable greed.
Re the obesity stats. If you know someone who is severely obese, please advise them to
have a Fibroscan to check their liver. I have a close relative who is now in stage 5
cirrhosis of the liver due to obesity. Not due to drinking; he did not drink alcohol in
excess. He is a college professor; he had all the usual blood tests, which were all fine. But
blood tests do not detect cirrhosis. Let me repeat that: blood tests do not detect cirrhosis
. He has about a year to live, unless he gets a transplant, he vomits blood and his muscles
are wasting. But his liver values on his bloodwork are fine .
Only a biopsy or a Fibroscan can detect this (Fibroscans are not perfect, but they are
better than nothing). This relative only found out he had a problem when he had the
characteristic bulge on his side, and went to the ER. His only "heads up" was that he was
told he had fatty liver. But the cirrhosis diagnosis only came about six months after
that.
Not everyone who is severely obese gets cirrhosis. There is a (common) genetic variation
which increases the risk; this relative has that variant. Also he ate terrible food all of
the time: Dunkin Donuts; Starbursts, McDonald's food. The liver is a filter. You can poison
it. Obesity is coming to be a very common cause of cirrhosis. Once you have it, losing weight
does not help. If you get cirrhosis from alcohol, stopping drinking can help. But changing
your eating does not help, once you get it from obesity. It is not even clear what you should
eat at that point (other than not eating toxic horrible stuff); I am not finding good
data.
I wanted to give him part of my liver, but I can't; I'm not healthy enough myself. Living
donation of part of your liver is a major operation.
"... Where is AOC in all this? She was th e prime mover on impeachment, specifically impeachment over a phone call rather than concentration camps and genocide. And now with impeachment she gave Pelosi cover to sell the country out again. I was wondering why many libreral centrists were expreasing admiration for her, a socialist. Maybe they recognized something? ..."
Interesting, to me at least, that the rocket docket timetable of the House impeachment
coincided with the deadline to pass a budget to avoid a(nother) govt shutdown. While all msm
eyes were transfixed by the hyperventilating spectacle, behind the scenes the budget passed
through the Dem House was filled with more tax breaks for the corporations and the .001%,
more money than the admin asked for the MIC, and killed a bill that would end medical
'surprise billing' (another gift to medical PE investors and giant hospital corporations),
basically a whole neolib wish list.
Interesting the two events coincided, and, that Nancy decided not to sent on the articles
to the Senate at this time. What gives? Is she hold on to them for a future time when she'll
need to use them as another distraction for the msm to report on? (no, that could not be the
reason. ;) )
Pointed this out a couple of days ago (Slate and Buzzfeed). Happy that it is not just the
online press pointing out it was Democrats killing this measure, Democrats in leadership
positions. I also like that few, if any, of our media is falling for the kabuki used by Neal
to stick the shiv in. Everyone gets that the 'competing plan' was there strictly to derail a
law that end the hugely profitable but fraudulent price gauging of healthcare by private
equity.
If he keeps this up, walking POS Schumer might make me miss Al D'Amato nah Al and Chuck
are just two different colors of tulle, adding illusion to the political process.
..and they could have just passed it for the good PR and then de-fanged it
administratively, but it looks like they wanted to press the point:
"No, Proles, we're not gonna let you breathe, not a bit."
Where is AOC in all this? She was th e prime mover on impeachment, specifically
impeachment over a phone call rather than concentration camps and genocide. And now with
impeachment she gave Pelosi cover to sell the country out again. I was wondering why many
libreral centrists were expreasing admiration for her, a socialist. Maybe they recognized
something?
"Nord Stream 2: Trump approves sanctions on Russia gas pipeline"
The Russians will probably finish that last segment themselves but the German reaction
will be the one to watch out for – if there is one. Without Nord Stream 2, Germany will
have to accept having a smaller economy because of insufficient energy to power it which will
have knock-on effects in taxation, revenue raising & allocation, etc.
This will make them less competitive against the US and other economies and if they are
forced to buy US gas shipments, it will play hell with their budget due to the excessive
cost. Having a US Ambassador that thinks of himself as a Proconsul of Germany has not
lessened any tensions either. So we will see if there is any German reaction.
When Russia finishes the pipeline, which is not really sure since the swiss special ships
might finish in time or might be actually needed to finish the pipeline, then why would a
reaction from Germany be needed?
If/when the pipeline is done, Germany will take the gas from it for e.g. its chemical
industry. From what I understand, the US hasn't sanctioned users of russian gas in general,
"only" companies who actively build on the pipeline, like the owner of the special ships
used.
If the US however doubles down and sanctions users of russian pipeline gas, then it will
probably have a big fight on its hand. Then not only Germany is affected but almost all EU
countries, except Poland and the Baltics of course.
Frankly, I just don't get the logic behind this move by Trump. Is he saying that he thinks
that Germany is a colony of the US and that the US gets to determine where they get their
resources? That is pretty high-handed, even for the US.
I think that's exactly what these sanctions are about. "The US considers the project a
security risk to Europe" certainly sounds colonialist, and "The Trump administration fears
the pipeline will tighten Russia's grip over Europe's energy supply and reduce its own share
of the lucrative European market for American liquefied natural gas" sounds like the USA
wants to tell Europe what to buy and where.
I'm not sure about pinning it all on Trump though: " Congress voted through the
measures as part of a defence bill last week and the legislation, which described the
pipeline as a "tool of coercion", was signed off by Mr Trump on Friday."
(Quotes from the BBC article)
Why have NATO. Do you need a military against a country that you buy gas from. You give
them enormous amounts of money and they can shut the switch at any time. Maybe we should
bring Russia into NATO to defend against aliens.
Russia asked to join NATO, but were rejected. NATO needs a bogey man enemy to justify
forcing all its members to spend 2% of GDP on US military equipment. The first thing American
arms salespersons did when the Berlin Wall fell was to head to Eastern Europe to sell
arms.
It might be high-handed, but it's not new. Variations of this game have gone on since the
80s, when the first gas exports from Russia were starting. This is an upswing in aggression,
but it's mostly a continuation of standard US policy.
I am not even sure that the increased aggression comes from Trump. It's more that gas
producers in the US are now more powerful than a decade ago (and somewhat desperate due to
low gas prices in the US), so their interests add to the old-school geopolitics.
Well Germany and EU are sure behaving as if they are colonies. Zero fight for what is good
for EU. Think Russia sanctions. Hurt only EU, not US and a little bit Russia, which now have
moved to produce themselves the stuff EU was selling to Russia. EU has screwed itself on the
long-term by order from the US. US is not Europe's friend, but is making sure that it gets
weaker and cannot offer an alternative, economical, social or military.
If you want to amuse yourself you can see the ships here :
They appear to be returning to port. Were last working just to the SSE of Bornholm (the
Danish island).
Here is a gazprom map of the route as of Oct .
Most of the remaining route, the segment in German EEZ waters going in the southwest directon
from Bornholm, is shallow water.
I keep wondering when Europe will decide to throw off the shackles. A complicating factor
may be history: they'd rather an American master, mostly far away, than a German one.
Didn't we interfere with Japanese oil supplies once? For large values of happy, I can say
I'm happy with synopsizing the result of World War 2 as being about 'Who had the most oil?' I
feel like we are now vaporizing so many kinds of capital to maintain energy dominance. Can
the US please stop fighting WWII sometime before WWIII
"... The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya. ..."
"... Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course, his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed. ..."
"... Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. ..."
"... We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact. ..."
The start of current decade revealed the most ruthless face of a global neo-colonialism. From Syria and Libya to Europe and Latin
America, the old colonial powers of the West tried to rebound against an oncoming rival bloc led by Russia and China, which starts
to threaten their global domination.
Inside a multi-polar, complex terrain of geopolitical games, the big players start to abandon the old-fashioned, inefficient direct
wars. They use today other, various methods like
brutal proxy
wars , economic wars, financial and constitutional coups, provocative operations, 'color revolutions', etc. In this highly
complex and unstable situation, when even traditional allies turn against each other as the global balances change rapidly, the forces
unleashed are absolutely destructive. Inevitably, the results are more than evident.
Proxy Wars - Syria/Libya
After the US invasion in Iraq, the gates of hell had opened in the Middle East. Obama continued the Bush legacy of US endless
interventions, but he had to change tactics because a direct war would be inefficient, costly and extremely unpopular to the American
people and the rest of the world.
The result, however, appeared to be equally (if not more) devastating with the failed US invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US
had lost total control of the armed groups directly linked with the ISIS terrorists, failed to topple Assad, and, moreover, instead
of eliminating the Russian and Iranian influence in the region, actually managed to increase it. As a result, the US and its allies
failed to secure their geopolitical interests around the various pipeline games.
In addition, the US sees Turkey, one of its most important ally, changing direction dangerously, away from the Western bloc. Probably
the strongest indication for this, is that Turkey, Iran and Russia decided very recently to proceed in an agreement on Syria without
the presence of the US.
Yet, the list of US failures does not end here. The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have
proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have
witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya.
Evidence from
WikiLeaks has shown that the old colonial powers have started a new round of ruthless competition on Libya's resources.
The usual story propagated by the Western media, about another tyrant who had to be removed, has now completely collapsed. They don't
care neither to topple an 'authoritarian' regime, nor to spread Democracy. All they care about is to secure each country's resources
for their big companies.
The Gaddafi case is quite interesting because it shows that
the Western
hypocrites were using him according to their interests .
Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they
had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order
to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course,
his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed.
Economic Wars, Financial Coups – Greece/Eurozone
It would be unthinkable for the neo-colonialists to conduct proxy wars inside European soil, especially against countries which
belong to Western institutions like NATO, EU, eurozone, etc. The wave of the US-made major economic crisis hit Greece and Europe
at the start of the decade, almost simultaneously with the eruption of the Arab Spring revolutionary wave and the subsequent disaster
in Middle East and Libya.
Greece was the easy victim for the global neoliberal dictatorship to impose catastrophic measures in favor of the plutocracy.
The Greek experiment enters its seventh year and the plan is to be used as a model for the whole eurozone. Greece has become also
the model for the looting of public property, as happened in the past with the East Germany and the
Treuhand Operation
after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
While Greece was the major victim of an economic war, Germany used its economic power and control of the European Central Bank
to impose unprecedented austerity, sado-monetarism and neoliberal destruction through silent financial coups in
Ireland ,
Italy and
Cyprus . The Greek political establishment collapsed with the rise of SYRIZA in power, and the ECB was forced to proceed
in an open financial coup against
Greece when the current PM, Alexis Tsipras, decided to conduct a referendum on the catastrophic measures imposed by the ECB, IMF
and the European Commission, through which the Greek people clearly rejected these measures, despite the propaganda of terror inside
and outside Greece. Due to the direct threat from Mario Draghi and the ECB, who actually threatened to cut liquidity sinking Greece
into a financial chaos, Tsipras finally forced to retreat, signing another catastrophic memorandum.
Through similar financial and political pressure, the Brussels bureaufascists and the German sado-monetarists along with the IMF
economic hitmen, imposed neoliberal disaster to other eurozone countries like Portugal, Spain etc. It is remarkable that even the
second eurozone economy, France,
rushed to
impose anti-labor measures midst terrorist attacks, succumbing to a - pre-designed by the elites - neo-Feudalism, under
the 'Socialist' François Hollande, despite the intense protests in many French cities.
Germany would never let the United States to lead the neo-colonization in Europe, as it tries (again) to become a major power
with its own sphere of influence, expanding throughout eurozone and beyond. As the situation in Europe becomes more and more critical
with the ongoing economic and refugee crisis and the rise of the Far-Right and the nationalists, the economic war mostly between
the US and the German big capital, creates an even more complicated situation.
The decline of the US-German relations has been exposed initially with the
NSA interceptions
scandal , yet, progressively, the big picture came on surface, revealing a
transatlantic
economic war between banking and corporate giants. In times of huge multilevel crises, the big capital always intensifies
its efforts to eliminate competitors too. As a consequence, the US has seen another key ally, Germany, trying to gain a certain degree
of independence in order to form its own agenda, separate from the US interests.
Note that, both Germany and Turkey are medium powers that, historically, always trying to expand and create their own spheres
of influence, seeking independence from the traditional big powers.
A wave of neoliberal onslaught shakes currently Latin America. While in Argentina, Mauricio Macri allegedly took the power normally,
the constitutional
coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, as well as, the
usual actions
of the Right opposition in Venezuela against Nicolás Maduro with the help of the US finger, are far more obvious.
The special weight of these three countries in Latin America is extremely important for the US imperialism to regain ground in the
global geopolitical arena. Especially the last ten to fifteen years, each of them developed increasingly autonomous policies away
from the US close custody, under Leftist governments, and this was something that alarmed the US imperialism components.
Brazil appears to be the most important among the three, not only due to its size, but also as a member of the BRICS, the team
of fast growing economies who threaten the US and generally the Western global dominance. The constitutional coup against Rousseff
was rather a sloppy action and reveals the anxiety of the US establishment to regain control through puppet regimes. This is a well-known
situation from the past through which the establishment attempts to secure absolute dominance in the US backyard.
The importance of Venezuela due to its oil reserves is also significant. When Maduro tried to approach Russia in order to strengthen
the economic cooperation between the two countries, he must had set the alarm for the neocons in the US. Venezuela could find an
alternative in Russia and BRICS, in order to breathe from the multiple economic war that was set off by the US. It is characteristic
that the economic war against Russia by the US and the Saudis, by keeping the oil prices in historically low levels, had significant
impact on the Venezuelan economy too. It is also known that the US organizations are funding the opposition since Chávez era, in
order to proceed in provocative operations that could overthrow the Leftist governments.
The case of Venezuela is really interesting. The US imperialists were fiercely trying to overthrow the Leftist governments since
Chávez administration. They found now a weaker president, Nicolás Maduro - who certainly does not have the strength and personality
of Hugo Chávez - to achieve their goal.
The Western media mouthpieces are doing their job, which is propaganda as usual. The recipe is known. You present the half truth,
with a big overdose of exaggeration.
The establishment
parrots are demonizing Socialism , but they won't ever tell you about the money that the US is spending, feeding the
Right-Wing groups and opposition to proceed in provocative operations, in order to create instability. They won't tell you about
the financial war conducted through the oil prices, manipulated by the Saudis, the close US ally.
Regarding Argentina, former president, Cristina Kirchner, had also made some important moves towards the stronger cooperation
with Russia, which was something unacceptable for Washington's hawks. Not only for geopolitical reasons, but also because Argentina
could escape from the vulture funds that sucking its blood since its default. This would give the country an alternative to the neoliberal
monopoly of destruction. The US big banks and corporations would never accept such a perspective because the debt-enslaved Argentina
is a golden opportunity for a new round of huge profits. It's
happening right
now in eurozone's debt colony, Greece.
'Color Revolutions' - Ukraine
The events in Ukraine have shown that, the big capital has no hesitation to ally even with the neo-nazis, in order to impose the
new world order. This is not something new of course. The connection of Hitler with the German economic oligarchs, but also with
other major Western companies, before and during the WWII, is well known.
The most terrifying of all however, is not that the West has silenced in front of the decrees of the new Ukrainian leadership,
through which is targeting the minorities, but the fact that the West allied with the neo-nazis, while according to some information
has also funded their actions as well as other extreme nationalist groups during the riots in Kiev.
Plenty of indications show that US organizations have 'put their finger' on Ukraine. A
video , for
example, concerning the situation in Ukraine has been directed by Ben Moses (creator of the movie "Good Morning, Vietnam"), who is
connected with American government executives and organizations like National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US Congress.
This video shows a beautiful young female Ukrainian who characterizes the government of the country as "dictatorship" and praise
some protesters with the neo-nazi symbols of the fascist Ukranian party Svoboda on them.
The same organizations are behind 'color revolutions' elsewhere, as well as, provocative operations against Leftist governments
in Venezuela and other countries.
Ukraine is the perfect place to provoke Putin and tight the noose around Russia. Of course the huge hypocrisy of the West can
also be identified in the case of Crimea. While in other cases, the Western officials were 'screaming' for the right of self-determination
(like Kosovo, for example), after they destroyed Yugoslavia in a bloodbath, they can't recognize the will of the majority of Crimeans
to join Russia.
The war will become wilder
The Western neo-colonial powers are trying to counterattack against the geopolitical upgrade of Russia and the Chinese economic
expansionism.
Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine
in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. Besides, Trump has already shown his hostile feelings against China, despite
his friendly approach to Russia and Putin.
We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation
in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that
they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian
borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact.
And, the USA? I keep getting phone calls from god knows where masquerading as local calls.
And our $100 billion per year intelligence services can do nothing to protect Americans from
something as simple as unwanted phone calls. We know every single intelligence service will
use cyber warfare and we have no way to stop it despite colossal expenditures on war
munitions.
Well, it looks like we've somehow managed to survive another year of diabolical Putin-Nazi
attacks on democracy.
It was touch-and-go there for a while, especially coming down the home stretch, what with
Jeremy Corbyn's desperate attempt to overthrow the UK government, construct a
British version of Auschwitz , and start rounding up and mass-murdering the Jews.
That was certainly pretty scary... but then, the whole year was pretty scary.
While Resistance members were still wrapping their heads in anti-cricket aluminum foil,
Putin (i.e., Russian Hitler) ordered Trump (i.e., Russian-asset Hitler) to launch a coup in
Venezuela (i.e., Russian Hitler's South American ally), probably to distract us from "
Smirkboy Hitler "
and his acne-faced gang of MAGA cap-wearing Catholic high-school Hitler Youth, who were trying
to invade and Hitlerize the capital. Or maybe the coup was meant to distract us from the
un-American activities of Bernie Sanders, who had also been deemed a Russian asset, or a
devious " Kremlin-Trump operation ," or
was working with Tulsi Gabbard to
build an army of blood-drinking Hindu nationalists, genocidal Assadists, and American
fascists to help the Iranians (and the Russians, of course, and presumably also Jeremy
Corbyn) frontally assault the State of Israel and drive the Jews into the sea.
As if all that wasn't horrifying enough (and ridiculous and confusing enough), by early
Spring there was mounting evidence that Putin had
somehow gotten to Mueller, possibly with one of those FSB pee-tapes, and was sabotaging the
"Russiagate" coup the Intelligence Community, the Democratic Party, the corporate media, and
the rest of the Resistance had been methodically preparing since 2016. Liberals' anuses began
puckering and unpuckering as it gradually became clear that the "Mueller Report" was not going
to prove that Donald Trump had colluded with Putin and Julian Assange to steal the presidency
from Hillary Clinton and transform the United States of America into a genocidal Putin-Nazi
Reich.
Meanwhile, the anti-Semitism pandemic that
had mysteriously erupted in 2016 (i.e., right around the time Trump won the nomination) was
raging unchecked throughout the West. Jews in Great Britain were on the brink of panic because
approximately 0.08 percent of
Labour Party members were anti-Semitic , as opposed to the rest of the British public, who
have never shown any signs of anti-Semitism (or any other kind of racism or bigotry), and are
practically a nation of Shabbos goys. Clearly, Corbyn had turned the party into his personal
neo-Nazi death
cult and was planning to carry out a second Holocaust just as soon as he renationalized the
British railways!
And it wasn't just the United Kingdom. According to corporate media virologists, idiopathic
anti-Semitism was breaking out everywhere. In France, the "Yellow
Vests" were also anti-Semites . In the U.S.A., Jews were facing " a perfect
storm of anti-Semitism ," some of it stemming from the neo-fascist fringe (which has been a
part of the American landscape forever, but which the corporate media has elevated into an
international Nazi movement), but much of it whipped up by Ilhan Omar, who had apparently
entered into a "Red-Brown" pact with Richard Spencer, or Gavin McInnes, or some other formerly
insignificant idiot.
Things got very confusing for a while, as Republicans united with Democrats to denounce
Ilhan Omar as an anti-Semite (and possibly a full-fledged Islamic terrorist) and to condemn the
existence of "hate," or whatever. The corporate media, Facebook, and Twitter were suddenly
swarming with hordes of angry anti-Semites accusing other anti-Semites of anti-Semitism. Meghan
McCain couldn't take it anymore, and she broke down on the Joy Behar Show and
begged to be converted to Judaism, or Zionism, right there on the air. This unseemly display of
anti-anti-Semitism was
savagely skewered by Eli Valley , an "anti-Semitic" Jewish cartoonist, according to McCain
and other morons.
Then it happened ... perhaps the loudest popcorn fart in political history. The Mueller
Report was finally delivered. And just like that, Russiagate was over . After
three long years of manufactured mass hysteria, corporate media propaganda, books, T-shirts,
marches, etc., Robert Mueller had come up with squat. Zip. Zero. Nichts. Nada. No collusion. No
pee-tape. No secret servers. No Russian contacts. Nothing. Zilch.
Cognitive dissonance gripped the nation. There was beaucoup wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Resistance members doubled their anti-depressant dosages and went into mourning. Shell-shocked
liberals did their best to pretend they hadn't been duped, again, by authoritative sources like
The Washington Post , The New York Times , The Guardian , CNN, MSNBC, et al., which had
disseminated completely fabricated stories about
secret meetings which never took place ,
power grid hackings that never happened ,
Russian servers that never existed ,
imaginary Russian propaganda peddlers , and
the list goes on , and on, and on and hadn't otherwise behaved like a bunch of mindless,
shrieking neo-McCarthyites.
Except that Russiagate wasn't over. It immediately morphed into " Obstructiongate ." As the
corporate media spooks explained, Mueller's investigation of Trump was never about collusion
with Russia. No, it was always about Trump obstructing the investigation of the collusion with
Russia that the investigation was not about, and that
everyone knew had never happened . In other words, Mueller's investigation was launched in
order to investigate the obstruction of his investigation.
Or whatever...
It didn't really matter, because, by this time, Assange had been arrested for
treason, or for jumping bail, or for smearing poo all over the walls of the Ecuadorean embassy,
and
The New York Times was reporting that a veritable "constellation" of social media accounts
"linked to Russia and far-right groups" was disseminating extremist "disinformation," and Putin
had unleashed the
Russian spywhale , and " Jews were
not safe in Germany again ," because the Putin-Nazis had formed an alliance with the
Iranian Nazis and the Syrian Nazis, who were backing the Palestinian Nazis that Antifa was
fighting on behalf of Israel , and Jews were not safe in the UK either, because of Jeremy
Corbyn, who Donald Trump (who, let's all remember, is literally Hitler) was conspiring with a
group of "unnamed Jewish leaders" to prevent from becoming prime minister, and Iran was
conspiring with
Hezbollah and al Qaeda to amass an arsenal of WMDs to launch at Israel and Saudi Arabia,
and other peaceful Middle Eastern democracies, and Trump was finally going to go full-Hitler
and declare martial law on the Fourth of July, and he was operating literal "concentration
camps" where
immigrants were being forced to drink out of toilets , which looked almost exactly the same
as the "detention
facilities" Obama had operated , except for well, you know, the "fascism."
So who had time to worry about the corporate media colluding with an attempted Intelligence
Community coup?
This sudden outbreak of " Trump-inspired
terrorism " and the manufactured
"fascism" hysteria that followed got the Resistance through end of the Summer and into the
Autumn, which was always when the main event was scheduled to begin. See, these last three
years have basically been a warm-up for what is about to happen the impeachment, sure, but
that's only one part of it.
If you thought the global capitalist ruling classes and the corporate media's
methodical crushing of Jeremy Corbyn was depressing to watch well, prepare yourself for
2020.
The Year of Manufactured Mass Hysteria was not just the Intelligence Community and the
corporate media getting their kicks by whipping the public up into an endless series of
baseless panics over imaginary Russians and Nazis. It was the final phase of cementing the
official "Putin-Nazi" narrative in people's minds.
Mark Galli, its current editor (who is leaving the publication in two weeks)
takes on Trump directly -- a courageous move on his part, as his magazine has largely been
apolitical. "The facts in this instance are unambiguous: the president of the United States
attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of
the president's political opponents," Galli writes. He draws the obvious conclusion for
Christians: "That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is
profoundly immoral." Galli goes further, digging into the behavior of the man in the Oval
Office, noting that Trump "has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration." He gets
specific: "He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals." As if
that wasn't enough, Galli adds, "He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his
relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone -- with its
habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders -- is a near perfect example of a
human being who is morally lost and confused." Galli's warning to Christians is clear. "To the
many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we
might say this: remember who you are and whom you serve," Galli writes. "Consider how your
justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an
unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump's immoral words and behavior
in the cause of political expediency. If we don't reverse course now, will anyone take anything
we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come?" Galli also
acknowledged Friday in an interview on CNN's "New Day" that his stand is unlikely to shake
loose Trump's strong hold on this voter segment, a crucial portion of his political base.
Galli's move is even more admirable when you consider that he published his editorial even
knowing that, as he said in his interview, he's not optimistic that his editorial will alter
Trump's support among white evangelicals. It's not a stretch to say that white evangelicals put
Trump into office in 2016. About
80% of them voted for him. They did so because of the abortion issue, mostly. They wanted
pro-life judges throughout the justice system. But this was a devil's bargain, at best.
<img alt="Faith could bring us together. But too often it divides us"
src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/191121180252-20191121-fractured-states-religious-leaders-large-169.jpg">Faith
could bring us together. But too often it divides us Younger evangelicals, those under 45,
have been slowly but steadily
moving away from Trump during the past two years or so, unhappy about his example. A key
topic that has driven them away is immigration. Loving your neighbor as yourself has always
been a bedrock Christian value. And Trump's stance on immigrants (especially those of color)
has upset the younger generation of evangelicals, with two-thirds of them saying in surveys
that immigrants strengthen our country, bringing their work ethic and talents with them from
Mexico or Central America or Syria. Climate change is another issue that has caught the
imagination of younger evangelicals. "I can't love my neighbor if I'm not protecting the earth
that sustains them and defending their rights to clean water, clean air, and a stable climate,"
Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, a national organizer for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, told
Grist . Needless to say, Trump's contempt on this subject grates badly on these young
Christians. Perhaps naively, Americans have always looked to the presidency for exemplary moral
behavior, and when there are obvious personal or moral failures, as with Nixon and Clinton,
there is disappointment, even anger. But if you're a Christian -- and I lay claim to this for
myself -- you understand that it's human to fail at perfect behavior. There is always
forgiveness. And, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "Humility is endless."
Humility lies at the heart of
Christian behavior. As does honesty. In these, Trump has set a terrible example, and he's now
been taken down for this by an important Christian voice. If only another 10 percent of
evangelicals take this seriously, and I suspect they will, Donald J. Trump's presidency is
destined for the ash heap of history.
Delaying the Senate trial erodes the Democrats' argument that impeachment was so urgent that
they could not wait for the courts to act on Trump's aggressive claims of privilege.
Seven Democratic presidential candidates who gathered on a debate stage in Los Angeles on
Thursday represent another argument for moving beyond impeachment.
... ... ...
Washington is fixated on the daily turns of the impeachment saga, but polls indicate that
most Americans are not. Business executive Andrew Yang pointed out that, even when the current
president is gone, the struggles of many people will remain, particularly in parts of the
country that helped elect Trump in 2016.
"We blasted away 4 million manufacturing jobs that were primarily based in Ohio, Michigan,
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri. I just left Iowa -- we blasted 40,000 manufacturing jobs
there," Yang said. "The more we act like Donald Trump is the cause of all our problems, the
more Americans lose trust that we can actually see what's going on in our communities and solve
those problems."
That is what voters are waiting to hear, and the sooner the better for Democrats.
The Blairites foisted the U-turn on Brexit onto the party when most of the seats it held
in the old parliament, and most of the seats it needed to win, voted leave. Now the Blairites
are hypocritically blaming Corbyn for the result of their own policy. The election loss was
exactly what they wanted: Corbyn out of the way and Britain 'safe' for neo-liberalism.
BigB ,
31 mn people voted to extend the consensual mandate of the neoliberal capitalist state to
globally expand, extract and expropriate planetary wealth for themselves. Unconsciously:
without any consideration of the consequences. Now, nearly 11 mn of them want to pretend they
were duped into this because two films did not get released? Can there be a more deluded
abdication of self-responsibility? Without any inherent maturity at all: it's hard to see
where UK politic goes from here? What is the deepest spot a mile below the nadir? The
'People's Government' of Boris Johnson we co-constituted the reality of last week?
The election was for a successor capitalist imperialist state: the capitalist imperialist
state was duly elected. No one – no one – can then abdicate responsibility to say
it was the "wrong capitalist state". If people do not like this process – and it is the
most debilitating, dehumanising, and destructive of all processes – then it is their
social responsibility to at least explore the possibility of finding another process. In the
co-creation of superior/inferior status and co-determination of the master/slave dialectic
– we volunteer to choose position of the inferior and the enslaved. Then spend the
consensual contract term complaining about the subordinant class politics we voted for.
Projecting blame scattergun everywhere but where the blame is due: with the voters and
endorsers of globalised neoliberal capitalism.
Is no one else getting bored of this? Not just the embarassment of excuses we can find for
our own self-inferiorisation and voluntary infantalisation: but the fact that no one will
make a positive assessment of how to break this vortex cycle of self-defeatism and
performative powerlessness so we never have to go through the same charade again? Which, no
doubt we will in five years time. Unless we take it on the chin: and fess up to what we have
created as a social reality the Trump/Johnson axis of world power.
If this below and beyond the low point cannot act as a bifurcation point – whereby
we totally reject the state electoral inferiorisation process – I do not know what can.
It is unlikely there will be much left to reclaim in five years: much less so in ten. If we
cannot claim humanity and ecology back from neoliberal globalisation in the next few years
well, it ain't going to be pretty.
A good starting point would be to admit the corruption of the entire state electoral
process of inferiorisation: and take co-responsibility for our part in the election of
Johnson. Then the avowal never to do it again and take the legislative and judicial power we
abdicated back. Which is the socially responsible alternative to the drawnout emetic debrief
that seems to be favoured.
GEOFF ,
Great point BigB I think you're wasting your time they don't care what happens here so long
as they're out of the EU that is all that matters to them. I'm so happy I don't have any
grandchildren, although I fear for those that have, so sad all done in the name of getting
our country back, I wonder how they will feel if farage gets some kind of peerage, you know
the one that has been fighting the elites, and celebrating his birthday at the Ritz owned by
those two socially aware brothers barclay , ha ha ha ha .
smelly ,
We have the very few, the few, and the serfs. The politics of the world is driven by the
Economics of the very few. The very few have created for themselves a feudal system, its
informal, its hidden, but its highly functional and it accounts in large measure for the
global atrocities.
The chiefs (a very few) distribute to the feudal lords(the few) in a variety of ways.
1. direct government contracts
2. privatize the assets and government services that remain after regime change or infra
structure destruction of economic value from regime sex corrupted, blackmailed, regime
changed or defeated nation states and or from sweetheart deals in corporate takeovers.
3. appointment to and assignment to intelligence, or high level diplomatic positions in
defeated entities.
4. promotion to USA congress or the USA presidency or to a high level corporate job.
5. control of access of the goy to education, entry level jobs leading to the knowledge to be
promoted, to bank loans, to houses in neighborhoods, to medical care, and to a massive
variety of other things. They are all in on it together.
6. many others
The tools of the trade are coercion by any means available to include sex, blackmail, spy
technology, war machinery, military, intelligence, private armies, dark money and money
laundering operations to name but a few.
Dependency : it is
This is no longer a problem bounded by one nation, it has become a problem important to the
liberties and freedoms and the station of status of person in the society, membership in
clubs, obtaining credentials to be eligible for licenses (law, medicine, home building,
contracting, service provider, and everything else). License is a huge gate used to keep the
Goya
What Bexit has shown is that there is not a bit of difference between those governed by
any of the nation governments of any kind(they are controlled by the same few), we are just
the Goy or as Hilary Clinton puts it: the deplorables. No longer should we look at ourselves
as citizens of Britain, or Citizens of the United States, or citizens of France, or citizens
of Saudi Arabia, or citizens of Israel, or citizens of Libya, or whatever, we must recognize
that it is the many vs the few . from here on out. We must not identify and expose all of the
ways nation state leaders use or allows others to use information to control our behaviors
and to dictate our rights.
We must help each other no matter or sex, language, religion or nationality because they
have made us all one, but trying to control our lives from birth to death and by trying to
use us, at our expense, for their purposes.
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
Professor Emeritus Vilfredo Pareto outlined the empirical skew of wealth transfer for 'the
few' as a function of culture whereby all have the same or similar wealth distribution.
Post-Lehman evidenced the wholesale destruction that empirical skew manifested on the Western
Banking System & concomitant ruling oiligopoly.
Empirically, the Western Fractional Reserve Banking System has crashed outright to
reveal
even greater skew after all the M&A post-Lehman debacle. In terms of wealth distribution
we are now in what Professor Emeritus Minsky characterized as Late Stage Ponzi Capitalism.
Amazon & Bezos are transnational, leveraged like a Hedge Fund, and a monopoly that was
legislated against during the 30s in the USA.
Today, in contemporary totalitarian society we are fed a daily diet of pseudoscience &
half-baked so-called 'truths' that serve to mask the lies & falsehood.
What is evidently true today is that the empirical skew of wealth has become a matter of
superstructural fault where the tectonic plates of sovereign nations are bound to give us all
degrees of continental shift in contradistinction to the empirical skew of wealth transfer
which is by no means immoveable.
Like gravity, what goes up must come down. Wealth hoarding sub-groups of elite will have
nowhere to hide when the avalanche cascades on top of them without notice before hand.
Six Sigma extinction level events exist for all empirical distributions given the right
conditions.
MOU
BigB ,
The other problem with 'the Few' analysis I have been trying to highlight is that we are in
it the Few that is. In terms of per capita mass aggregate consumption/pollution rates –
93% of us in the UK are in 'the Few'. Which holds for a rough Pareto Principle (80/20): we
are among the top 20% of consumers responsible for 70% of the lifestyle consumption emissions
[Anderson; LabourGND; Oxfam]. Which amounts to 28,000 tonnes per capita of aggregate material
flows: against a global average of 7,000 tonnes [Hickel]. In global consumption/pollution
terms: we are among the "wealth hoarding sub-groups of [the] elite" of the mass material
consumption bourgeoisie.
There are unfair distributions: and inequitable distributions between the haute
bourgeoisie and we in the bourgeoisie. But the greatest inequitable maldistribution is North
to South: where the poorest 50% of the global population are limited – by being
resource cursed and having to subsidise us – to 10% of lifestyle consumption emissions.
If you can call it a lifestyle; a consumer lifestyle; or a profligate pollution problem which
is doubtful? And it current rates of wealth redistribution: it will be 200-900 years before
they are out of poverty.
As for 'wealth hoarding sub-groups': we in the UK voted to extend the amount of mass
material material aggregate demand. Which is complex: because UK rates have been falling but
only because of the service economy. Rates of industrialisation and resource extractivism are
effectively exported. Global demand rises: and so must global supply. Our consumption
fetishism is driving global capitalism. Not solely: the whole of the developed world is.
It is this material economy that acts as a baseline – of sorts – for the
overfinancialised derivative, arbitrage, and highly leveraged stocks, bonds, and equities and
any other exotic financial instruments that can be gambled on. A market that is roughly 75
times the size of the material 'real' productive economy. The market that is likely being
subsidised by the repo- and other 'not QE' hypertrophic liquidity supplements. The market
that is going to collapse when the anabolic steroid effect fails to maintain exponential
growth. Professor Minsky will have his moment!
Whereupon the UK will quickly realise that it is a pissling little island in a sea of
globalisation. With an 80% tertiarised service economy. Servicing an extinct financial market
economy. With failing services and no food coming in from abroad. Or medicines. Or water
purification products. And possibly no energy. But we will have 60,000 military and
paramilitary police to uphold the private property rights of the haute bourgeoisie.
Maybe then we will see and feel what it is like for the rest of the world? Who we have
only ever viewed as subsidisers of our wealth? Just as we subsidise the wealth of those we
choose to be subordinate to. It's a shitty, shitty, system which the UK has done not too
badly out of. Well, enough for us to never look from the outside in through the eyes of a
Frantz Fannon: and try to change the system for a globally more equitable system free from
our white privileged ethnosupremacist racism.
We got the government we deserved – and voted for. And we await the fate of collapse
we deserve – and voted for. As John Michael Greer said: the UK is rushing to collapse
early to avoid the disappointment in the rush. We live in a complete fantasy bubble of a
post-Empire state of mind. As if other – dehumanised foreign – people and the
holistic integrity of the biosphere did not exist. Well, thanks to our lifestyle choices,
they may not for much longer. But the only thing that has perturbed our reserved compassion
and indifferent inhumanity is our election of a Johnson government. Well, that is an
indignity! But not even a fraction of an indignity that we are quite happy to violently
impose on the rest of the world. But let us pretend and console ourselves it would have been
a utopia if they had not held back those films.
Dungroanin ,
"We don't have to join too many dots to see why a discussion about Wikileaks, war crimes in
Iraq, and OPCW crimes in Syria was something the Tories didn't need,"
They also didn't need the Intelligence report of 'Russian' influence in their party and
government; the direct threat made by Pompeo to stop Labour, the deal which they have been
negotiating with the US which confirms the NHS is part of it amongst many other things
– as was confirmed by their Ambassador Woody (Of Johnson&Johnson fame who stand to
benefit hughy) ;the dangerous levels of capacity in the NHS; etc etc etc.
Anyway the Graun is claiming to run a ask us a question about the election now on their
blog – I've asked mine but am not holding my breath for an answer.
tonyopmoc ,
David Macilwain usually writes far better than this. In fact 90% of this, is the same sort of
nonsense, he has apparently been brainwashed with, by reading the Guardian et al.
He displays his own ignorance and arrogance, by yet again telling over 50% of The British
voting public that we didn't know what we were voting for re Brexit.
"not least because only 30% of that public actually voted for Brexit, and did so in
complete ignorance of what it might mean and because of their own long-standing
prejudices."
He analysed Skripal very well. This is total crap.
Tony
JudyJ ,
As soon as UK based Russian oligarchs are mentioned the presumption of many –
encouraged by Western media – is that they must be 'friends' of Putin or have 'close
connections' to him. In fact, in respect of most of them, it is exactly the opposite. They
are based in London precisely because the UK establishment doesn't clamp down on tax dodging
and corrupt business dealings as Putin has done since the beginning of his Presidential
tenures. Corrupt business owners donations to parties in power? Hmm, I wonder why it is that
they are given every encouragement and incentive to settle in London undisturbed?
This article is wrong to imply/assume that Brexiters/Lexiters didn't know what they were
voting for. Wrong to suggest/assume we did/do not have a strategy to try to help leave the
EU. Wrong to assume we are racist and/or stupid. Of course there are a few exceptions but on
the whole people know the score and we love the individual, distinct European countries; we
just despise the imperial, uber-technocratic, ultimately anti-democratic superstate that is
the EU.
See UK Column & similar websites, and the archive of Tony Benn/Barbara Castle/Peter
Shore/Bob Crow (on the reasons for disliking the EEC/EU/Maastrict & Lisbon Treaties etc)
for why so many people voted to leave the EU. I reckon when the options on who to vote for
were purposely limited by the LP (in the last few months after JC was forced to go along with
the PLP) and TBP (after Farage made a deal with Trump/Boris) many Brexiters (and a few
Lexiters?) were forced to vote for the Tories to give a message to the establishment? I am
guessing they thought the election would result in a hung parliament with the tories having
to ally with the DUP again.
Imo – I have a strong suspicion that the real result was a very close result (hung
parliament) and that the establishment using the secret services helped in some way to
engineer this landslide result (probably through postal ballot rigging). On the day of the
election many people observed and commented on the huge queues in the poll stations and
seeing so many young people voting like never before (including many photos on social media).
The result does not seem plausible and the status quo has/had so much to lose.
Incidentally, and this is obviously anecdotal but in my household (and as far as I know)
all my friends voted Labour or stayed at home (we are mostly Lexiters, don't-knows, and a
couple Brexiters) and only know quite well of two openlyTory voters (at my partners'
workplace). On the other hand, I do know my local area (which has been impoverished since the
Thatcher years) is a heavy leave-voting area and I reckon most people here lend their vote to
Tories for strategic reasons (I know a neighbour who wants the Tories to 'own' Brexit knowing
full well they will renege on all their promises and not just the Brexit promise – they
think Boris is a fake and wants to BRINO or, ultimately, even to remain).
I can only state what I observe and hear around me, and what I saw on social media during
the election, but I do know people are so much more informed than the establishment/media
would like to admit.
Francis Lee ,
I was shocked, yes shocked, to see the type sentiments espoused below.
"No-one could seriously believe that Brexit is something the ruling elite has pursued
because it respects the so-called democratic will of the British public – not least
because only 30% of that public actually voted for Brexit, and did so in complete ignorance
of what it might mean and because of their own long-standing prejudices.
That could have come from the mouth Jo Swinson, the Economist, the Guardian or any other
ultra-remainer rag.
It gets better, or worse depending on your point of view.
"Had the Government not had an interest in restructuring its relationship with the US and
NATO, and seen political and economic gains – well illustrated by the jump in the value
of Sterling following the result – then the idea of Brexit would just have quietly died
away."
Yep, it's those damn proles who voted for Brexit again and "did so in complete ignorance
of what that might mean and because of their own long-standing predudices." But of course!
Time to rethink the idea of universal suffrage perhaps. Actually those sort of sentiments
(see above) are precisely why Labour lost the election so heavily.
The point seems to be missed that euroland is an occupied zone and has been zone since
1945 – it is a neoliberal juggernaut and junior partner in the geopolitical global
order. In addition it is the civilian wing of NATO, another American construction. It is
based upon a core-periphery economic structure and upon a currency which locks its members
into a neoliberal straight-jacket, and since they cannot devalue the core runs up trade
surpluses whilst to periphery runs up permanent trade deficits. The euro currency is designed
to do precisely this. Moreover the Stability and growth pact robs states of their ability to
have an independent foreign and economic policy. The eastern and southern peripheries are
little more than colonies. Printing their own currencies – God forbid – is
strictly verboten, so that they cannot and will not recover. Taking Italy 137% of debt-to-gdp
ratio and Greece with a staggering 181% of debt-to-gdp you will get a pretty good picture of
what is happening in Euroland.
It really don't know why I have to explain all of this, particularly in light of the fact
that Corbyn himself has always been a eurosceptic, along with other notables such as Benn
(Sr.) Bryan Gould, Peter Shore and Barbara Castle, that was a unlike the present time when
Labour was Labour.
I think the Labour party has now gone to far to reverse course; it has become an
anachronism, and a neo-Blairite – ultra-remainer – is party now taking shape.
GEOFF ,
I've no idea why you keep going on about the EU , you got your way, we're leaving forget it,
lets see how good it's going to be in this shithole without some protection from the EU , why
do none of you address that, the slob has already started with his refusal to include workers
rights, the fat slob says we can have better employment protection once we leave ha ha ha ha
ha ha whats been stopping him from doing it for the last 40 years ? nothing. everyone is
entitled to their view obviously and I respect it, but you just shut us out as if your
opinion is all that matters, I would suggest 80% of those that voted leave know absolutely
nothing about the EU, I arrive at that by talking incessantly to people, who think they're
clued up and when you start pointing faults with their argument, you get the usual ' hey mate
I've only come in for a pint'
Francis Lee ,
"Share On Twitter" target="_blank"
href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=But+we+haven%26%238217%3Bt+left+it.+And+there+is+g...+&url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-guardian.org%2F2019%2F12%2F20%2Fofficial-secrets-lies-and-the-five-eyes%2F%23comment-107077">
But we haven't left it. And there is good reason to suppose that we never will. A BRINO is
being cooked up by a coalition of the usual suspects whose object is to end the existence of
the UK as an independent nation state and turn it into a province of a European super-state.
We will be voting – if at all – in the equivalent of local government or council
elections with decisions, with economic and geopolitical issues being decided by non-elected
technicians and bureaucrats.
Democracy is only meaningful at the national level. Democracy and Empire (the EU) or
should I say the EUSA, do not mix. Even Thucydides knew this.
GEOFF ,
But that happens here without the EU there are two pricks zac goldsmith and morgan, both been
rejected by the electorate , both been given a place in the H.O.L £305 a day , totally
unelcted but there to make our laws and you still won't see i twill you
Cassandra2 ,
Very much agree, I don't trust Boris to effect a clean break.
I generally trust my instincts like most normal plebs, but since the Lisbon Treaty Europe
has consolidate Federalisation, far removed from the original concept and principles of a
Common Market and my instincts prompted a closer look.
Delving deeper, an easy process given internet access, one discovers a cesspit of
deception. European Union is in reality the successor to the (totalitarian) Third Reich.
Refer to Christopher Story's YouTube 3 part lecture on the subject. EU was planned in 1942 by
a German social elite hierarchy in the likely event of Hitlers defeat. Key members of this
hierarchy were transferred (operation paperclip) to USA at the end of the war and were
integrated into a form of 5th column governing elite (power behind Deep State) who have since
1946 systematically hollowed the out the USA by undermining it's production base (excluding
military hardware production) and displacing economic investment through reckless
speculation/manipulation and perpetual global warfare.
Other than filling the Elites multi-trillion banking chest USA's resources and manpower
(Military & Intelligence) have been utilised to construct a global platform for imposing
a 'New World Order'. Europe's homogenization simply forms an essential part of this
ambition.
Given a cursory (pleb) assessment of Europe's widespread corruption, undemocratic
structure and it's true strategic purpose I cannot help but feel that those who voted
'remain' have had their critical faculties effectively lobotomized by Elite owned State MASS
INDOCTRINATION i.e. BBC et al.
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
Goldman Sachs engineered the entire EU finance by first fudging the books on Greece. The
whole edifice was built upon a shifting substrate of sand.
Castles made of sand float into the sea, eventually. Jimi Hendrix Axis Bold as Love
MOU
Francis Lee ,
"NOBODY voted for a HARD brexit onto WTO rules and the country should have been asked very
specifically if that is what the mythical 17 Million wanted."
'Nobody voted for a hard -Brexit.' Really!
How come you are privy to this "information?" It would be amusing to see you trying to
substantiate this statement.
And as for the 'mythical 17 million' (17.2 million actually) 'well, yes that must have
been a mirage; it didn't happen.
Strange times in which we live when conjecture is treated as if it were fact. Yep, that is
one of the hallmarks of the totalitarian mindset. In his marvellous essay, 'Notes on
Nationalism' Orwell captures this frame of mind perfectly. He writes:
"By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be
classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people'
(Leave voters by any chance?) "can be labelled 'good' or 'bad' But secondly (and this is much
more important) I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a particular nation, political
party, religious group or even football team, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising
no other duty than that of advancing its interests" (Remainers perhaps?)
Moreover, "although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat or revenge, the
nationalist is somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to
feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do
this off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether or not they support his
views Arguments with his adversaries are always inconclusive since each of the contestants
believe themselves always right and always winning the victory (in the sight of God
anyway).
Some of the true believers are not far from clinical schizophrenia, living quite happily
amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connexion with the physical world."
Sadly true.
Dungroanin ,
WE will NOT let YOU forget the VoteLEAVE bs. Paul & co.
Here is Vote Leave NOT saying we are going onto WTO rules:
'The day after nothing changes legally. There is no legal obligation on the British
Government to take Britain out of the EU immediately. There will be three stages of creating
a new UK-EU deal – informal negotiations, formal negotiations, and implementation
including both a new Treaty and domestic legal changes. There is no need to rush. We must
take our time and get it right.
WHAT'S THE OVERALL FRAMEWORK WE NEED?
Overall, the negotiations will create a new European institutional architecture that
enables all countries, whether in or out of the EU or euro, to trade freely and cooperate in
a friendly way. In particular, we will negotiate a UK-EU Treaty that enables us 1) to
continue cooperating in many areas just as now (e.g. maritime surveillance), 2) to deepen
cooperation in some areas (e.g. scientific collaborations and counter-terrorism), and 3) to
continue free trade with minimal bureaucracy. The details will have to await a serious
negotiation but there are many agreements between the EU and other countries that already
solve these problems so we will be able to take a lot 'off the shelf'.'
Etc. http://www.voteleavetakecontrol.org/briefing_newdeal.html
AND HERE IS FACT CHECK
'As far as we've seen, Leave campaigners hardly mentioned the customs union in explicit
terms at all, so there was generally little clarity about what leaving might mean in that
regard.'
&
'There are also examples of leave campaigners claiming the UK could adopt a position similar
to Norway -- which is still part of the single market while not being an EU member.
Arron Banks, a founder of the Leave.EU campaign tweeted in November 2015 "Increasingly the
Norway option looks the best for the UK".'
This article has clarified the main targets for the globalists but where do you think
Brexit stands in their agenda, do they want out of the EU or not? I am confused which side is
in favour of freedom and liberty and which one wants global centralised command and
control.
And, the USA? I keep getting phone calls from god knows where masquerading as local calls.
And our $100 billion per year intelligence services can do nothing to protect Americans from
something as simple as unwanted phone calls. We know every single intelligence service will
use cyber warfare and we have no way to stop it despite colossal expenditures on war
munitions.
Well, it looks like we've somehow managed to survive another year of diabolical Putin-Nazi
attacks on democracy.
It was touch-and-go there for a while, especially coming down the home stretch, what with
Jeremy Corbyn's desperate attempt to overthrow the UK government, construct a
British version of Auschwitz , and start rounding up and mass-murdering the Jews.
That was certainly pretty scary... but then, the whole year was pretty scary.
While Resistance members were still wrapping their heads in anti-cricket aluminum foil,
Putin (i.e., Russian Hitler) ordered Trump (i.e., Russian-asset Hitler) to launch a coup in
Venezuela (i.e., Russian Hitler's South American ally), probably to distract us from "
Smirkboy Hitler "
and his acne-faced gang of MAGA cap-wearing Catholic high-school Hitler Youth, who were trying
to invade and Hitlerize the capital. Or maybe the coup was meant to distract us from the
un-American activities of Bernie Sanders, who had also been deemed a Russian asset, or a
devious " Kremlin-Trump operation ," or
was working with Tulsi Gabbard to
build an army of blood-drinking Hindu nationalists, genocidal Assadists, and American
fascists to help the Iranians (and the Russians, of course, and presumably also Jeremy
Corbyn) frontally assault the State of Israel and drive the Jews into the sea.
As if all that wasn't horrifying enough (and ridiculous and confusing enough), by early
Spring there was mounting evidence that Putin had
somehow gotten to Mueller, possibly with one of those FSB pee-tapes, and was sabotaging the
"Russiagate" coup the Intelligence Community, the Democratic Party, the corporate media, and
the rest of the Resistance had been methodically preparing since 2016. Liberals' anuses began
puckering and unpuckering as it gradually became clear that the "Mueller Report" was not going
to prove that Donald Trump had colluded with Putin and Julian Assange to steal the presidency
from Hillary Clinton and transform the United States of America into a genocidal Putin-Nazi
Reich.
Meanwhile, the anti-Semitism pandemic that
had mysteriously erupted in 2016 (i.e., right around the time Trump won the nomination) was
raging unchecked throughout the West. Jews in Great Britain were on the brink of panic because
approximately 0.08 percent of
Labour Party members were anti-Semitic , as opposed to the rest of the British public, who
have never shown any signs of anti-Semitism (or any other kind of racism or bigotry), and are
practically a nation of Shabbos goys. Clearly, Corbyn had turned the party into his personal
neo-Nazi death
cult and was planning to carry out a second Holocaust just as soon as he renationalized the
British railways!
And it wasn't just the United Kingdom. According to corporate media virologists, idiopathic
anti-Semitism was breaking out everywhere. In France, the "Yellow
Vests" were also anti-Semites . In the U.S.A., Jews were facing " a perfect
storm of anti-Semitism ," some of it stemming from the neo-fascist fringe (which has been a
part of the American landscape forever, but which the corporate media has elevated into an
international Nazi movement), but much of it whipped up by Ilhan Omar, who had apparently
entered into a "Red-Brown" pact with Richard Spencer, or Gavin McInnes, or some other formerly
insignificant idiot.
Things got very confusing for a while, as Republicans united with Democrats to denounce
Ilhan Omar as an anti-Semite (and possibly a full-fledged Islamic terrorist) and to condemn the
existence of "hate," or whatever. The corporate media, Facebook, and Twitter were suddenly
swarming with hordes of angry anti-Semites accusing other anti-Semites of anti-Semitism. Meghan
McCain couldn't take it anymore, and she broke down on the Joy Behar Show and
begged to be converted to Judaism, or Zionism, right there on the air. This unseemly display of
anti-anti-Semitism was
savagely skewered by Eli Valley , an "anti-Semitic" Jewish cartoonist, according to McCain
and other morons.
Then it happened ... perhaps the loudest popcorn fart in political history. The Mueller
Report was finally delivered. And just like that, Russiagate was over . After
three long years of manufactured mass hysteria, corporate media propaganda, books, T-shirts,
marches, etc., Robert Mueller had come up with squat. Zip. Zero. Nichts. Nada. No collusion. No
pee-tape. No secret servers. No Russian contacts. Nothing. Zilch.
Cognitive dissonance gripped the nation. There was beaucoup wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Resistance members doubled their anti-depressant dosages and went into mourning. Shell-shocked
liberals did their best to pretend they hadn't been duped, again, by authoritative sources like
The Washington Post , The New York Times , The Guardian , CNN, MSNBC, et al., which had
disseminated completely fabricated stories about
secret meetings which never took place ,
power grid hackings that never happened ,
Russian servers that never existed ,
imaginary Russian propaganda peddlers , and
the list goes on , and on, and on and hadn't otherwise behaved like a bunch of mindless,
shrieking neo-McCarthyites.
Except that Russiagate wasn't over. It immediately morphed into " Obstructiongate ." As the
corporate media spooks explained, Mueller's investigation of Trump was never about collusion
with Russia. No, it was always about Trump obstructing the investigation of the collusion with
Russia that the investigation was not about, and that
everyone knew had never happened . In other words, Mueller's investigation was launched in
order to investigate the obstruction of his investigation.
Or whatever...
It didn't really matter, because, by this time, Assange had been arrested for
treason, or for jumping bail, or for smearing poo all over the walls of the Ecuadorean embassy,
and
The New York Times was reporting that a veritable "constellation" of social media accounts
"linked to Russia and far-right groups" was disseminating extremist "disinformation," and Putin
had unleashed the
Russian spywhale , and " Jews were
not safe in Germany again ," because the Putin-Nazis had formed an alliance with the
Iranian Nazis and the Syrian Nazis, who were backing the Palestinian Nazis that Antifa was
fighting on behalf of Israel , and Jews were not safe in the UK either, because of Jeremy
Corbyn, who Donald Trump (who, let's all remember, is literally Hitler) was conspiring with a
group of "unnamed Jewish leaders" to prevent from becoming prime minister, and Iran was
conspiring with
Hezbollah and al Qaeda to amass an arsenal of WMDs to launch at Israel and Saudi Arabia,
and other peaceful Middle Eastern democracies, and Trump was finally going to go full-Hitler
and declare martial law on the Fourth of July, and he was operating literal "concentration
camps" where
immigrants were being forced to drink out of toilets , which looked almost exactly the same
as the "detention
facilities" Obama had operated , except for well, you know, the "fascism."
So who had time to worry about the corporate media colluding with an attempted Intelligence
Community coup?
This sudden outbreak of " Trump-inspired
terrorism " and the manufactured
"fascism" hysteria that followed got the Resistance through end of the Summer and into the
Autumn, which was always when the main event was scheduled to begin. See, these last three
years have basically been a warm-up for what is about to happen the impeachment, sure, but
that's only one part of it.
If you thought the global capitalist ruling classes and the corporate media's
methodical crushing of Jeremy Corbyn was depressing to watch well, prepare yourself for
2020.
The Year of Manufactured Mass Hysteria was not just the Intelligence Community and the
corporate media getting their kicks by whipping the public up into an endless series of
baseless panics over imaginary Russians and Nazis. It was the final phase of cementing the
official "Putin-Nazi" narrative in people's minds.
And while the *** Impeachment Coup continues and the JEWS spread misery to every corner of
the world, and Russia disconnects from the JEWS, consider this:
Once upon a time there was a country,
Where there was
NO Usury
NO Unemployment
NO Homeless
NO ***********,
NO Freemasonry,
NO Zionism,
NO Communism,
(almost) NO CRIME
Where IMPORTANT decisions were MADE BY THE PEOPLE through REFERENDUMS
Where workers were payed DECENT wages
Where people could LIVE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE
Where VACATIONS were payed by the STATE
As was HEALTHCARE INSURANCE for EVERY WORKER
As were PENSION PLANS
As were MORTGAGES (Almost everybody could afford to buy a house)
Where NO ANIMALS were tortured; It was even legislated!
Where the leader of that country had an approval rate of over 98% by the people of that
country
Where there was NO HUNGER
Where NO ONE FROZE to DEATH
Where men were MEN and women were WOMEN.
After TWELVE YEARS OF DEVASTATION that man was given a DELIBERATE RUINED and BANKRUPTED
nation, with MILLIONS of unemployed citizens. Hunger was sweeping through the nation,
thousands starved and froze to death. It had become the cesspit of a continent in complete
and utter decay.
WITHIN THREE YEARS he made all of the above possible by throwing out the vultures and
making its citizens proud again of their country and their heritage.
Unfortunately this is a very sad state we have come to. The West could have embraced
Russia and worked with them to be integrated with the West. It is a vast land of resources
including human. Instead the MIC and those above that who control government have decided
that tension and fear is the best way to serve the elite.
On ZH today was an article about clandestine agencies at work since the end of WW ll. The
purpose of those agencies to sew discord and mayhem as their tool of choice was to achieve
the desired end; profit and power. gladio-the-story-of-a-conspiracy
fact
Groups that rise enough in power to begin to challenge the rulers are co-opted and
redirected to fail.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Muellergate and biased MSM overcame weak minded Americans and apparently caused Pu$$y
hatted evangelicals not to vote conservative in the 2018 Midterms. (If you believe there was
no ballot, voting machine or illegal voter fraud.).....
On to 2019, where the impeachment in name only in suspended animation will be used as the
Same Mullergate style main stream narrative to sway weak minded Americans and Voter fraud to
get Trump in 2020.
You had better hope Trump wins, because all your republican gun registered names are on
Google Databases. What do you think Hillary who invited NATO in during Bill's dalliance as
President was for, A Tea Party ?
On Thursday, police in Hong Kong announced the arrests of several individuals whom they
described as leaders of the Hong Kong protests movement. But these individuals (their
identities have not been released) were not simply collared out in the street.
Instead, police described the four as leaders of Spark Alliance, a mysterious organization
that has been one of the main financiers of the protest movement, including by bailing
protesters out of jail and helping to defray their legal fees.
Police seized HK$70 million ($9 million) in bank deposits and personal insurance products
from Spark, claiming that the group broke laws about money laundering.
In a response posted to its FB group, Spark blasted the police, accusing them of
deliberately trying to cut off one of the most important avenues of financing in the protest
movement.
On Thursday evening, police announced the arrests of four people connected with Spark
Alliance for suspected money laundering, the first cases brought over financing the
demonstrations after six months of protests against China's tightening grip over Hong Kong.
Authorities froze HK$70 million of bank deposits and personal insurance products linked to
the fund, while also seizing HK$130,000 in cash.
"The police attempted, through false statements, to distort the work of Spark Alliance as
money laundering for malicious uses," the group said in a statement on Facebook. " Spark
Alliance condemns this kind of defamatory action."
The arrests and seizures, as
Bloomberg explains, shed light on the innerworkings of the Hong Kong protest movement.
Millions of Americans who have read the news reports about the protests have probably been left
wondering how the protesters became so organized.
Well, this is how: Since the beginning of the movement, wealthy working HKers have observed
their duty to help those battling it out on the front lines in any way possible. Mostly, they
do it through donations to groups that purport to help bail out protesters after they've been
arrested, or groups that simply provide food and shelter for the demonstrators, many of whom
are teenagers, or in their early 20s.
This division of responsibilities is part of what's allowed the movement to continue on for
as long as it has.
But by cracking down on the money, HK police are essentially pulling the rug out from under
Hong Kongers facing criminal charges for protest-related activities.
Because Spark Alliance and another, more transparent, fund called the 612 Humanitarian Fund
are responsible for financing the protest movement: According to BBG, the two funds account for
70% of the money raised by the protest movement.
The impact of this crackdown is two-fold: not only will protesters counting on these funds
to pay their legal fees be left out in the cold, but the renewed police scrutiny could deter
some working Hong Kongers who have been supporting the movement with donations.
The crackdown deals a major blow to demonstrators as they face ever-mounting legal bills,
with more than 6,000 people arrested since June. Spark Alliance, one of the largest
crowd-funding campaigns supporting the protests, plays a crucial behind-the-scenes role -
often sending anonymous representatives to bail protesters out of jail in the middle of the
night.
The latest arrests risk deterring Hong Kong's professional class from giving more cash,
potentially curbing a substantial source of funds that have helped sustain the protests
longer than anyone had expected. They also show the limits of the leaderless movement's
ability to manage tens of millions of dollars with little oversight outside of a formal
financial system.
Funds bankrolling the protests have collectively raised at least HK$254 million ($33
million) since June, with 70% coming from just two groups, Spark Alliance and the 612
Humanitarian Fund, according to a tally based on disclosures from the groups and an analysis
of publicly available documents. That figure doesn't reflect all the money raised related to
the protests, only the funds Bloomberg News could verify.
Before the arrests, most Hong Kongers didn't know the identities of anyone behind Spark
Alliance. Its website and bank accounts (before they were shut down) all forwarded to a Pest
Control company.
But Spark proved its reliability early on by helping bail protesters out of jail. But the
group has been under scrutiny even before the police got involved. Last month, HSBC shut down
the group's account, saying they had detected activity that differed from the stated purpose of
the account.
"Spark is probably less transparent but people tend to believe them," said Jason, a
protester in his 30s who asked to be identified by his English name. He said he memorized the
group's phone number and called the group after he was arrested in August. Seven hours later,
two lawyers helped arrange HK$4,000 in bail money.
"Everyone knows the cost to fight for this movement and not everyone can afford lawyer
fees," he said. "We need protection."
Over the past few months he's raised half a million dollars for Spark Alliance and other
charities through the sale of Hong Kong-themed figurines, including a miniature Carrie Lam
and a masked protester. Asked on Thursday night if he would still give the money to Spark
Alliance, Jason said he wanted more information on the arrests.
The shadowy nature of some of these organizations has helped the Chinese government portray
the protests as having been financed by foreign powers like the US. Of course, these
accusations aren't entirely without merit. Beijing threatened sanctions this month against the
National Endowment for Democracy, a US-based group which donated $686,000 to various Hong Kong
nonprofits in 2019.
Meanwhile, the June 12 fund has already spent roughly a quarter of the money it has raised
since June, mostly on legal expenses and bail.
For many of the thousands of protesters who have been arrested, the criminal penalties that
they could face without adequate legal representation could land them in prison for years.
Without having the support of knowing their bail will be paid in the event of an arrest,
many demonstrators wouldn't be so eager to fight their way past police barricades and take
other risks like that.
But many members of the protest movement believe the 612 fund is too stodgy in how it
operates. Most see organizations like Spark Alliance as being closer to the true ideals of the
movement.
The 612 fund has been chided in online forums for deploying only 24% of the money it
raised while asking protesters to first apply for legal aid from the city. Other critics see
the 612 fund as part of an older political establishment in Hong Kong that has failed the
younger generation of democracy advocates, and they believe Spark Alliance is closer to
protesters in the trenches.
"The younger generation doesn't trust in any institutions, not even those that advocate
for democracy," said Patrick Poon, a researcher at Amnesty International in Hong Kong. "It's
an irrational decision to trust in a group believed to be closer to the people on the ground
even if they don't know who is behind the fund."
Ng, a 612 fund trustee, said the group is supported by "members of the public that are
incensed by what is being done by police and government."
"The movement is ongoing and we are using the funds for the stated purpose of humanitarian
aid," she said. "We don't have any obligation to spend all the money immediately."
Now that police have set their sights on Spark, we imagine a new group will need to come
forward and take up the mantle of the protest movement, or risk allowing it to fizzle out.
I keep wondering why ZH seems to be supporting the HK protestors when that 'color
revolution' too seems to be supported by the same elements promoting promoting the overthrow
of Trump and the overthrow of the elected government in Bolivia.
"Now that police have set their sights on Spark, we imagine a new group will need to come
forward and take up the mantle of the protest movement, or risk allowing it to fizzle
out."
Aww too bad. Looks like the CIA got their funds seized. No worries Soros will just add
more funding
In the six months riots and terrorisms, Hong Kong police did not kill anyone but gathering
information and evidence to dismantle foreign meddling in the city. During 7 days of protests
against religious discrimination in India the police already killed more than 20 people. IQ
does matter.
Wonder how many Muslims died in the past one year as victims of ZioNazi and Evil Empire
terrorism and mass murder.
100,000s? Yes, it's true, nobody in the world is as violent, evil, malicious and
belligerent as the ZioNazis and Evil Empire. Nobody is remotely close. Certainly not
China.
Chim Choms are BRUTAL so far 21 CIA clowns have gone MISSING and never HEARD or SEEN.. At
least Russia keeps these SPYS and do SWAPS Your agent for mine. TRADE OFF.. Not with CHIM
CHOMS God only KNOWS where CIA spys go I can IMAGINE Naturally they are ORGAN donors. Chim
choms don't **** around
The arrests and seizures, as
Bloomberg explains, shed light on the innerworkings of the Hong Kong protest movement.
Millions of Americans who have read the news reports about the protests have probably been
left wondering how the protesters became so organized.
Well, this is how: Since the beginning of the movement, wealthy working HKers have
observed their duty to help those battling it out on the front lines in any way possible.
Mostly, they do it through donations to groups that purport to help bail out protesters
after they've been arrested, or groups that simply provide food and shelter for the
demonstrators, many of whom are teenagers, or in their early 20s.
Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g.,
political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it
originates from and is supported by grassroots participants.
merican money is made from nothing... this allows for use in other nations to do evil
works... best to ban merican dollars others than individuals holding small amounts of it...
do not take it for exchange
There will be NO DEAL. China is not going to surrender their financial sovereignty to
the zionist bankers again after the communist party kicked them and their puppet (the
Nationalist KMT currently settled in Taiwan, China) out in 1949 :)
Told ya :) Still don't get it? Good :)
China is just being nice to Trump and let him save face and give him a ladder to
climb down :)
China already started cleaning up operation in Hong Kong by freezing the Zionist terrorist
slush fund :P When the funding stop no mercenaries will work for free to destroy Hong Kong.
Operation Yellowbird 2 just begins and you'll see them roaming in USA and Taiwan, then appear
on CNN, Fox News and all Zionist media as eyewitness to Hong Kong police brutality and how
communist China violates human rights :)
A man who fired a live round at officers in Tai Po on Friday night was involved in another
case centred on the seizure of bombs and firearms linked to anti-government protests, a
police source has said, adding that more suspects could be at large.
The force also warned that an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle seized in a follow-up flat raid
was the same model used in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting which
killed 58 people, adding that the weapon could cause severe casualties as it had a range of
up to 800 metres.
(Bloomberg) -- Glancing at bags of cash stuffed to the brim earlier this month, Gary Fan
simply wanted someone to remove them from an office in Hong Kong used by his political
party.
The former pro-democracy lawmaker had collected HK$2.7 million ($345,000) during an
anti-government protest the day before, and was waiting for someone to pick it up from a
mysterious group known as Spark Alliance that helps bail protesters out of jail. The next day,
a person whom he knew and trusted came to collect the cash, even though Fan says he doesn't
know who exactly is behind the group or where the money ends up.
"We just work by an honor system now, trusting them with a good cause," Fan said in a Dec.
11 interview, adding that Spark Alliance has "earned credibility with real work" like getting
legal assistance for protesters. Still, he said, "I absolutely agree there should be more
disclosure, transparency and accountability when you take money from the public."
On Thursday evening, police announced the arrests of four people connected with Spark
Alliance for suspected money laundering, the first cases brought over financing the
demonstrations after six months of protests against China's tightening grip over Hong Kong.
Authorities froze HK$70 million of bank deposits and personal insurance products linked to the
fund, while also seizing HK$130,000 in cash.
"The police attempted, through false statements, to distort the work of Spark Alliance as
money laundering for malicious uses," the group said in a statement on Facebook. "Spark
Alliance condemns this kind of defamatory action."
The crackdown deals a major blow to demonstrators as they face ever-mounting legal
bills, with more than 6,000 people arrested since June. Spark Alliance, one of the largest
crowd-funding campaigns supporting the protests, plays a crucial behind-the-scenes role --
often sending anonymous representatives to bail protesters out of jail in the middle of the
night.
The latest arrests risk deterring Hong Kong's professional class from giving more cash,
potentially curbing a substantial source of funds that have helped sustain the protests longer
than anyone had expected. They also show the limits of the leaderless movement's ability to
manage tens of millions of dollars with little oversight outside of a formal financial
system.
Funds bankrolling the protests have collectively raised at least HK$254 million ($33
million) since June, with 70% coming from just two groups, Spark Alliance and the 612
Humanitarian Fund, according to a tally based on disclosures from the groups and an analysis of
publicly available documents. That figure doesn't reflect all the money raised related to the
protests, only the funds Bloomberg News could verify.
The $33 million alone amounts to a third of the money the city has spent in overtime pay to
11,000 police officers since June, and would be able to purchase some 300,000 gas masks. But
the largest costs faced by protesters are legal fees that may stretch out for years.
Nearly 1,000 people have been charged for offenses like rioting, which carries a jail
sentence of as much as a decade, according to police. The 612 Fund says it can cost up to
HK$1.8 million per person for a 60-day legal defense, and many trials last far longer. Some
proceedings related to Hong Kong's 2014 Occupy protests are still ongoing.
Among dozens of groups, Spark Alliance is one of the most secretive: Even some donors and
lawyers who assist the group say they don't know who runs it, while the bank account listed on
its website belongs to a firm that owns a pest control company. A person who picked up Spark
Alliance's hotline last week said the number was only for protester requests. The group didn't
respond to requests for comment via Facebook, Whatsapp or Telegram.
'We Need Protection'
"Spark is probably less transparent but people tend to believe them," said Jason, a
protester in his 30s who asked to be identified by his English name. He said he memorized the
group's phone number and called the group after he was arrested in August. Seven hours later,
two lawyers helped arrange HK$4,000 in bail money.
"Everyone knows the cost to fight for this movement and not everyone can afford lawyer
fees," he said. "We need protection."
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
How dare anyone question official findings, details, and situations. Official means
official and that is official. Furthermore, no representatives should be challenged on their
representativiality or leadershipiality. When it is stated and found that various unnamed
letter organizations are working diligently on behalf of the people, that is fact and the
summation of de factos and prima facia that exists, period FULL STOP. Thank you and have a
great day!
It seems particular representatives of government and specific corporate interests are
responsible for the wars, while the intelligence agencies are involved with the terrorist
activities and the drugs/gun trade. I do not understand how souls can be so evil with
intentionally murdering and harming innocent civilians for political agendas, control, and
profits.
Most of the people are moral and wish for a peaceful, happy life with their family and
friends, so we need a society where virtue conquers the demons.
Get to the point. And "Secret Armies" to fight a Soviet invasion?...as opposed to all the
Non Secret Armies all over Europe and the US to fight a Soviet invasion?
Operation Gladio first came to light in Italy in 1990, after over 40 years of
clandestine operations. Members of the project revealed that similar projects existed in
most if not all countries of Western Europe. These stay-behind networks were... involved in
anti-communist activities including anti-democratic agitation and false flag terrorism. [It
was called "stay behind" because their alibi was they were preparing to wage a guerrilla
war in case of Communist invasion.]
In his 2004 book NATO's Secret Armies, arguably the most shocking book ever to be
ignored by the corporate media, Daniele Ganzer [documented] terrorism directed against the
people by secret armies funded and organized by NATO and answerable to deep state elements
within NATO, MI6 and the CIA rather than the respective governments.... And yet the claims
have been substantiated by juridical inquiries in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium and have
been debated (and condemned) in the European Parliament.
The scandal originally came to light in Italy in 1984 when an Italian judge Felice
Casson reopened the case of a terrorist car bomb in Peteano in 1972 and uncovered a series
of anomalies in the original investigation. The atrocity which had originally been blamed
on the communist Red Brigades turned out to be, in fact, the work of a right wing
organization called Ordine Nuovo . Following the discovery of an arms cache near
Trieste in 1972 containing C4 explosives identical to that used in the Peteano attack,
Casson's investigation revealed that the bombing in Peteano was the work of the military
secret service SID (Servizio Informazioni Difesa) in conjunction with Ordine Nuovo. The
intention had been to blame the bombing on the extreme left wing militant outfit, the Red
Brigades. The right wing terrorist, Vincenzo Vinciguerra was arrested and charged and
confessed to planting the bomb.
Judge Casson's investigation also revealed that the Peteano bombing was the continuation
of a series of bombings begun at Christmas 1969, the most well-known of which, on the
Piazza Fontane in Milan, killed 16 and injured 80. The bombing campaign culminated on 2
August 1980 with a massive bomb in the waiting room of Bologna railway station which killed
85 and injured 200. It was one of the largest terrorist outrages on mainland Europe in
modern times.
During his trial, Vincenzo Vinciguerra revealed that, in addition to discrediting left
wing political groups, there had been a second, even darker aim behind the bombings, namely
to inculcate a climate of fear among the general populace. This was known as the 'strategy
of tension' which was intended to generate a pervasive sense of fear which would encourage
the population to appeal to the state for protection.
Vincenzo Vinciguerra claimed during his trial: 'You had to attack civilians, the people,
women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The
reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public to
turn to the State to ask for greater security.'
You create fear with lies. And the state then suppresses dissent. The state media define
Communists as the enemy. Anything is justified to crush them. Communism and terrorists and
Islamic fundamentalists and today 'immigrants.'
One of these is not like the others. "Immigrants" (illegal) in their millions are a real
problem in the US and a worse one in Europe.
Create fear with lies? He forgot to mention "Climate Change" and the much hyped Turdburn
phenomenon.
"Gladio" Hoax ? Just like Op Mockingbird, Franklin child prostitution ring? Wake Up!
Operation Gladio is "a secret anti-Communist organization formed during the cold war
years," as
quoted in the New York Times . Kept secret for 45 years, operatives of
government-sponsored Operation Gladio in various European countries staged false flag events
which were blamed not just on Communists, but on leftists and other progressive organizations
to damage their credibility.
Also in case you think false flags are imaginary... "False flag terrorism" occurs when
elements within a government stage a secret operation whereby government forces pretend to be
a targeted enemy while attacking their own forces or people. The attack is then falsely
blamed on the enemy in order to justify going to war against that enemy.
Hey fukkup! "Franklin" was real... and yeah... the Repulsivan administrations of 42 and 43
REALLY were ... in the bizness of paying their jobbers to kidnap and program innocent kids
for their bent sexual pleasures. How you wanna work that into the "Gladio" thing asshat?
Maybe a lil 'Pope a dope' with the choirboys?
I got all the time in the world for punters who wish to challenge my premise on grounds of
factual and reasoned argument.
I got no time at all for your ******** straw man attempts to work around your own absence
of an argument by going "Franklin"
"Also in case you" don't know... your clown team don't allow quotes from anti-agent Orange
rags like the "NYT." Capiche?
Back up your butt and start churning the butt butter a lil better this time button
bouy!
Get a grip Guiseppe! Talmudists hate n despise all their lil enablers. Pooties no
different from Frimpf in that regard. Their puppet princes are the first ones under the
bus... when their usefulness expires.
Gladio has morphed over the years and presently active with all the FF mass shooting
"DRILLS" (sic).......
See the news about Va. for the pending ending results of how it got there.
Another test run for the election rigging from Sore-azz and company.
BOLO for MSM projecting upon the GOP and then the more free **** and 'evil guns' meme to pick
up.
So far it's all about Blooming-idiot and Tom Steyer hawking their snake oil in
Texas......gonna be a loooooog friggn year listening to these scum shovel bovine
excrement.....60 seconds at a time....like digital water boarding for the farm
animals....
Disinformers try to explain away the nefarious acts of a rogue CIA as "conspiracy" a term
coined by William Casey, CIA Director as a disinformation tool... These same disinformers
deny the Craigslist cattle call for crisis actors as well as call "coincidence" for FEMA or
Homeland Security drills the day before. They also deny postmortems conducted on video
footage of the attack to PROVE the fallasies of the event. These disinformers will go to
their grave asserting Building 7 collapsed due to the heat of an imaginary fire.
Meanwhile, at this same time the Russians had very nearly raped every human vagina in
Berlin when they rolled into town. They brutally put down revolts in Poland, Hungary, and
Czechoslovakia each with its own special brand of tortures and purges for decades after.
Mao was literally starving 40 million of its own people. Then he decided to wipe
China clean of any cultural "residue" at all. Who knows how many people got killed in that
storm.
Pol Pot thought he should finally create a true communist state and killed 2 million
out of 5 million of his own people trying to establish it.
As a monument to utter stupidity, Gaither Stewart ignores these facts and shits the bed
about Operation Gladio. And to kick it off, he face-plants about the need for Aristotelian
moderation!
I know, I know, don't let facts get in the way. Junk away, ignorant and angry
tapeworms.
It was an ugly era....let's not forget Eisenhower starving millions of innocent Germans,
in POW camps, and exposure to the elements to their slow agonizing deaths.
Patton defied the order and fed them.
Clearly a human trait the OSS scum and cabal did not like. So Patton was off'd.
The Russian soldiers who perped those rapes/murders were not Christian white Russians.
They were the Far East peoples (Chechnyans, Uzbeks, Mongols, et al) who were conscripts and
turned loose to perpetrate that mayhem against the German people and at the behest of Soviet
jews who wanted vengeance against Germany.
Mussolini defeated the mafia.
The communist partisans defeated Mussolini.
The CIA re-imported the mafia to defeat the communists
And armed the remaining fascists for Operation Gladio.
HB. I have used leases developed in our field in the past ten years to demonstrate that shale
is high cost. Again, rule of thumb the cost of a conventional well in our field is
approximately 1/100 of a shale oil well ($70K range v $7 million range).
Here are some examples with production through 10/31/19:
8 producers 4 injection wells. Cumulative BO 83,466. YTD BO 2,085. First production
4/2003.
10 producers 4 injection wells. Cumulative BO 116,065. YTD BO 2089. First production
9/2005.
10 producers 4 injection wells. Cumulative Bo 55,595. YTD BO 3,023. First production
3/2006.
4 producers 1 injection well. Cumulative BO 37,418. YTD BO 1,289. First production
8/2008.
8 producers 3 injection wells. Cumulative BO 42,494. YTD BO 2,328. First production
10/2008.
4 producers 1 injection well. Cumulative BO 19,216. YTD BO 1,220. First production
12/2010.
8 producers 3 injection wells. Cumulative BO 46,463. YTD BO 1,877. First production
8/2011.
4 producers 2 injection wells. Cumulative BO 10,700. YTD BO 634. First production
10/2011.
8 producers 3 injection wells. Cumulative 59,592 BO. YTD 4,956 BO. First production
11/2011.
1 producer. Water disposed of in adjoining lease. Cumulative BO 7,872. YTD BO 444 BO.
First production 5/2012.
8 producers 3 injection wells. Cumulative 56,500 BO. YTD 3,858 BO. First production
6/2012.
4 producers 1 injection well. Cumulative BO 11,758. YTD BO 1,457. First production
6/2013.
2 producers. Water disposed of on adjoining lease. Cumulative 3,524 BO. YTD BO 393. First
production 11/2013.
6 producers Two injection wells. Cumulative 25,988 BO. YTD 3,233 BO. First production
9/2014.
Figure in anywhere from $60K-80K to drill, complete and equip each well including
electric, flow and/or injection lines. Figure another $20-30K for a tank battery.
Assume anywhere from 12.5 to 20 percent royalty.
Of course, some projects do better than others. But compare this to shaleprofile.com
wells.
There was very little drilling in our field from 1987 to 2003. There has been very little
since 2015. Century plus year old stripper field.
There have also been many reclamation projects in our field during 2005-2014 of abandoned
wells wherein the producers went bust in the 1990s, with 1998 being a knockout blow.
We took over 2 wells drilled in the 1950s they were abandoned in 1998. We just had to
equip them and build a new tank battery. We also took over three wells also drilled in the
1950s where we had to do the same, plus plug the injection well and convert one producer to
an injector. These work well at $55-65 WTI also.
I can also point to many projects developed in our field in the 1980s where cumulative per
well has topped 40K BO to date.
Conventional oil is a much better deal than shale usually when you can find it. And also
when you aren't trying to pay for 8 figure CEO pay, skyscrapers and jets out of it.
Shale just has the scale. Huge scale. Worldwide game changing size.
Shallow, I can't thank you enough. Alot to digest here. My first glance gave me the feeling
shale drilling dollars are about half as productive. Maybe you have a better number.
When a new field is drilled, is it always under pressure without the cost of lifting it
from the hole? Then once the pressure is exhausted it becomes a stripper?
A lot of the Huntington Beach field lays under the ocean. There is over a mile long row of
wells along the shoreline. I'm assuming they go horizontal under the ocean. Only a few wells
have lift Jacks. Can strippers wells go horizontal?
There isn't enough down hole pressure here for natural flow. Everything goes on pumping unit
immediately and injection wells are also drilled at the same time as production wells.
To put into perspective, the field was originally drilled over 100 years ago. Waterflood
was initiated on a large scale right after WW2. Many wells were plugged in the late
1960s-early 1970s when oil prices were low. The field was redrilled in the late 1970s –
early 1980s. Little activity after 1986, until prices took off during the Iraq War.
For example, we operate a lease that was originally drilled in the 1950s. It was plugged
out in 1972. In 1979-81, all of the plugged wells were drilled out (casing had not been
pulled). New injection wells were drilled.
Cumulative from 9 producing wells since 1979 is over 140K BO with production currently at
5.5 BOPD. It is difficult to tell what these wells produced from 1953-1972, because they were
part of a larger unitized waterflood project. Our guess is around 200-250K BO during that
time frame.
Only a small company would be interested in 9 wells making 5.5 BOPD, but they have been
economic even during the worst part of 2016 (barely during Q1 – 2016).
There haven't been HZ wells drilled in the shallow zones (1,500' and below). However,
there has been some success with 1,800'-5,000' TVD hz wells. Not sure of the economics.
There has been success with slick water fracks in deeper vertical wells also.
No way. It's already here, and there will be no rebound. BTW I did carefully read your
comments above Dennis and thank you for your time to respond. As always, your responses are
significantly better than what my caustic remarks deserve.
As has been said many times, money does not equal geology. Even if a new tranche of
'investment' could be begged, borrowed, or stolen (likely stolen) it would be spent to build
new drilling equipment, pay for new leases/roads/infrastructure, with all of it into new
wells that will produce less than any before them. If inflation is a factor (and it is), the
borrowed & eventually defaulted upon money will buy less than before.
Shale started bad, and it will stay bad. No shale well was a gusher instead, they all
needed huge horsepower, millions of gallons of water, hundreds of tons of sand, and lots of
investment dollars just to get started. None of these were ever a Texas gusher. To me, this
is no business model to follow, it is a debacle.
We have seen hundreds of shale companies go bankrupt over the last couple of years. Going
forward, there won't be hundreds of bankruptcies because there won't be hundreds of shalies
to go bankrupt. Like the motorcar companies of old, it'll go from dozens of market
participants to a handful through M&A and bankruptcies. There is still plenty of surface
carnage to come and it is far from over. Bear in mind, this is largely the same crowd that
kept exclaiming a dropping 'breakeven' price from 2010 forward, to the point where $20 was
wildly shouted from the rooftops (particularly from John Mauldin) as the point of
profitability. Of course, none of it was true. Now we see at long last that $60 (and probably
$75) was the true breakeven point. Lots of C-suite executives should be in jail for their
malfeasance, but of course none are and with the exception of Aubrey McClendon, all of them
are still 'at large'.
So with all this in mind and to round off a long screech, I summarize by saying that 2019
is peak shale.
The small companies, which have gotten only B class land will have to reduce, leading the
decline.
The bigger ones can continue to grow to a certain amount – but using up their A
class land. Especially all non-Permian will see this very soon and start declining. So
Permian growth soon will not be enough to keep up all shale decline – and this at the
cost of the Permian Tier A claims.
Oil production from shale will have a long future if prices settle at 100$ – but
with worse land it will just not be a bit boom.
A boom means high drilling everything costs, in a long calm era everything has more normal
prices (why should a truck driver carrying fertiliser to farm tows earn much less than a
truck driver delivering sand to a hole). And so finally some money can be earned in the oil
spot.
If the Democrats take over and get more green, taxes on oil production will be increased
anyway, and tax credits cut – so more calm drilling anyway. This is a big "if", I don't
know how the D – R battle stands now.
" The golden age of U.S. shale is far from over, with an expected slowdown in the Permian
Basin likely to be temporary, according to the new U.S. Energy Secretary.
The shale boom helped transform the U.S. into a net exporter of crude and petroleum
products in September from a major importer a decade ago. Even as growth is set to slow next
year in the Permian and elsewhere as drillers respond to investor demands for capital
restraint, Dan Brouillette said the shale boom has further to run."
Permian Drillers Are Struggling To Keep Output Flat
Newer wells in the Permian see their oil and gas production declining much faster than
older wells, and operators will need to drill a large number of wells just to keep current
production levels, an IHS Markit analysis showed on Thursday.
IHS Markit has analyzed what it calls the "base decline" rate, calculating the actual or
expected production of all the operating wells at the start of the year and tracking their
cumulative decline by the end of the year. Over the past decade, the base decline rate of
the more than 150,000 producing oil and gas wells in the Permian has "increased
dramatically," according to the analysis.
Your article goes into a lot of depth. I noticed these statements:
"The main driver of Legacy Loss is Total Production, which is logical.
In Permian, higher Initial Production (IPt) increased legacy loss, probably because new wells
deplete faster than old wells"
New wells depleting fasting than old wells partly explains why the monthly legacy loss
keeps increasing from month to month. It's now close to 600kbd/month, according to EIA
DPR.
The chart below from the article shows Jan 2015 as Peak Shale No 1 as legacy loss was
above new monthly shale production. The author says when "red line gets above new monthly
initial production then that's Peak Shale No 2", which might happen as soon as early 2020.
This is shown by the dashed line "IPt minus Legacy Loss" reaching zero, which means Peak
Shale No 2. The author says that this could happen if WTI stays at $55.
The basic premise is that productivity per completion has stalled, and there is no longer
a huge overhang of cheap frac spreads keeping the frac market oversupplied.
And what, Dennis? How, pray tell, will 17 million horsepower -and other infrastructure
including manpower – magically re-appear in 2020 and inflate another peak? With
existing shale finances in the tank, $300 billion of already accumulated and un-repayable
debt, and Wall Street financiers demanding repayment on their investments, your
prognostication for a rebound has a tinge of 'wildly unrealistic' about it.
ExxonMoble boe per day is 2.25 millon and has a market value of $300 billion. The tight oil
shale play over the last decade has increased production 7 million bpd. Is $300 billion of
debt really out of line? Do you have CFO experience with a multi-billion dollar company?
In the trucking industry the major freight companies running 24/7 turn their tractor fleet
over on a 5 year rotation receiving 20 cents on the dollar at retirement. Ready mix trucks
are turned over after 10 years rotation at 20 cents or less on the dollar running 12/5. When
the business environment is good. It's easy to delay retirement a little to meet demand. When
times are difficult, the old trucks sit in the yard and can be stripped for parts.
I have to question your hair on fire comment. Do you know the life expectancy of a
drilling rig for a large corporation ? The related article is talking about retiring 10
percent. That's a 10 year rotation. Maybe replacement is just cost efficient verses down
time. The big boys don't work on the same time frame as the little guy.
HB. $300 billion divided by 7 million comes to over $42,000 per barrel of debt. IMO that
is a high level of debt unless oil prices recover to 2011-14 levels.
Only the best oil production is selling for that in our part of the world and that is
production with a decline rate of 3% per year or less.
Regarding XOM, keep in mind that includes not just the upstream, but the midstream and
down stream, both of which are substantial.
XOM also has substantial international upstream assets which are generating substantial
cash flow at $60s Brent.
The only reason there is any production of shale oil at all is that there is a combination of
cheap money and a plethora of desperate investors starved for yield. Well guess what, the
investors want a return on their investment and the cheap money is drying up. So, artificial
life support is being withdrawn and the patient is now expected to get off the emergency room
gurney and start working for his keep. We shall see how that turns out.
This whole exercise in perfidy is much like Uber, that has never made a profit to date,
and yet was supported by billions of investor dollars. The whole ignominious affair put
hundreds of thousands of cabbies into destitution and bankruptcy, i.e those who didn't enjoy
the largess of investors willing to put up with loss-making operations for years on end.
Uber and Shale; the twin shitstorms of inequity, capital misalocation, and widespread
collateral damage to their respective proximal markets.
I agree with your concerns Mike. It seems to me that debt will be accumulated in the system
until it needs to be defaulted on. The governments of the world have become expert on kicking
the can down the road.
But that path will end one day, perhaps suddenly. Default will come via one of several
mechanisms- currency devaluation and debt write-off, for example. Whatever method, it will
severely hurt those who were expecting pensions or government payments (Medicare/SS), or to
live on savings or investment yield. These things will be massively de-valuated. Negative
interest rates you have been hearing about are just the early symptom of this process. A
president who cannot release his tax returns because he has a long pattern of committing
severe financial crimes, is another. The extreme accumulation of wealth among the super
wealthy is yet another.
I have given up expecting a 'fair' or rational game.
The EIA has December 2019 C+C production at 12.99 million bpd. They have December 2020 at
13.28 million bpd. That is an increase, December to December of .29 million bpd. Quite a
comedown from the over 2 million bpd increase in 2018.
HB. The problem with shale is that it is expensive oil, despite what companies such as XOM
and CVX put out publicly. However, it has a big advantage in that it is onshore, USA.
I think part of the reason that XOM, CVX, COP, MRO and other companies with worldwide
operations keep at it is because it is onshore lower 48.
I remember when everything that these companies were doing was international. It required
employees to live in some less than desirable places. Recall the stories I have related here
about employees of these companies having less than 24 hours to leave Libya, or being herded
out of the office in Venezuela at gunpoint.
Working offshore can't be a picnic. Also, the liability is great, see BP's disaster.
The management and employees want shale to work very badly. And it does at a high enough
oil price. Unfortunately, the price hasn't been there since 2014. But they keep making stuff
up because they don't want to be sent back to the Middle East and other tough places, or work
offshore deepwater.
But what has been bad for the companies has been great for consumers. I can't believe how
much Bernie and Elizabeth ignore the benefit shale has been to the US economy.
What would have happened without US going from less than 5 million BOPD to almost 13
million in eleven years? I suspect a lot of bad things. My primary beef is that the companies
lie about what price they need for shale to work and completed too many wells when prices
were low.
I think maybe shale is finally figuring out they need above my preferred $55-65 WTI
price band. We have been slightly below that and it appears things are really slowing
down.
Also lots of Goldman Sachs charts, with the one below showing a peak plateau from 2022 to
2025. The legend is missing 3 shale plays. The bottom dark blue is Delaware (Permian),
Midland (Permian) above and Bakken, the grey.
The new US defense bill, agreed on by both parties, includes sanctions on executives of companies involved in the completion
of Nordstream 2. This is companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around
the arrival point.
This could include arrest of the executives of those companies, who might travel to the United States. One of the companies
is Royal Dutch Shell, who have 80,000 employees in the United States.
Some people believe 'the market' for crude oil is a fair and effective arbiter of the industry supply and demand.
But if we step back an inch or two, we all can see it has been a severely broken mechanism during this up phase in oil.
For example, there has been long lags between market signals of shortage or surplus.
Disruptive policies and mechanisms such as tariffs, embargo's, and sanctions, trade bloc quotas, military coups and popular revolutions,
socialist agendas, industry lobbying, multinational corporate McCarthyism, and massively obese debt financing, are all examples
of forces that have trumped an efficient and transparent oil market.
And yet, the problems with the oil market during this time of upslope will look placid in retrospect, as we enter the time beyond
peak.
I see no reason why it won't turn into a mad chaotic scramble.
We had a small hint of what this can look like in the last mid-century. The USA responded to military expansionism of Japan by
enacting an oil embargo against them. The response was Pearl Harbor. This is just one example of many.
How long before Iran lashes out in response to their restricted access to the market?
People generally don't respond very calmly to involuntary restriction on food, or energy, or access to the markets for these things.
President Trump is expected to sign legislation into law
AllSeas Group SA
said it would halt operations on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany on
expectations the U.S. Congress will pass legislation to sanction companies working on the
project, which critics say will bind Europe more tightly to Moscow.
The contractor said in a two-line statement it would suspend work "in anticipation of the
enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act."
... ... ...
Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, the main Senate sponsor of the sanctions,
wrote a letter with Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson to AllSeas Chief Executive Officer Edward
Heerema Wednesday warning the company that it would face "crushing and potentially fatal"
sanctions if it continued work on the pipeline.
"The consequences of your company continuing to do the work -- for even a single day after
the President signs the sanctions legislation -- would expose your company to crushing and
potentially fatal legal and economic sanctions," they wrote.
Good article, I believe it will not only be related to US shale oil quality but also a more
or less collapse in US shale , to use the shale pioneer Mark Papas words from 2019 " the best
in US shale is behind " but the investors choose to not believe him as it not fits with what
the shale producers had presented them. Perhaps this time wall street will learn a lesson
that might be quite exspensive. I am waiting for how much Exxon will write down of their
assets in Permian, that might be higher than Chevron have annonsed.
Tight oil output will not increase as much as forecast by IEA and OPEC so it is not likely a
refining wall at the World level will be be reached. As to demand outrunning supply, when
that occurs oil prices will rise to a level that demand is destroyed to the point that supply
will equal consumption as it must over the long term. Demand (consumption) cannot be higher
than supply (output) for very long as stocks cannot be less than zero plus pipeline fill and
minimum storage tank levels needed to keep the overall refinery and distribution system
functioning. Oil prices will rise from 2020 to 2030, of that we can be sure, unless a severe
World recession occurs (I expect this to begin in 2030+/-2 years and last for 2 to 4 years if
World economists remember their Keynesian economics, otherwise it could be 5 to 7 years, if
nonsense like fiscal austerity in the face of severe recessions is recommended and we are
foolish enough to forget the lessons of 1929-1933.)
Oil quality is not the way to address or label the issue. Quality is a word traditionally
used in oil to describe sulphur content, not a scarcity of middle distillates in the yield.
Needs a different word.
Further, from the article, diesel is not the consumption growth heavy constituent. It's
jet fuel. Up 3.7% last year. Gasoline was up almost 1%.
"... Given decreasing money available to shale oil, declining frac spread counts and falling rig counts, I now guess that US peak oil month is Nov 2019. Permian oil production should continue increasing slowly but it's not enough to offset falling production from other shale basins and other conventional oil basins. ..."
EIA STEO says US oil production in 2019 is 12.25 mbd. That means that IHS is forecasting
12.69 mbd in 2020. This 0.44 mbd growth is assumed to come from the 7 US shale regions on EIA
DPR. In 2019, shale region production was 8.60 mbd. 2020 shale region production is forecast
to be 9.04 mbd, after 0.44 mbd growth. EIA DPR says that Jan 2020 shale region production is
9.14 mbd which is greater than 9.04 mbd which means that IHS 0.44 mbd 2020 growth implies
that a US peak oil is happening about now.
IHS says that modest growth is expected in 2022, but they don't quantify how much growth.
I believe this sentence was added because IHS does not want to be accused of implying US oil
production has peaked. Dan Yergin, vice chair of IHS, founded CERA in 1982 which is now owned
by IHS. Dan Yergin "clearly doesn't care about converting peak oilers. He really wants to
influence Washington." In other words, IHS says modest growth in 2022, to please Washington
politicians. US shale growth might increase in 2022, even with higher oil prices, but I'm
guessing it won't. http://transitionvoice.com/2011/09/whos-afraid-of-daniel-yergin/
Given decreasing money available to shale oil, declining frac spread counts and
falling rig counts, I now guess that US peak oil month is Nov 2019. Permian oil production
should continue increasing slowly but it's not enough to offset falling production from other
shale basins and other conventional oil basins.
The
Economics Debate, again and again The debate on the economics profession – its
alleged ills and failings -- abates at times, but never ends. A recent
piece in The Guardian taking the profession to task for its lack of reform has prompted a
response from a group of economists. I thought it was time to re-up my own views on this
debate, in the form of two sets of ten commandments. The first set is directed at economists,
and the second to non-economists.
Ten commandments for economists
1. Economics is a collection of models; cherish their diversity.
2. It's a model, not the model.
3. Make your model simple enough to isolate specific causes and how they
work, but not so simple that it leaves out key interactions among causes.
4. Unrealistic assumptions are OK; unrealistic critical assumptions
are not OK.
5. The world is (almost) always second-best.
6. To map a model to the real world you need explicit empirical
diagnostics, which is more craft than science.
7. Do not confuse agreement among economists for certainty about how the
world works.
8. It's OK to say "I don't know" when asked about the economy or
policy.
9. Efficiency is not everything.
10. Substituting your values for the public's is an abuse of your
expertise.
Ten commandments for non-economists
1. Economics is a collection of models with no predetermined conclusions;
reject any arguments otherwise.
2. Do not criticize an economist's model because of its assumptions; ask
how the results would change if certain problematic assumptions were more realistic.
3. Analysis requires simplicity; beware of incoherence that passes itself
off as complexity.
4. Do not let math scare you; economists use math not because they are
smart, but because they are not smart enough.
5. When an economist makes a recommendation, ask what makes him/her sure
the underlying model applies to the case at hand.
6. When an economist uses the term "economic welfare," ask what s/he means
by it.
7. Beware that an economist may speak differently in public than in the
seminar room.
8. Economists don't (all) worship markets, but they know better how they
work than you do.
9. If you think all economists think alike, attend one of their
seminars.
10. If you think economists are especially rude to non-economists, attend
one of their seminars.
I have spent enough time around non-economists to know that their criticism often misses the
mark. In particular, many non-economists tend not to understand the value of parsimonious
modeling (especially of the mathematical kind). Their typical riposte is: "but it is more
complicated than that." It is of course. But without abstraction from detail, there cannot be
any useful analysis.
Economists, on the other hand, are very good at modeling but not so good at navigating among
their models. In particular, they often confuse a model, for the model. A big
part of the problem is that the implicit scientific method to which they subscribe is one in
which they are constantly striving to achieve the "best" model.
Macroeconomists are particularly bad at this, which accounts in part for their dismal
performance. In macroeconomics, there is too much of "is the right model the classical or the
Keynesian one" (and their variants), and too little of "how do we know whether it is the
Keynesian or the classical model that is the most relevant and applicable at this point in time
in this particular context."
Price of oil does have problem that will play out over next 6-8 months. Without a trade war
and Brexit hanging over markets. There isn't a whole lot of reason to be holding government
bonds which yield next to nothing or less than nothing in some cases. Fed is buying bills so
Repo market won't implode into another 2008. Only problem is they need to be buying coupons
or treasuries also. They are buying some treasuries but it's not near enough to hold interest
rates down. Yields on debt are going to rise without something like a trade war holding them
down. That is a problem if your long oil.
Keep an eye on 10 year US treasuries. If they become just a little less liquid and yields
rise as i believe they will. These OPEC cuts aren't going to mean as much as some might
think.
"... Since 2001, America has increasingly turned global economic and financial networks into weapons that can be used against adversaries. As we showed in earlier research, financial networks such as the "dollar clearing system" and the SWIFT messaging service, which provide foundations for the global financial system, have been used by the United States to gather intelligence and to isolate entire economies, such as Iran, from the global financial system. ..."
"... As we discuss in a new article in Foreign Affairs , other countries are beginning to think about how they can best respond: by threatening retaliation, by creating their own networks, or by insulating themselves from U.S. pressure. ..."
"America weaponized the global financial system. Now other states are fighting back." [
WaPo ].
" Since 2001, America has increasingly turned global economic and financial networks
into weapons that can be used against adversaries. As we showed in earlier research, financial
networks such as the "dollar clearing system" and the SWIFT messaging service, which provide
foundations for the global financial system, have been used by the United States to gather
intelligence and to isolate entire economies, such as Iran, from the global financial
system.
Control of these networks allows the United States to issue "secondary sanctions" against
countries, businesses or individuals that it wants to target, obliging non-U.S. actors to
adhere to the sanctions or risk substantial penalties.
Now, these tools are leading to backlash and reaction. As we discuss in a new
article in Foreign Affairs , other countries are beginning to think about how they can best
respond: by threatening retaliation, by creating their own networks, or by insulating
themselves from U.S. pressure.
After more than 17 years of the United States pouring blood and treasure into the effort
to build an Afghan army and government, why is it that the Kabul government continues to lose
ground against the Taliban? Further, why were we unsuccessful creating an Iraqi army that
could stand on its own against the Islamic State?
Before that, of course, came Vietnam.
Nor was that the start of the failure of American-backed armies. I was a teenager in 1949
when Chiang Kai-shek's American-backed Nationalist army lost to the Communist forces of Mao
Zedong in China. The American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, having conducted a study on
why our side lost, declared: "The Nationalist armies did not have to be defeated; they
disintegrated. History has proved again and again that a regime without faith in itself, and
an army without morale, cannot survive the test of battle."
Forty-four years ago, the American-trained and American-supplied army of South Vietnam
simply melted away before the less-well-equipped but better-motivated army of North Vietnam.
In 1975, I watched South Vietnamese soldiers taking off their uniforms and running away in
their underwear as the North Vietnamese closed in on Saigon.
Five years ago, the world watched another American-trained and American-equipped Iraqi
army bolt and run when the better motivated Islamic State forces overran Mosul in Northern
Iraq.
Why, over and over again, does the side America has backed in these civil wars end up
defeated? Four threads connect these lost wars of the last 70 years: corruption, patriotic
nationalism, a misplaced belief in American exceptionalism, and self-deception.
I saw corruption on a grand scale in Saigon. Generals and government officials were
funneling America's tax dollars into bank accounts abroad, fielding ghost armies in which
there were fewer soldiers on the ground than on the official payrolls. In Baghdad during the
American occupation, I learned that billions of American taxpayer dollars were bleeding out
to the Persian Gulf and Jordan, causing a laundered money real estate boom in the Jordanian
capital. In Afghanistan I learned that Afghan officers and soldiers routinely robbed the
villages they were sent to protect. Corruption sapped the people's belief in their US-backed
government in all four wars. Soldiers saw no reason to die for corrupt officials.
A second thread is that our side always appeared to be fighting on the side of foreigners,
while the Communists in China and Vietnam, as well as the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan,
always had a better grip on patriotic nationalism and resistance to foreigners. The
anti-colonial struggle was more important than the threat of Communism in most of the
post-World War II world, and the Islamist insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan knew how to
exploit the traditional resistance to foreign rule. The Taliban could appeal to patriotism
while trying to expel the infidel forces of the United States, just as their fathers,
grandfathers, and great grandfathers had resisted the Russians and the British before that in
the name of jihad.
A third thread is a curiously American trait of willfully ignoring other people's history
and cultures. I remember asking an American officer in Vietnam if he had read anything of the
French experience in Vietnam. His answer: "No, why should I? They lost, didn't they?" Robert
McNamara, defense secretary and an architect of our Vietnam War, said in later life that
Americans had never understood the Vietnamese. There were plenty of people who could have
helped him understand, but he wasn't interested. We were Americans -- exceptional, and
therefore not susceptible to the same forces that thwarted other efforts.
I met Americans in the Green Zone in Baghdad who knew nothing about the great schism
between Sunnis and Shia Muslims that was tearing the country apart. American-style democracy
was the answer to all ills, they felt. In Afghanistan I met Americans who thought purple ink
on the fingers of Afghans who had voted was the answer to a thousand years of tribal and
ethnic rivalries.
The fourth thread is self-deception. In Saigon, in Baghdad, and in Kabul I attended
briefings in which progress was always being made, the trend lines were always favorable, and
we were always winning wars we were actually losing. Wishful thinking is no substitute for
reality. Americans can train and assist the armies of those whom we want to support in the
civil wars of others, but we cannot supply the motivation and morale that is necessary to
survive the test of battle.
As we observe another anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack that shattered American
life 18 years ago, its full impact is still unfolding. Those who planned it succeeded beyond
their wildest dreams. The airborne assaults that took nearly 3,000 lives on that day may now
be seen as the most diabolically successful terror attack in history. That attack not only
wreaked carnage at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania.
It wound up dragging the United States into an endless state of war that has drained our
treasury, poisoned our politics, created waves of new terrorism, and made us the enemy of
millions around the world.
The apparent chief perpetrator of the 9/11 attack, Osama bin Laden, presumably cackled
with joy when he heard news of his success on that stunning day. He lived for another 10
years, long enough to cackle with even greater glee at Washington's self-defeating response
to the attack. Using the 9/11 attack as a pretext, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
Bin Laden died knowing that he had lured us into the greatest foreign policy disaster in
American history.
It is a truism that our lives are shaped not by what happens to us, but by how we react to
what happens to us. The same applies to nations. Devastating as the death toll was on Sept.
11, 2001, it turned out to be only a taste of what was to come. The United States has been at
war ever since. Thousands of Americans have died. So have hundreds of thousands of civilians
in the Middle East and beyond. This nearly two-decade-long spasm of attacking, bombing, and
occupying countries has decisively shaped the United States and its image in the world. Every
day that our "forever war" continues is a triumph for bin Laden. So is every wounded veteran
who returns home, every newly minted terrorist infuriated by an American attack, every
citizen of the world who recoils at what US forces are being sent to do. We did not simply
fall into bin Laden's trap, we raced in at full speed. Even now, we show little will to
extricate ourselves.
America's determination to strike back with devastating force after 9/11 was
understandable given our shared sense of ravaged innocence. We might have launched a
concentrated strike against the gang of several hundred criminals whose leaders attacked the
United States, and then come home. Instead we have used the 9/11 attack to justify wars and
military deployments around the world.
On Sept. 14, 2001, Congress passed an "authorization for the use of military force"
against the perpetrators of that week's attack and against their "associated forces." Three
presidents have used that authorization to deploy troops across the Middle East and in
countries from Kenya to Georgia to the Philippines. Every call for US withdrawal from
Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria is met by warnings that ending wars could produce "another
9/11." This has become the paralyzing mantra that prevents us from halting the hydra-headed
military campaign we have been waging for 18 years. We also use it to justify atrocities at
prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Bin Laden has succeeded even in colonizing our
minds.
Soon after passing its highly elastic authorization for military action against
"associated forces," Congress approved another, even more sweeping law: the Patriot Act. It
gave the government broad new power to monitor people and businesses, and has become a
foundation stone of our emerging "surveillance state." The 9/11 attack led us to distort not
only our approach to the world, but also the balance between freedom and security at
home.
Another pernicious aftereffect of the terror attack has been the deepening of our national
us-against-them narrative. This began with President George W. Bush's assertion that every
country in the world had to be "either with us or against us." Crusader rhetoric posits the
United States as the indispensable guardian of civilization, entitled to act as it chooses in
order to fend off a threatening tide of barbarism. Now this approach has leaked back into the
United States. Racist attacks that tear at our social fabric are the domestic reflection of
foreign policies that see the rest of the world as a hostile "other" bent on destroying our
way of life.
Last month it was announced that the five surviving alleged plotters of the 9/11 attack
will finally be brought to trial in 2021. If they are aware of what is happening in the
world, they will arrive in court with a deep sense of satisfaction. Their great triumph was
not the attack. It was the damage the United States has since inflicted upon itself.
Acheson is parroting Napoleon: "In war the moral is to the material as 3 is to 1."
He is wrong in the matter of "faith", unless the Chiang's army lost faith in Chiang's
moral poverty, what he stood for.
A better quote about Chiang losing is written by George C. Marshall, who went over and
came back sure Chiang was done for.
He said: "The US would not be dragged through the mud by those reactionaries". Meaning
Chiang was not the moral power in China.
Same for Vietnam US puppets were not and had no moral power/authority.
In Afghanistan same!
Iraq is split in moral authority, the areas populated by Shi'a are okay as long as the
central government does not pander to the Sunni 1/3 (Baathists were suppressing Shi'a).
I do not agree with quoting Acheson when there is plenty of professional soldier writings
that say it more clearly.
After Korea the professional soldiers were no longer expressive when it cme to propping
thugs, with no moral power in their own borders (granted many of the borders surround
fictional counties).
US has stood with thugs for most of its quagmire experience.......
This week US is looking for a way to start a new quagmire with Iran for royal murderers'
sharing their oil company!
Information from local sources said that US army helicopters have already transported the gold bullions under cover of darkness
on Sunday [February 24th], before transporting them to the United States.
The sources said that tens of tons that Daesh had been keeping in their last hotbed in al-Baghouz area in Deir Ezzor countryside
have been handed to the Americans, adding up to other tons of gold that Americans have found in other hideouts for Daesh, making
the total amount of gold taken by the Americans to the US around 50 tons, leaving only scraps for the SDF [Kurdish] militias that
serve them [the US operation].
Recently, sources said that the area where Daesh leaders and members have barricaded themselves in, contains around 40 tons
of gold and tens of millions of dollars.
Allegedly, "US occupation forces in the Syrian al-Jazeera area made a deal with Daesh terrorists, by which Washington gets tens
of tons of gold that the terror organization had stolen, in exchange for providing safe passage for the terrorists and their leaders
from the areas in Deir Ezzor where they are located."
ISIS was financing its operations largely by the theft of oil from the oil wells in the Deir Ezzor area, Syria's oil-producing
region, and they transported and sold this stolen oil via their allied forces, through Turkey, which was one of those US allies trying
to overthrow Syria's secular Government
and install a Sunni fundamentalist regime that would be ruled from Riyadh (i.e., controlled by the Saud family) . This gold is
the property of the Syrian Government, which owns all that oil and the oil wells, which ISIS had captured (stolen), and then sold.
Thus, this gold is from sale of that stolen black-market oil, which was Syria's property.
The US Government evidently thinks that the public are fools, idiots. America's allies seem to be constantly amazed at how successful
that approach turns out to be.
Jihadists were recruited from throughout the world to fight against Syria's secular Government. Whereas ISIS was funded mainly
by black-market sales of oil from conquered areas, the Al-Qaeda-led groups were mainly funded by the Sauds and other Arab royal families
and their retinues, the rest of their aristocracy. On 13 December 2013, BBC headlined
"Guide to the Syrian rebels" and opened "There are
believed to be as many as 1,000 armed opposition groups in Syria, commanding an estimated 100,000 fighters." Except in the Kurdish
areas in Syria's northeast, almost all of those fighters were being led by Al Qaeda's Syrian Branch, al-Nusra. Britain's Center on
Religion & Politics headlined on 21 December 2015,
"Ideology
and Objectives of the Syrian Rebellion" and reported: "If ISIS is defeated, there are at least 65,000 fighters belonging to other
Salafi-jihadi groups ready to take its place." Almost all of those 65,000 were trained and are led by Syria's Al Qaeda (Nusra), which
was protected by
the US
In September 2016 a UK official
"FINAL REPORT OF THE TASK
FORCE ON COMBATING TERRORIST AND FOREIGN FIGHTER TRAVEL" asserted that, "Over 25,000 foreign fighters have traveled to the battlefield
to enlist with Islamist terrorist groups, including at least 4,500 Westerners. More than 250 individuals from the United States have
also joined." Even just 25,000 (that official lowest estimate) was a sizable US proxy-army of religious fanatics to overthrow Syria's
Government.
On 26 November 2015, the first of Russia's videos of Russia's bombing ISIS oil trucks headed into Turkey was bannered at a US
military website
"Russia Airstrike on ISIS Oil Tankers" , and exactly a month later, on 26 December 2015, Britain's Daily Express headlined
"WATCH: Russian fighter jets smash ISIS oil tankers after spotting 12,000 at Turkish border" . This article, reporting around
twelve thousand ISIS oil-tanker trucks heading into Turkey, opened: "The latest video, released by the Russian defence ministry,
shows the tankers bunched together as they make their way along the road. They are then blasted by the fighter jet." The US military
had nothing comparable to offer to its 'news'-media. Britain's Financial Times headlined on 14 October 2015,
"Isis Inc: how oil fuels the jihadi terrorists" . Only America's allies were
involved in this commerce with ISIS -- no nation that supported Syria's Government was participating in this black market of stolen
Syrian goods. So, it's now clear that a lot of that stolen oil was sold for gold as Syria's enemy-nations' means of buying that oil
from ISIS. They'd purchase it from ISIS, but not from Syria's Government, the actual owner.
An estimated 20,000-40,000 barrels of oil are produced daily in ISIS controlled territory generating $1-1.5 million daily profit
for the terrorist organization. The oil is extracted from Dir A-Zur in Syria and two fields in Iraq and transported to the Kurdish
city of Zakhu in a triangle of land near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Israeli and Turkish mediators come to the city
and when prices are agreed, the oil is smuggled to the Turkish city of Silop marked as originating from Kurdish regions of Iraq
and sold for $15-18 per barrel (WTI and Brent Crude currently sell for $41 and $45 per barrel) to the Israeli mediator, a man
in his 50s with dual Greek-Israeli citizenship known as Dr. Farid. He transports the oil via several Turkish ports and then onto
other ports, with Israel among the main destinations.
The US had done the same thing when it took over Ukraine by
a brutal coup in February 2014
: It grabbed the gold. Iskra News in Russian
reported, on 7 March 2014 , that "At 2 a.m. this morning ... an unmarked transport plane was on the runway at Borosipol Airport"
near Kiev in the west, and that, "According to airport staff, before the plane came to the airport, four trucks and two Volkswagen
minibuses arrived, all the truck license plates missing." This was as translated by Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research headlining
on 14 March,
"Ukraine's Gold Reserves Secretly Flown Out and Confiscated by the New York Federal Reserve?" in which he noted that, when asked,
"A spokesman for the New York Fed said simply, 'Any inquiry regarding gold accounts should be directed to the account holder.'" The
load was said to be "more than 40 heavy boxes." Chossudovsky noted that, "The National Bank of Ukraine (Central Bank) estimated Ukraine's
gold reserves in February to be worth $1.8 billion dollars." It was allegedly 36 tons. The US, according to Victoria Nuland (
Obama's detail-person
overseeing the coup ) had invested around $5 billion in the coup. Was her installed Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
cleaning out the nation's gold reserves in order to strip the nation so that the nation's steep indebtedness for Russian gas would
never be repaid to Russia's oligarchs? Or was he doing it as a payoff for Nuland's having installed him? Or both? In any case: Russia
was being squeezed by this fascist
Ukrainian-American ploy.
The Syria operation was about oil, gold, and guns. However, most of America's support was to Al-Qaeda-led jihadists, not to ISIS-jihadists.
As the great independent investigative journalist Dilyana
Gaytandzhieva reported on 2 July 2017 :
"In December of last year while reporting on the battle of Aleppo as a correspondent for Bulgarian media I found and filmed
9 underground warehouses full of heavy weapons with Bulgaria as their country of origin. They were used by Al Nusra Front (Al
Qaeda affiliate in Syria designated as a terrorist organization by the UN)."
Furthermore, On
8 March 2013, Richard Spenser of Britain's Telegraph reported that Croatia's Jutarnji List newspaper had reported that "3,000
tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via
Jordan since November. The airlift of dated but effective Yugoslav-made weapons meets key concerns of the West, and especially Turkey
and the United States, who want the rebels to be better armed to drive out the Assad regime."
Also, a September 2014 study by Conflict Armaments Research (CAR), titled
"Islamic State Weapons
in Iraq and Syria" , reported that not only east-European, but even US-made, weapons were being "captured from Islamic State
forces" by Kurds who were working for the Americans, and that this was very puzzling and disturbing to those Kurds, who were risking
their lives to fight against those jihadists.
In December 2017, CAR headlined
"Weapons of the Islamic State"
and reported that "this materiel was rapidly captured by IS forces, only to be deployed by the group against international coalition
forces." The assumption made there was that the transfer of weapons to ISIS was all unintentional.
That report ignored contrary evidence, which I summed up on 2 September 2017 headlining
"Russian TV
Reports US Secretly Backing ISIS in Syria" , and reporting there also from the Turkish Government an admission that the US was
working with Turkey to funnel surviving members of Iraq's ISIS into the Deir Ezzor part of Syria to help defeat Syria's Government
in that crucial oil-producing region. Moreover, at least one member of the 'rebels' that the US was training at Al Tanf on Syria's
Jordanian border had quit because his American trainers were secretly diverting some of their weapons to ISIS. Furthermore: why hadn't
the US bombed Syrian ISIS before Russia entered the Syrian war on 30 September 2015? America talked lots about its supposed effort
against ISIS, but why did US wait till 16 November 2015 before taking action,
"'Get Out Of Your Trucks And Run Away': US Gives ISIS 45 Minute Warning On Oil Tanker Strikes" ?
So, regardless of whether the US Government uses jihadists as its proxy-forces, or uses fascists as its proxy-forces, it grabs
the gold -- and grabs the oil, and takes whatever else it can.
This is today's form of imperialism.
Grab what you can, and run. And call it 'fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption'. And the
imperial regime's allies watch in amazement, as they take their respective cuts of the loot. That's the deal, and they call it 'fighting
for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption around the world'. That's the way it works. International gangland.
That's the reality, while most of the public think it's instead really "fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against
corruption around the world." For example, as
RT reported on Sunday , March 3rd,
about John Bolton's effort at regime-change in Venezuela, Bolton said: "I'd like to see as broad a coalition as we can put together
to replace Maduro, to replace the whole corrupt regime,' Bolton told CNN's Jake Tapper." Trump's regime wants to bring clean and
democratic government to the poor Venezuelans, just like Bush's did to the Iraqis, and Obama's did to the Libyans and to the Syrians
and to the Ukrainians. And Trump, who pretends to oppose Obama's regime-change policies, alternately expands them and shrinks them.
Though he's slightly different from Obama on domestic policies, he never, as the US President, condemns any of his predecessors'
many coups and invasions, all of which were disasters for everybody except America's and allies' billionaires. They're all in on
the take.
The American public were suckered into destroying Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2011-now, and so many other countries,
and still haven't learned anything, other than to keep trusting the allegations of this lying and psychopathically vicious and super-aggressive
Government and of its stenographic 'news'-media. When is enough finally enough ? Never? If not never, then when ? Or do most people
never learn? Or maybe they don't really care. Perhaps that's the problem.
Back on 21 December 2018, one of the US regime's top 'news'-media, the Washington Post, had headlined
"Retreating ISIS army smuggled a fortune in cash and gold out of Iraq and Syria" and reported that "the Islamic State is sitting
on a mountain of stolen cash and gold that its leaders stashed away to finance terrorist operations." So, it's not as if there hadn't
been prior reason to believe that some day some of the gold would be found after America's defeat in Syria. Maybe they just hadn't
expected this to happen quite so soon. But the regime will find ways to hoodwink its public, in the future, just as it has in the
past. Unless the public wises-up (if that's even possible).
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Moscow planned to keep gas transit
via Ukraine irrespective of a number of gas pipelines Moscow currently builds to bypass its
ex-Soviet neighbor.
...
"This is a very difficult, sensitive topic. We would like to solve this problem," Putin said
at his annual press conference in Moscow.
"We will look for a solution that is acceptable for all parties, including Ukraine. That's
despite the construction of infrastructure such as Nord Stream 1, Nord Stream 2, TurkStream.
We will preserve gas transit through Ukraine."
...
Putin said on Thursday that Russia would be ready to give Ukraine a discount of 20-25% for
gas purchases. "I am confident we will reach an agreement ... We have no desire to exacerbate
the situation ... or use this to influence the situation in Ukraine itself."
...
This gives Ukraine three options:
keep buying Russian gas from Europe
swallow their pride and buy discounted gas direct from Russia
Yes it was corrupt before the violent coup, but at least people could live nicely and be
warm during winter. People have frozen during the winters since and many of them had to go
back to work because of the damn IMF loans that hurt big time.
Congress said that they had to put sanctions on Nordstream because of Russia aggression.
One article listed all of the aggressions they have done.
Invaded Iraq.
Supported the Honduran coup.
Invaded Libya
Invaded Syria....well you get the drift. Sorta like how Iran has destabilized the Middle East
as pompous Pompeo is saying. It's the effing hypocrisy!
Last Thursday/Friday the Fed published a $500 billion dollar REPO backstop plan to
cover private bank positioning through the end of the year
according to Dmitry Orlov it's the x10 rate spike on these REPOS that signifies that the
final act is underway. So, for folks paying attention to the prediction market, perhaps now
is the last moment to take heed.
Looking at the numbers for October and November, the Fed monetized over half (50.7%) of
new US government debt. A straight-line projection is that if it took the Fed to go from 0%
to 50% in four months, then it will go from 50% to 100% in another four -- by April Fool's
2020. But who's to say that the increase will be linear rather than exponential? Whichever it
is, the trend is unmistakable: the market in US government debt -- once the deepest and most
liquid market in the world -- is dead. The only thing propping up the value of USTs is the
Fed's printing press. And the only thing propping up the value of the output of the Fed's
printing press is what is it, exactly? Exactly
After more than 17 years of the United States pouring blood and treasure into the effort
to build an Afghan army and government, why is it that the Kabul government continues to lose
ground against the Taliban? Further, why were we unsuccessful creating an Iraqi army that
could stand on its own against the Islamic State?
Before that, of course, came Vietnam.
Nor was that the start of the failure of American-backed armies. I was a teenager in 1949
when Chiang Kai-shek's American-backed Nationalist army lost to the Communist forces of Mao
Zedong in China. The American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, having conducted a study on
why our side lost, declared: "The Nationalist armies did not have to be defeated; they
disintegrated. History has proved again and again that a regime without faith in itself, and
an army without morale, cannot survive the test of battle."
Forty-four years ago, the American-trained and American-supplied army of South Vietnam
simply melted away before the less-well-equipped but better-motivated army of North Vietnam.
In 1975, I watched South Vietnamese soldiers taking off their uniforms and running away in
their underwear as the North Vietnamese closed in on Saigon.
Five years ago, the world watched another American-trained and American-equipped Iraqi
army bolt and run when the better motivated Islamic State forces overran Mosul in Northern
Iraq.
Why, over and over again, does the side America has backed in these civil wars end up
defeated? Four threads connect these lost wars of the last 70 years: corruption, patriotic
nationalism, a misplaced belief in American exceptionalism, and self-deception.
I saw corruption on a grand scale in Saigon. Generals and government officials were
funneling America's tax dollars into bank accounts abroad, fielding ghost armies in which
there were fewer soldiers on the ground than on the official payrolls. In Baghdad during the
American occupation, I learned that billions of American taxpayer dollars were bleeding out
to the Persian Gulf and Jordan, causing a laundered money real estate boom in the Jordanian
capital. In Afghanistan I learned that Afghan officers and soldiers routinely robbed the
villages they were sent to protect. Corruption sapped the people's belief in their US-backed
government in all four wars. Soldiers saw no reason to die for corrupt officials.
A second thread is that our side always appeared to be fighting on the side of foreigners,
while the Communists in China and Vietnam, as well as the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan,
always had a better grip on patriotic nationalism and resistance to foreigners. The
anti-colonial struggle was more important than the threat of Communism in most of the
post-World War II world, and the Islamist insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan knew how to
exploit the traditional resistance to foreign rule. The Taliban could appeal to patriotism
while trying to expel the infidel forces of the United States, just as their fathers,
grandfathers, and great grandfathers had resisted the Russians and the British before that in
the name of jihad.
A third thread is a curiously American trait of willfully ignoring other people's history
and cultures. I remember asking an American officer in Vietnam if he had read anything of the
French experience in Vietnam. His answer: "No, why should I? They lost, didn't they?" Robert
McNamara, defense secretary and an architect of our Vietnam War, said in later life that
Americans had never understood the Vietnamese. There were plenty of people who could have
helped him understand, but he wasn't interested. We were Americans -- exceptional, and
therefore not susceptible to the same forces that thwarted other efforts.
I met Americans in the Green Zone in Baghdad who knew nothing about the great schism
between Sunnis and Shia Muslims that was tearing the country apart. American-style democracy
was the answer to all ills, they felt. In Afghanistan I met Americans who thought purple ink
on the fingers of Afghans who had voted was the answer to a thousand years of tribal and
ethnic rivalries.
The fourth thread is self-deception. In Saigon, in Baghdad, and in Kabul I attended
briefings in which progress was always being made, the trend lines were always favorable, and
we were always winning wars we were actually losing. Wishful thinking is no substitute for
reality. Americans can train and assist the armies of those whom we want to support in the
civil wars of others, but we cannot supply the motivation and morale that is necessary to
survive the test of battle.
As we observe another anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack that shattered American
life 18 years ago, its full impact is still unfolding. Those who planned it succeeded beyond
their wildest dreams. The airborne assaults that took nearly 3,000 lives on that day may now
be seen as the most diabolically successful terror attack in history. That attack not only
wreaked carnage at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania.
It wound up dragging the United States into an endless state of war that has drained our
treasury, poisoned our politics, created waves of new terrorism, and made us the enemy of
millions around the world.
The apparent chief perpetrator of the 9/11 attack, Osama bin Laden, presumably cackled
with joy when he heard news of his success on that stunning day. He lived for another 10
years, long enough to cackle with even greater glee at Washington's self-defeating response
to the attack. Using the 9/11 attack as a pretext, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
Bin Laden died knowing that he had lured us into the greatest foreign policy disaster in
American history.
It is a truism that our lives are shaped not by what happens to us, but by how we react to
what happens to us. The same applies to nations. Devastating as the death toll was on Sept.
11, 2001, it turned out to be only a taste of what was to come. The United States has been at
war ever since. Thousands of Americans have died. So have hundreds of thousands of civilians
in the Middle East and beyond. This nearly two-decade-long spasm of attacking, bombing, and
occupying countries has decisively shaped the United States and its image in the world. Every
day that our "forever war" continues is a triumph for bin Laden. So is every wounded veteran
who returns home, every newly minted terrorist infuriated by an American attack, every
citizen of the world who recoils at what US forces are being sent to do. We did not simply
fall into bin Laden's trap, we raced in at full speed. Even now, we show little will to
extricate ourselves.
America's determination to strike back with devastating force after 9/11 was
understandable given our shared sense of ravaged innocence. We might have launched a
concentrated strike against the gang of several hundred criminals whose leaders attacked the
United States, and then come home. Instead we have used the 9/11 attack to justify wars and
military deployments around the world.
On Sept. 14, 2001, Congress passed an "authorization for the use of military force"
against the perpetrators of that week's attack and against their "associated forces." Three
presidents have used that authorization to deploy troops across the Middle East and in
countries from Kenya to Georgia to the Philippines. Every call for US withdrawal from
Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria is met by warnings that ending wars could produce "another
9/11." This has become the paralyzing mantra that prevents us from halting the hydra-headed
military campaign we have been waging for 18 years. We also use it to justify atrocities at
prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Bin Laden has succeeded even in colonizing our
minds.
Soon after passing its highly elastic authorization for military action against
"associated forces," Congress approved another, even more sweeping law: the Patriot Act. It
gave the government broad new power to monitor people and businesses, and has become a
foundation stone of our emerging "surveillance state." The 9/11 attack led us to distort not
only our approach to the world, but also the balance between freedom and security at
home.
Another pernicious aftereffect of the terror attack has been the deepening of our national
us-against-them narrative. This began with President George W. Bush's assertion that every
country in the world had to be "either with us or against us." Crusader rhetoric posits the
United States as the indispensable guardian of civilization, entitled to act as it chooses in
order to fend off a threatening tide of barbarism. Now this approach has leaked back into the
United States. Racist attacks that tear at our social fabric are the domestic reflection of
foreign policies that see the rest of the world as a hostile "other" bent on destroying our
way of life.
Last month it was announced that the five surviving alleged plotters of the 9/11 attack
will finally be brought to trial in 2021. If they are aware of what is happening in the
world, they will arrive in court with a deep sense of satisfaction. Their great triumph was
not the attack. It was the damage the United States has since inflicted upon itself.
Acheson is parroting Napoleon: "In war the moral is to the material as 3 is to 1."
He is wrong in the matter of "faith", unless the Chiang's army lost faith in Chiang's
moral poverty, what he stood for.
A better quote about Chiang losing is written by George C. Marshall, who went over and
came back sure Chiang was done for.
He said: "The US would not be dragged through the mud by those reactionaries". Meaning
Chiang was not the moral power in China.
Same for Vietnam US puppets were not and had no moral power/authority.
In Afghanistan same!
Iraq is split in moral authority, the areas populated by Shi'a are okay as long as the
central government does not pander to the Sunni 1/3 (Baathists were suppressing Shi'a).
I do not agree with quoting Acheson when there is plenty of professional soldier writings
that say it more clearly.
After Korea the professional soldiers were no longer expressive when it cme to propping
thugs, with no moral power in their own borders (granted many of the borders surround
fictional counties).
US has stood with thugs for most of its quagmire experience.......
This week US is looking for a way to start a new quagmire with Iran for royal murderers'
sharing their oil company!
Information from local sources said that US army helicopters have already transported the gold bullions under cover of darkness
on Sunday [February 24th], before transporting them to the United States.
The sources said that tens of tons that Daesh had been keeping in their last hotbed in al-Baghouz area in Deir Ezzor countryside
have been handed to the Americans, adding up to other tons of gold that Americans have found in other hideouts for Daesh, making
the total amount of gold taken by the Americans to the US around 50 tons, leaving only scraps for the SDF [Kurdish] militias that
serve them [the US operation].
Recently, sources said that the area where Daesh leaders and members have barricaded themselves in, contains around 40 tons
of gold and tens of millions of dollars.
Allegedly, "US occupation forces in the Syrian al-Jazeera area made a deal with Daesh terrorists, by which Washington gets tens
of tons of gold that the terror organization had stolen, in exchange for providing safe passage for the terrorists and their leaders
from the areas in Deir Ezzor where they are located."
ISIS was financing its operations largely by the theft of oil from the oil wells in the Deir Ezzor area, Syria's oil-producing
region, and they transported and sold this stolen oil via their allied forces, through Turkey, which was one of those US allies trying
to overthrow Syria's secular Government
and install a Sunni fundamentalist regime that would be ruled from Riyadh (i.e., controlled by the Saud family) . This gold is
the property of the Syrian Government, which owns all that oil and the oil wells, which ISIS had captured (stolen), and then sold.
Thus, this gold is from sale of that stolen black-market oil, which was Syria's property.
The US Government evidently thinks that the public are fools, idiots. America's allies seem to be constantly amazed at how successful
that approach turns out to be.
Jihadists were recruited from throughout the world to fight against Syria's secular Government. Whereas ISIS was funded mainly
by black-market sales of oil from conquered areas, the Al-Qaeda-led groups were mainly funded by the Sauds and other Arab royal families
and their retinues, the rest of their aristocracy. On 13 December 2013, BBC headlined
"Guide to the Syrian rebels" and opened "There are
believed to be as many as 1,000 armed opposition groups in Syria, commanding an estimated 100,000 fighters." Except in the Kurdish
areas in Syria's northeast, almost all of those fighters were being led by Al Qaeda's Syrian Branch, al-Nusra. Britain's Center on
Religion & Politics headlined on 21 December 2015,
"Ideology
and Objectives of the Syrian Rebellion" and reported: "If ISIS is defeated, there are at least 65,000 fighters belonging to other
Salafi-jihadi groups ready to take its place." Almost all of those 65,000 were trained and are led by Syria's Al Qaeda (Nusra), which
was protected by
the US
In September 2016 a UK official
"FINAL REPORT OF THE TASK
FORCE ON COMBATING TERRORIST AND FOREIGN FIGHTER TRAVEL" asserted that, "Over 25,000 foreign fighters have traveled to the battlefield
to enlist with Islamist terrorist groups, including at least 4,500 Westerners. More than 250 individuals from the United States have
also joined." Even just 25,000 (that official lowest estimate) was a sizable US proxy-army of religious fanatics to overthrow Syria's
Government.
On 26 November 2015, the first of Russia's videos of Russia's bombing ISIS oil trucks headed into Turkey was bannered at a US
military website
"Russia Airstrike on ISIS Oil Tankers" , and exactly a month later, on 26 December 2015, Britain's Daily Express headlined
"WATCH: Russian fighter jets smash ISIS oil tankers after spotting 12,000 at Turkish border" . This article, reporting around
twelve thousand ISIS oil-tanker trucks heading into Turkey, opened: "The latest video, released by the Russian defence ministry,
shows the tankers bunched together as they make their way along the road. They are then blasted by the fighter jet." The US military
had nothing comparable to offer to its 'news'-media. Britain's Financial Times headlined on 14 October 2015,
"Isis Inc: how oil fuels the jihadi terrorists" . Only America's allies were
involved in this commerce with ISIS -- no nation that supported Syria's Government was participating in this black market of stolen
Syrian goods. So, it's now clear that a lot of that stolen oil was sold for gold as Syria's enemy-nations' means of buying that oil
from ISIS. They'd purchase it from ISIS, but not from Syria's Government, the actual owner.
An estimated 20,000-40,000 barrels of oil are produced daily in ISIS controlled territory generating $1-1.5 million daily profit
for the terrorist organization. The oil is extracted from Dir A-Zur in Syria and two fields in Iraq and transported to the Kurdish
city of Zakhu in a triangle of land near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Israeli and Turkish mediators come to the city
and when prices are agreed, the oil is smuggled to the Turkish city of Silop marked as originating from Kurdish regions of Iraq
and sold for $15-18 per barrel (WTI and Brent Crude currently sell for $41 and $45 per barrel) to the Israeli mediator, a man
in his 50s with dual Greek-Israeli citizenship known as Dr. Farid. He transports the oil via several Turkish ports and then onto
other ports, with Israel among the main destinations.
The US had done the same thing when it took over Ukraine by
a brutal coup in February 2014
: It grabbed the gold. Iskra News in Russian
reported, on 7 March 2014 , that "At 2 a.m. this morning ... an unmarked transport plane was on the runway at Borosipol Airport"
near Kiev in the west, and that, "According to airport staff, before the plane came to the airport, four trucks and two Volkswagen
minibuses arrived, all the truck license plates missing." This was as translated by Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research headlining
on 14 March,
"Ukraine's Gold Reserves Secretly Flown Out and Confiscated by the New York Federal Reserve?" in which he noted that, when asked,
"A spokesman for the New York Fed said simply, 'Any inquiry regarding gold accounts should be directed to the account holder.'" The
load was said to be "more than 40 heavy boxes." Chossudovsky noted that, "The National Bank of Ukraine (Central Bank) estimated Ukraine's
gold reserves in February to be worth $1.8 billion dollars." It was allegedly 36 tons. The US, according to Victoria Nuland (
Obama's detail-person
overseeing the coup ) had invested around $5 billion in the coup. Was her installed Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
cleaning out the nation's gold reserves in order to strip the nation so that the nation's steep indebtedness for Russian gas would
never be repaid to Russia's oligarchs? Or was he doing it as a payoff for Nuland's having installed him? Or both? In any case: Russia
was being squeezed by this fascist
Ukrainian-American ploy.
The Syria operation was about oil, gold, and guns. However, most of America's support was to Al-Qaeda-led jihadists, not to ISIS-jihadists.
As the great independent investigative journalist Dilyana
Gaytandzhieva reported on 2 July 2017 :
"In December of last year while reporting on the battle of Aleppo as a correspondent for Bulgarian media I found and filmed
9 underground warehouses full of heavy weapons with Bulgaria as their country of origin. They were used by Al Nusra Front (Al
Qaeda affiliate in Syria designated as a terrorist organization by the UN)."
Furthermore, On
8 March 2013, Richard Spenser of Britain's Telegraph reported that Croatia's Jutarnji List newspaper had reported that "3,000
tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via
Jordan since November. The airlift of dated but effective Yugoslav-made weapons meets key concerns of the West, and especially Turkey
and the United States, who want the rebels to be better armed to drive out the Assad regime."
Also, a September 2014 study by Conflict Armaments Research (CAR), titled
"Islamic State Weapons
in Iraq and Syria" , reported that not only east-European, but even US-made, weapons were being "captured from Islamic State
forces" by Kurds who were working for the Americans, and that this was very puzzling and disturbing to those Kurds, who were risking
their lives to fight against those jihadists.
In December 2017, CAR headlined
"Weapons of the Islamic State"
and reported that "this materiel was rapidly captured by IS forces, only to be deployed by the group against international coalition
forces." The assumption made there was that the transfer of weapons to ISIS was all unintentional.
That report ignored contrary evidence, which I summed up on 2 September 2017 headlining
"Russian TV
Reports US Secretly Backing ISIS in Syria" , and reporting there also from the Turkish Government an admission that the US was
working with Turkey to funnel surviving members of Iraq's ISIS into the Deir Ezzor part of Syria to help defeat Syria's Government
in that crucial oil-producing region. Moreover, at least one member of the 'rebels' that the US was training at Al Tanf on Syria's
Jordanian border had quit because his American trainers were secretly diverting some of their weapons to ISIS. Furthermore: why hadn't
the US bombed Syrian ISIS before Russia entered the Syrian war on 30 September 2015? America talked lots about its supposed effort
against ISIS, but why did US wait till 16 November 2015 before taking action,
"'Get Out Of Your Trucks And Run Away': US Gives ISIS 45 Minute Warning On Oil Tanker Strikes" ?
So, regardless of whether the US Government uses jihadists as its proxy-forces, or uses fascists as its proxy-forces, it grabs
the gold -- and grabs the oil, and takes whatever else it can.
This is today's form of imperialism.
Grab what you can, and run. And call it 'fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption'. And the
imperial regime's allies watch in amazement, as they take their respective cuts of the loot. That's the deal, and they call it 'fighting
for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption around the world'. That's the way it works. International gangland.
That's the reality, while most of the public think it's instead really "fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against
corruption around the world." For example, as
RT reported on Sunday , March 3rd,
about John Bolton's effort at regime-change in Venezuela, Bolton said: "I'd like to see as broad a coalition as we can put together
to replace Maduro, to replace the whole corrupt regime,' Bolton told CNN's Jake Tapper." Trump's regime wants to bring clean and
democratic government to the poor Venezuelans, just like Bush's did to the Iraqis, and Obama's did to the Libyans and to the Syrians
and to the Ukrainians. And Trump, who pretends to oppose Obama's regime-change policies, alternately expands them and shrinks them.
Though he's slightly different from Obama on domestic policies, he never, as the US President, condemns any of his predecessors'
many coups and invasions, all of which were disasters for everybody except America's and allies' billionaires. They're all in on
the take.
The American public were suckered into destroying Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2011-now, and so many other countries,
and still haven't learned anything, other than to keep trusting the allegations of this lying and psychopathically vicious and super-aggressive
Government and of its stenographic 'news'-media. When is enough finally enough ? Never? If not never, then when ? Or do most people
never learn? Or maybe they don't really care. Perhaps that's the problem.
Back on 21 December 2018, one of the US regime's top 'news'-media, the Washington Post, had headlined
"Retreating ISIS army smuggled a fortune in cash and gold out of Iraq and Syria" and reported that "the Islamic State is sitting
on a mountain of stolen cash and gold that its leaders stashed away to finance terrorist operations." So, it's not as if there hadn't
been prior reason to believe that some day some of the gold would be found after America's defeat in Syria. Maybe they just hadn't
expected this to happen quite so soon. But the regime will find ways to hoodwink its public, in the future, just as it has in the
past. Unless the public wises-up (if that's even possible).
"... The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya. ..."
"... Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course, his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed. ..."
"... Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. ..."
"... We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact. ..."
The start of current decade revealed the most ruthless face of a global neo-colonialism. From Syria and Libya to Europe and Latin
America, the old colonial powers of the West tried to rebound against an oncoming rival bloc led by Russia and China, which starts
to threaten their global domination.
Inside a multi-polar, complex terrain of geopolitical games, the big players start to abandon the old-fashioned, inefficient direct
wars. They use today other, various methods like
brutal proxy
wars , economic wars, financial and constitutional coups, provocative operations, 'color revolutions', etc. In this highly
complex and unstable situation, when even traditional allies turn against each other as the global balances change rapidly, the forces
unleashed are absolutely destructive. Inevitably, the results are more than evident.
Proxy Wars - Syria/Libya
After the US invasion in Iraq, the gates of hell had opened in the Middle East. Obama continued the Bush legacy of US endless
interventions, but he had to change tactics because a direct war would be inefficient, costly and extremely unpopular to the American
people and the rest of the world.
The result, however, appeared to be equally (if not more) devastating with the failed US invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US
had lost total control of the armed groups directly linked with the ISIS terrorists, failed to topple Assad, and, moreover, instead
of eliminating the Russian and Iranian influence in the region, actually managed to increase it. As a result, the US and its allies
failed to secure their geopolitical interests around the various pipeline games.
In addition, the US sees Turkey, one of its most important ally, changing direction dangerously, away from the Western bloc. Probably
the strongest indication for this, is that Turkey, Iran and Russia decided very recently to proceed in an agreement on Syria without
the presence of the US.
Yet, the list of US failures does not end here. The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have
proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have
witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya.
Evidence from
WikiLeaks has shown that the old colonial powers have started a new round of ruthless competition on Libya's resources.
The usual story propagated by the Western media, about another tyrant who had to be removed, has now completely collapsed. They don't
care neither to topple an 'authoritarian' regime, nor to spread Democracy. All they care about is to secure each country's resources
for their big companies.
The Gaddafi case is quite interesting because it shows that
the Western
hypocrites were using him according to their interests .
Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they
had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order
to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course,
his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed.
Economic Wars, Financial Coups – Greece/Eurozone
It would be unthinkable for the neo-colonialists to conduct proxy wars inside European soil, especially against countries which
belong to Western institutions like NATO, EU, eurozone, etc. The wave of the US-made major economic crisis hit Greece and Europe
at the start of the decade, almost simultaneously with the eruption of the Arab Spring revolutionary wave and the subsequent disaster
in Middle East and Libya.
Greece was the easy victim for the global neoliberal dictatorship to impose catastrophic measures in favor of the plutocracy.
The Greek experiment enters its seventh year and the plan is to be used as a model for the whole eurozone. Greece has become also
the model for the looting of public property, as happened in the past with the East Germany and the
Treuhand Operation
after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
While Greece was the major victim of an economic war, Germany used its economic power and control of the European Central Bank
to impose unprecedented austerity, sado-monetarism and neoliberal destruction through silent financial coups in
Ireland ,
Italy and
Cyprus . The Greek political establishment collapsed with the rise of SYRIZA in power, and the ECB was forced to proceed
in an open financial coup against
Greece when the current PM, Alexis Tsipras, decided to conduct a referendum on the catastrophic measures imposed by the ECB, IMF
and the European Commission, through which the Greek people clearly rejected these measures, despite the propaganda of terror inside
and outside Greece. Due to the direct threat from Mario Draghi and the ECB, who actually threatened to cut liquidity sinking Greece
into a financial chaos, Tsipras finally forced to retreat, signing another catastrophic memorandum.
Through similar financial and political pressure, the Brussels bureaufascists and the German sado-monetarists along with the IMF
economic hitmen, imposed neoliberal disaster to other eurozone countries like Portugal, Spain etc. It is remarkable that even the
second eurozone economy, France,
rushed to
impose anti-labor measures midst terrorist attacks, succumbing to a - pre-designed by the elites - neo-Feudalism, under
the 'Socialist' François Hollande, despite the intense protests in many French cities.
Germany would never let the United States to lead the neo-colonization in Europe, as it tries (again) to become a major power
with its own sphere of influence, expanding throughout eurozone and beyond. As the situation in Europe becomes more and more critical
with the ongoing economic and refugee crisis and the rise of the Far-Right and the nationalists, the economic war mostly between
the US and the German big capital, creates an even more complicated situation.
The decline of the US-German relations has been exposed initially with the
NSA interceptions
scandal , yet, progressively, the big picture came on surface, revealing a
transatlantic
economic war between banking and corporate giants. In times of huge multilevel crises, the big capital always intensifies
its efforts to eliminate competitors too. As a consequence, the US has seen another key ally, Germany, trying to gain a certain degree
of independence in order to form its own agenda, separate from the US interests.
Note that, both Germany and Turkey are medium powers that, historically, always trying to expand and create their own spheres
of influence, seeking independence from the traditional big powers.
A wave of neoliberal onslaught shakes currently Latin America. While in Argentina, Mauricio Macri allegedly took the power normally,
the constitutional
coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, as well as, the
usual actions
of the Right opposition in Venezuela against Nicolás Maduro with the help of the US finger, are far more obvious.
The special weight of these three countries in Latin America is extremely important for the US imperialism to regain ground in the
global geopolitical arena. Especially the last ten to fifteen years, each of them developed increasingly autonomous policies away
from the US close custody, under Leftist governments, and this was something that alarmed the US imperialism components.
Brazil appears to be the most important among the three, not only due to its size, but also as a member of the BRICS, the team
of fast growing economies who threaten the US and generally the Western global dominance. The constitutional coup against Rousseff
was rather a sloppy action and reveals the anxiety of the US establishment to regain control through puppet regimes. This is a well-known
situation from the past through which the establishment attempts to secure absolute dominance in the US backyard.
The importance of Venezuela due to its oil reserves is also significant. When Maduro tried to approach Russia in order to strengthen
the economic cooperation between the two countries, he must had set the alarm for the neocons in the US. Venezuela could find an
alternative in Russia and BRICS, in order to breathe from the multiple economic war that was set off by the US. It is characteristic
that the economic war against Russia by the US and the Saudis, by keeping the oil prices in historically low levels, had significant
impact on the Venezuelan economy too. It is also known that the US organizations are funding the opposition since Chávez era, in
order to proceed in provocative operations that could overthrow the Leftist governments.
The case of Venezuela is really interesting. The US imperialists were fiercely trying to overthrow the Leftist governments since
Chávez administration. They found now a weaker president, Nicolás Maduro - who certainly does not have the strength and personality
of Hugo Chávez - to achieve their goal.
The Western media mouthpieces are doing their job, which is propaganda as usual. The recipe is known. You present the half truth,
with a big overdose of exaggeration.
The establishment
parrots are demonizing Socialism , but they won't ever tell you about the money that the US is spending, feeding the
Right-Wing groups and opposition to proceed in provocative operations, in order to create instability. They won't tell you about
the financial war conducted through the oil prices, manipulated by the Saudis, the close US ally.
Regarding Argentina, former president, Cristina Kirchner, had also made some important moves towards the stronger cooperation
with Russia, which was something unacceptable for Washington's hawks. Not only for geopolitical reasons, but also because Argentina
could escape from the vulture funds that sucking its blood since its default. This would give the country an alternative to the neoliberal
monopoly of destruction. The US big banks and corporations would never accept such a perspective because the debt-enslaved Argentina
is a golden opportunity for a new round of huge profits. It's
happening right
now in eurozone's debt colony, Greece.
'Color Revolutions' - Ukraine
The events in Ukraine have shown that, the big capital has no hesitation to ally even with the neo-nazis, in order to impose the
new world order. This is not something new of course. The connection of Hitler with the German economic oligarchs, but also with
other major Western companies, before and during the WWII, is well known.
The most terrifying of all however, is not that the West has silenced in front of the decrees of the new Ukrainian leadership,
through which is targeting the minorities, but the fact that the West allied with the neo-nazis, while according to some information
has also funded their actions as well as other extreme nationalist groups during the riots in Kiev.
Plenty of indications show that US organizations have 'put their finger' on Ukraine. A
video , for
example, concerning the situation in Ukraine has been directed by Ben Moses (creator of the movie "Good Morning, Vietnam"), who is
connected with American government executives and organizations like National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US Congress.
This video shows a beautiful young female Ukrainian who characterizes the government of the country as "dictatorship" and praise
some protesters with the neo-nazi symbols of the fascist Ukranian party Svoboda on them.
The same organizations are behind 'color revolutions' elsewhere, as well as, provocative operations against Leftist governments
in Venezuela and other countries.
Ukraine is the perfect place to provoke Putin and tight the noose around Russia. Of course the huge hypocrisy of the West can
also be identified in the case of Crimea. While in other cases, the Western officials were 'screaming' for the right of self-determination
(like Kosovo, for example), after they destroyed Yugoslavia in a bloodbath, they can't recognize the will of the majority of Crimeans
to join Russia.
The war will become wilder
The Western neo-colonial powers are trying to counterattack against the geopolitical upgrade of Russia and the Chinese economic
expansionism.
Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine
in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. Besides, Trump has already shown his hostile feelings against China, despite
his friendly approach to Russia and Putin.
We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation
in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that
they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian
borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact.
Jewish financists are no longer Jewish, much like a socialist who became minister is no
longer a socialist minister. Unregulated finance promotes a set of destructive behaviors which
has nothing to do with nationality or ethnicity.
Of course that Joyce is peddling his own obsessions, but I have to admit that Singer &
comp. are detestable. I know that what they're doing is not illegal, but it should be (in my
opinion), and those who are involved in such affairs are somehow odious. The same goes for Icahn,
Soros etc. Still Ethnic angle is evident, too: how come Singer works exclusively with his
co-ethnics in this multi-ethnic USA? Non-Jewish & most Jewish entrepreneurs don't behave that
way.
It was very gratifying to see Tucker Carlson's
recent attack on the activities of Paul Singer's vulture fund, Elliot Associates, a group I
first
profiled four years ago. In many respects, it is truly remarkable that vulture funds like
Singer's escaped major media attention prior to this, especially when one considers how
extraordinarily harmful and exploitative they are. Many countries are now in very significant
debt to groups like Elliot Associates and, as Tucker's segment very starkly illustrated, their
reach has now extended into the very heart of small-town America. Shining a spotlight on the
spread of this virus is definitely welcome. I strongly believe, however, that the problem
presented by these cabals of exploitative financiers will only be solved if their true nature
is fully discerned. Thus far, the descriptive terminology employed in discussing their
activities has revolved only around the scavenging and parasitic nature of their activities.
Elliot Associates have therefore been described as a quintessential example of a "vulture fund"
practicing "vulture capitalism." But these funds aren't run by carrion birds. They are operated
almost exclusively by Jews. In the following essay, I want us to examine the largest and most
influential "vulture funds," to assess their leadership, ethos, financial practices, and how
they disseminate their dubiously acquired wealth. I want us to set aside colorful metaphors. I
want us to strike through the mask.
It is commonly agreed that the most significant global vulture funds are Elliot Management,
Cerberus, FG Hemisphere, Autonomy Capital, Baupost Group, Canyon Capital Advisors, Monarch
Alternative Capital, GoldenTree Asset Management, Aurelius Capital Management, OakTree Capital,
Fundamental Advisors, and Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP. The names of these groups are
very interesting, being either blankly nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or
rural/pastoral origins (note the prevalence of oak, trees, parks, canyons, monarchs, or the use
of names like Aurelius and Elliot). This is the same tactic employed by the Jew Jordan Belfort,
the "Wolf of Wall Street," who operated multiple major frauds under the business name Stratton
Oakmont.
These names are masks. They are designed to cultivate trust and obscure the real background
of the various groupings of financiers. None of these groups have Anglo-Saxon or venerable
origins. None are based in rural idylls. All of the vulture funds named above were founded by,
and continue to be operated by, ethnocentric, globalist, urban-dwelling Jews. A quick review of
each of their websites reveals their founders and central figures to be:
Elliot Management
-- Paul Singer, Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn, Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel
Cerberus -- Stephen Feinberg, Lee Millstein, Jeffrey Lomasky, Seth Plattus, Joshua Weintraub,
Daniel Wolf, David Teitelbaum FG Hemisphere -- Peter Grossman Autonomy Capital -- Derek Goodman
Baupost Group -- Seth Klarman, Jordan Baruch, Isaac Auerbach Canyon Capital Advisors -- Joshua
Friedman, Mitchell Julis Monarch Alternative Capital -- Andrew Herenstein, Michael Weinstock
GoldenTree Asset Management -- Steven Tananbaum, Steven Shapiro Aurelius Capital Management --
Mark Brodsky, Samuel Rubin, Eleazer Klein, Jason Kaplan OakTree Capital -- Howard Marks, Bruce
Karsh, Jay Wintrob, John Frank, Sheldon Stone Fundamental Advisors -- Laurence Gottlieb,
Jonathan Stern Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP -- Josh Birnbaum, Sam Alcoff
The fact that all of these vulture funds, widely acknowledged as the most influential and
predatory, are owned and operated by Jews is remarkable in itself, especially in a contemporary
context in which we are constantly bombarded with the suggestion that Jews don't have a special
relationship with money or usury, and that any such idea is an example of ignorant prejudice.
Equally remarkable, however, is the fact that Jewish representation saturates the board level
of these companies also, suggesting that their beginnings and methods of internal promotion and
operation rely heavily on ethnic-communal origins, and religious and social cohesion more
generally. As such, these Jewish funds provide an excellent opportunity to examine their
financial and political activities as expressions of Jewishness, and can thus be placed in the
broader framework of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy and the long historical trajectory
of Jewish-European relations.
How They Feed
In May 2018, Puerto Rico declared a form of municipal bankruptcy after falling into more
than
$74.8 billion in debt, of which more than $34 billion is interest and fees. The debt was
owed to
all of the Jewish capitalists named above, with the exception of Stephen Feinberg's
Cerberus group. In order to commence payments, the government had instituted a policy of fiscal
austerity, closing schools and raising utility bills, but when Hurricane Maria hit the island
in September 2017, Puerto Rico was forced to stop transfers to their Jewish creditors. This
provoked an aggressive attempt by the Jewish funds to seize assets from an island suffering
from an 80% power outage, with the addition of further interest and fees. Protests broke out in
several US cities calling for the debt to be forgiven. After a quick stop in Puerto Rico in
late 2018, Donald Trump pandered to this sentiment when he told Fox News, "They owe a lot of
money to your friends on Wall Street, and we're going to have to wipe that out." But Trump's
statement, like all of Trump's statements, had no substance. The following day, the director of
the White House budget office, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters: "I think what you heard the
president say is that Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to solve its debt
problem." In other words, Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to pay its Jews.
Trump's reversal is hardly surprising, given that the President is considered extremely
friendly to Jewish financial power. When he referred to "your friends on Wall Street" he really
meant his friends on Wall Street. One of his closest allies is Stephen Feinberg, founder
and CEO of Cerberus, a war-profiteering vulture fund that has now accumulated
more than $1.5 billion in Irish debt , leaving the country prone to a "
wave of home repossessions " on a scale not seen since the Jewish mortgage traders behind
Quicken Loans (Daniel Gilbert) and Ameriquest (Roland Arnall)
made thousands of Americans homeless . Feinberg has also been associated with mass
evictions in Spain, causing a collective of Barcelona anarchists to
label him a "Jewish mega parasite" in charge of the "world's vilest vulture fund." In May
2018, Trump made Feinberg
chair of his Intelligence Advisory Board , and one of the reasons for Trump's sluggish
retreat from Afghanistan has been the fact Feinberg's DynCorp has enjoyed years of lucrative government
defense contracts training Afghan police and providing ancillary services to the military.
But Trump's association with Jewish vultures goes far beyond Feinberg. A recent piece
in the New York Post declared "Orthodox Jews are opening up their wallets for Trump in
2020." This is a predictable outcome of the period 2016 to 2020, an era that could be neatly
characterised as How Jews learned to stop worrying and love the Don. Jewish financiers
are opening their wallets for Trump because it is now clear he utterly failed to fulfil
promises on mass immigration to White America, while pledging his commitment to Zionism and to
socially destructive Jewish side projects like the promotion of homosexuality. These actions,
coupled with his commuting
of Hasidic meatpacking boss Sholom Rubashkin 's 27-year-sentence for bank fraud and money
laundering in 2017, have sent a message to Jewish finance that Trump is someone they can do
business with. Since these globalist exploiters are essentially politically amorphous, knowing
no loyalty but that to their own tribe and its interests, there is significant drift of Jewish
mega-money between the Democratic and Republican parties. The New York Post reports, for
example, that when Trump attended a $25,000-per-couple luncheon in November at a Midtown hotel,
where 400 moneyed Jews raised at least $4 million for the America First [!] SuperPAC, the
luncheon organiser Kelly Sadler, told reporters, "We screened all of the people in attendance,
and we were surprised to see how many have given before to Democrats, but never a Republican.
People were standing up on their chairs chanting eight more years." The reality, of course, is
that these people are not Democrats or Republicans, but Jews, willing to push their money in
whatever direction the wind of Jewish interests is blowing.
The collapse of Puerto Rico under Jewish debt and elite courting of Jewish financial
predators is certainly nothing new. Congo , Zambia , Liberia ,
Argentina , Peru ,
Panama , Ecuador ,
Vietnam , Poland , and
Ireland are just some of the countries that have slipped fatefully into the hands of the
Jews listed above, and these same people are now closely watching
Greece and
India . The methodology used to acquire such leverage is as simple as it is ruthless. On
its most basic level, "vulture capitalism" is really just a combination of the
continued intense relationship between Jews and usury and Jewish involvement in medieval
tax farming. On the older practice, Salo Baron writes in Economic History of the Jews
that Jewish speculators would pay a lump sum to the treasury before mercilessly turning on the
peasantry to obtain "considerable surpluses if need be, by ruthless methods." [1] S. Baron
(ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1976), 46-7. The activities of the
Jewish vulture funds are essentially the same speculation in debt, except here the trade in
usury is carried out on a global scale with the feudal peasants of old now replaced with entire
nations. Wealthy Jews pool resources, purchase debts, add astronomical fees and interests, and
when the inevitable default occurs they engage in aggressive legal activity to seize assets,
bringing waves of jobs losses and home repossessions.
This type of predation is so pernicious and morally perverse that both the
Belgian and
UK governments have taken steps to ban these Jewish firms from using their court systems to
sue for distressed debt owed by poor nations. Tucker Carlson, commenting on Paul Singer's
predation and the ruin of the town of Sidney, Nebraska, has said:
It couldn't be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in the United
States? The short answer: Because people like Paul Singer have tremendous influence over our
political process. Singer himself was the second largest donor to the Republican Party in
2016. He's given millions to a super-PAC that supports Republican senators. You may never
have heard of Paul Singer -- which tells you a lot in itself -- but in Washington, he's
rock-star famous. And that is why he is almost certainly paying a lower effective tax rate
than your average fireman, just in case you were still wondering if our system is rigged. Oh
yeah, it is.
Aside from direct political donations, these Jewish financiers also escape scrutiny by
hiding behind a mask of simplistic anti-socialist rhetoric that is common in the American
Right, especially the older, Christian, and pro-Zionist demographic. Rod Dreher, in a
commentary on Carlson's
piece at the American Conservative , points out that Singer gave a speech in May
2019 attacking the "rising threat of socialism within the Democratic Party." Singer continued,
"They call it socialism, but it is more accurately described as left-wing statism lubricated by
showers of free stuff promised by politicians who believe that money comes from a printing
press rather than the productive efforts of businesspeople and workers." Dreher comments: "The
productive efforts of businesspeople and workers"? The gall of that man, after what he did to
the people of Sidney."
What Singer and the other Jewish vultures engage in is not productive, and isn't even any
recognisable form of work or business. It is greed-motivated parasitism carried out on a
perversely extravagant and highly nepotistic scale. In truth, it is Singer and his co-ethnics
who believe that money can be printed on the backs of productive workers, and who ultimately
believe they have a right to be "showered by free stuff promised by politicians." Singer places
himself in an infantile paradigm meant to entertain the goyim, that of Free Enterprise vs
Socialism, but, as Carlson points out, "this is not the free enterprise that we all learned
about." That's because it's Jewish enterprise -- exploitative, inorganic, and attached to
socio-political goals that have nothing to do with individual freedom and private property.
This might not be the free enterprise Carlson learned about, but it's clearly the free
enterprise Jews learn about -- as illustrated in their extraordinary
over-representation in all forms of financial exploitation and white collar crime. The
Talmud, whether actively studied or culturally absorbed, is their code of ethics and their
curriculum in regards to fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, embezzlement, usury, and financial
exploitation. Vulture capitalism is Jewish capitalism.
Whom They Feed
Singer's duplicity is a perfect example of the way in which Jewish finance postures as
conservative while conserving nothing. Indeed, Jewish capitalism may be regarded as the root
cause of the rise of Conservative Inc., a form or shadow of right wing politics reduced solely
to fiscal concerns that are ultimately, in themselves, harmful to the interests of the majority
of those who stupidly support them. The spirit of Jewish capitalism, ultimately, can be
discerned not in insincere bleating about socialism and business, intended merely to entertain
semi-educated Zio-patriots, but in the manner in which the Jewish vulture funds disseminate the
proceeds of their parasitism. Real vultures are weak, so will gorge at a carcass and
regurgitate food to feed their young. So then, who sits in the nests of the vulture funds,
awaiting the regurgitated remains of troubled nations?
Boston-based Seth Klarman (net worth $1.5 billion), who like Paul Singer has
declared "free enterprise has been good for me," is a rapacious debt exploiter who was
integral to the financial collapse of Puerto Rico, where he hid much of activities behind a
series of shell companies. Investigative journalists eventually discovered that Klarman's
Baupost group was behind much of the aggressive legal action intended to squeeze the decimated
island for bond payments. It's clear that the Jews involved in these companies are very much
aware that what they are doing is wrong, and they are careful to avoid too much reputational
damage, whether to themselves individually or to their ethnic group. Puerto Rican journalists,
investigating the debt trail to Klarman, recall trying to follow one of the shell companies
(Decagon) to Baupost via a shell company lawyer (and yet another Jew) named Jeffrey Katz:
Returning to the Ropes & Gray thread, we identified several attorneys who had worked
with the Baupost Group, and one, Jeffrey Katz, who -- in addition to having worked directly
with Baupost -- seemed to describe a particularly close and longstanding relationship with a
firm fitting Baupost's profile on his experience page. I called
Katz and he picked up, to my surprise. I identified myself, as well as my affiliation with
the Public Accountability Initiative, and asked if he was the right person to talk to about
Decagon Holdings and Baupost. He paused, started to respond, and then evidently thought
better of it and said that he was actually in a meeting, and that I would need to call back
(apparently, this high-powered lawyer picks up calls from strange numbers when he is in
important meetings). As he was telling me to call back, I asked him again if he was the right
person to talk to about Decagon, and that I wouldn't call back if he wasn't, and he seemed to
get even more flustered. At that point he started talking too much, about how he was a lawyer
and has clients, how I must think I'm onto some kind of big scoop, and how there was a person
standing right in front of him -- literally, standing right in front of him -- while I rudely
insisted on keeping him on the line.
One of the reasons for such secrecy is the intensive Jewish philanthropy engaged in by
Klarman under his Klarman Family
Foundation . While Puerto Rican schools are being closed, and pensions and health
provisions slashed, Klarman is regurgitating the proceeds of massive debt speculation to his "
areas of
focus " which prominently includes " Supporting the global Jewish community
and Israel ." While plundering the treasuries of the crippled nations of the goyim, Klarman
and his co-ethnic associates have committed themselves to "improving the quality of life and
access to opportunities for all Israeli citizens so that they may benefit from the country's
prosperity." Among those in Klarman's nest, their beaks agape for Puerto Rican debt interest,
are the American Jewish Committee, Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Holocaust
Memorial Museum, the Honeymoon Israel Foundation, Israel-America Academic Exchange, and the
Israel Project. Klarman, like Singer, has also been an enthusiastic proponent of liberalising
attitudes to homosexuality, donating $1 million to a Republican super PAC aimed at supporting
pro-gay marriage GOP candidates in 2014 (Singer donated $1.75 million). Klarman, who also
contributes to candidates
who support immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants,
has said "The right to gay marriage is the largest remaining civil rights issue of our time. I
work one-on-one with individual Republicans to try to get them to realize they are being
Neanderthals on this issue."
Steven Tananbaum's GoldenTree Asset Management has also fed well on Puerto Rico, owning $2.5
billion of the island's debt. The Centre for Economic and Policy Research has
commented :
Steven Tananbaum, GoldenTree's chief investment officer, told a business conference in
September (after Hurricane Irma, but before Hurricane Maria) that he continued to view Puerto
Rican bonds as an attractive investment. GoldenTree is spearheading a group of COFINA
bondholders that collectively holds about $3.3 billion in bonds. But with Puerto Rico facing
an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, and lacking enough funds to even begin to pay back its
massive debt load, these vulture funds are relying on their ability to convince politicians
and the courts to make them whole. The COFINA bondholder group has spent
$610,000 to lobby Congress over the last two years, while GoldenTree itself
made $64,000 in political contributions to federal candidates in the 2016 cycle. For
vulture funds like GoldenTree, the destruction of Puerto Rico is yet another opportunity for
exorbitant profits.
Whom does Tananbaum feed with these profits? A brief glance at the spending of the
Lisa and Steven Tananbaum Charitable Trust reveals a relatively short list of beneficiaries
including United Jewish Appeal Foundation, American Friends of Israel Museum, Jewish Community
Center, to be among the most generously funded, with sizeable donations also going to museums
specialising in the display of degenerate and demoralising art.
Following the collapse in Irish asset values in 2008, Jewish vulture funds including OakTree
Capital swooped on mortgagee debt to seize tens of thousands of Irish homes, shopping malls,
and utilities (Steve Feinberg's Cerberus took control of public waste disposal). In 2011,
Ireland emerged as a hotspot for distressed property assets, after its bad banks began selling
loans that had once been held by struggling financial institutions. These loans were quickly
purchased at knockdown prices by Jewish fund managers, who then aggressively sought the
eviction of residents in order to sell them for a fast profit. Michael Byrne, a researcher at
the School of Social Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland's largest university,
comments : "The
aggressive strategies used by vulture funds lead to human tragedies." One homeowner, Anna Flynn
recalls how her mortgage fell into the hands of Mars Capital, an affiliate of Oaktree Capital,
owned and operated by the Los Angeles-based Jews Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. They were "very,
very difficult to deal with," said Flynn, a mother of four. "All [Mars] wanted was for me to
leave the house; they didn't want a solution [to ensure I could retain my home]."
When Bruce Karsh isn't making Irish people homeless, whom does he feed with his profits? A
brief glance at the spending of the
Karsh Family Foundation reveals millions of dollars of donations to the Jewish Federation,
Jewish Community Center, and the United Jewish Fund.
Paul Singer, his son Gordin, and their Elliot Associates colleagues Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn,
Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel, have a foothold in almost every country, and
have a stake in every company you're likely to be familiar with, from book stores to dollar
stores. With the profits of exploitation, they
fund campaigns for homosexuality and mass migration , boost Zionist politics,
invest millions in security for Jews , and promote wars for Israel. Singer is a Republican,
and is on the Board of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He is a former board member of the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, has funded neoconservative research groups like
the Middle East Media Research Institute and the Center for Security Policy, and is among the
largest funders of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was also
connected to the pro-Iraq War advocacy group Freedom's Watch. Another key Singer project was
the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that was founded in
2009 by several high-profile Jewish neoconservative figures to promote militaristic U.S.
policies in the Middle East on behalf of Israel and which received its seed money from
Singer.
Although Singer was initially anti-Trump, and although Trump once
attacked Singer for his pro-immigration politics ("Paul Singer represents amnesty and he
represents illegal immigration pouring into the country"), Trump is now essentially funded by
three Jews -- Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Sheldon Adelson, together accounting for over $250
million in pro-Trump political money . In return, they want war with Iran. Employees of
Elliott Management were one of the main sources of funding for the 2014 candidacy of the
Senate's most outspoken Iran hawk, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who urged Trump to conduct a
"retaliatory strike" against Iran for purportedly attacking two commercial tankers. These
exploitative Jewish financiers have been clear that they expect a war with Iran, and they are
lobbying hard and preparing to call in their pound of flesh. As one political commentator put
it, "These donors have made their policy preferences on Iran plainly known. They surely expect
a return on their investment in Trump's GOP."
The same pattern is witnessed again and again, illustrating the stark reality that the
prosperity and influence of Zionist globalism rests to an overwhelming degree on the predations
of the most successful and ruthless Jewish financial parasites. This is not conjecture,
exaggeration, or hyperbole. This is simply a matter of striking through the mask, looking at
the heads of the world's most predatory financial funds, and following the direction of
regurgitated profits.
Make no mistake, these cabals are everywhere and growing. They could be ignored when they
preyed on distant small nations, but their intention was always to come for you too. They are
now on your doorstep. The working people of Sidney, Nebraska probably had no idea what a
vulture fund was until their factories closed and their homes were taken. These funds will move
onto the next town. And the next. And another after that. They won't be stopped through blunt
support of "free enterprise," and they won't be stopped by simply calling them "vulture
capitalists."
Strike through the mask!
Notes
[1] S.
Baron (ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1976), 46-7.
To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being a
result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while
maybe not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit?
An application of "chutzpah" to business, if you will -- the gall to break social
conventions to get what you want, while making other people feel uncomfortable; to wheedle
your way in at the joints of social norms and conventions -- not illegal, but selfish and
rude.
Krav Maga applies the same concept to the martial arts: You're taught to go after the
things that every other martial art forbids you to target: the eyes, the testicles, etc. In
other sports this is considered "low" and "cheap." In Krav Maga, as perhaps a metaphor for
Jewish behavior in general, nothing is too low because it's all about winning .
There's a rather good article on the New Yorker discussing the Sacklers and the
Oxycontin epidemic. It focusses on the dichotomy between the family's ruthless promotion of
the drug and their lavish philanthropy. 'Leave the world a better place for your presence'
and similar pieties and Oxycontin.
The article lightly touches on the extent of their giving to Hebrew University of
Jerusalem -- but in general, treads lightly when it comes to their Judaism.
understandably. The New Yorker isn't exactly alt-right country, after all. But can
Joyce or anyone else provide a more exact breakdown on the Sacklers' giving? Are they genuine
philanthropists, or is it mostly for the Cause?
@anon'To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being
a result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while
maybe not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit? '
It's important not to get carried away with this. Figures such as Andrew Carnegie, while
impeccably gentile, were hardly paragons of scrupulous ethics and disinterested virtue.
I won't defend high finance because I don't like it either. But this is a retarded and highly
uninformed attack on it.
1. The article bounces back and forth between two completely different fields: private
equity and distressed debt funds. The latter is completely defensible. A lot of bondholders,
probably the majority, cannot hold distressed or defaulted debt. Insurance companies often
can't by law. Bond mutual funds set out in their prospectuses they don't invest in anything
rated lower than A, AA, or whatever. Even those allowed to hold distressed debt don't want
the extra costs involved with doing so, such as carefully following bankruptcy proceedings
and dealing with delayed and irregular payments.
As a result, it is natural that normal investors sell off such debt at a discount to funds
that specialize in it.
2. Joyce defends large borrowers that default on their debt. Maybe the laws protecting
bankrupts and insolvents should be stronger. But you do that, and lenders become more
conservative, investment declines, and worthy businesses can't get investments. I think
myself the laws in the US are too favorable to lenders, but there's definitely a tradeoff,
and the question is where the happy middle ground is. In Florida a creditor can't force the
sale of a primary residence, even if it is worth $20 million. That's going too far in the
other direction.
3. " either blankly nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or rural/pastoral
origins "
More retardation. Cerberus is a greek dog monster guarding the gates of hell. Aurelius is
from the Latin word for gold. "Hemisphere" isn't an Anglosaxon word nor does in invoke rural
origins.
Besides being retardedly wrong, the broader point is likewise retarded: when
English-speaking Jews name their businesses they shouldn't use English words. Naming a
company "Oaktree" should be limited to those of purely English blood! Jews must name their
companies "Cosmopolitan Capital" or RosenMoses Chutzpah Advisors."
4. The final and most general point: it's trivially easy to attack particular excesses of
capitalism. Fixing the excesses without creating bigger problem is the hard part. Two ideas I
favor are usury laws and Tobin taxes.
Jewishness aside, maximizing shareholder is the holy grail of all capitalist enterprises. The
capitalist rush to abandon the American working class when tariff barriers evaporated is just
another case of vulturism. Tax corporations based on the domestic content of their products
and ban usury and vulturism will evaporate.
Someone with the username kikz posted a link to this article in the occidental observer. I
read it and thought it was a great article. I'm glad it's featured here.
The article goes straight for the jugular and pulls no punches. It hits hard. I like
that:
1. It shines a light on the some of the scummiest of the scummiest Wall Street
players.
2. It names names. From the actual vulture funds to the rollcall of Jewish actors running
each. It's astounding how ethnically uniform it is.
3. It proves Trump's ties with the most successful Vulture kingpin, Singer.
4. It shows how money flows from the fund owners to Zionist and Jewish causes.
This thing reads like a court indictment. It puts real world examples to many of the
theories that are represents on this site. Excellent article.
Elliott Management is perhaps most notorious for its 15-year battle with the government
of Argentina, whose bonds were owned by the hedge fund. When Argentine president Cristina
Kirchner attempted to restructure the debt, Elliott -- unlike most of the bonds' owners --
refused to accept a large loss on its investment. It successfully sued in US courts, and in
pursuit of Argentine assets, convinced a court in Ghana to detain an Argentine naval
training vessel, then docked outside Accra with a crew of 22o. After a change of its
government, Argentina eventually settled and Singer's fund received $2.4 billion, almost
four times its initial investment. Kirchner, meanwhile, has been indicted for
corruption.
@Lot
You give partial information which seem misleading and use arguments which are also weak and
not enlightening.
1- Even if its natural that unsafe bonds are sold, this doesn't justify the practices and
methods of those vulture fonds which buy those fonds which are socially damaging. I'm not
certain of the details because it's an old case and people should seek more information. Very
broadly, in the case of Argentina most funds accepted to make an agreement with the country
and reduce their demands. Investors have to accept risks and losses. Paul Singer bought some
financial papers for nothing at that time and forced Argentina to pay the whole price. For
years Argentina refused to pay, but with the help of New York courts and the new Argentinian
president they were forced to pay Singer. This was not conservative capitalism but
imperialism. You can only act like Singer if you have the backing of courts, of a government
which you control and of an army like the US army. A fast internet search for titles of
articles: "Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer's ruthless strategies include bullying CEOs,
suing governments and seizing their navy's ships". "How one hedge fund made $2 billion from
Argentina's economic colapse".
Andrew Sayer, professor in an English university, says in his book "Why we can't afford
the rich" that finances as they are practiced now may cost more than bring any value to a
society. It's a problem if some sectors of finances make outsized profits and use methods
which are more than questionable.
2- You say that if borrowers become more protected "lenders become more conservative,
investment declines, and worthy businesses can't get investments." I doubt this is true. In
the first place, risk investments by vulture fonds probably don't create any social value.
The original lenders who sold their bonds to such vulture fonds have anyway big or near total
losses in some cases and in spite of that they keep doing business. Why should we support
vulture fonds, what for? What positive function they play in society? In Germany, capitalism
was much more social in old days before a neoliberal wave forced Germany to change Rhine
capitalism. Local banks lended money to local business which they knew and which they had an
interest that they prosper. Larger banks lended money to big firms. Speculation like in
neoliberal capitalism wasn't needed.
3- The point which you didn't grasp is that there is a component of those business which
isn't publicly clear, the fact that they funcion along ethnic lines.
4- It would be easy to fix excesses of capitalism. The problem is that the people who
profit the most from the system also have the power to prevent any change.
@Robjil
This is an example of what I was saying. Less Euro whites in the world is not going to be a
good world for Big Js. Non-Euros believe in freedom of speech.
Jewish Bigwigs can't get control of businesses in East Asia. They have been trying. Paul
Singer tried and failed. In Argentina he got lots of "success". Why? Lots of descendants of
Europeans there went along with "decisions" laid out by New York Jews.
Little Paulie tried to get control of Samsung. No such luck for him in Korea. In Korea
there are many family monopolies, chaebols. A Korean chaebol stopped him. Jewish Daniel Loeb
tried to get a board seat on Sony. He was rebuffed.
I was moved to reflect on the universality of this theme recently when surveying media
coverage on Korean and Argentinian responses to the activities of Paul Singer and his
co-ethnic shareholders at Elliott Associates, an arm of Singer's Elliott Management hedge
fund. The Korean story has its origins in the efforts of Samsung's holding company, Cheil
Industries, to buy Samsung C&T, the engineering and construction arm of the wider
Samsung family of businesses. The move can be seen as part of an effort to reinforce
control of the conglomerate by the founding Lee family and its heir apparent, Lee Jae-yong.
Trouble emerged when Singer's company, which holds a 7.12% stake in Samsung C&T and is
itself attempting to expand its influence and control over Far East tech companies,
objected to the move. The story is fairly typical of Jewish difficulties in penetrating
business cultures in the Far East, where impenetrable family monopolies, known in Korea as
chaebols, are common. This new story reminded me very strongly of last year's efforts by
Jewish financier Daniel Loeb to obtain a board seat at Sony. Loeb was repeatedly rebuffed
by COO Kazuo Hirai, eventually selling his stake in Sony Corp. in frustration.
Here is how the Koreans fought off Paul Singer.
The predominantly Jewish-owned and operated Elliott Associates has a wealth of
self-interest in preventing the Lee family from consolidating its control over the Samsung
conglomerate. As racial outsiders, however, Singer's firm were forced into several tactical
measures in their 52-day attempt to thwart the merger. First came lawsuits. When those
failed, Singer and his associates then postured themselves as defending Korean interests,
starting a Korean-language website and arguing that their position was really just in aid
of helping domestic Korean shareholders. This variation on the familiar theme of Jewish
crypsis was quite unsuccessful. The Lee family went on the offensive immediately and,
unlike many Westerners, were not shy in drawing attention to the Jewish nature of Singer's
interference and the sordid and intensely parasitic nature of his fund's other
ventures.
Cartoons were drawn of Singer being a vulture.
Other cartoons appearing at the same time represented Elliott, literally, as humanoid
vultures, with captions referring to the well-known history of the fund. In the above
cartoon, the vulture offers assistance to a needy and destitute figure, but conceals an axe
with which to later bludgeon the unsuspecting pauper.
ADL got all worked about this. The Koreans did not care. It is reality. Freedom of speech
works on these vultures. The west should try some real freedom of speech.
After the cartoons appeared, Singer and other influential Jews, including Abraham
Foxman, cried anti-Semitism. This was despite the fact the cartoons contain no reference
whatsoever to Judaism – unless of course one defines savage economic predation as a
Jewish trait. Samsung denied the cartoons were anti-Semitic and took them off the website,
but the uproar over the cartoons only seemed to spur on even more discussion about Jewish
influence in South Korea than was previously the case. In a piece published a fortnight
ago, Media Pen columnist Kim Ji-ho claimed "Jewish money has long been known to be ruthless
and merciless." Last week, the former South Korean ambassador to Morocco, Park Jae-seon,
expressed his concern about the influence of Jews in finance when he said, "The scary thing
about Jews is they are grabbing the currency markets and financial investment companies.
Their network is tight-knit beyond one's imagination." The next day, cable news channel YTN
aired similar comments by local journalist Park Seong-ho, who stated on air that "it is a
fact that Jews use financial networks and have influence wherever they are born." It goes
without saying that comments like these are unambiguously similar to complaints about
Jewish economic practices in Europe over the course of centuries. The only common
denominator between the context of fourteenth-century France and the context of
twenty-first-century South Korea is, you guessed it, Jewish economic practices.
The Koreans won. Paulie lost. Good win for humanity. The Argentines were not so lucky.
They don't have freedom speech like the Koreans and East Asians have.
In the end, the Lee strategy, based on drawing attention to the alien and exploitative
nature of Elliott Associates, was overwhelmingly effective. Before a crucial shareholder
vote on the Lee's planned merger, Samsung Securities CEO Yoon Yong-am said: "We should
score a victory by a big margin in the first battle, in order to take the upper hand in a
looming war against Elliott, and keep other speculative hedge funds from taking short-term
gains in the domestic market." When the vote finally took place a few days ago, a
conclusive 69.5% of Samsung shareholders voted in favor of the Lee proposal, leaving
Elliott licking its wounds and complaining about the "patriotic marketing" of those behind
the merger.
What our Jewish friends have done to Argentina, through maneuvering the elections, killing
dissidents, and marking territory, is a cautionary tale to anybody woke enough to see with
their own eyes.
Zion had the opportunity to go to Uganda and Ugandans were willing, but NO Zion had to
have Palestine, and they got it through war, deception, and murder. It was funded by usury,
as stolen purchasing power from the Goyim.
The fake country of Israel, is not the biblical Israel, and it came into being by
maneuverings of satanic men determined to get their way no matter what, and is supported by
continuous deception. Even today's Hebrew is resurrected from a dead language, and is fake.
Many fake Jews (who have no blood lineage to Abraham), a fake country, and fake language.
These fakers, usurers, and thieves do indeed have their eyes set on Patagonia, what they call
the practical country.
@Anon
"If debts can simply be repudiated at will, capitalism cannot function."
Is this children's capitalist theory class time? throwing around some simple slogans for a
susceptible congregation of future believers?
Should be quite obvious that people, groups of people, if not whole nations , can be
forced and or seduced into depths by means of certain practices. There are a thousand ways of
such trickery and thievery, these are not in the theory books though. In these books things
all match and work out wonderfully rationally
Then capitalism cannot function? Unfortunately it has become already dysfunctional, if not
a big rotten cancer.
Lobelog ran some articles in Singer, Argentina, Iran Israel and the attorney from Argentina
who died mysteriously . Singer is a loan shark. Argentinian paid dearly .
Google search –
NYT's Argentina Op-Ed Fails to Disclose Authors – LobeLog
https://lobelog.com/tag/paul-singer/
Paul Singer NYT's Argentina Op-Ed Fails to Disclose Authors' Financial Conflict of Interest
by Eli Clifton On Tuesday, Mark Dubowitz and Toby Dershowitz, two executives at the hawkish
Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), took
The Right-Wing Americans Who Made a Doc About Argentina
https://lobelog.com/the-right-wing-americans-who-made-a-doc-about-argentina/
Oct 7, 2015 One might wonder why a movie about Argentina, in Spanish and . of Nisman's and
thought highly of the prosecutor's work, told LobeLog, FDD, for its part, has been an
outspoken critic of Kirchner but has From 2008 to 2011, Paul Singer was the group's
second-largest donor, contributing $3.6 million.
NYT Failed to Note Op-Ed Authors' Funder Has $2 Billion
What our Jewish friends have done to Argentina, through maneuvering the elections,
killing dissidents, and marking territory, is a cautionary tale to anybody woke enough to
see with their own eyes.
The Democrats declared war this week. Not on Donald Trump but on the United States and the
Constitution.
What started as a coup to overturn the 2016 election has now morphed into a Civil War as
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Fran-feces) presided over the passage of a bill which creates a
clear Constitutional Crisis.
And that means we have multiple factions vying for control of our government, the definition
of a Civil War.
In passing these articles of impeachment against President Trump Congress has arrogated to
itself powers it does not have.
The first article asserts a motive to Trump's actions to invalidate his role as chief law
enforcement officer for the country. It doesn't matter if you like him or any President having
this power, he does have it.
Read that first article and then apply it to a country other than Ukraine where Trump
didn't have 'probable cause' for investigation into corruption and malfeasance there.
That could be Abuse of Power.
But this happened in Ukraine where Trump clearly has probable cause.
The following is the scenario the first impeachment article is asserting as the basis for
abuse of power, through ascribing political motives to the President:
One day President Trump wakes up and says, "Shit! Joe Biden's leading me in the polls. I
need to do something about this."
So, Trump twirls his orange comb-over and calls up the Prime Minister of Armenia, a
Russian ally, to whom we've pledged aid. Since it's a Russian ally and Trump may have
colluded with the Russians, they would be a good candidate to help him.
But Joe Biden has no history of diplomacy or oversight in Armenia as Vice-President.
There's no record of any contact of any kind with Biden in Armenia, for argument's sake.
Trump then, during the phone call, shakes down the Armenian PM for that aid, explicitly
saying he must create dirt on Joe Biden or he would withhold appropriated aid funds to the
country.
Then, after getting caught, Trump tries to hide the record of the phone call by hiding
behind Executive Privilege.
That would be Abuse of Power and an impeachable offense. It would be regrettable but
indefensible that the odious jackals in Congress were right to impeach him. They would,
actually, be defending the Constitution and fully within their rights.
But, that's not what happened.
Biden was put in charge of Ukraine by President Obama. He had full discretion on policy
towards Ukraine and was caught on tape bragging about doing exactly what the impeachment
article is accusing Trump of doing. Shaking Ukraine down for favors in order to get $1 billion
in aid.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/KCF9My1vBP4
Since the prosecutor who Biden had fired was investigating corruption into his son Hunter's
involvement with Ukrainian gas company Burisma, this admission is pretty damning, showing clear
personal motive to use his office to stop investigation into his family.
This is Abuse of Power. This is subjecting U.S. foreign policy to the whims of an elected
official, squelching an investigation into his personal family, using the office for personal
gain.
So, when viewed through this lens the first impeachment article is a complete lie. Trump
didn't do the things asserted. The transcript of the phone call with Ukrainian President
Zelensky proves that.
Trump made the phone call public immediately.
The phone call and Trump's order to review the foreign aid were contemporaneous but not
conditional. If you have a non-charitable view of the President it may raise some questions,
but there was probable cause here.
Your opinions on Trump do not add up to High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
The implications of this impeachment article are, however, staggering.
It says explicitly that the U.S. president cannot discharge his duties as a law enforcement
official if the person of interest is someone of the opposite party or a potential electoral
opponent.
It says that probable cause is not a standard for investigation only political
considerations.
That's a clear violation of Congress' role. Congress writes laws. The President executes
them. If the Congress wants to assume law enforcement powers it should work to amend the
Constitution.
This is a clear example of why impeachment is a political process not a legal one. But, if
they are going to act this politically, at least they should put the veneer of legality on it.
Even the equally odious Republicans who impeached Bill Clinton did that.
But in asserting this as an offence Congress seeks to place the Legislative Branch as
superior to the Executive in matters of law enforcement and implementation.
That's a clear violation of the separation of powers. It may suck that the guy holding the
Office of the Presidency is someone you don't like or not willing to turn a blind eye to
corruption, but doing his job is not a 'high crime or misdemeanor.'
The second article is even worse. Because asserts the power to subpoena members of the
Executive branch under the impeachment inquiry into the first article. And since Congress has
sole authority over impeachment, no judicial review of its subpoena power can be made.
This is fully unconstitutional since it subverts the power of the Judicial branch to settle
disputes between the Executive and Legislative branches as established by the Constitution.
Pelosi and company are broadening the definition of 'the sole power of impeachment' to say
that whatever Congress deems as worthy of an impeachment inquiry is therefore law and the other
branches have no say in the matter.
This is patent nonsense and wholly tyrannical.
Rod Rosenstein and Andrew Weismann tried to use an equally broad interpretation of
'obstruction of justice' to include future harm to continue the special council's investigation
into Trump's alleged collusion with Russia.
Moreover it renders the concept of judicial review as laid down in Marbury vs. Madison null and void.
Congress cannot just make up laws and crimes out of whole cloth and then unilaterally declare
them constitutional under the rubric of impeachment.
The Supreme Court has the right to strike down bills Congress passes as
unconstitutional.
This drives a massive wedge through the separation of powers in a blatant power grab by
Pelosi and the Democratic House majority to protect themselves from Trump's investigations into
their crimes surrounding events in Ukraine.
When viewed dispassionately, Obstruction of Congress is not a crime but rather a function of
each of the other two branches of government. It's no better when the President hides behind
Executive Orders to legislate unconstitutionally.
And it's even worse when the Supreme Court makes up laws from the bench rather than kick the
ball back to Congress and start the process all over again.
That's what the whole three co-equal branches of government is supposed to mean.
Now, in practice I don't believe the three branches are equal, as the Judicial branch
routinely oversteps its authority. But in this case if it does not step in immediately and
defend itself from this Congress then the basic fabric of our government unravels
overnight.
That the second impeachment article is directly dependent on the flawed (or non-existent)
logic of the first impeachment article renders the whole thing simply laughable on the face of
it.
I'm no legal scholar so when I can see how ridiculous these articles are then you know this
has nothing to do with the law but everything to do with power.
And the reality is, as
I discussed in my latest podcast , what this impeachment is really about is distracting and
covering up the multiple layers of corruption in U.S. foreign and domestic policy stretching
back decades. Many of the tendrils emanating from the events surrounding the FISA warrants
improperly granted connect directly to the Clintons, Jeffrey Epstein, William Browder and the
rape of Russia in the post-Soviet 90's.
We're talking an entire generation or more of U.S. officials and politicians implicated in
some of the worst crimes of the past thirty years.
The stakes for these people are existential. This is why they are willing to risk a
full-blown constitutional crisis and civil war to remove Trump from office.
They know he's angry at them now. This is personal as well as philosophical. Trump is a
patriot, a narcissist and a gangster. That's a powerful combination of traits.
The polls are shifting his way on this as the average person knows this impeachment is
pathetic. They are tired of the Democrats' games the same way British voters are over the
arguments against Brexit.
So the old adage about killing the king come to mind. If Pelosi et.al. miss here, the
retribution from Trump will be biblical.
The damage to the society is too great to argue irrelevancies. No one outside of the Beltway
Bubble and the Crazies of the Resistance cares about what Trump did here. It's too arcane and
most people are against giving a shithole like Ukraine taxpayer money in the first place.
The whole thing is a giant pile of loser turds steaming up the room and impeding getting any
work done.
In the end We'll know if Trump has his ducks in a row in how Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell plays his cards versus Pelosi. If McConnell pussy-foots around and gives Pelosi
anything on how the trial in the Senate is conducted then the fix is in and Trump is done.
But, if McConnell shuts this down then what comes next will be a righteous smackdown of
Trump's political opponents that will make the phone call with Zelensky look like a routine
call to Dominos' for a double pepperoni.
Either way, this coup attempt by Pelosi is now open warfare. There will be casualties.
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The inescapable truth is that Trump has 1) not delivered on his 2016 promises, and 2) has
surrounded himself with some of the vilest NeoCon scum on the planet. If he was a true
patriot, as he claimed during the 2016 election campaign, why would he not honor his promises
and surround himself with certifiable gangsters? It raises an important question. Is trump
controlled opposition who was installed as president to undermine and neutralize true
conservatives and patriots? His actions and deeds since becoming president would support this
interpretation.
If true, then the Democratic Party impeachment is little more than kabuki theater that
provides cover for Trump while ensuring his election in 2020 when all hell breaks loose as
the bubble or fake economy built on debt and counterfeit money crashes.
Patriotic and true conservative Americans according to this scenario are being setup up as
the fall guys to take the blame for the Greater Depression instead of the real culprits which
are the Fed and banksters on Wall Street.
Trump appears to be playing the role of Hoover who during the 1930s Great Depression paved
the way for Roosevelt and the Marxist New Deal which was imposed on an unsuspecting American
people struggling to survive during a depression created for them by the Fed. The words of
Franklin Roosevelt speak for themselves.
"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that
way."
He won't be removed from office but the brainwashed Trumpeteers and satanic "Christian"
Zionists will be riled enough to elect him in 2020...all part of the grand plan.
Trump's
executive order -- deceptively called "An Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism" --
issued this past week, will empower the federal Department of Education to withhold funding
to college campuses that do not squash anti-Israel rhetoric. In other words, it is now
official government policy to deny college students and faculty members their Natural and
constitutional right to criticize -- especially and primarily if they criticize any and all
things Israel. This will also doubtless include speech that supports Palestinian rights.
Trump also declared that the religion of Judaism is a nationality or ethnicity and is
beyond criticism. Can you imagine the outcry if he had declared Christianity to be a
nationality?
Plus, by issuing this Executive Order, Donald Trump has made every Christian and non-***
in the United States a second-class citizen. But don't expect Robert Jeffress and his gaggle
of Christian Zionists to figure that out.
I have said repeatedly that Donald Trump is America's first Zionist president. And Trump's
actions continue to prove that statement true.
As I wrote in another article this impeachment circus may very well be a Zionist ploy to
keep people thinking Trump is anti deep state, like the QAnon psyop.
He may be anti globalist but not deep state. Well in any case if the Dems don't send the
impeachment to the Senate then this is just a mock trial for appearances sake only. And the
fact Pelosi balked yesterday strengthens that possibility!
The Constitution is itself a farce and a mask for the exercise of power. How does one
interpret "general welfare"? To whom do you petition for the transgressions of "rights"? Is
it not a branch of the same government? We are not in the same situation as the colonists of
the 13 colonies. The enemy is not separated by an ocean. The political decline and conflict
questioned in this article is a result of the economic decline worldwide. Prepare for what
comes after the USA and don't dwell on legal trivialities within.
There are very few Christians, in truth. Professing to be Christian means nothing if you
don't believe every word from the mouth of Yahweh. The judeo-christian churches are the great
apostasy.
@Colin
Wright Intelligence and bias for co-operation may lead some groups to far greater
achievements, in scams as well as in everything else.
That aside, I think we daily meet plenty of individuals who'd sell their mothers, and
maybe kill lives, for pennies. They are like machines not even conscious of what they are
doing.
I meet them daily, in whatever activity, and none of them is Jewish. Also their shops,
businesses, and so on are always the ones that prosper more: people love being scammed, and
people love the show of power implicit in making you pay some extra for the service you
requested, and still keeping plenty of customers with you.
So, it's the usual with Joyce (and not only Joyce of course). You take something that is
human, talk of Jews, point to that something in Jews, and pretend, trusting that your readers
will pretend the same, that it's a Jewish-specific something.
Because if you were to say: everyone does this, everywhere, but when Jews do it it's just on
a larger scale, then you'd be shining light on the fact that what changes with Jews is just
skills, and that they are intelligent enough to co-operate more than the others.
Like when Mac Donald speaks of Jewish self-deception.
I feel I am swimming in self-deception everytime I talk with people (more so with women), and
they aren't Jewish. Do people do anything, but self-deceive?
So?
Elliott Management is perhaps most notorious for its 15-year battle with the government
of Argentina, whose bonds were owned by the hedge fund. When Argentine president Cristina
Kirchner attempted to restructure the debt, Elliott -- unlike most of the bonds' owners --
refused to accept a large loss on its investment. It successfully sued in US courts, and in
pursuit of Argentine assets, convinced a court in Ghana to detain an Argentine naval
training vessel, then docked outside Accra with a crew of 22o. After a change of its
government, Argentina eventually settled and Singer's fund received $2.4 billion, almost
four times its initial investment. Kirchner, meanwhile, has been indicted for
corruption.
This massive transfer of the American tech industry has largely been the work of one
leading Republican donor -- billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who also funds the
neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Islamophobic and
hawkish think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Republican Jewish
Coalition (RJC), and also funded the now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).
Singer's project to bolster Israel's tech economy at the U.S.' expense is known as
Start-Up Nation Central, which he founded in response to the global Boycott, Divest and
Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use nonviolent means to pressure Israel to comply
with international law in relation to its treatment of Palestinians.
@Lot
You give partial information which seem misleading and use arguments which are also weak and
not enlightening.
1- Even if its natural that unsafe bonds are sold, this doesn't justify the practices and
methods of those vulture fonds which buy those fonds which are socially damaging. I'm not
certain of the details because it's an old case and people should seek more information. Very
broadly, in the case of Argentina most funds accepted to make an agreement with the country
and reduce their demands. Investors have to accept risks and losses. Paul Singer bought some
financial papers for nothing at that time and forced Argentina to pay the whole price. For
years Argentina refused to pay, but with the help of New York courts and the new Argentinian
president they were forced to pay Singer. This was not conservative capitalism but
imperialism. You can only act like Singer if you have the backing of courts, of a government
which you control and of an army like the US army. A fast internet search for titles of
articles: "Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer's ruthless strategies include bullying CEOs,
suing governments and seizing their navy's ships". "How one hedge fund made $2 billion from
Argentina's economic colapse".
Andrew Sayer, professor in an English university, says in his book "Why we can't afford
the rich" that finances as they are practiced now may cost more than bring any value to a
society. It's a problem if some sectors of finances make outsized profits and use methods
which are more than questionable.
2- You say that if borrowers become more protected "lenders become more conservative,
investment declines, and worthy businesses can't get investments." I doubt this is true. In
the first place, risk investments by vulture fonds probably don't create any social value.
The original lenders who sold their bonds to such vulture fonds have anyway big or near total
losses in some cases and in spite of that they keep doing business. Why should we support
vulture fonds, what for? What positive function they play in society? In Germany, capitalism
was much more social in old days before a neoliberal wave forced Germany to change Rhine
capitalism. Local banks lended money to local business which they knew and which they had an
interest that they prosper. Larger banks lended money to big firms. Speculation like in
neoliberal capitalism wasn't needed.
3- The point which you didn't grasp is that there is a component of those business which
isn't publicly clear, the fact that they funcion along ethnic lines.
4- It would be easy to fix excesses of capitalism. The problem is that the people who
profit the most from the system also have the power to prevent any change.
The article bounces back and forth between two completely different fields: private
equity and distressed debt funds. The latter is completely defensible. A lot of
bondholders, probably the majority, cannot hold distressed or defaulted debt. Insurance
companies often can't by law. Bond mutual funds set out in their prospectuses they don't
invest in anything rated lower than A, AA, or whatever. Even those allowed to hold
distressed debt don't want the extra costs involved with doing so, such as carefully
following bankruptcy proceedings and dealing with delayed and irregular payments.
The author is not a finance expert but he correctly spotlights flaws of so-called
'predatory capitalism' which is disproportionately Jewish.
Private equity is rife with vices like asset-stripping and looting e.g Eddie Lampert
('Jewishness' member) plus El Trumpo appointee Steven Mnuchin at Sears.
Vulture funds often load all sorts of costs, even frivolous ones, and extra interest
charges on the original debt to maximize profit.
Some countries have the Duplum rule which limits the amount you are liable to a creditor
when you default on a debt.
I generally like Tucker but thought his piece on Singer was way off base and a silly hit job.
As others above have commented, if you think it's wrong to buy or try to collect on defaulted
debt, what is the alternative set of laws and behavior you are recommending? If debts can
simply be repudiated at will, capitalism cannot function. (Also, while it would take too much
time and space to debate the Puerto Rico situation here, it bears noting that the entire PR
public debt burden of ~$75 billion comes to around $25,000 per resident -- about a third of
the comparable burden of public sector debt per person in the United States, which itself
ignores tens of trillions of "off balance" sheet liabilities for underfunded social security,
Medicare, Medicaid and public sector pension obligations. The source of PR's problems lies
pretty clearly at the feet of PR's long corrupt politicians -- not the incidental holders of
its bonds who would simply like to be repaid or have the debt reasonably restructured.)
Other minor points worth noting:
Joyce names a few Jews associated with Baupost but misleadingly omits its president, the
guy who is running the show: Jim Mooney, a proud graduate of Holy Cross and big supporter of
Catholic and Jesuit causes. If memory serves, Jim was also the guy behind some of Baupost's
biggest and most successeful distressed debt (or "vulture" to use Joyce's pejorative term)
trades. The firm's Jewish founder (Seth Klarman) has also donated tons of money to secular
causes, including something like $60 million for a huge facility at Cornell.
Speaking of donations and Jews, I believe Bloomberg (not technically a "vulture"
capitalist but clearly just as bad -- I.e., Jewish -- on the Joyce scale) gave $1.5 billion
to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins. If memory serves, that may have been the largest donation
to any university ever. Maybe Carnegie's donations were greater in "real" dollars, but
Bloomberg's donation is still pretty significant -- with likely more to come.
@sally
Sally, please, knock it off. If you worked on Wall Street you'd know this article is just the
tip of the iceberg of Jewish financial criminality. Years ago Jim Cramer of CNBC fame, who
used to appear with Goldman Sachs' former and current PR man Larry Kudlow, also headed Wall
Street's top hedge fund at the time, Cramer Berkowitz. A former employee and Jewish at that
wrote an expose, Trading With the Enemy letting non-Jews in the reading public in on
what's really going on. Of course there's a Jewish pipeline giving them the news before it's
news, which is what it means to be a Wall Street insider. Or so says Jim Cramer, and the book
establishes this with solid evidence and not speculation.
For example, one of the Jewish anchors on CNBC would routinely call Cramer, which the
author overheard at the trading desk, and tip Cramer off about a market moving news story
about to be aired so Cramer could front run the market, fanatically divvying the orders out
to avoid scrutiny. His most important client was Norman Podoretz of socialist fame, who put
up the seed money for Cramer, who'd be on the phone to Cramer throughout the day checking on
his investments when not pushing socialism on the stupid goys. That's what socialism means in
America. The big names among Jewish stock and bond analysts at the big houses would also be
on the line with Cramer right before market making analysis was about to be released.
It's also the case that no economy and society can survive the sort of FIRE parasitism
this country's now burdened with, which as Spengler put it a century ago, amounts to tricking
a profit off every penny of goyisher labor. A dog can handle a number of ticks and fleas
sucking its blood, but will die soon enough when the ticks and fleas are consuming a quarter
or more of its blood. As Dr Joyce points out in yet another brilliant article, DJT is
demonstrably a puppet of the Jewish billionaires mentioned, who're in a rage to destroy the
families and everything the fools attending his rallies hold dear.
@J
Adelman Yes, the Jews have always stood up for the underdog (except when they were slave
traders) and promoted social harmony (except for cultural Marxism) and "Jewish influence" is
purely a figment of your imagination (except WWI and the Communist revolution .and and ). And
they definitely have nothing to do with the financial industry or banks (it is all a
conspiracy the protocols ya know).
Do you really believe your own poopaganda? A little introspection goes a long way. Why
have you been persecuted or kicked out of every country you have ever lived in? You never,
ever do anything wrong?
No one is demonizing you. You do it to yourself. People like Epstein and Weinstein are
your standard bearers. Events like 9/11 are your trophies. Your infiltration of the body
politic and malign influence in society is once again becoming visible to everyone and it is
making you afraid.
You have done it again. You never, ever learn. You play the perpetual victim .everyone
hates me without a reason. My sin is greater than I can bear (Cain) everyone who comes across
me will kill me. I spend my time wandering the earth (boo ho). And despite slaying your
brother you are accorded divine protection.
Jesus said (paraphrasing here) that if the unclean spirit is cast out of a man and is not
replaced with something wholesome he takes "seven other spirits" into himself and becomes
totally insane. You did this to yourself and you will realize that your problem is no longer
with man but with God himself. Jacob the deceiver has wrestled all his life against his
fellow man and triumphed but now he will confront God himself. Get ready to meet your Maker
and see how far your excuses will get you with the Almighty.
Jewish financists are no longer Jewish, much like a socialist who became minister is no
longer a socialist minister. Unregulated finance promotes a set of destructive behaviors which
has nothing to do with nationality or ethnicity.
Of course that Joyce is peddling his own obsessions, but I have to admit that Singer &
comp. are detestable. I know that what they’re doing is not illegal, but it should be (in
my opinion), and those who are involved in such affairs are somehow odious. The same goes for
Icahn, Soros etc. Still Ethnic angle is evident, too: how come Singer works exclusively with his
co-ethnics in this multi-ethnic USA? Non-Jewish & most Jewish entrepreneurs don’t
behave that way.
It was very gratifying to see Tucker Carlson's
recent attack on the activities of Paul Singer's vulture fund, Elliot Associates, a group I
first
profiled four years ago. In many respects, it is truly remarkable that vulture funds like
Singer's escaped major media attention prior to this, especially when one considers how
extraordinarily harmful and exploitative they are. Many countries are now in very significant
debt to groups like Elliot Associates and, as Tucker's segment very starkly illustrated, their
reach has now extended into the very heart of small-town America. Shining a spotlight on the
spread of this virus is definitely welcome. I strongly believe, however, that the problem
presented by these cabals of exploitative financiers will only be solved if their true nature
is fully discerned. Thus far, the descriptive terminology employed in discussing their
activities has revolved only around the scavenging and parasitic nature of their activities.
Elliot Associates have therefore been described as a quintessential example of a "vulture fund"
practicing "vulture capitalism." But these funds aren't run by carrion birds. They are operated
almost exclusively by Jews. In the following essay, I want us to examine the largest and most
influential "vulture funds," to assess their leadership, ethos, financial practices, and how
they disseminate their dubiously acquired wealth. I want us to set aside colorful metaphors. I
want us to strike through the mask.
It is commonly agreed that the most significant global vulture funds are Elliot Management,
Cerberus, FG Hemisphere, Autonomy Capital, Baupost Group, Canyon Capital Advisors, Monarch
Alternative Capital, GoldenTree Asset Management, Aurelius Capital Management, OakTree Capital,
Fundamental Advisors, and Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP. The names of these groups are
very interesting, being either blankly nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or
rural/pastoral origins (note the prevalence of oak, trees, parks, canyons, monarchs, or the use
of names like Aurelius and Elliot). This is the same tactic employed by the Jew Jordan Belfort,
the "Wolf of Wall Street," who operated multiple major frauds under the business name Stratton
Oakmont.
These names are masks. They are designed to cultivate trust and obscure the real background
of the various groupings of financiers. None of these groups have Anglo-Saxon or venerable
origins. None are based in rural idylls. All of the vulture funds named above were founded by,
and continue to be operated by, ethnocentric, globalist, urban-dwelling Jews. A quick review of
each of their websites reveals their founders and central figures to be:
Elliot Management
-- Paul Singer, Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn, Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel
Cerberus -- Stephen Feinberg, Lee Millstein, Jeffrey Lomasky, Seth Plattus, Joshua Weintraub,
Daniel Wolf, David Teitelbaum FG Hemisphere -- Peter Grossman Autonomy Capital -- Derek Goodman
Baupost Group -- Seth Klarman, Jordan Baruch, Isaac Auerbach Canyon Capital Advisors -- Joshua
Friedman, Mitchell Julis Monarch Alternative Capital -- Andrew Herenstein, Michael Weinstock
GoldenTree Asset Management -- Steven Tananbaum, Steven Shapiro Aurelius Capital Management --
Mark Brodsky, Samuel Rubin, Eleazer Klein, Jason Kaplan OakTree Capital -- Howard Marks, Bruce
Karsh, Jay Wintrob, John Frank, Sheldon Stone Fundamental Advisors -- Laurence Gottlieb,
Jonathan Stern Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP -- Josh Birnbaum, Sam Alcoff
The fact that all of these vulture funds, widely acknowledged as the most influential and
predatory, are owned and operated by Jews is remarkable in itself, especially in a contemporary
context in which we are constantly bombarded with the suggestion that Jews don't have a special
relationship with money or usury, and that any such idea is an example of ignorant prejudice.
Equally remarkable, however, is the fact that Jewish representation saturates the board level
of these companies also, suggesting that their beginnings and methods of internal promotion and
operation rely heavily on ethnic-communal origins, and religious and social cohesion more
generally. As such, these Jewish funds provide an excellent opportunity to examine their
financial and political activities as expressions of Jewishness, and can thus be placed in the
broader framework of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy and the long historical trajectory
of Jewish-European relations.
How They Feed
In May 2018, Puerto Rico declared a form of municipal bankruptcy after falling into more
than
$74.8 billion in debt, of which more than $34 billion is interest and fees. The debt was
owed to
all of the Jewish capitalists named above, with the exception of Stephen Feinberg's
Cerberus group. In order to commence payments, the government had instituted a policy of fiscal
austerity, closing schools and raising utility bills, but when Hurricane Maria hit the island
in September 2017, Puerto Rico was forced to stop transfers to their Jewish creditors. This
provoked an aggressive attempt by the Jewish funds to seize assets from an island suffering
from an 80% power outage, with the addition of further interest and fees. Protests broke out in
several US cities calling for the debt to be forgiven. After a quick stop in Puerto Rico in
late 2018, Donald Trump pandered to this sentiment when he told Fox News, "They owe a lot of
money to your friends on Wall Street, and we're going to have to wipe that out." But Trump's
statement, like all of Trump's statements, had no substance. The following day, the director of
the White House budget office, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters: "I think what you heard the
president say is that Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to solve its debt
problem." In other words, Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to pay its Jews.
Trump's reversal is hardly surprising, given that the President is considered extremely
friendly to Jewish financial power. When he referred to "your friends on Wall Street" he really
meant his friends on Wall Street. One of his closest allies is Stephen Feinberg, founder
and CEO of Cerberus, a war-profiteering vulture fund that has now accumulated
more than $1.5 billion in Irish debt , leaving the country prone to a "
wave of home repossessions " on a scale not seen since the Jewish mortgage traders behind
Quicken Loans (Daniel Gilbert) and Ameriquest (Roland Arnall)
made thousands of Americans homeless . Feinberg has also been associated with mass
evictions in Spain, causing a collective of Barcelona anarchists to
label him a "Jewish mega parasite" in charge of the "world's vilest vulture fund." In May
2018, Trump made Feinberg
chair of his Intelligence Advisory Board , and one of the reasons for Trump's sluggish
retreat from Afghanistan has been the fact Feinberg's DynCorp has enjoyed years of lucrative government
defense contracts training Afghan police and providing ancillary services to the military.
But Trump's association with Jewish vultures goes far beyond Feinberg. A recent piece
in the New York Post declared "Orthodox Jews are opening up their wallets for Trump in
2020." This is a predictable outcome of the period 2016 to 2020, an era that could be neatly
characterised as How Jews learned to stop worrying and love the Don. Jewish financiers
are opening their wallets for Trump because it is now clear he utterly failed to fulfil
promises on mass immigration to White America, while pledging his commitment to Zionism and to
socially destructive Jewish side projects like the promotion of homosexuality. These actions,
coupled with his commuting
of Hasidic meatpacking boss Sholom Rubashkin 's 27-year-sentence for bank fraud and money
laundering in 2017, have sent a message to Jewish finance that Trump is someone they can do
business with. Since these globalist exploiters are essentially politically amorphous, knowing
no loyalty but that to their own tribe and its interests, there is significant drift of Jewish
mega-money between the Democratic and Republican parties. The New York Post reports, for
example, that when Trump attended a $25,000-per-couple luncheon in November at a Midtown hotel,
where 400 moneyed Jews raised at least $4 million for the America First [!] SuperPAC, the
luncheon organiser Kelly Sadler, told reporters, "We screened all of the people in attendance,
and we were surprised to see how many have given before to Democrats, but never a Republican.
People were standing up on their chairs chanting eight more years." The reality, of course, is
that these people are not Democrats or Republicans, but Jews, willing to push their money in
whatever direction the wind of Jewish interests is blowing.
The collapse of Puerto Rico under Jewish debt and elite courting of Jewish financial
predators is certainly nothing new. Congo , Zambia , Liberia ,
Argentina , Peru ,
Panama , Ecuador ,
Vietnam , Poland , and
Ireland are just some of the countries that have slipped fatefully into the hands of the
Jews listed above, and these same people are now closely watching
Greece and
India . The methodology used to acquire such leverage is as simple as it is ruthless. On
its most basic level, "vulture capitalism" is really just a combination of the
continued intense relationship between Jews and usury and Jewish involvement in medieval
tax farming. On the older practice, Salo Baron writes in Economic History of the Jews
that Jewish speculators would pay a lump sum to the treasury before mercilessly turning on the
peasantry to obtain "considerable surpluses if need be, by ruthless methods." [1] S. Baron
(ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1976), 46-7. The activities of the
Jewish vulture funds are essentially the same speculation in debt, except here the trade in
usury is carried out on a global scale with the feudal peasants of old now replaced with entire
nations. Wealthy Jews pool resources, purchase debts, add astronomical fees and interests, and
when the inevitable default occurs they engage in aggressive legal activity to seize assets,
bringing waves of jobs losses and home repossessions.
This type of predation is so pernicious and morally perverse that both the
Belgian and
UK governments have taken steps to ban these Jewish firms from using their court systems to
sue for distressed debt owed by poor nations. Tucker Carlson, commenting on Paul Singer's
predation and the ruin of the town of Sidney, Nebraska, has said:
It couldn't be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in the United
States? The short answer: Because people like Paul Singer have tremendous influence over our
political process. Singer himself was the second largest donor to the Republican Party in
2016. He's given millions to a super-PAC that supports Republican senators. You may never
have heard of Paul Singer -- which tells you a lot in itself -- but in Washington, he's
rock-star famous. And that is why he is almost certainly paying a lower effective tax rate
than your average fireman, just in case you were still wondering if our system is rigged. Oh
yeah, it is.
Aside from direct political donations, these Jewish financiers also escape scrutiny by
hiding behind a mask of simplistic anti-socialist rhetoric that is common in the American
Right, especially the older, Christian, and pro-Zionist demographic. Rod Dreher, in a
commentary on Carlson's
piece at the American Conservative , points out that Singer gave a speech in May
2019 attacking the "rising threat of socialism within the Democratic Party." Singer continued,
"They call it socialism, but it is more accurately described as left-wing statism lubricated by
showers of free stuff promised by politicians who believe that money comes from a printing
press rather than the productive efforts of businesspeople and workers." Dreher comments: "The
productive efforts of businesspeople and workers"? The gall of that man, after what he did to
the people of Sidney."
What Singer and the other Jewish vultures engage in is not productive, and isn't even any
recognisable form of work or business. It is greed-motivated parasitism carried out on a
perversely extravagant and highly nepotistic scale. In truth, it is Singer and his co-ethnics
who believe that money can be printed on the backs of productive workers, and who ultimately
believe they have a right to be "showered by free stuff promised by politicians." Singer places
himself in an infantile paradigm meant to entertain the goyim, that of Free Enterprise vs
Socialism, but, as Carlson points out, "this is not the free enterprise that we all learned
about." That's because it's Jewish enterprise -- exploitative, inorganic, and attached to
socio-political goals that have nothing to do with individual freedom and private property.
This might not be the free enterprise Carlson learned about, but it's clearly the free
enterprise Jews learn about -- as illustrated in their extraordinary
over-representation in all forms of financial exploitation and white collar crime. The
Talmud, whether actively studied or culturally absorbed, is their code of ethics and their
curriculum in regards to fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, embezzlement, usury, and financial
exploitation. Vulture capitalism is Jewish capitalism.
Whom They Feed
Singer's duplicity is a perfect example of the way in which Jewish finance postures as
conservative while conserving nothing. Indeed, Jewish capitalism may be regarded as the root
cause of the rise of Conservative Inc., a form or shadow of right wing politics reduced solely
to fiscal concerns that are ultimately, in themselves, harmful to the interests of the majority
of those who stupidly support them. The spirit of Jewish capitalism, ultimately, can be
discerned not in insincere bleating about socialism and business, intended merely to entertain
semi-educated Zio-patriots, but in the manner in which the Jewish vulture funds disseminate the
proceeds of their parasitism. Real vultures are weak, so will gorge at a carcass and
regurgitate food to feed their young. So then, who sits in the nests of the vulture funds,
awaiting the regurgitated remains of troubled nations?
Boston-based Seth Klarman (net worth $1.5 billion), who like Paul Singer has
declared "free enterprise has been good for me," is a rapacious debt exploiter who was
integral to the financial collapse of Puerto Rico, where he hid much of activities behind a
series of shell companies. Investigative journalists eventually discovered that Klarman's
Baupost group was behind much of the aggressive legal action intended to squeeze the decimated
island for bond payments. It's clear that the Jews involved in these companies are very much
aware that what they are doing is wrong, and they are careful to avoid too much reputational
damage, whether to themselves individually or to their ethnic group. Puerto Rican journalists,
investigating the debt trail to Klarman, recall trying to follow one of the shell companies
(Decagon) to Baupost via a shell company lawyer (and yet another Jew) named Jeffrey Katz:
Returning to the Ropes & Gray thread, we identified several attorneys who had worked
with the Baupost Group, and one, Jeffrey Katz, who – in addition to having worked
directly
with Baupost – seemed to describe a particularly close and longstanding relationship
with a firm fitting Baupost's profile on his experience page. I called
Katz and he picked up, to my surprise. I identified myself, as well as my affiliation with
the Public Accountability Initiative, and asked if he was the right person to talk to about
Decagon Holdings and Baupost. He paused, started to respond, and then evidently thought
better of it and said that he was actually in a meeting, and that I would need to call back
(apparently, this high-powered lawyer picks up calls from strange numbers when he is in
important meetings). As he was telling me to call back, I asked him again if he was the right
person to talk to about Decagon, and that I wouldn't call back if he wasn't, and he seemed to
get even more flustered. At that point he started talking too much, about how he was a lawyer
and has clients, how I must think I'm onto some kind of big scoop, and how there was a person
standing right in front of him – literally, standing right in front of him –
while I rudely insisted on keeping him on the line.
One of the reasons for such secrecy is the intensive Jewish philanthropy engaged in by
Klarman under his Klarman Family
Foundation . While Puerto Rican schools are being closed, and pensions and health
provisions slashed, Klarman is regurgitating the proceeds of massive debt speculation to his "
areas of
focus " which prominently includes " Supporting the global Jewish community
and Israel ." While plundering the treasuries of the crippled nations of the goyim, Klarman
and his co-ethnic associates have committed themselves to "improving the quality of life and
access to opportunities for all Israeli citizens so that they may benefit from the country's
prosperity." Among those in Klarman's nest, their beaks agape for Puerto Rican debt interest,
are the American Jewish Committee, Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Holocaust
Memorial Museum, the Honeymoon Israel Foundation, Israel-America Academic Exchange, and the
Israel Project. Klarman, like Singer, has also been an enthusiastic proponent of liberalising
attitudes to homosexuality, donating $1 million to a Republican super PAC aimed at supporting
pro-gay marriage GOP candidates in 2014 (Singer donated $1.75 million). Klarman, who also
contributes to candidates
who support immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants,
has said "The right to gay marriage is the largest remaining civil rights issue of our time. I
work one-on-one with individual Republicans to try to get them to realize they are being
Neanderthals on this issue."
Steven Tananbaum's GoldenTree Asset Management has also fed well on Puerto Rico, owning $2.5
billion of the island's debt. The Centre for Economic and Policy Research has
commented :
Steven Tananbaum, GoldenTree's chief investment officer, told a business conference in
September (after Hurricane Irma, but before Hurricane Maria) that he continued to view Puerto
Rican bonds as an attractive investment. GoldenTree is spearheading a group of COFINA
bondholders that collectively holds about $3.3 billion in bonds. But with Puerto Rico facing
an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, and lacking enough funds to even begin to pay back its
massive debt load, these vulture funds are relying on their ability to convince politicians
and the courts to make them whole. The COFINA bondholder group has spent
$610,000 to lobby Congress over the last two years, while GoldenTree itself
made $64,000 in political contributions to federal candidates in the 2016 cycle. For
vulture funds like GoldenTree, the destruction of Puerto Rico is yet another opportunity for
exorbitant profits.
Whom does Tananbaum feed with these profits? A brief glance at the spending of the
Lisa and Steven Tananbaum Charitable Trust reveals a relatively short list of beneficiaries
including United Jewish Appeal Foundation, American Friends of Israel Museum, Jewish Community
Center, to be among the most generously funded, with sizeable donations also going to museums
specialising in the display of degenerate and demoralising art.
Following the collapse in Irish asset values in 2008, Jewish vulture funds including OakTree
Capital swooped on mortgagee debt to seize tens of thousands of Irish homes, shopping malls,
and utilities (Steve Feinberg's Cerberus took control of public waste disposal). In 2011,
Ireland emerged as a hotspot for distressed property assets, after its bad banks began selling
loans that had once been held by struggling financial institutions. These loans were quickly
purchased at knockdown prices by Jewish fund managers, who then aggressively sought the
eviction of residents in order to sell them for a fast profit. Michael Byrne, a researcher at
the School of Social Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland's largest university,
comments : "The
aggressive strategies used by vulture funds lead to human tragedies." One homeowner, Anna Flynn
recalls how her mortgage fell into the hands of Mars Capital, an affiliate of Oaktree Capital,
owned and operated by the Los Angeles-based Jews Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. They were "very,
very difficult to deal with," said Flynn, a mother of four. "All [Mars] wanted was for me to
leave the house; they didn't want a solution [to ensure I could retain my home]."
When Bruce Karsh isn't making Irish people homeless, whom does he feed with his profits? A
brief glance at the spending of the
Karsh Family Foundation reveals millions of dollars of donations to the Jewish Federation,
Jewish Community Center, and the United Jewish Fund.
Paul Singer, his son Gordin, and their Elliot Associates colleagues Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn,
Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel, have a foothold in almost every country, and
have a stake in every company you're likely to be familiar with, from book stores to dollar
stores. With the profits of exploitation, they
fund campaigns for homosexuality and mass migration , boost Zionist politics,
invest millions in security for Jews , and promote wars for Israel. Singer is a Republican,
and is on the Board of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He is a former board member of the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, has funded neoconservative research groups like
the Middle East Media Research Institute and the Center for Security Policy, and is among the
largest funders of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was also
connected to the pro-Iraq War advocacy group Freedom's Watch. Another key Singer project was
the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that was founded in
2009 by several high-profile Jewish neoconservative figures to promote militaristic U.S.
policies in the Middle East on behalf of Israel and which received its seed money from
Singer.
Although Singer was initially anti-Trump, and although Trump once
attacked Singer for his pro-immigration politics ("Paul Singer represents amnesty and he
represents illegal immigration pouring into the country"), Trump is now essentially funded by
three Jews -- Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Sheldon Adelson, together accounting for over $250
million in pro-Trump political money . In return, they want war with Iran. Employees of
Elliott Management were one of the main sources of funding for the 2014 candidacy of the
Senate's most outspoken Iran hawk, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who urged Trump to conduct a
"retaliatory strike" against Iran for purportedly attacking two commercial tankers. These
exploitative Jewish financiers have been clear that they expect a war with Iran, and they are
lobbying hard and preparing to call in their pound of flesh. As one political commentator put
it, "These donors have made their policy preferences on Iran plainly known. They surely expect
a return on their investment in Trump's GOP."
The same pattern is witnessed again and again, illustrating the stark reality that the
prosperity and influence of Zionist globalism rests to an overwhelming degree on the predations
of the most successful and ruthless Jewish financial parasites. This is not conjecture,
exaggeration, or hyperbole. This is simply a matter of striking through the mask, looking at
the heads of the world's most predatory financial funds, and following the direction of
regurgitated profits.
Make no mistake, these cabals are everywhere and growing. They could be ignored when they
preyed on distant small nations, but their intention was always to come for you too. They are
now on your doorstep. The working people of Sidney, Nebraska probably had no idea what a
vulture fund was until their factories closed and their homes were taken. These funds will move
onto the next town. And the next. And another after that. They won't be stopped through blunt
support of "free enterprise," and they won't be stopped by simply calling them "vulture
capitalists."
Strike through the mask!
Notes
[1] S.
Baron (ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1976), 46-7.
To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being a
result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while
maybe not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit?
An application of "chutzpah" to business, if you will – the gall to break social
conventions to get what you want, while making other people feel uncomfortable; to wheedle
your way in at the joints of social norms and conventions – not illegal, but selfish
and rude.
Krav Maga applies the same concept to the martial arts: You're taught to go after the
things that every other martial art forbids you to target: the eyes, the testicles, etc. In
other sports this is considered "low" and "cheap." In Krav Maga, as perhaps a metaphor for
Jewish behavior in general, nothing is too low because it's all about winning .
There's a rather good article on the New Yorker discussing the Sacklers and the
Oxycontin epidemic. It focusses on the dichotomy between the family's ruthless promotion of
the drug and their lavish philanthropy. 'Leave the world a better place for your presence'
and similar pieties and Oxycontin.
The article lightly touches on the extent of their giving to Hebrew University of
Jerusalem -- but in general, treads lightly when it comes to their Judaism.
understandably. The New Yorker isn't exactly alt-right country, after all. But can
Joyce or anyone else provide a more exact breakdown on the Sacklers' giving? Are they genuine
philanthropists, or is it mostly for the Cause?
@anon'To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being
a result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while
maybe not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit? '
It's important not to get carried away with this. Figures such as Andrew Carnegie, while
impeccably gentile, were hardly paragons of scrupulous ethics and disinterested virtue.
I won't defend high finance because I don't like it either. But this is a retarded and highly
uninformed attack on it.
1. The article bounces back and forth between two completely different fields: private
equity and distressed debt funds. The latter is completely defensible. A lot of bondholders,
probably the majority, cannot hold distressed or defaulted debt. Insurance companies often
can't by law. Bond mutual funds set out in their prospectuses they don't invest in anything
rated lower than A, AA, or whatever. Even those allowed to hold distressed debt don't want
the extra costs involved with doing so, such as carefully following bankruptcy proceedings
and dealing with delayed and irregular payments.
As a result, it is natural that normal investors sell off such debt at a discount to funds
that specialize in it.
2. Joyce defends large borrowers that default on their debt. Maybe the laws protecting
bankrupts and insolvents should be stronger. But you do that, and lenders become more
conservative, investment declines, and worthy businesses can't get investments. I think
myself the laws in the US are too favorable to lenders, but there's definitely a tradeoff,
and the question is where the happy middle ground is. In Florida a creditor can't force the
sale of a primary residence, even if it is worth $20 million. That's going too far in the
other direction.
3. " either blankly nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or rural/pastoral
origins "
More retardation. Cerberus is a greek dog monster guarding the gates of hell. Aurelius is
from the Latin word for gold. "Hemisphere" isn't an Anglosaxon word nor does in invoke rural
origins.
Besides being retardedly wrong, the broader point is likewise retarded: when
English-speaking Jews name their businesses they shouldn't use English words. Naming a
company "Oaktree" should be limited to those of purely English blood! Jews must name their
companies "Cosmopolitan Capital" or RosenMoses Chutzpah Advisors."
4. The final and most general point: it's trivially easy to attack particular excesses of
capitalism. Fixing the excesses without creating bigger problem is the hard part. Two ideas I
favor are usury laws and Tobin taxes.
Jewishness aside, maximizing shareholder is the holy grail of all capitalist enterprises. The
capitalist rush to abandon the American working class when tariff barriers evaporated is just
another case of vulturism. Tax corporations based on the domestic content of their products
and ban usury and vulturism will evaporate.
Someone with the username kikz posted a link to this article in the occidental observer. I
read it and thought it was a great article. I'm glad it's featured here.
The article goes straight for the jugular and pulls no punches. It hits hard. I like
that:
1. It shines a light on the some of the scummiest of the scummiest Wall Street
players.
2. It names names. From the actual vulture funds to the rollcall of Jewish actors running
each. It's astounding how ethnically uniform it is.
3. It proves Trump's ties with the most successful Vulture kingpin, Singer.
4. It shows how money flows from the fund owners to Zionist and Jewish causes.
This thing reads like a court indictment. It puts real world examples to many of the
theories that are represents on this site. Excellent article.
Andrew Carnegie left behind institutions like Carnegie Hall, Carnegie-Mellon University,
and over 2500 Free Libraries from coast to coast, in a time when very little was done to
help what we now call the “underprivileged”.
And he funded the building of the Peace Palace (“Vredespaleis”) in The Hague,
presently the seat of the International Court of Justice, an institution not held in high
esteem in the home country of the generous donor.
Jimmy1969 says: December
19, 2019 at 2:12 pm GMT 200 Words Golden Tree Asset Management bought up Post Media in
Canada at a fire sale years ago from the bankrupt Asper family. Post Media is a conglomerate
that controls dozens and dozens of media outlets in all of Canada including 95% of all the
major Newspapers in every large city. Therefore Canadian news is de facto controlled by an
American New York Jewish hedge fund. That fact has been known for years and is joked about on
all of the bar stools in Canada where reporters hang out .but not in the Press. No one writes
about it none of the Nationalistic Professors, Journalists, Members of Parliament no one. One
fact is certain you will never ever see a single bad word in any of their papers critical of
Israel, or any actions of Israelis. Any comment critical of Israel or Zionist power, no matter
how objective or moderate is immediately deleted. And sadly this is no joke. The world should
take note of how Canada is strangled. Read More Replies: @bike-anarkist
Replies: @the
grand wazoo , @eah
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@silviosilver
Paying what you owe is perfectly fine and moral. Paying double of what you owe on account of
inflated fees and interest is blood sucking. Doing this to developing nations is downright
cruel.
Let's say Congo owes $10 billion. A finance firm buys that debt for $8 billion, collects
the full $10 billion (which already includes interest) and make a $2 billion profit. That's
not too terrible.
But to buy the debt for $8 billion and then force Congo to pay $60 billion is Jewish.
Playing the victim while accusing Congo of financial mismanagement and forcing them to close
their schools and hospitals – very Jewish. Evading the ethical implications of one's
actions and seeking cover behind legalism like a coward –> Jew level –
Godlike
Jews see themselves as the ingroup, and the "goyim" as the outgroup. Since Whites are the
"outgroup" it's not just acceptable, but praiseworthy, to exploit them. To "beat" them at
war.
The problem is that Whites wrongly do not see Jews as an outgroup – something that
Jews themselves take great pains to discourage via their various front groups like the
ADL.
There is no "technical" fix, there is no objective "system" that can change this dynamic.
There is no "level playing field."
Whites need to ostracize Jews at all levels. Boycott, Divest and Sanction – not just
their apartheid regime of Jew bigotry in Zionist-occupied Palestine, but at every level of
society, business, civil institutions, etc.
Jews are destroying the world. Everywhere they go, they leave behind nations in ruins.
Look at Europe, Africa and the Americas, Jews have left their ugly footprints. Corruption,
prostitution, drugs and human trafficking are their trade.
Reading the (obvious) Jews commenting here on their various financial swindle-systems is a
lot like reading zionists defending Israel. The basic tactics are always the same:
1.) Focus on some small aspects or most recent events and make a comparison to Gentiles or
other events with similar micro-narratives. "See? Everyone else does it! Why single out us
poor, persecuted Jews?"
2.) Use these minute distractions to drown out the overall issues, underlying concepts,
long history or guiding ideology in noise and minutiae.
3.) Never start at the beginning of the story and follow the trajectory though; always
start in the middle and focus on some trivial detail, use it to defend the (never stated)
sicko ideology that started the problem in the first place. Completely ignore any timelines
or larger perspectives.
David Icke calls it (or used to call it -- - back when his backbone was healthy) the
Reptilian Brain. The ability to manipulate trivial minutiae while never addressing underlying
concepts or timelines.
It is hard to feel sorry for WASPs, they struck a deal with the Jews centuries ago
Catholic political powers have been "striking deals with Jews" for two thousand years.
There is a synagogue in Rome right next to the Vatican which has been legally privileged
since the days of Christ. As E. Michael Jones detailed in his book, Jewish Revolutionary
Spirit , the Catholic Church itself defended Jews from the angry mobs time and time again
throughout their history, to the point bishops and priests would harbor Jews in the
cathedrals and lock the doors before the peasants could arrest them.
Indeed, the infighting among Whites promoted by the likes of Jones is yet again another
assist from Catholic powers to their partners, the Jews.
The popular "neo-reactionary/NRx" movement, started by the Ashkenazi Curtis Yarvin, is yet
another "right-wing" fad that blames Calvinists for all the problems in the world.
Jews are blameless, yet again another White ethnicity/religion is at fault.
No wonder Jews get away with what they do. Whites are too busy infighting over false
history demonizing various rival cults.
So, the "vultures" flew out to the West after devouring the Russian empire and now with the
help of the likes of the homeboy or more like a two bit whore, Ben Sasse, they've descended
on America and have started gutting it out.
Where will they fly next? White Christians don't want them and black/brown Muslims can't
stand them but perhaps China is their next destination being that they have shipped most of
the jobs out there and the whole lot of them are marrying "Chinese-American" women in droves
for good measure.
In the coming battle of the titans, the one who's name can't be pronounced, viz. Yahweh,
hopefully has better guns than Jehovah and Allah, for it sure is gonna need it when the
latter two gang up on it maybe Buddha will give it a helping hand being that they're
practically in-laws now!
My question is how do entities like Puerto Rico get so far in debt in the first
place?
For the same reason individuals get into debt, financial incompetence and sometimes a bit
of bad luck.
I've personally never understood how people can take out loans from companies like Wonga
or QuickQuid (both Jewish owned incidentally) seeing as they quite clearly advertise their
exorbitant interest rates.
Look up income by ethnic group in the UK and US, you will find that Indians and Chinese
(South Asians) are the richest in both countries (except for Jews of course).
What I have found is that these two groups come from a debt-averse culture, their kids
actually live with their parents until they have saved enough money for a house and other
such things required to start a family.
Whites meanwhile are WAY to trusting of these faceless financial institutions, they get
into debt very easily and thus become slaves, if you have kids, the first thing you should
educate them about is finance and debt, don't throw them out to the dogs either, it's tragic
to see some getting into debt and then having other problems like drugs and alcohol
addictions.
I came out of that book with the utmost admiration for Bill Browder.
You don't seem to be serious, if I understood what you want to say. Even Der Spiegel has
published a critical article in English about Browder, Browder is the one who pushed for
sanctions against Russia because of the case Magnitsky:
Questions Cloud Story Behind U.S. Sanctions
The story of Sergei Magnitsky has come to symbolize the brutal persecution of
whistleblowers in Russia. Ten years after his death, inconsistencies in Magnitsky's story
suggest he may not have been the hero many people -- and Western governments -- believed him
to be.
@Anonymous
Sure, but you're talking utopia. The reality is that public entities issue bonds to finance
special projects or even their operations. Somebody then buys the bonds and expects to be
paid back.
@Realist
There is something especially deficient with Whites when it comes to money matter, how can
such a large number of Whites take short-term loans from companies like Wonga and QuickQuid,
when the nature of their business (usury) is very clearly advertised. I was around 10 years
old when I was astounded at the 5000% APR loans advertised on TV, and wondered if I
understood interest right.
Parents, especially White ones, really need to educate their children on personal finance
and debt, it seems a lot of Whites these days do not actually own anything and all their
flashy gadgets and whatnot are being loaned out (buying Iphone on contract for example),
these people are the hardest hit as they can't scrape together even a couple of hundred
pounds/dollars/euros when hard times come. Its farcical albeit tragic.
Wow what a confused mess. Here's a summary: Vulture capitalism is bad for no particular
reason but only an evil anti-Semite (like you) would dare criticize capitalism.
And they want the island of Puerto Rico for themselves, save a few thousand able bodies to
serve as maids and gardeners. But what about the triple-raced residents of the island itself?
Well, that's easy! Dump them in states like Florida and New York and let the suckers pay for
it. After all, it's not like they are going to vote for the other side we get to eat the cake
and keep it too!
An article that appeared in Goebbels newspaper, Der Angriff (The Attack) titled
"The Jew", a short excerpt that is relevant to your comment;
The Jew is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a scoundrel, parasite,
swindler, profiteer, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a Jew and
you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back:
"I've been found out."
I think the term "vulture capitalism" is calumnious to vultures, who, as carrion birds,
perform a useful and purifying function in nature.
The Jews as a collective, i.e., the Jews who identify as such, concur in the death
sentence of Christ handed down by their Sanhedrin and espouse the Talmudic mitzvah of killing
the best of the gentiles (which naturally implies elevating the worst of the gentiles to
power and prominence) are more to be likened to plague bearing rodents. Unlike vultures, rats
feast on corruption and putrescence, spread disease and also kill the living.
We embrace the finance capitalist worldview at our peril. In its essence, it is nothing
but the worship of money making and profiteering as the supreme aspiration of life,
irregardless of its horrible effects on our compatriots and fellow humans. In doing so, we
become Jews at heart.
There is nothing wrong with industry and the profit motive per se. Predatory finance
contributes nothing to the well being of a nation and the needs of the physical economy- it
is supremely toxic and corrosive of both. It must be expunged and its champions expropriated
and exiled. People like the odious Peter Singer have no place in a moral world; they ought to
be first expropriated, then exiled as far away from their host societies as possible.
I was personally wounded by the anti gay rhetoric peppered across this article. I can't help
making the association that Paul singer's son came out as gay and that this must be the
source of the author's animus against him and the others. Shakespeare, who was also
homosexual, described this state of mind as "a green eyed monster," i.e. jealousy. I'm
mortified that other members of the commentariat have not taken issue with this. Maybe we
would be more compassionate to the denizens of middle America if they allowed our most basic
civil rights.
@J
Adelman Oh those kind jews have always been for the working class? But there is a white
working class and jews want them extinct from the face of the earth. Read 'Abolishing
whiteness has never been more urgent.' By Mark Levine
@silviosilver
You make several good points but you don't address the issue of capitalists manipulating the
politicians with campaign contributions. If a fund gets paid off by public money due to
politicians putting the fund owners ahead of the taxpayers, that's corrupt. What happened to
the 'creative destruction' principle by which large IBs like Goldman would have been allowed
to collapse and their principals carried off in leg-irons in 2008? Oh -- they are "too big to
fail and too big to jail." So much for the free market myth.
Moreover, most Jews support endless free money for "victim groups" to be forcibly
extracted from the middle-class. Never mind if Mr. Jones has a lengthy criminal record, let's
pay for him to go to college, let's pay his rent, let's pay his medical bills, etc. Why then
take such a hard line on people who foolishly get into debt?
Moreover, the economic downturn that caused many mortgagors to default was CAUSED BY the
big Wall Street firms' irresponsible behavior.
Also, most people do tend to temper economic contracts with a degree of compassion.
Gentile capitalism does not exist in a vacuum.
I recall reading about a young female environmentalist who was refusing to leave a
venerable redwood tree that was scheduled to be cut down. The WASP businessman who owned the
tree was extremely patient with the girl, tried to win her over, threw her food and drinks,
and so on. The land with the tree was then sold to some Jewish firm. At that point the
article left off. The tree was cut down with no further negotiation.
The greatest jewish vulture fund is the zionist privately owned feral reserve aka the FED ,
is creates money out of thin air and feeds this money to the otherwise bankrupt zionist banks
and not just here in the ZUS but in Europe, and the BIS is the vulture fund of vulture funds
owned by the zionists, the biggest scam in the history of the world.
By the way, Tucker Carlson said that 911 truthers were nuts, that says it all about
him.
Mass immigration for cheap labor, the weaponization of the grievance industry against
white majority/European nations and the use for the production of anti-white race baiting
media.
Much great work!! Very impressed. Would recommend to Moses himself.
@Colin
Wright I remember seeing a clip where Jared Taylor was on some talk show. He was calmly
citing statistics on how blacks are over represented among violent criminals. A sassy black
women broken in with "Jeffrey Dahmer Ted Bundy they were all white!" Not her exact words but
something to that effect. Naxalt, in other words.
I don't think Joyce is suggesting that all unscrupulous capitalists are Jews, or vice
versa. It is true that gentiles can be scumbags (the Enron boys.)
Now most Muslims are not terrorists, and many terrorists are not Muslims.
And yet it seems like there are many people who will notice patterns among other groups,
rightfully roll their eyes when they hear PC arguments in favor of those groups, and then
pull out the naxalt and what-about-isms when you notice patterns in Jewish behavior.
@Dutch
Boy Your statement: "maximizing shareholder is the holy grail of all capitalist
enterprises" statement is spot on.
I've been saying that for decades.
Labor is never given value, but is a commodity-a "necessary evil" according to the Wall
Street types and is to be minimized and marginalized at all costs.
Adolph Hitler's Germany monetized labor and gave it value. THAT is the reason that the
jews went after Germany. Post WW1 Germany was successful in its economy due to throwing off
the shackles (and shekels) of the internationalist banksters.
Henry Ford CREATED a market which had not existed when he paid his employees $5.00 per day
when the average wage of the day was around $1.25 per day. His premise was not entirely
altruistic as assembly line work was monotonous; a way had to be found to retain employees as
well.
Of course, the wall street types and the banksters howled that Ford's wage rates would
destroy capitalism (as they knew it-those at the top reap all of the benefits while the
proles are forced to live on a bare subsistence wage, due to the machinations of those at the
top).
Guess what??
The OPPOSITE happened. Henry Ford knew one of the basic tenets of a truly free,
capitalistic society, that a well-paid work force would be able to participate and contribute
to a strong economy, unlike what is taught in business schools today-that wages must be kept
to a bare minimum and that the stockholder is king.
Our "free trade" politicians have assisted the greedy wall street types and banksters in
depressing wages on the promise of cheap foreign labor and products.
A good example of this is the negative criticism that Costco receives for paying its
employees well above market wages. These same wall street types praise Wal-Mart for paying
its employees barely subsistence wages while assisting them in filling out their public
assistance (welfare) forms.
Any sane person KNOWS that in order for capitalism to work, employees need to make an
adequate wage. Unfortunately, this premise does not exist in today's business climate.
Henry Ford openly criticized those of the "tribe" for manipulating wall street and
banksters to their own advantage, and was roundly (and unjustly) criticized for pointing out
the TRUTH.
Catholic priest, Father Coughlin did the same thing and was punished by the Catholic
church, despite his popularity and exposing the TRUTH of the American economy and the
outsider internationalists that ran it . . . and STILL run it.
Our race to the bottom will not be without consequences. A great realignment is necessary
(and is coming) . .
@lavoisier
I'm not sure I'd put Buffett in that category. For example, in one of the companies he
bought, he kept a factory with declining profits open as long as he could to avoid throwing a
large chunk of people out of work overnight. He has mostly made his money by avoiding dopey
fads and a disciplined buy-and-hold approach to stocks.
@J
Adelman' Jewish people have always stood against tyranny against the working class,
the poor and other people of color." '
Right. I'd say Jews actually collaborated extensively in the imposition of tyranny
on the working class in Eastern Europe from 1917 to 1991. That'd be one counter-example.
Should we explore others? The role of Jews in the medieval slave trade? After all,
somebody had to castrate all those Christian boys who were to serve as harem
guards.
No reason to dredge up ancient history -- except here you are, making a blatantly false
claim about it. 'Always stood against ', my ass.
They are gunning for India now who do you think that brought in the Turks who ruled as the
Moguls to exploit the Hindu wealth and later on who did in the Muslims?
Disraeli and his ilk always knew that India was poor but their temples were rich with gold
and it's that they are after one can't build one's own "Third Temple" without it.
Why are the black cohens being promoted (South Brahmins the most pliable ones) at Google,
Microsoft and Pepsi etc.? Because the waterboys, and girls, will help rope in what's left of
the Indian carcass for thirty pieces of silver!
@secondElijah
You are probably the most antisemitic troll I have ever met online.
So, when did Epstein and Weinstein become the standard bearers of the Jewish community?
It is your jealousy of the Jewish people that makes you spew such vile hatred here.
Smug, obnoxious white people like you who have always considered this country their private
preserve are an endangered species. The demographic trends cannot be denied.
In less than 25 years white folks will become a minority in this country. So enjoy it while
you can, Bubba, your days of driving the bus are numbered.
You and other whites here are like the bad guys in every horror movie ever made, who gets
shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass -- even if
it takes four sequels to make it happen -- but who in the meantime keeps coming back around,
grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that you were
finally dead this time. Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie ends. Our
ankles survive.
YOU DO NOT.
@Saguaro
The soup has boiled over, the horse has bolted and the barn has burnt down and yet you
Yankees haven't woken up.Your politicians are whores who cannot function without funding from
the jews. And Jeffery got them all for Mossad. Enjoy
@Vaterland
The "standing up for People of Color" schtick is particularly disingenous, as all the Jews
have really done isuse their disproportionate control of the media to peddle false narratives
and distort history. One good example of this is the case of then president of the Atlanda
chapter of B'nai B'rith, Leo Frank. Frank had raped and murdered 13 year-old Mary Phagan and
when he was found out, he used his connection with New York Jews to get lots of money and
hire the best defence lawyers, his lawyer then launched vicious racial attacks on a Black
semi-literate janitor who worked in the factory that Frank was in charge of (and where Phagan
worked) to try and convict him of the horrible crime.
Jews will be friends of POC when it suits them. The funny thing about the Frank case is
that the Jewish media has made it out that Frank was innocent and wrongly lynched (only after
his death sentence had been commuted by a judge who was suspected to have been bribed by
powerful New York Jews), and that the Black janitor was the guilty one. This is absurd seeing
as the racist Southern jury would never favour a "White" man over a Black man (anti-semtism
wasn't that big in the South, and especially so considering this was before the Bolsheviks
took control of Russia), and that if Frank had truly been White, this case would be a
landmark case in which the evil rich White man was tried and the Black man was given
justice.
"Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States.
I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of
the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the
profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I
take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families.
That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin
fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I
have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I
will rout you out!"
Islam stands in their way of usury-ripping of mankind of their
resources and defrauding mankind via bank thefts.
Bring on the Shariah Law. I would much rather live under Shariah, God's Constitution than
under Euoropean/Western diabolic, satanic, fraudulent monies, homosexual, thievery, false
flag hoaxes, WMD's, bogus wars, Unprovoked oppression, tel-LIE-vision, Santa Claus lies,
Disney hocus pocus , hollywood, illuminati, free mason, monarchy, oligarchy, millitary
industrial complex, life time congressman/senators, upto the eye balls taxation, IRS
thievery, Fraudulent federal reserve, Rothchild/Rockerfeller/Queens and Kings city of London
satanic cabal, opec petro$$$ thievery, ISISraHELL's, al-CIA-da hoaxes, Communist, Atheist,
Idol worshippers, Fear Monger's, Drugged and Drunken's oxy crystal coccaine meth psychopath,
child pedeophilia, gambler's, Pathological and diabolical liars, Hypocrites, sodomites ..I
can't think of any right now, because my mind is exploding with rage because of these
troubling central banker's satanic hegemony!
Quran Chapter 30
39. The usury you practice, seeking thereby to multiply people's wealth, will not multiply
with God. But what you give in charity, desiring God's approval -- these are the
multipliers.
40. God is He who created you, then provides for you, then makes you die, then brings you
back to life. Can any of your idols do any of that? Glorified is He, and Exalted above what
they associate.
41. Corruption has appeared on land and sea, because of what people's hands have earned, in
order to make them taste some of what they have done, so that they might return.
@Really
No Shit Jews are doing to White countries what Whites and Jews did to India, no honour
amongst thieves, the ones with the higher verbal IQ wins.
Also it is important to note that the reason India came under the sway of Anglo-Zionist
banking cartels so easily was because how divided it was, I reckon that is why they are
promoting mass immigration. Import lots of different groups, then run lots of race-baiting
stories to distract the plebs from their financial machinations.
This is why Jews are well represented in non-antisemitic White Nationalist organisations
like Jared Taylor's AmRen, they are great at playing both sides.
And he funded the building of the Peace Palace ("Vredespaleis") in The Hague, presently
the seat of the International Court of Justice, an institution not held in high esteem in
the home country of the generous donor.
@Wally
You can act confused all you want, you know exactly what I am talking about, the fact of the
matter is Whites like you and Joyce would be laughing it up at countries/territories like
Puerto Rico, Congo, Vietnam etc etc being carved up and financially enslaved if Whites were
also allowed a piece of the pie along with Jews (as was the case in the days of the British
Empire when WASP's and Jews worked together), but now that the low-IQ countries have been
looted, the Jews have turned on the Whites and the latter are now crying that their criminal
comrades have now betrayed them.
You quite clearly have a clue, you are just terrified and trying to divert because I am
right, the Jews will do to the White nations what the White nations and Jews did to the
non-White nations. All I can say is that you WASPs should have kept to youselves like Eastern
Europeans and Eastern Asians, they didn't really engage in lofty ambitons to dominate the
world and as such are intact at the moment and seem like they will remain that way for a long
time, they are the true conservatives, WASPs have always had a Jewish streak within their
corrupt souls and are now paying the price for engaging with a criminal race.
Why do you think Epstein has all these Gentiles in his pocket? You think do-gooding
gentiles just randomly decided to get into bed with Epstein and Co.? How many East Asians and
Eastern Euros do you see terrified of being outed as paedophiles.
Don't deceive yourselves, all debts are paid in the end, especially when the creditors are
Jews.
@Adrian
They are a function of Empire in Hague, who protect empire criminals, and assume a non
existent legitimacy and jurisdiction as a private entity to take down empire opponents.
It is the very same kangaroo court as the IMT or Tokio show trials.
In the book "Heaven is for real" a 4 year old boy who supposedly is dead for a short period,
but actually visits heaven; when he returns, is asked : what is the meaning, the purpose of
life on earth?
His response is so simple, that it could only be true. And it could only come from
knowing
Don't deceive yourselves, all debts are paid in the end, especially when the creditors
are Jews.
It is a mathematical impossibility due to interest. The FED probably goes negative
interest like ECB mafia.
Chances are higher they do a reset and start anew with an electronic ponzi scheme.
No one seriously plans to pay these "debts", they can't be paid, and are actually a nothing
burger, pure fiction.
" it is truly remarkable that vulture funds like Singer's escaped major media attention prior
to this ."
Not really. The Jew's grip is starting to slip now, though. More and more people are
becoming aware that they are virulent parasites and always have been.
@Mulegino1
Real capitalism is the competition of ideas, innovation, efficient manufacturing and quality
products made and produced by honest companies. That competition can, in theory at least,
make people (and companies) "try harder". But only when a company's success is determined by
the strength of its products, not by the "deals" it cuts with Jewish financial, advertising,
"marketing" and swindling rackets, designed to line the pockets of the Jew while destroying
honest competition by Gentiles who struggle to play fair and innovate.
Jewish vulture "capitalism" contributes NOTHING of value to any company or any culture. It
never has and never will.
You and other whites here are like the bad guys in every horror movie ever made, who
gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass --
even if it takes four sequels to make it happen -- but who in the meantime keeps coming
back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that
you were finally dead this time. Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie
ends. Our ankles survive.
YOU DO NOT.
Talk about deflection. Any nation, empire, culture or civilization wherein the Jewish
collective gains critical mass and ultimately absolute power turns into a real horror,
not a movie. The Jews may be said to be the true prototype of the "bad guys in every horror
movie", since they can only be gotten rid of by very rigorous means taken in the healthiest
and most vigorous cultures and societies. Indeed, antisemitism itself is the healthy
immunological reaction of a flourishing culture, and its lack thereof the pathology of a
moribund one.
Woke Christians of European provenance have nothing to envy the Jew (the archetypal Jew)
over. We realize that the true measure of success is not primarily monetary or the
fulfillment of cheap ambitions, but a spiritual and cultural one. On the contrary, the Jewish
hatred against Christian Europe and the civilization that it constructed is engendered out of
sheer envy and malice, because Jewry understands that is would never be capable of
constructing anything similar, and never has. In all of the arts, Jewry has produced nothing
of note.
This is not to say that individual Jews have not made contributions to the arts and sciences,
but they have done so only by participation in gentile culture, not qua Jews. Jewry only
tears down and deconstructs; it is not creative in the sense of high art, and can thrive only
in the swamp of gentile decadence and moral putrefaction. Whatever Jewry touches, it turns to
merde.
European Jewish IQ has only gone 1/2 a standard deviation above the white norm in the last
100 years. Interesting to know why, but the belief Jews have always been more intelligent is
just lack of data.
bias for co-operation
Nazis did this too – they worked reaaally well with each other. The issue was how
they thought of and treated others.
That aside, I think we daily meet plenty of individuals who'd sell their mothers, and
maybe kill lives, for pennies. They are like machines not even conscious of what they are
doing.
Your 1 data point aside, are you saying all humans act in identical ways, regardless of
how the ideologies they embrace ask them to act?
Take the ideology of Islam – it does not allow for aggressive war, surprise attacks,
the killing of women or children (unless they take up arms)..
Judaism allows for aggressive war, surprise attack, and demands the killing of all
when a state of war is declared.
Do you believe these declarations lead to identical actions by their practitioners? (in
other words – people act how they would wish to act, and don't really engage in any
belief systems beyond what pulls their own selves?)
So, it's the usual with Joyce (and not only Joyce of course). You take something that is
human, talk of Jews, point to that something in Jews, and pretend, trusting that your
readers will pretend the same, that it's a Jewish-specific something.
Yes, correct – no ideology is perfect at taming human action, and corruption is a
human action, not a Jewish action. But we could still engage in comparative ideology, and
this is what Joyce (and not only Joyce, of course) engage in.
Saying 'well, all peoples engage in force and deceit, so is there any actual difference
between them and their beliefs?' is absurdism. In such a world, I will build a nation of
priests, fashioned along the lines of the Aztek priesthood. Give me your children so I can
rip out their hearts and make it rain – after all 'we are all the same'!!
The argument is that, for the proportion of the population, the fraction of monopoly power
in Western economies that is taken up by Jewish power is much disproportional to other
nations/belief systems.
It is fair to ask whether people who engage in other belief systems have the same level of
desire for monopoly, just less skill to get it due to their belief systems.. I would say yes,
they have the same level of desire (we are all human after all (not that if you read chapter
1 of the Tanya, you will be offered that point of view)) – but that their belief
systems specifically push them away from materialism and desire for money and power, even at
the expense of others. That is the exact point of religion (self-improvement) btw, so
the next question is – is the Jewish religion effective?
At which point, the Jewish ideology becomes the wolf in the hen house – because it
fails to tame the human away from such materialistic desire (as it btw claims it does
best).
Should the hens be allowed to point out what they see as a wolf? Yes.
That the supposed wolf then obfuscates and justifies their actions by pointing to others,
mostly, betrays that it is, in fact, a wolf.
I have become totally disenchanted with the SEC. Stupid, Evil, Crazy! It would not surprise
me if they are the ones that have been terrorizing me, with stupid, evil, crazy chants
through appliances after illegallly implaced RFIDs, microchips, or sensors illegally
implanted in my ears and nose that started after my first phone was hacked in 2017! Can't
expect stupid people not to be stupid, evil people not to be evil, and crazy people not to be
crazy! They were just born that way!
@J
Adleman brookings.edu : "The US will become minority white in 2045 Census projects "
:
"During that year [2045] whites will comprise 49.7 per cent of the population in contrast to
24.6 per cent for Hispanics , 13.1 per cent for Blacks , 7.9 per cent for Asians and 3.8 per
cent for multi-racial populations " Are these projections good or bad for the "Jewish people
" ?
Nov 22, 2013 Thomas DiLorenzo – The Revolution Of 1913
From the Tom Woods show Loyola economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo discusses three events
from 1913 that greatly escalated the transmogrification of America from the founder's vision
(limited government) to its current state (unlimited government).
@silviosilver
Yes, and just because you can doesn't mean you should. And if there's a predilection among
jewish men to engage in predatory lending and collecting tactics that is disproportionate to
their of the population, there's something about their genes or their culture that shapes
them to be this way.
Also, notice how you left out the part where they jack up the interest rates and debtor's
fees to grossly inflate their income. Is there a reason to do this other than as a quick way
to make money off already impoverished people? It's kind of like opening up a rent to own
place in a low income place. The people who do that shit know exactly why they should set up
among poor people; low wealth and bad decision making abound.
And yes, it does seem to be particularly jewish given how many jews are involved in its
practice and given that it used to be frowned upon in Christian Europe. Hell, God himself (as
Jesus) went and beat the shit out of a bunch of jews for their money lending in the temple.
That's the best part of the Bible, frankly. God gets so sick of the his own chosen people
that he sends himself to chastise and whip them for their greed and hubris. No lesson was
learned.
And then they killed him. And they lost their homeland for 2000 years. And then were
kicked out of a hundred plus kingdoms, cities and countries. And then a miserable liberal
shows how vile and stupid their children are:
You know, maybe instead of making excuses, you can just acknowledge the wrongdoing and
acknowledge that some jews are particularly malicious. Cuz eventually, people are
gonna get sick of the shit jews pull and see jewish (or gentile zionist) people defending
their obvious misdeeds and get pissed at them as well. Remember, the well is open to
everyone.
Besides being retardedly wrong, the broader point is likewise retarded: when
English-speaking Jews name their businesses they shouldn't use English words. Naming a
company "Oaktree" should be limited to those of purely English blood! Jews must name their
companies "Cosmopolitan Capital" or RosenMoses Chutzpah Advisors."
Telling that you go with hyperbole here: the only two options must be Albion
Whyteman Capital or Foreskin-Chewing Pornographers Incorporated!
There are two interesting things about the onomastics of the prepuce-free business world.
One is that far fewer sons of Abraham name their businesses after themselves (I'm sure this
will insincerely be attributed to some fear of native kulaks' repressed urge-to-pogrom, even
in Finland or Japan.) The other is an observation made by an associate of a famous Austrian
landscapist: even merely remarking on their origins causes these guys mental distress.
Here in the melting pot, the difference couldn't be any starker. You can make small talk
with any flavor of goy based on it: that's a Polish name, isn't it? Yeah, how did you
know! Try this one with Levy or Nussbaum down at The Smith Group or The Jones Foundation
and watch them plotz.
Jews have always weaponized usury. Long before Christianity, Jews operated the East/West
mechanism on donkey caravan trade routes. Silver would drain from the West, and Gold would
drain from the east, while Jewish caravaneers would take usury on exchange rate differences.
This operated for thousands of years.
Haibaru donkey bones have been discovered outside of Sumer. The Aiparu/Haibaru (Hebrew)
tribes were formed as merchants operating between city states. In those days, psychopaths and
criminals would be excommunicated from civilized city states, and would take up with the
wandering merchant tribe.
Why do you think the Jew is always interested in owing the money power? Why do you think
the Jew perpetually stands outside the walls of the city state, plotting its destruction?
History tells us things, and we had better listen. That is – real history, not what
you learned in (((public skool))). There are two ways to deal with the Jew: 1) Remove him
from your country. 2) Limit him.
Limiting was done by Byzantium under Justinian. The Jew was limited FROM money
counting/banking; limited from participation in government; limited from access to pervert
young minds – especially as school teachers and professors.
It takes a King or Tsar who cares about his population, and is willing to eject or filter
out toxins from the body politic. (((Democracy))) is a failed form of government, whereby
monied Oligarchs control the polity by compromat and pulling strings.
You are not going to be able to vote your way out of the Jew problem.
@Colin
Wright Echoing words once supposedly used by Hermann Goering: whenever I here the word
'philanthropist' these days, I instinctively reach for my revolver!
Take the ideology of Islam – it does not allow for aggressive war, surprise
attacks, the killing of women or children (unless they take up arms)..
Ilya,
There is deception in Islam. Sorry. You cannot make claims about Islam not allowing for
aggressive war and surprise attacks.
These concepts even have names and doctrine that support them. Wahabbi/Salafist Islam is
exactly in alignment with Islamic teachings, especially when using abrogation techniques.
Taqiyya is lying with intent to deceive. The analog in Judaism is the Kol-Niedre, which
allows one pre-forgiveness for lying, cheating, even murder of Goyim.
Hudnas is are used to lay in wait, build up strength, to then attack the enemy.
Islam has derogatory terms to demean e.g. Kaffirs, which is similar to Goyim.
There is also deception in Christianity, but this deception is OUT OF ALIGNMENT WITH
DOCTRINE. The doctrine of super-session means the old testament is superseded, completed, a
historical record.
In Islam the doctrine of Abrogation means that the more pacific Meccan verses are
abrogated (made less relevant) that post Medina. Ergo, Wahabbi Islam and the Takfiri's are
doctrinaly correct, while Judaizer Christians (those that worship the old testament) are out
of alignment and heretics.
Judaism is actually a new religion that came into being after 73 AD, when the verbal
tradition (Caballa) became written down into Talmud.
Our Jewish friends have always been practicing usury, going back to since forever.
Our Jewish friends, I count as worse that Islamics. However two wrongs don't make a right.
Islam badly needs reform or to be expunged. Talmudic Judaism is by far the worst religion on
the planet, and its adherents must malfunction by definition.
o ..kill all the Jewish, er, "vulture capitalists" , right? Or should we go "easy" on
them all and merely ship them all off to special "re-education" camps? Or am I missing
something here ?
You are missing something because you are unwilling to adapt and learn with new
information. This makes you an ideologue.
Lolbertarianism IS A JEWISH CONSTRUCT.
There are no such things as free markets. Money's true nature is law, not gold. Money
didn't come into being with barter and other nonsense lolbertarians believe.
Most of the luminaries that came up with "libertarian" economics are Jews, and it is a
doctrine of deception. The idea is to confuse the goyim with thoughts and ideas that make
them easy pickings.
A determined in-group of predators operating in unison, will take down an "individual"
every-time.
Don't expect anything to improve with Jay Clayton as SEC Chair, and his wife and her father
Gretchen Butler Clayton who was CEO of CSC and mysterious WMB Holdings which share the same
address in addition to many Goldman Sachs divisions. Gretchen was employed by Goldman Sachs
as an attorney from 1999-2017. Many companies affiliated with the Panama Papers share the
same address as well.
Jewish people have treated me better than my own White Euro family.
Jews are tribal, gee what a surprise after 1000's of years of people trying to wipe them
out . and so their charity is within the tribe, but there is no charity within the tribe
among Whites.
Jews, along with Asians and at least some Africans, believe in not just climbing the
ladder, but in actually helping others – at least family – up it also. Whites
believe in climbing the ladder and then pulling it up after them.
I was explaining to a friend recently: My (relative) has proven that if I showed up at
their door, starving, they'd not give me a cheese sandwich, while in my experience, strangers
have been overall a fairly kind lot and a stranger, 50/50, might. Therefore, while I find the
idea of robbing or burning down the house of a stranger abhorrent, I don't mind the idea so
much when it involves a person who's proven to be cold and evil.
For more on this, see the book Angela's Ashes. The Irish family could have stayed in New
York where they were being befriended by a Jewish family. There was a ray of hope. The Irish
kids, at least, would have been fed, steered into decent schooling, etc. But foolishly they
went back to Ireland, to be treated like utter dogshit by their fellow White family and
"people".
Most of the predation going on in the US and worldwide is being done by WASPS who are
using Jews as a convenient scapegoat.
@tono
bungay Feel free to offer us some counter-examples, tono. How many such funds to you know
of that aren't disproportionately Jewish? We're all ears!
@Robjil
This is an example of what I was saying. Less Euro whites in the world is not going to be a
good world for Big Js. Non-Euros believe in freedom of speech.
Jewish Bigwigs can't get control of businesses in East Asia. They have been trying. Paul
Singer tried and failed. In Argentina he got lots of "success". Why? Lots of descendants of
Europeans there went along with "decisions" laid out by New York Jews.
Little Paulie tried to get control of Samsung. No such luck for him in Korea. In Korea
there are many family monopolies, chaebols. A Korean chaebol stopped him. Jewish Daniel Loeb
tried to get a board seat on Sony. He was rebuffed.
I was moved to reflect on the universality of this theme recently when surveying media
coverage on Korean and Argentinian responses to the activities of Paul Singer and his
co-ethnic shareholders at Elliott Associates, an arm of Singer's Elliott Management hedge
fund. The Korean story has its origins in the efforts of Samsung's holding company, Cheil
Industries, to buy Samsung C&T, the engineering and construction arm of the wider
Samsung family of businesses. The move can be seen as part of an effort to reinforce
control of the conglomerate by the founding Lee family and its heir apparent, Lee Jae-yong.
Trouble emerged when Singer's company, which holds a 7.12% stake in Samsung C&T and is
itself attempting to expand its influence and control over Far East tech companies,
objected to the move. The story is fairly typical of Jewish difficulties in penetrating
business cultures in the Far East, where impenetrable family monopolies, known in Korea as
chaebols, are common. This new story reminded me very strongly of last year's efforts by
Jewish financier Daniel Loeb to obtain a board seat at Sony. Loeb was repeatedly rebuffed
by COO Kazuo Hirai, eventually selling his stake in Sony Corp. in frustration.
Here is how the Koreans fought off Paul Singer.
The predominantly Jewish-owned and operated Elliott Associates has a wealth of
self-interest in preventing the Lee family from consolidating its control over the Samsung
conglomerate. As racial outsiders, however, Singer's firm were forced into several tactical
measures in their 52-day attempt to thwart the merger. First came lawsuits. When those
failed, Singer and his associates then postured themselves as defending Korean interests,
starting a Korean-language website and arguing that their position was really just in aid
of helping domestic Korean shareholders. This variation on the familiar theme of Jewish
crypsis was quite unsuccessful. The Lee family went on the offensive immediately and,
unlike many Westerners, were not shy in drawing attention to the Jewish nature of Singer's
interference and the sordid and intensely parasitic nature of his fund's other
ventures.
Cartoons were drawn of Singer being a vulture.
Other cartoons appearing at the same time represented Elliott, literally, as humanoid
vultures, with captions referring to the well-known history of the fund. In the above
cartoon, the vulture offers assistance to a needy and destitute figure, but conceals an axe
with which to later bludgeon the unsuspecting pauper.
ADL got all worked about this. The Koreans did not care. It is reality. Freedom of speech
works on these vultures. The west should try some real freedom of speech.
After the cartoons appeared, Singer and other influential Jews, including Abraham
Foxman, cried anti-Semitism. This was despite the fact the cartoons contain no reference
whatsoever to Judaism – unless of course one defines savage economic predation as a
Jewish trait. Samsung denied the cartoons were anti-Semitic and took them off the website,
but the uproar over the cartoons only seemed to spur on even more discussion about Jewish
influence in South Korea than was previously the case. In a piece published a fortnight
ago, Media Pen columnist Kim Ji-ho claimed "Jewish money has long been known to be ruthless
and merciless." Last week, the former South Korean ambassador to Morocco, Park Jae-seon,
expressed his concern about the influence of Jews in finance when he said, "The scary thing
about Jews is they are grabbing the currency markets and financial investment companies.
Their network is tight-knit beyond one's imagination." The next day, cable news channel YTN
aired similar comments by local journalist Park Seong-ho, who stated on air that "it is a
fact that Jews use financial networks and have influence wherever they are born." It goes
without saying that comments like these are unambiguously similar to complaints about
Jewish economic practices in Europe over the course of centuries. The only common
denominator between the context of fourteenth-century France and the context of
twenty-first-century South Korea is, you guessed it, Jewish economic practices.
The Koreans won. Paulie lost. Good win for humanity. The Argentines were not so lucky.
They don't have freedom speech like the Koreans and East Asians have.
In the end, the Lee strategy, based on drawing attention to the alien and exploitative
nature of Elliott Associates, was overwhelmingly effective. Before a crucial shareholder
vote on the Lee's planned merger, Samsung Securities CEO Yoon Yong-am said: "We should
score a victory by a big margin in the first battle, in order to take the upper hand in a
looming war against Elliott, and keep other speculative hedge funds from taking short-term
gains in the domestic market." When the vote finally took place a few days ago, a
conclusive 69.5% of Samsung shareholders voted in favor of the Lee proposal, leaving
Elliott licking its wounds and complaining about the "patriotic marketing" of those behind
the merger.
@jack
daniels Now that I think about it, it was unfair to make an anecdotal judgment that
Jewish lenders are less forgiving. There are plenty of examples, I'm sure, of compassionate
Jews and flinty gentiles.
Finally! An intelligent criticism of Trump for a change. So tired of the brainless
Democrat/MSM impeachment circus. They make me feel like a reflexive MAGAtard just for
defending the constitution, logic, etc., from their never-ending stream of inanities.
Meanwhile, the real problem with Trump is not that he's Hitler; it's that he's not Hitler
enough!
I am also so tired of Zionist-loving cucks bleeting on about the evils of the CRA without
ever considering the role played by the (((profiteers))) who lobbied such policies into law
in the first place. Realize that what Paul Singer does for a living used to be illegal in
this country up until recently. That's right: US bankruptcy law used to forbid investors from
buying up debt second-hand at a discount and then trying to reclaim the entire face
value from the debtor. But I see all kinds of people even on this thread blaming the victim
instead -- 'Damn goyishe deadbeats!' Whatever
What Singer and the other Jewish vultures engage in is not productive, and isn't even
any recognisable form of work or business. It is greed-motivated parasitism carried out on
a perversely extravagant and highly nepotistic scale. In truth, it is Singer and his
co-ethnics who believe that money can be printed on the backs of productive workers, and
who ultimately believe they have a right to be "showered by free stuff promised by
politicians."
To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being
a result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while
maybe not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit?
The last Gentleman on WS was not a Jew. Bring back the WASP. You can maintain your honor,
and manners and still succeed. Jews take the easy low road of deception and cheating. WASP
take the higher road of harder work and ethical business practice.
[MORE]
The courtly Mr. Jenrette, who has been dubbed "the last gentleman on Wall Street" earned this
sobriquet largely for his reputation of being particularly sensitive to the human dimension
in an industry where such matters often get sidestepped. Nonetheless, despite Mr. Jenrette's
modest demeanor, he's risen to the top in an often cutthroat business. He remained with
Donaldson Lufkin through good times and bad, guiding it after its two other founding partners
departed for other ventures and, next month, he will step down as the chairman of the
Securities Industry Association, the brokerage trade group.
"Dick has been the one who carried the firm from its original promise through to closure,"
said Samuel Hayes 3d, an investment banking professor at the Harvard Business School.
"Dick's more in tune with human values and that's not frequently found on Wall Street."
Richard Jenrette, 89, Wall Street power, Raleigh native, dies https://www.wral.com ›
richard-jenrette-89-wall-street-power-and-preserva
Apr 23, 2018 – A courtly, soft-spoken North Carolina native whom The New York Times
once called the "last gentleman on Wall Street," Jenrette (pronounced
Wall Street's 'last gentleman' left behind these 24 lessons about life and success: At the
time of his death late last month due to complications from lymphoma, these couple dozen
rules to live by were left on his desk.
Stay in the game. That's often all you need to do -- don't quit. Stick around! Don't be a
quitter!
•Don't burn bridges (behind you)
•Remember -- Life has no blessing like a good friend!
•You can't get enough of them
•Don't leave old friends behind -- you may need them
•Try to be nice and say "thank you" a lot!
•Stay informed/KEEP LEARNING!
•Study -- Stay Educated. Do Your Home Work!! Keep learning!
•Cultivate friends of all ages -- especially younger
•Run Scared -- over-prepare
•Be proud -- no Uriah Heep for you! But not conceited. Know your own worth.
•Plan ahead but be prepared to allow when opportunity presents itself.
•Turn Problems into Opportunities. Very often it can be done. Problems create
opportunities for change -- people willing to consider change when there are problems.
•Present yourself well. Clean, clean-shaven, dress "classically" to age. Beware style,
trends. Look for charm. Good grammar. Don't swear so much -- it's not cute.
•But be open to change -- don't be stuck in mud. Be willing to consider what's new but
don't blindly follow it. USE YOUR HEAD -- COMMON SENSE.
•Have some fun -- but not all the time!
•Be on the side of the Angels. Wear the White Hat.
•Have a fall-back position. Heir and the spare. Don't leave all your money in one
place.
•Learn a foreign language.
•Travel a lot -- around the world, if possible.
•Don't criticize someone in front of others.
•Don't forget to praise a job well done (but don't praise a poor job)
•I don't like to lose -- but don't be a poor loser if you do.
•It helps to have someone to love who loves you (not just sex).
•Keep your standards high in all you do.
•Look for the big picture but don't forget the small details.
"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I" care not who makes its laws"
That is what Mayer Amschel Rothchild said in the 1750s. Now, is it a stretch of my
imagination to believe the Central Banks of the West, all Jewish controlled, would unfairly
favor their 'own' when issueing or disbursing the money they are permitted to create.
We are not allowed to audit the Federal Reserve, so we know not what they do with it beyond
what they tell us. In 2016 it was discovered that between the year 1999 and 2016 well over
$23 trillions had been stolen from just 2 departments of our government, the DoD and HUD.
(Someone should look at NASA). Is it possible the seed money, for not only Venture
capitalists schemes but also buying governments and law makers, has been diverted, shoveled
out of the back door of these corrupt central banks and into the hands of their fellow
jews?
Anyway, the more exposure articles like this get the closer we get to ending their reign.
As I noted in my previous examination of contemporary Jewish usury, Jews have been at
the forefront of innovation in debt for many centuries, and remain its most adroit auteurs.
Although obviously rooted in centuries of Jewish financial practice, Singer and his
co-ethnics (all four equity partners of Elliott are Jewish, and its COO is the
charmingly-named Zion Shohet) pioneered the finer points of the vulture-fund concept. The
firm was born in 1977 when Singer pooled $1.3 million from family and friends,
His firm's first big "win" was the pillage of Panama in 1995.
but it only really took off in October 1995, when Elliott Associates L.P. purchased
$28.7 million of Panamanian sovereign debt for the discounted price of $17.5 million. The
banks holding those bonds, a group that included heavy hitters like Citi and Credit Suisse,
had given up on repayment from Panama. To cut their losses, they sold their holdings to
Elliott which, like a medieval tax farmer, went in with a heavy hand. When Panama's
government asked for a restructuring of its foreign debt in 1995, the vast majority of its
bondholders agreed – apart from Elliott. In July 1996, Elliott Associates,
represented by one of the world's most high-profile securities law firms, filed a lawsuit
against Panama in a New York district court, seeking full repayment of the original $28.7
million – plus interest and fees. The case made its way from a district court in
Manhattan to the New York State Supreme Court, which sided with Elliott. In the end,
Panama's government had to pay the Jewish group over $57 million, with an additional $14
million going to other creditors. Overnight, Singer's group made $40 million, and the
people of Panama found their original sovereign debt had more than doubled.
@Mefobills
If you could point to a verse in the Quran that allows for aggressive war, it would help me
learn – when I read it I saw an explosive self defence at any infringment on the Ummah,
but not much beyond that.
Of course the origination story of the faith is one of fighting, and without any wise men
to guide the laypeople, the faith has an issue in that it is easy for people to not follow
what it teaches.
Islam has been assaulted for a millennium, and so the self defence aspect of its faith has
become more active than the rest.. it needs reform I agree (and not in the direction the
Salafists have taken it), but more so there is a need for the Ummah to have a few generations
of non-aggression from the outside world.. without it the pressure will only be towards
violence – for any nation or faith!
Judaism has monopolized for millennia though, and still acts as a victim. Different kettle
of fish.
Also, you can debate the positives and negatives of Islam with a Muslim (not as a rabid
ignoramus of course – you must be polite, and have learnt something, as well as be open
to learning more). Almost every debate with a Jew about Judaism has started with, continued
with, and ended with name calling for me however.
Judaism fails as a religion because it does not encourage the practitioner to look at
themselves when confronted with error, Islam still does imo.
Does anyone here remember how John Leibowitz aka John Stewart spent months ripping Mitt
Romney to shreds? Remember? Evil white man vulture capitalism at Bain? Remember? Romney was
Adolf Hitler, and look he put his golden retriever on the roof once?
Say. How come that Mr Leibowitz never talked about the Jews who basically destroyed yes
the entire Rust belt by acquisition and outsource?
That Mr Johnny Leibovitz sure did hate the goy a lot and all. He never talked about his
own people. What a fair fellow Mr Johnny Leibovitz was. He even changed his name. Why change
the name?
Remember. Bain Capital and that kind of merger pump and dumps is all done by Mormons
goyim.
@Colin
Wright Your statement: "Jews actually collaborated extensively in the imposition of
tyranny on the working class in Eastern Europe from 1917 to 1991" not only applies to Europe,
but the united States of America as well.
It's the JEWS it's always the JEWS
[MORE]
Our present situation and the devolving into the morass of "multiculturalism" and "diversity"
is no accident. The jewish talmud and that jewish invention-communism has "rules" for the
debasement of (white) civil society.
The following statements are a result of personal experiences–your mileage may
vary
I came of age during the first so-called "civil-rights" movement and saw for myself the
underhanded dealings, the demonization of decent, law-abiding whites, and in general, the
deterioration of civil society.
Almost all of the "civil-rights" workers and demonstration "handlers" were of one
persuasion–New York based leftist communist jews. They cared not one wit about true
"civil rights", but were there to create hate and discontent among their black charges (who
were too stupid or naive to see that they were being used to suborn and destroy legitimate
government and society–a favorite communist tactic).
These New York-based "carpetbaggers" fomented their hate and discontent, only to become
future "civil-rights" attorneys, race-hustlers, and America-hating leftist communists and the
ADL and $PLC being invented.
Those of us whites who were in the middle of this "civil-rights" revolution had a saying:
" Behind every negro, there is a jew ". No truer words were spoken.
Let's not forget their infestation of the nation's education and entertainment systems,
(which continues to the present day), in which they can spread their jewish supremacist
poison.
The so-called "non-violent civil-rights demonstrations" were anything but "non-violent".
Robberies, rapes, and other criminal acts were common, but never reported, as even the
"mainstream media" was "in on the game" and conveniently turned off their cameras during the
acts of violence. You see, even then,"creating crises" was a part of the agenda.
The "beginning of the end" of America was the use of federal troops against white
Americans, which, in itself was a violation of "posse comitatus"–the prohibition on the
use of federal troops for domestic "law enforcement" purposes. As most whites were (and still
are) law-abiding, they (we) were "steamrollered" by the use of federal troops to crush honest
dissent. We never recovered from those unconstitutional actions. It was all downhill from
there
The next step may be "civil-war" in which us whites will have to take back our birthright
by force.
"Foreign Policy described the court's decision as "a groundbreaking moment in the modern
history of finance." By taking the case to a New York district court, Elliott broke with
long-standing international law and custom, according to which sovereign governments are not
sued in regular courts meant to deal with questions internal to a nation state. Further, the
presiding judge accepted the case – another break with custom. It set the stage for two
decades of similar parasitism on struggling countries by Elliott Associates, a practice that
has reaped billions for Jewish financiers. "
A year later after the ground breaking decision. Paulie tries this scam on another nation,
Peru.
Just one year after the Panama decision, Singer spent about $11 million on
government-backed Peruvian bank debt in 1996. After Singer took Peru to court in the U.S.,
U.K., Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, and Canada, the struggling nation finally agreed in
2000 to pay him $58 million. That meant he got better than a 400 percent return.
In 2001, the victim was Argentina.
In 2001, Elliott Associates purchased an Argentinian default for $48 million; the face
value of that debt today is $630 million. The fund wants repayment for the full value of
the debt to all of Argentina's creditors, as it did in 1995 with Panama. This amounts to
$1.5 billion, which could rise to $3 billion including, again, that all-important interest
and fees.
Another victim was the Congo in 2002-03.
..specific activities of Elliott Associates in Congo, where it originally bought $32.6
million in sovereign debt incurred by that country for the knockdown price of under $20
million. In 2002 and 2003, a British court (tactically chosen) forced the Congolese
government to settle for an estimated $90 million, which included that all-important
interest and fees. Elliott Associates rapidly became known as the quintessential "vulture
fund."
1. Re Sidney, Nebraska: Maybe I'm missing something but wasn't it Cabela's owners, for
example co-founder and chairman Jim Cabela, who sold Cabela, not Elliot Management (Singer et
al)? I gather Elliot Management owned only 11% of the company. Was that enough to force them
to sell?
2. The article confuses honest straightforward loans with tax farming and government
corruption. Loans can be very useful, e.g. for a car to get to a job, or for a house so you
build up equity instead of paying rent.
@Hapalong
Cassidy Bain's not much of an exception to Joyce's pattern: although Mitt, like the other
three founders, was a goy, there were plenty of Chosen Ones associated with the company right
from the start:
In addition to the three founding partners, the early team included Fraser Bullock,
Robert F. White, Joshua Bekenstein, Adam Kirsch, and Geoffrey S. Rehnert Early investors
included Boston real estate mogul Mortimer Zuckerman and Robert Kraft, the owner of the New
England Patriots football team.
@BannedHipster
According to the Talmud, we goyim are not the descendants of Adam and Eve, like the
Jews. No, we are the bastard progeny of Adam's first wife, Lilleth, who eloped with the demon
Samael. So we goyim are really all half-demons and therefore we are an abomination in the
sight of Jew-hova, and we get what we deserve at the hands of his 'chosen people'.
improving the quality of life and access to opportunities for all Israeli citizens so that
they may benefit from the country's prosperity
Read 'all Jewish Israeli citizens'. I doubt they're going to do any life-enhancing
or make opportunities available to any of the grunting subhuman goyim .
It's important not to get carried away with this. Figures such as Andrew Carnegie, while
impeccably gentile, were hardly paragons of scrupulous ethics and disinterested virtue.
Andrew Carnegie built something that made life better for people. Making steel is a
beneficial thing.
These evil vulture Jews build nothing – they make people poorer. They suck the
wealth out of people who have little. They know 100% what they are doing.
Jesus expressed anger against the money changers on the temple steps.
It is OK for you to have natural human feelings and be angry at these Jew bastards.
@Anon
Romney is a Mormon, one of the church officials. The Mormons are closer to the Jews pattern
of worshiping money and using charity donation for business investments.
Mormons arent considered Protestants .
"Although the church has not released church-wide financial statements since 1959, in
1997, Time magazine called it one of the world's wealthiest churches per capita.[147] In a
June 2011 cover story, Newsweek stated that the LDS Church "resembles a sanctified
multinational corporation -- the General Electric of American religion, with global ambitions
and an estimated net worth of $30 billion." A whistle blower within the church reported them
to the IRS for using their status as a non taxable religious groups to invest in business
ventures instead of charities.
@anon
Maybe I can answer your question.
I studied and befriended many jews as a student (Imperial College, London etc) – none
were above average intelligent, and although they were very geeky, they only got average
grades.
When I moved to LA – most of my friends were jews and again, none were very bright
(even though a few were famous). Most of these LA jewish friends were probably psychopaths
– thinking back – very manipulative, exploitative and they lied a lot.
I think it's mostly through their cultural nepotism – they work on their own unity
(they help promote each other) while at the same time they work on destroying unity in their
host and everyone else.
Many have changed their Eastern European names.
And they go out of the way to help other jews (only) – a Serbian friend in Toronto
looks very jewish (but is not religious) told me several times here in Toronto, other Jews
(his boss etc) just offered to help him for no reason ("Is there anything I can do for you?"
etc). He did not understand why they did that – then I realized he actually looks like
a Jewish stereotype (as does his twin brother). So he thought he was helping his own
tribe.
When I went to Cuba with a Jewish 'friend' from LA – he was actively looking for
anything jewish (and nothign else – he did not want to see anything famous like a
beautiful cemetery in Havana etc) – only synagogs etc – where he gave some money
to jews he never even met. I was there with him and saw it. He was even angry if I suggested
we see something nice , historical and not-jewish. We met a NY jew there and we gave his a
ride in the car we rented – they immediately teamed up against me – for no reason
– I regretted going with him on this trip. It was an awful experience –
consistent with all the books I read on psychopaths and also that book Jewish History, Jewish
Religion, the weight of 3000 years
Another very wealthy American mother of a friend asked her South African friends (also jews)
to help her book trips in South Africa (and they of course recommended only their Jewish
friends) – it's their son who told me this.
So a lot of backstabbing, cultural nepotism and actively (but in a hidden way as most
psychopaths like to do) they do at wakening and isolating their host. That's their only
advantage – not intelligence (at least in my experience )
I recently learned that from about 1790 to 1967 the USState department refused to issue US
passports to people who held foreign passports. State also didn't hire any dual citizens for
any job from cafeteria dishwasher to ambassador.
Then in the mid sixties, an Israeli immigrant who became a US citizen applied for a US
passport. State refused to issue the US passport. So the Israeli immigrant practiced lawfare.
In 1967 the Supreme Court issued one of its usual detrimental and dangerous rulings. State
was ordered to start issuing US passports to dual citizens.
Soon there were numerous applications to State depot jobs from Israeli citizens residing
in the US. Knowing lawsuits loomed, State caved.
And that children is how and why State, commerce, DOJ CIA treasury, top security civilian
departments in the Pentagon and other federal agencies became flooded with dual American
Israeli citizens who divert money to Israel. Plus they work for Israel instead of the US.
Mysterious how the only Whites who manage to make it past affirmative action barriers are
jews.
Maybe there's a special affirmative action quota for Israelis residing in America.
@J
Adelman Adelman, be careful what you wish for, as in a debate you will be drowned.
Being labeled an ANTISEMITE is the new badge of honor and courage.
Central banks and their fiat fractional reserve banking system is slowly collapsing, as more
and more nations avoid using the BIS. Joyce's article fully explains why Russia is being
promoted as some type of arch-enemy.
@DaveE
I don't even know what capitalism means anymore. It doesn't seem like it's an actual free
market system. Seems like it is slavery for the little guy, and parasitism for the rich.
Maybe we should ditch the word capitalism for usuryism.
"'It was very gratifying to see Tucker Carlson's recent attack on the activities of Paul
Singer's vulture fund, Elliot Associates '"
I am going to avoid the Jew is bad mantra here. I read that article. But it was not an
expose' of hedgefunds, at least not at the level i was expecting. They merged two companies
and sold off or closed that which was least profitable.
In that article there was no clear discussion – about what could have prevented the
closure. So it was hard to respond positively in favor of not closing. I am advocate of
keeping work in the US, but I don't think it is unreasonable that companies be sustainable. I
would have liked that exposure, that the hedge had no intention of exploring possible profit
making alternatives.
And that is where Mr. Carlson lost me. He did not link the companies as you have. Nor
provide the examples you bring to the fore.
What distresses me about Islam is that the pacific practitioners, e.g. Suffi's, many Shias
and Sunnis are out of alignment, and hence are subject to violence from their coreligionists.
I happen to believe there are many wonderful people within the religion what I am saying is
that there is an elephant in the room, and it has a name: abrogation.
I'm going to use a smoke there is fire analogy using data.
If a religion launches repeated attacks against civilizations, then there is something
"in" the religion that is used for justification of said aggression. I'm of the opinion that
data matters, and you have to adjust your position to come into accord with real world
data.
Between 632 and 1922, Islam launched 548 offensive battles against classical
civilization
These attacks were often brutal, especially with rapes being used to "convert women"
rapidly.
In Islam (as in other religions as well) the Imam can turn knobs and get an output. This
means that abrogation is used to pick and choose verses depending on situation, to maneuver
the sheeple in the direction Imam's or political authority want them to go – including
offensive war. I used the term political authority on purpose, because Islam is more than
just a religion, it is a political-theocratic construct that is all-encompassing.
There may not be a specific verse allowing aggressive violence, but there is something
going on based on the data. (I admit to being a lay-man and not an expert on minutia of
Islam. I don't want to go there based on what I already know to be true.)
In Christianity, if there are calls for aggressive violence it is OUT OF ALIGNMENT because
of super-session. Christian adherents who do this are Judaizers, and have to use the old
testament for justification.
@Digital
Samizdat Who the heck is Lillith? Where did she come from? Adam's apple? At least Samael
is a step up from a talking snake. Talk about rewrite. Almost on par to the silly ones on the
daytime soaps. Oh wait . probably same writers.
@Rebel0007
"This won't end well."
-- They cannot help themselves. Two components make it impossible for the tribe to behave in
a preservation mode:
1. the victimhood complex, despite all the recently displayed data about Jewish murderous
ways in the host countries
2. the disproportionate number of psychopaths who are approved by tribal epos and mentality
Perhaps the only solution is to make the aggressive Jews become confined to their Jewish
country. Like an infectious disease that needs to be quarantined. Otherwise, the Jewish
psychopaths will continue leaching and destroying.
Not only the vulture bankers but a complete set of ziocons-infested stink-tanks should be
relocated (with their immediate families) to the Jewish State and prohibited from crossing
the Jewish State borders. Plus the limitations on their involvement in international commerce
and banking. Let the Jews be finally in Jerusalem today, not "next year." Let them enjoy the
company of other Jews.
Jew billionaire globalizer money-grubber Paul Singer has bought and paid for politician
puppet whore Marco Rubio.
JEWS ORGANIZED GLOBALLY(JOG) -- of which Paul Singer is a shady participant -- have plans
for after Trump and they involve the US Senators Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton
and others.
Paul Singer pushes mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration. Paul Singer wants
to continue to use mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration as demographic weapons
to attack and destroy the historic American nation.
Paul Singer wants to continue to use the US military as muscle to fight endless wars on
behalf of Israel.
I wrote this in February of 2019:
I just got reminded that Marco Rubio won a lot of the GOP billionaire Jew donor money away
from Jebby Bush in the 2016 GOP presidential primary because the Jew billionaires -- Paul
Singer in particular -- were not too thrilled with Jebby Bush's connection to James Baker.
James Baker was a factor in the Jew billionaire decision to back Marco Rubio.
George W Bush had dragged the American Empire into a war in Iraq on behalf of Israel and
the GOP Jew billionaire donors were still not convinced of Jebby Bush's slavish devotion to
Israel.
Marco Rubio signalled his willing whoredom to the ISRAEL FIRST foreign policy of endless
war on behalf of Israel in a way that left nothing to chance for the GOP Jew billionaire
donors.
Marco Rubio is nothing more than a filthy politician whore for the GOP Jew billionaire
donors who want to continue to use the US military as muscle to fight wars on behalf of
Israel.
New York Times article:
Mr. Rubio has aggressively embraced the cause of wealthy pro-Israel donors like Mr.
[Sheldon] Adelson, whom the senator is said to call frequently, and Mr. Singer, who both
serve on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, an umbrella group for Republican
Jewish donors and officials. Mr. Bush has been less attentive, in the view of some of these
donors: Last spring, he refused to freeze out his longtime family friend James A. Baker
III, the former secretary of state, after Mr. Baker spoke at the conference of a liberal
Jewish group.
The lobbying of Mr. Singer intensified in recent weeks as Mr. Bush's debate stumbles and
declining poll numbers drove many donors to consider Mr. Rubio anew. Last week, Mr. Bush's
campaign manager, Danny Diaz, and senior adviser, Sally Bradshaw, flew to New York to make
personal appeals on Mr. Bush's behalf, in the hopes of heading off an endorsement of Mr.
Rubio, according to two people close to the former governor's campaign.
This is a timely article for me as I have been pondering the relationship between Jews and
neoliberalism for some time now.
At university I studied under a brilliant Neo-Marxist professor who showed me some theory
and arguments that went a long way towards explaining how to make sense of the global power
structure. (Just a quick not for those who recoil at the mere mention of Neo-Marxist: the
academics that use a marxist lens as a tool to criticize the powerful are not all the cuckold
communist SJW types – some of these individuals are extremely intelligent and they make
very powerful arguments backed by loads of data.) One of the theories I was introduced to was
the notion of the Transnational Capitalist Class in this article called Towards A Global
Ruling Class? Globalization and the Transnational Capitalist Class:
http://media.library.ku.edu.tr/reserve/respring18/Intl313_ZOnis/3_Historical_Structuralism.pdf
The authors write the following:
Sklair's work goes the furthest in conceiving of the capitalist class as no longer
tied to territoriality
Inherent in the international concept is a system of nation-states that mediates relations
between classes and groups, including the notion of national capitals and national
bourgeoisi. Transnational, by contrast, denotes economic and related social, political, and
cultural processes – including class formation that supersede nation-states
What distinguishes the TCC from national or local capitalists is that it is involved
in globalized production and manages globalized circuits of accumulation that give it an
objective class existence and identity spatially and politically in the global system above
any local territories and polities.
Since reading your (Dr Joyce) work on the JQ I began to see the connection between age old
complaints of Jews, and what Ford referred to as "The International Jew". In fact, replace
the term "transnational capitalist class" from my passages quoted above (and many others) and
what you have is perfect mirror image of the argument.
This question has come up often lately, synchronistically (or maybe not). I'm somewhat new
to the JQ, having consumed many hours of work (including much of your own) after being sent
down the rabbit hole by the ongoing Epstein case. I was pondering that perhaps, Jews take the
blame for what the predatory capitalists are doing. Not even a week later you addressed this
precise question in your piece about Slavoj Ziszek and now with "vulture capitalism" it is
coming up yet again in Carlson's segment followed by the article right here. It also came up
on the "other side" in the blog I follow of a professor of globalization in this article:
https://zeroanthropology.net/2019/11/27/global-giants-american-empire-and-transnational-capital/
The link above is a review of the book Giants: The Global Power Elite . The review
provides a summary of the book which once again could be a text about Jews if one were to
replace the term "transnational capitalist class" with "Jews". Why I mention it, though, is
the following: "Chapter 2, "The Global Financial Giants: The Central Core of Global
Capitalism," identifies the 17 global financial giants -- money management firms that control
more than one trillion dollars in capital. As these firms invest in each other, and many
smaller firms, the interlocked capital that they manage surpasses $41 trillion (which amounts
to about 16% of the world's total wealth). The 17 global financial giants are led by 199
directors. This chapter details how these financial giants have pushed for global
privatization of virtually everything, in order to stimulate growth to absorb excess capital.
The financial giants are supported by a wide array of institutions: "governments,
intelligence services, policymakers, universities, police forces, militaries, and corporate
media all work in support of their vital interests" (p. 60).
Chapter 3, "Managers: The Global Power Elite of the Financial Giants," largely consists of
the detailed profiles of the 199 financial managers just mentioned.
This caught my eye because I immediately wondered how many of those 199 directors are
Jewish. It also pertains directly to this exact article because I am confident that the
vulture capitalists you targeted here are profiled in the book, probably with many
others.
Now, I am not in the business of writing about the JQ, so I wanted to suggest to anyone
out there that is that if they were to obtain a copy of this book and determine how many of
the 199 directors are jews. What this could accomplish is a marriage of the major two
theories of the "anti-semites" (for lack of a better word) and the "Neo-Marxists". I would
argue that perhaps both sides would learn they are coming at the same thing from two
different angles. Most would ignore it, but maybe a few leftist thinkers would receive a much
needed electric shock if they were to see the JQ framed in marxist terms. Perhaps some
alliances could be forged across the cultural divide in this struggle. Personally I believe
that both angles are perfectly valid, and that understanding one without the other will
leaves far too much to be desired when studying the powerful.
@the
grand wazoo Reagan relaxed the laws on takeovers and as a result what Galbraith called the technostructure (modern
corporation in which the business was run by not with an eye on shareholder value but in the
interests of everyone involved) was ripped apart.
However the technostructure had come about in the 30s when the Depression led to mass lay
offs, which had began to cause social unrest. The Chinese are have already cutting a swath
through Western productive capacity, and now they are coming for the rest to the extent that
the European Union is tightening the limits of foreign direct investment and takeovers. Trump
is calling for negative interest rates, which were not adopted even during the 1930s when
one-quarter of the labor force was idle.
Prospects for severe economic pain being imposed on ordinary working people and the
consequent (eventual) establishment of a new technostructure are excellent. I hate to sound
like an accelerationist, but Jews like Singer are bringing that day closer.
@Ghali
'Everywhere they go, they leave behind nations in ruins. "
-- They always find the willing local collaborators ready to make a big profit. Who can
forget Dick Cheney, the Enemy of Humanity? The same kind of unrestricted criminality and
amorality lives on in Tony Blair the Pious. The fact that this Catholic weasel and major
criminal Tony Blair is still not excommunicated tells all we need to know about the
Vatican.
Assange is rotting in a prison, while Tony Blair and Ghislaine Maxwell are roaming free. The
Jewish connections pay off.
I know some Torah Jews who are angry that Mischlings have no right of return to Israel,
and apparently now aren't part of the ruling American Jewish nation, or American, or have
anywhere to go now. They're also angry at what they see as a repeat of the cycle of
international Jewish action and inevitable reaction they will have to bear the brunt of.
They referred me to this website: The Institute for Historical Review where they
apparently contribute.
" Although Jews make up no more than three or four percent of Russia's population, they
wield enormous economic and political power in that vast and troubled country. "At least half
of the powerful 'oligarchs' who control a significant percentage of the economy are Jewish,"
the Los Angeles Times has cautiously noted. (See also: D. Michaels, "Capitalism in the New
Russia," May-June 1997 Journal, pp. 21-27. )"
So that was the context of who owned capital in Russia, what was the effect?
" According to Harvard University scholar Graham Allison, who is also a former US
assistant Secretary of Defense, ordinary Russians have experienced, on average, a 75 percent
plunge in living standards since 1991 -- almost twice the decline in Americans' income during
the Great Depression of the 1930s. But in the midst of this widespread economic misery, a
small minority has grown fabulously wealthy since the end of the Soviet era ."
But how is that possible? Swashbuckling international capitalists like Bill Browder were
bringing their Ivy League MBA's to more efficiently manage all those assets. And he said how
much he wanted to save the Polish Train-yards.
What happened? A Putin arose. He took the capital from the Jews, and the Jews were
dispatched to the United States. Putin also aligned himself with a different Jewish faction
less virulently dismissive of the needs of the people they ruled.
What do they do in the United States? Something similar as the economy careens towards
another financial crisis and living standards, mortality rates, and the middle class
plummet.
"Jewish power in Russia, Galushin continues, has resulted in millions of homeless
children, widespread tuberculosis and cholera, a shortage of medicines, cheating retirees of
their pensions, suicide in the armed forces, and the death of science. What do the Gusinskys,
the Berezovskys, the Chubais, the Nemtsovs, the Kiriyenkos, the Smolenskys, the Livshits, and
the Gaidars say about this? Millions of Russians have perished under their rule. Are the
Russian people ready to judge these scoundrels for their crimes, Galushin ask",
Robert Maxwell was a Chezch Jew – he also robbed hundreds of millions worth of
pensions. How is it possible that all these Jewish capitalists can be linked to readily to
Jeffrey Epstein?
How did Robert Maxwell get his seed money?
Here is a letter sent to Boris Berezovsky nee Abramovich.
"In sharp contrast to the intense feelings expressed by such Russian writers over the
catastrophic situation in their country today is the seeming indifference of American and
German taxpayers who have unwittingly channeled billions of dollars and marks to the
oligarchs -- who in turn have transferred this largesse to secret Swiss accounts. Who
monitors the distribution of these billions through the World Bank, the IMF, the financial
houses, and various banks? Who is responsible for this terrible injustice?"
That's really strange, because isn't that what the Russians accused Browder of doing? They
say that he channelled billions of dollars out of Russia into the United States. Then we had
the great Russian menace that is still ongoing in the media, and failing.
But Browder said that the Russian collusion story that was created by Fusion GPS, and then
the FISA court warrants issued on the basis of the fabricated Steele 'pissgate' dossier and
media stories was 100% true.
And Steele worked for the Russia desk of British Intelligence, and was being paid by the
Democrats.
Even the proto-Shabbos goys at the National Review had to distance themselves from it.
They showed that the date the FBI and Justice said it was verified it couldn't possibly have
been verified.
So why did so many Jewish capitalists like Browder support it?
And why aren't the Russians being permitted to trace Russian monies into Cyprus if Bill
Browder and now Jewish captialist ever has every done a thing that is wrong?
Because literally to the letter what is said about Donald Trump, the Democrats were
actually doing.
"" It got almost no attention, but in May [2018], CNN reported that Sens. Robert
Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to
Ukraine's prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four
investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that
their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as "strong
advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine," the Democratic senators
declared, "We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some
in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President
Trump," before demanding Lutsenko "reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation
with this important investigation ."
And yet Trump pulls the Jews ever closer. A ruling race of ubermenschen now.
'No reason'.
Can you imagine what American Blacks and savage Hispanics let alone whites are going to do
if the US economy craters like the Russian economy, and everything is transferred to the
banks?
@Old
and grumpy Yeah . fine idea. I've always maintained there are two uses of the word
"capitalism" industrial capitalism or competition of ideas vs. financial capitalism, the
Darwinian struggle for the most ruthless bankster to rig the "markets" most efficiently.
Whether we give it new terminology I don't care much . but I sure wish people would
understand the difference, one way of another !
Trump and the Republican Party puppets are nothing more than nasty politician whores for
billionaire Jews such as Seth Klarman and Paul Singer and Shelly Adelson and Les Wexner and
Bernie Marcus and many other money-grubber Jew donors.
The Republican Party Jew donors want to continue to flood the USA with mass legal
immigration and mass illegal immigration and the Jew donors want to continue to use the US
military as muscle to fight unnecessary wars and endless wars on behalf of Israel.
The Republican Party Jew donors also want to have all their shady money-grubber scams
protected by the Republican Party politician whores.
I wrote this in October of 2017 about Seth Klarman and Puerto Rican government debt:
Puerto Rico must be allowed to go belly up. The bond owners who own Puerto Rican debt must
go tits up. The US government must not bail out the investors who purchased Puerto Rican
government debt, or any debt whatsoever connected to Puerto Rico. Seth Klarman has been
revealed as a person who has bought Puerto Rican bonds in hopes of cashing out big.
SETH KLARMAN must be given a salt shaker to sprinkle salt on his worthless Puerto Rican
bonds before he eats them. Klarman must lose 100 cents on the dollar for his greedy purchase
of Puerto Rican debt. Klarman has loads of loot, and the Puerto Rican government debt was
purchased for one of his funds. I am sure his investors won't mind getting soaked by Seth for
a bit of money -- it is not even a whole billion dollars, only close to it.
David Dayen says:
Klarman, who has been described as the Oracle of Boston, has a history of buying
unpopular or distressed assets on the cheap in hopes of a payday. Baupost manages over $30
billion in assets. He is known as the top campaign contributor in New England and has been
a major donor in Republican politics in Massachusetts, including largely secret support for
2016's Question 2, an ultimately unsuccessful effort to lift a state cap on charter
schools. Klarman supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, calling Donald Trump "completely
unqualified for the highest office in the land."
Klarman's involvement in Puerto Rican debt will surely come as a surprise to activists
in Massachusetts and Puerto Rico, who have never mentioned him among the "vultures" who are
causing undue pain for the island's U.S. citizens.
Jewish people have treated me better than my own White Euro family.
White Euro people are/were evolved for small tribes. They were hunter gatherers, and
evolved concurrently with dogs. In my opinion the pathological altrusim of whites has to do
with the close relations to dogs, pets and later livestock. The whole "good shepherd" is more
of a Western Construct of Cro-Magnon white people, than the insular goat-herding types of the
middle east.
For example, in Scandinavia and most white countries, a 'baby sitter' can be a neighbor,
while in middle eastern cultures, a baby sitter can only be from a family member.
In other words, white people extend trust to one another, while middle-eastern ethos is
more familal then tribal. Ice age evolution, especially the fourth ice ages, selected for
pathological altruism is whites; which is why whites extend their grace to foreigners, brown
people, and are easily duped by Jews.
All you can do is try to rise above your own families failings. White people have to think
it through intellectually, as it does not come naturally.
Jews are tribal, gee what a surprise after 1000's of years of people trying to wipe them
out . and so their charity is within the tribe, but there is no charity within the tribe
among Whites.
Yes, but what is being debated here is how Jews use their ethnocentrism and in-group
methods to practice usury against out-groups. Euro-whites are a perfect host for the
parasite. The parasitical methods EVOLVED over millenia to operate the usury mechanism, to
take rents and unearned income. This is why they have been kicked out of 109 countries,
because what they do is seen as immoral and against the common good. (Euro whites eventually
smarten up and it always takes a King to eject the Jews.)
For more on this, see the book Angela's Ashes. The Irish family could have stayed in New
York where they were being befriended by a Jewish family.
Let's not get cause and effect reversed. The potato famine in Ireland was devastating
because high-value crops were being exported to England to pay for wait for it . usury on
debts the Irish owed the English. The English in turn were operating the state sponsored
usury system of the Bank of England, which came into being in 1694. The BOE in turn was
JEWISH in construct, being maneuvered into place by Sephardic Jews from Amsterdam.
The Irish, being trusting souls, fell into the usury trap and could not keep up with the
exponential debts.
A general statement: White people can build high trust civilizations that benefit all of
their people, but are easily subverted when the wrong type of predators infiltrate. If your
family was extended, and had aunts and uncles and cousins, who lived in the general area for
centuries, then there would be a network to fall back on.
See slaughter of the cities by Jones:
And yes, the FIRE sector and impetus behind the destruction of your extended family was
JEWISH. The breakdown of neighborhoods and ethnics was on purpose.
The Jew is anti-logos, and whatever he touches he destroys. (There are exceptions of
course – but these people no longer possess a negative Jewish spirit.)
Sorry your family was destroyed. When whites become un-moored they don't know how to
act.
@J
Adleman Quite bizarre post. First,he makes a half ass defense of Jew
character.(Weinstein,Epstein don't represent jews! Well,they kind of do. Any jew who is
called to accounts for his crimes automatically does not represent jews!
You are a used condom. Do you represent the jews? Id day yes.)
Your diatribe sounds like an alt righter's view of jews. Are you real?
if you think it's wrong to buy or try to collect on defaulted debt, what is the
alternative set of laws and behavior you are recommending? If debts can simply be
repudiated at will, capitalism cannot function.
Capitalism includes money. You can't separate the risks in lending from other risks. Bad
investors should be punished and good investors rewarded. Resources should be well allocated.
Otherwise it's not capitalism.
These insane Boomers seem to think that there is a Jewish coup underway to remove Trump
because of all the things that Jews are saying in Jewish publications and every single person
involved being Jewish and stuff.
@Germanicus
About the Carnegie donated "Peace Palace" in The Hague, presently the seat of the In
ternational Court of Justice:
Germanicus claims:
They are a function of Empire in Hague, who protect empire criminals, and assume a non
existent legitimacy and jurisdiction as a private entity to take down empire opponents.
Such as this ruling for instance:
Guardian 3 Oct.2018:
International court of justice orders US to lift new Iran sanctions
Mike Pompeo indicates US will ignore ruling, after judges in The Hague find unanimously in
favour of Iran
@silviosilver
"What Joyce regards as a defect of "vulture" funds, others might regard as an benefit. "
-- Of course. I hope you did not miss the fact that the Jewish vulture funds -- ruthless,
unethical, and leaching on goyim -- contribute to the Jewish Holocaust Museum.
Is not it touching that the same bloody destroyers of nations demand from the same nations a
very special reverence -- out of ethical considerations, of course -- towards the Jewish
victims of WWII? But only Jewish victims. All others were not victims but casualties. See
Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine. See the unlimited hatred of ziocons towards Russia.
@Anonymous" but maybe a few leftist thinkers would receive a much needed electric shock if they were
to see the JQ framed in marxist terms " – I would not count on the effect of the
electric shock on the leftist thinkers. The role of Jewish Bolsheviks in the Cheka, NKVD,
GULAGs, genocides by famine has been known from the very beginning and yet it left no impact
on the leftist thinkers.
"According to Harvard University scholar Graham Allison, who is also a former US
assistant Secretary of Defense, ordinary Russians have experienced, on average, a 75 percent
plunge in living standards since 1991 -- almost twice the decline in Americans' income during
the Great Depression of the 1930s. But in the midst of this widespread economic misery, a
small minority has grown fabulously wealthy since the end of the Soviet era."
"Although Jews make up no more than three or four percent of Russia's population, they
wield enormous economic and political power in that vast and troubled country. "At least half
of the powerful 'oligarchs' who control a significant percentage of the economy are Jewish,"
the Los Angeles Times has cautiously noted. (See also: D. Michaels, "Capitalism in the New
Russia," May-June 1997 Journal, pp. 21-27.)"
It's interesting how the appeal of Eduard Topol to Jews in Russia is now starting to echo
Jewish calls in the United States for Jews to stop the path they are currently on.
Here is the complete text of Topol's extraordinary "Open Letter to Berezovksy,
Gusinsky, Smolensky, Khodorkovsky and other Oligarchs," translated for the Journal by Daniel
Michaels from the text published in the respected Moscow paper Argumenty i Fakty ("Arguments
and Facts"), No. 38, September 1998:
Magnitsky and Bill Browder is also really interesting.
It turns out that a large measure of the Russiagate story arose because Russian lawyer
Natalia Veselnitskaya, who traveled to America to challenge Browder's account, arranged a
meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump campaign advisers in June 2016 to present this
other side of the story.
Then we had Democrats actually literally word for word doing what they accuse Trump of
doing in Ukraine.
"It got almost no attention, but in May [2018], CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez
(D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine's
prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations
they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support
for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as "strong advocates for a
robust and close relationship with Ukraine," the Democratic senators declared, "We have
supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to
have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump," before
demanding Lutsenko "reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this
important investigation."
What's the first rule of Communist and Satanist Saul Alinsky? Always accuse your opponents
of what you are doing.
Imagine having a Grandfather as the literal Chairman of the American Communist Party, and
all the amazing lessons you would learn about political maneuvering and ideology.
And it's amazing.
Browder's story is that Russian officials stole his companies seals and then fraudulently
formulated a tax avoidance scheme with a complete paper trail that they fabricated against
him in totem. Precisely matching the amount of money he was trying to remove from their
country, like those other Jewish Oligarchs who imposed conditions that were multiples worse
then even the American depression.
When under oath it turns out that Magnitsky wasn't even a lawyer at all, and didn't go to
law school. Why did the media owned by Mormons of course keep saying that Magnitsky was
Browder's lawyer?
Why did the Russians fraudulently fabricate a paper-trail for another Jewish Oligarch to
steal money out of Russia? Just like they colluded with Trump when a Russian lawyer sought to
explain what happened. Because that totally happened.
Maybe the problem isn't Capitalism. Maybe, when even the ur-Shabbos goys at National
Review are shaking their head and washing their hands like Pilate, maybe it's a different
problem.
Yet Trump holds these people ever close to his beating heart.
And then there are all these connections to Jeffrey Epstein that are like an explosion
linking all these people.
Poor old Russia. Even Putin isn't worse then what came before.
The link above is a review of the book Giants: The Global Power Elite. The review
provides a summary of the book which once again could be a text about Jews if one were to
replace the term "transnational capitalist class" with "Jews". Why I mention it, though, is
the following: "Chapter 2, "The Global Financial Giants: The Central Core of Global
Capitalism," identifies the 17 global financial giants -- money management firms that
control more than one trillion dollars in capital.
From the review .
"Robinson's claim that nation-states have become, "little more than population containment
zones," while "the real power lies with the decision makers who control global capital" (p.
26). Both propositions are unconvincing: first, populations are clearly not being
contained; second, if states matter so little, and the real decision-makers are global
capitalists, then why do the latter need states
That is such stupid reasoning it blows the mind. He is trying to shift the global problem
to institutions .. instead of the people who head those institutions
Institutions, agencies , financial firms, etc .are ALL run by PEOPLE .who make the
policies,laws, take the actions.
Why does the 'transnational capitalist class' need states? well duh because
people/labor/consumers are indeed "contained' in states subject to the states laws and
system. The transnational capitalist class created the institutions he speaks of 'from
within' those states thru their control of its system and their same goal partners who do the
same from within their respective states.
That the capitalist class is not tied to any territory has been observable since 1960.
I don't have time now to look up how many of 199 directors are Jews . but I know enough of
the economic history of various countries to know that Jews were the first business and
finance globe trotters,,,,.from Spain to Amsterdam, France to Africa , etc.etc. Jew were
first hired as reps and facilitators by the gentile business owners especially because of
their breather tribal contacts in many countries ..that was their stepping stone to becoming
transnational capitalist themselves.
Understanding our global capitalist ruling elite and who they are is not rocket
science
Buy your loans from another lender,
change the terms (add fees, penalties, underhanded stuff),
reposses your collatteral.
Outta be illegal.
White Gentiles, you must infiltrate and take over big business and big finance to help
protect your people from predation .and to give all peoples principled, fair financial
services. To help our society, and even others. Paul Singer doesnt seem to care about most of
his fellow men. We could do better, and help the world be a better place.
Yet more evidence is piling up that Donald J Trump is the Great Betrayer.
A man who had the biggest mandate in post war history to clean up the Swamp that is D.C.,
reform Immigration to save America and reform the economy for American workers.
He has squandered all of it while pandering to Jews.
When the Donald is revealed as the Great Betrayer where will Jews run? Yes, they have
several back up plans. Patagonia, Ukraine and Israel.
Imagine that. They have their own country and 2 back up plans. It is really tough being a
hated, oppressed minority.
@Anonymous
Thanks for your comment. You've come to the right place. Unz is an ideal hangout for
left/right fusionists who don't fit in perfectly with either side, but are interested in
hearing from both. In addition, if you're looking for other good right-wing sites that aren't
libertarian, Zionist or overly Christian, I can also heartily recommend Dr. Kevin MacDonald's
Occidental Observer ,
where Dr. Joyce himself usually posts.
What this could accomplish is a marriage of the major two theories of the "anti-semites"
(for lack of a better word) and the "Neo-Marxists". I would argue that perhaps both sides
would learn they are coming at the same thing from two different angles. Most would ignore
it, but maybe a few leftist thinkers would receive a much needed electric shock if they
were to see the JQ framed in marxist terms.
Or, more correctly, it would be a re -marriage of anti-Semitism and Marxism. If you
have a background in Marxism yourself, maybe you recall reading or hearing about Karl Marx's
pre-Kapital classic, On the Jewish Question , where he basically identifies
finance-capitalism as a Jewish phenomenon in essence and origin. Money quote
:
"Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew but the everyday
Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the
secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical
need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his
worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may
exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities . The
bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange .
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of
money in general.[ ] The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because
he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him,
money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical
spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the
Christians have become Jews. [ ] In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the
emancipation of mankind from Judaism."
Marx himself, of course, came from a family of rich conversos, so he knew whereof he
spoke.
Perhaps some alliances could be forged across the cultural divide in this struggle.
Personally I believe that both angles are perfectly valid, and that understanding one
without the other will leaves far too much to be desired when studying the powerful.
As a third-way national socialist, I hope so, too. Libertarianism/capitalism and mainline
socialism are dead-ends, having both been thoroughly co-opted (founded?) by the Jews. Both
fail to address the pink elephant in the corner; both put some hopelessly abstract ideology
before the welfare of my people–while benefiting another. And so, as the original NS
used to say: 'Neither godless Bolshevism nor soulless capitalism!'
Reality: Contrary to popular mythology, not all serial killers are white. Serial killers
span all racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. The racial diversity of serial killers
generally mirrors that of the overall U.S. population. There are well documented cases of
African-American, Latino and Asian-American serial killers. African-Americans comprise the
largest racial minority group among serial killers, representing approximately 20 percent of
the total. Significantly, however, only white, and normally male, serial killers such as
Ted Bundy become popular culture icons.
@Lot
Your defense of bond holders do not hold water. They agreed to take the risk at the given
price. If the debtor can't pay back, they have the eat the losses, period. Usury law needs to
be put in place to outlaw these vulture funds. Then the bond funds will adjust by demanding
better terms that truly reflects the risk from the get go, and the debtors will adjust by
being much more cautious in their borrowing since the borrowing cost is so high.
Instead, this current arrangement basically uses bond funds to put up a false front,
telling a debtor they can borrow at 2% when the real rate should be at 20% given the known
risks, then the debtor goes crazy borrowing because it's so cheap to borrow, and when they
can't pay back, the bond gets sold to the vultures who come collecting at 20% or they seize
assets. This is no different than the subprime mortgage crap, except now that is regulated so
they go after sovereign debt and corporate debt instead. These vultures need to go die
period.
Trump is now essentially funded by three Jews -- Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Sheldon
Adelson, together accounting for over $250 million in pro-Trump political money. In return,
they want war with Iran.
Hmm -- The day after Trump in inaugurated for his second term -- will Iran be in his
crosshairs?
@Jimmy1969
This is a great, concise overview of Canadian media influence by the "silent" Jewish
overlords via Golden Tree.
I tried copy/paste of your comment on CBC, but it did NOT last 2minutes before being
suspended!!
I am sorry to have used your comment without your permission, but I am going to "misspell"
some words to defeat the algorithm to get your message across.
@Lot
For points 1 and 2, I think that you would learn a lot from reading his previous article (
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/08/01/paul-singer-and-universality-of-anti-semitism/
) on vulture capitalism. It is not just that they are recovering assets from defaults. These
vulture groups will use the courts to increase the size of the debts and sue for extra "fees"
on top, even when all other lenders are against it. They typically manage to get US courts in
NYC to try these cases, which also is apparently abnormal (apparently it would be more normal
to use international courts). This is what Joyce refers to here:
"This type of predation is so pernicious and morally perverse that both the Belgian and UK
governments have taken steps to ban these Jewish firms from using their court systems to sue
for distressed debt owed by poor nations. "
These funds do not do something that normal investors do, especially not to the bonds of
governments of struggling third-world countries.
As for 3, you are misunderstanding. Joyce never demanded that they name their charities
anything in particular, but it is obviously the case that your typical normie thinks that
"white males," presumably golf-playing Episcopalians or something, are the ones running
finance, and these golfy-sounding names (Elliot, Monarch, GoldTree, OakTree, Canyon, Tilden
Park) fit the perception. We whites receive the society's hate for the wealth disparities
created by high finance.
4. No, it is not difficult to do finance differently. Every other investor has higher
patience for poor countries in Central America and Africa, and they all look at Elliot with
confused scorn.
And, things would probably run fine without hyper-aggressive multi-billionaires in pushing
the courts to f- over those who default on debts they owe to the maximum degree. Japan and
Norway do quite fine with businesses that are run by gentle and humble goys who feel ashamed
at the thought of getting "too rich."
@J
Adleman You will be thrown out.
You will have to choose between Israel, Ukraine and Patagonia. No one else will take you.
You have destroyed our politics, media and economy.
You are not respected.
You buy compliance with money.
You have bankrupted the U.S. dollar with debt pursuing Israel's enemies.
Do any of you goys remember when the Jewish funded Democrats through the US State
department gave Russia one third of the US strategic uranium reserve and also funnelled
military tech to Russia's Skolkovo Valley? At a time when they were working on the Hypersonic
ballistic missile engine?
It's almost like there was this plan for people to move back into Russia, just like China,
but for some reason the Russians and Chinese didn't cooperate.
Remember when David Spengler wrote about this a few years back hence?
Do you think disloyal Jews had anything to do with 18 American CIA assets getting captured
and murdered by the Chinese Intelligence services through 2010 to 2012?
Could it be that there were loyal Americans who were interfering with Chinese pay for play
with the Jewish nation in the United States? Or might have come upon it?
Imagine being an American military service member knowing that your Jewish commanders and
Jewish senior officers have got your back.
It's amazing isn't it.
Clinton was receiving tens of millions of dollars from Skolkovo Valley Syndicate owners in
Russia, and in exchange all she gave them were military secrets that may have given Russia
for example it's lead in hypersonic military technology.
And then we're told China had a duplicate version of her emails in China, in exchange for
what?
US Taxpayer money funded the Russian weapons program.
How much China tech was also funded by US taxpayers?
And then these people accused Trump of collusion with Russia, because the Russians were
telling the Trump family that the Magnitsky Act was unjust because the Russians were trying
to secure their assets against the kind of predatory practices that lowered Russian mortality
to where it's headed in the Midwest. Right now. For the same reasons.
Yeah – this trend is absolutely going to be permitted to continue.
The American nation forewarned and forearmed is simply going to allow itself to go the way
of the Russian Slav under a century of Jewish and proto-Jewish (the man who was made to call
himself Stalin) leadership.
Maybe, just maybe, an American President might consider a Magnitsky Act the subjects of
which were different. Maybe Trump is the last civic-nationalist President, maybe.
Look at how loyal the ruling nation in the United States is to their fellow Americans.
There aren't enough hours in the day to trace the labyrinthine set of Jewish betrayals and
asset transferrals – remember the Panama Papers? Remember the Samson Option?
Why won't Browder let the Russians investigate Cyprus?
Maybe good old fashioned local corruption with noblesse oblige is preferable to this
international corruption.
The Jews got out-leveraged by the Russians, and now, finally, the Empire might be able to
take back Korriban from the Jewdi.
Of course that's impossible. You have to trade one for the other. Just one set for the
other set.
If you want to find a list of these capitalists – you just look at who attends the
World Jewish Congress Galas.
" Ira Rennert (net worth $3 billion, previously, $6 billion, investor, known as a "junk
bond billionaire," found guilty of corruption in 2015, placed a mill in Baltimore's outer
harbor into bankruptcy, causing more than 2,000 workers to lose their jobs, owes Baltimore $8
million in unpaid city water bills, allegedly used money he looted from his business to build
a 29-room mansion & compound – a garage holds 100 cars)
Dick Parsons (former Time Warner CEO, CBS chair, & Citibank chair; in 2012 shareholders
filed a lawsuit against Parsons and some other executives for "stuffing their pockets while
running the bank into the ground")
Ben Ashkenazy (net worth $4 billion, Israeli American real estate tycoon, a benefactor of the
2015 AIPAC Real Estate Luncheon at New York's Grand Hyatt Hotel)
Jack Chehebar (real estate mogul, sued for alleged breach of contract, accused of beating his
son)
Ray Kelly (longest serving commissioner in the history of the New York City Police
Department, for a period was an Interpol vice president, charged by Muslim groups of
discrimination: "The commissioner oversaw a spying program that targeted Muslims based solely
on their religion, showed poor judgment by participating in a virulently anti-Islamic film,
and approved a report on terrorism that equated innocuous behavior such as quitting smoking
with signs of radicalization."
What did God say once?
In Genesis 18:32 He said he would spare Sodom and Gamorrah if Abraham could find just 10
honourable men. He couldn't find them. Only the family of Lot.
There isn't much time left. It might simply be the case that the rot goes too deep and too
dark.
Valhalla is a worthy place. I think there might be some Russians there, along with the
souls of those 18 Americans who were tortured and murdered in China for reasons unknown.
Capitalism includes money. You can't separate the risks in lending from other risks. Bad
investors should be punished and good investors rewarded. Resources should be well
allocated. Otherwise it's not capitalism.
There are different kinds of capitalism. It is part of today's hypnotism that people don't
know the different types.
For example, there is finance capitalism, industrial capitalism, and what Andrew Joyce
calls vulture capitalism.
Vulture capitalism is a subset of finance capitalism.
Industrial capitalism was invented in the American colonies, especially Massachusetts bay.
The American system of economy (industrial capitalism with mixed economy and sovereign money)
has since been lost to America, as it imported Jewish/British finance capitalism as the
operating construct after 1913.
You can separate risks in lending. That is more hypnosis that you have been imbibing on.
The entire corpus of Classical economics goes about trying to separate unearned from earned
income, how to tax properly, what is site value, and it also is able to separate risk
types.
The fact that you do not know these things is not surprising, as most of western man is
living inside of a Jewish inverted reality bubble. The agents of mammon won, and classical
economics is not even taught in university.
Homosexuality is present in our society, but doesn't register much in demographics and as
such, I am happy to call gays as homosexuals. Tackling animus towards homosexuals requires
NOT trying to enforce new nomenclature of gender etc., otherwise an unexpected nasty backlash
can occur. Within your "ingroup", you can say what you like, but do not try and force ingroup
dynamics on the majority that are not interested.
Otherwise, you are behaving by identity politics, just like the Jews force their identity
upon the majority.
@sally
" Time after time I have asked my Jewish friends are you are Zionist, and most say they do
not really know what Zionism is? "
Zionism is a name which is more well known as an identifier by the critical (among the
Goy), carrying by now negative connotations. Broadly it is not an ism which is well known to
the man in the street. It could well be that among Jews, the name Zionism is only handled by
certain groups.
The question should have been rephrased asking what position these Jewish friends take with
regard to Israel. It comes down roughly to the same thing.
To not know of Zionism might be strategically a good thing, it refers to convergent
interests, actually a power block, you don't want to throw around such things, it could make
people aware Keep it diluted, diversity, obfuscation.
Ben Franklin and the American revolution was almost put in a similar pinch by the Amsterdam
banker Jean DeNeufville. In a letter to John Adams, 14 December 1781*, Franklin explained
that DeNeufville wanted as security for a loan "all the lands, cities, territories, and
possessions of the said Thirteen States, which they may have or possess at present, and which
they may have or possess in the future, with all their income, revenue, and produce, until
the entire payment of this loan and the interests due thereon."
Franklin considered that "extravagant" but Newhouse rejoined, "this was usual in all loans
and that the money could not otherwise be obtained". Franklin retold in this lengthy letter,
"Besides this, I was led to understand that it would be very agreeable to these gentlemen if,
in acknowledgment of their zeal for our cause and great services in procuring this loan, they
would be made by some law of Congress the general consignee of America, to receive and sell
upon commission, by themselves and correspondents in the different ports and nations, all the
produce of America that should be sent by our merchants to Europe."
Talk about shooting the moon
While Wikipedia says DeNeufville was Mennonite, Franklin concluded with this colorful --
and bitter -- remark , "By this time, I fancy, your Excellency is satisfied that I was wrong
in supposing John de Neufville as much a Jew as any in Jerusalem, since Jacob was not content
with any per cents, but took the whole of his brother Esau's birthright, and his posterity
did the same by the Canaanites, and cut their throats into the bargain; which, in my
conscience, I do not think Mr. John de Neufville has the least inclination to do by us while
he can get any thing by our being alive. I am, with the greatest esteem, etc., ✪ B.
Franklin."
Perhaps it was just an expression based on an earlier stereotype?
*Bigelow, 1904. The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 9 Letters and Misc. Writings
What our Jewish friends have done to Argentina, through maneuvering the elections, killing
dissidents, and marking territory, is a cautionary tale to anybody woke enough to see with
their own eyes.
Zion had the opportunity to go to Uganda and Ugandans were willing, but NO Zion had to
have Palestine, and they got it through war, deception, and murder. It was funded by usury,
as stolen purchasing power from the Goyim.
The fake country of Israel, is not the biblical Israel, and it came into being by
maneuverings of satanic men determined to get their way no matter what, and is supported by
continuous deception. Even today's Hebrew is resurrected from a dead language, and is fake.
Many fake Jews (who have no blood lineage to Abraham), a fake country, and fake language.
These fakers, usurers, and thieves do indeed have their eyes set on Patagonia, what they call
the practical country.
Unz is an ideal hangout for left/right fusionists who don't fit in perfectly with either
side, but are interested in hearing from both
You just described me to a tee. I defy categorization, especially ideological ones
(although I half jokingly refer to myself as a free-thinkist), and I feel this makes me
weird.
I've been to TOO. However I can't bring myself to start commenting on a white nationalist
website. I will admit I am unable to articulate this discomfort presently.
As to your point about Marx – I actually forgot about his work on the JQ. The Saker,
who is a columnist on this site, referenced Marx's essay on the JQ some time ago. I must have
not read the whole thing or I'd have remembered it. I didn't know that Marxism originated
with anti-Semitism, but that is fascinating. I have encountered some Marxists in my time and
they focus exclusively (predictably) on the cis-white-male patriarchy, or whatever occupies
their brainwashed minds after an Introduction to Gender Studies class.
@Anon
"If debts can simply be repudiated at will, capitalism cannot function."
Is this children's capitalist theory class time? throwing around some simple slogans for a
susceptible congregation of future believers?
Should be quite obvious that people, groups of people, if not whole nations , can be
forced and or seduced into depths by means of certain practices. There are a thousand ways of
such trickery and thievery, these are not in the theory books though. In these books things
all match and work out wonderfully rationally
Then capitalism cannot function? Unfortunately it has become already dysfunctional, if not
a big rotten cancer.
Isaiah 1:4 4 Alas, sinful nation, A people laden with iniquity, A brood of evildoers,
Children who are corrupters! They have forsaken the LORD, They have provoked to anger The
Holy One of Israel, They have turned away backward.
Ezekiel 21:25 25 'Now to you, O profane, wicked prince of Israel, whose day has come, whose
iniquity shall end
Jeremiah 5:9 Shall I not punish them for these things?" says the LORD. "And shall I not
avenge Myself on such a nation as this?
As Jesus said which of the prophets have you not killed or persecuted? The truth hurts. As
for me I do not hate Jews ..I feel terribly sad for a people that are capable of greatness
and squandered the gifts given to them by God. Are you a holy nation? Don't make me laugh.
Repent. Your time is coming. No more running and hiding. Deception will no longer save you
only acceptance of the Messiah.
Hey! Don't mention anything a Jew ever did, especially usury, or else the entire cult will go
up in a holocaustal mushroom cloud of emo nasal whining. In Judaism you've got a fanatical
sect that systematically selects and brainwashes its members to inculcate extreme values of
two Big Five personality axes: high neuroticism and low intellect (where intellect means
open-mindedness.) Note the existential crisis triggered by a straightforward lecture from The
Society for the Study of Unbelievably Obvious Shit.
Of course Israel is holocausting the Palestinians. This is what happens when the founding
myth of a nation is, We wiped em all out and then they wiped us almost all out so now we
gotta wipe em all out etc., etc., etc.
Well, the only difference between a narcissist and a psychopath is that the former need
people to like them whereas psychopaths genuinely could not care less (although they learn
early that acting as if they do can be very helpful , as can always trying to elicit sympathy
etc).
As I noticed while reading a few books on psychopathy (I was inspired to after reading Steve
Job's biography) – their whole 'culture' is structured as a (collective )
PSYCHOPATH.
It seems that (collectively) they cannot care about others even if they wanted to. Due to
their sickness
I am not saying they are all that way – but overall their 'culture' seems to be that
way
@Digital
Samizdat Indeed I cannot agree more. I quote from a 1923 interview of Hitler:
"Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party
programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"
"Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of
dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The
Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from
the Socialists.
"Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain
lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to
disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private
property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is
patriotic.
@Colin
Wright The Sacklers occupy a hoity-toity rung in the philanthropy universe, as they have
given enough $$$ to Harvard for H to paste their name on its museum housing I believe its
whole Asian art collection. Students have now protested Harvard's high-profile gift of
probity and cultural status to the Sacklers via, literally, an "Aushangerschild" on a major
university museum. Harvard protests back: Jeez, if we don't take the Sacklers' dough we might
be obliged to stop taking the dough from Exxon, etc.
@Anon
you are right about repaying the loan
but Banksters have managed over decades I think starting with Clinton to remove protection
laws (which were stating how much interest was the maximum a bankster could charge his pray
etc). They also removed the rules of how much was the maximum they could lend (according to
how much their victim makes a year etc).
So even though you are right that loans should be repaid – it is immoral to allow a
well connected mafia to change all the laws and remove protections while pushing up prices of
everything because it suits the lender (who has a licence to print).
They basically lend money that does not exist and get interest for that. So the more sheeple
are tricked into borrowing the better for them, but the worse for everyone else
They should not be allowed to bribe politicians to remove all the protection that was there
since 1920s I think.
It's a marriage from hell: easy to bribe Anglosheep meets the masters of predatory bribing
who own the printing press
That stupid cuck Trump just got impeached by the House. Thats a good lesson to everybody
how much good Jew-ass kissing does for you .you get stabbed in the back anyway lol
Couldn't have happened to a more deserving and treacherous scumbag!
But he should have been impeached for his treachery to the constitution and to the
American people for his slavish devotion to all things Jewish!
@Digital
Samizdat True, but irrelevant. The Jews that matter don't read the Talmud or believe in
"Adam and Eve."
It's 2020. The Jewish religion is "The Holocaust" and we're all "Nazis."
Frankly, it's these traditional religious notions of "anti-semitism" that get in the way
of understanding what is, at the core, an ethnic issue. It's Sheldon Adelson, the Zionist
entity in Palestine, and the ADL that are the problem, not some looney-tunes rabbi living in
Brooklyn.
The other side of the expalnation is the laking of reaction of the victim,the american
people.
The least that the people that loot the world trough and with the USA power should do, is ,at
least ,let us,the american people, a free ride.
Not illegal in the Talmud either but most certainly illegal in all of the countries that
DynCorp was caught profiting from this type of business. For some reason they never seem to
suffer for their exposure suggesting that they may be wielding the same influence that
Epstein had over our elected officials.
We dont have to get back to the Singer of this world but to our own politicians ,that allowed
them to do this to us,and to the world.In this kind of abusive realtionship the 2 sides are
to blame.
@Just
passing through "Look up income by ethnic group in the UK and US, you will find that
Indians and Chinese (South Asians) are the richest in both countries (except for Jews of
course)."
And why is that? Think about it. These are members of the Indian and Chinese elite who the
multinational corporations are doing business with.
In order to do business in China, the Chinese stipulated that the western corporations had
to give one of the members of the Chinese elite half ownership in the company. They were also
required to turn over the western technology to the China-based company. Western technology,
western money, cheap Chinese slave labor, ability to pollute to your heart's content. For
both sides, it was a win-win. The Chinese elite got filthy rich and then moved over to the
West with their newfound gains, buying up properties, forcing prices up for the natives. The
western corporations not only wanted cheap products to export back to the U.S., but they were
also developing a whole new market – Chinese consumers who would buy their products as
well. Double plus good!
And once in the West, the Chinese and the Indians stick to their groups. They hire their
own, promote their own, do business together. A lot of corruption, money laundering,
cheating, taking advantage of and bending laws. Rule of law? Code of ethics? Morals? Do unto
others? They never learned it. Opportunistic dual citizens.
I would not count on the effect of the electric shock on the leftist thinkers. The role
of Jewish Bolsheviks in the Cheka, NKVD, GULAGs, genocides by famine has been known from
the very beginning and yet it left no impact on the leftist thinkers.
It unfortunately has not had much of an effect on a lot of people in the West, who remain
ignorant or in denial of the role played by Jewish Bolsheviks in historic mass murders and
totalitarian repression.
Waiting for the Hollywood movie to tell the story.
This is an expensive, weighty, and important book, which will take some time to
digest.
Classical economists re-learn the science of money, starting with Prodhoun and even Marx
in Das Kapital volume 3. (Leftists are often correct about money, but wrong on social
issues.)
The jew Marx does do some deception in volume 3 with a sneaky equation that does not
compound interest, but otherwise he is pretty accurate. Marx was probably beholden to his
finance masters.
This is why you need to start with Zarlinga, as there is no BS to lead you astray. Hudson
tends to drill the bulls-eye too. There is so much deception in the field of money and
economy, that it is easy to get caught up in false narratives, like one-born free
libertarianism. Usury flows fund the deception, even to the point of leaving out critical
passages in translations, such as in Aristotle's works. Or, important works are bought up and
burned.
Michael Hudson is the leading economist resurrecting Classical Economics. Reading all of
Hudson and Zarlinga will take some time and effort, but it is good to take a first step.
@Anon
I respectfully disagree that "Kenya was given up [by Great Britain] before there was even an
anti-colonial movement in Kenya ."
According to Wikipedia : " The armed rebellion of the Mau Mau was the culminating response to
Colonial rule . Although there had been previous instances of violent resistance to
colonialism , the Mau Mau revolt was the most prolonged and violent anti-colonial warfare in
the British Colonial colony. From the start the land was the primary British interest in
Kenya ."
Just as the Kenyans suffered the consequences of British colonialism , the "Palestinians will
suffer
the consequences of Zionist colonialism until Israel's original sin is boldly confronted and
justly remedied " foreignpolicyjournal.com
@anon
A particular distinction of Jewish investors versus gentile investors – on average, of
course – is their use of bribery to get the force of government behind them. Rather
than taking a bet about some group being able to pay back some bonds and letting the chips
fall where they may, Jews start bribing or influencing politicians to force that group to pay
back the bonds.
Buy some bonds, charge outrageous fees, bribe officials in some form or other, get govt to
force the payment of bonds and outrageous fees. Rinse and repeat. Jews have been doing this
in some form aor another for 1500 years. It's why the peasants get a tad angry at both the
Jews and their bribed politicians/nobility.
@lavoisier
"But he should have been impeached for his treachery to the constitution and to the American
people for his slavish devotion to all things Jewish!"
A purely political impeachment, right down party lines. I hear Schiff has got his hands
full of Ukrainian-Jewish oligarchic money. Dear me, wait until that comes out.
Trump is in league with the Jews? Yeah, who isn't? Obama's lips are still sore from
kissing Jewish Wall Street bankers' asses (notice that none of them went to jail). Same with
the Clinton's.
You can get politicians to pass all sorts of laws in your favor if you've got enough dirt
on them. After all, your side owns the media, Hollywood, academia, the courts, the banks.
If dirt doesn't work, you can always threaten to impeach them in order to get what you
want.
But Trump is also revealing every last dirty one of them (accidentally or on purpose).
People see them now.
@J
Adelman J Adelman comes out swinging. He's such a tough guy. But does he make sense? Does
he care if he makes sense? The writer is talking about those Jews who are vulture
capitalists. He's not talking about every Jew. Isn't it a little odd that nearly all of these
funds are run by Jews? Can your corrupt mind accept that fact and address the question? Or
are you going to bore us with your religion and by that I mean your obsession with
anti-semitism, which is your religion.
@PCA
Stop splitting hairs. Is this the best you can do? Are you one of Lot's cronies? I don't
normally address petty matters of this kind but Joyce is describing a multitude of sins and
misconduct orchestrated by various Jewish financiers around the globe. It is not merely one
phenomenon; thus, 'phenomena' fits. Go troll someone else.
Lobelog ran some articles in Singer, Argentina, Iran Israel and the attorney from Argentina
who died mysteriously . Singer is a loan shark. Argentinian paid dearly .
Google search –
NYT's Argentina Op-Ed Fails to Disclose Authors – LobeLog
https://lobelog.com/tag/paul-singer/
Paul Singer NYT's Argentina Op-Ed Fails to Disclose Authors' Financial Conflict of Interest
by Eli Clifton On Tuesday, Mark Dubowitz and Toby Dershowitz, two executives at the hawkish
Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), took
The Right-Wing Americans Who Made a Doc About Argentina
https://lobelog.com/the-right-wing-americans-who-made-a-doc-about-argentina/
Oct 7, 2015 One might wonder why a movie about Argentina, in Spanish and . of Nisman's and
thought highly of the prosecutor's work, told LobeLog, FDD, for its part, has been an
outspoken critic of Kirchner but has From 2008 to 2011, Paul Singer was the group's
second-largest donor, contributing $3.6 million.
NYT Failed to Note Op-Ed Authors' Funder Has $2 Billion
@mark
green Mark green the queen of self rightousness.
There are many non jews runny vulture funds worldwide with at least 100 in china
alone.
The list joyce provided is selective and politically motivated.There are many more non
jews who are guilty of financial crimes.The jails are full of them.
The vulture funds are a product of a system that punishes failure.Do not blame the
funds,blame the system.
This story and like many that appear here is designed to pressure israel to change
politically.Israels future lies in the hands of God not some mutt with a serious case of
mutters.
@Lot
venture capital funds are only made necessary because we have a federal reserve.. which is a
private bank and private banks want to earn interest.
consider the difference between when a private lender makes loans to the USA
(treasury)
on the books of the feds is the following
due from the USA $11,000
new cash printed and given to dumb clucks at the USA $10,000
profit on the loan $ 1,000
what happened here is the fed printed $10,000 in new bills.
Assume the loan made at 10% interest and it is due in 1 year.
Ok so what is the loan on the USA books
cash $10,000
amount payable to the Federal Reserve $11,000
loss on the deal $ 1,000
this loan becomes the loan on the local bank books
the government gives the bank its loan and its obligation to repay the principal plus
interest
If there were no interest (that is the government printed its own money and made
venture loans to entrepreneurs at 0% interest the entries would look like this )
Amount due in one year from venture borrower $10,000
new cash printed and loaned to venture $10,000
so if the venture guy spent the $10,000 and then went broke the treasury would still gets
its money back in taxes from those who earned profit the money the venture paid.. no one has
to beat somebody to pay the interest (the economy does not have the extra $1000 dollars in
interest so somebody has to lose)
When interest must be paid its like musical chairs.. each time the music stops there are
not enough chairs to go around, someone is left standing ( its like that in money lending,
the debtors dance until the music stops, but because the private bank only put the principal
amount $10,000 in circulation the guy needs $11,000 to pay the loan back where does he get
the extra $1,000? <=If ten $10,000 loans are made, and 1 guy goes broke, there will be
enough cash in the system for the 9 others to pay the interest they each owe and enough for
the local private bank and lawyers to get paid for handling the bankruptcy. . <= we
started with 10 loans, one loan went broke the 9 remaining borrowers each pay $11,000 to
retire the debt , there are 9 loans "$99,000 to repay them and $1000 to pay debt service
costs and legal fees.
if there were no interest on the loans, the bankruptcy would not matter.
What makes the venture capitalist have a business at all is the Federal reserve is a
private profit making bank. Lending printed money from the Federal reserve requires interest
to be paid, and that requirement of interest makes the economy horde its capital and the
economic players playing king of the mountain to get the extra money they need to pay the
interest . ..
Zionism brought private banking to the USA and the USA wrote a tax law to collect the
money from the Americans it governs to pay the interest on the debt.
this is a really simplistic description of what is happening to our economy so don't rely
on it but instead use its simplistic idea to model the impact of having interest on the
national debt is having each year. If our government reversed what it privatized to the
Federal Reserve, we could make the economy run more or less as we please. \we could eliminate
the national debt and with it income tax es.
Typical Jew baiting article. Mitt Romney isn't a "Jew" Ashish Masih isn't. Many more examples
of gentiles taking advantage of their brothers. May as well consider the Walton family of
Wal-Mart to be vultures as well since they benefit the most from this system, they're so
called Christians, not Jews. The problem is capitalism. Author seems to suggest that a moral
economic system has been corrupted. The system was designed in an era of widespread slavery
folks. Its an immoral system that requires theft, slavery, war, immigration, all the things
you hate, to survive. The system is working exactly as it is designed to work. Exploit
workers, the environment and resources, shift all the profits from workers to the owners of
capital, period. Welcome to the late stage, it eats and destroys itself
From the days of the colonists slaughtering the Injuns and stealing their land. The days
of importing African slaves, and indentured servants. The days of child labor and factory
owners hiring Pinkertons to gun down workers who protested shitty wages and working
conditions. The good ol days of the gilded age. Now the age of offshoring to China or some
other lower wage nation. Overthrowing leaders not willing to let their resources and people
be plundered and enslaved, driving refugees to our borders fleeing violence and poverty.
Importing H1B workers to drive down wages. It was always a corrupt system of
exploitation/theft/slavery. This is nothing new and doesn't require "Jews" to be immoral.
And all these so called "Christians" like Pastor Pence approve. Usury and capitalism run
amok. I'm sure Jesus is smiling down on all these Bible toting demons who allow their fellow
man to be exploited by the parasites. Sad!
Good for Tucker. He has his moments I'd watch his show if he wasn't a partisan hack. But
that will never happen working for Fox or any other corporate media.
@Colin
Wright I doubt Trump promised to go to war with Iran before he was elected. In his
Inauguration Speech, Trump said he wanted to bring the troops home and stop the wars. He
didn't have to say these things, he had already won the election, but he said them anyway.
One of the few times the media has laid off Trump was when he sent some missiles into
Syria (after he gave them hours of warning ahead of time that the missiles were coming). If
Hillary had been elected, Syria would have been leveled by now and flying an Israeli
flag.
Obama brought us the destruction of Libya and the murder of Gaddafi, the coup in Ukraine,
and through ISIS, which the U.S. armed, trained and paid for, tried to destroy Syria.
I don't really blame Obama or Bush Jr. or Clinton. They were all puppets who did as they
were told. If they hadn't, in the words of Chuckie Schemer, there would have been "six ways
from Sunday of getting back at them".
If you don't do what they want, you're impeached, some of your dirty laundry is aired, or
they purposely crash the stock market on you. If you still don't get the message, maybe
you're just assassinated.
Trump loves his daughter and she is married to a Jew. If they're not getting their way, I
could see them telling Trump: "Sad what happened at the Pittsburgh synagogue, isn't it? Sure
hope nothing like that happens to your daughter."
I don't envy Trump. He not only is up against the Democrats, but he is also fighting the
globalist neocons in his own party. Both parties want open borders and more war, something
Trump does not believe in. As far as I can see, he's throwing them bones in order to shut
them up. If he gets elected again, which I think he will, we might see a different Trump. Who
knows.
@Jimmy1969
I think this deal has already taken place. Israel has given away to China for 99 years the
hall commercial incomming This deal has taken place 2 or 3 years ago
Don't blame it on the Talmud. These Jews act in accordance to their Torah: "If Yahweh your
God blesses you as he has promised, you will be creditors to many nations but debtors to
none; you will rule over many nations, and be ruled by none" (Deuteronomy 15:6). "feeding on
the wealth of the nations" (Isaiah 61:5) is Israel's destiny according to Yahweh.
@mcohen
I took a squint at both your own and Mark Green's comment history. Your comment history
cannot even begin to compare in value, but I should have already guessed that from the
name-calling in the first line of your comment. Just weak, extremely weak.
Rather amusing to read our resident Jewish apologists carrying on about the absolute sanctity
of the necessity of collecting debts to the functioning of the capitalistic system. These
nations and corporate entities that are now in thrall of the Wall Street Jews , were herded
into debt by that other faction of the capitalist system, the dealers in easy money.
Snookering the rubes into lifelong debt, telling them that money is on the tap, promoting
unsustainable spending habits and then let the guillotine come down, for the vultures to feed
on. They are two sides of the same coin.
Its damned funny that the rich Jews nowadays are absolutely addicted to usury, rentier
activities, and debt collection, when the Bible itself condemns such activities. But they are
our elder brothers in faith according to some.
@Colin
Wright Carnegie was a Protestant. The Protestant cancer serves it's Jewish masters. Read
'The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit' by E. Michael Jones. There is definitely a revolutionary
nature to the international Jew just as there is to their Protestant dupes. Jewish nature is
to subvert the natural order and the west was built by the guidance of LOGOS. The Catholic
Faith created by God guided the creation of the west. These Jewish exploits are a result of
the Wests rejection of its nature and its enslavement
1. rich or poor, creditor or debtor, in the final analysis, ultimately, all will become equal
in the grave. the filthy rich might decide to lay their corpses in coffins made of gold, but
it will be in vain. the sorrows and the joys of this fleeting world shall quickly pass like
the shadow.
2. talmudics feel the need to accumulate money in order to have sense of security since they
were stateless for two millennia. paradoxically, amount of wealth is indirectly proportional
to a sense of security, provoking backlash from aggrieved host people.
3. establishment of State of Israel did not reduce the need for the accumulation but has only
heightened it since now talmudics feel the need to support it so that she could maintain
military superiority over neighbouring threats.
4. as long as Palestinians are not free and Israel does not make peace, talmudics will
continue to meddle in American politics. if you don't want to save the Palestinians for the
sake of humanity and truth or justice, at least you should do it for your own sake.
5. loan sharking, vulture whatever, etc., is the ugliness of big capitalism with capital C,
what is beyond sickening is the promotion of sodomy. if one becomes poor or homeless, it's a
pity. to go against nature is an abomination.
6. by using such words as "homosexual" you have accepted the paradigm of the social engineers
and corruptors, and are therefore collaborating with them. words have consequences since that
is how we convey ideas unless you own Hollywood and can produce your own moving pictures
too.
7. talmudics is a better word than as a great American scholar says, since people who promote
sodomy are absolutely opposed to the Torah (O.T.). those who still struggle to follow it
couldn't care less what happens to benighted goyim, only becoming reinforced in pride of
their own purity as opposed to disgraced nations. thus, practically, they too are talmudics,
alien to the spirit of the ancient holy fathers and prophets of Israel. the word "Orthodox"
has been stolen and now has lost all meaning or it means the exact opposite of what it
originally meant.
8. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Matthew 5:5
@Colin
Wright Well there's nothing wrong in principle about specialists in valuing distressed
debt and managing it nuying such debt and using the previously established mechanisms for
getting value out of their investment. So the problem is how they go about enforcing their
rights and the lack of regulation to mitigate hardship in hard cases.
Still it is notable that it should, overwhelmingly be a Jewish business and such a
powerful medium for enriching Jewish causes and communities at the expense of poor
Americans.
While Whites theoretically still have the numbers to affect/determine the outcome of
elections, a majority of Whites usually stay home because they are tired of the 'evil of two
lessers' choice they are offered -- even voting for Trump got them little/nothing.
@Colin
Wright George Bush needed Tony Blair's support to attack Iraq , Donald Trump now has the
support of Boris Johnson to attack Iran : "Boris Johnson refuses to rule out military
intervention on Iran ." metro.co.uk
It is said that the "deep state " removed Theresa May from office as she was "too soft" on
Iran . As you suggest the attack will not happen until Trump's second term unless, in the
meantime , there is a false flag attack like 9/11 which can be blamed on the Iranians .
East Asians have freedom of speech. That is all that is needed to end Jewish Mafia vulture
capitalism. If it was Italian Mafia vulture capitalism, the west would end it a few seconds.
When one is in a "no see, no say, no hear" tribal group one can get away with everything.
East Asians don't believe in hiding reality.
Here is more on how Samsung fought back against little Paulie.
Samsung published controversial sketches in response to row over merger
Jewish U.S. hedge fund boss Paul Singer was trying to stop a Samsung business deal
In response the firm released cartoons on its website depicting Singer as a vulture
A row has broken out in South Korea with media there describing Jews as 'ruthless' with
money
Merger between Samsung C&T and Cheil Industries was approved today
This is how Paulie's row with Samsung started.
These are the extraordinary cartoons Samsung posted on its website which reportedly
depict a Jewish hedge fund boss as a money-grabbing vulture.
The row between Samsung and one of its major shareholders, Paul Singer, has sparked an
anti-Semitism row in South Korea.
Harvard-educated Mr Singer, 70, whose hedge fund Elliott Management owns a seven per
cent stake in Samsung C&T fell out with the company after he objected to a merger
deal.
Cartoons shown what Paul's company did to the Congo, just one of many nations he
pillaged.
In response Samsung posted a number of inflammatory cartoons on its website showing Mr
Singer as a long-beaked vulture, which have since been taken down.
In one of the sketches a poor-looking man goes, cap in hand, to the vulture who has an
axe hidden behind his back.
The caption reads: 'Elliott Management's representative method of earning money is,
first of all, to buy the national debt of a struggling country cheaply, then insist on
taking control as an investor and start a legal suit'
In another people appear to be dying in the desert from dehydration. Underneath is the
caption: 'Because of it, Congo suffered even more hardship'.
This is believed to refer to Elliott Management's business dealings in the Congo.
Samsung wanted to keep their company in the Lee family. They did not want a Jewish Mafia
tribal group take over.
The bitter fall out came because Samsung Group's founding family wanted to complete a
merger with its holding company Cheil Industries and Samsung C&T to shore up its
control of the firm as its chairman, Lee Kun-hee's health is in decline.
In the End, Samsung won. Paul lost.
The Lee family, who control Samsung, owns 43 per cent of Cheil Industries. The
controversial merger was finally approved today.
South Koreans are not shy to express reality as it is. The west has to learn the value of
freedom of speech before it too late for the west.
But the row has sparked an outpouring of anti-Semitism in South Korea.
One columnist described Jewish money as 'ruthless and merciless'.
And on Tuesday the former South Korean ambassador to Morocco Park Jae-seon expressed his
concern about the influence of Jews in finance.
In an extraordianry outburst he said: 'The scary thing about Jews is they are grabbing
the currency markets and financial investment companies.
'Their network is tight-knit beyond one's imagination,' Park added.
The next day, cable news channel YTN aired similar comments by local journalist Park
Seong-ho.
'It is a fact that Jews use financial networks and have influence wherever they are
born,' he said.
Neither Park Jae-seon and Park Seong-ho were available for comment.
In a piece published a fortnight ago, Media Pen columnist Kim Ji-ho claimed 'Jewish
money has long been known to be ruthless and merciless'.
While Whites theoretically still have the numbers to affect/determine the outcome of
elections, a majority of Whites usually stay home because they are tired of the 'evil of
two lessers' choice they are offered -- even voting for Trump got them little/nothing.
I said nothing of an electoral solution to America's problems the problems will not be
solved that way.
@Art
That scary thought has crossed my mind, too, Art. I've even started wondering if this whole
impeachment circus is really part of an elaborate plot to guarantee Trump's re-election. I
mean, would Pelosi's insane actions make the slightest sense otherwise? And everyone has
noted how this is such a 'Jew coup,' haven't they? It all looks so suspicious
What our Jewish friends have done to Argentina, through maneuvering the elections,
killing dissidents, and marking territory, is a cautionary tale to anybody woke enough to
see with their own eyes.
True, but irrelevant. The Jews that matter don't read the Talmud or believe in "Adam and
Eve."
Whether they believe it or not, they act as though they do. That shows it is an ancient
and essential part of their ethnic subculture. Who knows? Maybe Kevin MacDonald is right and
it's actually genetic .
It's 2020. The Jewish religion is "The Holocaust" and we're all "Nazis."
The holo-hoax is just their modern version of 'chosenness'. Pretending to be the
biggest victims evah! is just another way of making themselves appear collectively as
morally superior to the rest of mankind–even the darkies:
But whether it's being wielded by the Zionists or the lefty Social Jewish Warriors, it's
really just a power play down deep. It's really just another way of reminding us
goyim–white and colored–that we are all just half-demons (so to speak) compared
to The Chosen.
@Wally
It is rather entertaining watching you kvetch, Jewish colonialism over WASP nations will be
glorious.
Vietnam & Congo can choose as they wish, it is they who vote for their leaders.
In fact, Congo was better off with colonialism.
America voted for Zion Don, he is now receving hundreds of millions of dollars from Jews
to do their bidding. It is hilarious that you can't see the irony of your comments.
In fact, it is even more funny what the Jews will do to WASP nations, enjoy your future of
transexualism and fast food, WASPs totally deserve everything that is coming at them.
Then you change the subject to Epstein. Pathetic.
If you had an IQ above room temperature, you would realise my segue into the Epstein
affair was a response to your question of "What deal was supposedly struck".
You killed Lumumba," she roared at the Belgian officials on the platform, before being
escorted away by the police. The music and speeches resumed.
She was right: they did. Belgium was heavily implicated in the 1961 killing of the
radical, first prime minister of an independent Congo, now the war-torn Democratic Republic
of Congo. In 1975 a US inquiry also pointed conclusively to CIA involvement in the
execution carried out by a Katangan police unit under a Belgian officer.
Paul Singer, a Jewish Mafia vulture capitalist did some "work" on the Congo too.
He also bought some of Congo's debt for $10m and sued for $127m. The Congolese
government was found to be corrupt and under US racketeering law, Singer may be able to
claim triple damages, reaping as much as $400m.
On March 9, 2016, Department of Justice (DOJ) oversight personnel learned that the FBI
had been employing outside contractors who had access to raw Section 702 Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) data, and retained that access after their work for the FBI was
completed.
This information was disclosed in a 99-page FISA court ruling on April 26, 2017, that was
declassified by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.
That wasn't an isolated incident and the improper access granted to outside contractors
"seems to have been the result of deliberate decisionmaking" (footnote – page 87).
The FISA court noted the "FBI's apparent disregard of minimization rules" and questioned
"whether the FBI may be engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that
have not been reported."
"This is bigger than Watergate + 9/11 + the Bay of Pigs + almost every other conspiracy
theory you can name combined. It is also why you're seeing definite signs of panic and
desperation everywhere from the House of Representatives to the mainstream media to the
boardrooms of the Fortune 500. This reaches from the heart of the Swamp in Washington DC to
Silicon Valley and Seattle, Washington. In East Germany, it came out after the Wall fell that
one-fifth of the population was involved in the surveillance of the other four-fifths of the
population; now keep in mind that due to the mathematical reach of the FISA warrants, the 825
million surveillance orders issued actually exceeds the 320 million population of the
USA.
Now we know how and why Google and Amazon and Facebook got so big, so fast. They were the
corporate arm of the surveillance state."
You disloyal Jews used government resources and private contractors to surveil the entire
country.
I wonder what's going to happen next?
Also why haven't you responded to any of the comments about what the Jews did in
Russia?
@RealistI said nothing of an electoral solution to America's problems
And I said nothing about an "electoral solution", or any other kind of "solution", to
"America's problems" -- I said/implied that blaming Whites, or the way they vote, more or
less exclusively, as you did, for the way things are, was not exactly a genius take -- there
is literally no one for a race conscious white person, eg a WN, to vote (affirmatively)
for at the moment -- and it is hard to imagine anyone emerging in the near future.
For the record: I (also) do not think just voting, especially in the current
one two party system with the usual 'evil of two lessers' choices offered,
will do anything for Whites.
What We abrogate (of) a sign or [We] cause it to be forgotten, We bring better than it
or similar (to) it. Do not you know that Allah over every thing (is) All-Powerful?
2:106
The verses on abrogation read as to only allow Allah to abrogate, so any human action on
this is stepping over the line imo.. maybe other than when 100% of the Ummah agree on
something, I read that could remove a surah of the Quran, like a voice of God. That rhymes
nicely imo.
Of course how to judge which ruling to use? I agree, it brings in a casuistry into the
faith that generally helps to confuse.. I don't know much about it though yet.
I think Islam preaches a decent message, but the average practitioner is open to
misinterpret it quite a bit. This is a failing of the teaching.. but I think Mohammed's
message was corrupted like Christ's message pretty much straight after his death. Gospel of
Thomas and Tolstoy's rewrites all the way for something closer imo.
venture capital funds are only made necessary because we have a federal reserve.. which
is a private bank and private banks want to earn interest.
Sentiments are correct and you are hovering over the target, but some details are
needed.
The federal reserve is the tail on the dog, not the dog. The Fed was created as a part of
the corporate banking money trust. Before Fed the reserve loops of banks were not tied
together, and they had to use treasuries (T bills or Lincoln Green-backs) to balance their
ledgers.
Banksters wanted to extend their money power beyond their region. In the days before
federal reserve bank money power would fall off the further you got away from the bank. Banks
hypothecate new bank credit, and the credit has to swim home to the debt instrument. This
"swimming home" is done easily when the ledgers are all connected through reserve loops (also
called the overnight market).
After Federal Reserve (1913) and before Wright Pattman, the Federal Reserve was recycling
its profits made on public debt back to its stock owners and member banks. The member banks
especially, were guaranteed profits no matter how the economy did. After Wright Pattman (mid
60's) Fed has to rebate to treasury they couldn't face up to the allegations they were
stealing from the commons, which they were.
Today, the FED rebates interest on TBills and public debt back to Treasury. The private
banks within the system continue to hypothecate new money at interest, as that is their
business model. This business model does not include morality, nor does it work in the public
interest. It works to enrich finance at the expense of the working/laboring economy.
So, central banks are not profit centers, but instead they ensure profit lower down
– within the private banking system. Central banks are backstops to prevent instability
within the already unstable debt money system.
Recent Example: The Repo Crises, whereby FED is monetizing repurchase agreements. Non bank
actors such as hedge funds, REIT's and others have been given access to the overnight market
(where reserves are supposed to be traded). The FED now swaps new keyboard dollars for
various finance paper to keep the non bank actors in the repo market liquid.
This action is artificial and props up the finance sector at the expense of the normal
working economy, and hence it is usurious.
Usury is a word that has been normed out of our language. Why? Because our (((friends)))
are agents of mammon, and they cannot help themselves. It may be genetic.
Usury is a power relation, where you steal from others because you can. Laws are changed
to enable the thefts.
In the case of the FED it was taking 6 percent from the people on public debts. Public
debts were funded by taxpayers. This money was then funneling backwards from FED into their
crony banks and paid off sycophants.
We don't know what the FED is doing today because the bad guys won't allow an audit. The
general statement is that private corporate banking is usurious, and was born in iniquity,
and that is where your eye should gaze, not necessarily at the FED or any central bank.
The debt money system and finance capitalism is state sponsored usury, and is a Jewish
construct.
Vulture capitalism is simply vultures buying up or creating distressed assets and then
changing the law, or using force to then collect face value of the debt instrument or other
so called asset. Vultures will use hook or crook to force down what they are buying, and hook
or crook to force up what they are selling. God's special people can do this because when
they look in the mirror, they are god, and are sanctioned to do so.
Maybe the vulture should replace the bald eagle as America's favorite bird since our dear
shabbos goy President Trump and cohorts are undermining the First Amendment and trying to
make it a crime to criticize Jews and/or Israel. Oh and don't think I am promoting the other
Zionist and their shabbos goy on the demshevik side. The Jew CONTROLS both sides and "our"
two party system has become Jew vs. Jew, not republican vs. democrat. Lenin said that the
best way to control the opposition was to lead it and (((they))) are at it AGAIN.
I think Islam preaches a decent message, but the average practitioner is open to
misinterpret it quite a bit. This is a failing of the teaching.. but I think Mohammed's
message was corrupted like Christ's message pretty much straight after his death. Gospel of
Thomas and Tolstoy's rewrites all the way for something closer imo.
The line of good and evil runs down the middle of each person's heart, and they have to
decide.
My line of attack on Judaism, Islam, Christianity, or whatever, has to answer the
question: "Is it good narrative for high civilization." Does the narrative make people
malfunction?
There are branches of Islam that are good narrative – where people choose the better
side of Islam.
The point is that these good branches, say the Suffi's, have to keep the crazy aunt in the
basement.
Abrogation allows what comes later, to gain power over what comes earlier. And what comes
earlier is the best part of Islam.
Christianity has the same problem, it does not do a good job of policing its crazies, who
twist scripture. Judaism, especially Talmudic Judaism is Kabala and utterances of the sages,
and it morphs and changes over time. For example, after Sabatai Sevi, the Kol-Neidre was
weaponized, and this construct is used by today's Zionists to wreak havoc. Before Sabatai,
there was Hillel, who weaponized usury.
Yes, I agree about Christianity changing quite a bit. In the first 300 years it was much
different than today, especially after the Arien controversy was settled by Constantine's
maneuvering of Bishops at council of Nicea. For example, before; reincarnation was part of
Christian doctrine, and after; reincarnation was excluded.
Trump should be impeached and convicted. But not for the reasons in the two Articles passes
by the House.
He should be for
Violating the Symington and Glenn amended 1961 Foreign Assistance Act to ban any aid to
clandestine nuclear powers that were not NPT signatories. Trump increased aid to Israel.
Moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem in violation of numerous UN Security Council and
General Assembly resolutions.
The abuse of Office via Nepotism in having totally unqualified Jared and Ivanka Kushner
serve as US Government respresentatives.
Executive Order classifying Jews as a Nationality protected from Free Speech criticism of
them, in violation of the First Amendment.
Of course those in Congress, that facilitated and cheered on the Israeli centric Trump
acts, should all be voted out forever.
I have long maintained that libertarianism/capitalism is really like a kind of Calvinism
for atheists. Calvinists used to assume that, since whatever happened was God's will and
God's will was invariable good, then whatever happened was good. Likewise, many modern cucks
seem to have just substituted The Market for God. Morally speaking, it all lets man off the
hook for anything that results–especially when those men happen to be Jewish
financiers!
No, boys and girls, The Market is not inherently good. It requires that a moral system be
superimposed on top of it in order to make it moral.
@Anon
After reading the book of this MI6 asset (and potential killer) who tried to fleece Russia,
you probably can benefit from watching a movie by Nekrasov about him. See references in:
It looks like it was Browder who killed Magnitsky, so that he can't spill the beans. And
then in an act of ultimate chutzpah played the victim and promoted Magnitsky act.
While Nancy Pelosi
threatens to withhold articles of impeachment passed Wednesday night by the House, Harvard
Law Professor Noah Feldman says that President Trump isn't technically impeached until the
House actually transmits the articles to the Senate. Feldman, who testified in front of the
House Judiciary Committee's impeachment proceedings earlier this month, argues in a
Bloomberg Op-Ed that the framers' definition of impeachment "assumed that impeachment was a
process, not just a House vote," and that " Strictly speaking, "impeachment" occurred –
and occurs -- when the articles of impeachment are presented to the Senate for trial. And at
that point, the Senate is obliged by the Constitution to hold a trial ."
If the House does not communicate its impeachment to the Senate, it hasn't actually
impeached the president . If the articles are not transmitted, Trump could legitimately say
that he wasn't truly impeached at all.
That's because "impeachment" under the Constitution means the House sending its approved
articles of to the Senate, with House managers standing up in the Senate and saying the
president is impeached.
As for the headlines we saw after the House vote saying, "TRUMP IMPEACHED," those are a
media shorthand, not a technically correct legal statement . So far, the House has voted to
impeach (future tense) Trump. He isn't impeached (past tense) until the articles go to the
Senate and the House members deliver the message . -Noah Feldman
Pelosi, meanwhile, won't transmit the articles until the Senate holds what she considers a
"fair" trial.
Roughly modeled after England's impeachment procedures, the framers in Article I of the
constitution gave the House "the sole power of impeachment," while giving the Senate "the sole
power to try all impeachments."
Article II outlines says the president "shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and
conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
There's more:
But we can say with some confidence that only the Senate is empowered to judge the
fairness of its own trial – that's what the "sole power to try all impeachments"
means.
If the House votes to "impeach" but doesn't send the articles to the Senate or send
impeachment managers there to carry its message, it hasn't directly violated the text of the
Constitution. But the House would be acting against the implicit logic of the Constitution's
description of impeachment.
A president who has been genuinely impeached must constitutionally have the opportunity to
defend himself before the Senate . That's built into the constitutional logic of impeachment,
which demands a trial before removal.
To be sure, if the House just never sends its articles of impeachment to the Senate, there
can be no trial there . That's what the "sole power to impeach" means.
In closing, Feldman says " if the House never sends the articles, then Trump could say with
strong justification that he was never actually impeached ," adding "And that's probably not
the message Congressional Democrats are hoping to send."
In times past the Senate would have guarded its power against the House. I'm guessing the
Democrat Senators thinks party is more important than all that.
This pansy has no standing about anything related to impeachment.
He has not made any academic studies on the topic nor did he even take the time to prepare
for his biased and totally ridiculous testimony in the "impeachment."
It is all part of our lesson from this event.
Schiff is a graduate of Harvard. And this pansy teaches at Harvard.
The lesson to take away from all this is never ever hire anyone from Harvard nor to
believe anything from them because they are not educated they are indoctrinated.
Think about it people CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, all in lock step with the Democratic
Party no objective reporting at all anymore. These national media outlets and the Democratic
Party continue to publish and propagate false and fake new stories and never retract them or
admit it was all pure fiction.
Why, we have to ask why? Because they deem the American public not smart enough to think
for themselves. If the truth does not fit the pre-determined narrative it is buried or
covered-up by the national media. Their position is you will think do and say as we tell you,
since you're just not smart enough to think for yourself or decide for yourself on how you
want to live your own lives. We know what's best for you. The self-appointed Elite and the
Dems on both Coasts deem all of us in the flyover states not smart enough to vote for a
President, You're just not smart enough to raise your children and teach your kids as you
deem fit, you should not be allowed to worship as you desire or own guns, you're just not
smart enough to control and manage your retirement savings. They desire to eliminate the
Electoral College so your vote is eliminated. Trump scares the hell out of them because they
see their money pot being taken away from them and their ill-conceived control over our
Country slipping away. They have looted and pillaged this country for decades and built a
lavish lifestyle using your hard earned tax dollars. The area around Washington DC is not the
richest area in America by accident.
What have the Democrat party done for the citizens of the US the last 3 years or the last
20 years for that matter. Do you think their impeachment push and the attacks for the last 3
years are because they have the American people's best interest at heart? Think again. They
care absolutely nothing about the American people and have one goal and one goal only and
that is to control every single aspect of your life. They will try and seize every bit of
your retirement savings through taxes and fees for their own enrichment. They will sell out
America at every turn only to enrich themselves. If they ever regain power they will unleash
unimaginable carnage on America and you are all regardless of your political party Fodder for
their fire.
A vote for any Democrat is a vote for your own and our Country's demise.
Impeachment is the Democrat version of the battle of Stalingrad. The Dem's are the
Germans, walking into a trap, refusing to withdraw and regroup as their fanatic Fuhrer, Frau
Nancy, claims Victory, only to be annihilated by her hubris.
"... By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of Bank Whistleblowers United. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives ..."
Posted on
December 18, 2019 by Yves Smith Yves here. What Black calls
the New Democrats have more recently been called Blue Dogs and even (gah) frontliners, but
whatever you want to call them, they are corporate stooges loyal to bad economic ideas, most
notably deficit hawkery and austerity.
By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate
professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of
Bank Whistleblowers United. Originally published at
New Economic Perspectives
On December 5, 2019, Lawrence O'Donnell made an impassioned attack on Pete Buttigieg on his
" The
Last Word " program on MSNBC. Buttigieg's statements criticizing the Democratic Party as
historically soft on deficits enraged O'Donnell. The context was Buttigieg's effort to signal
to New Hampshire voters that he was the most conservative Democratic candidate for the
presidential nomination. Nothing signals 'responsible' so well to 'New Democrats' and the media
as a candidate screaming 'deficits' in a crowded meeting room in a small New Hampshire
town.
O'Donnell correctly pointed out that Buttigieg's claims about Democrats and deficits are
'Republican lies.' The truth is that New Democrats have been the only group in America
dedicated to inflicting austerity on our Nation. Republicans only pretend to care about
deficits when Democrats have power. Buttigieg knows this, but his political interests in
portraying himself as a stalwart emerging leader of the New Democrats caused him to position
himself (falsely) as unique among New Democrats in his dedication to inflict austerity.
O'Donnell (largely) correctly pointed out that New Democrats had been fighting federal
deficits for Buttigieg's entire life. O'Donnell stressed the New Democrats actions in 1993,
when Buttigieg was eleven. O'Donnell lauded the New Democrats for pushing austerity even when
they knew doing so was likely to cause Democrats to lose elections.
O'Donnell's dominant message, measured by both length and passion, was the crippling price
the Democrats paid for the New Democrats' pushing for austerity in 1993. He made clear it was
not a "one-off" – Democrats paid that price again when President Obama, a self-described
New Democrat, pushed to inflict austerity on the Nation in 2010.
O'Donnell describes the New Democrats (Bill Clinton and Al Gore) as knowingly taking a
"grave political risk" in 1993 in voting in favor of austerity. The risk was that Democrats,
not simply New Democrats, would lose scores of seats – and control of the House and
Senate. O'Donnell stressed that no Republicans voted for the New Democrat's 1993 austerity
program. O'Donnell explained the initial political results of austerity. "The Democrats lost
the House because of that vote for the first time in 40 years." He then explained they also
lost the Senate.
O'Donnell repeatedly explained that the New Democrats knew that their decision to inflict
austerity on Americans would likely produce this political disaster – and "bravely" did
so because of their belief that inflicting austerity on Americans was essential. He noted that
he "watched with pride" this exercise of political suicide.
O'Donnell then cited President Obama's austerity efforts – during the weak recovery
from the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). At a time when the need to provide stimulus, not inflict
austerity, was obvious, Obama embraced what again proved the politically suicidal option.
As fate would have it, the death of Paul Volcker days after O'Donnell's takedown of
Buttigieg extended O'Donnell's argument further back in time – to before Buttigieg's
birth. In 1979, President Carter (a Democrat) appointed Volcker to Chair the Federal Reserve.
Volcker soon unleashed powerful monetary austerity, raising interest rates to unprecedented
levels for the United States. Volcker's obituary stressed
the politically suicidal nature of inflicting austerity – and the Democrats' pride in
knowingly losing elections because of their embrace of it.
The harsh Fed policy no doubt contributed to Mr. Carter's re-election defeat at the hands
of Ronald Reagan; he had to campaign when interest rates were at their peak, and before the
inflation fever had begun to break. Mr. Carter, in his memoirs, would offer a typically
understated assessment: "Our trepidation about Volcker's appointment was later
justified."
***
"Paul was as stubborn as he was tall," Mr. Carter said in a statement on Monday morning,
"and although some of his policies as Fed chairman were politically costly, they were the
right thing to do.
O'Donnell's denunciation of Buttigieg for adopting dishonest Republican talking points about
Democrats and deficits did not discuss several essential points. The first two points emerge
from answering this question: what was the cost to the Nation – not the loss of
Democratic seats – of the New Democrats' intransigent insistence on inflicting austerity?
Shakespeare explained famously that "mercy" was "twice blest," because it blesses both the
giver and the receiver. The quality of austerity, however, is typically at least thrice damned.
It is not a "gentle rain from heaven," but a sandstorm from hell that batters the public and
punishes the politicians who unleash the whirlwind. It is at least thrice damned because it
causes three grave forms of harm on the public.
Inflicting austerity on the United States government has three likely consequences for the
public. It is likely to cause or extend a recession. It forces Democrats into an unending
series of "Sophie's choice[s]s." We cannot adopt any new program of consequence without budget
'scoring' – requiring new taxes or cutting other vital federal programs. Under austerity,
Democrats must shrink existing overall federal spending. By extending existing recessions or
leading to new ones, austerity causes economic harms that increase social and political
breakdowns that can lead to the election of fanatics and corrupt fake-populists. The political
parties that refuse to inflict austerity (at least when they are in power) will be the
political winners.
Republican fiscal policies combine "wedge" offerings to fire up the worst of their base and
massive tax breaks for the elites that fund their campaigns – leading to a recurrent
cycle in which the New Democrats champion policies that cause the public to identify Democrats
as the party most likely to raise taxes and cut vital federal programs. Republican political
power and 'wedge' legislation and policies cause enormous harm, particularly to the poor and
minorities. The larger the Republican deficits, the greater the New Democrats' urgency to
inflict austerity – and embrace political suicide. It is a self-reinforcing cycle
producing recurrent political disaster for Democrats.
O'Donnell does not address two other critical points. First, MSNBC's top commentators
endlessly warn Democrats that they must nominate the presidential candidate most likely to
defeat President Trump. MSNBC's commentators implore us not to focus on policy differences
among the candidates. Their message is relentless realpolitik, particularly, you should never
vote for the candidate whose policies you believe are far superior to the candidate the MSNBC
commentators think is most electable. MSNBC and the New Democrats claim they share the same
prime directive – Democratic Party electoral victories are the only imperative.
O'Donnell's anti-Buttigieg rant reveals the truth about MSNBC and the New Democrats' real
prime directive – inflicting austerity even when doing so is economically irrational and
politically suicidal is their sole imperative. The obvious questions, which O'Donnell never
asked or attempted to answer, are why he and his MSNBC colleagues push the false prime
directive (winning must be the sole paramount goal) as gospel while praising the New Democrats
for repeatedly causing the Democratic Party to commit political suicide through inflicting
austerity on our Nation. Logically, the only possible answer to that question is that O'Donnell
and the New Democrats must view inflicting austerity as being of transcendent importance. It
outweighs everything. Inflicting austerity is the New Democrats and MSNBC's sole prime
directive. They are not simply willing to lose so many contests that they lose control of the
presidency, the House, and the Senate – they are "proud" to do so when the reason for
those losses is 'we committed political suicide to fight to inflict austerity.' The related
questions are whether MSNBC and the New Democrats are actually blind to the contradiction
between the real and phony prime directives and why they think viewers and voters will be too
dumb to spot the obvious contradiction. Why do New Democrats and MSNBC insist on hiding their
real prime directive?
A related question arises from this bizarre prime directive to inflict austerity even when
it is politically suicidal. Why did New Democrats and MSNBC choose inflicting austerity as
their holy grail? What is it about inflicting austerity that makes New Democrats so "proud" to
cause the Democratic Party to commit political suicide and deliver control of the House,
Senate, and Presidency to the likes of Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, and
Donald Trump? Preventing Bush's invasion of Iraq, global climate disruption, and Trump's
election would all make sense as overriding priorities. Those are things worthy of losing a
House seat or even the entire House.
Inflicting austerity typically harms America and our people. A federal budget deficit is not
bad. A federal budget surplus is not good. Clinton and Gore's budget surpluses were not good
for America. They were likely harmful, as recessions soon followed our prior budget surpluses
throughout our history. In each of the cases O'Donnell lauded, the New Democrats' insistence on
inflicting austerity did not simply prove politically suicidal for the Democratic Party –
austerity was a terrible economic policy that caused harm. How did inflicting austerity become
the overriding priority of New Democrats, swamping all other policies? In 1993, when Clinton
and Gore made O'Donnell "proud" by inflicting austerity, the inflation rate was three percent.
That rate of inflation was trivially higher than what the Fed would adopt as its inflation
target (2%) – the preferred rate of inflation. Even under neoclassical economic nostrums,
there was no need, much less a compelling need, to inflict austerity.
In 2010, when Obama first sought to inflict austerity on us, the rate of inflation was 2.3
percent and the unemployment rate was 9.6 percent. The economic illiteracy of his austerity
horrified even neoclassical economists. Fortunately, the Tea Party Republicans pushed so
aggressively in the "Grand Bargain" negotiations with Obama that the tentative deal he reached
with congressional Republicans collapsed. Otherwise, Obama's infliction of austerity would have
ended the already weak recovery, plunged the Nation back into a Great Recession, and caused him
and scores of congressional Democrats to lose their elections in 2012.
O'Donnell's presentation, implicitly, makes it clear that he thinks austerity is so
obviously desirable, and the budget deficits of a fully sovereign nation so obviously the
gravest conceivable threat that he need provide neither logic nor evidence to support the New
Democrat's politically suicidal and economically illiterate austerity prime directive.
O'Donnell's cheerleading for the austerity prime directive was never supported, but it has
become facially indefensible over the last quarter-century. Trump's tax reduction scheme for
the wealthiest was outrageous on multiple grounds, but O'Donnell can observe the present
unemployment and inflation rates. Unemployment is at 3.5% and the inflation rate for 2018 was
1.9% -- less than the Fed's target rate. Inflation is the only logical bugaboo about federal
budget deficits, so O'Donnell and Buttigieg's feverish fear that federal deficits are about to
cause a catastrophe is beyond bizarre. The bond markets confirm that there is no expectation of
material inflation.
The New Democrats remain transfixed by their 'virtue' and 'bravery' in losing control of all
three branches of government by insisting on inflicting economically illiterate and politically
suicidal austerity assaults on the voters – raising taxes and cutting vital services.
They refuse to act on the real emergencies we face such as global climate disruption based on
the economically illiterate fantasy that 'we cannot afford' to prevent the worsening
catastrophe. The 'New Democrats' and their media enablers demand that we nominate candidates
dedicated to enacting politically suicidal deficit hysteria policies and adopting tepid
anti-environment policies that are suicidal towards the lives of our children and
grandchildren. The most remarkable aspect of this insanity, however, is that the hucksters
pitch their embrace of their prime directive as defining the concept of "responsible." Indeed,
it is so obviously 'responsible' that O'Donnell and Buttigieg feel neither logic nor facts are
necessary to prove the virtues of austerity. They omit the fact that austerity proponents'
warnings and promises have repeatedly proved false and outright harmful as well as politically
suicidal.
Could it be that the New Democrats are not stupid or irrational at all but know what they
are doing and happily play their role in the permanent professional wrestling spectacle as
the hapless patsies who keep losing to the real tough guy? After all, they get paid
handsomely in any case.
Not only did President Carter appoint Volcker, but he also vetoed a bill to raise the
national debt ceiling. Thankfully Congress, run by a very different set of Democrats at the
time, over-rode his veto.
"Austerity" is basically the only policy Team Blue has undertaken without outside
pressure. As bad as it is, it's the one thing they can point to over the last 25 years as
something they did without mass mobilization or court cases embarrassing them into not being
totally heinous.
Then little Mayo Pete is trying to deny Team Blue their only accomplishment.
"If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is
winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible."
US senator Harry S. Truman 1941
let me fify
"If we see that the Republicans are winning the war, we ought to help the Democrats; and
if that the Democrats are winning, we ought to help the Republicans, and in that way let them
kill as many as possible."
"... "Drain the swamp" is useful shorthand, too, that means Trump is shutting off the flow of billions of dollars in corrupt money to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, and threatening to properly prosecute them for their crimes. The impeachment is really another crime waiting to be prosecuted, where the legislative branch has been hijacked to commit obstruction of justice on behalf of themselves. ..."
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native
American criminal class except Congress.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
"Trump definitely understands that the primary reason why they are trying to impeach
him is because they deeply hate him..."
"Hate" may be a useful shorthand here, but it really has nothing to do with what's going
on.
"Drain the swamp" is useful shorthand, too, that means Trump is shutting off the flow of
billions of dollars in corrupt money to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, and threatening
to properly prosecute them for their crimes. The impeachment is really another crime waiting
to be prosecuted, where the legislative branch has been hijacked to commit obstruction of
justice on behalf of themselves.
" Neocons for some strange reason also hate Trump, although it is not clear why --
he
Not going to comment on British politics much since I'm an ignorant American, but I have
wondered about the neocon hatred of Trump myself and I think it boils down to the fact that
he is not trustworthy.
Yes, I would agree that "the fact that he is not trustworthy" can well be an important
factor. But the USA foreign policy establishment was viewed as untrustworthy for some time
now, so nothing changed for foreign countries in this sense. Or only the degree changed.
But there are more important factors in play, I think.
The main factor probably is that the USA foreign policy establishment are hard core
neocons and preach "Full Spectum Dominance" doctrine. Heretics are burned at the stake.
That includes Trump's impeachment, persistent attempts to derail Sanders (using Biden to
push the selection of the candidate from into the state where the support of superdelegates
can be decisive), weaken Warren, and Tulsi Gabbard excommunication.
Trump's limited prevarications on Russia threaten the strategy to expand NATO to Ukraine
which is a part of the plan of a long term strategy of encircling Russia and maintaining US
dominance over Europe.
As Trump pushes great power rivalry as the name of the game, his policies threatens to
weaken the US control of EU, which Trump wants to label as an economic competitor.
Here the strategic difference between Trump and the Deep State approaches become apparent:
Trump is pushing mercantilist strategy against potential competitors,while the Deep State
pursues the strategy of maintaining the global neoliberal empire led by the USA at all
costs.
The latter presuppose imposing neoliberal globalization, forceful opening other countries
economies to multinationals (much like in Trotskyism "Permanent War" doctrine), and the
maintenance of USA primacy by dominating regional alliances like NATO. But it presupposes
sharing of loot. Which Trump rejects.
Impeachment, besides its more petty purposes (distraction from real social problems;
forestalling and derailing Sanders by propelling Biden as No.1 opponent of Thump and his
policies ), is the culmination of the whole series of attempts of neoliberal oligarchy's to
stage a color revolution against the President who, even though he agrees with this cabal on
all policy matters, is considered too unreliable, too undisciplined, and too damn honest
about the real goals of the US-led neoliberal empire. The latter factor is especially
worrisome ;-)
If they can take him down, they think they can restore the business-as-usual status quo
("kick the can down the road" for a decade or more). The latter might well be an illusion.
Trump and Brexit radically changed the situation and you can't step into the same river
twice.
Trump's impeachment in this sense is yet another nail in the coffin of neoliberalism as it
negatively affects the perception of the USA, reveals to the whole world the dirty USA
internal politic kitchen, and complicates the USA foreign policy, especially "democracy
promotion" part of it, China's Global Times was quite measured yet pointed:
"To many Chinese, it seems that US-style democracy has already become a negative
concept, which has brought ceaseless chaos and produced absurd farces.
James Comey's claim that the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation was run "seven layers" below
him is a total lie according to Attorney General William Barr, who said that the FBI's probe
was actually handled by a " very small group of very high level officials ."
To review, Comey told "Fox News Sunday" that as the director of the FBI, he was "seven
layers" above the investigation, and that he left things to the career professionals when '17
serious errors' occurred which were later uncovered by the Inspector General.
"The idea that this was seven layers below him is simply not true ," Barr told Fox 's Martha
MacCallum in a Wednesday interview, adding "I think that one of the problems with what happened
was precisely that they pulled the investigation up to the executive floors, and it was run and
birddogged by a very small group of very high level officials ."
Watch:
AG Barr on Comey 'seven layers' above the investigation:
One of the problems that happened is the investigation was pulled up to the executive
floors & was run by a very small group of very high level officials. pic.twitter.com/0jA1eoM0kM
According to the Inspector General's report, the FBI withheld exculpatory information on
former Trump campaign aide Carter Page when submitting an application to the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on him.
And according to the Daily Caller , the report also noted that Comey was directly involved
in plans to open operation Crossfire Hurricane after reviewing the initial FISA application on
Page.
So from now on the party which hold the House can start impeachment process on false premises
the day the President from other party was elected. As simple as that.
That open a huge can to worms for future Presidents,
Notable quotes:
"... Let me explain something. This will set a precedent for house of reps to come. When we have a liberal president and a republican house we will do the same and impeach him for nothing because this just shows that if you own the house you can impeach him for nothing and that isn't good for the future ..."
I don't know anything about politics but i know that impeaching a president with radical
fans might not be the smartest move for a country that's all ready divided , just my
opinion.
The claim its a danger to our constitution when they have no pronlem with infringing our
2nd Amendment, 1st Amendment and pledge to do away with the elctorial college...
Hypocrisy
Let me explain something. This will set a precedent for house of reps to come. When we
have a liberal president and a republican house we will do the same and impeach him for
nothing because this just shows that if you own the house you can impeach him for nothing and
that isn't good for the future
Trump is doing a great job,and doing every thing he promises. The only high crime was
defying Dems authority.He has become a clear and present danger to their chances of ever
winning another election.
Impeachment is the Democrat version of the battle of Stalingrad. The Dem's are the
Germans, walking into a trap, refusing to withdraw and regroup as their fanatic Fuhrer, Frau
Nancy, claims Victory, only to be annihilated by her hubris.
Alan Dershowitz, the acclaimed US legal academic, is fond of noting the proverbial if the
shoe is on other foot test – to see who is and isn't sincere in their convictions. This
matter relates to the call to have Russia formally banned from the next Summer and Winter
Olympics. The same is even more applicable to those who don't favor any Russians competing
under the Olympic flag as authorized neutral athletes.
The British head of World Athletics, Sebastian Coe,
brazenly supports a ban on all Russian track and field athletes, until it can be firmly
established (in his view) that they're clean. Coe's take has been widely reported in Western
mass media, with little, if any second guessing of the hypocrisy he exhibits.
Despite
missing three consecutive drug tests , American sprinter Christian Coleman, was allowed to
compete at this past World Athletics Championships . It's quite doubtful that any Russian would
be allowed the benefit given to Coleman. As is true with a number of other sports, there're
credible reports indicating that World Athletics has an inconsistent worldwide drug testing
regimen.
A few years ago, an ESPN "Outside the Lines" segment (aired at an early Sunday morning low
ratings time slot), noted that some top Jamaican track and field athletes have regularly missed
drug tests, as a Jamaican whistleblower on this issue has been castigated in her country.
(Pardon me for not having a transcript of that show.)
Regarding non-Russian Olympians, Coleman's situation is by no means an isolated one.
The ban against Russia competing as a country at the 2018 Winter Olympics didn't see a
noticeable banning of top Russian Olympians for suspected drug use. (Under the Olympic flag and
anthem, these Russians competed as the "Olympic Athletes from Russia") Hence, that prohibition
was essentially a form of collective punishment against an entire nation and its people. At the
recommendation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), Russia now faces a banning for the next
Summer and Winter Olympics.
On the reportedly altered Russian database of drug test results, how many other countries
have been asked to forward as complete an accounting of their respective athletes? As of now
and as reported, this particular pertaining to Russia looks shady. Verifiable specifics on the
database editing haven't been released. Regardless, when it comes to drug testing over the past
several years, Russia's top Olympic caliber athletes are probably the most carefully
scrutinized in the world. These individuals spend time outside Russia (training and/or
competing), where they can and have been suddenly tested. Unless my information is wrong (which
I doubt), they also get tested in Russia, with samples going to the WADA and/or a WADA
affiliated vender.
The
British WADA member Jonathan Taylor , said that a lengthy appeal process at the Court of
Arbitration for Sport (CAS), could allow for Russia to formally participate at the 2020 Summer
Olympics. Taylor is against this scenario – instead favoring for Russia to be excluded
from the next Summer and Winter Olympics. He emphasized that a CAS ruling against Russia after
the 2020 Summer Olympics, would result in that country getting banned from the 2024 Summer
Olympics.
I suspect that most Russians don't see Taylor as a fair reviewer, who is truly concerned
about Russia's best interests. If Russia can't achieve a relatively quick CAS appeal in its
favor, it's arguably in Russia's best interests to have a delayed decision, allowing for a
formal Russian 2020 Summer Olympics representation.
As time passes, there's a chance that a growing number will see how unfair Russia has been
treated, in conjunction with organizations like World Athletics and WADA possibly getting an
overhaul, to better prevent any unfair treatment against a given nation and its people.
On the Republican side, Rep. Doug Collins, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee,
was the first Republican to respond, accusing the Dems of running an unfair and deeply partisan
impeachment inquiry...
"This is an impeachment based on presumption," Mr. Collins said. "This is a poll-tested
impeachment about what actually sells to the American people. Today is going to be a lot of
things. What it is not is fair. What it is not is about the truth."
...While failing to prove their case against Trump.
...fully one half of Americans believe the president is innocent, and that the impeachment
push is merely a politically calculated smear job.
Trump started to play victim and this is really dangerous situation fro neoliberal democrats,
as he is a master in this genre. The President Doth Protest Too Much. While the Schiff
impeachment trial was neocon clowns show, he did committed crimes while in office (Douma false
flag, Oil grab in syria, Yeamen, etc) . But both Republicans and DemoRats are ob board for those,
and are afraid to talk about the real issues, converting impeachment into a second rate Kabuki
theatre
Pelosi now probably has the second thought about impeachment. There is a profound belief
among neoliberal Dems that politically things for them are much worse than they really are. but
while neoliberal is dead people still are voting for those jerks became the other party is even
worse.
Looks like neoliberal Democrats (aka DemoRats) made a political mistake
Notable quotes:
"... "This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history." ..."
"... Maybe we should rename the Trump impeachment and call it what it really is... ..."
The following are ten of the key highlights from that letter
#1 "This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by
Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative
history."
#2 "By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office,
you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on
American Democracy."
#3 "Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith
by continually saying you pray for the President when you know this statement is not true,
unless it is meant in a negative sense."
#4 "You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars of
US aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company
paying his son millions of dollars."
#5 "Now you are trying to impeach me by falsely accusing me of doing what Joe Biden has
admitted he actually did."
#6 "You have developed a full-fledged case of what many in the media call Trump
Derangement Syndrome and sadly, you will never get over it!"
#7 "You view democracy as your enemy!"
#8 "You are the ones interfering in America's elections. You are the ones subverting
America's Democracy."
#9 "More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials."
#10 "Any member of Congress who votes in support of impeachment against every shred of
truth, fact, evidence, and legal principle, is showing how deeply they revile the voters and
how truly they detest America's Constitutional order."
If you would like to read the entire letter for yourself, you can find it
right here . It only takes a few minutes to read, and I think that most of you will find it
very enjoyable.
... ... ...
Following Trump's letter, Pelosi sent out one of her own to her Democratic colleagues asking
them to join her on the House floor
on Wednesday morning
... ... ...
Pelosi and her minions intended to destroy Donald Trump, but they may have just guaranteed
him four more years in the White House. And for Trump, that would be the sweetest revenge of all.
"Trump definitely understands that the primary reason why they are trying to impeach
him is because they deeply hate him..."
"Hate" may be a useful shorthand here, but it really has nothing to do with what's going
on. "Drain the swamp" is useful shorthand, too, that means Trump is shutting off the flow of
billions of dollars in corrupt money to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, and threatening
to properly prosecute them for their crimes. The impeachment is really another crime waiting
to be prosecuted, where the legislative branch has been hijacked to commit obstruction of
justice on behalf of themselves.
When they got Clinton, it felt like a big deal. Now, it's just another episode in the Kabuki
threat of Washington, DC
"Anyway, when the hammer came down on Bill Clinton (21 years ago tomorrow, in fact), it felt
right. Justice had been served. Two months later, the GOP-run Senate would acquit Clinton of the
charges. He served out the rest of his term, and went on to become very rich, a globalist grifter
of great renown. One day, he will die peacefully in bed. His bed, one hopes. Life went on."
"I hate that we have such a lowlife as the American president. But do you know what else I
hate? That the Democratic Party went crazy over the last 20 years. That it's for open borders.
That the Democratic Party is for writing into federal civil rights law the destruction of one of
the most fundamental building blocks of human civilization: the gender binary. I hate that the
Democrats are so drunk on identity politics that a Democratic-run government would create a legal
and policy framework in which my own sons would be considered public enemies because of the color
of their skin, their sex, and depending on the context, their religion."
TRUMP WILL WIN THIS IN THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION AND IN THE SENATE, WHERE IT WILL BE
CODIFIED.
Trump and Mitch are actually doing the democrats a favor by throwing this crap out in the
Senate after a very short debate. Otherwise, if by the tiniest of margins some of the repubs
turn on Trump because they too are guilty of crimes against humanity which many will be found
to be, the resultant pitch-fork mobs would rip them apart...
Democrats just sent a strong message to people. Don't investigate crooks named Biden. Just
don't touch this. Biden must walk free and any person who dares to challenge crooks,
Democratic party crooks, or any other crooks is now to face Democrats.
Good guy named Trump dared to ask a foreign country to investigate corrupted crooks. Bad
idea.
It is no longer democratic thing to defend the law, preserve and promote honesty, not to
mention integrity and ethics. Nah. Vote for Democrats, because they support mafia, sell guns
to criminals, vigorously defend crooks in power and make no mistake - they laugh at Americans
every day.
Trump is no saint, but for gods sake impeach because of Bidens? My God.
Some House Democrats push Pelosi to withhold impeachment articles, delaying Senate
trial
"WASHINGTON -- A group of House Democrats is pushing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other
leaders to withhold the articles of impeachment against President Trump that emerged from the
House on Wednesday, potentially delaying a Senate trial for months.
The notion of impeaching Trump but holding the articles in the House has gained traction
among some of the political left as a way to potentially force Senate majority leader Mitch
McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, to conduct a trial on more favorable terms for Democrats.
And if no agreement is reached, some have argued, the trial could be delayed indefinitely,
denying Trump an expected acquittal.
The gambit has gained some traction inside the left wing of the House Democratic Caucus
this week. Representative Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Oregon, said Wednesday, as his
colleagues debated the impeachment articles on the House floor, that he has spoken to three
dozen Democratic lawmakers who expressed some level of enthusiasm for the idea of ''rounding
out the record and spending the time to do this right.''
''At a minimum, there ought to be an agreement about access to witnesses, rules of the
game, timing,'' Blumenauer said of a Senate trial.
Another Democrat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal
deliberations, said there is ''serious concern about whether there will be a fair trial on
the Senate side'' and acknowledged active talks about withholding the articles.
After the impeachment vote Wednesday, Pelosi would not rule out the idea of withholding
the articles.
The notion has been most prominently advocated by Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School
professor who has advised the House Judiciary Committee on the impeachment process. In a
recent Washington Post op-ed, he wrote that ''the public has a right to observe a meaningful
trial rather than simply learn that the result is a verdict of not guilty.''..."
That can increase Trump popularity further, as it portrays DemRats as unprincipled, dirty political Schemers, Washington pond scam,
so to speak. Two gangs fighting for dominance while nation became poorer and poorer.
They failed (or more correctly were too afraid as it implicates them too) to discuss real issues on which Trump could be impeached
and not Pelosi gambit backfired.
Notable quotes:
"... "How do Democrats impeach and withhold when they've been telling everybody Trump must be removed right now because he poses an immediate threat to our elections? Would Dems go straight from pre-emptive impeachment to deferred impeachment?" ..."
"We have legislation approved by the Rules Committee that will enable us to decide how we will send over the articles of impeachment,"
Pelosi told reporters Wednesday.
" We cannot name [impeachment] managers until we see what the process is on the Senate side."
She added that "so far, we haven't seen anything that looks fair to us" in the Senate.
Nancy Pelosi:
"We have legislation approved...that will enable to decide how we send over the articles of impeachment."
The
Conservative Treehouse blog describes this as a "cunning Lawfare ploy" that was a "pre-planned procedural process by design."
"Now the delay in sending the articles of impeachment allows the House lawyers to gather additional evidence while the impeachment
case sits in limbo."
"The House essentially blocks any/all impeachment activity in the Senate by denying the transfer of the articles from the House
to the Senate. Additionally, the House will now impede any other Senate legislative action because the House will hold the Senate
captive. Meanwhile the Democrat presidential candidates can run against an impeached President. "
This additional evidence could include Mueller grand jury material, a deposition by former White House counsel Don McGahn and
less Trump's financial and tax records.
Knowing that the Senate will never vote to impeach Trump, Democrats plan to use the House impeachment vote as yet another tool
with which to undo the results of the 2016 election, keeping Trump under a permanent cloud of suspicion right through 2020.
However, as Byron York noted rather pointedly, this is entirely disingenuous considering the Democrats pre-impeachment utterances:
"How do Democrats impeach and withhold when they've been telling everybody Trump must be removed right now because he poses
an immediate threat to our elections? Would Dems go straight from pre-emptive impeachment to deferred impeachment?"
And remember, the public is now against impeachment broadly...
Mitch doesn't need Nanzi to "send" anything over to the Senate. The U.S. Constitution states that " The Senate shall have
the sole Power to try all Impeachments. " Art. I, Sec. 3. That power is not dependent on the House "sending" anything to the
Senate. Moreover, the Articles of Impeachment have been published, and the House vote has been published, so the Senate can print
those off and start the trial today . Get on with it, Mitch, and dismiss this charade.
This is just more unconstitutional behavior and yet another attempt by house Dems to usurp power the constitution does not
grant to them:
"The Senate shall the time and place of the trial"
If turtle doesn't get the show on the road, Trump will have to force the issue. However the turtle acknowledged that the Senate
must act in a way which throughly rebukes the Dems for this attempt to lower the bar and prevent it from moving forward.
If she doesn't send the impeachment articles to the Senate then that is something the founding fathers didn't anticipate. If
not resolved the Supreme Court could get involved to define the gray into black and white. I could see Trump taking it to the
courts.
On another note it is pretty funny to see Pelosi griping about the unfairness of McConnell coordinating with the white house
while at the same time coordinating with Schumer.
"Now the delay in sending the articles of impeachment allows the House lawyers to gather additional evidence while the impeachment
case sits in limbo."
What the hell is going on? What new evidence are they gathering? The House voted and they impeached. There is no ongoing investigation
any longer. They cannot reconvene.
The Republican Senate, must do its duty and move forward to the conclusion on this, as quickly as possible.
Pelosi is clearly overreaching by trying to control the Senate. McConnell should remind her that she is not a Senator, and
should stick to controlling her own chamber.
McConnell should also have the Senate pass a resolution that any measures passed by the House must be turned over to the Senate
within 30 days, or the Senate will dismiss such measures as void and invalid.
The Democrats and Republicans are well aware of what is coming. They hope these acts of desperation will somehow delay the
inevitable. Most Americans aren't prepared for the level of corruption, deceit and debauchery that will be exposed. It's almost
time to pay the piper. It is going to shock the world.
Criminally manufactured treasonous conspiracy with fraud perpetrated by DNI/IG Atkins, Ciaramella and Brennan, Schiff, Pelosi,
Nadler, and Obama cohorts and holdovers.
This gets described and prosecuted in their conspiratorial sedition if it goes to Full senate.
They don't dare send it, because they will be arrested, and may be subject to grand jury even before then on FISA related findings.
All the Democrats have is Impeachment. Without it they have nothing to do until November. So, they plan to Impeach President
Trump again, and maybe another time after that to run out the clock.
If House Dems refuse to send Articles of Impeachment to the Senate for trial it would be a breathtaking violation of the Constitution,
an act of political cowardice, and fundamentally unfair to President
@realdonaldTrump .
Going to have to have an amendment to the Constitution. No open ended impeachment motions. Time limitation on when the
House sends impeachment motion to the Senate, after Congress passes motion for impeachment.
I would hope this goes to the supreme court and they rule that this denies the right to a speedy trial. Because the senate
vote is actually considered a trial.
The anti-Russian insanity that dominates the politics of America is dangerous, stupid and
detached from facts. Two news items from Wednesday (December 18th) should scare the hell out of
you.
The first concerns Russia's Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, which is nearing completion
and will deliver gas to Europe.
According to Reuters :
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed legislation to slap sanctions on companies building a
massive underwater pipeline to bring Russian natural gas to Germany, but it was uncertain
whether the measures would slow completion of the project.
Senator Jim Risch, a Republican and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
said the sanctions will prevent the project's completion and are an "important tool to counter
Russia's malign influence and to protect the integrity of Europe's energy sector."
Nord Stream 2, led by state-owned Gazprom, would allow Russia to bypass Poland and Ukraine
to deliver gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany. U.S. lawmakers say Ukraine could lose billions
of dollars in transit fees if it is built.
This is not the fault of the Democrats. This is being driven by Republicans, with Senator
Ted Cruz
leading the charge .
The Trump administration should use sanctions to halt the construction of a pipeline that
would allow Russia to transport natural gas directly to Europe, potentially generating cash to
fuel President Vladimir Putin's military aggression, says Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline "would make Europe even more dependent on Russian energy," Cruz
told FOX Business' Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday. "And that makes Europe susceptible to economic
blackmail, because Putin has already demonstrated he's perfectly willing to cut off the gas in
the dead of winter to try to force people to do what he wants."
Russia's "military aggression?" Did Russia invade Iraq twice in the last 29 years? Did
Russia launch a war in Libya? Did Russia arm and train insurgents in Syria? I think Ted Cruz
has not been paying attention to world events over the last thirty years. The number one
country engaged in foreign military aggression is the United States. Hands down.
Here are the actual military facts about Russia:
Russia's 2018 GDP of $1.66 trillion, which is just 8% of America's total GDP of $21.5
trillion.
Russia's annual manufacturing value added is currently about $200 billion compared
to $2.2 trillion for the US economy.
Russia's working age population of about 85 million is already just a fraction of the US
working age population of 255 million.
Russia's $61 billion of military outlays in 2018 amounted to less than 32
days of Washington's current $750 billion of expenditures for defense.
During the Cold War Russia armed itself to the teeth via a forced-draft and allocated
upwards of 40% of the GDP of the Soviet empire to the military. Today the Russian defense
budget amounts to less than 4% of the country's anemic economy.
The US has eleven such carrier strike groups. Russia has zero modern
carrier strike groups and one beat-up, smoky old (diesel) aircraft carrier. A carrier based
strike group is composed of roughly 7,500 personnel, at least one cruiser, a squadron of
destroyers and/or frigates, and a carrier air wing of 65 to 70 aircraft.
The United States dwarfs Russia's ability to project force via air power-- the US has
6,100 helicopters to Russia's 1,200 and 6,000 fixed wing fighter and attack aircraft versus
Russia's 2,100. More importantly, the US has 5,700 transport and airlift aircraft compared to
just 1,100 for Russia.
The only military category where Russia enjoys a decisive edge is tanks -- 22,710 versus
8750 for the United States. This is a legacy of WW II, where Russian tanks played the
critical role in pushing the Nazis back to Germany.
As recently as 2017, the Russian fleet operated 61 submarines. "Historically the backbone
of the Russian navy, 75 percent of the 61 operational submarines are over 20 years old and
are slowly being replaced." The United States has 75 and is building two new ones each year
at a cost of $5 billion.
So why is this pipeline now a redline in the sand that Russia dare not cross? Apparently
because it will give Russia a way to make more money to finance its massive military buildup
(hopefully you understand sarcasm) and, more importantly, will cost Ukraine lost income. Can't
afford to have Ukrainian oligarchs running out of money that they are sending to Democrat and
Republican consulting firms and candidates.
While it is unlikely that the sanctions will prevent the pipeline from being completed,
largely because they come too little, too late, this is not going to
hinder efforts to punish Russia :
A new Bloomberg headline reads "U.S. Concedes Defeat on Gas Pipeline It Sees as Russian
Threat" just following new sanctions included in the House and Senate passed 2020 National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) this week.
But two administration officials tell Bloomberg it's too little too late, despite Trump's
heightened rhetoric of calling Germany "a captive to Russia" and charging Berlin with
essentially giving "billions" of dollars to Russia:
Senior U.S. administration officials, who asked not to be identified discussing the
administration's take on the project, said sanctions that passed Congress on Tuesday as part of
a defense bill are too late to have any effect. The U.S. instead will try to impose costs on
other Russian energy projects, one of the officials added.
Seriously, that United States has no right to threaten Russia in this way. It is reminiscent
of the sanctions that the United States imposed on Japan prior to World War II that blocked
Japan's access to critical oil and rubber supplies. That was a precipitating factor in Japan's
decision to attack us on December 7, 1941.
NATO exercises near the border with Russia reflect the alliance's preparations for a
large-scale military conflict, Russia's chief military officer said in remarks published
Wednesday.
The chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, said at
Tuesday's meeting with foreign military attaches that NATO's activities have heightened
tensions and reduced security along the Russian border.
Asked if the Russian military sees a potential threat of war, Gerasimov said that Moscow
doesn't see "any preconditions for a large-scale war."
He added, however, that Western pressure on Russia could trigger "crisis situations" that
may spin out of control and provoke a military conflict.
The anti-Russia hysteria in the United States is tying the hands of Donald Trump to act
responsibly to protect America. If he vetoes the bill put forward by the Congress he will be
accused, as he has been for more than two years, of catering to Putin.
The fanatics and frauds waving the Russian threat ignore the fact that the United States and
Russia work closely and productively on the Space Station. Our astronauts and their cosmonauts
co-exist peacefully in space and we rely on the Russians to haul our folks to and from the
Space Station. In Syria, the Combined Air Operations Center (i.e., CAOC) communicates daily
with Russian counterparts to ensure that their respective air assets do not fire on each other
or inadvertently wander into a combat space. This has been going on for more than three
years.
Russia still has nuclear weapons. It is their ultimate deterrent against another invasion.
The memory of losing more than 12 million soldiers in World War II remains vivid and painful.
The U.S. public can barely remember that we lost less than 500,000 soldiers, marines and
sailors in World War II. Our inability to remember coupled with unjustified belligerence is
pushing us towards a war with Russia that would be beyond catastrophic.
''The Trump administration should use sanctions to halt the construction of a pipeline that
would allow Russia to transport natural gas directly to Europe, potentially generating cash
to fuel President Vladimir Putin's military aggression, says Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas''
I don't know how many times I have ..Who do these politicians think they are !!??
They were not elected to 'run the world'. WE must get rid of them.
The Col told me awhile ago that the CIA doesn't do 'accidental deaths' ....too bad.
At least, these sanctions are not only directed against Russia, but also against Western
Europe.
First,the sanctions directly affect not only Gasprom, but also Western European companies
that are involved in building the pipelines (since only a small part of the work remains to
be done, Nordstream 2 can probably be finished without some of them, but if everything
continues as before, some Western European companies involved in building the pipelines would
clearly be affected by US sanctions, among them a specialized Swiss company).
Second, the purpose of the pipelines clearly is not only to help Russia selling gas, but also
to help Germany buying Russian gas.
The sanctions are not anti-Russian sanctions, but sanctions against Europe, including Russia,
Germany, and other European countries.
Especially in Germany, there is absolutely no tolerance for such sanctions with which the US
wants to force Europeans to buy uncompetitive expensive US fracking gas. There are talks
about European countersanctions against the US. The US may hope to exploit disagreements
among EU countries. After all some EU countries like Poland are against Nordstream. But the
US should not rely on this - such blatant interference in European matters is clearly not
tolerated by the EU. An appropriate countermeasure might be punitive Tarifs on US fracking
gas exports - there is not much demand for it, anyway, but it would make sense to prevent any
significant amounts of US fracking gas from being bought in Europe as long as the US wants to
force Europeans to buy it.
In any case, these anti-European sanctions show once more that the US has become a pariah
nation that has isolated itself and has no real allies any more (except perhaps Saudi Arabia
and Israel).
I would not call these sanctions only anti-Russian sanctions. They are just as well directed
against Western Europe.
First, it is not only Gasprom which is involved in building the pipeline (although it is
the owner), but also European companies (among them a Swiss one). Since Nordstream II is
almost finished, the services of some of these companies may not be necessary any more, but
if they continued normally, also some Western European companies would be sanctioned.
Second, obviously, the purpose of the pipelines is not only to help Russia selling gas,
but also to help Germany (and other Western European countries that will receive it via
Germany) buying Russian gas.
In Germany, there is very little tolerance for such sanctions, and people talk about
counter-sanctions against the US. An appropriate measure could be punitive tariffs on US
fracking gas. There is little demand for US fracking gas in Europe, anyway, since it is more
expensive, but it may make sense to make sure than no significant amounts of US gas are sold
in Europe as long as the US wants to force Europeans to buy it.
The US may hope to exploit disagreements about Nordstream within the EU. After all, some
countries like Poland are against it. But the US should not rely on this tactic working. Such
blatant interference in European energy supplies with sanction will hardly be tolerated by
the EU.
In any case, these anti-European sanctions show one more how much the US has become a
pariah country that has isolated itself and hardly has allies any more (except perhaps Saudi
Arabia and Israel).
I agree that one of the motives for these anti-European sanctions is anti-Russian insanity
in the US. But another important motive is disrespect of the US for Western Europe, which it
seems to regard as a kind of colonies or vassal states it can tell what to do.
In Europe, there is still a certain gap - while polls show that the US is very unpopular,
among European elites, pro-US forces still have a certain influence. But probably, it won't
take very long until European countries will adapt their policies towards the US in the
direction a majority of their citizens wants. Another such example of US folly is the idea
that Germany should pay more for the presence of US troops. According to polls, about half of
the German population wanted US troops to leave, anyway, even before the question of
increased payments was raised, and if the US is serious about this demand, the consequence
that it will lose its military bases is obvious.
I credit you with possessing the good sense, seemingly rare, to not wish to enter into a
direct military conflict with Russia, particularly out of some hyper inflated sense of
threat, owing (no less) to their aggression. Kudos to you for acknowledging which country is
the number one threat of military aggression in the world.
The sarcasm of referring to a mounting Russian threat is merited insofar as their military
budget is actually falling as a proportion of output.
I would suggest, however, when assessing the strength of the enemy you rightly argue that
it is stupid to provoke, that you do not limit yourself to the prevailing think-tank
approaches to assessing that threat. It's pretty obvious to most people that comparing an
Su-35 to an F-35 in dollar terms makes the F-35 3 or 4 times the military threat of the
Sukhoi. Ditto with an Su-57 to F-22 comparison.
But it would be better to listen to actual military experts with technical training in the
STEM disciplines needed to provide the analysis. I would suggest you look at the work of A.
Martyanov's work, a retired Russian naval officer writing occasionally US Naval institute
Blog. Or visit his blog, Reminiscence of the Future, through which you could get more
background on his books, including the latest, The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs.
His concern is that (while some of us use these CIA factbook-type analysis to cool off the
hysterical claims of threat) Russia hawk politicians and think-tank military pseudo-experts
are using these to seriously downplay Russia's capacity to counter American aggression. Would
welcome your thoughts on his work.
Russia's 2018 GDP of $1.66 trillion, which is just 8% of America's total GDP of $21.5
trillion.
Larry, it is patently and, actually, grossly untrue on both counts. Nor comparison of
military budgets is legitimate tool. In fact, all this is in the foundation of the United
States failing, time after time, having a good grasp of the military balance.
Last winter LNG from the Russian Yamal gas field was delivered to the United States. Perhaps
Washington should deal with its own dependence on Russian energy before it starts pressuring
Europe.
The goal is to overturn the government of Russia, just like the goal has been to overturn the
government of Bolivia (Mission Accomplished), Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, North Korea,
Libya, Lebanon, Iran, Syria... This is imperialism. It's history is long and has been
successfully practiced by far by the British and Americans. And it's goal is the theft of the
resources, human and natural, of the countries targeted. It is old news. Nothing has changed
for two hundred years. My God, the original Crimean War was fought for exactly the same
reasons as the current Crimean War although the actual fighting is of a different scale and
different style. Permit me to include in the litany above Native Americans who were
slaughtered for their territory. It is astonishing that President Trump seems to be less than
enthusiastic about this program, but it certainly recommends him highly if he is. And today,
we may ask who is behind this program. It is certainly not the American people.
A new Bloomberg headline
reads "U.S. Concedes Defeat on Gas Pipeline It Sees as Russian Threat" just following new
sanctions included in the House and Senate passed 2020 National Defense Authorization Act
(NDAA) this week.
But two administration officials tell Bloomberg it's too little too late , despite Trump's
heightened rhetoric of calling Germany "a captive to Russia" and charging Berlin with
essentially giving "billions" of
dollars to Russia :
Senior U.S. administration officials, who asked not to be identified discussing the
administration's take on the project, said sanctions that passed Congress on Tuesday as part
of a defense bill are too late to have any effect . The U.S. instead will try to impose costs
on other Russian energy projects, one of the officials added.
The admission is a rare concession on what had been a top foreign-policy priority for the
Trump administration and highlights how European allies such as Germany have been impervious
to American pressure to abandon the pipeline. It also shows how the U.S. has struggled to
deter Russia from flexing its muscles on issues ranging from energy to Ukraine to election
interference.
The resolution contained in the defense spending bill, expected to be immediately signed
into law by Trump, are measures which specifically target companies assembling the pipeline --
a last ditch US effort to block the controversial 760-mile, $10.2BN project that would allow
Russia to export natural gas directly to Germany, depriving Ukraine of badly needed gas transit
fees along the current route for Russian supplies.
Washington's position has long been that it weakens European energy security, while Merkel's
Germany has rejected Trump's
"meddling" in European energy affairs, which the Europeans have lately sought to
diversify.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a February visit to Poland said Nord Stream 2
ultimately "funnels money to Russians in ways that undermine European national
security."
It's expected to double Russian gas shipments to the EU's biggest economy Germany, while
others fear --
including dissenters within Merkel's own ruling coalition -- it will give Moscow
significant geopolitical leverage over Europe while also punishing Ukraine.
The new US sanctions measures will target executives of companies operating vessels laying
the pipeline , and will further seek to hinder those companies' ability to operate on the
project. It's been spearheaded by Russian giant Gazprom and five European energy companies,
including French electricity and gas firm Engie SA and Royal Dutch, and the Swiss company
Allseas Group SA, among others, and is nearing completion, expected soon this coming year.
Bloomberg
reports further, "Trump has indicated that he'll sign the legislation passed Tuesday. The
penalties on companies building the project, led by Russian energy company Gazprom PJSC, would
be effective immediately, according to a Senate Republican aide."
In total, continues Bloomberg, "Some 350 companies are involved in building the undersea
link, most notably the Swiss company Allseas Group SA, whose ships are laying the last section
of pipe in Danish waters."
Regardless, Gazprom head Alexei Miller has for months said it's "past the point of no
return" and that nothing would derail it. "We are working from the idea that Nord Stream 2 will
be realized strictly in accordance with the planned timetable," he
previously told shareholders.
THE UNITED STATES CORPORATION needs to keep its nose out of European energy policy! In
fact, it needs to keep its nose out of everybody else's business.
My apologies if this has been posted before, but here is a news conference broadcast by
Interfax a few days ago detailing a joint French-Ukrainian journalistic investigation into a
huge money laundering scheme using various shadow banking organizations in Austria and
Switzerland, benefiting Clinton friendly Ukrainian oligarchs and of course the Clinton
Foundation.
The link is short enough to not require re-formatting:
Of course. I have said this repeatedly. I say this with confidence because I have read a
book that is solely about Gazprom and all aspects of gas production, distribution, payment
etc. etc. within and outside Russia. Which of course includes the major special problem of
Ukraine. You cannot understand any Ukraine politics and scams (and Uk-RF politics and
conflicts) without understanding the role of gas, and of Ukraine as a bottleneck for a LOT of
the gas flowing between Russia and the EU. The Ukrainians have always been fiddling the
Russians and their gas. And then the EU got into the picture and caused more trouble for
Russia. Anyhow, it is fitting that the scam described in the video runs on GAS.
The punchline: "The FBI's handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the OIG
report, was antithetical to the hieghtned duty of candor" required by federal investigators,
adding "The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be
unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession , and with which they withheld
information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in
other FBI applications is reliable ," wrote the court, which called the recent watchdog report
from the DOJ's Inspector General "troubling."
https://www.fisc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/MIsc%2019%2002%20191217.pdf
"The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported
or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information
detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI
applications is reliable."
Think FLYNN_FISA [ILLEGAL?]
"WORSE THAN WATERGATE" - Nancy Pelosi's statement in Nov 2019 at press conference when she
greenlighted the impeachment of President Trump based on unknown Whistleblower complaint. In
light of the I.G. Report, Speaker Pelosi's statement seems a wild exaggeration.
___
Now Democrats are begging Republicans to join them in impeachment vote an appealing to
their sense of duty and the Oath they swore to uphold the constitution. But there has been
eerie silence from the Democrats as to the astonishing revelations by Inspector General
Horowitz of 2016 pre and post election interference by FBI, CIA and others. The principles
that are deemed so sacred with respect to removing Trump are not worthy of discussing when it
comes to actions taken against Trump, and in support of Clinton, by the Obama Administration.
In fact, Democrats and their comrades in the media seem to want to suppress this matter until
they can find a way to spin it to their base. Other than just attacks on Barr and Trump, it
is not clear that there is any way to put a positive spin on all the deceit and subterfuge
that occurred in 2016.
It is impossible to believe there was not a conspiracy against Trump when every mistake
made in the Clinton email investigation was favorable to her and every mistake made in the
Trump-Russia investigation was adverse to Trump. If the Democratic Senators really want to
stand for democratic principles, they should demand a full investigation of the origins of
the Trump-Russia investigation and stop attacking A.G. Barr for his legitimate pursuit of the
truth. For 3 years we heard from CNN and other media that "there's no evidence" that anything
is amiss at the FBI. Now it is clear that the evidence is abundant and was under their nose -
they had to chose to over look it. And, the evidence points to a potential criminal
conspiracy at the very highest levels of the Obama Administration to disenfranchise the
people of the United States.
The greatest danger lies in snooping on an opposition party. That's exactly what happened
in 2016. A Democratic administration used law enforcement and intelligence resources to
conduct espionage on Republican opponents. It gained warrants using false information
provided by the Democrats' own candidate, who paid foreign agents (through intermediaries)
for the information. The judges who approved the warrants were apparently duped, the targeted
campaign never warned. If these charges are substantiated, they represent clearly the worst
political scandal in American history.
DAMAGE ASSESSMENT - (1) Public confidence in a fair Democratic system and Democratic
ideals are shaken and may take a generation or more to recover. People that were previously
merely skeptical now fully believe the whole system is a sham. (2) Political Parties - The
2-Party system is now seen by most thoughtful people as a structural problem in our
democracy. It has become anti-democratic and clearly susceptible to manipulation. The
Progressives attempted to hijack the Democratic Party and to foment anti-Trump hysteria to
fuel impeachment and gain power to achieve a radical agenda. Even Obama is now calling them
out; (3) Adversaries of the US are enjoying every minute of this ugly political nightmare.
They can see how biased the media has been. How flawed our system of governance has become.
They will seek to gain from the turmoil.
HOW DO WE FIX THIS? We must institute reforms of the government and of the democratic
process. We need more direct citizen participation and less party influence. A non-profit
called New Unity (see https://newunity.org ) has proposed an interesting concept of a
Citizen Assembly which would be composed of ordinary citizens who would statistically
reflect the general population of the USA. This would be a standing body in Washington that
reflects "the Will of the People." The Delegates would be selected the same way that jurors
are selected. That selection process means there is no political party screening candidates
and no $ that influence candidates. Each Delegate could serve for one year term - so there
are automatic "term limits". The Citizen's Assembly could be made a 3rd chamber of congress.
The Assembly would be the ideal branch to act as jurors in an impeachment because they do not
have any party affiliation which creates a conflict of interest. Today 99.8% of Congressional
representatives is a member of one of the two major parties.
iii. appropriately disciplining or replacing those identified by the entity as responsible
for the misconduct either through direct participation or failure in oversight, as well as
those with supervisory authority over the area where the misconduct occurred;
The Washington Post , through
documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, has published a long
investigation into Afghanistan. Journalists have collected over 400 testimonies from American
diplomats, NATO generals and other NATO personnel, that show that reports about Afghanistan
were falsified to deceive the public about the real situation on the ground .
After the tampering with and falsification of the report of the Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons (OPCW) , we are witnessing another event that will certainly discomfit those
who have hitherto relied on the official reports of the Pentagon, the US State Department and
international organizations like the OPCW for the last word.
There are very deliberate reasons for such disinformation campaigns. In the case of the
OPCW, as I
wrote some time back, the aim was to paint the Syrian government as the fiend and the
al-Qaeda- and Daesh-linked "moderate rebels" as the innocent souls, thereby likely justifying a
responsibility-to-protect armed intervention by the likes of the US, the UK and France. In such
circumstances, the standing and status of the reporting organization (like the OPCW) is
commandeered to validate Western propaganda that is duly disseminated through the
corporate-controlled mainstream media.
In this particular case, various Western capitals colluded with the OPCW to lay the
groundwork for the removal of Assad and his replacement with the al-Nusra Front as well as the
very same al-Qaeda- and Daesh-linked armed opposition officially responsible for the 9/11
attacks.
As if the massaging of the OPCW reports were not enough in themselves to provoke
international outrage, this dossier serves to give aid and comfort to jihadi groups supported by the Pentagon
who are known to be responsible for the worst human-rights abuses, as seen in Syria and Iraq in
the last 6 years.
False or carefully manipulated reports paint a picture vastly different from the reality on
the ground. The United States has never really declared war on Islamic terrorism, its
proclamations of a "War on Terror" notwithstanding. In reality, it has simply used this
justification to occupy or destabilize strategically important areas of the world in the
interests of maintaining US hegemony, intending in so doing to hobble the energy policies and
national security of rival countries like China, Iran and the Russian Federation.
The Post investigation lays bare how the US strategy had failed since its inception, the
data doctored to represent a reality very different from that on the ground. The inability of
the United States to clean up Afghanistan is blamed by the Post on incorrect military planning
and incorrect political choices. While this could certainly be the case, the Post's real
purpose in its investigation is to harm Trump, even as it reveals the Pentagon's efforts to
continue its regional presence for grand geopolitical goals by hiding inconvenient truths.
The real issue lies in the built-in mendacity of the bureaucratic and military apparatus of
the United States. No general has ever gone on TV to say that the US presence in Iraq is needed
to support any war against Iran; or that Afghanistan is a great point of entry for the
destabilization of Eurasia, because this very heart of the Heartland is crucial to the
Sino-Russian transcontinental integration projects like the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and
the Belt and Road Initiative. In the same vein, the overthrow of the Syrian government would
have ensured Israel a greater capacity to expand its interests in the Middle East, as well as
to weaken Iran's main regional ally.
The Post investigation lays bare the hypocrisy of the military-industrial complex as well as
the prevailing political establishments of Europe and the United States. These parties are not
interested in human rights, the wellbeing of civilians or justice in general. Their only goal
is to try and maintain their global hegemony indefinitely by preventing any other powers from
being able to realize their potential and thereby pose a threat to Atlanticist preeminence.
The war in Iraq was launched to destabilize the Middle East, China's energy-supply basin
crucial to fueling her future growth. The war in Syria served the purpose of further
dismantling the Middle East to favor Saudi Arabia and Israel, the West's main strategic allies
in the Persian Gulf. The war in Afghanistan was to slow down the Eurasian integration of China
and Russia. And the war in Ukraine was for the purposes of generating chaos and destruction on
Russia's border, with the initial hope of wresting the very strategically area of Crimea from
Russia.
The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and this has been on full display in
recent times. Almost all of Washington's recent strategic objectives have ended up producing
results worse than the status quo ante. In Iraq there is the type of strong cooperation between
Baghdad and Tehran reminiscent of the time prior to 1979. Through Hezbollah, Iran has
strengthened its position in Syria in defense of Damascus. Moscow has found itself playing the
role of crucial decider in the Middle East (and soon in North Africa), until only a few years
ago the sole prerogative of Washington. Turkey's problems with NATO, coupled with Tel Aviv's
open relation with Moscow are both a prime example of Washington's diminishing influence in the
region and Moscow's corresponding increase in influence.
The situation in Afghanistan is not very different, with a general recognition that peace is
the only option for the region being reflected in the talks between the Afghans, the Taliban,
the Russians, Chinese, Indians and Pakistanis. Beijing and Moscow have well known for over a
decade the real intent behind Washington's presence in the country, endeavoring to blunt its
impact.
The Post investigation only further increases the public's war weariness, the war in
Afghanistan now having lasted 18 years, the longest war in US history. Jeff Bezos, the owner of
the Post , is a bitter opponent of Trump and wants the president to come clean on the
Afghanistan debacle by admitting that the troops cannot be withdrawn. Needless to say,
admitting such would not help Trump's strategy for the 2020 election. Trump cannot afford to
humiliate the US military, given that it, along with the US dollar, is his main weapon of
"diplomacy". Were it to be revealed that some illiterate peasants holed up in caves and armed
with AK-47s some 40 years ago are responsible for successfully keeping the most powerful army
in history at bay, all of Washington's propaganda, disseminated by a compliant media, will
cease to be of any effect. Such a revelation would also humiliate military personnel, an
otherwise dependable demographic Trump cannot afford to alienate.
The Washington Post performed a service to the country by shedding light on the
disinformation used to sustain endless war. But the Post's intentions are also political,
seeking to undermine Trump's electoral chances by damaging Trump's military credentials as well
as his standing amongst military personnel. What Washington's elite and the Post do not know,
or perhaps prefer to ignore, is that such media investigations directed against political
opponents actually end up doing irreparable damage to the political and military prestige of
the United States.
In other words, when journalist do their job, the military industrial complex finds it
difficult to lie its way through wars and failures , but when a country relies on Hollywood to
sustain its make-believe world, as well as on journalists on the CIA payroll, on compliant
publishers and on censored news, then any such revelations of forbidden truths threaten to
bring the whole facade crashing down. Tags Politics
This doesn't seem very complicated to me.
Turkey is emboldened by Turkstream (and by the Ukraine/Georgia stalemate) - Erdogan clearly
believes he can monopolize gas transit between Central Asia/Middle East/Eastern Mediterranean
and Europe. This would be a huge geopolitical and economic benefit for Turkey - far above and
beyond any religion based "leadership" Turkey could benefit from the Muslim world.
Russia doesn't really care as it already has a pole position regarding natural gas to Europe
- Erdogan's actions will only serve to slow down any buildout of competing supply from
Central Asia/Middle East. Erdogan is likely being financially backed by Qatar as well - they
also stand to benefit if Turkey can carve out a pipeline domination in the Eastern Med.
"Follow the money..." If I recall correctly, Haftar got a nice pile of money from Russia in
the form of Libyan banknotes that he ordered, and the status of those banknotes was unclear,
but in LNA zone they are as good as the central bank notes. Legally, payments for Libyan oil
have to go to that bank, and the operations, location and loyalty of that bank deserve an
investigative article.
Erdogan has too little money to succeed, IMHO. If he were flushed, he would place nice
weapon orders in UK, France, Germany and USA, as KSA + UAE did, and as we know from Yemen,
that secures NATO blessings, either verbal or quiet. His military is probably in a better
shape than Egyptian, if vulnerable to attacks by mysterious submarines. The coastal highway
from Egypt is surely good enough for military vehicles, but it is vulnerable to attacks from
air.
Putin's priority number 2 in the region is South Stream, so he will probably not supply
mysterious submarines, Greece could being irate over maritime claims, and Egypt would have
the most obvious motif. My conclusion is that the sultan's dog's barks a lot, and sometimes
bites, but with some caution. Libyan expedition has the smell of Sicilian Expedition, a
notable event during the Peloponessian war.
Egypt will not tolerate a Muslim Brotherhood led Libya as its neighbor. Before the Turkish
support allows the GNA government to defeat Haftar Egypt will intervene. The situation can
thereby soon develop into an intense war during which Turkish troops fight on Libyan grounds
against the Egyptian military.
<=I think if Egypt intervenes in Libya it will strengthen the brotherhood in Egypt and
Libya and may terminate brother Sisi's rule.
i agree with Psychohistorian's Mezran quote.. a Russian Turkey agreement will foreclose
USA and British access to oil from Libya, Egypt and Turkey( new OPEC will form).
Now the GNA is a UN construct so Turkey supporting it should not be a big deal politically
for the west. As for the CIA fellow, if he is working as closely as he appears to be with
Russia, I think Turkey stepping in is just as suggested:
"...from the karlof1 link:
""Mezran suggested. "If the Turks become the major supporter of the GNA, not the Europeans or
the Americans, and the Russians are the ones who are the major supporter of Haftar, then all
it would take is an agreement between Moscow and Ankara to solve the Libyan problem, causing
much damage to American and European power.""Posted by: psychohistorian | Dec 17 2019 20:25
utc | 11.
I particularly like the strategy cutting out the Central Bank by the General and Russia,
looks to me like there is a master plan being rolled out and it is moving quickly. Perhaps
Peace is breaking out:)
b said; "After the NATO war destroyed Africa's richest country Libya is still split."
Another "mission accomplished" by the evil empire. They couldn't stand for any leader to
share the wealth of the nation with it's people, so a lesson was given, and is still in
effect.
@ Posted by: ben | Dec 17 2019 22:58 utc | 20 who wrote
"
b said; "After the NATO war destroyed Africa's richest country Libya is still split."
Another "mission accomplished" by the evil empire. They couldn't stand for any leader to
share the wealth of the nation with it's people, so a lesson was given, and is still in
effect.
"
Thanks for that perspective. That is THE reason that I continue to call out Hillary "We
came, we saw, he died" Clinton as the war criminal I hope she is prosecuted for in her
lifetime.
Does anyone have an idea of both the size and combat readiness of Egyptian forces?
Would Sisi be in a position to send in a force of, say, 50,000 or 100,000 troops with
armour and air cover? If so, he could end both the Muslim Brotherhood/Al-Quaeda problem in
Libya as well as nip one of Erdogan's meddlesome adventures in the bud.
I want what Libyans want, but it seems nobody can be arsed to find that out. I strongly
suspect Libyans' preference would be for neither of these two foreign funded options since
both of these grubby groups are committed to maintaining the repeal of the petroleum act
which has protected Libyans from rapacious foreign corporations and foreign-state owned
enterprises who put sweet FA into any of their hosts' economies while meddling unceasingly in
host politics to ensure everyone but them gets screwed.
IMO the amerikan interest is less about oil & other Libyan resources than ensuring
that Libya can never again support North African nations who the empire is determined to
annex and form into a vast super-national state where governments have no control, but
corporations do.
AFAIK, both cliques in Libya are proponents of Arab nationalism which intend to pretend
the black african and berber populations are all foreigners despite both groups having a
longer history of living in the region than arabs do.
Arabs entered this region, the Magreb, about 647 AD fighting to take control off the
indigenous population of the Magreb which up until then comprised myriad african ethnicities
& language groups until around 709 when Arabs united under the banner of Islam had
complete control.
There really hasn't been a demographic based census in Libya, most likely because the role
of black africans or as the imperialists like to refer to them 'sub-saharan' (which of course
implies they are outsiders) has always been contentious among some Libyans who consider
themselves to be 'Arabs' or as they like to claim, the ruling class.
Generally the bulk of lighter skinned Libyans class themselves as Berber-Arabs, while other
Libyans (eg Muamar Ghaddaffi -may he rest in peace) consider themselves to be Berber.
The iFUKUS intervention promoted a mob claiming to be solely Arab and therefore the
legitimate rulers of the nation. They also reckoned all black africans in Libya were
foreigners. A genocidal campaign of terror and good old amerikan style lynching of black
folks followed. We rightly see the sociopath in H Clinton at this time, but what about
Oblamblam, WTF was he thinking?
Eventually some bright spark saw that killing was wasteful, so those black Libyans
remaining were rounded up and sold into slavery - to 'owners' primarily in Saudi Arabia and
the UAE.
Who knows if Libya can ever find another leader as enlightened as the Colonel? All we do
know is that there is no chance of such a leader emanating from either Haftar's gang or the
'UN-recognised' gang.
Libyans don't deserve either of these agglomerations of arseholes which is why they are
copping them. A big message from the big states that any nation which indulges in such caring
and sharing of neighbours & friends as Libya did, must be severely punished so no other
decent society will dare try that on.
"<=I think if Egypt intervenes in Libya it will strengthen the brotherhood in Egypt and
Libya and may terminate brother Sisi's rule."
I think Snake is on to something here. The power balance in Egypt is fairly evenly divided
with only a slight advantage to Sisi over Muslim Brotherhood forces.
What Turkey is seeking is fair treatment and recognition of rights it feels that it has in
the Mediterranean Sea. What a group of nations (Israel, Egypt, Greece and the US –
hereafter referred to as The Group) is attempting to do is deny Turkey any rights at all.
Those that disagree with Turkish claims have the following position:
1. Greek "owned" islands, which in some cases (e.g. Kastellorizo) go really close to the
Turkish coast, exclude Turkey from any significant rights to the Mediterranean.
2. Turkey has no claim to the area around Cyprus.
3. Cyprus is partnered with Israel, Egypt, Greece and the US for energy exploration in the
Mediterranean Sea and Turkey is not included.
4. In January 2019, the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum was convened as a means for
Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Jordan, Israel, Italy and the Palestinian Authority to develop a
regional natural gas market. Turkey was excluded from this forum and was very upset. (A month
later ExxonMobil announced a new gas discovery in Cypriot waters.)
In other words it is a melange of denying rights, legal assertions and exclusion
tactics.
Now look at a map of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and then tell me - Is it reasonable
that Turkey should have practically no rights at all? Any fair-minded person would recognise
that Turkey does and all reasonable people would recognise that all the countries bordering
the area of exploration have rights and should cooperate and work together and none should be
excluded. What is happening is that The Group wants it all.
It is a very big mistake to believe that Turkey is in the wrong and also that it will back
down on this.
In addition to Turkey, the countries that are excluded appear to be Syria, Lebanon, and
Libya. It is right that The Group is seeking to exclude all these other countries?
It doesn't matter whether the oil and gas are viable (it may or may not be) what is
happening is that Turkey is not being allowed any recognition and they are choosing to assert
(take) their rights (because there is no other option available to them). If Turkey did not
do so then they would lose any future rights to the Mediterranean at all.
Syrian, Lebanon and Libya are obviously too weak to assert their rights. Although the
Palestinian Authority participated in Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum I don't really expect
Palestine to benefit much and it should be noted the Palestinian Authority is are far too
weak to do anything – I'm afraid they are just being used.
Greece and Cyprus are being used as pawns by the US (why else would US Ambassador Pyatt be
based in Greece? This kind of disruption is his speciality) and Greece is being set to
confront Turkey.
Now look at a map of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and then tell me - Is it reasonable
that Turkey should have practically no rights at all? Any fair-minded person would recognise
that Turkey does and all reasonable people would recognise that all the countries bordering
the area of exploration have rights and should cooperate and work together and none should be
excluded. What is happening is that The Group wants it all.
The reason why Turkey does not want the Libyan GNA to fall is because they fear that
Haftar will fall into line with The Group and further strengthen Turkey's exclusion from the
Mediterranean energy exploration. So it is in Turkey's great national interest to secure
Libya as an ally. Also, the GNA are still recognised as the legitimate government of Libya by
the UN so in legal terms Turkey is not doing anything wrong in recognising and supporting the
Libyan GNA.
As regards the Turkey/Libyan Maritime Zone - What is happening is that Turkey and Libya
are showing The Group that it to can carve out areas and claim to areas of the Mediterranean
Seas just as much as they can.
It was widely believed that the 2015-17 Cyprus reunification talks where positive and the
closet ever to reaching a settlement. Who should be blamed for the collapse? Many believe
that is was the Greek Cypriot side that was a fault. The big sticking point was that the
Turkish Cypriot side wanted some 40,000 Turkish troops to remain based in the North of the
Island because of fears over security. At the time the Greek Cypriot side said it was
impossible to accept the continued presence of Turkish troops. This was a big mistake, Cyprus
would have been federally united and in 10 years time the Turkish troops could well have been
greatly reduced. When the talks collapsed the talk was of inevitable partition.
And what do we see in 2019? Anastasiades, the Greek Cypriot President, wants to reopen
talks "exactly where they left off" - A belated recognition that it was the Greek Cypriots
that threw away what would have been a fantastic settlement and a fairly blatant attempt to
peel away Turkish Cypriots from Turkey (Anastasiades call for a resumption of talks seems to
have come with some unnecessary hostile remarks directed at Turkey), and hasty desire (now
that there has been a gas discovery off the coast of Cyprus) to rescue the agreement because
The Group now they can use this agreement to further marginalise Turkey.
I like Frances's take on this...ie smells like a master plan between Russia and Turkey...
Why not...?...the Sultan and VVP deciding to carve up some territory, as in the old
colonial days...?
Russia and Turkey are getting closer all the time...Helmer's take about the 'Stavka' not
being fully on board with this notwithstanding...
The very useful clue is from that Atlantic Council article...the rule to apply here is to
just be for everything they are against...and be against whatever they are for...
In this case they are agitating for the West to step up to the plate and arm the
GNA...even a fly zone for farg's sakes...
Yeah...everything but let Turkey and Russia divide the spoils among themselves
right...?...throw a wrench into the spokes at any cost...?
But the thing is that Trump is not interested in any new wars or proxy wars...and I think
a Libya 2.0 is going to be an extremely hard sell anywhere, with the disaster of Killary's
2011 adventure still fresh in everyone's minds...
So nobody is stepping in...there is a vacuum there and I think that there may be some
grand bargain cooking behind the scenes with VVP and the Sultan...who knows how far
this thing could go...?
It's already causing HUGE headaches in Sodom on the Potomac...as is clear from the shrieks
of agony from the likes of the Atlantic Council and many others...
Turkey may not be the best militarily; they are slow and ponderous but they are strong
enough to move forward, occupy and hold space and take a significant amount of attrition
while doing so. Turkey is strong enough to be able to assert "facts on the ground" even if
they have to absorb several hard blows - they have been learning a lot from Russia on
this.
With regards to Libya, Turkey cannot be prevented from moving forward, occupying space,
supplying the Libyan GNA, providing military equipment and troops, etc. UNLESS their lines of
supply are cut and this means that The Group would have to attack first and sink a Turkish
ship.
And this would mean that Greece (the obvious party that might be set-up for this role)
would attack Turkey and sink a Turkish ship? This would be an act of war against Turkey and
Turkey would, as a result of such action, be fully (and legally) entitled to respond. So,
commonsense tells you that Greece and The Group can't really do this.
If The Group enables Haftar to sink a Turkish ship then Turkey will be able to claim an
attack against them, and retaliate and occupy Libya and expect NATO support whilst doing so.
The effect of such an act by Haftar's forces would inevitably result in victory for Erdogan
(counter-intuitive though that may seem).
While Turkey and Erdogan's association with the Muslim Brotherhood can be seen as a vector
that ensures Egypt's hostility towards Turkey's presence in Libya can this really express
itself militarily?
The Muslim Brotherhood is a strong movement in Egypt which has been around for a very long
time. Effectively this excludes Egypt from joining any direct attack on Turkey because they
will fear the unintended consequences that will arise within Egypt.
I'm afraid The Group, in seeking to exclude a major country like Turkey (with an obvious
major interest in the Mediterranean), is taking the first step towards war. Sinking a Turkish
ship would be another step towards war. Turkey will win any conflict as long as they are
prepared to accept some hard blows (and they will be). The Group will lose any conflict
because they are only able to strike small (sink a ship at most) or strike huge
(annihilation); they have no middle game – Turkey will be able to absorb small blows
and China & Russia will not allow Turkey to be destroyed.
At present, Turkey has nothing to lose (as far as the Mediterranean Sea energy exploration
goes) - it follows that in any military conflict that Turkey will gain. Military conflicts
have to be settled by negotiation - it is only a western delusion that wars are fought to
unconditional surrender or absolute destruction. It is The Group and, in particular, Greece
that will lose (Greece has a lot to lose in any conflict - no matter how well it goes for
Greece - they will have to give up something, even if they think they have won, because that
will be price of ending any conflict (because it always is unless you can annihilate your
adversary).
It is not Turkey that is over-reaching- it is The Group (Israel, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus and
the US) that have overplayed their hand and have most to lose.
The only thing that makes any sense in terms of a strategic plan is that it nothing more
than machinations by the US seeking to bring chaos closer to the heart of Europe. From the
outset, The Group knew what they were doing to Turkey and they knew how Turkey would feel
about it and how Turkey was likely to react.
div> On paper, Erdogan may have easy superiority in Libya, but he may get
into troubles for two reasons:
1) Libyans, currently quite fractured, actually both major coalitions are riven by internal
lack of cohesion. To compare, Assad government had no business surviving, but the opposition
was split into moderates, i.e. small time gangsters and bandits having difficulties making
units of more than 100 people, and jihadists who had some abstruse reasons to hate each other.
And Turkey did not make such a good job in Idlib, Afrin and north Aleppo.
2) Egypt. Forget about ground troops, they would probably focus on air supremacy. This is an
Achilles heel of an expeditionary force. If they are intelligent (a risk that has to be
consider), they may hit the moment Turkey attempts to expand its foothold. Just letting it
slide would be a considerable loss of face for al-Sisi
Posted by: Piotr Berman , Dec 18 2019 2:19 utc |
36
On paper, Erdogan may have easy superiority in Libya, but he may get into troubles for two
reasons:
1) Libyans, currently quite fractured, actually both major coalitions are riven by internal
lack of cohesion. To compare, Assad government had no business surviving, but the opposition
was split into moderates, i.e. small time gangsters and bandits having difficulties making
units of more than 100 people, and jihadists who had some abstruse reasons to hate each
other. And Turkey did not make such a good job in Idlib, Afrin and north Aleppo.
2) Egypt. Forget about ground troops, they would probably focus on air supremacy. This is an
Achilles heel of an expeditionary force. If they are intelligent (a risk that has to be
consider), they may hit the moment Turkey attempts to expand its foothold. Just letting it
slide would be a considerable loss of face for al-Sisi
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Dec 18 2019 2:19 utc |
36
Kastellorizo – A Greek Island off the Turkish Coast
Greece "owns" Kastelorizo, an island which is only about 2 kilometres off the coast of
Turkey. "Ownership" of islands such as Kastellorizo is meant to "give" Greece the "right" to
exclude Turkey from the Mediterranean Sea? I'm afraid that this is an absolutist, simplistic
and unrealistic position.
The "ownership" of Kastellorizo has changed many times throughout history and has been
"owned" by Turkey (the Ottomans) on a number of occasions. If you look at the maps you can
see that Kastellorizo is part of the same geological formation as the nearby Turkish coast.
It's akin to claiming "ownership" of my doorstop and then claiming that you "own" everything
outside the walls of my house (including my garden, car, garage, dog, cat, etc. and then
telling me I can't even use my doorstep or leave my house. If you did that to me, I would
push you aside and that is what Turkey is doing to Greece.
I know that many, many Greeks fundamentally disagree but they are just being partisan,
unfair and realistic and are allowing themselves to getting carried away with hostility
towards Turkey.
Kastellorizo could have been assigned to Turkey at the end of the WWII as part of the
Paris Peace Treaties of 1947 but instead, the "ownership" of Kastellorizo was removed from
Italy and given to Greece.
In any military conflict between Turkey and Greece (like, for instance) sinking a Turkish
Ship, then islands Kastellorizo will be immediately taken into "ownership" by Turkey and it
will be a long time, if ever, that Greece can think about re-"owning" Kastellorizo.
Essentially, the issue of Kastellorizo and its "ownership" would be settled and there would
be very little Greece could do about it.
When Greece asserts is rights to the Mediterranean Sea based on "ownership" of islands
such as Kastellorizo and uses such "ownership" to deny Turkey rights to the Mediterranean Sea
it is just being provocative and unreasonable and inducing Turkey.
Turkey is wrong if it thinks something in international law allows it to annul the freedom of
the seas and block pipelines. I will repost what
I wrote on October 31:
MARITIME LAW EXPLAINED
The United Nations Convention
on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) from 1958 guarantees to all countries the right to lay
cables and pipes in international waters. This is part of the freedom of the seas. Laying
cables and pipes is not "economic" activity as defined in the 1982 treaty that gave
countries the right to a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone
(EEZ).
Pipe laying is affected only by the little-known
Espoo Convention from 1991 that obliges the parties to carry out an environmental
impact assessment of certain activities at an early stage of planning. Nowhere in the
treaty does it say that it can be used to stop the freedom of navigation or other freedoms
of the seas.
Turkey does not need and doesn't intend to conquer Libya.
All Turkey has to do is maintain the Libyan GNA which is the government legally recognised
by the UN.
Only the Security Council can remove recognition of the Libyan GNA and this would be a
fairly cynical move by the West if attempted (and, I imagine, would be vetoed by more than
just Russia and China).
Military aircraft are vulnerable when ground troops have access to modern surface to air
missiles and are trained in their use. Expect Libyan GNA forces to have copious supplies of
the ground and shoulder-launched versions of these weapons. What good did aircraft do for
Saudi Arabia in Yemen? There is no winner here, only stalemate and that's more than good
enough for Turkey.
The only way to prevent Turkey from achieving its aims is to sink it's supply ships. This
would be a rash and extremely inadvisable act.
I would advise policymakers and Governments (particularly, The Group) to see where this is
all heading and not go down this path.
The coming debacle may present few heroes for our consideration. The weakest states are
probably headed for the smash-and-grab treatment at the end of the day. How is one to believe
that Erdogan gives a damn about the government in Libya?--any government? Hafter and the GNA
are both pretenders who have only marginal support in that country. These are but stick
figures in a land that's been thrown into a howling anarchy, thanks to the military operation
that Obama green-lighted. Since Erdogan is dealing with virtual nonentities, this aggression
is his aggression. And this illegal sea lane is his insult to international law and prior
agreements that recognize the rights of regional nations. It looks a lot like an act of war
or at least a pretty serious provocation.
Greece, for one, ought to be worried about this development, as some of the resources it
counts on as its territorial right is threatened here.
I don't believe that any of the Mediterranean Sea is "international waters" it's all been
carved up into Exclusive Economic Zone's (EEZ)- there's nothing left! The Group are carving
everything up for themselves and left Turkey (and a number of other countries e.g. Syria)
with very little.
Any person thinking rationally would be able to see that Turkey has been treated unfairly
and will see Turkey has been left with no effective (peaceful) way to get any redress.
All Greece and the rest of the Mediterranean nations need to do is get together, cooperate
and share.
The actions of The Group (Israel, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus and the US) are the ones that are
causing all the difficulties because they have tried to grab everything for themselves and
exclude everyone else.
Greece and the rest of The Group need to include Turkey, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and
Palestine (and remove the US).
When Greece asserts is rights to the Mediterranean Sea based on "ownership" of islands
such as Kastellorizo and uses such "ownership" to deny Turkey rights to the Mediterranean Sea
it is just being provocative and unreasonable and inducing Turkey to consider military
options.
Turkey controls the Dardanelles (the entrance to the Black Sea) by treaty. Turkey has been
treated as it deserves. The Aegean Sea is recognized as Greek waters; and that probably
includes the seabed beneath it. When Greece was at its most vulnerable after the recent
financial collapse, Turkish air force ramped up overflights of Greek territory, some of it
pretty aggressive, just to rub salt in the wound. It wasn't very neighborly. It looks like
Erdogan's new sea lane trespasses the Greek island of Rhodes and several others.
What Andrew Korkblko suggests is that the pipeline, that Turkey is obstructing with the
"Turkey/Libyan Maritime Zone", is not really about Cypriot gas (which b. believes will be too
small and uneconomic to justify a pipeline) but about Israeli gas which is intended to be
piped under the Mediterranean Sea into Europe as a competitor to Russian gas. Maybe the whole
thing about Cypriot gas is just a smokescreen to disguise the true origins (Israel) of the
gas.
What, I suppose, Israel is trying to achieve is to minimise the number of nations that
have a say about (and, I guess, a cut of) the pipeline. So, the attempt to cut Turkey and
other weaker countries out of share (gas transit fees) has forced Turkey to move on its
long-held grievance about being treated unfairly in the Mediterranean Sea.
Are we about to see a war in the Mediterranean between Greece and Turkey caused by US and
Israeli machinations?
I am not talking about rights that are legally justified by "ownership" - what I am saying
is that the whole of the Mediterranean Sea and its resources should be shared fairly and
reasonably by all nations of the Mediterranean.
The proposed gas pipeline is just an example where a small group of nations (Israel,
Egypt, Greece, Cyprus and the US - The Group) have got together to grab what they can for
themselves and exclude others.
Your argument is essentially we have the legal right, we are recognised under
international law, therefore we can do what we like, we can have it all, and you, who have
been excluded, you will have nothing. But, anyone can see that this is unreasonable and the
path to disaster.
But in some ways all this is now moot. The pipeline appears to be really about Israeli gas
and the lack of wisdom in trying to exclude Turkey. If The Group has any sense they will
share the booty with Turkey. If not, they will get Greece to sink a Turkish ship - the
outcome won't be good for Greece.
"My administration will never tolerate the suppression, persecution or silencing of the
Jewish people," Trump declared at the ceremony, which doubled as a Hanukkah party.
Likbez at #5 wrote: 'Paleoconservatives hate Trump.'
I dunno. I look at 'The American Conservative' from time to time, which was created and is
run by Pat Buchanan, who's pretty much the original paleocon.
Part of that is because it's good to understand what the enemy is thinking. But also it
turns out 'The American Conservative', for instance, has guys like Scott Ritter and Andrew
Bacievich writing for them, as well as other critics of the American elite that will never be
allowed in the MSM. And that's because one particular policy axe Buchanan and his writers grind
very strongly is against the forever wars, U.S. military interventionism, and the MIC. They
hate the neocons and types like John Bolton.
Thus, when Trump makes noises or does something that looks like it plays against the MIC,
the State Department and the three-letter agencies aka The Blob, and maybe has a chance of
tamping down on the bloody military interventionism, Buchanan and co. are pro-Trump.
Conversely, Buchanan and co. are big on the evangelical Christian stuff and the hard-working
American white nuclear family who built America, blah blah blah. Whereas Trump is a billionaire
vulgarian. And there Buchanan and his writers don't like him.
So paleocons like Buchanan seem to deal with Trump on a policy-by-policy basis. Though I
radically disagree with some of the policies that Buchanan does favor, that seems reasonable to
me.
Christians had better not let the unachievable perfect be the enemy of the common-sense
good enough.
" Neocons for some strange reason also hate Trump, although it is not clear why -- he
completely folded and conduct their foreign policy."
Not going to comment on British politics much since I'm an ignorant American, but I have
wondered about the neocon hatred of Trump myself and I think it boils down to the fact that
he is not trustworthy. Yes, he has caved in and when you get past the tweets he is trying to
start a new nuclear arms race and actually armed Ukraine and gave Israel almost everything
but still, he isn't stable. He doesn't play the game right. He is supposed to talk about how
we want democracy and freedom and instead he rather openly fawns over dictators. Well, yes,
other Presidents support dictators, but never with so much open enthusiasm. Appearances
matter. And even neocons want someone who is mentally stable conducting their preferred brand
of militaristic warmongering.
If true this china capitulation. Or some shrewd tactical maneuver, as the next year it is
China who hold trump cards -- it can derail Trump re-election with ease.
I have my doubts about Trump being the Grand Dealmaker he calls himself. Looking at seven
bankruptcies as a proof of that ... mythical skill I don't find much. I recall Trump suing the
Deutsche Bank after the bank wanted a credit back. His lawyers in court referred to the bank
crisis, called the Deutsche Bank as a bank responsible for that and said that thus they don't
deserve repayment. that was Chutzpah in the First Degree, For very obvious reasons Trump lost
that case and did pay back.
When Trunmp recently went on searching lawyers to work and sue for him he didn't find any. A
big corp lawyer anonymously briefly explained why: "Doesn't pay. Doesn't listen.'
A US-China trade deal was announced to chaotic fanfare late Friday Asian time – and we
are sceptical. First, we still don't have details other than that December tariffs were
postponed by both sides, the 15% US tariffs imposed on 1 September are to be reduced to 7.5% as
a sign of goodwill, and the 25% tariffs on USD250bn stay in place . Second, we aren't going to
get a signing ceremony between the US and Chinese leaders, which does not send an encouraging
signal. And third, what we see is close to the terms we previously criticized for being
unrealistic in reports such as 'A Great Deal of Nonsense" and "LOL-A-PLAZA".
The US Trade Representative (USTR) says the final text of the phase one
agreement is still being finalised, and he will sign it early next year for a likely incept
date of end-January 2020. The areas covered include: Intellectual Property (IP); Technology
Transfer; Agriculture; Financial Services; Currency; Expanding Trade; and Dispute Resolution.
Each of these promises much and yet potentially delivers little.
China has pledged to address issues of geographical indications, trademarks, and enforcement
against pirated and counterfeit goods. That's just after a Chinese court ruled that Japanese
retailer Muji doesn't own its own name in China and a local rival started years afterwards
does. Enforcement matters, not promises: more on that in a moment.
China has agreed to end forcing or pressuring foreign companies to transfer their tech as a
condition for obtaining market access or administrative approvals. Again, enforcement is all
that matters here. China also " commits to refrain from directing or supporting outbound
investments aimed at acquiring foreign technology pursuant to industrial plans that create
distortion. " That is China's reason for outbound investment! For example, Sweden's Defence
Research Agency just released a detailed survey of Chinese corporate acquisitions in their
country showing at least half are correlated with the "Made in China 20205" plan.
China will " support a dramatic expansion of US food, agriculture and seafood product
exports " , with the USTR stating the target is to jump to USD40bn in 2020, a USD16bn increase
over the pre-trade war level of USD24bn, and to aim for USD50bn. Part of that reflects China's
decimated pork herd, so is hardly a concession. Yet it is hard to conceive of how the total
figure can be achieved without China using the US to displace agri imports from other nations,
e.g., Argentinean and Brazilian soy, and perhaps Aussie and Kiwi farm goods. That also
increases China's economic exposure to the US at a time of rising geopolitical tensions between
the two (see news of the US' secret expulsion of two Chinese diplomats), and US' farmers
exposure to China in kind. For its part, the Chinese press are not mentioning these US hard
targets, and are talking about WTO trading terms, which bodes poorly.
The financial services chapter pledges China to an opening up already underway as it
searches for new sources of USD inflows, so again is not a concession. Interestingly, it also
says US ratings agencies will get access – which will be fun given the evident credit
stresses emerging in China just as US banks will be trying to sell China as an investment
destination. .
On currency the US is requiring "high-standard commitments" to refrain from competitive
devaluations and targeting of exchange rates. Everyone knows the CNY is not freely-traded
– but also that China is doing its best to prop it up, not to try to push it lower. The
key message is CNY is not going to be allowed to do what it ought to be doing, i.e., weakening,
as China is pledging new fiscal stimulus in 2020 that will decrease its external surplus. That
runs counter to market forces, and smacks of a kind of Plaza Accord. Of course, as long as this
US-China agreement holds that might be sustainable due to the promised higher capital
inflows...
Eexcept the expanding trade chapter implies the opposite. The USTR says China is pledging to
boost its 2020 imports of US goods and services by USD100bn over the level in 2017, and by
USD100bn again in 2021, for a total increase of USD200bn . Given 2017 was pre-trade war and US
exports to China dropped off a cliff in 2019, this means around a 110% y/y increase in
purchases in 2020 – and agri is only a portion of that. The problems should be obvious.
How can a slowing Chinese economy (imports are down y/y from most sources), see this kind of
increase without substituting US for world exports or local goods? How can a China with a USD
liquidity shortage serious enough to be driving said lowered import bill, and
'1USD-in/1USD-out' de facto capital controls, cope with the net reduction on the trade side? As
of November, the 12-month rolling Chinese global trade surplus with the US it was USD330bn and
globally was USD440bn. We are talking about reducing that US figure by 2/3 and the global total
by 1/2!
Which brings us to the last chapter: Dispute Resolution. Getting China to comply is far
harder than getting it to sign. The USTR notes the agreement " establishes strong procedures
for addressing disputes related to the agreement and allows each party to take proportionate
responsive actions that it deems appropriate ." In other words, each side can unilaterally do
what they want when they want! So much for the unilateral US control of the process.
So how to see this in summary? The reduction in tariffs from 15% to 7.5% is a positive,
albeit far less than the Wall Street Journal had promised. (NB, the USTR took the
extraordinary step of publicly chastising the WSJ journalists who wrote that story –
regular readers may recall I have also called them out more than once in the past.) Indeed, if
China really has agreed to all that is stated here then further incremental tariff rollbacks
can be seen – though the USTR has said the 25% tariffs will stay as collateral for a
phase two deal that nobody really expects to happen. Yet the terms of this phase one still seem
to be A Great Deal of Nonsense. How can China stop buying foreign tech? How can it buy as much
US stuff as pledged? How can it do so and not undermine the WTO? How can it do so and not
weaken CNY? And how can it do so with a strong CNY without increasing its USD debts, its
strategic reliance on the USD, and to US goods? In short, if China does as the USTR claims, the
US is a huge winner here (and there are lots of losers); if China does not comply with what
look an impossible import targets, then the US can frame China as the bad guy and the tariffs
can go back up again. Arguably, the question is not if that will happen, but when.
The geographic maps of recent Western elections, look remarkably similar across the world.
Brexit, Kurz, Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Khan, Salvini & Di Maio as well as the rise of
the AfD in Germany all evidence a strikingly similar pattern.
Urban centers are trying to hold on to the status quo for dear life.
The rest of the country that could be defined as the (usually) silent majority, has had
enough.
This vote was no surprise.
We have reached one of those historical junctures that are brought about by the same old
political tactics.
A centralized monetary system that is coopted for political power.
Fiscal deficits have a very well defined, if not understood, life cycle. The end of the
cycle has been the same across the ages.
Many more "surprising" political outcomes to come in the following months.
USSR, Yugoslavia, US, EU, and the Indian Union are predicated on the ideas of the
Enlightenment Tradition. So far, USSR and FRY have disintegrated. If EU fails, could US and
EU be too far behind. In US, we have the political ascendancy of foolish Protestantism, in
India that of Hindu masses.
Can any states, predicated on secularism of the Enlightenment Tradition survive the rise
of religious politics?
According to "Electoral Reform Society", all votes are not equal in UK:
Across Britain, it took...
🗳️864,743 votes to elect 1 Green MP
🗳️642,303 votes to elect 0 Brexit Party MPs
🗳️334,122 votes to elect a Lib Dem
🗳️50,817 votes for a Labour MP
🗳️38,316 votes for a Plaid Cymru MP
🗳️38,300 votes for a Con. MP
🗳️25,882 votes for a SNP MP
But then again, who said Britain with its monarchy, is a democracy?
The problem is that in a disunited kingdom, Conservatives with Tories only represent the
English and the Northern Ireland Oranje (through Unionists). Corbyn's problem was that he
didn't rid of his Rightwing faction, including "Friends of Israel" in Leadership
positions.
He grew Labor more than the Neo-Liberal Blair did.
You make the same mistake that Democrats did after 2016. It is not about the total number
of votes. Britain has a parliamentary system. It is about winning each parliamentary seat.
Just as in the US, it is about winning the electoral votes in each state. Boris won a
landslide according to the electoral rules that was the same for each party contesting the
election.
The question that Labor needs to ask is why did they lose seats that Labor has held for 50
or more years? Not whining about the rules of the election.
Labour won a single seat in London, in a wealthy neighborhood, and lost dozens in some of
the poorest parts of the U.K. that have endured years of economic decline. Left-wing
parties across the west have lost touch with actual marginalized communities.
Reflection is not a quality that mainstream politicians have. Got to blame someone else.
Surprised they haven't blamed Putin or Ukraine yet :-)
That tweet thread was very instructive. Amazing that areas that were solid Labor for so
long deserted them this election. Something they should really think hard about.
The first person who brought the Russians in to this discussion is Blue Peacock, except the
CONSERVATIVES who convicted the Skripal Affair. Indeed, reflection IS rear
You are making a mistake. Corbyn grew the Labor party MORE than Blair, Kinnock,...
The flair you described in British electoral system is by design to ensure the rule of the
crown, neo-feudal minions, nobility & "novo-nobility" with an appearance of consent. The
"redistricting" in Britain is similar to US & different in the sense that is permanent
(contradiction in terms) due to the the immigration- & social mobility differences.
Also, Scotland, one of Labor's main bastions, is sick & tired of the waiting to reform
the Albion and understandably just wants to separate their ways. I observe, but do not judge,
the fact of the matter being that the vote of the majority of Britain's doesn't count towards
determining the rule of the land. Similar to a LOT of countries but dissimilar in the sense
that their ruling class uses the "voting spectacle" as a public patch to lecture the others
about democracy (electoral college) & human rights (Assange torture).
You are right in the sense that Corbyn was not firm enough to get ride of the Trojan
Blairites. He needed to be less compromising and at least "market" (whether to deliver or
not, is another matter) a more radical solution as Boarish Johnson did: E.g. a terrorist act
happens on London bridge, by a Jihadist - on parole (??) during election time - under
Israel-Firster Priti Patel & Corbyn gets the blame!? Conservatives were in power and run
the prisons and the judiciary. Corbyn missed the necessary viciousness and was weak,
considering he did not make a HUGE scandal out of this with Johnson being weak on terrorism
(which is true, as we all know that MI-5/6 exports Jihadists to Syria and runs NGO's to the
benefit of Jihadis).
On a "two tier" or "multi tier" EU, that is a possibility sometimes mentioned. I recollect it
was mentioned by the German Ambassador at a talk he gave a while ago, and there is sometimes
press reference to the idea. It would get over the Target 2 problem and also make the problem
of fiscal transfer less urgent.
The question is, how would one get to two tier? Last time I looked the Target 2 balances
were around a trillion and represented one half of Germany's foreign assets. The Southern
countries couldn't pay that back and the German public would not accept, I think, half their
foreign assets being written off.
This is the problem with the EU. It's not a single unified country. Nor is it merely a
loose trading association. It's half way between the two and it is forced to keep moving
towards further unification simply because remaining as it is is untenable.
But moving either way is difficult too. There are the populist movements that either
threaten the integrity of the EU or at least hold it back from further unification. There are
the structural problems of the EZ that could only be resolved by further unification. And
that resolution would require the taxpayers in the richer countries to pay far more to the
poorer countries. Certainly in Germany that would prove politically difficult.
Brussels has committed itself to fast track further unification. It looks to me like
someone on ice having to run faster and faster to keep his balance. That view might be
coloured by the fact that I like neither the political side of the EU nor its effect on the
peripheral countries, but it's important to recognise that in addition to the financial
bubble problems all Western countries or entities face, the EU/EZ has deep structural
problems that will not be easy to resolve.
Well, Corbyn grew Labour between in 2015-2017, before outing himself as a closet-Remainer.
After that, he lost it all between 2017-2019.
On the second point, you are quite correct: far from ridding Labour of its "Friends of
Israel" wing, he actually allowed them to force him to rid Labour of his own pro-Palestinian
allies!
Any way you slice it, Corbyn was just weak and pathetic.
From my understanding the west's relationship with the Turks is strategic. Having western
armies in Turkey, as well as nukes, and Turkeys military alliance against the Russians helps
contain Russia, helps reduce their influence in the middle east, and helps shield Israel, and
the gulf from the Russians.
For America to recognize that any major Muslim nation has inflicted a mass murder on non
Muslims like the Armenians and Christians throughout the middle east, and south eastern
Europe would open up A floodgate of knowledge, and end the censorship of the media
perpetually pretending that muslims cannot be racist, and allow Israel to better defend
itself with the truth about Muslim intentions and treatment of Jews in the present, and allow
the Europeans to defend themselves from conquest, and allow the Americans the possibility of
avoiding much of the hardship of having a large Muslim minority in the first place. Even the
Gulf Nations would have the opportunity to defend themselves with the truth about Islam if
they wanted to.
It is difficult to measure the strategic value of things like containing the Russians, and
the price of losing influence over the gulf's oil business. But I believe in general, that
the opportunities opened by knowledge are far more valuable than some improved situation on
the grand chessboard. By definition the loss of wealth from even the gulf oil would translate
into less than the potential value of knowledge.
There is the possibility of peoples free will. They make take freedom to discuss non white
racism, hatred of whites, discrimination in general in society against whites and Jews, and
they may throw it away, and cower in fear some more. But I do not think that is the
situation. Israelis are not able to give speeches on college campuses in Europe, Canada and
even most of America. The white women of the west have been poisoned by this knowledge of
inequality and fear of the violence and ostracization they will face for standing for their
own people, or far less, and being accused of being A racist. The price for their biological
emotions is counted in millions of unformed families.
Frankly, its to hard a test for most white women, who get pressured into dating non
whites, in order to prove they're not racist, with all of its consequences, and its years of
abuse. If white men remain tall and strong, white women, both Jewish and gentile will still
be conquered by the schools, and cut down in massive numbers.
Far better to die on some battlefield by the millions, then in the bedrooms by the
hundreds of millions.
The legitimacy of the schools and the universities are destroyed, the official reason to
go, is to signal that you are A traitor to your people. The police, and courts are on life
support, the military is directionless, the politicians have nothing meaningful to say.
I consider it a blessing that Trump has the option of exposing the Armenian massacre at
the hands of the Muslims. I hope its effect is as far reaching as I imagine and hope. I
believe it is overwhelmingly in the best interests of both our people, and according to the
discourse I believe its time has come. I may be mistaken, even though I am not clear how.
What additional knowledge could be attained in these matters? I pray for the wisdom of our
leaders, and to the awesome power of G-d. In Him I trust.
this committee is responsible for overseeing the Intelligence Community and exposing
abuses. Yet when the IG identified gross abuses in our jurisdiction, you expressed full
faith in the agencies we're supposed to be vigilantly monitoring. and you rejected any
oversight whatsoever of their supposed clean-up efforts.
Nunes's frank letter might have a surprising effect. He has declared open season on
Schiff. It's like the child in the Emperor's New Clothes. Once the cat is out of the bag like
this and "what must not be spoken" gets spoken, it could send shock waves.
There are Democrats on the edge of flipping. When they see the letter, it could have the
effect of crystallizing their decision to leave the Democrat party. They certainly don't want
to be associated with Schiff, the pariah to their own reelection chances.
We are writing today to let you know that we are fed up with all the insanity and
stupidity coming from the democrat party. We have been loyal democrats all our lives, and we
are appalled at the lunacy of the impeachment trial. It's all an out right waste of time that
the democrat Adam Schiff is showing the nation. We did not even watch it because he is an in
your face liar.
What you better understand and know is, many like ourselves are sick and tired of the
unacceptable behavior of the democrat party. We are sick and tired of paying our tax dollars
to pay you and the democrat party that has not done a darn thing for us, the American
People.
We are here to tell you that if you vote for impeachment, you are saying to all us voters
that you are just as stupid and insane to back up with your vote, the highly unfair partisan
impeachment process based on nothing or any real evidence. We do not want anyone that is that
ignorant as our representative.
Do you understand that the leadership in the democrat party has made us all look like
stupid insane idiots and we have seen enough? You must know that if you vote for this fake
impeachment process, WE WILL VOTE YOU OUT! We will vote for any other democrat, or if we have
too, the republican candidate that is running against you.
Please do the right thing not for the democrat party, but for the American people who
voted for you. Get back to the business of America and the American People! This is the
bottom line, if you vote for impeachment, you are out of there. Do not discount our stead
fast position on this issue.
Thank you in advance for your consideration of our request.
The author singles out low interest rates and the possible trade deal with China as the main
factors for this alleged recession-avoidance.
Well, she's wrong, 100% wrong. Her argument sounds even more absurd when you realize the
trade deal has only now being seriously negotiated and is not in fact done yet(and not "since
August") and that the USA's interest rates have been essentially zero or even in negative
territory in real terms since 2009.
The reason the USA still registers relatively high GDP growths (in relation to its First
World vassals) is that it is the financial superpower. The "real economy" in the USA has been
in full stagnation or recession for years now, but Wall Street keeps beating records after
records. That means the USA is suffering a problem of valorisation, i.e. a crisis of
capitalism.
The USA will suffer a major recession soon. Prediction from the real experts forsee it most
probable in 2020-2022. The American elite clearly knows that, and is doing everything in their
reach to avoid that, so this monumental effort can delay it by some years - but it will
come.
There's nothing like wild volatility to destroy the integrity of those high-end bankers and
analysts who are brave enough to make oil price predictions year in and year out.
But the forecasting nightmare doesn't stop them, even at the worst of times.
In the final month of last year, banks and analysts were brave enough to divulge their
predictions for 2019.
At that time, the second year of the OPEC
agreement was coming to a close; the U.S. had
re-imposed sanctions on Iran four months earlier with waiver extensions; and the average
price of a Brent barrel for December was changing hands at $56.50, compared to the month
earlier average of $65.20. WTI averaged $49 in December 2018. OPEC had
agreed to cut production again for 2019.
So who should we look for when it's time to forecast what oil prices will do in 2020? That
depends on their track record the last time around.
Here are some of the best and worst oil price predictions of 2019:
The World Bank
For 2019,
the World Bank was one of the first on the scene to provide its outlook in late 2018.
The Bank said the most important factor for 2019 would be OPEC, specifically the lack of
spare production capacity among OPEC members. This lack of oil production capacity would
provide "limited buffers" should there be a sudden shortfall in the supply of oil "raising the
likelihood of oil price spikes in 2019."
While WB acknowledged that the world was currently in a state of oversupply, it could swing
the other way quickly. In the first month of 2019, the World Bank conservatively predicted that
Brent would average $67 per barrel for the year -- a $2 per barrel decrease from its June 2018
predictions for 2019. The WB was quick to add that the "uncertainty around this forecast is
high."
How did they do? Aside from needlessly worrying the market with OPEC's lack of capacity, it
turns out their prediction was a bit high. The average
price of the Brent barrel in Q1 2019 was $63.30; for Q2 it was $68.30, and Q3 at $61.90.
November's average was $62.70.
Citi
Citi's
forecast for 2019 , also made in December 2018, was more sober-minded, with the bank
predicting that Brent would average $60 for the year. It, too, predicted a volatile market for
the next year, largely because the U.S., Russia, and Saudi Arabia -- the top three oil
producers in the world--all had different views as to what that perfect oil price should be.
The bank also predicted that oil production in the United States would continue to offset much
of what OPEC would cut -- a prediction that turned out to be close to reality: US production
has increased 1.2 million bpd this year -- precisely what OPEC agreed to cut.
How did they do? Not terrible. Its primary range was for Brent to trade between $55 and $65
per barrel--a generous $10 price range. Even with that big range, oil sat above $65 for the
better part of February through May.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML)
Also in mid-December 2018, BAML took a stab at making Brent price
predictions , forecasting that oil would resume its path back up to $70 average in 2019,
with a potential for higher prices in Q2. Similar to Citi and World Bank, BAML said that oil
prices would be volatile.
How did they do? It's hard to argue with the fact that oil indeed appears to be trending
upward, which could be interpreted as "resuming its path back up to $70". And Q2 was in fact
higher, with oil prices actually surpassing $70 for a time in April and May.
However, BAML lost a bit of credibility in our book when it hedged its forecast by saying
that "the only certainty is uncertainty." BAML hedged further in April when it said oil prices
had a higher chance of hitting $100 than what the
market consensus was, due to OPEC supply cuts, a slowdown in US shale, and IMO 2020
regulations.
BAML further watered down its predictions in August when it said oil could
fall to $30 or $40 should China decide to import substantial amounts of oil from Iran,
despite the US sanctions.
The EIA
A month after Citi, WB, and BAML ponied up their predictions, the EIA came out with its own.
Its prediction
for 2019 , provided in its January 2019 Short Term Energy Outlook, was that Brent would
average $61 per barrel. Around this time, specifically at the start of the year, Brent was
trading at $53.80 and WTI was trading at $45.41 .
How did they do? Not half bad. Brent traded at an average of $61.90 for the 3rd quarter
2019, and November's average was $62.70 -- less than $2 off per barrel for a prediction made 11
months ago in a volatile market.
That's it for the predictions made at the start of the year. But other predictions along the
way, armed with a half a year or more of actual data, are noteworthy as well.
FX Empire: Using adaptive dynamic learning (ADL),
FX Empire predicted in July of this year that oil prices would rotate between $47 and $64
between July and October, before falling in November and December to a range between $45 and
$50. FX Empire said it could actually dip below $40 by the end of 2019, or in early 2020.
How did they do? FX Empire's ADL appears to be pretty far off the mark. This CL=F is today
trading at $59.42, nearly $20 higher than it's sub-$40 prediction for the end of the year.
Goldman Sachs' Jeff Currie : In October, Currie, head of Goldman's commodity research,
warned that oil prices could fall as low as $20
per barrel for WTI if oversupply were to result in full storage facilities. With nowhere to
put it, explains Currie, the price of oil would fall dramatically as production would have to
crash. However, crude oil inventories in the United States are not dramatically up, and are
almost even-steven with this time last year, down a total of
1.41 million barrels over the last 50 weeks. Global oil inventories are a different story,
though. In Currie's defense, he did say that there was a less than 50% chance of oil falling
below $20 barrel.
How did they do? By our math, that 50% hedge would have made Goldman correct either way.
IEA : Piggybacking off Goldman's October forecast for the oil-inventory-pocalypse, the IEA's
Fatih Birol said that these low prices would force the US to cut production, resulting in a
price hike once again. In July, the IEA predicted that slowing oil demand would cap oil prices,
and keep them from moving
too much higher. At the time, Brent was trading at $63.01, with WTI trading at
$56.18.
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How did they do? With Brent trading on December 12 at $64.47, the $1.50 increase comfortably
falls within the not-too-much-higher range, so we'd say the IEA's prediction was spot on.
Analyst Poll : In August,
Reuters polled 51 economists and analysts, who thought Brent would average $65.02 in 2019.
At the time, Brent had averaged $65.08, so the $65.02 wasn't stepping out on a long limb.
How did they do? Wisely, the analysts cited the US-China trade dispute and risk of an
economic slowdown as the reason for its new forecast, which was down from $67.47 for the month
before. Still, the price prediction was a bit high.
RBC Capital Markets : RBC's Helima Croft in May suggested that Brent could top
$80 over the summer due to Iranian tensions.
How did they do? RBC got it partially right. Iran tensions did indeed escalate. Iran
repeatedly made threats to close Hormuz, drone strikes attacked Saudi Aramco's oil
infrastructure, and Iran seized a British oil tanker and held onto it for months. Still, prices
didn't get anywhere near $80. But this isn't your daddy's oil market. A year or two ago,
tensions in the Middle East -- especially ones that are more than just threats, would have sent
oil prices soaring. But the market is today permanently spooked with the trade war negotiations
with China and slow oil demand growth, meaning these geopolitical risks no longer pack the same
punch.
Iran : In June, a top military aide to Iran's Supreme Leader
issued a prediction which was really more of a warning: that the first bullet fired in the
Persian Gulf would push oil prices above $100 per barrel. At the time, oil was trading at
$61.67.
How did they do? Not well. Things did heat up in the Gulf, and bullets -- many of them --
have been fired over the last month after major fuel protests in Iran. There were also drone strikes over
Saudi Arabia that did significant damage to oil infrastructure, which took offline over 5
million bpd. Still, oil got nowhere near $100.
Eurasia Group : Henry Rome, a senior analyst at political risk consultancy Eurasia Group,
agreed that these same Iranian tensions could push prices above $100, and a major confrontation
with Iran "would likely" send prices above $150.
How did they do? Even worse than Khamenei's military aide.
WSJ Poll: At the end of April, a week or so after the US announced that it would not extend
the waivers to buyers of sanctioned Iranian oil, WSJ-polled analysts expected Brent to
average $70 per barrel in 2019 -- an increase of $2 per barrel from its previous poll a
month earlier.
How did they do? Oil was already trading at $70 at the time of their prediction, so it
wasn't really a huge leap of faith at the time. Still, prices failed to get any higher than
that for the remainder of the year, rendering their prediction in the far-too-high
category.
We have been good democrats all our lives. Voted for Clinton, and Obama twice. We all voted
for you in the last election, but after watching this idiocy in the fake impeachment trial, and
seeing the democrat party rapidly turning towards out right communism, which is actually
anti-American, we will no longer vote for any democrats.
Our family is fed up and sick and tired of you taking the taxes we pay and seeing you do
absolutely nothing for us, or our country. We quit! The undersigned do hereby declare that we
no longer choose to vote for you and the witch hunting party, the criminal democrat party of
which you belong. You are all alike. Liars and deceivers. No longer do we wish to be associated
or looked on as accomplices in the democrat criminal communist party that does not care about
the individual voter, their family, or the American People that voted for you.
We the American people that voted for you, are not you. You no longer represent We, the
People. We do not want to be known as criminals, or those who associate with, and empower you
reprobates. We no longer support the democrat party that wastes so much time and taxpayer money
doing nothing good for us. Making up lies to impeach a president is not good. It's
criminal!
The malfeasance of the democrat party, and out right lies and determination to focus only on
impeaching the president for no good justifiable reason is filthy, a farce, and very
embarrassing. We want no part of it anymore. All of you have become a bunch of despicable,
colluding criminals. Corrupt to the core, and you only have one thing on your mind. It is not
we, the voters. It is only the continued hateful idiocy of fake hearings, the impeachment hoax
like the Russia hoax was, and big fat lies to drag out the clock so the real criminals that
everybody knows are criminals get away with their crimes, corruptions, and their treasonous
acts against America and the People of Conscious.
We therefore declare that we will be voting for any republican running against you, because
you are an associate of the criminal democrats that are now communists. We and our families are
not criminals, communist, nor will we ever again be associated with what you and they do. We
now disavow the criminal democrat party of liars and deceivers that do nothing for we
Americans. We disavow you, congressman/woman!
They will gingerly exchange the regulated EU economy for the freewheeling American economy - and hasn't that economy worked
so well for American workers.
If so, that's a good thing, for the regulated EU economy has treated Britons and Europeans even worse. The EU regulations, treaties
and policies are overall highly destructive to workers, massive welfare for the rich. What remains of European Social Democracy and
welfare states obscure the fact that US workers are actually treated better by their nation's fundamental economic policies and structures.
Europe as a whole is MORE unequal, more of a class society than the USA, not less.
Brexit is a good thing, a leftist, progressive policy. It's jumping completely off the hot stove, not into the fire. The British,
who preferred Labour's other policies, felt that the merits of Brexit outweighed all the other negatives of the Tories. They might
be right.
The release of Justice Department
Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report, which shows that the Democrats, media, and FBI
lied about not interfering in an election, will be a historian's marker for how a decent nation
fooled itself into self-harm . Forget about foreigners influencing our elections; it was
us.
The Horowitz Report is being played by the media for its conclusion: that the FBI's intel op
run against the Trump campaign was not politically motivated and thus "legal."
That covers one page of the 476-page document, but because it fits with the
Democratic/mainstream media narrative that Trump is a liar, the rest has been ignored.
"The rest," of course, is a detailed description of America's domestic intelligence
apparatus, aided by its overseas intelligence apparatus, and assisted by its Five Eyes allies'
intelligence apparatuses. And the conclusion is that they unleashed a full-spectrum spying
campaign against a presidential candidate in order to influence an election, and when that
failed, they tried to delegitimize a president.
We learn from the Horowitz Report that it was an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, a
man with ties to his own nation's intel services and
the
Clinton Foundation, who set up a meeting with Trump staffer George Papadopoulos, creating
the necessary first bit of info to set the plan in motion. We find the FBI exaggerating,
falsifying, and committing wicked sins of omission to buffalo the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) courts into approving electronic surveillance on Team Trump to overtly
or inadvertently monitor the
communications of Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, Jeff
Sessions, Steve Bannon, Rick Gates, Trump transition staffers, and likely Trump himself.
Trump officials were also monitored by British
GCHQ , the information shared with their NSA partners, a piece of all this still not fully
public.
We learn that the FBI greedily consumed the Steele Dossier, opposition "research" bought by
the Clinton campaign to smear Trump with allegations of sex parties and pee tapes. Most
notoriously, the dossier claims he was a Russian plant, a
Manchurian Candidate , owned by Kremlin intelligence through a combination of treats (land
deals in Moscow) and threats ( kompromat over Trump's evil sexual appetites). The Horowitz
Report makes clear the FBI knew the Dossier was bunk, hid that conclusion from the FISA court,
and purposefully lied to the FISA court in claiming that the Dossier was backed up by
investigative news reports, which themselves were secretly based on the Dossier. The FBI knew
Steele had created a classic intel officer's
information loop , secretly becoming his own
corroborating source, and gleefully looked the other way because it supported his
goals.
Horowitz contradicts media claims that the Dossier was a small part of the case presented to
the FISA court. He finds that it was "central and essential." And it was garbage: "factual
assertions relied upon in the first [FISA] application targeting Carter Page were inaccurate,
incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in
its possession at the time the application was filed." One of Steele's primary sources, tracked
down by FBI, said Steele had
misreported several of the most troubling allegations of potential Trump blackmail and campaign
collusion.
We find human dangles, what Lisa Page
referred to as "our OCONUS lures" (OCONUS is spook-speak for O utside CON tinental US ) in
the form of a shady Maltese academic, Joseph Mifsud, who himself has deep ties to multiple U.S.
intel agencies and the Pentagon, paying Trump staffers for nothing speeches to buy access to
them. We find a female FBI undercover agent inserted into social situations with a Trump
staffer (pillow talk is always a spy's best friend). It becomes clear the FBI sought to
manufacture a foreign
counterintelligence threat as an excuse to unleash its surveillance tools against the Trump
campaign.
We learn that Trump staffer Carter Page, while under FBI surveillance, was actually
working for the CIA in Russia. The FBI was told this repeatedly , yet it never
reported it to the FISA court while seeking approval for its secret investigation of Page. An
FBI lawyer even doctored an email to hide the fact that Page was working for the Agency and not
the Russians; it was that weak a case. The Horowitz Report went on to find "at least 17
significant errors or omissions" concerning FBI efforts to obtain FISA warrants against Page
alone. California Congressman Devin Nunes raised these points almost two years ago in a
memo the MSM widely discredited, even though we now know it was basically true and
profoundly prescient.
Page was a nobody with nothing, but the FBI needed him. Horowitz explains that agents
"believed at the time they approached the decision point on a second FISA renewal that, based
upon the evidence already collected, Carter Page was a distraction in the investigation, not a
key player in the Trump campaign, and was not critical to the overarching investigation." They
renewed the warrants anyway, three times, largely due to their value under the "
two hop " rule. The FBI can extend surveillance two hops from its target, so if Carter Page
called Michael Flynn who called Trump, all of those calls are
legally open to monitoring. Page was a handy little bug.
Carter Page was never charged with any crime. He was blown into a big deal only by the
fictional Steele Dossier, an excuse for the FBI to electronically surveil the Trump
campaign.
When Trump was elected, the uber-lie that he was dirty with Russia was leaked to the press
most likely by James Comey and John Brennan in January 2017 (not covered in the Horowitz
Report), and a process, which is still ongoing, tying the president to a foreign power, began.
"With Trump, All Roads Lead to Moscow,"
writes the New York Times even today , long after both the Mueller Report and now the
Horowitz Report say unambiguously otherwise. "Monday's congressional hearing and the inspector
general's report tell a similar story," bleats the Times , when in fact the long read of both
says precisely the opposite.
Michael Horowitz, the author of this current report, should be a familiar name. In January
2017, he opened his probe into the FBI's Clinton email investigation. In a damning passage,
that 568-page report
found it "extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his
superiors for the admitted purpose of preventing them from telling him not to make the
statement, and to instruct his subordinates in the FBI to do the same. By departing so clearly
and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the
perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice."
Horowitz's Clinton report also criticizes FBI agents and illicit lovers Peter Strzok and
Lisa Page, who exchanged texts disparaging Trump before moving from the Clinton email probe to
the Russiagate investigation. Those texts "brought discredit" to the FBI and sowed public
doubt. They included one exchange reading, "Page: "[Trump's] not ever going to become
president, right? Strzok: "No. No he's not. We'll stop it."
If after reading the Horowitz Report you want to focus only on its page one statement that
the FBI did not act illegally, you must in turn focus on what is "legal" in America. If you
want to follow the headlines saying Trump was proven wrong when he claimed his campaign was
spied upon, you really do need to look up that word in a dictionary and compare it to the
tangle of surveillance, foreign government agents, undercover operatives, and payoffs that
Horowitz details.
It is very difficult to collect my thoughts into something coherent after four hours sleep
in the last 48 hours, but these are heads of key issues to be developed later.
I have no doubt that the Johnson government will very quickly become the most unpopular in
UK political history. The ultra-hard Brexit he is pushing will not be the panacea which the
deluded anticipate. It will have a negative economic impact felt most keenly in the remaining
industry of the Midlands and North East of England. Deregulation will worsen conditions for
those fortunate enough to have employment, as will further benefits squeezes. Immigration will
not in practice reduce; what will reduce are the rights and conditions for the immigrants.
Decaying, left-behind towns will moulder further. The fishing industry will very quickly be
sold down the river in trade negotiations with the EU – access to fishing (and most of
the UK fishing grounds are Scottish) is one of the few decent offers Boris has to make to the
EU in seeking market access. His Brexit deal will take years and be overwhelmingly fashioned to
benefit the City of London.
There is zero chance the Conservatives will employ a sizeable number of extra nurses: they
just will not be prepared to put in the money. They will employ more policemen. In a couple of
years time they will need them for widespread riots. They will not build any significant
portion of the hospitals or other infrastructure they promised. They most certainly will do
nothing effective about climate change. These were simply dishonest promises. The NHS will
continue to crumble with more and more of its service provision contracted out, and more and
more of its money going into private shareholders' pockets (including many Tory MPs).
The disillusionment will be on the same scale as Johnson's bombastic promises. The
Establishment are not stupid and realise there will be an anti-Tory reaction. Their major
effort will therefore be to change Labour back into a party supporting neo-liberal economic
policy and neo-conservative foreign (or rather war) policy. They will want to be quite certain
that, having seen off the Labour Party's popular European style social democratic programme
with Brexit anti-immigrant fervour, the electorate have no effective non-right wing choice at
the next election, just like in the Blair years.
To that end, every Blairite horror has been resurrected already by the BBC to tell us that
the Labour Party must now move right – McNicol, McTernan, Campbell, Hazarayika and many
more, not to mention the platforms given to Caroline Flint, Ruth Smeeth and John Mann. The most
important immediate fight for radicals in England is to maintain Labour as a mainstream
European social democratic party and resist its reversion to a Clinton style right wing ultra
capitalist party. Whether that is possible depends how many of the Momentum generation lose
heart and quit.
Northern Ireland is perhaps the most important story of this election, with a seismic shift
in a net gain of two seats in Belfast from the Unionists, plus the replacement of a unionist
independent by the Alliance Party. Irish reunification is now very much on the agenda. The
largesse to the DUP will be cut off now Boris does not need them.
For me personally, Scotland is the most important development of all. A stunning result for
the SNP. The SNP result gave them a bigger voter share in Scotland than the Tories got in the
UK. So if Johnson got a "stonking mandate for Brexit", as he just claimed in his private school
idiom, the SNP got a "stonking mandate" for Independence.
I hope the SNP learnt the lesson that by being much more upfront about Independence than in
the disastrous "don't mention Independence" election of 2017, the SNP got spectacularly better
results.
I refrained from criticising the SNP leadership during the campaign, even to the extent of
not supporting my friend Stu Campbell when he was criticised for doing so (and I did advise him
to wait until after election day). But I can say now that the election events, which are
perfect for promoting Independence, are not necessarily welcome to the gradualists in the SNP.
A "stonking mandate" for Independence and a brutal Johnson government treating Scotland with
total disrespect leaves no room for hedge or haver. The SNP needs to strike now, within weeks
not months, to organise a new Independence referendum with or without Westminster
agreement.
If we truly believe Westminster has no right to block Scottish democracy, we need urgently
to act to that effect and not just pretend to believe it. Now the election is over, I will
state my genuine belief there is a political class in the SNP, Including a minority but
significant portion of elected politicians, office holders and staff, who are very happy with
their fat living from the devolution settlement and who view any striking out for Independence
as a potential threat to their personal income.
You will hear from these people we should wait for EU trade negotiations, for a decision on
a section 30, for lengthy and complicated court cases, or any other excuse to maintain the
status quo, rather than move their well=paid arses for Independence. But the emergency of the
empowered Johnson government, and the new mandate from the Scottish electorate, require
immediate and resolute action. We need to organise an Independence referendum with or without
Westminster permission, and if successful go straight for UDI. If the referendum is blocked,
straight UDI it is, based on the four successive election victory mandates.
With this large Tory majority, there is nothing the SNP MPs can in practice achieve against
Westminster. We should now withdraw our MPs from the Westminster Parliament and take all
actions to paralyse the union. This is how the Irish achieved Independence. We will never get
Independence by asking Boris Johnson nicely. Anyone who claims to believe otherwise is a fool
or a charlatan.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the
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article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Money quote: "Johnson will have to work superhard on this if he is to re-create not the
Thatcher coalition but the Disraeli nation. That's what he means when he talks about "One Nation
Conservatism." That was Disraeli's reformist conservatism of the 19th century, a somewhat
protectionist, supremely patriotic alliance between the conservative elites and the ordinary man
and woman. It will take a huge amount of charm and policy persistence to cement that coalition if
it is to last more than one election. But if Boris pulls that off, he will have found a new
formula designed to kill off far-right populism, while forcing the left to regroup."
Notable quotes:
"... But just as important, he moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy ..."
Brexit is an eruption of English nationalism, and the Tories are now, under that shambling
parody of a drunk racist English aristo, Johnson, an English nationalist party.
IMHO this is highly questionable statement. Brexit is a form of protest against neoliberal
globalization. The fact that is colored with nationalism is the secondary effect/factor:
rejection of neoliberalism is almost always colored in either nationalist rhetoric, or Marxist
rhetoric.
Here are some quotes from paleoconservative analysis of the elections taken from two recent
articles:
While I do not share their enthusiasm about "Red Tories" rule in the UK, and the bright
future for "Trumpism without Trump" movement in the USA, they IMHO provide some interesting
insights into paleoconservatives view on the British elections results and elements of social
protest that led to them:
[AS] It is clearer and clearer to me that the wholesale adoption of critical race, gender,
and queer theory on the left makes normal people wonder what on earth they're talking about
and which dictionary they are using. The white working classes are privileged? A woman can
have a penis? In the end, the dogma is so crazy, and the language so bizarre, these natural
left voters decided to listen to someone who
does actually speak their language , even if in an absurdly plummy accent.
[AS] But just as important, he moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on
public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the
far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy . ... This is
Trumpism without Trump. A conservative future without an ineffective and polarizing nutjob at
the heart of it. Unlike Trump, he will stop E.U. mass migration, and pass a new immigration
system, based on the Australian model. Unlike Trump, he will focus tax cuts on the working
poor, not the decadent rich. Unlike Trump, he will stop E.U. mass migration, and pass a new
immigration system, based on the Australian model. Unlike Trump, he will focus tax cuts on
the working poor, not the decadent rich. It's very much the same movement of left-behind
people expressing their views on the same issues, who, tragically, put their trust in Trump.
What we've seen is how tenacious a voting bloc that now is, which is why Trumpism is here to
stay. If we could only get rid of the human cancer at the heart of it.
[AS] Trump has bollixed it up, of course. He ran on Johnson's platform but gave almost all
his tax cuts to the extremely wealthy, while Johnson will cut taxes on the poor. Trump talks
a big game on immigration but has been unable to get any real change in the system out of
Congress. Johnson now has a big majority to pass a new immigration bill, with Parliament in
his control, which makes the task much easier. Trump is flamingly incompetent and unable to
understand his constitutional role. Boris will assemble a competent team, with Michael Gove
as his CEO, and Dom Cummings as strategist.
[AS] If Johnson succeeds, he'll have unveiled a new formula for the Western right: Make no
apologies for your own country and culture; toughen immigration laws; increase public
spending on the poor and on those who are "just about managing"; increase taxes on the very
rich and redistribute to the poor; focus on manufacturing and new housing; ignore the woke;
and fight climate change as the Tories are (or risk losing a generation of support).
[RD] I have no idea why the Republicans are so damned silent on wokeness, including the
transgender madness. No doubt about it, the American people have accepted gay marriage and
gay rights, broadly. But the Left will not accept this victory in the culture war. They
cannot help bouncing the rubble, and driving people farther than they are willing to go, or
that they should have to go. It's the elites -- and not just academic elites. Every week I
get at least two e-mails from readers sending me examples of transgender wokeness taking over
their professions -- especially big business. People hate this pronoun crap, but nobody dares
to speak out against it, because they are afraid of being doxxed, cancelled, or at least
marginalized in the workplace.
[RD] My friend said (I paraphrase):
"Can you blame people for not answering pollsters' questions? Everybody is told all the
time that the things they believe, and the things they worry about, are backwards and
bigoted. They have learned to keep it to themselves. It's the same thing here. I hate
Donald Trump, but I'm probably going to end up voting for him, because at least he doesn't
hate my sons. I want a good future for every child -- black, Latino, white, all of them --
but the Left thinks my sons are what's wrong with the world
[RD] Boris (and Sully) style Toryism is better than nothing, isn't it? As a general rule,
in this emerging post-Christian social and political order, we conservative Christians had
better not let the unachievable perfect be the enemy of the common-sense good enough.
We have been good democrats all our lives. Voted for Clinton, and Obama twice. We all voted
for you in the last election, but after watching this idiocy in the fake impeachment trial, and
seeing the democrat party rapidly turning towards out right communism, which is actually
anti-American, we will no longer vote for any democrats.
Our family is fed up and sick and tired of you taking the taxes we pay and seeing you do
absolutely nothing for us, or our country. We quit! The undersigned do hereby declare that we
no longer choose to vote for you and the witch hunting party, the criminal democrat party of
which you belong. You are all alike. Liars and deceivers. No longer do we wish to be associated
or looked on as accomplices in the democrat criminal communist party that does not care about
the individual voter, their family, or the American People that voted for you.
We the American people that voted for you, are not you. You no longer represent We, the
People. We do not want to be known as criminals, or those who associate with, and empower you
reprobates. We no longer support the democrat party that wastes so much time and taxpayer money
doing nothing good for us. Making up lies to impeach a president is not good. It's
criminal!
The malfeasance of the democrat party, and out right lies and determination to focus only on
impeaching the president for no good justifiable reason is filthy, a farce, and very
embarrassing. We want no part of it anymore. All of you have become a bunch of despicable,
colluding criminals. Corrupt to the core, and you only have one thing on your mind. It is not
we, the voters. It is only the continued hateful idiocy of fake hearings, the impeachment hoax
like the Russia hoax was, and big fat lies to drag out the clock so the real criminals that
everybody knows are criminals get away with their crimes, corruptions, and their treasonous
acts against America and the People of Conscious.
We therefore declare that we will be voting for any republican running against you, because
you are an associate of the criminal democrats that are now communists. We and our families are
not criminals, communist, nor will we ever again be associated with what you and they do. We
now disavow the criminal democrat party of liars and deceivers that do nothing for we
Americans. We disavow you, congressman/woman!
We will see... I am skeptical about idea that Brennan will be indicted.
But this article supports the idea that impeachment was a counterattack of Brannan faction of CIA and Clinton mafia against
Barr and Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... Former CIA officer and counter-intelligence expert Kevin Shipp says that former Obama Administration Attorney General (AG) Eric Holder gave a big Deep State panic signal when he wrote in an Op-Ed last week in the Washington Post trashing current AG William Barr and his top prosecutor John Durham ..."
"... We have to understand it was Eric Holder that Barack Obama used to target the heads of corporations that spoke out publicly about Barack Obama. We know Holder was held in 'Contempt of Congress.' He spied on AP reporters, ran guns to drug cartels and blacked out the information. He spied on over a hundred journalists, and on and on we go... ..."
"... when Holder comes out and puts out this bombshell in the Washington Post, which is another indication that indictments are coming. John Brennan, former Obama Administration CIA Director, is going to be at the top of the list. " ..."
"... during the entire Trump Presidency, the mainstream media (MSM) has operated as a propaganda arm of the Deep State and the Democrats ..."
"... Shipp says the hoax of Russia collusion and the impeachment sham of President Trump is distracting us from other very big problems such as the extreme debt the country and the world is facing . Shipp says, ..."
Former CIA officer and counter-intelligence expert Kevin Shipp says that former Obama
Administration Attorney General (AG) Eric Holder gave a big Deep State panic signal when he
wrote in an Op-Ed last week in the Washington Post trashing current AG William Barr and his top
prosecutor John Durham. Shipp explains,
"This is very significant. We all remember that Holder was Obama's right hand man. Eric
Holder was Barack Obama's enforcer. The fact that Holder comes out this quickly after the
Inspector General (IG) Horowitz Report comes out... and makes this veiled threat against
Durham's reputation. The fact that Eric Holder came out and made this statement is a clear
indication to me they are running scared.
We have to understand it was Eric Holder that Barack Obama used to target the heads of
corporations that spoke out publicly about Barack Obama. We know Holder was held in 'Contempt
of Congress.' He spied on AP reporters, ran guns to drug cartels and blacked out the
information. He spied on over a hundred journalists, and on and on we go...
They (Deep State) are convinced there are going to be indictments. Secondly, there is AG
Barr's outrage over (IG) Horowitz's report and what it did not do. He made statements that
there was spying and actions by government officials that need to be criminally looked into.
Barr's outrage over this shows me that there are going to be indictments, and that he is
taking this seriously. Again, when Holder comes out and puts out this bombshell in the
Washington Post, which is another indication that indictments are coming. John Brennan,
former Obama Administration CIA Director, is going to be at the top of the list. "
Shipp says during the entire Trump Presidency, the mainstream media (MSM) has operated as a
propaganda arm of the Deep State and the Democrats . Shipp contends,
"They put these stories out intentionally because they are creating their own story, and
that is what the propaganda mainstream media does. It creates its own story...
They want to frame their latest story that there really wasn't any spying on Trump. That's
what FISA warrants and applications are all about. They are all about spying ."
Shipp thinks this will be a big nail in the coffin of the MSM. Shipp says, "The mainstream
media will never come back from this..."
"...because finally, through shows like this and others, the real information is coming
out as to what the mainstream media has done . At the top of that list is the New York Times,
the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC...
What they did is they created the Russia collusion story as if it was reality, as if it
was real. That is part of the procedure in doing this. Then, they invented the evidence, and
that was the Steele Dossier. They portrayed this as evidence to create this false narrative.
Then they sent this story out to each outlet, and all repeat the same story over and over and
over again knowing the more they repeat it, the more people were going to believe it. Then,
the FBI leaked information to the mainstream media. The FBI took that information leaked to
the media and used their stories as evidence. Brennan leaked the dossier to the mainstream
media as part of this whole machine."
Shipp says the hoax of Russia collusion and the impeachment sham of President Trump is
distracting us from other very big problems such as the extreme debt the country and the world
is facing . Shipp says,
"Trump inherited a financial monster that was not his doing. When he was sworn into
office, it already existed. It is very serious, and I think now or very soon the U.S.
government will not be able to afford the interest on the national debt, much less paying off
the debt itself."
It is reported that central banks are buying record amounts of gold, and even Goldman Sachs
is telling its clients to buy the yellow metal. Shipp says,
" This is a solid indicator that we are headed for the financial rapids with Goldman Sachs
especially. Goldman Sachs is a global bank, and it's one of the main banks in the United
States. The fact that Sachs and others are building up gold reserves is a clear indication
that they expect a financial downturn, to put it mildly, that is coming. "
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with former CIA Officer and whistleblower Kevin Shipp.
I kinda think that everyone is holding off to see if Trump gets re-elected.
If he does then there will be indictments, jail time, and a real cleaning of the
house.
The guys in the middle of this investigation depose the "liberal" old guard and offer
sacrifices to their own "conservative" god of filth. Same Mammon, just a different order of
worship.
If he doesn't get re-elected then the guys that are investigating this can just slink back
into the current slime and survive in some basic way.
I have seen this dynamic when companies merge as equals. Everybody is afraid to act
because the stakes are so high. It's a chess game played by ruthless cowards.
With the Hong Kong protests showing no sign of letting up, a new narrative has emerged; that
anti-government activists are "
sliding into terrorism with home-made bombs" designed to inflict mass casualties.
On Sunday, Hong Kong police reported that they foiled a second bomb plot in under a week -
arresting three men who were allegedly testing home-made devices and chemicals in a secluded
area, according to
SCMP .
"If this keeps up, China will be virtually forced to shut down the protests - all in the
name of fighting terrorism."
well, I had argued all along that the strategy of the incremental escalation of violence,
the destruction of public infrastructure, both well documented regime change strategies, were
designed to ignite a civil war and force Mainland intervention.
This could then be used as an excuse for the usual embargo tactics. The construction of a
remote detonated bomb is highly complex and as you will recall from Islamic terrorism, bomb
makers are highly skilled.
For this skill to suddenly materialise in HK suggests intelligence agents at work. Hong
Kong has real problems, all economic, but their 5 demands don't call for economic remedies,
indeed they call for things that will never happen.
The leaders of the protests, Josh Wong, Deniese Ho and others are trained by NED and other
agencies to sow discord in what was otherwise a peaceful community.
There was a BBC documentary on utube about HK activists being trained at the NED/Soros
Oslo Freedom forum 2014 but it seems to have been memoryholed in the last few days.
"If this keeps up, China will be virtually forced to shut down the protests..."
Total nonsense. At this point if people in HK started blowing themselves up, the only thing
to pop in Beijing will be some champagne bottles. If Hong Kong slowly destroys itself,
Beijing will just contentedly watch from the sidelines as all that banking business goes to
Shanghai, Macao or across the river to Shenzhen.
In case of Page it was much worse the Glenn Greenwald claims. The most probably scenario
that he was directed to join Trump compain and then to contact Russian government so that this
false flag operatin can be used for establishing surveillance. Why they need to establish
surveillance on CIA/FBI informant? Because he called people they really wanted to survail.
Just as was true when the Mueller investigation closed
without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia over the
2016 election, Wednesday's issuance of the long-waited report from the
Department of Justice's Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives
from the U.S. media were utter
frauds .
Before evaluating the media component of this scandal, the FBI's gross abuse of its power
– its serial deceit – is so grave and manifest that it requires little effort to
demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI –
in order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter
Page during the 2016 election – manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating
evidence, and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.
If you don't consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in
order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major
scandal, what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a
building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials
with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because
that's what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited
police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert
democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.
In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or
hide this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It's brimming with
proof of FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something
that was not true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an
agent of the Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications
surveilled.
Just a few excerpts from the report should suffice to end any debate for rational persons
about how damning it is. The focus of the first part of the IG Report was on the warrants
obtained by the DOJ, at the behest of the FBI, to spy on Carter Page on the grounds that
there was probable cause to believe he was an agent of the Russian government. That Page was
a Kremlin agent was a widely disseminated media claim – typically asserted as fact even
though it had no evidence. As a result of this media narrative, the Mueller investigation
examined these widespread accusations yet concluded that "the investigation did not establish
that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016
presidential election."
The IG Report went much further, documenting a multitude of lies and misrepresentations by
the FBI to deceive the FISA court into believing that probable cause existed to believe Page
was a Kremlin agent. The first FISA warrant to spy on Page was obtained during the 2016
election, after Page had left the Trump campaign but weeks before the election was to be
held.
About the warrant application submitted regarding Page, the IG Report, in its own words,
"found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure
that all factual statements in a FISA application are 'scrupulously accurate.'" Specifically,
"we identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA
application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based
upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed."
It's vital to reiterate this because of its gravity: we identified multiple instances in
which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate,
incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had
in its possession at the time the application was filed.
The specifics cited by the IG Report are even more damning. Specifically, "based upon the
information known to the FBI in October 2016, the first application contained [] seven
significant inaccuracies and omissions." Among those "significant inaccuracies and
omissions": the FBI concealed that Page had been working with the CIA in connection with his
dealings with Russia and had notified CIA case managers of at least some of those contacts
after he was "approved as an 'operational contact'" with Russia; the FBI lied about both the
timing and substance of Page's relationship with the CIA; vastly overstated the value and
corroboration of Steele's prior work for the U.S. Government to make him appear more credible
than he was; and concealed from the court serious reasons to doubt the reliability of
Steele's key source.
... ... ..
Among the most significant new acts of deceit was that the FBI "omitted the fact that
Steele's Primary Subsource, who the FBI found credible, had made statements in January 2017
raising significant questions about the reliability of allegations included in the FISA
applications, including, for example, that he/she did not recall any discussion with Person 1
concerning Wikileaks and there was 'nothing bad' about the communications between the Kremlin
and the Trump team, and that he/she did not report to Steele in July 2016 that Page had met
with Sechin."
In other words, Steele's own key source told the FBI that Steele was lying about what the
source said: an obviously critical fact that the FBI simply concealed from the FISA court
because it knew how devastating that would be to being able to continue to spy on Page. As
the Report put it, "among the most serious of the 10 additional errors we found in the
renewal applications was the FBI's failure to advise [DOJ] or the court of the
inconsistences, described in detail in Chapter Six, between Steele and his Primary Sub-source
on the reporting relied upon in the FISA applications."
The IG Report also found that the FBI hid key information from the court about Steele's
motives: for instance, it "omitted information obtained from [Bruce] Ohr about Steele and his
election reporting, including that (1) Steele's reporting was going to Clinton's presidential
campaign and others, (2) [Fusion GPS's Glenn] Simpson was paying Steele to discuss his
reporting with the media, and (3) Steele was "desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and
was passionate about him not being the U.S. President."
If it does not bother you to learn that the FBI repeatedly and deliberately deceived the
FISA court into granting it permission to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a
presidential campaign, then it is virtually certain that you are either someone with no
principles, someone who cares only about partisan advantage and nothing about basic civil
liberties and the rule of law, or both. There is simply no way for anyone of good faith to
read this IG Report and reach any conclusion other than that this is yet another instance of
the FBI abusing its power in severe ways to subvert and undermine U.S. democracy. If you
don't care about that, what do you care about?
* * * * *
But the revelations of the IG Report are not merely a massive FBI scandal. They are also a
massive media scandal, because they reveal that so much of what the U.S. media has
authoritatively claimed about all of these matters for more than two years is completely
false.
Ever since Trump's inauguration, a handful of commentators and journalists – I'm
included among them – have been sounding the alarm about the highly dangerous trend of
news outlets not merely repeating the mistake of the Iraq War by blindly relying on the
claims of security state agents but, far worse, now employing them in their newsrooms to
shape the news. As Politico's media writer Jack Shafer wrote in 2018, in
an article entitled "The Spies Who Came Into the TV Studio" :
In the old days, America's top spies would complete their tenures at the CIA or one of
the other Washington puzzle palaces and segue to more ordinary pursuits. Some wrote
their memoirs . One
ran for president . Another died a few months after
surrendering his post. But today's national-security establishment retiree has a different
game plan. After so many years of brawling in the shadows, he yearns for a second,
lucrative career in the public eye. He takes a crash course in speaking in soundbites,
refreshes his wardrobe and signs a TV news contract. Then, several times a week, waits for
a network limousine to shuttle him to the broadcast news studios where, after a light
dusting of foundation and a spritz of hairspray, he takes a supporting role in the anchors'
nighttime shows. . . .
[T]he downside of outsourcing national security coverage to the TV spies is obvious.
They aren't in the business of breaking news or uncovering secrets. Their first loyalty --
and this is no slam -- is to the agency from which they hail. Imagine a TV network covering
the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin
to appreciate the current peculiarities.
In a perfect television world, the networks would retire the retired spooks from their
payrolls and reallocate those sums to the hiring of independent reporters to cover the
national security beat. Let the TV spies become unpaid anonymous sources because when you
get down to it, TV spies don't want to make news -- they just want to talk about it.
It's long been the case that CIA, FBI and NSA operatives tried to infiltrate and shape
domestic news, but they at least had the decency to do it clandestinely. In 2008, the New
York Times' David Barstow
won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing a secret Pentagon
program in which retired Generals and other security state agents would get hired as
commentators and analysts and then – unbeknownst to their networks – coordinate
their messaging to ensure that domestic news was being shaped by the propaganda of the
military and intelligence communities.
But now it's all out in the open. It's virtually impossible to turn on MSNBC or CNN
without being bombarded with former Generals, CIA operatives, FBI agents and NSA officials
who now work for those networks as commentators and, increasingly, as reporters.
Congrats to my friend @joshscampbell , CNN's newest
national Correspondent. His passion for going where the news is and covering important
stories will continue to benefit viewers. pic.twitter.com/j49k0KOzNj
The past three years of "Russiagate" reporting – for which U.S. journalists have
lavished themselves with Pulitzers and other prizes despite a
multitude of embarrassing and dangerous errors about the Grave Russian Threat – has
relied almost exclusively on anonymous, uncorroborated claims from Deep State operatives (and
yes, that's a term that fully applies to the U.S.). The few exceptions are when these
networks feature former high-level security state operatives on camera to spread their false
propaganda, as in this enduringly humiliating instance:
John Brennan has a lot to answer for -- going before the American public for months,
cloaked with CIA authority and openly suggesting he's got secret info, and repeatedly
turning in performances like this. pic.twitter.com/EziCxy9FVQ
All of this has meant that U.S. discourse on these national security questions is shaped
almost entirely by the very agencies that are trained to lie: the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon,
the FBI. And their lying has been highly effective.
For years, we were told by the nation's leading national security reporters something that
was blatantly false: that the FBI's warrants to spy on Carter Page were not based on the
Steele Dossier. GOP Congressman Devin Nunes was
widely vilified and
mocked by the super-smart DC national security reporters for issuing a
report claiming that this was the case. The Nunes memo in essence claimed what the IG
Report has corroborated: that embedded within the FBI's efforts to obtain FISA court
authorization to spy on Carter Page was a series of misrepresentations, falsehoods and
concealment of key evidence:
As the Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi – one of the few left/liberal journalists with
the courage and integrity to dissent from the DNC/MSNBC script on these issues – put it
in
a detailed article :
"Democrats are not going to want to hear this, since conventional wisdom says former
House Intelligence chief Devin Nunes is a conspiratorial evildoer, but the Horowitz report
ratifies the major claims of the infamous '
Nunes memo .'"
That the Page warrant was based on the Steele Dossier was something that the media
servants of the FBI and CIA rushed to deny. Did they have any evidence for those denials?
That would be hard to believe, given that the FISA warrant applications are highly
classified. It seems far more likely that – as usual – they were just repeating
what the FBI and CIA (and the pathologically dishonest Rep. Adam Schiff) told them to say,
like the good and loyal puppets that they are. But either way, what they kept telling the
public – in highly definitive tones – was completely false, as we now know from
the IG Report:
Yes. I am telling you the dossier was not used as the basis for a FISA warrant on Carter
Page.
Over and over, the IG Report makes clear that, contrary to these denials, the Steele
Dossier was indeed crucial to the Page eavesdropping warrant. "We determined that the
Crossfire Hurricane team's receipt of Steele's election reporting on September 19, 2016
played a central and essential role in the FBI's and Department's decision to seek the FISA
order," the IG Report explained. A central and essential role .
Just compare the pompous denials from so many U.S. national security reporters at the
nation's leading news outlets – that the Page warrant was not based on the Steele
Dossier – to the actual truth that we now know :
"in support of the fourth element in the FISA application-Carter Page's alleged
coordination with the Russian government on 2016 U.S. presidential election activities, the
application relied entirely on the following information from Steele Reports 80, 94, 95,
and 102″ (emphasis added).
Indeed, it was the Steele Dossier that led FBI leadership, including Director James Comey
and Deputy Diretor Andrew McCabe, to approve the warrant application in the first place
despite concerns raised by other agents that the information was unreliable. Explains the IG
Report:
FBI leadership supported relying on Steele's reporting to seek a FISA order on Page
after being advised of, and giving consideration to, concerns expressed by Stuart Evans,
then NSD's Deputy Assistant Attorney General with oversight responsibility over QI, that
Steele may have been hired by someone associated with presidential candidate Clinton or the
DNC, and that the foreign intelligence to be collected through the FISA order would
probably not be worth the 'risk' of being criticized later for collecting communications of
someone (Carter Page) who was "politically sensitive."
The narrative manufactured by the security state agencies and laundered by their reliable
media servants about these critical matters was a sham, a fraud, a lie. Yet again, U.S.
discourse was subsumed by propaganda because the U.S. media and key parts of the security
state have decided that subverting the Trump presidency is of such a high priority –
that their political judgment outweighs the results of the election – that everything,
including outright lying even to courts let alone the public, is justified because the ends
are so noble.
As Taibbi put it:
"No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be,
reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be
embarrassed."
No matter how dangerous you believe the Trump presidency to be, this is a grave threat to
the pillars of U.S. democracy, a free press, an informed citizenry and the rule of law.* * *
* *
Underlying all of this is another major lie spun over the last three years by the
newly-minted media stars and liberal icons from the security state agencies. Ever since the
Snowden reporting – indeed, prior to that, when the New York Times' Eric Lichtblau and
Jim Risen (now with the Intercept)
revealed in 2005 that the Bush-era NSA was illegally spying on U.S. citizens without the
warrants required by law – it was widely understood that the FISA process was a
rubber-stamping joke, an illusory safeguard that, in reality, offered no real limits on the
ability of the U.S. Government to spy on its own citizens. Back in 2013 at the Guardian, I
wrote a
long article , based on Snowden documents, revealing what an empty sham this process
was.
But over the last three years, the strategy of Democrats and liberals – particularly
their cable outlets and news sites – has been to venerate and elevate security state
agents as the noble truth-tellers of U.S. democracy. Once-reviled-by-liberal sites such as
Lawfare – composed of little more than pro-NSA and pro-FBI apparatchiks –
gained
mainstream visibility for the first time on the strength of a whole new group of liberals
who decided that the salvation of U.S. democracy lies not with the political process but with
the dark arts of the NSA, the FBI and the CIA.
Sites like Lawfare – led by Comey-friend Benjamin Wittes and ex-NSA lawyer Susan
Hennessey – became Twitter and cable news stars and used their platform to resuscitate
what had been a long-discredited lie: namely, that the FISA process is highly rigorous and
that the potential for abuse is very low. Liberals, eager to believe that the security state
agencies opposed to Trump should be trusted despite their decades of violent lawlessness and
systemic lying, came to believe in the sanctity of the NSA and the FISA process.
The IG Report obliterates that carefully cultivated delusion. It lays bare what a sham the
whole FISA process is, how easy it is for the NSA and the FBI to obtain from the FISA court
whatever authorization it wants to spy on any Americans they want regardless of how flimsy is
the justification. The ACLU and other civil libertarians had spent years finally getting
people to realize this truth, but it was wiped out by the Trump-era veneration of these
security state agencies.
In an excellent article
on the fallout from the IG Report , the New York Times' Charlie Savage, long one of the
leading journalistic experts on these debates, makes clear how devastating these revelations
are to this concocted narrative designed to lead Americans to trust the FBI and NSA's
eavesdropping authorities :
At more than 400 pages, the study amounted to the most searching look ever at the
government's secretive system for carrying out national-security surveillance on American
soil. And what the report showed was not pretty.
The Justice Department's independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, and his
team uncovered a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process in how the F.B.I. went
about obtaining and renewing court permission under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act, or FISA, to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.
"The litany of problems with the Carter Page surveillance applications demonstrates how
the secrecy shrouding the government's one-sided FISA approval process breeds abuse," said
Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security
Project. "The concerns the inspector general identifies apply to intrusive investigations
of others, including especially Muslims, and far better safeguards against abuse are
necessary."
His exposé left some former officials who generally defend government
surveillance practices aghast.
"These errors are bad," said David Kris, an expert in FISA who oversaw the Justice
Department's National Security Division in the Obama administration. "If the broader audit
of FISA applications reveals a systematic pattern of errors of this sort that plagued this
one, then I would expect very serious consequences and reforms" .
Civil libertarians for years have called the surveillance court a rubber stamp because
it only rarely rejects wiretap applications. Out of 1,080 requests by the government in
2018, for example, government records
showed that the court fully denied only one.
Defenders of the system have argued that the low rejection rate stems in part from how
well the Justice Department self-polices and avoids presenting the court with requests that
fall short of the legal standard. They have also stressed that officials obey a heightened
duty to be candid and provide any mitigating evidence that might undercut their request. .
. .
But the inspector general found major errors, material omissions and unsupported
statements about Mr. Page in the materials that went to the court. F.B.I. agents
cherry-picked the evidence, telling the Justice Department information that made Mr. Page
look suspicious and omitting material that cut the other way, and the department passed
that misleading portrait onto the court.
This system of unlimited domestic spying was built by both parties, which only rouse
themselves to object when the power lies in the other side's hands. Just last year, the vast
majority of the GOP caucus joined with a minority of Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi and Adam
Schiff to
hand President Trump all-new domestic spying powers while blocking crucial reforms and
safeguards to prevent abuse. The spying machinery that Edward Snowden risked his life and
liberty to expose always has been, and still is, a bipartisan creation.
Perhaps these revelations will finally lead to a realization about how rogue, and
dangerous, these police state agencies have become, and how urgently needed is serious
reform. But if nothing else, it must serve as a tonic to the three years of unrelenting media
propaganda that has deceived and misled millions of Americans into believing things that are
simply untrue.
None of these journalists have acknowledged an iota of error in the wake of this report
because they know that lying is not just permitted but encouraged as long as it pleases and
vindicates the political beliefs of their audiences . Until that stops, credibility and faith
in journalism will never be restored, and – despite how toxic it is to have a media
that has no claim on credibility – that despised status will be fully deserved.
The former (((Guardian))) "journalist" *** libtard Joo who lives in Brazil with his
boyfriend, is going to tell us the truth about the (((FBI))) and the (((Deep
State)))????
LOL
The (((Intercept))) has already ratted out at least one whistleblower to the Deep State,
so be careful on who do you believe in..
The most important point of the FISA abuse for surveillance authorization of 4 US
citizens was for the purpose of collateral surveillance of all of their contacts with the
Trump campaign, transition and White House
investigate the 17 intel agencies that unanimously said Russia 'meddled' in the 2016
election. if they lied for political gain, then they are traitors for trying to start a war
with Russia that endangers all Americans
I honestly don't care either way. The entire system is corrupt and overrun with Zionists
from top to bottom, including of course the MSM. All this theater of a witch hunt against
Trump is for show; in reality they're all on the same page, playing the American public for
fools. That's why nothing significant ever changes no matter who gets into office. Always
more wars for faux-Israel and the MIC, staged coups and proxy wars abroad, more regulatory
capture, the national debt skyrocketing into oblivion, no border security, special
privileges for a (((chosen few))) which violate Constitutional law, massive bailouts at
taxpayers' expense, and on it goes.
I did not waste my time reading it all. Just skimmed few paragraphs to confirm that all
of this was known to everybody long time ago.
To me the basic question is why Trump is a such *****. He should fire long time ago 3/4
of CIA, FBI, Justice Department and many other three letter government employers. He has
full right as a president to do this. If he doesn't do that they eventually will destroy
him.
Instead he is pussying around those grave issues and nobody gets punished for high
crimes they committed. He is just tweeting crap that bear no consequences to anybody.
This is the best chance he's got to drain the swamp. But I am pretty sure swamp will
stink for a long time after he is gone. In short, he is sissy unable to do the job he
promised to do to the people who voted for him.
The Democratic leaders in Congress really should have checked with Central Casting before
picking the stars of their passion play: "The Impeachment and Destruction of Donald Trump."
Former National Security Council staffer
Fiona Hill was supposed to appear as a principled and dignified heroine. Instead, her
virulent hate, ignorance and contempt for Russia were apparent to all. And she looked uncannily
identical to the late
Alan Rickman playing Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies.
Congressman Adam Schiff chaired the House Intelligence Committee hearing and was supposed to
be the wise, fearless and incorruptible chairman. Instead, the camera's cruel, unblinking eye
revealed him as a buffoon – and a sinister one at that.
Schiff's round bald dome was identical to Mussolini's and his
ridiculous bulging eyes are those of Christopher Lloyd's evil cartoon villain
Judge Doom in the Hollywood movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"
The supposedly heroic Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council
was even worse – Presented as an all-American Patriot, instead he resembled the thick,
hulking brutal thug that Hollywood Central Casting always chooses to play endless Russian
intelligence service or criminal villains in thousands of bad primetime TV shows.
Kurt Volker was almost as bad. He was the quiet cool, calm, bespectacled villain –
always a CIA bureaucrat and usually played by Ronnie Cox – who wants to feed Matt Damon,
Brad Pitt, Steven Seagal or Bruce Willis to the villains.
And of course – the Real Hero could not appear at all. The Whistleblower's identity is
being jealously guarded – though as Senator Rand Paul has pointed out, everyone knows who
he is and – far from being a Disinterested Pure Hero, he was a CIA veteran and former
senior National Security Council official outspoken in his contempt for the President of the
United States: In other words, yet another anonymous Deep State manipulator and
apparatchik.
No doubt he will be revealed as the winner on the Fox Television Channel's popular show,
"The Masked Singer."
Or perhaps he will reveal himself in an exclusive interview with a fawning Rachel Maddow,
still masked and identified as "The Lone Ranger."
Now Rand Paul does have the looks, the bearing, the moral fervor and the dramatic character
to play the hero in this botched fiasco of a drama. But there is only one small problem. He is
on the other side. He has forcefully publicly defended President Donald Trump.
Gravity – Albert Einstein assures us – "bends" light (A dubious assertion at
best but at least Einstein, unlike Schiff and Company Looked the Part he always played –
Lovable, Child-Like Jewish Genius Who Never Gets a Hair Cut) And Trump Derangement Syndrome
(TDS) has bent the brains of movie directors Nancy Pelosi and Schiff.
Trump Derangement Syndrome: a fearful, incurable affliction more terrible and humiliating
than Alzheimer's: Better to forget who you are than remember you are a hate-crazed, foaming at
the mouth, credulous idiot who will believe anything.
Like all policy wonks of their aging generation of corrupt and complacent Baby Boomers,
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Schiff have salivated at the
thought of inflicting a "Watergate 2" impeachment drama comeuppance on Donald Trump.
But the Villain of Watergate, Richard Nixon, was indeed an inept and more than slightly
sinister creep (and lifelong liberal). He looked the part and he exuded pious bogus ineptitude
on camera his entire career. (Nixon's inspiration for how he projected himself on television
was clearly Jack Webb playing Sergeant Joe Friday in the wonderfully badly acted "Dragnet"
police series on US television in the 1950s.)
By contrast, Donald Trump channels John Wayne, the most popular and enduring movie star in
American history:
Trump is a physically big and fearless New York construction businessman turned immensely
successful popular entertainer. He, like Wayne is a natural athlete. It is a matter of public
record ignored by all fearful liberal wimps that Trump really was offered a contract after
college to be Major League Baseball player for the Phillies, but he turned it down to focus on
his business career.
Working class American Heartland men and women over 40 instinctively loved Wayne and
therefore they love Trump too. Aging American feminists like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth
Warren – and the further they are over 50, the more rabid and rage crazed and insane they
become – hated Wayne and are traumatized by his resurrection as a defining national
culture hero nearly four decades after his physical death echoing in the figure of Trump.
It was Trump's genius at silent reaction shots that ridiculed 17 Republican Congress
members, Senators and Governors in the 2015-16 campaign before he even began to turn his wit
and video skills on Hillary Clinton – a creepy Richard Nixon clone if there was one.
Trump was crafted by Fate and his brilliant media career from The Apprentice to Worldwide
Wrestling Central Casting to be the Hero of Impeachment. Making him the villain reverses the
entire emotional dynamic of the drama. It is like casting James Stewart as Nixon. (At worst,
Trump is classic King Kong eternally plagued by those pesky biplanes: And everybody roots for
Kong)
Liberals who loved Watergate went into emotional frenzies over Nixon's imagined humiliation
at the hands of such ludicrous pompous and overpaid fools as Dan Rather of CBS.
Pelosi and her laughably misnamed "advisers" have learned nothing from all this. This week,
we are seeing yet more interminable biased show-trial hearings and the even more ludicrous
Jerrold Nadler has taken center stage. He looks like Frankenstein's dwarf –servant
Igor in Mel Brooks' classic 1973 comic horror movie "
Young Frankenstein ."
The bottom line on why Impeachment has failed so miserably to whip up a storm or convince
anyone beyond the already committed "Trump Must Go", babies-throwing-tantrums across Liberal
America lies in the childishness and elemental incompetence of its cast and directors. Being
repulsive and ridiculous human beings themselves, they have no clue how obvious it would be
that they would appear that way to everyone else.
In a truly bizarre and insane moment during the ongoing impeachment hearing, democrat
Congressman Hank Johnson asked fellow lawmakers to imagine the teenage daughter of Ukraine's
president tied up in Trump's basement. Apparently, he wanted to summon mental images of an
"imbalance of power" between the two world leaders.
"They're standing there, President Trump is holding court. And he says, 'Oh, by the way,
no pressure.' And you saw President Zelensky shaking his head as if his daughter was
downstairs in the basement, duct-taped," Johnson said, drawing laughter from the room.
If Sanders got nominated, he could do what you suggest. He ( or surrogates) . could also
coin the phrase The Cowardly Lyin' . . . Trump . . . with a picture of Trump's facial
features photoshopped into the center of the face of the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz.
It would be a clever political pun and a memorable visual image. I give it away for free to
anyone who wants to use it.
But the CenDems don't want to see Sanders nominated. Or Warren or Gabbard. So they will do
all they can to prevent it. The only hope Sanders or Warren or Gabbard has for winning the
nomination is to win it on the First Ballot. The only way one of them can do that is if All
of their delegates uNANimously combine ALL their delegate votes behind ONE of those three
candidates. And ALL the combined delegates for those three candidates would have to ALL
uNANimously aGREE to do that . . . and which one to do it for. Because the First Ballot is
the one only single chance that the Decent Three have to prevent a Catfood Nominee by getting
one of themselves nominated. The CenDems actively and fervently prefer losing with C. Anof
Catfood than winning with Sanders or Warren or Gabbard.
As Yoda would say . . . " First Ballot or First Ballot Not! There is no Second
Ballot."
If the Decent Three cannot collectively co-win the nomination for one of themselves on
Ballot Number One, all they will have left is to obstruct every effort to stop the balloting
for a Brokered Convention. They have to make the ballotng go on and on and on . . . until
Balloting becomes such torture for the Catfood Delegates that the Catfood Conventioneers will
give in to whatever the Decent Three choose to extort from the Catfood Leadership to make the
pain stop.
This article is so much weaker then his testimony that it is a great disappointment. May be threats has had a shilling effects.
This is a Kabuki theater. Both sides are afraid to talk about the real issues such as CIA/FBI intrusion in 2016 elections and the
coup d'état to depose Trump after it. As well as Trump support of Yemen war, Douma false flag operation, the role of Obama
administration in Ukraine, Libya, Syria and Skripals poisoning false flag operation, etc
Notable quotes:
"... Yet, they would prefer guaranteed failure rather than build a credible case for removal. Why? The reasons put forward by House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and others are not credible and, given the paucity of examination given these claims, it is worth closer scrutiny. ..."
"... he flopped on his face when he said " It certainly was not akin to the Russian hacking operation in 2016." ..."
"... WHAT Russian hacking operation, fella? Technology has already proven the "hacking" was a download to a thumb-drive done MANUALLY. ..."
"... Here is another article that says "the Russians hacked". If they use this lie enough than it will become fact. ..."
"... Turley asks, but doesn't answer. The obvious answer, is they don't have any good reason or case to impeach Trump, and they just disagree with him politically. As Turley says, the case will be "summarily rejected". There are many elections in the coming months, though mostly at the state level: https://election-calendar.com/ ..."
"... Turley thinks there is a case if the Dems just spend more time developing it? I think this guy is just trying to get out from under all the hate mail for himself he generated telling the truth at the impeachment tribunal. ..."
"... Turley dishonors himself trying to look now more in the impeachment camp when he told the truth in the first place...at the Hearing....It is obvious now he is trying to save his job at a left wing school....maybe he needs to find some independent or moderate school to teach at for he is now showing a yellow streak down his back. ..."
"... If Washington DC were NOT a den of crooks, it shouldn't need a newspaper like The Washington Post to paint everything pearly white. ..."
"... The crookedness is proportional to the count of starched collars ..."
The House Judiciary Committee is about to approve two articles of impeachment as member after member last night declared that
time is of the essence. The House is now set to fulfill its pledge to impeach President Donald Trump by Christmas. For some us, the
mad rush toward impeachment by the Democrats has been utterly incomprehensible. It is difficult enough to go to the Senate in a presidential
impeachment without an accepted crime and on the narrowest basis in history. However, the Democrats know that they have combined
those liabilities with the thinnest record of any modern impeachment – a record filled with gaps and conflicts. The Democrats know
that this record is guaranteed to fail and could easily justify the Senate holding a trial as cursory as its hearings.
Yet, they would prefer guaranteed failure rather than build a credible case for removal. Why? The reasons put forward by House
Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and others are not credible and, given the paucity of examination given these
claims, it is worth closer scrutiny.
So why? The answer to that question will likely occupy historians for decades after this slipshod impeachment is summarily rejected.
In the impeachment hearing, I testified that President Donald Trump could be impeached for abuse of power but that the record was
facially inadequate and incomplete. I encouraged the Committee to just take a few more months to subpoena roughly ten witnesses with
direct evidence and secure judicial orders that I believe would support the Committee on its obstruction article. While I was relieved
to see the Committee drop the allegations of bribery, extortion, and other crimes that I testified against, it refused to simply
take a little more time to develop a more complete case.
None of the excuses for the pledge to impeach by Christmas are even remotely plausible. They can be divided into two basic groupings:
court challenges would take too much time and there is a crime in progress that must be stopped.
No Time To Wait
First, there is the argument by Chairman Schiff in response to the criticism over the short investigation (which even the New
York Times has challenged). Schiff insisted that waiting will mean a guarantee of that there will be no impeachment while also guaranteeing
that there will be foreign meddling in the 2020 election: "People should understand what that argument really means. It has taken
us eight months to get a lower court ruling that Don McGahn has no absolute right to defy Congress. Eight months for one court decision."
As has consistently been the case, no major media outfit seemed interested to fact check that statement. It happens to be untrue.
The House waited until August 7th to go to court to compel McGahn's appearance. That was roughly four months ago, not eight. It
was also filed before the House voted to start the impeachment inquiry on October 31st. Back in January, I testified in the House
Judiciary Committee and pushed the Committee to hold such a vote to allow for expedited cases over testimony like McGahn's. At the
time, I warned that the House was running out of runway to get an impeachment off the ground. With such a vote, these cases could
have moved at the accelerated pace of an impeachment.
The question is why would the House not only refuse to try to secure these witnesses but actually withdraw a subpoena before
a ruling in the Kupperman.
Turley asks, but doesn't answer. The obvious answer, is they don't have any good reason or case to impeach Trump, and they
just disagree with him politically. As Turley says, the case will be "summarily rejected". There are many elections in the coming
months, though mostly at the state level: https://election-calendar.com/
Half the Dems want impeachment to get the TDS vote from their gerrymandered heavily Democrat districts. They've gerrymandered
their districts into ones that do not represent the majority of the country, and it's going to bite them as the few socialists
that get elected, will get nothing done, and swing districts will swing to the GOP giving them a House majority, and GOP control
of all branches. They got rid of more competitive districts, so they don't have to serve conservatives, and they won't regardless
if they win or lose. They've manufactured their own demise.
At least Trump reaches out to liberals, while liberals denigrate and show their hate for conservatives, as their reps like
Mad Maxine call for more hate.
Turley thinks there is a case if the Dems just spend more time developing it? I think this guy is just trying to get out
from under all the hate mail for himself he generated telling the truth at the impeachment tribunal.
Funny you are saying that, I thought the same thing. Screw him, you either have honor all the time or not at all. Some of the
clowns think it is like being funny, sometimes you are not at all.
Turley dishonors himself trying to look now more in the impeachment camp when he told the truth in the first place...at
the Hearing....It is obvious now he is trying to save his job at a left wing school....maybe he needs to find some independent
or moderate school to teach at for he is now showing a yellow streak down his back.
"... I think the current period can be called the “collapse of neoliberalism” period. In any case the neoliberal elite who was in power (Blairists, Clintonists) lost the trust of people. This is true both for the US and labour in the UK. In this sense the anti-Semitic smear against Corbin is equivalent to neo-McCarthyism hysteria in the USA. Both reflect the same level of desperation and clinging to power of “soft neoliberals.” ..."
It’s time to stop pretending we’re still in the postwar period (the question is, are we in a pre-war one).
True. As “Full Spectrum Dominance” inevitably lead to “threat inflation” it is logically drives the USA into the major war.
I think the current period can be called the “collapse of neoliberalism” period. In any case the neoliberal elite who was
in power (Blairists, Clintonists) lost the trust of people. This is true both for the US and labour in the UK. In this sense the
anti-Semitic smear against Corbin is equivalent to neo-McCarthyism hysteria in the USA. Both reflect the same level of desperation
and clinging to power of “soft neoliberals.”
Unfortunately Corbin proved to be too weak to withstand the pressure and suppress Blairists. But Blairists in labour might
still be up to a great disappointment. The history train left the station and they are still standing on the neoliberal platform,
so to speak.
That’s why Brexit, as a form of protest against neoliberal globalization, has legs. It is a misguided, but still a protest
movement.
From now on, only the rich will have the luxury of any sense of historical continuity.
The rich are not uniform. Financial oligarchy wants to stay, while manufacturers probably would prefer Brexit.
Why did so many people – from government contractors and high-ranking military officers, to state department and National
Security Council officials – feel the need to lie about how the war in Afghanistan was going?
This is because it’s easy cash cow for the old boys club by sending working class kids to be killed in a far off land.
The pentagon with the full cooperation of MSM will sell it as we are defending our ways of life by fighting a country 10,000
kms away.
This show the poor literacy, poor analytical thinking of US population constantly brain washed by MSM, holy men, clergy,
other neo con organisations like National rifle club etc.
and
manoftheworld -> Redswordfish 10 Dec 2019 15:47
Perhaps the only thing Trump has got right .. and ever will get right.. is his dislike for war. He is right about Afghanistan.
The terrible US press and political reaction to his peace talks with the Taliban showed that the deep state still doesn’t
get it…
Mattis, Graham et al are insane liars… and so is Hilary Clinton and Petraeus… none of them has ever had the guts to tell
the truth…
the average American is way more indoctrinated than the average pupil at a madrasa. …we should boot these lying American
generals out of NATO.. they’re a threat to world peace…
In any case Brexit is a litmus test of what is the next stage for neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization.
Corbyn's defeat was entirely due to the treachery of the engrained leadership of the Labour
Party.
While the membership is generally radical and socialist, 80% of the MPs, local
councillors, Union Officers and party officials were put there by the Blairites and are
almost impossible to remove from the offices in which they have enormous potential
influence.
Corbyn was in an almost impossible position but his mistake was, characteristically, to
assume a higher degree of good will and loyalty to the 'cause' than most MPs, careerists,
contemptuous of ordinary people and desperate for the approval-in a society which is famous
for its social snobbery- of the ruling Establishment.
It is significant that, whereas Johnson expelled dozens of MPs from the Tory party, Labour
expelled only one-Chris Williamson on the basis of an obviously idiotic charge of
antisemitism on his part.
Sometimes left wing winners have to be ready to fight to the death to secure the mandates
they are given and in doing so to damage the opposition. In this case the Blairites.
Sometimes betraying the working class and the poor takes the form of refusing to be
ruthless.
The irony is that Corbyn is by far the longest standing critic of the EU in British public
life, as the Blairites very quickly charged when the referendum on the EU (" a highly
democratic organisation" in Laguerre's astonishing judgement) was won by the 'wrong side'.
And in 2017 he campaigned on the promise to 'get Brexit done". It was only out of a refusal
to confront the Remainers, including most of his Shadow Cabinet, that the hybrid policy to
implement the Blairite Peoples Vote was adopted.
I imagine that the Remainers in the Labour Party and the Blairites of every sort will be
saddened by the public's renewed mandate for Brexit, but their dominant emotion will be
euphoria that the left was defeated, neo-liberalism still reins unchallenged and imperialism
maintained in British Foreign Policy.
If the Labour Party now sticks to its principles it will purge itself of its Fifth Columns
and use the breathing space before the next election to re-organise itself as a socialist
party.
To do this it needs firstly, to establish a newspaper, secondly to build a Youth wing,
thirdly to institute a national system of political education so that every member
understands what socialism is and takes a part in its construction. And fourthly that Labour
becomes the organising focus for both Unions organising the unorganised and social movements
defending tenants, the poor, disabled and vulnerable.
But this is all very unlikely, the party structure is biassed against democracy, it is
almost impossible to impose the will of the membership on the people who run the party. And
ought to be run out of it.
JC was crucified, by authority of the Empire, at the urging of the Israeli authorities in
Jerusalem and with the invaluable assistance of corrupt traitors among his own people
Now that Brexit
is almost certainly going to happen, I'm reposting this piece from late 2016 ,
with some minor corrections, indicated by strike-outs. Feel free to have your say on any aspect
of Brexit.
Since the collapse of faith in neoliberalism following the Global Financial Crisis, the
political right has been increasingly dominated by tribalism Trumpism. But in most cases, including the US, this
has so far amounted to little more than Trilling's irritable mental gestures . To the extent
that there is any policy program, it is little more than crony capitalism. Of all the
tribalist Trumpist groups that have achieved
political power the only ones that have anything amounting to a political program are the
Brexiteers.
The sustainability of tribalism Trumpism as
a political force will depend, in large measure, on the perceived success or failure of Brexit.
So, what will the day after Brexit (presumably, sometime in March 2019) look like, and more
importantly, feel like? I'll rule out the so-called "soft Brexit" where Britain stays in the EU
for all practical purposes, gaining some minor concessions on immigration restrictions. It
seems unlikely and would be even more of an anti-climax than the case I want to think
about.
Hidari 12.14.19 at 9:14 am (no link)
Doubtless one of the attractions of Brexit at least to those who thought it up (Farrage etc.)
is that it is a completely token rebellion: it appears to change very much while in reality
changing very little.
Only one thing:
'On the contrary, it seems pretty clear that all EU citizens will get permanent residence,
even those who arrived after the Brexit vote.'
Are we completely sure about this?
'One thing that this post missed completely is that Brexit is an entirely English project,
imposed on the Scots and Irish. That's become more and more evident, and looks sure to
dominate the days after Brexit happens.'
I kept on putting this point forward in various CT threads, getting, for some reason,
massive pushback*, despite the fact that it is obviously true and always has been. Perhaps a
colour coded map of the 'new' UK (which shows, essentially, the entirety of England as blue,
with the exception of larger conurbations), the Welsh speaking ('outer') parts of Wales as
green, essentially the entirety of Scotland as yellow, and the majority of the North of
Ireland as being green, will make that point for me.
*I'm not sure why, but I think it's something to do with an unwillingness to see that in
all four sections of the 'United' Kingdom we are seeing an eruption of nationalism: the SNP
in Scotland, Sinn Fein in NI, Plaid in Wales and of course the Tories in England, with the
Tories now functioning as, so to speak, the political wing of UKIP, or, if you want, UKIP/the
Brexit Party with the 'rough edges' shaved off.
'Liberal' intellectuals have always had a blind spot for nationalism, and have always
tended to reason that because nationalism is 'irrationalism' or whatever, that no one could
'really' think that way and that, therefore, nationalism doesn't 'really' exist. It obviously
does, as a 1 second glance at the 'new' UK map will demonstrate.
likbez 12.14.19 at 4:57 pm (no link)
Everything Trump does is consistent with regular conservatism
I respectfully disagree. It is not. Paleoconservatives hate Trump. Neocons for some
strange reason also hate Trump, although it is not clear why -- he completely folded and
conduct their foreign policy. Which is as far from classic conservatism as one can get.
I view Trumpism as specific for the USA flavor of "national neoliberalism" -- domestic
neoliberalism without neoliberal globalization, or with globalization of a different type.
The one based on bilateral treaties where stronger state can twist hands of the weaker state
and dictate the conditions -- kind of neo-imperialism on steroids ( neoliberalism always was
neo-imperial in foreign policy toward weaker states) .
The irony of Corbin defeat is that he was/is a critic of the EU imperialism, which
by-and-large is Franco-German imperialism (EU role in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Ukraine, Libya,
Syria, Greece) . The EU is not the dominant superpower, so it can't bully the US or China, or
Russia. It can do it only when dealing with lesser powers. That's why it's difficult for
anyone living inside a major EU-member to actually notice such a behavior: the desire to
crush resistance of any lesser country and to force it to abide by its very own rules,
whether the other countries want it or not.
The Blairites euphoria that the left was defeated, and neoliberalism still reins supreme
is IMHO unwarranted. Neoliberalism as an ideology is dead and that means that Labour Party in
its current form is dead as well. The same is true about the US Dems. They can achieve some
tactical successes but they can't overturn their strategic defeat.
And Brexit means more close alliance with the USA (in a form of subservience) as alone GB
can't conduct previous imperialist policies. It was punching above her weight within the EU
(with Scripals false flag as the most recent example, see Tony Kevin take on the subject
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/08/a-determined-effort-to-undermine-russia
) , and this opportunity no longer exists.
When Liberal governments fail to provide answers for economic despair the road is paved for
strong-armed, bloviating fascists. And the more desperate things become fascism will only get
stronger if history is any indication.
ban nock on Fri,
12/13/2019 - 6:18am and the analogies with Sanders and the US only go so far.
Politics in the US, Britain, and Europe in general are being upended, I'd caution against
pigeon holing things into the old left/right, Dem/Repub, Tory/Labor, scenario.
Britain's Labor similar to America's Democratic Party has lost lots of it's legitimacy with
working people. Globalisation has decimated cities like Liverpool and Manchester. Labor didn't
support Brexit, the biggest issue in politics in Britain. Being a part of the EU allowed
workers from Eastern Europe to enter England and directly compete for low skilled jobs.
Labor in England also included upper middle class woke culture, which is very pro EU and
anti Brexit. It's impossible to imagine a pro Brexit leader in Labor just as much as it is
impossible to imagine working class people in England supporting the loss of their jobs via
Remain. People voted for their economic self interests, can you blame them? As in the US there
are more working class voters than there are upper middle class intellectuals.
Boris Johnson promised increased funding for the National Health Service, not tearing it
down as many seem to suggest. Whether he does so is yet to be seen, but I wouldn't read his win
as a rejection of the social safety net. Socialism is for many some kind of intellectual game,
the working class is much less interested in ideas, and much more interested in health care,
higher wages, and better conditions overall.
Ever since I watched Bernie Sanders' rise in the primaries in 16 I've felt he would be a
much stronger general election candidate than he is in the primaries. As contrary as Trump
might seem to hard core political junkies, Trump did steal many of Sander's memes and use them
in the general election. Most wage earners actually do feel powerless in the face of the
corporate overclass, they feel things getting worse not better.
To have even a snowball's chance in the pre primaries, the endless positioning and twitter
wars that have occurred for months prior to even our first primary, Sanders is now committed to
many of the same positions as the woke side of the Democratic Party. There might well be a big
enough drop off of Hispanics, African Americans, and Working Class Dems of all hues to lose
this thing again, even if Sanders wins the primary. The Democratic Party has lost working
people even as it has gained Country Club Republicans from the suburbs.
Last night as the results were obvious I watched the old DK, the NYT, and other web sites.
Stunned Silence. It's as if they didn't realize 2016 happened and were surprised all over
again.
The impeachment . The two articles of impeachment are so anemic as to invite ridicule.
1. "Abuse of power" by expressing concern over thievery by Ukrainians and Americans? This is
a charge? The Washington Post has been running a series of articles based on "leaked" US Afghan IG reports and interviews with people involved in that wretched place. These articles reveal
the massive scale of the thievery that lost America enormous amounts of money taken through
graft and bribery. Was it unreasonable for this president to solicit the Ukrainian president's
cooperation in trying to deal with a similar situation in that country. He mentioned Uncle Joe
Biden and his drug addled son? Well, why not? The younger of the two has IMO been used as the
family bag man for collecting protection money. Joe Biden himself looks to me to be a political
version of Jimmy Hoffa the mobbed up Teamsters boss of long ago, but, with less charm, "a
little for you, a lot for me," etc. He was potentially a rival for the 2020 election? He was
not then a candidate. Is every human or semi-human to be exempt from investigation and
prosecution because he MIGHT become a political rival? The Democrats know full well this would
be absurd.
2. "Obstructing congress" What we are seeing in the behavior of the Democratic majority in
the House and minority in the senate is an attempt to seize control of the federal government
using the constitutional powers to "advise and consent" on appointments and the ability to
impeach in the House.. They have not yet tried to impeach federal judges appointed by the other
party but IMO they will try that soon. In this article of impeachment they claim that the
president has obstructed their function by relying on the doctrine of Executive Privilege to
deny them access to his present and past staff. Trump did not invent this doctrine. It is a
well established feature of American law. Without it no president could conduct internal policy
discussions or confidential discussions with foreign leaders. The Democrats know full well that
the principal of Executive Privilege is often contested in the courts. That is what they should
have done this time, but instead they have chosen to charge the president for impeachment for
claiming Executive Privilege. They do not claim this is a violation of law. They merely stamp
their feet and scream that they are unhappy and want him gone.
This farce will end in a trial in the US Senate with the Chief Justice of SCOTUS presiding.
The Republicans control the senate and will not allow Trump to be deposed. The senate can
dismiss the charges by a simple majority vote and that is what Senator Lindsey Graham wants to
see happen. Trump does not want that. He wants to be tried for the purpose of turning the
tables on the Democrats.
I think he is correct in wanting that. If that occurs, witnesses must be subpoenaed and
examined in open court. The Bidens must be so called to demonstrate the reasonable nature of
Trump's concern over their behavior in Ukraine . pl
Just wondering. Suppose the Senate dismisses the Impeachment. Won't the Chief Justice have to
rule on the question of whether or not there is at least probable cause for the democrats'
determination that this is probable cause to Impeach?
Chief Justice could rule on a demurrer which would dismiss the case without a trial - failure
to present prima facie elements of the underlying charge. Therefore nothing of fact is
triable - case dismissed.
Which is probably why Democrats ditched the more specific treason, bribery and extortion
charges, leaving only the garbage can of "abuse of power" and "obstruction" behind. By what
standards of evidence are both those remaining elements - abuse of power and obstruction --
even tried, let alone judged?
Biden on camera bragging about a quid pro quo to fire a prosecutor examining corruption at
a company where Biden's son is on the board taking a fat paycheck with no experience or
expertise to have that position.
I agree that Trump should get his wish. He has endured a lot of false "reporting." And those
untruths need to be shown for what they are. I wonder if Mitch McConnell would be able to
arrange that despite Graham.
I know that Trump's personality attracts that sort of shocked response from some people.
Heck, I'm a Republican and was first also opposed to Trump because of his personality. But
I'm of the opinion that the Democrats and their fawning media characters have earned a lot of
the same sort negative responses and disgust on the part of the people because their
personalities are pretty off-putting also.
I'm still suffering from cognitive dissonance because Adam Schiff has somehow actually
remained in his elected position. I can't imagine a high school principal allowing someone
who does "parody" to continue as a student council candidate.
I do believe that Nancy Pelosi may be really sinking into dementia or alcoholism--just
on the basis of her inability to control her dentures. To have those two criticize the
character of Trump really seems strange. I feel that I'm watching a Dickens novel performed
on national news each day. I can't laugh, though, because this is happening in
reality.
Given the corruption on both sides of the Senate it is probable that no-one wants an in depth
trial during which unwanted facts might accidentally appear. Much better to whisk it through
without it touching the sides so to speak.
OK so Trump doesn't get the exoneration he wants but then nothing will explode in his
face. Its not a win win but then its not a lose either and it is unlikely to seriously affect
his chances next November. Plus as a quid pro quo he might have got his defence spending
increase and the trade bill through.
I'm trying to remember the site I read it on, maybe south front, where the point was made the
graft flows through these governments we give billions to, back through the various
institutes and global initiatives the US politicians set up. McCain and Clinton being the two
mentioned. So neither side wants it looked into too deeply.
A conversation between two heads of state is not and should not be conducted as though the
subject matter of the conversation is subject to the rules and assumptions of a court of
justice.
Graham has a vested interest in not having an extensive trial with many witnesses as it
may uncover his own culpability in the Ukraine corruption. And of course may drag in Saint
McCain too!
His and Mitch's argument to Trump likely would be, that with no trial they can guarantee
acquittal but with a trial they can't.
An article in the Duran indicates that and why Senate Republicans may buck Trump's wishes, as
they are as deep in Ukraine corruption as any of the Dems are. Lindsay, the late John M and
Sleep Joe are perhaps the most deeply planted ...
You mean that with the same investigative power the Obama administration had he has none
of the alleged evidence on senators you allude to? What a wonderful implication from a Cyprus
based media outlet founded in 2016 and run by the host of an RT political show. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-duran/
As of today Trump's approval rating is 43.9% and Congress's approval rating is 24%. I gather
that the House Democrats don't realize how unpopular they are and how many Americans support
"obstruction of Congress". Are they trying to turn Trump into a national hero?
In the legitimate focus on the impeachment, a stunning revelation in the Horowitz report has
been largely overlooked. In January 2017, the FBI conducted three interviews with the key
source to Christopher Steele for his dossier. He told interviewed on all three occasions that
the material he passed on to Steele was gossip and second and third-hand rumors with no
proof. He even said that the sexual allegations were actually a joke and he never meant for
them to be taken serious. The FBI in seeking the follow-on FISA warrant merely reported they
interviewed Steele's source and he was "cooperative and candid." No content reported.
In addition, Horowitz found email exchanges between FBI and CIA, in which the FBI inquired
if Carter Page was a CIA source. Three times the CIA responded "yes." But the FBI agent
preparing the affidavit for the FISA renewal lied and wrote "no" to the question of Page's
CIA work. That was the false statement Horowitz referred to.
These are serious crimes by FBI officials and they should not go unnoted in the MSM or
left to be ignored. I hope that Durham is carefully reading every word of the Horowitz report
for points of criminal misconduct to present to his Federal grand jury.
You can't fully discuss impeachment of Trump without going back to the first cause, and in
this case it was clearly criminal misconduct by Federal law enforcement.
that a bipartisan agreement exists that the Democrats can introduce the impeachment but
the majority Republicans will vote it out without trial.
An approach which seems plausible. But after nigh on four full years of a campaign against
initially a candidate and for the majority of the time the holder of the presidential office
involving lurid allegations might not a trial be helpful in restoring some public confidence
in the body politic? And in reducing the levels of vitriol.
Earlier today a person asked me what was going to happen in the impeachment trial, and I said
that the senate will decide that after the case gets to them. The rules of procedure and
rules of evidence (if any!) will be determined by the senate.
The U.S. Constitution says in Article 1, section 3 that--
"The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that
Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is
tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: and no Person shall be convicted without the
Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present.
"Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office,
and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, trust, or profit, under the
United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to
Indictment, Trial, Judgment, and Punishment, according to Law".
Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Repub. Kentucky) appeared on the Sean
Hannity television show on FoxNews and said in essence that how a trial will proceed is up in
the air, as he explains at the 1 minute mark until 2 minutes and 17 seconds into the
video--
McConnell, as usual, carefully maintains his position, and says that everything he does
about an impeachment trial, "I am coordinating with White House counsel". And, "There will be
no difference between the president's position and our position as to how to handle this to
the extent that we can".
What McConnell is obviously doing is protecting himself no matter what the political
effect of the content of the trial may be.
He says: "We all know how it's going to end. There is no chance the president is going to
be removed from office".
It is worse than that. Groups of current or former high level employees band together to
bid on large scale development contracts. They have local partners and the loot is
tremendous.
Warren's awkward attempts to portray herself as a woman of color, even if a etsy weeny
tiny bit, always seemed strange to me, ignoring the resume nonsense. It makes sense with the
realization that Women of Color, have become a new politically privileged class, in spite of
some of them being not very oppressed.
Indian (subcontinent) women come from a tradition of a caste based society of wealth and
privilege. The most succesful ones intuitively home in on and game American race-based
identity politics in spite of their advantages, such as being one of the wealthiest religious
groups in the nation,
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/11/how-income-varies-among-u-s-religious-groups/
No Bernie style economic class based socialism for them, no way. It's maintain privilege,
Silicon Valley corporate caste based salaries, Republican reductionism, Hillary hopium and
yet, they proudly proclaim their affiliation with real women of color, on whose backs they
surf, like last generation's black cleaning women, the grandparents of which might have
actually been slaves.
3 examples: Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, Neera Tanden and Kamala Harris.
Women-of-color in general are not a privileged class. The not-very-poor women of color are
perhaps a newly privileged class.
The Goldman Sachs women-of-color have become a new privileged class, in line with the
tenets of Goldman Sachs Feminism. " The arc of history is long, and it bends towards rainbow
gender-fluid oligarchy."
Spotlight on defense authorization bill: Saudi Arabia wins big with assist from
Kushner
The White House secured a major reprieve for Saudi Arabia this week by convincing
Congress to drop several provisions from its annual defense bill before the House passed it
on Wednesday. The Senate is expected to vote on the bill next week. Gone are sanctions on
key Saudi officials for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and restrictions on US
support for Riyadh's campaign in Yemen. The New York Times reports that President Donald
Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner – who reportedly maintains a
direct WhatsApp line with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – played a key role in the
negotiations.
The United Arab Emirates also came out ahead as the final bill removes language
taking aim at the $8 billion in emergency arms sales to Gulf countries that Trump
authorized in May citing the threat of Iran. The UAE had lobbied against these provisions
and also opposed calls for a report detailing the "military activities" of the UAE, Saudi
Arabia and other international actors in Libya. . The final bill no longer singles out
specific countries but still requires "a detailed description of the military activities of
external actors" in the country.
We always stick by our friends, through thick and thin and murder, and war crimes, and
terrorism, and well, all of it. After all, what are friends for?
As Dean Baker pointed out in his book Rigged, the neoliberal capitalism of America is
rigged to benefit the top 1%. After all, they were the architects. Most Americans appreciate
that. Nevertheless, the vast majority willingly wade into its rigged quicksand. All economies
are rigged in the sense that there is a structure to it all. Moreover, the architects of that
system will ensure there is something in it for themselves – rigged. Our school system
does not instruct Americans on how their own economic system works (is rigged), so most of us
become its victims rather than its beneficiaries.
Books by Liz Warren and her daughter offer remedial guidance on how to make the current US
economic system work for the average household. So, in a sense, Liz comes across as an
adherent to the system she is trying to help others master .
This seems to be a losing proposition for candidate Warren because most Americans want a
new system with new rigging; not a repaired system that has been screwing them for
generations.
A big part of why Labor and Corbyn lost so badly is the complete abdication of "the Left" on
Brexit. The left were supposed to be anti-globalists, in which case their task was to join
battle offering an egalitarian, left-populist version of Brexit which would have benefited
the people.
Instead, faced with a real decision and a real opportunity they punted and ran home to
globalist mama. This removed one of the main reasons to bother supporting them.
Thing is, this destroys the left in Britain. The right in Labour had been in control since
the early 1980s, and Corbyn's leadership victory was an accident which will not be given a
second chance. Now what will replace Corbyn will not be Blairism, it will be something well
to the right of Blairism, something much more like the DNC in the United States.
In other words, this is not a defeat of a party, it is a catastrophe for anyone seeking to
struggle against the triumph of neoliberal barbarism. Oh, and it makes the probability of the
end of the world through environmental catastrophe or nuclear war much higher. So apart from
the ideological catastrophe it's also a human calamity.
Corbyn destroyed hismelf. He performed quite well, unexpectedly so, in 2017 because he said
that he would honour the result of the 2016 referendum. Yesterday the electors punished him
for reneging on that and telling 17.4 million voters that they were wrong.
It was the less well off who voted to Leave, and it was the less well off who yesterday
deserted Labour in droves. They have had enough of being told that they are in the wrong by a
middle class elite who would be repelled if they ever actually met someone from the working
class.
I am no expert on UK politics, but it does look like Brexit was the issue that Boris won
on. Everybody is sick of it and wants if over with.
I am no expert on UK politics either, but from my point of view in Norway the main issue
to be resolved is dismantling the EU, and it looks like the Brexit vote and this election
confirms that many in the UK see it the same way. Whether it will happen is another
question.
I voted NO in the 1994 Norwegian referendum on the question of becoming member of
"European Community". One of the arguments in the debate at that time was that the "European
Community" was aiming to become a union and a superstate. Those who argued that way were
called lots of things, including conspiracy theorists. Today we are not members of the EU,
but all the "regulations" are forced upon us anyway. The EU is a non-democratic nightmare
that must be demolished.
I don't expect much good from the Tories, I don't exclude another betrayal of the Brexit
cause, but we shall see. Corbyn lost on his betrayal of Brexit, that is for sure. I
sympathize with Corbyn, but betraying the Brexit referendum is a no-no.
What the UK needs is real progressives that see the EU as the globalist project it is. It
also means that the "climate crisis" must be recognised as a political tool created by the
same forces. Corbyn failed on both accounts and therefore he lost.
Now that the official results are out, I'll comment on the British elections.
If Corbyn had won and taken us out of the EU we would have gone all Venezuela. If he'd won
and kept us in the EU we'd have gone all Greece. The result is the best of the bad options
available.
This comment on The Guardian encapsulates the average Conservative voter for these 2019
elections.
The UK is really at a crossroads: it is too tiny and poor in natural resources to
implement socialism, but it is declining as a capitalist power.
I don't think the average British really thinks Venezuela is socialist or that Corbyn's
policies would make them very poor, but I think they are afraid of the sanctions and
embargoes they would suffer from the USA if they dared to try to go back to
social-democracy.
This defeat may also be historic: this could go to History as the end of social-democracy.
Social-democracy was already dead as an effective political force after the oil crisis of
1974-5, but at least it was able to polarize with neoliberalism in the ideological field and
had some prestige that far outlived itself (to the point it was the main propaganda weapon
that ultimately convinced Gorbachev to destroy the USSR, and to the point it was able to
convince historians like Hobsbawn that it had actually "won the war" after 2008). Now it
isn't considered even credible by half of the population of one of the few countries it was
able to govern and fully influence in the post-war period.
In Rosa Luxemburg's last article (a few days before she was executed), she finally
admitted defeat to the Bolsheviks. "We must separate the essential from the non-essential",
she wrote. And the essential, she completed, was the fact that the Bolsheviks were right and
the German Social-Democrats were wrong. It happened again, almost 100 years later.
(Brexit anger is about wage inequality - like US Trump support. 35 years, GDP doubled,
median earnings up 10% in UK, 0% in US. If the media wrote about basic economics everyone
would know this. Instead the bottom 75% have plain unfocussed anger with Trump/Brexit being
lightening rods to direct it).
It might be wise to be careful here about assumptions used. First off, cognisance of
population changes will not automatically translate into employed working sector changes,
many factors intervene preventing a direct relationship. Secondly, having a accurate GDP
measure from beginning to end of the period observed is crucial (to avoid apples vs. oranges
comparisons) so that changes in productive sources (and their employed numbers) are accounted
for (law offices rarely employ as many as heavy industrial firms). The history of price/wage
inflation or loss of exchange value of currency will affect reported GDP statistics as well.
Thirdly is measuring the general education and skill level of those employed, as those
decrease so do earnings/salaries/wages. Fourthly, look at the change in social protections
provided to the population in question, these protections have a cost that must be met, their
absence has an even greater cost to income obtained but rarely appearing on the economic
balance sheets. Regulatory capture by monopoly, sovereign & trust-fund management removes
business restrictions and passes those costs to those employed. Try putting this on a
bumper-sticker for your car.
In the U.S. the population had increased in double digits from the census of 1950 (150.9
millions) to 2010 (308.7 millions). Working income had not significantly increased from
1970's, Purchasing Power Parity of 1970 dollar and 2019 dollar is unobtainable information.
GDP statistics are of the nature of apples vs. oranges, measuring unrelated economic
production; it can be done but isn't (for reasons political) [an income of US$400,000 in 1915
would translate into a 1980's income of about US$ 8.5 millions; the economies were still
roughly speaking nearly the same still and comparable, as wealth distributions were becoming
again].
Corbyn rendered his party toxic. His penchant for standing in solidarity with terrorists
and anti-Semites opened a seal out of which a cascade of anti-Jewish sentiments poured,
engulfing his party in scandal. His brand of radical socialism was insufferably hidebound.
His expressions of sympathy for history's greatest criminals were thoughtlessly dogmatic.
The Labour Party under Corbyn drifted so far toward overt Jew-hatred that Britain's chief
rabbi denounced the institution. The Archbishop of Canterbury agreed with that assessment,
as did 85 percent of the country's Jews. There was no ambiguity here.
Sanders may be insulated from the charge that he shares these suspicious sentiments
because he is Jewish, but this clear pattern raises some disturbing questions. It is
incumbent on the press to ask them. To at least a degree, Sanders clearly evinces some of
Corbyn's instincts on policy, but his affiliations suggest a similar tolerance for the
radical left's occasionally anti-Semitic indulgences.
Opposing antisemitism is a core value of progressivism. So it's very troubling to me
that we are also seeing accusations of antisemitism used as a cynical political weapon
against progressives. One of the most dangerous things Trump has done is to divide
Americans by using false allegations of antisemitism, mostly regarding the US–Israel
relationship. We should be very clear that it is not antisemitic to criticize the policies
of the Israeli government.
Ending that occupation and enabling the Palestinians to have self-determination in an
independent, democratic, economically viable state of their own is in the best interests of
the United States, Israel, the Palestinians, and the region. My pride and admiration for
Israel lives alongside my support for Palestinian freedom and independence. I reject the
notion that there is any contradiction there. The forces fomenting antisemitism are the
forces arrayed against oppressed people around the world, including Palestinians; the
struggle against antisemitism is also the struggle for Palestinian freedom . I stand in
solidarity with my friends in Israel, in Palestine, and around the world who are trying to
resolve conflict, diminish hatred, and promote dialogue, cooperation, and
understanding.
In a truly bizarre and insane moment during the ongoing impeachment hearing, democrat
Congressman Hank Johnson asked fellow lawmakers to imagine the teenage daughter of Ukraine's
president tied up in Trump's basement. Apparently, he wanted to summon mental images of an
"imbalance of power" between the two world leaders.
"They're standing there, President Trump is holding court. And he says, 'Oh, by the way,
no pressure.' And you saw President Zelensky shaking his head as if his daughter was
downstairs in the basement, duct-taped," Johnson said, drawing laughter from the room.
The Democratic leaders in Congress really should have checked with Central Casting before
picking the stars of their passion play: "The Impeachment and Destruction of Donald Trump."
Former National Security Council staffer
Fiona Hill was supposed to appear as a principled and dignified heroine. Instead, her
virulent hate, ignorance and contempt for Russia were apparent to all. And she looked uncannily
identical to the late
Alan Rickman playing Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies.
Congressman Adam Schiff chaired the House Intelligence Committee hearing and was supposed to
be the wise, fearless and incorruptible chairman. Instead, the camera's cruel, unblinking eye
revealed him as a buffoon – and a sinister one at that.
Schiff's round bald dome was identical to Mussolini's and his
ridiculous bulging eyes are those of Christopher Lloyd's evil cartoon villain
Judge Doom in the Hollywood movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"
The supposedly heroic Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council
was even worse – Presented as an all-American Patriot, instead he resembled the thick,
hulking brutal thug that Hollywood Central Casting always chooses to play endless Russian
intelligence service or criminal villains in thousands of bad primetime TV shows.
Kurt Volker was almost as bad. He was the quiet cool, calm, bespectacled villain –
always a CIA bureaucrat and usually played by Ronnie Cox – who wants to feed Matt Damon,
Brad Pitt, Steven Seagal or Bruce Willis to the villains.
And of course – the Real Hero could not appear at all. The Whistleblower's identity is
being jealously guarded – though as Senator Rand Paul has pointed out, everyone knows who
he is and – far from being a Disinterested Pure Hero, he was a CIA veteran and former
senior National Security Council official outspoken in his contempt for the President of the
United States: In other words, yet another anonymous Deep State manipulator and
apparatchik.
No doubt he will be revealed as the winner on the Fox Television Channel's popular show,
"The Masked Singer."
Or perhaps he will reveal himself in an exclusive interview with a fawning Rachel Maddow,
still masked and identified as "The Lone Ranger."
Now Rand Paul does have the looks, the bearing, the moral fervor and the dramatic character
to play the hero in this botched fiasco of a drama. But there is only one small problem. He is
on the other side. He has forcefully publicly defended President Donald Trump.
Gravity – Albert Einstein assures us – "bends" light (A dubious assertion at
best but at least Einstein, unlike Schiff and Company Looked the Part he always played –
Lovable, Child-Like Jewish Genius Who Never Gets a Hair Cut) And Trump Derangement Syndrome
(TDS) has bent the brains of movie directors Nancy Pelosi and Schiff.
Trump Derangement Syndrome: a fearful, incurable affliction more terrible and humiliating
than Alzheimer's: Better to forget who you are than remember you are a hate-crazed, foaming at
the mouth, credulous idiot who will believe anything.
Like all policy wonks of their aging generation of corrupt and complacent Baby Boomers,
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Schiff have salivated at the
thought of inflicting a "Watergate 2" impeachment drama comeuppance on Donald Trump.
But the Villain of Watergate, Richard Nixon, was indeed an inept and more than slightly
sinister creep (and lifelong liberal). He looked the part and he exuded pious bogus ineptitude
on camera his entire career. (Nixon's inspiration for how he projected himself on television
was clearly Jack Webb playing Sergeant Joe Friday in the wonderfully badly acted "Dragnet"
police series on US television in the 1950s.)
By contrast, Donald Trump channels John Wayne, the most popular and enduring movie star in
American history:
Trump is a physically big and fearless New York construction businessman turned immensely
successful popular entertainer. He, like Wayne is a natural athlete. It is a matter of public
record ignored by all fearful liberal wimps that Trump really was offered a contract after
college to be Major League Baseball player for the Phillies, but he turned it down to focus on
his business career.
Working class American Heartland men and women over 40 instinctively loved Wayne and
therefore they love Trump too. Aging American feminists like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth
Warren – and the further they are over 50, the more rabid and rage crazed and insane they
become – hated Wayne and are traumatized by his resurrection as a defining national
culture hero nearly four decades after his physical death echoing in the figure of Trump.
It was Trump's genius at silent reaction shots that ridiculed 17 Republican Congress
members, Senators and Governors in the 2015-16 campaign before he even began to turn his wit
and video skills on Hillary Clinton – a creepy Richard Nixon clone if there was one.
Trump was crafted by Fate and his brilliant media career from The Apprentice to Worldwide
Wrestling Central Casting to be the Hero of Impeachment. Making him the villain reverses the
entire emotional dynamic of the drama. It is like casting James Stewart as Nixon. (At worst,
Trump is classic King Kong eternally plagued by those pesky biplanes: And everybody roots for
Kong)
Liberals who loved Watergate went into emotional frenzies over Nixon's imagined humiliation
at the hands of such ludicrous pompous and overpaid fools as Dan Rather of CBS.
Pelosi and her laughably misnamed "advisers" have learned nothing from all this. This week,
we are seeing yet more interminable biased show-trial hearings and the even more ludicrous
Jerrold Nadler has taken center stage. He looks like Frankenstein's dwarf –servant
Igor in Mel Brooks' classic 1973 comic horror movie "
Young Frankenstein ."
The bottom line on why Impeachment has failed so miserably to whip up a storm or convince
anyone beyond the already committed "Trump Must Go", babies-throwing-tantrums across Liberal
America lies in the childishness and elemental incompetence of its cast and directors. Being
repulsive and ridiculous human beings themselves, they have no clue how obvious it would be
that they would appear that way to everyone else.
If Sanders got nominated, he could do what you suggest. He ( or surrogates) . could also
coin the phrase The Cowardly Lyin' . . . Trump . . . with a picture of Trump's facial
features photoshopped into the center of the face of the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz.
It would be a clever political pun and a memorable visual image. I give it away for free to
anyone who wants to use it.
But the CenDems don't want to see Sanders nominated. Or Warren or Gabbard. So they will do
all they can to prevent it. The only hope Sanders or Warren or Gabbard has for winning the
nomination is to win it on the First Ballot. The only way one of them can do that is if All
of their delegates uNANimously combine ALL their delegate votes behind ONE of those three
candidates. And ALL the combined delegates for those three candidates would have to ALL
uNANimously aGREE to do that . . . and which one to do it for. Because the First Ballot is
the one only single chance that the Decent Three have to prevent a Catfood Nominee by getting
one of themselves nominated. The CenDems actively and fervently prefer losing with C. Anof
Catfood than winning with Sanders or Warren or Gabbard.
As Yoda would say . . . " First Ballot or First Ballot Not! There is no Second
Ballot."
If the Decent Three cannot collectively co-win the nomination for one of themselves on
Ballot Number One, all they will have left is to obstruct every effort to stop the balloting
for a Brokered Convention. They have to make the ballotng go on and on and on . . . until
Balloting becomes such torture for the Catfood Delegates that the Catfood Conventioneers will
give in to whatever the Decent Three choose to extort from the Catfood Leadership to make the
pain stop.
It would be amusing to watch. However, the end result is a lose-lose for The United States
no matter who wins.
Crook(D) v Crook(R) is the perception – much as it is with impeachment with Pelosi
playing the part of Biden – with Trump standing a good chance to win. As of right now,
the 2020 election is Democrats to lose. They are doing a great job of that so far and it is
not even 2020.
Centrist Democrats will be trying to court the same voters – suburban center-right
Republicans – that Trump will be angling to get. Should it be Biden that wins the
nomination.
If Sanders somehow is nominated and Trump refuses to engage in debats? Run a "Trump Tucks
Tail and Runs" campaign with a massive highlight of his policy failures. Trump excels in the
arena of personal attacks. Biden would lose. Sanders could keep it clean and focused on
policy, dropping nuke after nuke on Trump. With Biden? Given how Centrist Democrats and
Republicans are both guilty of cooperating on issues such as Syria, Libya, Wall Street,
torture, Iraq, etc?
Centrist Democrats have no powder or if they do? Their powder is all wet. It was amazing
the number of policy attacks and opportunities that Centrist Democrats had to use against
Trump in 2016 yet were too afraid to. Opting for personal attacks. I still remember that
ambush by Andersen Cooper and Hillary Clinton against Trump at the 2nd(?) debate discussing
the allegations against Trump regarding rape, etc.
Never mind that Hillary Clinton had Bill with his prior allegations of sexual abuse. That
was the lamest ambush I've ever seen. You could practically see Hillary Clinton's vein pop
out on her forehead when Trump responded. I thought she was going to have a stroke. That
ambush wasted approximately 25 minutes of debate time and achieved less than nothing.
As we've seen with the latest funding bill? Centrist Democrats gave Trump what he wanted.
So, what do Centrist Democrats have to run on?
In a rare interview on Fox News' "Hannity" Thursday night, Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell (R-KY) expressed certainty that President Donald Trump would stay in office
despite the fact that there has yet to be a vote on
impeachment .
"There's no chance the President's going to be removed from office," McConnell told
Hannity.
Further, McConnell said he expects all Republicans and even some Democrats to vote against
impeachment.
"This is a thoroughly political exercise. It's not like a courtroom experience, It's a
political exercise. They've been trying to do this for three years. They've finally screwed up
their courage to do it," McConnell said.
He continued,
" It looks to me like it may be backfiring on them particularly in swing districts that
the Speaker's party managed to win in order to get the majority. Most of the nervousness I
see on this issue with politicians since it's a political process is on the Democratic
side."
This goes so much deeper, as Whitney Webb points out below, there are much broader
implications beyond the depraved pedophile aspect.
Epstein's links to intelligence have since been confirmed. The CIA-Mossad links to
Epstein were detailed in a recent MintPress investigative series and several mainstream media
reports have corroborated Epstein's time as a self-described "financial bounty hunter" who
hunted down embezzled funds and also hid stolen money for powerful people and
governments.
references allude to Epstein's shady business activities in the New York and Palm Beach
real estate markets from the mid-1980s to the late-1990s that were used to launder massive
amounts of money for organized crime and intelligence. It is likely for this reason that
Epstein's real estate activities during this period have been so deliberately ignored by the
U.S. press, even though other aspects of his financial activities were heavily scrutinized in
recent months.
Indeed, in examining Epstein's involvement in real estate markets, particularly in New
York, it becomes clear that those activities have no shortage of controversial tie-ins to the
current U.S. presidential administration as well as major New York power players involved in
suspect financial activity immediately prior to the September 11 attacks as well as the 2008
financial crisis.
I would be vastly surprised if Epstein's ties to the NY real estate markets doesn't
include most of the major players not just the Trump organization. The outlier real estate
moguls would be those without ties to controversial partners and organized crime.
With regard to ""There will come a day where we will realize Jeffrey Epstein was the most
prolific pedophile this country has ever known.":
The focus is on Epstein, but it doesn't belong there. What about the adolescent females
who have been victimized? Does anyone here have a clue or give a damn about what it means
psychologically for the rest of their lives? And what about the hundreds or thousands of
politicians, judges, media people, cultural leaders, et al who have been intimidated,
blackmailed, compromised? What does that mean for politics, the economy, justice, etc.?
" this is how these games are played. If you look carefully, you will see them widely.
Inform, enlighten, while throwing in doubletalk and untruths. The small number of people who
read such books and articles will come away knowing some history that has no current
relevance and being misinformed on other history that does. They will then be in the know,
ready to pass their "wisdom" on to those who care to listen. They will not think they are
average.
But they will be mind controlled, and the killer cat will roam freely without a bell,
ready to devour the unsuspecting mice."
By Anat R. Admati, the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business
(GSB), a Director of the GSB Corporations and Society Initiative, and a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
Originally published at
ProMarket
Author's note: This essay is based on a speech I gave at the
Stigler Center 2019 Conference on Political Economy of Finance. Whereas the content refers to my experiences as an academic with
expertise in finance and economics, the key ideas apply to other areas in business schools and beyond. I hope colleagues will reflect
on the harm from silos and on our opportunities as academics to benefit society.
In the real world, it turned out, important economic outcomes are often the consequences of political forces. During 2010, people
within regulatory bodies told me privately that false and misleading claims were affecting key policy decisions. They urged me to
help clarify the issues and I felt compelled to become involved. Despite years of
research and advocacy , however, flawed
claims persist and still have an impact. (A recently
updated document lists and debunks 34 such claims.)
Many of my experiences in the last decade, which involved extensive interactions outside as well as within academia, were sobering.
I saw confusion, willful blindness , political
forces, various and sometimes subtle forms of corruption, and
moral disengagement
, first hand. The harm from economists ignoring political economy became increasingly evident. There was no way for me to return
to ignoring the issues.
It was also impossible to explain my experiences using economics alone. In writing an essay in 2016 for a book on Finance in
a Just Society edited by a philosopher, I went beyond economics and finance and drew from scholarship in political science, law,
sociology, and social psychology. My essay was entitled " It
Takes a Village to Maintain a Dangerous Financial System ."
Sadly, among the enablers of our inefficient and distorted financial system are economists and academics. Perhaps most shocking,
a fallacious claim about the impact and "cost" of more equity funding, which contradicts basic teachings in corporate finance, has
been included in many versions and editions of banking textbooks authored by prominent academic and former Federal Reserve governor
Frederic Mishkin. (See Section 3.3
here or Chapter 8 of The Bankers' New Clothes .)A risk manager
in one of the largest banks, whom I met in 2016 at a conference attended almost exclusively by practitioners and regulators and who
had dropped out of a top doctoral program in finance, quipped in an email after quoting from an academic paper: "with such friends
[as academics], who needs lobbyists?"
Lobbyists, who engage in "marketing" ideas to policymakers and to the public, are actually influential. They know how to work
the system and can dismiss, take out of context, misquote, misuse, or promote research as needed. If policymakers or the public are
unable or unwilling to evaluate the claims people make, lobbyists and others can create confusion and promote misleading narratives
if it benefits them. In the real political economy, good ideas and worthy research can fail to gain traction while bad ideas and
flawed research can succeed and have an impact.
Luigi Zingales highlighted political economy issues within our profession in a 2013 essay entitled "
Preventing
Economists' Capture " and in his 2015
AFA presidential address entitled "
Does Finance Benefit Society
?" Zingales notes and laments a pro-business and pro-finance bias within economics and finance and the pervasive blindness to
issues such as corporate fraud and political forces. "Awareness of the risk of [economists'] capture is the first line of defense,"
he writes in his 2013 essay. I agree that the issues are real yet often denied or ignored, and that recognizing problems is essential
for addressing them.
Governance and political economy challenges are pervasive beyond banking, where I encountered them so clearly. For example, corporate
governance research, including my own coauthored papers (in
1994 and
2009 ) on shareholder activism, has focused almost exclusively on conflicts between shareholders and managers, effectively assuming
that competitive markets, contracts, and laws protect everyone except for the narrowly-defined "shareholder" -- who is implicitly
assumed to own only one corporation's shares and to care only about the price of those shares.
Having observed governance and policy failures in banking, I realized that the focus on shareholder-manager conflicts is far too
narrow and often misses the most important problems. We must also worry about the governance of the institutions that create and
enforce the rules for all. How power structures and information asymmetries play out within and between institutions in the private
and public sectors is critical.
A 2017 Journal of Economic Perspectives Symposium on the modern corporation includes
an essay I wrote on the distortions that arise
as a result of the focus in corporate governance on financialized targets that purport to capture "shareholder value" when combined
with political economy forces that can lead to governments failing to set and enforce proper rules. The symposium also includes
an essay by Luigi Zingales on how political
and market power feed off each other. We both noted that more public awareness and understanding of these problems is essential for
addressing them.
Economists and academics have numerous opportunities to be helpful by looking more frequently out of their windows, expanding
their domain beyond "solved political problems," collaborating across disciplines, and bringing back a more holistic approach to
their work. Small changes in this direction are starting to happen, as the Stigler Center's conferences on the political economy
of finance show, but we can and should do much more.
Numerous research topics are ripe for more study by theorists and empiricists. Within the following long list of topics (still
a partial one) there are low-hanging fruits and more challenging problems that may require interdisciplinary reach and which tenured
academics are in a particularly privileged position to take on: whistleblower policies, the impact of consumers, employees, and politicians
on corporate actions, accounting rules for derivatives, the effectiveness of boards, audits and auditors regulation, the design of
bankruptcy laws, money laundering, corporate fraud, the organization and pricing of deposit insurance, debt subsidies, the role of
financial literacy and ideology in policy discussions, the structure and governance of regulatory agencies and central banks, lobbying
of multinational corporations, the governance of international bodies such as Financial Stability Board, Basel Committee, and IMF,
and the political economy of corporate enforcement.
Anat Admati. Photo by Nancy Rothstein
Engaging with policy issues in our research and teaching, and even engaging in
advocacy when appropriate and effectively lobbying on behalf
of the public (for example by writing
comment letters or
opinion pieces ) can be valuable and important. Policy
involvement, however, requires not only disclosing
potential conflicts of interest but, most importantly, scrutinizing research carefully to ensure it is adequate for guiding policy.
A problem I have become acutely aware of is that economists and others can be cavalier in claiming that research is relevant for
real-world application without such scrutiny.
As a theorist, I know models have unrealistic and sometimes stylized assumptions, yet models can bring important insights, and
theoretical and empirical papers that capture key features of the real world can be useful for policy. It takes a big leap of faith,
however, and can actually do more harm than good, to claim that models whose assumptions greatly distort the real world are adequate
for real-world applications. Specific examples are discussed in the
first paper I wrote with Peter DeMarzo,
Martin Hellwig, and Paul Pfleiderer (Sections 5-7), the
omitted chapter from the book I wrote with Martin Hellwig, Paul Pfleiderer's
paper on the misuse of models in finance
and economics (which starts with the old joke about the economist assuming a can opener on a deserted island and, among other things,
compares economics and physics) and a recent
presentation by Paul Pfleiderer that discusses the role of assumptions in theoretical and empirical research and which includes
great visuals.
The key takeaways if research is claimed to be relevant for the real world are:
Just because a model claims to "explain" something in the real world does not give it logical or actual validity . Even if
we may never have the data to be able to reject a model, there are ways to apply casual empiricism ("if this model was true, we would
observe x and we don't"), and we must be especially careful if a model contradicts other plausible explanations for what we see.
(Consider: "cigarette smoking improves people's health" as an "explanation" of why people smoke.) Just because a model can be
"calibrated" does not give it logical or actual validity .
Applying inadequate economic models to policy in the real world is akin to building bridges using flawed engineering models. Serious
harm may follow.
We can also enrich our teaching and connect more dots for our students by
developing interdisciplinary courses and by bringing out
the bigger picture, at least occasionally, in teaching standard courses. For example, basic corporate finance courses show how to
calculate the debt tax shield, and we should point out that there is no good reason for the tax code to subsidize debt relative to
equity and that this tax code can create distortions. We can also ask whether shareholders as individuals actually want a company
in which they hold shares to pursue "
positive Net Present Value
" projects that involve pollution or deceptive marketing of harmful products.
Many students are anxious to have such discussions. There is a broad sense today that standard business practices and dysfunctional
governments have exacerbated economic, social, and political problems. We must find ways to broaden the discussion beyond our narrow
lanes. Academic silos are part of the problem, and we should break them to be part of the solution.
Finally, we can and should engage in trying to ensure that governments and other institutions serve society. If only conflicted
experts engage in the process of creating rules, especially on important issues that appear technical and confusing such as accounting
standards or financial regulation, we get what Karthik Ramanna calls "
thin political markets " and
our assumptions about markets are more likely to be false. Academics may be in the best position to inform policy, expose flawed
or poorly enforced rules, and help hold power to account. We cannot assume others will be able or willing to do it without our help.
Governance and politics are key to outcomes everywhere. Related issues about power and control and about the respective roles
of governments and private sector institutions are playing out prominently today in the technology sector. A course I
taught recently about
the internet allowed me to compare and contrast the finance and internet sectors. The Stigler Center has laudably been informing
policy related to digital platforms .
In a recent Harvard
Business Review piece, I argue that business schools should practice and promote "civic-minded leadership" much more than
they currently do. (The text is also available
here .) I hope more academics and academic institutions recognize and embrace the great opportunities we have to try to make
the world a better place.
Does anyone know of a good book (or series of books) that discusses the history and evolution of economics. Ideally, I'm looking
for something that discusses particular political philosophers (e.g Adam Smith, Marx, Keynes, Mises, etc.) in sequence. What I'm
interested in is not only their ideas, but also their histories–what were the circumstances of their lives that lead to their
ideas and how did the political environment they found themselves in contribute. Also, how were the philosophies adopted or corrupted
by followers (e.g. Marx and Russian communism, Adam Smith and neoliberalism). I have yet to find a truly comprehensive book that
has this info. I would expect a title something like "History of Political Economy." Any suggestions from the NC commentariate?
So far I haven't found one book that covers it all. And most books I do find try to describe all economic thought in terms
of the author's particular belief system, which to me isn't all that helpful. So I read a lot of books on history, economics,
and archeology to try and piece together an accurate story. And I still have not read nearly enough to have a complete picture.
If I was much smarter I'd try to do it on my own. Sadly, I'm only mildly intelligent and a crappy writer. Somebody get Michael
Hudson on this so I can read it. I'll start the Kickstarter campaign.
It's much like religion in that introspection and study is generally confined to the walled-garden-containing-all-that-is-true-in-this-world
of choice.
This question intrigued me enough to explore what the Library of Congress catalog has to offer in response to it. The short
answer, based on a good deal of rather fancy searching, is not much -- in English. The subject heading, "Economics–History," is
the one that LC applies to the history of economics as a discipline. However, it retrieves so many citations as to be all but
useless, even when those results are sorted chronologically, because it has been applied to so many works that treat narrow rather
than broad sub-topics. LC has numerous books sharing the straightforward title, History of Economic Thought; they range in date
from 1911 on. The oldest is by Lewis F. Haney. The latest of them seems to be the 2nd "updated" edition of History of Economic
Thought, by E. K. Hunt (2002).
The Library of Congress has also established the subject heading "Political economy–history." However,
it is attached to only one title that covers the topic broadly: Histoire de la pensée économique : abrégé des analyses et
des théories économiques des origines au XXe siècle / Alain Redslob (2011). Despite characterizing itself as a 'summary' the
book comes in at a hefty 355 pages. LC classifies this work at HB75. A title search on "Political Economy" yields, to my eye,
only one somewhat recent work that seems to offer a general treatment: Political economy / Dan Usher (2003). Coming in at 427
pages, it is classified as "Economics" and classed at HB171.5. LC applies the heading 'Economics–Historiography" to eleven works
of which the most relevant here may be: History and historians of political economy / Werner Stark ; edited by Charles M.A. Clark
(1994). As a check of those results a bit of googling turned up a set of essays edited by Maxine Berg under the title, Political
Economy in the Twentieth Century (1990), which set out to represent thinking outside the 'mainstream' of neoclassical or Keynesian
traditions. LC classes it at HB87.
For books titled "History of Political Economy" it looks like one would have to go back into
the 19th century, to discover works bearing just such a title by John K. Ingram (1888; reprinted 2013 by Cambridge UP) and Gustav
Cohn (1894), thus apparently from the point where the Berg essays begin. I have read nothing by any of the authors I've mentioned
here; am just posting the outcome of my searching fwiw.
I have, but haven't yet finished, "An Economist's Guide to Economic History" by Blum and Colvin. If the text itself is insufficient,
the bibliography ought to be pretty comprehensive.
Yes Galbraith Sr was the last classical that pointed out the failings of the payed for PR merchants that some have called economists
and to rub salt in that wound claim dominate economics has no value based biases.
Richard Wolff (of Democracy at Work) has one but I'm not able to search for the title. Just google/qwant his name and a title
that you will recognize as what you are looking for will appear.
I've skimmed that book and it seemed accessible and neatly putting together timelines and major inflection points in the development
or economics.
"In the real world, it turned out, important economic outcomes are often the consequences of political forces."
Sorry to sound mean, but, duh.
"The key takeaways if research is claimed to be relevant for the real world are:
Just because a model claims to "explain" something in the real world does not give it logical or actual validity. Even if we
may never have the data to be able to reject a model, there are ways to apply casual empiricism ("if this model was true, we would
observe x and we don't"), and we must be especially careful if a model contradicts other plausible explanations for what we see.
(Consider: "cigarette smoking improves people's health" as an "explanation" of why people smoke.)"
Did the individuals she is addressing ever take a required undergraduate course in research methods?
Not understanding that is like believing that money does actually grow on trees. I don't understand how this could be
a revelation to supposedly intelligent people with advanced degrees.
You've got Evonomic's newsletter sign-up text box, copy-pasted in here, along with the article text. Guessing that wasn't intentional.
Mentioning it just in case.
This has "Academics may be in the best position to inform policy, expose flawed or poorly enforced rules, and help hold power
to account. We cannot assume others will be able or willing to do it without our help."
Given the funding method for much of academics (wealthy patrons, wealthy think tanks, wealthy companies and wealthy parents)
is it reasonable to expect that academics will truly speak truth to power?
In my view, the article implies a more vigilant economic profession COULD be important in influencing policy.
But I have doubts this could occur.
Economics and economists may be used in the same way that an insurance company executive told me that outside consultants were
sometimes chosen at his firm.
He suggested that consultants were sometimes selected because they were expected to agree with what management wanted to do.
One could suggest that similar dynamics exist for newspaper editorial writers.
If editorial writers were to go counter to their expected editorial content (right or left), they could well be expecting their
future paychecks would be at risk.
Western economics has evolved to serve TPTB, not the common good.
One can see that outside voices, such as Steve Keen and Michael Hudson, are relegated to outside the mainstream.
And on top of that, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb and others have regularly pointed out, achieving a high degree of efficiency
typically comes at the expense of safety.
An old Star Trek episode titled The Trouble With Tribbles is about Star Fleet and Klingons disputing ownership of a planet
which can grow vast amounts of food grains. In one short scene the Klingons claim ownership based on their more efficient exploitation
of resources (more efficient than the Federation) which, they claim, gives them 'rights' to own the planet. To which either McCoy
or Kirk say to themselves, "Oh yes, they're efficient all right. Ruthless, but efficient."
And on top of that, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb and others have regularly pointed out, achieving a high degree of efficiency
typically comes at the expense of safety.
No system ever operates at a greater efficiency than at the moment before its collapse.
Just something to think about, Capitalism rewarding efficiency rather than sustainability or robustness. Both of these require
the expenditure of resources, costs, which subtract from potential profits.
Yes, exactly. I liked this piece, long overdue for me. But what exactly is "efficiency"? I agree that there is no good reason
for the tax code to subsidize debt if, if, adequate financing is otherwise available. Hence the question: Why is there no alternative?
I dunno about small changes but I'm pretty sure we need to be able to downshift, as opposed to spinning out disastrously. There's
this too: finance itself (because financial time is much faster than ordinary time) is more desperate, even frantic, to maintain
its survival in a competitive "economy" so that as finance turns into financialization it achieves critical mass. And in order
just to hang on and not explode requires massive infusions of new money just so finance can stay on top of their own monster.
Some rodeo. The first good regulation for economic security might be to extend financial time – reducing the necessity for huge
turnover profits. But doing so in a way that preserves finance in a tame and domestic manner. Like preventing all the animals
in the barn from eating exponential volumes of alfalfa and producing mud slides of manure in order that the noble farmer doesn't
lose his tennies whilst mucking . Thereby reducing the risks inherent in equity finding – which for a sole proprietor (should
any still exist) is also known as crushing debt.
> The first good regulation for economic security might be to extend financial time – reducing the necessity for huge turnover
profits.
In ecology there is a tau function, the delay time. Predator population lags prey variation and can stabilize systems. And
Theo Compernelle gives details about delaying response time, as the productivity of a work session drops with the number of interruptions.
The Oct 28 Links included the article "Asynchronous Communication: The Real Reason Remote Workers Are More Productive", along
similar lines.
This seems to go against instant messaging, hi frequency trading, and OODA loops. But those seem to operate best in disregulated
situations. To extend financial time – what would that do to speculation?
Edit: Also, Taleb had something on taking data points too often leading to noisy results.
tau function seems to apply here. so as not to eat the seed corn. by extending financial time I meant slow it way down, in
my mind that means extending obligations over a much longer period. That might also mean many fewer financings, less opportunity
to speculate. tau is interesting; nice to know nature has this one figured out.
speculation is the "money" in financial markets. lenghten time=0 opportunity=0liquidity
on the other hand maybe another LTCM can be avoided.
pet theory, financial markets and all their attendend complexity exist to abosrb blasting high energy, innovation to assure survival,nutjob
i know
I'm thinking that one possibility would be money that expires after a set amount of time. Say one year. Money could not then
be used as an asset. It would have to be continuously and reliably spent. All assets would be physical. For one thing, we would
know what society really possessed, as opposed to the imaginary stuff/asset money is.
When I was a little boy, obsessing over Christmas presents, it seemed to me that politics was economics and that economics
was about the extraction of resources from the earth, and from human beings, with all kinds of shenanigans about timing.
No matter how much I learn, it seems that not much has changed.
Thank you for this post! Political economics is a much better name for this pseudo science. If aerospace engineers were wrong
as often as theses clowns airplanes would routinely fall out of the air.
And as Boeing so aptly demonstrates, putting the MBA PMC types in charge of the engineers, also results in airplanes falling
out of the air.
But huge props to Steve Keen for calling this out!
Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman took the "animal spirits" out of economics and turned it into a mathematical model. However,
the behavioral economics and psychological research has shown that people are hard-wired in ways that make the mathematical models
flawed and erroneous.
As a design engineer, we use lots of complex modeling but ultimately our design blueprints and specifications are not rigidly
based on these models because people and/or robots have to build and operate the things. So there is a fair amount of simplification
and clarification that has to happen to have something built without major errors and then operated without major errors, as well
as maintained with varying levels of attention and funding. These require a fair amount of understanding about how humans process
and execute things and/or the limitations on what can be programmed into robots and computers.
I point out to junior engineers that the people who will build and operate the systems did not necessarily graduate in the
top 25% of their high school class unlike the designers. However, many of them have different skill sets that the designers don't
have, such as how to operate heavy equipment and do physical trade activities. So we need to design systems to a common denominator
that work from design and operations viewpoints.
In economics, we are seeing the systems being biased by focusing on theoretical models that don't actually work in practice
because they don't account for what people actually do compared to what a "rational" model says they should do. Hence the crap
about "trickle-down" that never actually works in practice in tax cut plans for the wealthy. Similarly, complex private healthcare
systems in the US don't remotely follow a "perfect information" model that would allow the "invisible hand" to produce efficiency.
so we get massive bloat and rentiere models that prey on consumers. However, that has become a feature, not a bug, on K-street.
Thank you X 10. Samuelson and Friedman claimed they could take the "animal spirits", aka human nature however defined, out
of economics. The claim amounts to saying they could measure, quantify, model, and manipulate human responses to changing situations,
which amounts to a claim of god-like understanding of human mental capacities. How do they measure a human? Reason and logic and
measurable outputs are only a part – and how large a part is as yet undetermined – in human awareness and decision making. Logic
is a good servant but a bad master, as the saying goes. Samuelson and Friedman construct a 'rational man' without ever questioning
the epistemology of their construct. (Mary Shelly might recognize the conceit.)
Michael Hudson is perhaps the best place to start. (Bill Black is a close second. Author of "The Best Way to Rob a Bank is
to Own One.")
Really, if one's education includes a healthy dose of history, anthropology, sociology, politics, and social theory, it's tempting
to suggest that economics is a self-important and smug discipline. Wow, politics affects markets, property relations, and conflict
over economic surplus! Wow. Good to know. And someone just told me that human beings aren't as rational as economists assume.
Wow again. Thanks.
12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual
wickedness in high places.
started by an unemployed Englishman named Eliot Higgins
Good on him – being able to create a thing that rises to such prominence in such a
short space of time speaks volumes about this Higgins guy's entrepreneurial ability. And if he
wasn't mobbed-up to begin with, he sure as fuck is now – which is a double-
mitzvah (for him).
If he did so starting from being unemployed, then anybody who turned down a job application
from the guy must be kicking themselves. (' Unemployed ' is obviously used pejoratively
in the blockquote; 'Englishman' is purely-descriptive).
.
Also, the entire article accepts Bernays' conclusion, but disagrees as to which objectives
should be pursued.
Bernays' conclusions are hardly controversial: most people are gullible imbeciles .
It's not clear to me how much more empirical evidence we need before that becomes just a thing
that everyone with an IQ above 115 accepts.
So the question then becomes " OK, now what? ".
As usual, the right answer is " Depends " – and not just for those with bladder
control problems.
If you want to do things that are just , exploiting gullible imbeciles would appear
to violate the playing conditions. It would be hors jeu ; not done; just not
cricket .
As the Laconian famously said . " IF ."
For those for whom the 'if' condition returns 'false', it does very little to bleat about
how awful they are. You're not going to cause a little switch in their brain to flick on (or
off?), whereupon they realise the error of their ways and make a conscious decision to leave
the gullible imbeciles unexploited.
It's even unlikely to affect their victims (remember, they're imbeciles) – because
otherwise some infra-marginal imbeciles would have to process their way through quite a bit of
cognitive dissonance, and they're not wired for introspection (or processing).
So the sole real purpose (apart from κάθαρσις
catharsis ) is prophylaxis (προ +
φύλαξις – guarding ). Both good enough aims
obviously the writer is the one who gets the cathartic benefit, but who is going to be on
heightened alert as a result of this Cassandra -ish jeremiad -ing?
Non-imbeciles don't need it; imbeciles won't benefit.
Here's the thing: the gullible imbeciles are going to be exploited by someone
.
.
This is something that people of my persuasion struggle with. It boils down to the
following:
Let's assume that a reprehensible thing exists already, and is unlikely to be overthrown
by my opposition to it. Should I just participate and line my pockets?
The resources used are going to be used whether I participate or not, so it may as well be
me who gets them. After all, I will put them to moral uses – and while inside, I can do
things that are contrary to the interests of the reprehensible thing.
There is no satisfactory counter-argument to that line of reasoning, and yet I reject
it.
Then again: I was dropped on my head as an infant, so YMMV.
A few days ago, veterans' group VoteVets endorsed Pete Buttigieg. It has previously supported
Tulsi Gabbard. Details:
New York Times, "Liberal Veterans' Group Endorses Pete Buttigieg in 2020 Race":
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/pete-buttigieg-votevets-endorsement.html
"... Public choice economics has big influence and a bad name. It is a school of economic thought that has at different times been associated with scholars at the University of Rochester, Virginia Tech, and George Mason University. ..."
"... Samuelson, in his famous and influential textbooks, saw a clear role for government in regulating markets. Public choice scholars vehemently disagreed . For political and theoretical reasons, they instead saw government as a fountain of corruption. Public choice economists argued that government regulations were the product of special interest groups that had "captured" the power of the state, to cripple rivals and squeeze money from citizens and consumers. Regulations were not made in the public interest, but instead were designed to bilk ordinary citizens. ..."
"... The conventional story is that as Warren moved from the right to the left, she abandoned the public choice way of thinking about the world, in favor of a more traditional left-wing radicalism. A more accurate take might be that she didn't abandon public choice, but instead remained committed to its free-market ideals, while reversing some of its valences. ..."
"... A recent popular history book, which qualified as a finalist for the National Book Award, depicts public choice as a kind of stealth intellectual weapons program , developed by economist James Buchanan to provide Chilean President Augusto Pinochet with the justification for his dictatorial constitution, and the Koch brothers with the tools to dismantle American democracy. ..."
"... Warren's ideas have a close family resemblance to those of Olson, a celebrated public choice theorist. (Perhaps she has read him; perhaps she has just reached similar conclusions from similar starting points.) Olson, like other public choice scholars, worried about the power of interest groups. He famously developed a theory of collective action that shows how narrowly focused interest groups can dominate politics, because they can organize more cheaply and reap great benefits by setting rules and creating monopolies at the expense of the ordinary public. This means that government programs often actively harm the poor rather than helping them. ..."
"... Olson also castigated libertarian economists for their "monodiabolism" and "almost utopian lack of concern about other problems" so long as the government was chained down. He argued that the government was not the only source of economic power: Business special interests would corrupt markets even if the government did not help them. ..."
"... Warren shares far more intellectual DNA with Mancur Olson and his colleagues than with traditional socialism. However, there are important differences. Olson wrote his key work in the 1980s, before the globalization boom. His arguments for free trade depend on the assumption that open borders will disempower special interests. ..."
Elizabeth Warren's politics seem like a tangle of contradictions. She wants free markets,
but also wants to tax billionaires' capital. Her enemies on the right claim that
she is a socialist , but Warren
describes herself as "capitalist to my bones."
Warren's politics are so confusing because we have forgotten that a pro-capitalist left is
even possible. For a long time, political debate in the United States has been a fight between
conservatives and libertarians on the right, who favored the market, and socialists and
liberals on the left, who favored the government.
It has been clear since 2016 that the traditional coalition of the right was breaking up.
Conservatives such as U.S. President Donald Trump are no fans of open trade and free markets,
and even favor social protections so long as they benefit their white supporters. Now, the left
is changing too.
Warren is reviving a pro-market left that has been neglected for decades, by drawing on a
surprising resource: public choice economics. This economic theory is reviled by many on the
left, who have claimed that it is a Koch-funded intellectual conspiracy designed to destroy
democracy. Yet there is a left version of public choice economics too, associated with thinkers
such as the late Mancur Olson. Like Olson, Warren is not a socialist but a left-wing
capitalist, who wants to use public choice ideas to cleanse both markets and the state of their
corruption.
Public choice economics has big influence and a bad name. It is a school of
economic thought that has at different times been associated with scholars at the University of
Rochester, Virginia Tech, and George Mason University. Public choice came into being in fervent
opposition to the mainstream of economics, which was dominated by scholars such as Paul
Samuelson.
Samuelson, in his famous and influential textbooks, saw a clear role for government in
regulating markets. Public choice scholars vehemently disagreed . For
political and theoretical reasons, they instead saw government as a fountain of corruption.
Public choice economists argued that government regulations were the product of special
interest groups that had "captured" the power of the state, to cripple rivals and squeeze money
from citizens and consumers. Regulations were not made in the public interest, but instead were
designed to bilk ordinary citizens.
Perhaps the most influential version of public choice was known as law and economics. For
decades, conservative foundations supported seminars that taught judges and legal academics the
principles of public choice economics. Attendees were taught that harsh sentences would deter
future crime, that government regulation should be treated with profound skepticism, and that
antitrust enforcement had worse consequences than the monopolies it was supposed to correct. As
statistical research by Elliott Ash, Daniel L. Chen, and Suresh Naidu has shown
, these seminars played a crucial role in shifting American courts to the right.
Warren was one of the young legal academics who attended
these seminars , and was largely convinced by the arguments. Her early work on bankruptcy
law started from public choice principles, and displayed a deep skepticism of intervention.
The conventional story is that as Warren moved from the right to the left, she abandoned the
public choice way of thinking about the world, in favor of a more traditional left-wing
radicalism. A more accurate take might be that she didn't abandon public choice, but instead
remained committed to its free-market ideals, while reversing some of its valences. Her work as
an academic was aimed at combating special interests, showing how the financial industry had
shaped bankruptcy reforms so that they boosted lenders' profits at borrowers' expense.
Notably, she applied public choice theory to explain some aspects of public choice, showing how
financial interests had funded scholarly centers which
provided a patina of genteel respectability to industry's preferred positions.
Now, Warren wants to to wash away the filth that has built up over decades to clog the
workings of American capitalism. Financial rules that have been designed by lobbyists need to
be torn up. Vast inequalities of wealth, which provide the rich with disproportionate political
and economic power, need to be reversed. Intellectual property rules, which make it so that
farmers no longer really own the seeds
they sow or the machinery they use to plant them, need to be abolished. For Warren, the problem
with modern American capitalism is that it is not nearly capitalist enough. It has been
captured by special interests, which are strangling competition.
It is hard to see how deeply Warren's program is rooted in
public choice ideas, because public choice has come to be the target of left-wing conspiracy theories. A recent popular
history book, which qualified as a finalist for the National Book Award, depicts public choice as a kind of
stealth intellectual weapons program , developed by economist James Buchanan to provide
Chilean President Augusto Pinochet with the justification for his dictatorial constitution, and
the Koch brothers with the tools to dismantle American democracy.
For sure, the mainstream of public choice is strongly libertarian, and the development of
the approach was funded by conservative individuals and foundations. What left-wing paranoia
overlooks is that there has always been a significant left-wing current of public choice, and
even a potent left-wing radicalism buried deep within public choice waiting to be uncovered.
The free-market ideal is a situation in which no actor has economic power over any other. As
many of Warren's proposals demonstrate, trying to achieve this ideal can animate a radical
program for reform.
Warren's ideas have a close family resemblance to those of Olson, a celebrated public choice
theorist. (Perhaps she has read him; perhaps she has just reached similar conclusions from
similar starting points.) Olson, like other public choice scholars, worried about the power of
interest groups. He famously developed a theory of collective action that shows how narrowly
focused interest groups can dominate politics, because they can organize more cheaply and reap
great benefits by setting rules and creating monopolies at the expense of the ordinary public.
This means that government programs often actively harm the poor rather than helping them.
However, Olson also castigated libertarian economists for their "monodiabolism" and "almost
utopian lack of concern about other problems" so long as the government was chained down. He
argued that the government was not the only source of economic power: Business special
interests would corrupt markets even if the government did not help them.
The result, according to Olson, was that societies, economies, and political systems became
increasingly encrusted with special-interest politics as the decades passed. Countries
benefited economically from great upheavals such as wars and social revolutions, which tore
interest groups from their privileged perches and sent them tumbling into the abyss.
Olson wanted to open up both politics and the economy to greater competition, equalizing
power relations as much as possible between the many and the few. He argued that under some
circumstances, powerful trade unions could benefit the economy. When unions and business groups
were sufficiently big that they represented a substantial percentage of workers or business as
a whole, they would be less likely to seek special benefits at the expense of the many, and
more likely to prioritize the good of the whole. Olson also believed strongly in the benefits
of open trade, not just because it led to standard economic efficiencies, but because it made
it harder for interest groups to capture government and markets. Northern European economies
such as Denmark, which combine powerful trade unions with a strong commitment to free markets,
represent Olsonian politics in action.
Warren shares far more intellectual DNA with Mancur Olson and his colleagues than with
traditional socialism. However, there are important differences. Olson wrote his key work in
the 1980s, before the globalization boom. His arguments for free trade depend on the assumption
that open borders will disempower special interests.
As economists such as Dani Rodrik and political scientists such as Susan Sell have shown,
this hasn't quite worked out as Olson expected. Free trade agreements have become a magnet for
special interest groups, who want to cement their preferences in international agreements that
are incredibly hard to reverse. The U.S. "fast track" approach to trade negotiations makes it
harder for Congress to demand change, but allows industry lobbyists to shape the
administration's negotiating stance. Investor-state dispute resolution mechanisms provide
business with a friendly forum where they can target government rules that hurt their economic
interests. All of this helps explain why Warren is skeptical of arguments for the general
benefits of free-trade agreements: they aren't nearly so general as economists claim.
Close attention to Warren's public choice influences reveals both her radicalism and its
limits. Like Olson, she is committed to the notion that making capitalism work for citizens
will require changes that border on the revolutionary. The sweeping proposals she makes for
changes to America's gross economic inequality, its economic relations with the rest of the
world, its approach to antitrust legislation, and its tolerance of sleazy relationships among
politicians, regulators, and industry are all aimed at creating a major upheaval. Where she
proposes major state action, as in her "Medicare for All" plans, it is to supplant market
institutions that aren't working, and are so embedded in interest group power dynamics that
they are incapable of reform.
Yet this is a distinctly capitalist variety of radicalism. Socialists will inevitably be
disappointed in the limits to her arguments. Warren's ideal is markets that work as they
should, in contrast to the socialist belief that some forms of power are inherent within
markets themselves. Not only Marxists, but economists such as Thomas Piketty, have suggested
that the market system is rigged in ways that will inevitably favor capital over the long run.
The fixes that Warren proposes will at most dampen down these tendencies rather than remove
them.
If Warren wins, she will not only disappoint socialists. Her proposals may end up being too
radical for Congress, but not nearly radical enough to tackle challenges such as climate
change, which will require a rapid and dramatic transformation of the global economy if
catastrophe is to be averted. Libertarians and mainstream public choice scholars will attack
her from a different vantage point, arguing that she is both too skeptical about existing
market structures and too trusting of the machineries of the state that she hopes to use to
remedy them. State efforts to reform markets can easily turn into protectionism.
What Warren offers, then, is neither a socialist or deep green alternative to capitalism,
nor a public choice justification for why regulators ought to leave it alone. The bet she is
making is that capitalism can solve the major problems that the United States faces, so long as
the government tackles inequality and defangs the special interests that have parasitized the
political and economic systems. Like all such bets, it is a risky one, but one that might
transform the U.S. model of capitalism if it succeeds.
Henry Farrell is a professor of
political science and international affairs at George Washington University.
Sanders (D)(1): "Don't Think Sanders Can Win? You Don't Understand His Campaign"
[Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, New York
Times ]. "Mr. Sanders has reached the typically invisible, downwardly mobile working class
with his language of "class warfare." He has tapped into the anger and bitterness coursing
through the lives of regular people who have found it increasingly impossible to make ends meet
in this grossly unequal society . Since Mr. Trump's election, "class," when it's discussed at
all, has been invoked for its hazy power to chart Mr. Trump's rise and potential fall. Recall
the endless analyses of poor and working-class white voters shortly after his election and the
few examinations of poor and working-class people of color. But the Sanders campaign has become
a powerful platform to amplify the experiences of this multiracial contingent. Under normal
circumstances, the multiracial working class is invisible .
This has meant its support for Mr. Sanders's candidacy has been hard to register in the
mainstream coverage of the Democratic race. But these voters are crucial to understanding the
resilience of the Sanders campaign, which has been fueled by small dollar donations from more
than one million people, a feat none of his opponents has matched. Remarkably, he also has at
least 130,000 recurring donors, some of whom make monthly contributions." • Unsurprising,
when you think about it. Of course the working class is multiracial. Far more so than
the Democrat based in the 10%.
Sanders (D)(2): "Defense Industry Gives More To Bernie Than Any 2020 Candidate" [
The American Conservative ]. "Despite his frequent votes against defense bills, Senator
Bernie Sanders has collected more presidential campaign contributions from defense industry
sources than any other candidate, including Donald Trump. That's according to data on 2020
funding at the OpenSecrets.org
website, which is sponsored by the Center for Responsive Politics . As of early December,
Sanders had out-collected Trump $172,803 to $148,218 in defense industry contributions, a
difference of 17 percent. And his margin had been growing in October and November . Sanders
also out-collected all of his Democratic rivals . The implications for the relationship of
defense industry contributors to Sanders and the others may, or may not, be everything you
might assume. Defense industry PACs, and the corrupting influence they have over compliant
politicians, are not the source of this money . Instead, it all comes from what the
OpenSecrets.org data show as "Individuals" From OpenSecrets.org, it appears that Sanders has
thousands of individual contributions from people who identified affiliations with Boeing and
Lockheed Martin, though no donations appear to amount to the legal maximum, and most seem to be
from engineers, technicians, and other non-management types." • Nevertheless, industry
influence is industry influence, and the writer brings up, as they ought, the basing of the
F-35 in Vermont.
Sanders (D)(3): "Bernie Sanders is breaking barriers with young Latinos. Now he just needs
them to vote" [
CNN ]. "Recent polling suggests that Sanders has a clear advantage with young Latino
voters, who could, with even a modest growth in turnout, fundamentally alter the composition --
racially and ideologically -- of the Democratic electorate." • This is so hilarious. For
years , liberal Democrats have waited for demographics to do their work for them. Now
Latinx voters have arrived -- and Sanders is hijacking them with a policy-based appeal. And he
doesn't need to carry hot sauce in his purse or call himself mi abuelo !
Sanders (D)(4): "Grandpa Slacks Are The New Dad Jeans" [
Elle ]. "When you think of style icons, Bernie Sanders is probably low on your list. I'm
not referencing campaign trail Bernie, with his
hypebeast parka and
sleek navy suit . I'm all about Bernie off-duty: the one who visits Ariana Grande concerts
or walks around in stained button downs. His style should be dissected with the same fervor we
approach female politicians. Feel the Bern, because at a second glance, his style is, looks at
notes, cool . Canceling student debt is nice and all, but let's praise his presidential
crusade for the next it-pant: grandpa slacks." • This here is what they call earned media.
Next week: Hair styles.
UPDATE Sanders (D)(5): "The Trailer: What Nevada could mean for Bernie Sanders" [
WaPo ]. On the Weigel flight jacket incident (
yesterday ): "It was a warm moment, it led local news, and it grew organically from the
Sanders strategy to win Nevada. The senator from Vermont has poured money into organizing, just
like in other early states, with the campaign planning to hire its 100th Nevada staffer by this
weekend. And just like in other early states, Sanders focuses his speeches on voters with
something to lose . more than Iowa or New Hampshire, it could prove whether the Sanders
strategy is working at scale, ready to be expanded into the next 47 states." • Nevada is
Harry Reid's patch, and Reid supports Warren. The Nevada press, aided by the local Democrat
establishment, faked the chair-throwing incident at the state Democrat convention. And the
Culinary Workers have concerns about #MedicareForAll vs. their union plans. So Nevada is no
cakewalk for Sanders, despite his strong Latinx support.
Warren (D)(1): "ELIZABETH WARREN" [ Indivisible ]. "Elizabeth Warren is the
top-scoring candidate on the scorecard because she's got both a bold progressive vision for our
country and the day-one democracy agenda we need to make that vision a reality. She also earns
the top score for building grassroots power." • Oh.
"Why this expert warns that a voting watchdog has 'lost its way' -- and our elections are at
risk" [
Alternet ]. "Verified Voting, the national advocacy group seeking accountable election
results, has been "providing cover" for untrustworthy new voting systems and the public
officials buying them, according to an esteemed academic board member who has resigned in
protest
To be accused by the inventor of its "gold-standard" audit solution of selling out while
states and counties are buy voting technology that will be used into the 2030s is remarkable
.
Stark and other critics say that the cards produced by a so-called ballot-marking device
(BMD) may not be accurate because potentially insecure software sits between a voter's fingers
and the printout.
Thus, Stark contends that his audit tool cannot assess if the reported result is correct.
Also, BMD systems are far more costly than hand-marked ballot systems, he and other critics
have said.
They note that the acquisition costs are followed by per-machine service agreements designed
to generate millions in annual revenues for vendors." • On BMDs,
see NC here .
I get the question often, though one would think it's obvious - Who are these "globalists"
we refer to so much in the liberty movement? Sometimes the request comes from honest people who
only want to learn more. Sometimes it comes from disinformation agents attempting to mire
discussion on the issue with assertions that the globalists "don't exist". The answer to the
question can be simple and complex at the same time. In order to understand who the globalists
are, we first have to understand what they want.
We talk a lot about the "globalists" because frankly, their agenda has become more open than
ever in the past ten years. There was a time not long ago when the idea of the existence of
"globalists" was widely considered "conspiracy theory". There was a time when organizations
like the Bilderberg Group did not officially exist and the mainstream media rarely ever
reported on them. There was a time when the agenda for one world economy and a one world
government was highly secretive and mentioned only in whispers in the mainstream. And, anyone
who tried to expose this information to the public was called a "tinfoil hat wearing
lunatic".
Today, the mainstream media writes puff-pieces about the Bilderberg Group and even jokes
about their secrecy. When members of Donald Trump's cabinet, Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner,
attended Bilderberg in 2019, the mainstream media was wallpapered with
the news .
When the World Government Summit meets each year in Dubai, attended by many of the same
people that attend Bilderberg as well as shady mainstream icons and gatekeepers like Elon Musk
and Neil deGrasse Tyson, they don't hide their discussions or their goals, they post them on
YouTube .
I remember when talking about the US dollar being dethroned and replaced with a new one
world currency system and a cashless society controlled
by the IMF was treated as bizarre theory. Now it's
openly called for by numerous leaders in
the financial industry and in
economic governance . The claim that these things are "conspiracy theory" no longer holds
up anymore. In reality, the people who made such accusations a few years ago now look like
idiots as the establishment floods the media with information and propaganda promoting
everything the liberty movement has been warning about.
The argument on whether or not a globalist agenda "exists" is OVER. The liberty movement and
the alternative media won that debate, and through our efforts we have even forced the
establishment into admitting the existence of some of their plans for a completely centralized
global system managed by them. Now, the argument has changed. The mainstream doesn't really
deny anymore that the globalists exist; they talk about whether or not the globalist agenda is
a good thing or a bad thing.
First , I would point out the sheer level of deception and disinformation used by the
globalists over the past several decades. This deceptions is designed to maneuver the public
towards accepting a one world economy and eventually one world governance . If you have to
lie consistently to people about your ideology in order to get them to support it, then there
must be something very wrong with your ideology.
Second , the establishment may be going public with their plans for globalization, but
they aren't being honest about the consequences for the average person. And, there are many
misconceptions out there, even in the liberty movement, about what exactly these people
want.
So, we need to construct a list of globalist desires vs globalist lies in order to define
who we are dealing with. These are the beliefs and arguments of your run-of-the-mill
globalist:
Centralization
A globalist believes everything must be centralized, from finance to money to social
access to production to government. They argue that centralization makes the system "more
fair" for everyone, but in reality they desire a system in which they have total control over
every aspect of life. Globalists, more than anything, want to dominate and micro-manage every
detail of civilization and socially engineer humanity in the image they prefer.
One
World Currency System And Cashless Society
As an extension of centralization, globalists want a single currency system for the world.
Not only this, but they want it digitized and easy to track. Meaning, a cashless society in
which every act of trade by every person can be watched and scrutinized. If trade is no
longer private, preparation for rebellion becomes rather difficult. When all resources can be
manged and restricted to a high degree at the local level, rebellion would become unthinkable
because the system becomes the parent and provider and the source of life. A one world
currency and cashless system would be the bedrock of one world governance. You cannot have
one without the other.
One World Government
Globalists want to erase all national borders and sovereignty and create a single elite
bureaucracy, a one world empire in which they are the "philosopher kings" as described in
Plato's Republic.
As Richard N. Gardner, former deputy assistant Secretary of State for International
Organizations under Kennedy and Johnson, and a member of the Trilateral Commission, wrote in
the April, 1974 issue of the Council on Foreign Relation's (CFR) journal Foreign Affairs (pg.
558) in an article titled
'The Hard Road To World Order' :
" In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather
than from the top down. It will look like a great 'booming, buzzing confusion,' to use
William James' famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty,
eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal
assault."
This system would be highly inbred, though they may continue to give the masses the
illusion of public participation and "democracy" for a time. Ultimately, the globalists
desire a faceless and unaccountable round table government, a seat of power which acts as an
institution with limited liability, much like a corporation, and run in the same sociopathic
manner without legitimate public oversight. In the globalist world, there will be no redress
of grievances.
Sustainability As Religion
Globalists often use the word "sustainability" in their white papers and agendas, from
Agenda 21 to Agenda 2030. Environmentalism is the facade they employ to guilt the population
into supporting global governance, among other things. As I noted in my recent article
'Why Is The Elitist Establishment So Obsessed With Meat' , fake environmentalism and
fraudulent global warming "science" is being exploited by globalists to demand control over
everything from how much electricity you can use in your home, to how many children you can
have, to how much our society is allowed to manufacture or produce, to what you are allowed
to eat.
The so-called carbon pollution threat, perhaps the biggest scam in history, is a key
component of the globalist agenda. As the globalist organization The Club Of Rome, a
sub-institution attached to the United Nations, stated in their book 'The First Global
Revolution' :
" In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea
that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would
fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a
common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these
dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about,
namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in
natural processes. and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be
overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."
In other words, by presenting human beings as a species as the great danger, the
globalists hope to convince humanity to sublimate itself before the mother earth goddess and
beg to be kept in line. And, as the self designated "guardians" of the Earth, the elites
become the high priests of the new religion of sustainability. They and they alone would
determine who is a loyal servant and who is a heretic. Carbon pollution becomes the new
"original sin"; everyone is a sinner against the Earth, for everyone breaths and uses
resources, and we must all do our part to appease the Earth by sacrificing as much as
possible, even ourselves.
The elites don't believe in this farce, they created it. The sustainability cult is merely
a weapon to be used to dominate mass psychology and make the populace more
malleable.
Population Control
Globalists come from an ideological background which worships eugenics – the belief
that genetics must be controlled and regulated, and those people they deem to be undesirables
must be sterilized or exterminated.
The modern eugenics movement was launched by
the Rockefeller Foundation in the early 1900's in America , and was treated a a
legitimate scientific endeavor for decades. Eugenics was taught in schools and even
celebrated at the World's Fair. States like California that adopted eugenics legislation
forcefully sterilized tens of thousands of people and denied thousands of marriage
certificates based on genetics. The system was transferred to Germany in the 1930's were it
gained world renown for its inherent brutality.
This ideology holds that
4% or less of the population is genetically worthy of leadership, and the elites
conveniently assert that they represent part of that genetic purity.
After WWII the public developed a distaste for the idea of eugenics and population
control, but under the guise of environmentalism the agenda is making a comeback, as
population reduction in the name of "saving the Earth" is in the
mainstream media once again . The Question then arises - Who gets to decide who lives and
who dies? Who gets to decide who is never born? And, how will they come to their decisions?
No doubt a modern form of eugenics will be presented as the "science" used to "fairly"
determine the content of the population if the elites get their way.
Narcissistic
Sociopathy
It is interesting that the globalists used to present the 4% leadership argument in their
eugenics publications, because 4% of the population is also consistent with the number of
people who have
inherent sociopathy or narcissistic sociopathy , either in latent or full-blown form,
with 1% of
people identified as full blown psychopaths and the rest as latent. Coincidence?
The behavior of the globalists is consistent with the common diagnosis of full-blown
narcopaths, a condition which is believed to be inborn and incurable. Narcopaths
(pyschopaths) are devoid of empathy and are often self obsessed. They suffer from delusions
of grandeur and see themselves as "gods" among men. They believe other lowly people are tools
to be used for their pleasure or to further their ascendance to godhood. They lie incessantly
as a survival mechanism and are good at determining what people want to hear. Narcopaths feel
no compassion towards those they harm or murder, yet crave attention and adoration from the
same people they see as inferior. More than anything, they seek the power to micro-manage the
lives of everyone around them and to feed off those people like a parasite feeds off a host
victim.
Luciferianism
It is often argued by skeptics that psychopaths cannot organize cohesively, because such
organizations would self destruct. These people simply don't know what they're talking about.
Psychopaths throughout history organize ALL THE TIME, from tyrannical governments to
organized crime and religious cults. The globalists have their own binding ideologies and
methods for organization. One method is to ensure benefits to those who serve the group (as
well as punishments for those who stray). Predators often work together as long as there is
ample prey. Another method is the use of religious or ideological superiority; making
adherents feel like they are part of an exclusive and chosen few destined for greatness.
This is a highly complicated issue which requires its own essay to examine in full. I
believe I did this effectively in my article
'Luciferians: A Secular Look At A Destructive Globalist Belief System' . Needless to say,
this agenda is NOT one that globalists are willing to admit to openly very often, but I have
outlined extensive evidence that luciferianism is indeed the underlying globalist cult
religion. It is essentially an ideology which promotes moral relativism, the worship of the
self and the attainment of godhood by any means necessary – which fits perfectly with
globalism and globalist behavior.
So, now that we know the various agendas and identifiers of globalists, we can now ask "Who
are the globalists?"
The answer is – ANYONE who promotes the above agendas, related arguments, or any
corporate or political leader who works directly with them. This
includes presidents that claim to be anti-globalist while also filling their cabinets with
people from globalist organizations.
To make a list of names is simple; merely study the membership rosters of globalists
organizations like the Bilderberg Group, the Council On Foreign Relations, the Trilateral
Commission, Tavistock Institute, the IMF, the BIS, World Bank, the UN, etc. You will find a
broad range of people from every nation and every ethnicity ALL sharing one goal – A
world in which the future for every other person is dictated by them for all time; a world in
which freedom is a memory and individual choice is a commodity only they have the right to
enjoy.
* * *
If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on
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HERE .
The short story is that these stanks are stronger than ever in terms of their ability to
build support for what their funders task them to do, laundering the fingerprints on the rigged
outcome to make it all look like the honest work of unbiased academics.
Corporate media, even in the old days where they were not as bad, would not dig into the
stanks' shorts too deeply, as they had a symbiotic relationship. The media used them for
"expert" sourcing in getting their geopolitical articles done and looking classy.
There is no way to get rid of the stanks now, as they are too deeply entrenched. It would
take funding like they have to construct an "anti-stank" – a new batch of non-stanks that
were not in the tank Jim W. Dean ]
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For the longest time the so-called "think tanks" have been an indispensable element of the
American political system. These days there are well over two thousand such "analytical
centers" operating in the US, which exceeds the combined total in other major international
players such as India, China, Argentina, Germany, and the UK.
The first noticeable spike in the number of think tanks across America occurred in the
post-WWII years when such "analytical centers" assumed the duty of upholding the emerging
unipolar world order within which Washington reigned above all other nations.
In fact, most of them were created primarily by the military, interested in developing a
strategy for accumulating large volumes of politically relevant information, which would have
been impossible without the employment of civilian specialists possessing diverse skill sets
that allowed them to become proficient at geostrategic analysis.
Thus, in 1956, the US Secretary of Defense headed by Charles Erwin Wilson demanded that a
total of America's five largest universities join their efforts in establishing a non-profit
research organization called the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA). In less than a decade,
this entity grew into a massive scientific institution employing well over 600 people.
In the 1960s, there were over 200 think tanks operating simultaneously all across America.
The most famous and influential among them were the so-called "government-funded centers",
among them the RAND Corporation, the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Institute for Naval
Analysis, and the Aerospace Corporation, all of which were directly supported by the US
Congress, which would allocate up to 300 million dollars annually to support their
operations.
However, in addition to
those thinks tanks funded by the state, there was a rapidly growing number of privately-owned
analytical centers that were funded by special interests who decided to use these entities to
advance their own agendas, thus indirectly influencing American domestic and foreign policies
by launching various campaigns.
There where various charitable foundations that came in handy, providing gifts and public
donations and allowing their analysts to profit from various publications. During the period
from 1957 to 1964, when the very term "think tanks" was coined, the total turnout of those
entities increased to 15 billion dollars annually.
At the peak of the think tank craze in the United States -- from 1960 to 1970 -- more than
150 billion dollars were spent on their operations. Today, the budget of the RAND Corporation
alone exceeds the threshold of 12 billion dollars a year.
Initially, this American think tank empire was used to overcome crises and develop long-term
strategies, with custom-tailored recipes provided to American politicians for approaching
various regions of the world. In the 1960s, they were tasked with finding solutions to the
problems associated with the Vietnam War, the declining role of the US dollar in global
financial markets and the internal instability of the United States.
That's when globalist projects were born, which were designed in such a way that they would
divert the attention of the general public from the most acute social problems at home.
Thus, by the end of the previous century, American think tanks turned themselves into an
active decision-making tool in the US, as they were not just using "external financing" to
advance the agendas of their benefactor s , but were also capable of putting forward respected
analysts supporting their cause, with the controlled mass media promoting their narrative.
The close interconnection of the large think tanks and the US government structures is
confirmed by American politicians and businessmen changing high-profile positions within the
government with positions in these entities.
From the point of view of political rotation, those think tanks serve as a training ground
for future high-ranking officials of upcoming administrations, where the establishment
handpicks and approves these figures who will eventually get elected. And while one party is in
power, the other sends its front-liners back to the think tanks.
A vivid example of this phenomenon is the track record of Donald Trump's former advisor on
matters of national security, John Bolton, who at different periods of his political career was
employed by three different think tanks – the Jewish Institute for National Security of
America (JINSA), the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) and the
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Besides this, as you may know, he was Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and
International Security Affairs under George W. Bush, a member of the New American Century
(PNAC), and in 2007 joined the American Enterprise Institute (AE), that is also an NGO.
Upon receiving specific tasks from behind the scenes interests, elites and various
departments, these think tanks began developing various foreign policy concepts, training
experts and representatives while preparing public opinion for certain developments through the
media, like the advancement of "color revolutions" or the reemergence of some "evil powers"
attempting to compete with Washington.
Aside from the well-publicized example of the RAND Corporation, you can look at StrategEast,
which is described as the strategic center for political and diplomatic decisions. The main
stated objective of StrategEast is the development of programs for specific states on the basis
of their susceptibility to various Western (American) values.
Behind this idyllic concept hides the following: StrategEast analysts collect information on
the possibility of creating a pro-American society within targeted territories that are of
interest to the United States.
For instance, from the mid-80s onwards, Washington was interested in the Soviet Union, and
its republics, which resulted in the Baltic states, and then Georgia and Ukraine joining the
list of US allies due to the programs developed by StrategEast. Today, they are busy
researching the Central Asian states, so it doesn't take much imagination to predict what will
happen next.
In the initial stages, StrategEast programs provide a recipe to drive a country away from
its traditional cultural values, so that it can be turned into an anti-Russian stronghold (as
was done in the Baltic countries, Georgia, and Ukraine) or into their anti-Chinese equivalent
(like is happening now with the countries of Central and Southeast Asia).
In Central Asia, for example, American "experts" have begun to impose the idea of
translating the national alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin under a very strange pretext that it
would then make life easier for local Internet users (while failing to explain why the
incredibly complex Japanese and Chinese characters do not impede the ability of users in Japan
and China to use the Internet).
In parallel with linguistic and cultural Westernization, the local public is being prepared
for the possibility of massive protests so that it won't object to "color revolutions" that
engineered to follow.
As we're witnessing the new Cold War going into full swing, there must be an objective
assessment of the activities of US think tanks, as their "concepts" and "projects" should be
approached with a clear understanding of the fact that they advance certain interests that do
not necessarily correspond with the national interests of other countries.
Valery Kulikov, expert politicologist, exclusively for the online magazine 'New Eastern Outlook'
Jewish hedge fund manager Henry Laufer keeps a low profile.
Laufer and his business partner Jim Simons burned
$14 million on Hillary Clinton in 2016. He is currently spending $2.8 million on figures
like Nancy Pelosi and disgraced, corrupt Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz's re-election
campaign.
The Laufers are also generous patrons of Media Matters for America, the anti-free speech
organization that has made multiple attempts to get Tucker Carlson off the air.
Paul Singer [***] (GOP)
If you're wondering why so many prominent conservative figures are **** stars and
homosexuals, it's all downstream from international *** Paul Singer.
Singer, who puts the
"vulture" in "vulture capitalist," is one of the country's top funders of homosexual
activism and the
reason the Republican party did not fight against gay marriage. He was instrumental in
paying to
obtain the infamous "Steele Dossier," which falsely claimed Donald Trump was being
blackmailed by Vladimir Putin with video of prostitutes urinating on him in Russia. He has a
wide array of politicians, journalists and other influential people in his pocket, largely
dedicated to pushing hawkish Israel policies, homosexuality and
discrediting critics of capitalism .
Going into 2020, the hedge fund oligarch is pouring $3.4 million dollars into Lindsey
Graham's PAC , the WFW Fund (dedicated to financing female conservatives) and the American
Unity PAC (a group dedicated to advancing homosexual activists inside the Republican
party).
While the JEWS that run and own google decide your fate, their *** buddies are doing this
to your U.S. political system:
'Zionist Money Already Corrupting the 2020 Elections'
by Eric Striker
"WATCHING THE last Democratic debate, you would think the candidates were vying for an
electorate that is 90% Black and illegal alien.
Issues like jobs, infrastructure, even foreign policy were largely ignored.
The [***] parasites in the shadows making a mockery out of representative democracy have
good reason to be confident: they are already starting to corrupt the 2020 elections.
Open
Secrets analyzed the most recent donor data for the top 10 political donors going into
next year's first quarter.
Unsurprisingly, 8 out of 10 of these fat cats are Jews.
Henry and Marsha Laufer [JEWS] (Democrat)
Jewish hedge fund manager Henry Laufer keeps a low profile.
Laufer and his business partner Jim Simons burned
$14 million on Hillary Clinton in 2016.
He is currently spending $2.8 million on figures like Nancy Pelosi and disgraced, corrupt
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz's re-election campaign.
The Laufers are also generous patrons of Media Matters for America, the anti-free speech
organization that has made multiple attempts to get Tucker Carlson off the air.
Karla Jurvetson [***] (Democrat)
Jurvetson, whose real surname is Tinklenberg, is a physician who recently divorced
billionaire Steve Jurvetson.
Her ex-husband is a big player in Silicon Valley, known for hosting
drug-fueled orgies where mentally disturbed tech CEOs dress up like bunny rabbits.
Paul Singer [***] (GOP)
If you're wondering why so many prominent conservative figures are **** stars and
homosexuals, it's all downstream from international *** Paul Singer.
Singer, who puts the
"vulture" in "vulture capitalist," is one of the country's top funders of homosexual
activism and the
reason the Republican party did not fight against gay marriage. He was instrumental in
paying to
obtain the infamous "Steele Dossier," which falsely claimed Donald Trump was being
blackmailed by Vladimir Putin with video of prostitutes urinating on him in Russia. He has a
wide array of politicians, journalists and other influential people in his pocket, largely
dedicated to pushing hawkish Israel policies, homosexuality and
discrediting critics of capitalism .
Going into 2020, the hedge fund oligarch is pouring $3.4 million dollars into Lindsey
Graham's PAC , the WFW Fund (dedicated to financing female conservatives) and the American
Unity PAC (a group dedicated to advancing homosexual activists inside the Republican
party).
Deborah Simon [***] (Democrat)
The *** Simon inherited her money from her property development father, Melvin Simon, of
Simon Property Group. The elder Simon was the subject of multiple lawsuits when he
ripped off his shareholders and paid himself a $120 million dollar bonus.
Deborah has so far spent $3.5 million dollars on various Democratic PACs, including $1
million dedicated to bankrolling David Brock's operations.
Bernard Marcus [***] (GOP)
Bernard Marcus, the Jewish emigre who founded Home Depot, was one of the a handful of
billionaires to give Donald Trump big donations during his 2016 presidential run.
Now, Zionist activist Marcus has set aside $4.6 million dollars to keep Senate Majority
leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, both up for re-election in
2020, in his pocket.
George Soros [***] (Democrat)
Soros is one of many Jewish finance-capitalists corrupting our politics. He spent $20
million during the 2016 election.
Today, Soros looks to be the big fish in small bowls by targeting prosecutorial races.
This is dangerous, as few people pay much attention to District Attorney races, even though
these figures have the power to put innocent people in prison and let guilty people go
free.
The $5.1 million he's utilizing this quarter have all gone to his new "Democracy PAC,"
which played a
major role in getting extremist prosecutors elected in Virginia. Soros also famously
provided $1.7
million dollars to fellow *** Larry Krasner, who ran for prosecutor in Philadelphia as a
literal supporter of Black Lives Matter.
Superficially these elections are low stakes, so even a few hundred thousands dollars can
guarantee a landslide victory for the most absurd and extreme candidates. Soros' money going
into 2020 promise to accelerate the US judicial system's decline into anarcho-tyranny .
Tom Steyer [***] (Democrat)
Steyer is yet another Jewish hedgefund manager with a penchant for lavish political
spending.
Steyer funds countless neo-liberal think-tanks and Democratic party causes. Now, he is
planning to blow
$100 million on his highly unpopular presidential run.
This billionaire who made much of his money in the coal industry is now primarily pushing
climate change , which is really
just austerity through the backdoor . This quarter, he has spent $6.5 million on his own
Super PAC, NextGen Climate Action.
Donald Sussman [***] (Democrat)
This hedgefund *** leads in donations during this period.
Sussman is Paul Singer's former business partner and played a major role in the
billionaire cabal that tried to win the Democrats the whole Congress in 2018.
He is giving $7.5 million to various Democratic party PACs, and has a special interest in
Cory Booker's flagging campaign -- currently polling at 3%.
Please think about it, folks. These companies thrive on H1B Visas and foreign talent. With
the social power invested in these companies, the foreign-born employees create yet another
conduit of foreign election influence.
The H-1Bs have ruined the industry. So much American talent is underemployed or unemployed
simply because they can't get noticed amidst the oceans of foreign nationals.
The so-called "Anti-Defamation League," like every Jewish interest group, doesn't
practice what it preaches. In fact, the ADL under CEO Johnathan Greenblatt is one of the
main organizations working to defame its political enemies and to censor free speech
online. Their cause? As usual, securing Jewish ethnic interests.
This is what it all boils down to in the end. All the censorship is at the behest of the
ADL and crony CEOs (mostly Jewish) working in tandem to attack free speech on the
internet...
If Trump gets re-elected, if Big Tech continues to evade accountability, if imperial
adventures continue abroad, if migrant farmworkers cannot feed their families, you can trace
it back to this Tuesday, and the actions a House Speaker took while nobody was paying
attention .
-- David Dayen, The American Prospect (emphasis added)
As the Impeachment Drama lumbers to a 2020 conclusion, morphing into its variant selves and
sucking life from every other story the media most folks attend to are inclined to tell,
unwatched things are happening in its shadow.
Nancy Pelosi has used end-of-year urgency and the impeachment distraction to pass four
pieces of major legislation, three of which will become law, all on the same day.
NAFTA 2.0 is one of them. Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, agreed under pressure to
approve Pelosi's House version of NAFTA 2.0, rebranded "USMCA," or United States-Mexico-Canada
Agreement, for obvious reasons. This is a deal he should never have made, yet he made it.
Consider who Trumka is -- a bridge between the neoliberal mainstream of the Democratic Party
and the (presumably further left) labor movement that supports and sustains it. In other words,
he's the person who blesses neoliberal policies as "progressive" (thus retaining mainstream
Democratic Party approval) while modifying those policies in the margins to be less terrible
(thus retaining the approval of progressives, who want to think of him as opposed to
neoliberalist policies).
He's the person, in other words, who makes the labor movement look less like a puppy of the
Democratic Party establishment to progressives, while keeping the labor movement (and himself)
firmly in the Party establishment tent. The drama of "Will Trumka approve USMCA?" we recently
witnessed exemplified this role.
To anyone with two cells in their brain, it was obvious as soon as the question was asked
that he would approve USMCA. The stage was set; his arrival on it announced; the spotlight was
ready and bright. Would he really walk onto this stage at this late date and say no to Party
leaders? Of course not.
Would he have been able to stay in his lofty perch if he had? His job was to bless the cake
after it had been baked, not to unbake it.
What pressure was Trumka under? First, obviously, from the Democratic Party and its
billionaire donors, to give them what they and the Republicans -- and Donald
Trump -- all wanted, a neoliberal-lite trade deal that could become in Nancy Pelosi's words "a
template for future trade agreements a good template."
Second, Trumka was under pressure from his union base itself (so say some, including David
Dayen in the piece linked below), many of whom are Trump supporters, to give President Trump a
signature first-term victory, just in time for the start of his second-term campaign.
Do I believe this latter explanation? No, but I believe Trumka believes it. And if indeed it
is true that Trumka has to serve Trump, at least in part, in order to serve his own base, it's
further evidence of the careerism of his actions, in contrast to behavior from actual
labor-movement principles.
Here's Dayen on this sordid tale (emphasis added):
Pelosi got
AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka to sign off on the U.S.–Mexico-Canada Agreement
(USMCA), handing Trump a political victory on one of his signature issues. Predictably, White
House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham immediately gushed, calling USMCA "the biggest and
best trade agreement in the history of the world."
It's, um, not that. Economically, USMCA is a nothingburger; even
the most rose-colored analysis with doubtful assumptions built in shows GDP growth of
only 0.06 percent per year. There's one good provision: the elimination of the investor-state
dispute settlement (ISDS) provision that allowed corporations to sue governments in secret
tribunals over trade violations. There's one bad provision: the
extension of legal immunity for tech platforms over user-generated content, put into a
trade deal for the first time. This will make the immunity shield, codified in Section 230 of
the Communications Decency Act, much harder to alter in the future. Pelosi has called this
deal a "template" for future agreements, though trade reformers have called it a bare minimum
floor.
Pelosi
tried to remove the immunity shield , but abandoned the request. She did succeed in
removing a provision for Big Pharma that extended exclusivity periods for biologics. The
Sierra Club has termed the deal an "
environmental failure " that will not have binding standards on clean air and water or
climate goals. But the threshold question on the USMCA was always going to be labor
enforcement: would the labor laws imposed on Mexico hold, improving their lot while giving
U.S. manufacturing workers a chance to compete? There was also the open question of why the
U.S. would reward Mexico with a trade deal update when trade unionists in the country
continue to be kidnapped and killed.
In his statement, Trumka lauds the labor enforcement, noting provisions that make it
easier to prove violations (including violence against workers), rules of evidence for
disputes, and inspections of Mexican facilities, a key win. But I've been told that the
AFL-CIO did not see the details of the text before signing off, which is unforgivable ,
especially on trade where details matter. There was
no vote by union leaders , just a briefing from the AFL-CIO.
At least one union, the Machinists, remains opposed , and
others were noncommittal until they see text. The Economic Policy Institute, which is
strongly tied to labor, called the agreement " weak tea at
best ," a tiny advance on the status quo that will not reverse decades of outsourcing of
U.S. jobs.
Meanwhile, back at the Trump re-election ranch:
While the economics are negligible (and potentially harmful on tech policy), on the
politics
activists are losing their mind at the prospect of a Trump signing ceremony, with labor
by his side, on a deal that he will construe as keeping promises to Midwest voters . "Any
corporate Democrat who pushed to get this agreement passed that thinks Donald Trump is going
to share the credit for those improvements is dangerously gullible," said Yvette Simpson, CEO
of Democracy for America, in a statement. Only a small handful of Democratic centrists were
pushing for a USMCA vote, based mostly on the idea that they had to "do something" to show
that they could get things done in Congress. Now they've got it, and they'll have to live
with the consequences.
I guess helping re-elect the "
most dangerous president ever " pales in comparison to passing bipartisan-approved
neoliberal trade deals.
One of Richard Trumka's jobs, if he wants to stay employed, is to make sure neoliberal Party
leaders like Nancy Pelosi are happy and well served while simultaneously keeping progressives
thinking that Big Labor is still in their corner even on issues the donor class most cares
about.
"... Ciaramella notably contacted House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff's (D-CA) office before filing his complaint , on a form which was altered to allow for second-hand information, after going to a Democratic operative attorney who will neither confirm nor deny his status as the whistleblower. ..."
NY Post Editorial Board Names Eric Ciaramella As Whistleblower by Tyler Durden Fri, 12/13/2019 - 10:30 0
SHARES
The
New York Post Editorial Board has named CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella as the whistleblower at
the heart of the Trump impeachment saga, confirming an October 30 report by
RealClearInvestigation 's Paul Sperry which has been widely cited in subsequent
reports.
Whistleblower lawyers refuse to confirm or deny Ciaramella is their man. His identity is
apparently the worst-kept secret of the Washington press corps . In a sign of how farcical
this has become, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said his name as part of a series of names
during a live hearing Wednesday night aired on television. He never called him the
whistleblower, just said he was someone Republicans thought should testify, yet Democrats
angrily denounced the "outing." If you don't know the man's name, how do you know the man's
name? -
New York Post
Ciaramella, a registered Democrat, is a CIA analyst who specializes in Russia and Ukraine,
and ran the Ukraine desk at the National Security Council (NSC) in 2016. He previously worked
for then-NSC adviser Susan Rice, as well as Joe Biden when the former VP was the Obama
administration's point-man for Ukraine. He also worked for former CIA Director John Brennan,
and was reportedly a highly valued employee according to
RedState ' s Elizabeth Vaughn. He also became former National Security Adviser H.R.
McMaster's personal aide in June 2017, was
called out as a leaker by journalist Mike Cernovich that same month.
He also worked with Alexandra Chalupa , a Ukrainian-American lawyer and Democratic operative
involved in allegations that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 US election by releasing the so-called
'Black Ledger' that contained Paul Manafort's name.
In 2017, former White House chief strategist
Steve Bannon wanted Ciaramella kicked off the National Security Council over concerns about
leaks.
Earlier this year, Ciaramella ignited the Democratic impeachment efforts against President
Trump when, using second-hand information, he anonymously complained that Trump abused his
office when he asked Ukraine to investigate corruption allegations against Joe Biden and his
son Hunter, as well as claims related to pro-Clinton election interference and DNC hacking in
2016.
Ciaramella notably contacted House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff's (D-CA)
office before filing his complaint , on a form which was altered to allow for second-hand
information, after going to a Democratic operative attorney who will neither confirm nor deny
his status as the whistleblower.
Steve Bannon was only on the National Security Council for two months, and was removed in
early April 2017 at the direction of the President. So the story about Bannon valiantly
trying to save the day is probably more of his resume padding.
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In testimony before Congress this week, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander
Vindman, an Army officer with more than 20 years of service, told lawmakers that he had heard
the president try to pressure Ukraine's president to unearth dirt on a political rival. In
response, the president's allies have decided to make an issue of Vindman's birthplace. They
say his infanthood in Kiev -- he left at age 3 -- reveals something about his character and his
allegiances. They are right, but in exactly the wrong way.
Here, you should pardon the expression, are some facts and a little bit of history. When
Vindman was born on June 6, 1975, Ukraine was enveloped in the Soviet Union. At birth, Vindman
would have been added temporarily to his parents' internal passports, a document that all
Soviet citizens were required to carry starting at 16, mostly to make sure they were not
residing somewhere without official permission.
That passport contained the infamous "fifth line" or "pyati punkt," in Russian, which had
been created under Josef Stalin and listed the holder's "nationality." Vindman was born in
Ukraine, but that line would not have said "Ukrainian" unless his parents had chosen to defy
the law. It would have said "Jew."
In the Soviet Union, Jews were considered separate and apart from other nationalities,
especially in two of the republics, Russia and Ukraine, where the local party enforcers were
particularly happy to do the Kremlin's dirty work. You could be born in Minsk or Pinsk, or Omsk
or Tomsk, or even Alexandrovsk or Petropavlovsk, and if you were born to Jewish parents, your
passport was likely stamped "Jew."
When I first learned this, upon arriving in Moscow in May 1983 as a reporter for the
Associated Press, I was outraged. I saw it like the Nazi's yellow star. I couldn't imagine how
Jewish people could stand it.
Until one day, I put that question to Naum Meiman, a Jewish mathematician who was part of
Andrei Sakharov's circle of dissidents. The answer was simple and humbling.
He didn't want "Russian," or any other so-called Soviet nationality, in his passport.
Russians didn't consider him Russian, officially or otherwise, and he didn't want the label.
"I'm a Jew who is forced to live in Russia, not a Russian," he said more than once.
I am certainly not speaking for Vindman, whom I do not know, but I have never met a Jew who
fled the Soviet Union and felt any kind of loyalty to the country -- one where Jews were
spurned from birth and then imprisoned within the state's borders until it decided to allow
them to leave. In those days, the Soviet Union revoked émigré's citizenships, in
what was supposed to be a final act of deep humiliation, but was invariably a badge of
pride.
"Here we have a U.S. national security official who is advising Ukraine while working inside
the White House, apparently against the president's interest," Fox News host Laura Ingraham
told viewers Monday.
The circumstances of Vindman's birth argue for a different interpretation. They show him to
be part of a tradition of 20th century Eastern European Jews who suffered under tyrannies of
the left and the right. These people fled the first chance they had to a country that would
accept them as fellow citizens, one where they would not be constantly questioned about their
loyalties. For many decades, that country was the United States.
To contact the author of this story: Andrew Rosenthal at [email protected]
Retired Brigadier General Peter Zwack spoke to "Nightline" ahead of Vindman's testifying
before the House Intelligence Committee during a public impeachment hearing of President
Trump.
Former democrat
21 days ago Mr Vindman looks more like a doorman, than a Army Officer in that uniform !
Larry
21 days ago
What's that "thing" on his ring finger (appears wooden)? Is that from his partner "Husband"?
In my US Army years, soldiers were dishonorable discharged from this "Criminal Offense" !
Former Attorney General Eric Holder, the first AG in history to be held in both
criminal and civil contempt by Congress for failing to turn over ' Fast and
Furious ' documents, says that current Attorney General William Barr is "nakedly partisan"
and unfit for office.
In a Wednesday night op-ed in the
Washington Post , Holder - who previously described himself as President Obama's
'wing-man,' wrote that Barr is employing "the tactics of an unscrupulous criminal defense
lawyer" by vilifying critics of President Trump.
Holder slammed Barr's recent comments at a Federalist Society event, in which the AG
"delivered an ode to essentially unbridled executive power" by "dismissing the authority of the
legislative and judicial branches."
When, in the same speech, Barr accused "the other side" of "the systematic shredding of
norms and the undermining of the rule of law," he exposed himself as a partisan actor, not an
impartial law enforcement official. Even more troubling -- and telling -- was a later (and
little-noticed) section of his remarks, in which Barr made the outlandish suggestion that
Congress cannot entrust anyone but the president himself to execute the law. -Eric Holder
"It undermines the need for understanding between law enforcement and certain communities
and flies in the face of everything the Justice Department stands for," wrote Holder, adding "I
and many other Justice veterans were hopeful that he would serve as a responsible steward of
the department and a protector of the rule of law."
So - Eric Holder thinks Barr should be an "impartial law enforcement official," and not a
"partisan actor," yet described himself in a
2013 interview as President Obama's "wing-man."
In 2012, 'scandal-free' Obama claimed executive privilege over Fast and Furious documents
"gunwalking" operation sought by House investigators investigating the death of Border Patrol
agent Brian Terry at the hands of foreign nationals who used a weapon obtained through illegal
straw purchases orchestrated by Obama's ATF.
Holder blasted the contempt votes as "politically motivated" and "misguided."
As a result of his stupidity, Attorney General Eric Holder's actions killed US Boarder and
Mexican police . Holder should have been charged with homicide for the murders of the US
Boarder Gaurds.
Holder is another protection card to play, yesterday it was Bill Clinton. They are
reaching desperation, bottom of the barrel, and soon all will be naked and exposed. Easy to
lose sight of the damage to our nation wrought by this one party that puts it's survival and
needs above us all.
..all i mostly see is the needed collapse and waiting for that to happen..
someone around here said recently that it should be smooth sailing for the USA for at
least another 150 to 200 years, so indeed to make a prediction it's enough you have vocal
cords.
interestingly though, Dmitry Orlov, who has invested much of his overall thesis in the
process of collapse (of the US empire) recently
predicted its happening in his lifetime At this point, I am tempted to go out on a limb
and predict that if all goes well (for me) I will still be alive when this collapse actually
transpires
This observation by Lambert Strether sums it up: "Karlan's wasn't even footnoted, whether
to facts, or to law." She is supposedly a professor of law, supposedly advising the Congress
about the process of impeachment. She didn't even try to do her job. One may not agree with
Turley, although the long excerpt brings a broad perspective to what is criminality and to
how much criminality we now consider normal in the U.S. government. To his credit, Turley
marshals facts into a synthesis.
What the Republicans don't seem to get is that will to power isn't all that matters and
that their commitment to economic degradation and looting the citizenry have thrown them into
a crisis (as the paleo-conservatives keep pointing out). Among liberals like Pelosi (and
Karlan), the cluelessness is breathtaking. American liberalism is in a profound crisis, with
Karlan's disquisition being particulary breathtaking for clichés-a-minute, sheer
vulgar thinking, and kitsch.
This is the end. For those of us on the left, and I hesitate to advise non-action, it may
be time simply to let these two rotten structures and ways of thinking collapse. It is like
watching two ghost ships engaged battle, desparately trying to sink one another into a putrid
ocean.
On a lighter (!) note, I will quote Gramsci:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying away and the new cannot
yet be born; during this break in continuity, unhealthy events of every kind are
happening.
La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può
nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.
An old lawyer adage: If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the
law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither the facts nor the law , pound the
table.
"... Ms. Rion spoke with Ukrainian former Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko who outlines how former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch perjured herself before Congress . ..."
"... What is outlined in this interview is a problem for all DC politicians across both parties. The obviously corrupt influence efforts by U.S. Ambassador Yovanovitch as outlined by Lutsenko were not done independently. ..."
"... Senators from both parties participated in the influence process and part of those influence priorities was exploiting the financial opportunities within Ukraine while simultaneously protecting Joe Biden and his family. This is where Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham were working with Marie Yovanovitch. ..."
In a fantastic display of true investigative journalism, One America News journalist Chanel
Rion tracked down Ukrainian witnesses as part of an exclusive OAN investigative series. The
evidence being discovered dismantles the baseless Adam Schiff impeachment hoax and highlights
many corrupt motives for U.S. politicians.
Ms. Rion spoke with Ukrainian former Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko who outlines how
former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch perjured herself before Congress .
What is outlined in this interview is a problem for all DC politicians across both parties.
The obviously corrupt influence efforts by U.S. Ambassador Yovanovitch as outlined by Lutsenko
were not done independently.
Senators from both parties participated in the influence process and part of those influence
priorities was exploiting the financial opportunities within Ukraine while simultaneously
protecting Joe Biden and his family. This is where Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey
Graham were working with Marie Yovanovitch.
Imagine what would happen if all of the background information was to reach the general
public? Thus the motive for Lindsey Graham currently working to bury it.
You might remember George Kent and Bill Taylor testified together.
It was evident months ago that U.S. chargé d'affaires to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, was
one of the current participants in the coup effort against President Trump. It was Taylor who
engaged in carefully planned
text messages with EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland to set-up a narrative helpful to Adam
Schiff's political coup effort.
Bill Taylor was formerly U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine ('06-'09) and later helped the Obama
administration to design the laundry operation providing taxpayer financing to Ukraine in
exchange for back-channel payments to U.S. politicians and their families.
In November Rudy Giuliani released a letter he sent to Senator
Lindsey Graham outlining how Bill Taylor blocked VISA's for Ukrainian 'whistle-blowers' who are
willing to testify to the corrupt financial scheme.
Unfortunately, as we are now witnessing, Senator Lindsey Graham, along with dozens of U.S.
Senators currently serving, may very well have been recipients for money through the
aforementioned laundry process. The VISA's are unlikely to get approval for congressional
testimony, or Senate impeachment trial witness testimony.
U.S. senators write foreign aid policy, rules and regulations thereby creating the financing
mechanisms to transmit U.S. funds. Those same senators then received a portion of the laundered
funds back through their various "institutes" and business connections to the foreign
government offices; in this example Ukraine. [ex. Burisma to Biden]
The U.S. State Dept. serves as a distribution network for the authorization of the money
laundering by granting conflict waivers , approvals for financing (think Clinton Global
Initiative), and permission slips for the payment of foreign money. The officials within the
State Dept. take a cut of the overall payments through a system of "indulgence fees", junkets,
gifts and expense payments to those with political oversight.
If anyone gets too close to revealing the process, writ large, they become a target of the
entire apparatus. President Trump was considered an existential threat to this entire process.
Hence our current political status with the ongoing coup.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out , because, well, in reality all of the U.S.
Senators (both parties) are participating in the process for receiving taxpayer money and
contributions from foreign governments.
A "Codel" is a congressional delegation that takes trips to work out the payments
terms/conditions of any changes in graft financing. This is why Senators spend $20 million on a
campaign to earn a job paying $350k/year. The "institutes" is where the real foreign money
comes in; billions paid by governments like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Ukraine, etc.
etc. There are trillions at stake.
[SIDEBAR: Majority Leader Mitch McConnell holds the power over these members (and the
members of the Senate Intel Committee), because McConnell decides who sits on what committee.
As soon as a Senator starts taking the bribes lobbying funds, McConnell then has
full control over that Senator. This is how the system works.]
The McCain Institute is one of the obvious examples of the financing network. And that is
the primary reason why Cindy McCain is such an outspoken critic of President Trump. In essence
President Trump is standing between her and her next diamond necklace; a dangerous place to
be.
So when we think about a Senate Impeachment Trial; and we consider which senators will vote
to impeach President Trump, it's not just a matter of Democrats -vs- Republican. We need to
look at the game of leverage, and the stand-off between those bribed Senators who would prefer
President Trump did not interfere in their process.
McConnell has been advising President Trump which Senators are most likely to need their
sensibilities eased. As an example President Trump met with Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski in
November. Senator Murkowski rakes in millions from the multinational Oil and Gas industry; and
she ain't about to allow horrible Trump to lessen her bank account any more than Cindy McCain
will give up her frequent shopper discounts at Tiffanys.
Senator Lindsey Graham
announcing today that he will not request or facilitate any impeachment testimony that
touches on the DC laundry system for personal financial benefit (ie. Ukraine example), is
specifically motivated by the need for all DC politicians to keep prying eyes away from the
swamps' financial endeavors. WATCH:
This open-secret system of "Affluence and Influence" is how the intelligence apparatus gains
such power. All of the DC participants are essentially beholden to the various U.S.
intelligence services who are well aware of their endeavors.
There's a ton of exposure here (blackmail/leverage) which allows the unelected officials
within the CIA, FBI and DOJ to hold power over the DC politicians. Hold this type of leverage
long enough and the Intelligence Community then absorbs that power to enhance their self-belief
of being more important than the system.
Perhaps this corrupt sense of grandiosity is what we are seeing play out in how the
intelligence apparatus views President Donald J Trump as a risk to their importance.
Everyone loves money. I like money. The only question is how to earn them. Neither I, nor
you, nor many of us will cross a certain moral and ethical line (border), but there are
people without morality, without ethical standards, without conscience. We all look the same
outwardly, but we are all completely different inside.
Ukraine is Obama's **** , this is not Trump's ****. Trump's stupidity was only one - he
got into this ****. I wrote, but I repeat - USA acted as the best friend in relation to
Russia, having taken off a leech from Russia and hanging it on itself. Do you know such an
estate of Rothschilds - called Israel and its role in the life of USA?
So, Ukraine was for the Russians the same Israel in terms of meaningless spending. Look at
Vlad, in 2014 he looked like a fox who was eating a chicken, and on January 1, 2020 he will
look like a fox who eating a whole brood of chickens. I think he has portraits of Obama and
Trump in his bedroom.
Yes, indeed. Lindsey will bury the story, he is on the take. Your tax dollars at work. By
the way, the Fed picked up all of the Ukies gold for safekeeping at 33 Liberty St. NY, with
Yats permission, of course.... https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-18/ukraine-admits-its-gold-gone
A glimpse into how elected officials accumulate millions, retire wealthy, pampered and
privileged....and I'm not talking pensions I'm talking corruption. Obama, Biden, Hillary,
Kerry, Holder, Rice and ALL the senior Obama Administration officials knew of each other's
corrupt sinecures.
Well, it is based on a OAN story. Believe it or not, they actually sent a reporter to
Ukraine to talk to people with knowledge of the matter and look what they came up with. Kind
of makes you wonder why other well funded news organizations never thought to do something
like that.
I don't know that we deserve this. We are all working people, with families to raise,
taxes to pay and the Dems and Commies have been working against us 24/7. And most of them get
paid to do so from government jobs that pay them 8 hours a day when many work 1 hour a day,
all the while scheming against us.
If Trump wins a second term, he is gonna **** these people up good.
Now that I've read the article, I'm both shocked and appalled at learning that Ukraine is
a money laundering operation for the politically connected. (They provide many other 'perks'
as well.)
I've warned about light in the loafers Lindsey as well as McConnell before and more than
once. Sessions should also be denied a re-admission into the swamp. There are others.
An old lawyer adage: If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the
law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither the facts nor the law , pound the
table.
Karlan was pounding the table.
Bituman_2000
Starting to see a pattern. Absolute contempt for the plebs.
The congress decline is now visible. Other institutions will follow.
Much depends on how long "plato oil" will hold and Seneca cliff arrives.
Notable quotes:
"... First the institutions will decline. Second, the State will decline. Third, the economy will decline and only after this "phase 3" that we'll be able to se the real desintegration of the USA. ..."
"... More probable would be the gradual secession of some States after the economy has degraded enough. I wouldn't consider the loss of one peripheral State as the formal end of the USA, but if it goes to the stage of it losing more or less the Southern States or the Midwest States, then I think some historians would use these as a useful event to mark the formal end of the USA. ..."
"... the USA will remain a very influent regional superpower for the foreseeable future. It would have to take the entire capitalist structure to fall for the USA to really enter its disintegration phase. I've talked with some Marxists, and the most optimistic of them believe the USA still has some 150-200 years of tranquil existence. Of course, we're not psychics, so they are all wild guesses. ..."
@ Posted by: Passer by | Dec 9 2019 16:39 utc | 102
Well, the only USA that matters to the rest of the world is the
USA-as-the-world's-sole-superpower. If that version of the USA disappears, then we would be
talking about a completely different geopolitical architecture ("multipolar").
The USA itself doesn't need to collapse or disintegrate for that to happen.
My opinion is that the USA is losing its "sole superpower" status, albeit at a very slow
pace. It couldn't be another way, since the USA is a nuclear superpower, so its competitors
must deactivate its hegemony slowly and gently.
I also believe the USA will disappear some day, but in a different way than the USSR.
Since the USA is a capitalist economy, it will desintegrate rather than collapse, and this
disintegration will happen more a la Roman Empire (Crisis of the Third Century and beyond)
rather than a la USSR. Capitalism has an anarchic way of producing and distributing its
wealth, resulting in a decentralized web of institutions. First the institutions will
decline. Second, the State will decline. Third, the economy will decline and only after this
"phase 3" that we'll be able to se the real desintegration of the USA.
I don't believe the USA will fall by conquest, mostly because it has MAD, second because
its geographic location favors a defensive war of its territory. More probable would be
the gradual secession of some States after the economy has degraded enough. I wouldn't
consider the loss of one peripheral State as the formal end of the USA, but if it goes to the
stage of it losing more or less the Southern States or the Midwest States, then I think some
historians would use these as a useful event to mark the formal end of the USA.
But before that, I believe the USA will remain a very influent regional superpower for
the foreseeable future. It would have to take the entire capitalist structure to fall for the
USA to really enter its disintegration phase. I've talked with some Marxists, and the most
optimistic of them believe the USA still has some 150-200 years of tranquil existence. Of
course, we're not psychics, so they are all wild guesses.
"... Ms. Rion spoke with Ukrainian former Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko who outlines how former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch perjured herself before Congress . ..."
"... What is outlined in this interview is a problem for all DC politicians across both parties. The obviously corrupt influence efforts by U.S. Ambassador Yovanovitch as outlined by Lutsenko were not done independently. ..."
"... Senators from both parties participated in the influence process and part of those influence priorities was exploiting the financial opportunities within Ukraine while simultaneously protecting Joe Biden and his family. This is where Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham were working with Marie Yovanovitch. ..."
In a fantastic display of true investigative journalism, One America News journalist Chanel
Rion tracked down Ukrainian witnesses as part of an exclusive OAN investigative series. The
evidence being discovered dismantles the baseless Adam Schiff impeachment hoax and highlights
many corrupt motives for U.S. politicians.
Ms. Rion spoke with Ukrainian former Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko who outlines how
former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch perjured herself before Congress .
What is outlined in this interview is a problem for all DC politicians across both parties.
The obviously corrupt influence efforts by U.S. Ambassador Yovanovitch as outlined by Lutsenko
were not done independently.
Senators from both parties participated in the influence process and part of those influence
priorities was exploiting the financial opportunities within Ukraine while simultaneously
protecting Joe Biden and his family. This is where Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey
Graham were working with Marie Yovanovitch.
Imagine what would happen if all of the background information was to reach the general
public? Thus the motive for Lindsey Graham currently working to bury it.
You might remember George Kent and Bill Taylor testified together.
It was evident months ago that U.S. chargé d'affaires to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, was
one of the current participants in the coup effort against President Trump. It was Taylor who
engaged in carefully planned
text messages with EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland to set-up a narrative helpful to Adam
Schiff's political coup effort.
Bill Taylor was formerly U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine ('06-'09) and later helped the Obama
administration to design the laundry operation providing taxpayer financing to Ukraine in
exchange for back-channel payments to U.S. politicians and their families.
In November Rudy Giuliani released a letter he sent to Senator
Lindsey Graham outlining how Bill Taylor blocked VISA's for Ukrainian 'whistle-blowers' who are
willing to testify to the corrupt financial scheme.
Unfortunately, as we are now witnessing, Senator Lindsey Graham, along with dozens of U.S.
Senators currently serving, may very well have been recipients for money through the
aforementioned laundry process. The VISA's are unlikely to get approval for congressional
testimony, or Senate impeachment trial witness testimony.
U.S. senators write foreign aid policy, rules and regulations thereby creating the financing
mechanisms to transmit U.S. funds. Those same senators then received a portion of the laundered
funds back through their various "institutes" and business connections to the foreign
government offices; in this example Ukraine. [ex. Burisma to Biden]
The U.S. State Dept. serves as a distribution network for the authorization of the money
laundering by granting conflict waivers , approvals for financing (think Clinton Global
Initiative), and permission slips for the payment of foreign money. The officials within the
State Dept. take a cut of the overall payments through a system of "indulgence fees", junkets,
gifts and expense payments to those with political oversight.
If anyone gets too close to revealing the process, writ large, they become a target of the
entire apparatus. President Trump was considered an existential threat to this entire process.
Hence our current political status with the ongoing coup.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out , because, well, in reality all of the U.S.
Senators (both parties) are participating in the process for receiving taxpayer money and
contributions from foreign governments.
A "Codel" is a congressional delegation that takes trips to work out the payments
terms/conditions of any changes in graft financing. This is why Senators spend $20 million on a
campaign to earn a job paying $350k/year. The "institutes" is where the real foreign money
comes in; billions paid by governments like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Ukraine, etc.
etc. There are trillions at stake.
[SIDEBAR: Majority Leader Mitch McConnell holds the power over these members (and the
members of the Senate Intel Committee), because McConnell decides who sits on what committee.
As soon as a Senator starts taking the bribes lobbying funds, McConnell then has
full control over that Senator. This is how the system works.]
The McCain Institute is one of the obvious examples of the financing network. And that is
the primary reason why Cindy McCain is such an outspoken critic of President Trump. In essence
President Trump is standing between her and her next diamond necklace; a dangerous place to
be.
So when we think about a Senate Impeachment Trial; and we consider which senators will vote
to impeach President Trump, it's not just a matter of Democrats -vs- Republican. We need to
look at the game of leverage, and the stand-off between those bribed Senators who would prefer
President Trump did not interfere in their process.
McConnell has been advising President Trump which Senators are most likely to need their
sensibilities eased. As an example President Trump met with Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski in
November. Senator Murkowski rakes in millions from the multinational Oil and Gas industry; and
she ain't about to allow horrible Trump to lessen her bank account any more than Cindy McCain
will give up her frequent shopper discounts at Tiffanys.
Senator Lindsey Graham
announcing today that he will not request or facilitate any impeachment testimony that
touches on the DC laundry system for personal financial benefit (ie. Ukraine example), is
specifically motivated by the need for all DC politicians to keep prying eyes away from the
swamps' financial endeavors. WATCH:
This open-secret system of "Affluence and Influence" is how the intelligence apparatus gains
such power. All of the DC participants are essentially beholden to the various U.S.
intelligence services who are well aware of their endeavors.
There's a ton of exposure here (blackmail/leverage) which allows the unelected officials
within the CIA, FBI and DOJ to hold power over the DC politicians. Hold this type of leverage
long enough and the Intelligence Community then absorbs that power to enhance their self-belief
of being more important than the system.
Perhaps this corrupt sense of grandiosity is what we are seeing play out in how the
intelligence apparatus views President Donald J Trump as a risk to their importance.
Everyone loves money. I like money. The only question is how to earn them. Neither I, nor
you, nor many of us will cross a certain moral and ethical line (border), but there are
people without morality, without ethical standards, without conscience. We all look the same
outwardly, but we are all completely different inside.
Ukraine is Obama's **** , this is not Trump's ****. Trump's stupidity was only one - he
got into this ****. I wrote, but I repeat - USA acted as the best friend in relation to
Russia, having taken off a leech from Russia and hanging it on itself. Do you know such an
estate of Rothschilds - called Israel and its role in the life of USA?
So, Ukraine was for the Russians the same Israel in terms of meaningless spending. Look at
Vlad, in 2014 he looked like a fox who was eating a chicken, and on January 1, 2020 he will
look like a fox who eating a whole brood of chickens. I think he has portraits of Obama and
Trump in his bedroom.
Yes, indeed. Lindsey will bury the story, he is on the take. Your tax dollars at work. By
the way, the Fed picked up all of the Ukies gold for safekeeping at 33 Liberty St. NY, with
Yats permission, of course.... https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-18/ukraine-admits-its-gold-gone
A glimpse into how elected officials accumulate millions, retire wealthy, pampered and
privileged....and I'm not talking pensions I'm talking corruption. Obama, Biden, Hillary,
Kerry, Holder, Rice and ALL the senior Obama Administration officials knew of each other's
corrupt sinecures.
Well, it is based on a OAN story. Believe it or not, they actually sent a reporter to
Ukraine to talk to people with knowledge of the matter and look what they came up with. Kind
of makes you wonder why other well funded news organizations never thought to do something
like that.
I don't know that we deserve this. We are all working people, with families to raise,
taxes to pay and the Dems and Commies have been working against us 24/7. And most of them get
paid to do so from government jobs that pay them 8 hours a day when many work 1 hour a day,
all the while scheming against us.
If Trump wins a second term, he is gonna **** these people up good.
Now that I've read the article, I'm both shocked and appalled at learning that Ukraine is
a money laundering operation for the politically connected. (They provide many other 'perks'
as well.)
I've warned about light in the loafers Lindsey as well as McConnell before and more than
once. Sessions should also be denied a re-admission into the swamp. There are others.
"... This is merely political theater and a way to stiffen their spines of jello for their coup. Heaven forfend that President Evo Morales Donald Trump be ousted in a coup by the American Deep State. Our ruling class and their servants really are stupid enough to believe that destroying the norms, both written and unwritten, that our society is actually governed by is a good thing. ..."
"... For the powers that be war crimes are not impeachable offenses. ..."
"... The MSM is reporting the "impeachment" as if it was a serious (approved by expert academics) endeavor. However, the veil is lifting. The revealed face of the ruling class is Neo-Orwellian. ..."
"... Turley says he is now getting threatening phone calls as well people trying to get him fired as professor because he dared to pooh pooh the case for impeachment. ..."
"... The insanity of [neo]liberals strikes me as the actions of the philosophically bankrupt, the hysterical demonizing of Trump being their desperate way to avoid recognizing that fact. ..."
"... Nadler, like Schiff before him, is putting on a diversionary show. The big rush in both shows has been to construct narratives to sow doubt in the minds of viewers and voters, on a tight schedule. That schedule has been known for some time, with a big component dropping today in the IG report. ..."
"... Whether it's Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and any others I've missed, I want to know how many of these rats had / have financial interests in these wars ..."
"... The verdict is prepared before the charges! ..."
"... The House Dems started to boil when Trump suggested the Magnitsky Act was not impartial and Browder might be a crook, heaven forbid. But when Trump really started to focus on the Ukraingate stuff the House shifted into high gear. ..."
"... Schiff started to look like a cornered animal, the expression on his face went from moral superiority to downright angst. His eyes started to bug out. Nancy went from no impeachment to, almost overnight, yes impeachment. And Rudy Giuliani was accused of Treason for questioning their favorite operative, Joe Bagman. ..."
"... Let the last stage of the Great Looting of the Planet begin. ..."
"... I think there are too many moving parts to allow any meaningful analysis of such a soon-to-be-fait accompli. Justice, fairness, Constitution, "rule of law" are the shibboleths of the weak. None of those are anything but fig leafs over tumescent power, mentioned occasionally and clearly without adherence or conviction by that tiny set of front people and spokespersons for the even smaller set that actually move the levers of power. In the end, of course, as with all the climax events of the last few generations, we mopes will never get more than a modified limited hangout of an inkling to what actually happened, and not even that while the play's afoot. ..."
"... "However hurried a court may be in its efforts to reach the merits of a controversy, the integrity of procedural rules is dependent upon consistent enforcement because the only fair and reasonable alternative thereto is complete abandonment." Miller v. Lint, 62 Ohio St. 2d 209 (1980). ..."
"... Proceeding to a vote on this incomplete record is a dangerous precedent to set for this country. Removing a sitting President is not supposed to be easy or fast. It is meant to be thorough and complete. This is neither. ..."
"... A thorough investigation is the missing step before a case is presented to the Senate (or to a jury). The White House stonewalled the House Intelligence Committee. Just like with the Nixon impeachment inquiry the first step must be to litigate in the courts the assertion of Executive Privilege. ..."
"... JeffK above is correct that there is a subtle distinction between the Venn circles of "leverage" and "extortion" -- the distinction being whether pressure is being exerted on behalf of the state in pursuit of a stated foreign policy objective (however misguided that policy may be) or whether it is intended for the personal political or financial benefit of an official. These are "gray areas" in which understanding the subjective intent of the actor is crucial. ..."
"... As a veteran prosecutor, to me this is where the House Democrats are failing to act as ethical prosecutors. They have failed to develop the evidentiary record, which is their fundamental Due Process duty prior to filing charges. " I know he's good for it " isn't evidence. ..."
You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel. –Matt 23:24
Patient readers, I had originally intended to compare and contrast the statements of the
four lawyers (Feldman, Karlan, Gerhardt, and Turley)
appearing before the House Judiciary Committee . But I changed course, for a few reasons:
First, Feldman, Karlan, and Gerhardt simply didn't produce serious documents; all were short,
and Karlan's wasn't even footnoted, whether to facts, or to law.
Turley's statement at least showed signs of legal reasoning, as opposed to preaching to the
choir, but there's no point my summarizing it;
you can just read it .[1]
Second, since the House Judiciary's report on the " Constitutional
Grounds for Impeachment " followed so soon after the lawyers' testimony that it could
hardly have been influenced by it, their testimony was evidently for show. Finally, this
abbreviated Season 2 of Impeachment! , "UkraineGate," reminds me of nothing so much as
Gish Gallop : There's
too much to track in the time frame available, the few trustworthy interpreters are
overwhelmed, and that's by intent. (Season 1, "RussiaGate," was more of a Gish stroll by
comparison.)
So I'm going to do something completely different. Conventional wisdom agrees that when
impeaching a President, the House plays the role of the prosecutor, and brings and prosecutes
the indictment; and the Senate then tries the case. From Senate.gov
, just as a change from citing the Federalist Papers, which I too shall get to:
In impeachment proceedings, the House of Representatives charges an official of the
federal government by approving, by majority vote, articles of impeachment. A committee of
representatives, called "managers," acts as prosecutors before the Senate.
The question nobody seems to be asking is whether the House, in this impeachment
inquiry, is acting as a prosecutor should act[2]. That is the question I will ask in this post.
(I'm sensible that we have actual prosecutors in the readership, and so I'm going out on a limb
here; the fact that nobody I can find has gone out on this particular limb doesn't mean that it
is, or is not, a good limb to go out on. We'll see!)
The primary duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice within the bounds of the law,
not merely to convict . The prosecutor serves the public interest and should act with
integrity and balanced judgment to increase public safety both by pursuing appropriate
criminal charges of appropriate severity, and by exercising discretion to not pursue criminal
charges in appropriate circumstances. The prosecutor should seek to protect the innocent and
convict the guilty, consider the interests of victims and witnesses, and respect the
constitutional and legal rights of all persons, including suspects and defendants.
What then is justice? Philosophers differ, but here is a defintion from which "the rule of
law" (of which we hear so much) can be derived. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy :
The third aspect of justice to which Justinian's definition draws our attention is the
connection between justice and the impartial and consistent application of rules
– that is what the 'constant and perpetual will' part of the definition conveys.
Justice is the opposite of arbitrariness. It requires that where two cases are
relevantly alike, they should be treated in the same way . Following a rule that
specifies what is due to a person who has features X, Y, Z whenever such a person is
encountered ensures this. And although the rule need not be unchangeable – perpetual in
the literal sense – it must be relatively stable. This explains why justice is
exemplified in the rule of law, where laws are understood as general rules impartially
applied over time. Outside of the law itself, individuals and institutions that want to
behave justly must mimic the law in certain ways (for instance, gathering reliable
information about individual claimants, allowing for appeals against decisions).
The Law Dictionary conceptualizes the requirement for "impartial and consistent application
of rules" as fairness. From " The Four Pillars of the Rule
of Law ":
It's one thing for the laws to be written fairly, but if they are enforced in such a way
that is either arbitrary or unfair then the rule of law begins to break down. For example, if
a jurisdiction passes laws against drug use, but then only enforces those laws against a
particular ethnic minority or social group, then the laws are not being enforced fairly.
Citizens living under a rule of law system have a right to know that the laws are being
administered and enforced in a way that is fair and accessible.
There are many theories of justice, but surely the "impartial and consistent application of
rules" is understood by lay readers as fundamental. From the Washington Post, "
The U.S. court system is criminally unjust ":
We like to believe that decisions made in U.S. courts are determined by the wisdom of the
Constitution, and guided by fair-minded judges and juries of our peers.
Unfortunately, this is often wishful thinking. Unsettling research into the psychology of
courtroom decisions has shown that our personal backgrounds, unconscious biases about race,
gender and appearance, and even the time of day play a more important role in outcomes than
the actual law.
Having established that the House, when impeaching a President, acts as a Prosector, that
the duty of a prosecutor is not merely to seek conviction, but justice, let's now ask ourselves
whether the House, assuming it to have impeached Trump, will have acted in accordance with its
duties, or not.
As a sidebar, it may be urged that unlike a prosecutor's office, the House has no permanent
prosecutorial function. Indeed, House.gov seems, unlike the Senate, to have no page on
impeachment at all; and the House is structured
very differently :
The House is the only branch of government that has been directly elected by American
voters since its formation in 1789. Unlike the Senate, the House is not a continuing body.
Its Members must stand for election every two years, after which it convenes for a new
session and essentially reconstitutes itself -- electing a Speaker, swearing-in the
Members-elect, and approving a slate of officers to administer the institution. Direct,
biennial elections and the size of the membership (currently 435 voting Representatives) have
made the House receptive to a continual influx of new ideas and priorities that contribute to
its longstanding reputation as the "People's House."
It could be argued, then, that the "rules" for impeachment need only to be consistent during
the two years of a House session, and could then be changed at the next session, an evident
absurdity since the President serves for four years, and could presume himself acting
unimpeachably for two years, and then be impeached, for the same acts , in the third.
Clearly, some sort of institutional memory of what is impeachable and what is not, even if
tacit, must be shared among the three branches of government and the public -- even if not
adhered to by all. Fortunately, for Trump's impeachment, we have such repository in the person
of the Leader of the House -- one might call them the Chief Prosecturor -- Nancy Pelosi, to
whose remarkable statement I now turn. End sidebar.
Here is how Nancy Pelosi describes her past exercise of her prosecutorial function (in this
case, declining to prosecute:
DEAN CHIEN, STUDENT, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY: So, Speaker Pelosi, you resisted calls for
the impeachment of President Bush in 2006, and President Trump, following the Mueller report
earlier this year.
This time it's different. Why did you impose – why did you oppose impeachment in the
past? And what is your obligation to protect our democracy from the actions of our President
now?
PELOSI: Thank you. Thank you for bringing up the question about – because when I
became Speaker the first time, there was overwhelming call for me to impeach President Bush,
on the strength of the war in Iraq[3], which I vehemently opposed, and again not –
again, I – I say "Again," I said – said at other places that I – that was
my we – all has always (ph) Intelligence.
I was Ranking Member on the Intelligence Committee even before I became part of the
leadership of Gang of Four. So, I knew there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq . It
just wasn't there.
They had to show us now – to show the Gang of Four all the Intelligence they
had. The Intelligence did not show that that – that was the case. So, I knew it was a
– a misrepresentation to the public. But having said that, it was a, in my view, not a
ground for impeachment. That was – they won the election. They made a
representation . And to this day, people think – people think that that it was
the right thing to do.
If people think that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11, I mean it's as appalling what
they did. But I did – and I've said, if somebody wants to make a case, you bring it
forward.
(Remarkably, or not, Pelosi kept her knowledge that the Iraq War was built on lies secret
from the public. This doesn't strike me as the right approach to " a Republic, if you can keep it .") First,
apparently a President's "misrepresentation to the public" that led to war -- a war that
resulted, even in the early years of the war, in tens of thousands of civilian deaths,
thousands of American deaths, hundreds of billions of dollars, and the Abu Ghraib torture
scandal -- is not a "high crime or misdemeanor." Pelosi would have us believe that Bush's
disinformation campaign was not, as Madison writes in Federalist 65 , a
case of "misconduct of public men, or, in other words the abuse or violation of some public
trust." And why? Because "[Bush] won the election." Except Pelosi gets the timeline wrong. Bush
won his election in 2004. The Democrats took back the House in 2006 -- how we cheered, then; it
was almost as satisfying as Obama's inaugural -- based in large part on Bush's botched handling
of Iraq. Pelosi "won the election." And then didn't do anything with her power.
Let's ask a little consistency from our Chief Prosecutor, shall we? Because that's what
justice demands? If "misrepresentation to the public the public" in service of taking the
country into war -- the aluminum tubes, the yellowcake, all the whackamole lies that Bush put
forth -- is not impeachable, then how on earth is what Trump did, even under the very worst
intepretation, impeachable? Are we really going to convict Trump because he -- Bud
from Legal insists I insert the word "allegedly" -- tried to muscle Zelensky? Here is
what Turley, who approached his statement as a lawyer would, did with that accusation . I'm
going to quote a great slab of this, because the whole thing ticks me off so much:
Presidents often put pressure on other countries which many of us view as inimical to our
values or national security. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama reportedly put
pressure on other countries not to investigate the U.S. torture program or seek the arrest of
those responsible.103 President Obama and his staff also reportedly pressured the Justice
Department not to initiate criminal prosecution stemming from the torture program.104
Moreover, presidents often discuss political issues with their counterparts and make comments
that are troubling or inappropriate. However, contemptible is not synonymous with
impeachable. Impeachment is not a vehicle to monitor presidential communications for such
transgressions. That is why making the case of a quid pro quo is so important – a case
made on proof, not presumptions. While critics have insisted that there is no alternative
explanation, it is willful blindness to ignore the obvious defense. Trump can argue that he
believed the Obama Administration failed to investigate a corrupt contract between Burisma
and Hunter Biden. He publicly called for the investigation into the Ukraine matters.
Requesting an investigation is not illegal any more than a leader asking for actions from
their counterparts during election years.
Trump will also be able to point to three direct conversations on the record. His call
with President Zelensky does not state a quid pro quo. In his August conversation with Sen.
Ron Johnson (R., WI.), President Trump reportedly denied any quid pro quo. In his September
conversation with Ambassador Sondland, he also denied any quid pro quo. The House
Intelligence Committee did an excellent job in undermining the strength of the final two
calls by showing that President Trump was already aware of the whistleblower controversy
emerging on Capitol Hill. However, that does not alter the fact that those direct accounts
stand uncontradicted by countervailing statements from the President. In addition, President
Zelensky himself has said that he did not discuss any quid pro quo with President Trump.
Indeed, Ambassador Taylor testified that it was not until the publication of the Politico
article on September 31st that the Ukrainians voiced concerns over possible preconditions.
That was just ten days before the release of the aid. That means that the record lacks not
only direct conversations with President Trump (other than the three previously mentioned)
but even direct communications with the Ukrainians on a possible quid pro quo did not occur
until shortly before the aid release. Yet, just yesterday, new reports filtered out on
possible knowledge before that date -- highlighting the premature move to drafting articles
of impeachment without a full and complete record.105
Voters should not be asked to assume that President Trump would have violated federal law
and denied the aid without a guarantee on the investigations. The current narrative is that
President Trump only did the right thing when "he was caught." It is possible that he never
intended to withhold the aid past the September 30th deadline while also continuing to push
the Ukrainians on the corruption investigation. It is possible that Trump believed that the
White House meeting was leverage, not the military aid, to push for investigations. It is
certainly true that both criminal and impeachment cases can be based on circumstantial
evidence, but that is less common when direct evidence is available but unsecured in the
investigation. Proceeding to a vote on this incomplete record is a dangerous precedent to set
for this country. Removing a sitting President is not supposed to be easy or fast. It is
meant to be thorough and complete. This is neither.
Put Turley's justifiable polemic against a childish West Wing view of international
relations aside. Just look at the triviality of the subject matter, whether you think Trump
is guilty or not . White House appearances. Military aid. Corruption investigations. How is
lying the country into the Iraq war not impeachable, and this mass of anodyne
trivialities im peachable? When it's the same prosecutor declining to indict for Iraq,
and deciding to indict for Ukraine? Whatever this is, it's not "the impartial and consistent
application of rules", and that means the House is failing in its prosecutorial duty to seek
justice, and not merely conviction.
NOTE Yes, I'm leaving the national security aspects of Ukraine aside. We can take up the
question of whether the interagency process should run foreign policy, or the President, and
the Blob's peculiar view of the national interest another time.
I agree with this analysis, but Madam Speaker Pelosi and her fellow players are not doing
what they are doing for the Republic's, the law, ethics, morality, and certainly not for
justice's sake. If they were, Pelosi would not have mentioned her prewar knowledge of
President Bush's and his Administration's lies on the reasons given for going to war.
This is merely political theater and a way to stiffen their spines of jello for their
coup. Heaven forfend that President Evo Morales Donald Trump be ousted in a coup by
the American Deep State. Our ruling class and their servants really are stupid enough to
believe that destroying the norms, both written and unwritten, that our society is actually
governed by is a good thing.
Maybe TPTB truly believe that an increasingly ungovernable, immiserated, and desperate
society in an increasingly unpredictable climate is just another chance to consume the poor
instead of the poor consuming them.
The democrats couldn't go after the bush administration for falsely leading this country to
invade iraq, for one big reason . they were JUST as guilty . They, including clinton; voted,
and went on all the air waves, did op eds; all justifying the charade, that was the run up to
the iraq invasion.
People ought not forget,
EVERY bit of information proving the iraq war was a lie . was in plenty of places BEFORE the
invasion. And every establishment shill did their level best to not only ignore the truth,
but to discredit it with pathetic lies and rhetoric.
The democrats were just as guilty for iraq as the republicans.
And when the terrorists who were used as a ploy to blow up the twin towers, were being
protected by the fbi between 1998 and 2000.(look at Robert Wright and John Vincent fbi agents
from chicago office, who were told by superiors to "let sleeping dogs lie".. after a two year
investigation of two of the "were to become terrorists"and yasin al-qadi. their money man who
was a co owner of P-TECH(above top secret clearances at :cia,fbi,nsa,faa,secret
service,norad,nro,etc.) and later a donor to the MITT Romney campaign) The clintons and the
democratic elite were right there pretending nothing was happening. And have since pretended
that "the war on freedom",,,,or as they call it "the war on terror" is justified.
whether it was the democratic party or the new york times or la times or washington post of
the weekly standard or fox news or PBS EVERY media powerhouse was on the side of "the big
lie"..
Pathetic logic fails were fed to the american population 24/7/365
The truth be damned and still is
When you have a Democrat do away with Glass-Steagall, who needs Republican villains. Both
totally corrupt parties are beholden to the banks and corporations, and need to be voted out
of office.
Question, is there a statute of limitations for impeachable offenses? Because the Speaker of the House admitted on the public record of implicitly participating
(by her silence) in an orchestrated lie that led to the deaths and maiming of thousands of
American soldiers. Should we be taking that public statement and calling for her impeachment? Can you impeach
the Speaker of the House?
Maybe the Democrats are hoping that once it reaches the Senate, that one of their number
will step up, make a stirring West-Wing style speech which will cause all those present
– Republicans included – to rise to their feet and clap and cheer as they vote
for Trump to be finally kicked out of the White House. Then in their newfound maturity, they
will make Mike Pence the new President of the United States as they work together for a
better country with new respect for each other.
The MSM is reporting the "impeachment" as if it was a serious (approved by expert
academics) endeavor. However, the veil is lifting. The revealed face of the ruling class is
Neo-Orwellian.
"Nadler's committee will likely vote to impeach Trump. In a report defining what it
considers impeachable offenses, the committee states that even if Trump did not actually
break any laws in his supposed "quid pro quo" dealings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky, he can still be impeached for his unstated motives.
"The question is not whether the president's conduct could have resulted from
permissible motives. It is whether the president's real reasons, the ones in his mind at the
time, were legitimate, " it stated."
Turley says he is now getting threatening phone calls as well people trying to get him
fired as professor because he dared to pooh pooh the case for impeachment.
There has been a
vast and irrational response to Trump from day one–perhaps based on the fantasy that
the presidency really is like The West Wing whereas the reality is likely closer to the HBO
comedy Veep. From "now watch this drive" Dubya to Obama and his "propeller heads" our
presidents are a series of vain peacocks with Trump merely the extreme case. Impeach them
all–or none.
This observation by Lambert Strether sums it up: "Karlan's wasn't even footnoted, whether
to facts, or to law." She is supposedly a professor of law, supposedly advising the Congress
about the process of impeachment. She didn't even try to do her job. One may not agree with
Turley, although the long excerpt brings a broad perspective to what is criminality and to
how much criminality we now consider normal in the U.S. government. To his credit, Turley
marshals facts into a synthesis.
What the Republicans don't seem to get is that will to power isn't all that matters and
that their commitment to economic degradation and looting the citizenry have thrown them into
a crisis (as the paleo-conservatives keep pointing out). Among liberals like Pelosi (and
Karlan), the cluelessness is breathtaking. American liberalism is in a profound crisis, with
Karlan's disquisition being particulary breathtaking for clichés-a-minute, sheer
vulgar thinking, and kitsch.
This is the end. For those of us on the left, and I hesitate to advise non-action, it may
be time simply to let these two rotten structures and ways of thinking collapse. It is like
watching two ghost ships engaged battle, desparately trying to sink one another into a putrid
ocean.
On a lighter (!) note, I will quote Gramsci:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying away and the new cannot
yet be born; during this break in continuity, unhealthy events of every kind are
happening.
La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può
nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.
I think your last quote hits the nail on the head. It should be painted on every highway
overpass. The insanity of [neo]liberals strikes me as the actions of the philosophically bankrupt,
the hysterical demonizing of Trump being their desperate way to avoid recognizing that fact.
I can understand that almost all people crave certainty, but Jesus its time to let it go and
strike out to elsewhere.
An old lawyer adage: If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the
law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither the facts nor the law , pound the
table.
Nadler, like Schiff before him, is putting on a diversionary show. The big rush in both
shows has been to construct narratives to sow doubt in the minds of viewers and voters, on a
tight schedule. That schedule has been known for some time, with a big component dropping
today in the IG report.
They had seen enough in SCIFs and elsewhere to know that Team Dem was going to get slammed
due to its supporters in the FBI and DOJ. That much is evident in reviewing the report and
scores of other documents available to the public. What hasn't been made available, like the
Atkinson piece, also provide further support to the Schiff and Nadler accelerants.*
In a way, I almost feel sorry for Rep. Schiff as he was sent on a fool's errand. History
will be unkind to him, among others.
Of greater concern during their proceedings is the absolute lack of regard for the
principles like Due Process established in our US Constitution, and the rule of law.
Then she's a war criminal too! I also remember her saying, "well, we didn't want to ruin
our chances" (in the next election). My fondest wish is that GW Bush, Jr. and the gang who
lied us into the war in Iraq be prosecuted and convicted for war crimes. A somewhat hopeless
wish – that.
She can be surprisingly frank about these things sometimes. She is saying the same thing
in this quote ("people think that that it was the right thing to do" = opposing this would
have cost us votes). I can't understand why anybody would ever trust her again after a
revelation like that.
Whether it's Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and any others I've missed, I want
to know how many of these rats had / have financial interests in these wars including daily
drone-fests a few years ago.
The war drums have been beating on the Ukraine vs Russian for a
few years now. Pelosi is worth over $100,000,000 on mere $200,000 humble public servant
salary, many others on both Team Blue and Team Red similar.
If Team Red Senate votes to
summarily dismiss impeachment it is the tell that there were / are many more cockroaches they
do not want to expose, such as Lindsey Graham, Mitt, McCain, Kerry, not to forget Rummy,
Wolfe, Condi, Cheney, W, O, Hillary, Poppy and so on.
Any 20 somethings in those households
die or maimed "over there"? Let them all hang, dig their corpses up if you have to. Trump
should double-dog dare them all to do it.
I voted for Trump solely as a bull in the china shop, with everything preceding him the
past ~ 40 years as the china shop. Andy Jackson was not on the ballot 3 years ago, so I had
to settle.
I agree that DJT's misdeeds (at least the ones we know about) do not approach those of the
Bush/Cheney presidency (the ones we know about). I wonder what lies beneath the D
determination to impeach. I have been getting emails from various D-oriented organizations asserting that control of
the Senate is within reach for the Ds in 2020, and asking for funds.
Given the near certainty that the Senate will not vote to convict (either through ~20Rs
voting with Ds or ~30Rs simply not voting), perhaps it is hoped that a failure to convict in
the Senate would help Ds make the case for an extra heavy base turnout in 2020 to deliver the
Senate to the Ds.
They can't, or won't, govern. But with control of both houses, they might be able to
impeach and convict.
If the Democratic Party refuses to govern, just why should they be in office? Unless it is
Goldman Sach, Jeff Bezos, and their fellow oligarchs, it is just mendacity masquerading as
seriousness. The Republicans also do not govern, but loot the lower 80% of the population
while dismantling the government.
Just before the Civil War, Republican Party replaced the American Whigs and the Democratic
Party split in two and looked like it too was going away as well. Let's have a clean sweep
this time and maybe prevent another war.
It seemed that the Democrats started out focused on a Trump connection to laundered
Russian money. They didn't like his friendliness toward Putin. The FBI and Mueller went
straight for Manafort and got him cold. It's possible they can't get Trump because he dealt
through DeutscheBank and DB has been protected so far from prosecution.
Every bank in the EU
seems to have laundered Russian money. So to start prosecuting would/will be a total circus.
The House Dems started to boil when Trump suggested the Magnitsky Act was not impartial and
Browder might be a crook, heaven forbid. But when Trump really started to focus on the Ukraingate stuff the House shifted into high gear.
Schiff started to look like a cornered
animal, the expression on his face went from moral superiority to downright angst. His eyes
started to bug out. Nancy went from no impeachment to, almost overnight, yes impeachment. And
Rudy Giuliani was accused of Treason for questioning their favorite operative, Joe Bagman.
And how impolite of Trump and Rudy to suggest that Joe's doofus son could be up to the same
corruption as daddy. So the fear in the House is visible. I'm thinking there are lotsa
members who might be not just complicit in the coup but complicit having received money for
favors. Or in the case of Browder, helping an international thief and conman with high
connections here and in the UK. High connections usually means political bribes. So Trump
knows where the skeletons are buried imo and it freaks them out beyond any possible just
proceeding. And Nancy's an idiot with a gavel.
Prosecutors seeking justice? On what alien planet do you suppose that might be happening?
Prosecutorial misconduct, caprice, and inconsistency is a hallmark of the US criminal
carcerial system. Our Gulag doesn't just fill itself it needs prosecutors to keep the ball
rolling. Sorta like insurance delivering healthcare.
How is lying the country into the Iraq war not impeachable, and this mass of anodyne
trivialities impeachable?
It's not. The system has broken completely down, although many americans don't know it
yet. The democrats need to back off, although I wouldn't put money on it.
Good to remember the ultimate frame that bounds this Gong Show Trial: "In the long run we
are all dead."
What's going on here seems to me to have the same overall flavor of what's happening in
Britain. Let the last stage of the Great Looting of the Planet begin.
I think there are too many moving parts to allow any meaningful analysis of such a
soon-to-be-fait accompli. Justice, fairness, Constitution, "rule of law" are the shibboleths
of the weak. None of those are anything but fig leafs over tumescent power, mentioned
occasionally and clearly without adherence or conviction by that tiny set of front people and
spokespersons for the even smaller set that actually move the levers of power. In the end, of
course, as with all the climax events of the last few generations, we mopes will never get
more than a modified limited hangout of an inkling to what actually happened, and not even
that while the play's afoot.
And what good would it doe us to know all the details? What power do American mopes, for
sure, atomized and fearful and befuddled, have to "bend the arc of history toward
justice"?
Well, I think we made a credible effort to bend the arc of history in 1776, and again in
1865. I have little doubt that history will eventually repeat itself, or at least rhyme quite
nicely.
Pence represents a large cohort of Evangelicals who are not averse to using 'direct
action' to advance their causes. Think of the abortion doctors who were shot by 'right wing
nutters,' and the horrific tactics used against women trying to enter and leave abortion
clinics.
One of Pence's strengths is his unswerving adherence to a particular ideology. He has focus,
and that aspect of his character gives him strength and purpose.
Even Napoleon realized the value of the Moral in human affairs.
Also consider groups within the Government and Military aligned with the Evangelical mind
set. Pence has ample resources to manage the job of President.
History shows that relatively small groups of committed and coordinated True Believers can
take over and run governments. Pence is the figurehead for such a group. Beware.
Biden was asked if he would comply if subpoenaed for the Senate trial and he said no. So
Trump is to be impeached for his "crimes" while his potential opponent defies the law and
that's ok because .why was that ok again?.
"However hurried a court may be in its efforts to reach the merits of a controversy, the
integrity of procedural rules is dependent upon consistent enforcement because the only fair
and reasonable alternative thereto is complete abandonment." Miller v. Lint, 62 Ohio St. 2d
209 (1980).
"We have granted discretionary review because a majority of a Court of Appeals panel has
refused to follow a long line of decisions of the highest court of this state in violation of
S.C.R. 1.030(8)(a) which provides:
'The Court of Appeals is bound by and shall follow applicable precedents established in
the opinions of the Supreme Court and its predecessor court.'
The rule is fundamental and is absolutely necessary in a hierarchical judicial system. If
every tier of courts in the judicial hierarchy were free to disregard the decisions of a
higher court, the Court of Appeals could freely disregard the decisions of the Supreme Court,
the circuit courts could freely ignore the decisions of the Court of Appeals and the Supreme
Court and our District Courts would be bound by no law at all, free to ignore the decisions
of all higher courts. The result of that course is anarchy." Special Fund v. Francis, 708
S.W.2d 641 (Ky. 1986).
The above favorable articulations notwithstanding what I've been seeing the past decade,
or so, is something much more akin to "The Rule of Whimsy," with said rule of whimsy having
replaced "The Rule of Law."
I don't think the comparative impeachable offenses argument adds any clarification. The
distinction is that the current proceedings are about potential extortion that impacts the
next election; the impeachable lies and corruption that led to the Iraq war took two years
for the public to perceive. Future versus past. Even if Kerry won in 2004, there would not
have been convictions because the conflict was still in progress. Besides, those that carry
out orders are the ones that get convictions, not the commanders. Oh, and let's not forget
"the fog of war" – a very useful alibi for top military advisers and political
leaders.
I think the problem with the current impeachment mess can be Venn diagrammed. Imagine two
circles. Once circle titled political leverage, the other circle titled extortion. Move the
circles together to partially overlap. Where they overlap is titled Joe Biden. A distinction
can usually be made between political leverage and extortion by asking who the stakeholders
are. Leverage (with military aid) is always going on, and it benefits "regional stability"
and "national security". Extortion benefits the requester, weakens his rivals, creates a
compromising dependency the supplicant. In the overlap area the extorted political smear gets
executed and the goods get delivered. I think the GOP's argument is that as long as the goods
get delivered it is acceptable political leverage. They want to minimize the effect of
smearing Joe Biden on the election. They want to blur the distinction between extortion and
leverage.
Back to future versus past: The current mess may originate with an lack of conflict of
interest oversight during/by the Obama administration by sending Joe Biden and John Kerry to
Ukraine to negotiate anti-corruption deals favorable to the US, knowing that their family
members were involved with Burisma. Surely there were others in the state Department that
could have been direct envoys of the administration. If Burisma wants to stack their board
with influential people and pay them a ridiculous sum for doing nothing – just to
attract investors – well you can chalk that up to corporate stupidity. It's not
necessarily corruption, especially if it works. How many US private equity firms have
high-visibility dead weight board members?
It took me all of one week to connect corruption with the Iraq war, back when it was
beginning. The comparison of past with present is quite useful because it highlights the
injustice that is going on right now. Even if Trump committed impeachable offenses, does not
give the House any moral authority to engage in selective prosecution for the exact same type
of behavior that they themselves, and past presidents have engaged in. This whole circus is
nothing but politics, it certainly isn't about justice, nor doing what is actually good for
the country. Disclaimer: I voted for Jill Stein. Deal with it.
I can only watch small snippets of the "impeachment hearings" before screaming at the TV
like an insane man. Even if one accepts the argument that Trump was using leverage to influence US
election: BIDEN WAS NOT THE NOMINEE !!!!!!!!!!! there were many others vying for the position. How
can you use leverage for personal gain on an event which hasn't and may not occur ?
It only works if he becomes the nominee. Trump was very effective at portraying his
opponents as he wanted during the 2016 campaign ("Crooked Hillary" ) with all the self
inflicted gaffs "Uncle Joe" makes it would seem to be shooting fish in a barrel for Trump in
2020 Why work through Ukraine, when he'd have it so easy destroying him on national TV while
stroking his own ego at the same time
So, in Myanmar, should the Hague not act because it's hands aren't clean? It hasn't acted
against the US, for example, which was a much more dangerous agressor in the ME recently (not
to speak of other cases), and so clearly, the investigation into Myanmar is "merely"
political. Even if investigating the US is impractical, it could investigate smaller
countries that have been involved in that case -- but they haven't, since this is merely
"political".
In fact, following this to the reduction to absurdity, no court ever has clean hands --
everything is corrupt to some extent, self-interested and hypocritical. Do we abandon all
pretense at systems of justice? Or is the case presented here "special" in some sense,
whereby we should look at the goals of the accusers beyond and above the acts and goals of
the accused?
Thank you, Lambert this is a great piece. I haven't been able to follow this impeachment
thing at all. But your final question and answer pulls it together for me.
It doesn't make sense because it really doesn't make sense. Also why now, when we are about to have an election?
I just wish I had the nerve and moral strength to share your post.
The are two answers to the question, "How is lying the country into the Iraq war not
impeachable, and this mass of anodyne trivialities impeachable?"
The optimistic answer is, "Because the former is a matter of statecraft, and the latter is
using official power to derive a direct personal benefit, and the standards for impeachment
based statecraft are much higher." (Congress in rejected Cambodia based articles of
impeachment in 1974)
The cynical answer is, "Because everyone in Washington, DC has sad-sack children who get
jobs because of their political power, and Trump must not be allowed to infringe on our
privilege."
The thing is, BOTH answers are true for different people.
For folks like Pramila Jayapal or AOC, I think that they see this as bribery and an abuse
of office for personal gain. (This group has been calling for impeachment for a while)
For someone like Nancy Pelosi, whose kids have clearly had opportunities as a result of
her position, I think that it is the latter.
How these two categories are split in the Democratic caucus, and there are probably some
in the, "Both," camp, is beyond me.
However, even by a relatively strict interpretation if impeachable offense, we have
obstruction of justice in the Mueller report, obstruction of Congress right now, tax and bank
fraud (though those were done when he was a private citizen), connections to the mob, both
domestic and Russian, witness intimidation, and bribery off the top of my head. (Ignoring
campaign finance violations, because seriously, who cares)
I have always felt the the furor over Russian interference in the election, which was
minor compared to what Churchill did in 1940, was primarily about excusing the corrupt and
incompetent Democratic Party (mis)leadership, and you will notice that I have not included
any of that, though obviously the cover-up flowed from that in some cases.
As Lambert knows, I'm retired after working as a prosecutor in Silicon Valley for 32
years. I think that Lambert is "on to something" here, but doesn't quite hit the mark.
Selective Prosecution is a huge issue in this country, but it isn't the issue
here.
I agree that for years , Presidents have been committing "impeachable offenses"
without being impeached. Unlike the decision to prosecute an ordinary citizen, impeachment
is a political decision . However, the question being asked by the House Judiciary
Committee, whether attempting to extort the investigation of a political rival through the
withholding of foreign aid or favors to a foreign head of state is only one small
facet of the impeachment inquiry. If Trump were to have engaged in such conduct, I
believe that it would certainly constitute an impeachable offense . Whether to proceed with
an investigation into such an offense is a political decision. I happen to agree that Trump
is a turd and that he should be investigated.
Once this political decision has been made, the potentially impeachable offense must be
investigated and prosecuted . The House leadership are engaging in the typical mistake of the
rookie prosecutor: saying to him/herself " I know he's good for it " and filing
charges without conducting a complete and thorough investigation . This is where
Professor Turley is correct:
Proceeding to a vote on this incomplete record is a dangerous precedent to set for this
country. Removing a sitting President is not supposed to be easy or fast. It is meant to be
thorough and complete. This is neither.
A thorough investigation is the missing step before a case is presented to the Senate (or
to a jury). The White House stonewalled the House Intelligence Committee. Just like with the
Nixon impeachment inquiry the first step must be to litigate in the courts the assertion of
Executive Privilege. JeffK above is correct that there is a subtle distinction between the
Venn circles of "leverage" and "extortion" -- the distinction being whether pressure is being
exerted on behalf of the state in pursuit of a stated foreign policy objective (however
misguided that policy may be) or whether it is intended for the personal political or
financial benefit of an official. These are "gray areas" in which understanding the
subjective intent of the actor is crucial.
This is where hard evidence such as tapes and transcripts of the actual words used become
critical. This evidence apparently exists, but House Democrats have failed to file suit to
obtain them. Only when we know the words used and the surrounding circumstances can we draw
inferences about the subjective intent of the actors. In the criminal law we draw such
inferences about an actor's subjective intent all the time . However, we apply special
rules when drawing inferences about a person's intent. Those inferences must not only be
reasonable , they must be the only reasonable inferences that can be drawn from
the facts and circumstances presented.
As a veteran prosecutor, to me this is where the House Democrats are failing to act as
ethical prosecutors. They have failed to develop the evidentiary record, which is their
fundamental Due Process duty prior to filing charges. " I know he's good for it "
isn't evidence.
As Lambert knows, I'm retired after working as a prosecutor in Silicon Valley for 32
years. I think that Lambert is "on to something" here, but doesn't quite hit the mark.
Selective Prosecution is a huge issue in this country, but it isn't the issue
here.
I agree that for years , Presidents have been committing "impeachable offenses"
without being impeached. Unlike the decision to prosecute an ordinary citizen, impeachment
is a political decision . However, the question being asked by the House Judiciary
Committee, whether attempting to extort the investigation of a political rival through the
withholding of foreign aid or favors to a foreign head of state is only one small
facet of the impeachment inquiry. If Trump were to have engaged in such conduct, I
believe that it would certainly constitute an impeachable offense . Whether to proceed with
an investigation into such an offense is a political decision. I happen to agree that Trump
is a turd and that he should be investigated.
Once this political decision has been made, the potentially impeachable offense must be
investigated and prosecuted . The House leadership are engaging in the typical mistake of the
rookie prosecutor: saying to him/herself " I know he's good for it " and filing
charges without conducting a complete and thorough investigation . This is where
Professor Turley is correct:
Proceeding to a vote on this incomplete record is a dangerous precedent to set for this
country. Removing a sitting President is not supposed to be easy or fast. It is meant to be
thorough and complete. This is neither.
A thorough investigation is the missing step before a case is presented to the Senate (or
to a jury). The White House stonewalled the House Intelligence Committee. Just like with the
Nixon impeachment inquiry the first step must be to litigate in the courts the assertion of
Executive Privilege.
JeffK above is correct that there is a subtle distinction between the
Venn circles of "leverage" and "extortion" -- the distinction being whether pressure is being
exerted on behalf of the state in pursuit of a stated foreign policy objective (however
misguided that policy may be) or whether it is intended for the personal political or
financial benefit of an official. These are "gray areas" in which understanding the
subjective intent of the actor is crucial.
This is where hard evidence such as tapes and transcripts of the actual words used become
critical. This evidence apparently exists, but House Democrats have failed to file suit to
obtain them. Only when we know the words used and the surrounding circumstances can we draw
inferences about the subjective intent of the actors. In the criminal law we draw such
inferences about an actor's subjective intent all the time . However, we apply special
rules when drawing inferences about a person's intent. Those inferences must not only be
reasonable , they must be the only reasonable inferences that can be drawn from
the facts and circumstances presented.
As a veteran prosecutor, to me this is where the House Democrats are failing to act as
ethical prosecutors. They have failed to develop the evidentiary record, which is their
fundamental Due Process duty prior to filing charges. " I know he's good for it "
isn't evidence.
Schiff behaviour was egregious and as such it is now DemoRats liability...
Goldman finding are all bogus as they can't be compared with crimes on Obama and Clinton family.
Notable quotes:
"... Castor accused Democrats of sustaining a months-long quest to find an issue on which to impeach Trump. After Mueller's investigation didn't deliver the results they wanted, he said Democrats now are focusing on Trump's interactions with Ukraine, particularly his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. ..."
"... "The record in the Democrats' impeachment inquiry does not show that President Trump abused the power of Congress or obstructed Congress," Castor said. "To impeach a president who 63 million people voted for over eight lines in a call transcript is baloney." ..."
Here's the Democratic position, according to their lawyers...
"The evidence is overwhelming that the president abused his power" by trying to get
Ukraine to help his prospects for re-election by announcing an investigation into a political
rival, former Vice President Joe Biden," said Barry Berke, counsel to House Judiciary
Democrats.
He and Daniel Goldman, counsel for Democrats on the Intelligence Committee, also cited
numerous instances of the Trump administration withholding documents and other evidence
sought by Congress in connection with the Ukraine probe.
...and the Republican position.
The panel's Republican counsel, Steve Castor, reiterated one of the chief defenses of the
president that's been put forward by Trump allies: "The impeachment inquiry's record is
riddled with hearsay, presumptions and speculation."
He accused Democrats of pursuing an "artificial and arbitrary political deadline" to
overturn the 2016 election and impeach Trump's before the Christmas holiday.
Goldman detailed what he called four "critical" findings from the investigation, according
to Dems. All of these points will likely feature prominently in the articles.
Trump used the power of his office to pressure and induce the newly-elected president of
Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 presidential election for Trump's personal and political
benefit.
In order to increase the pressure on Ukraine to announce the politically-motivated
investigations that the president wanted, he withheld a coveted Oval Office meeting and $391
million of essential military assistance from Ukraine.
Trump's conduct undermined the U.S. election process and poses an imminent threat to our
national security.
Faced with the revelation of his pressure campaign against Ukraine, Trump directed an
unprecedented effort to obstruct Congress' impeachment inquiry into his conduct.
Meanwhile, Republicans insist that the Dems' impeachment drive was a waste of time because
it doesn't show abuse of power.
Castor accused Democrats of sustaining a months-long quest to find an issue on which to
impeach Trump. After Mueller's investigation didn't deliver the results they wanted, he said
Democrats now are focusing on Trump's interactions with Ukraine, particularly his July 25
phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
"The record in the Democrats' impeachment inquiry does not show that President Trump
abused the power of Congress or obstructed Congress," Castor said. "To impeach a president
who 63 million people voted for over eight lines in a call transcript is baloney."
Unfortunately, the impeachment hearing blitz has done little to shift public opinion. Poll
averages compiled by FiveThirtyEight and RealClear Politics show that Americans are evenly
divided with roughly 47% to 48% supporting impeachment and 44% to 45% opposing. Some individual
polls have found that more than eight in ten people say their minds are made up.
Though Nadler says he hasn't yet made a final decision, it looks like evidence from the
Mueller probe will be left out of the articles of impeachment by Democrats (probably not a bad
idea).
Looks like Schiff went overboard and it is he who should be impeached...
Notable quotes:
"... Likewise, Mr. Schiff published call records between Mr. Giuliani and me and suggested they involved my Ukraine stories. Many contacts I had with Mr. Giuliani involved interviews on the Mueller report and its aftermath or efforts to invite the president's lawyer on the Hill's TV show, which I supervised. ..."
"... Mr. Schiff's team has tried to minimize the conduct because he never subpoenaed my phone records directly but extracted them from others' call records. That defense is laughable. ..."
"... Similarly, in the days since Mr. Schiff's phone-record release, I have had people who openly talked to me on the phone this year suddenly ask to communicate only by encrypted apps. They don't want their names splashed in the next congressional report. And they fear a bipartisan open season on phone records of political opponents in the future. ..."
"... Mr. Schiff appears to assume that Congress enjoys unlimited investigative powers under the Constitution's Speech or Debate clause. He does not. I recommend the chairman examine the record in McSurely v. McClellan , a two-decade legal battle that began in 1967 and pitted a powerful committee chairman against a liberal activist couple in Kentucky. It is widely regarded -- along with the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s -- as one of most egregious episodes of misconduct in the modern history of congressional oversight. ..."
"... "can only stand as a small reaffirmation of the proposition that there are bounds to the interference that citizens must tolerate from the agents of their government -- even when such agents invoke the mighty shield of the Constitution and claim official purpose to their conduct." ..."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation's
Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide , the bible for agents, has long recognized
that journalists, the clergy and lawyers deserve special protections because of the
constitutional implications of investigating their work . Penitents who confess to a priest,
sources who provide confidential information to a reporter, and clients who seek advice from
counsel are assumed to be protected by a high bar of privacy, which must be weighed against the
state's interests in investigating matters or subpoenaing records. Judges and members of
Congress also fall into a special FBI category because of the Constitution's separation of
powers.
The FBI and Justice Department have therefore created specific rules governing agents'
actions involving special-circumstances professionals, which include high-level approval and
review. There are also special rules for
subpoenaing journalists.
If the executive branch, and by extension the courts that enforce these privacy protections,
observe the need for such sensitivity, it seems reasonable that Congress should have similar
guardrails ensuring that the powers of the state are equally and fairly applied.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff apparently doesn't see things that way
.
His committee secretly authorized subpoenas to AT&T earlier this year for the phone records of President
Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and an associate. He then arbitrarily extracted
information about certain private calls and made them public.
Many of the calls Mr. Schiff chose to publicize fell into the special-circumstances
categories: a fellow member of Congress ( Rep. Devin Nunes, the Intelligence Committee's
ranking Republican), two lawyers (Mr. Giuliani and fellow Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow ) and a
journalist (me).
More alarming, the released call records involve figures who have sometimes criticized or
clashed with Mr. Schiff. I wrote a
story raising questions about his contacts with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, a key
figure in the Russia probe, that brought the California Democrat unwelcome scrutiny. Mr. Nunes
has been one of Mr. Schiff's main Republican antagonists, helping to prove that the exaggerated
claims of Trump-Russia election collusion were unsubstantiated. Messrs. Sekulow and Giuliani
represent Mr. Trump, who is Mr. Schiff's impeachment target.
Mr. Schiff's actions in obtaining and publicizing private phone records trampled the
attorney-client privilege of Mr. Trump and his lawyers. It intruded on my First Amendment
rights to interview and contact figures like Mr. Giuliani and the Ukrainian-American
businessman Lev Parnas without fear of having the dates, times and length of private
conversation disclosed to the public.
Contrary to Mr. Schiff's defense that he was simply serving the investigative interest of
Congress, the release of the phone records served much more to punish people whose work Mr.
Schiff found antagonistic than to fulfill an oversight purpose . And it served Congress poorly
because it spread false insinuations. Mr. Schiff's report suggested, for instance, that Mr.
Giuliani called the White House to talk to the Office of Management and Budget, implying he
might have been trying to help Mr. Trump withhold aid to Ukraine as Democrats allege. The White
House says that claim is wrong; the number was a generic phone entry point and no one in OMB
talked to Mr. Giuliani.
Likewise, Mr. Schiff published call records between Mr. Giuliani and me and suggested they
involved my Ukraine stories. Many contacts I had with Mr. Giuliani involved interviews on the
Mueller report and its aftermath or efforts to invite the president's lawyer on the Hill's TV
show, which I supervised.
Mr. Schiff's team has tried to minimize the conduct because he never subpoenaed my phone
records directly but extracted them from others' call records. That defense is laughable.
Once a journalist and his calls are made public through the powers of the surveillance
state, there is an instant chilling effect on press freedom.
I know this firsthand. In 2001 and 2002, when I was a reporter for the Associated Press, the
Justice Department obtained my home phone records and the FBI
illegally seized my mail without a warrant in an effort to unmask my sources on federal
corruption and stop publication of a story about the government's counterterrorism failures
before 9/11. In the end the FBI returned my reporting records, apologized to me privately, and
announced new rules to avoid a repeat for other journalists.
Yet by that time many of my longtime sources had told me they had chosen not to contact me
for fear of being detected. Others would only meet in person, concerned that my phones were
wiretapped.
Similarly, in the days since Mr. Schiff's phone-record release, I have had people who openly
talked to me on the phone this year suddenly ask to communicate only by encrypted apps. They
don't want their names splashed in the next congressional report. And they fear a bipartisan
open season on phone records of political opponents in the future.
Rep. Mike Turner (R., Ohio), a member of the Intelligence Committee, tells me he's drafting
legislation to put guardrails on future congressional subpoenas for phone records. That's a
good start, but more needs to be done sooner.
Mr. Schiff appears to assume that Congress enjoys unlimited investigative powers under the
Constitution's Speech or Debate clause. He does not. I recommend the chairman examine the
record in McSurely v. McClellan , a two-decade legal battle that began in 1967 and pitted a
powerful committee chairman against a liberal activist couple in Kentucky. It is widely
regarded -- along with the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s -- as one of most egregious episodes
of misconduct in the modern history of congressional oversight.
In one of the final
appellate decisions in that topsy-turvy case, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia ruled that Congressional oversight isn't boundless and that the Speech or
Debate Clause has limits. The final paragraph of that ruling derided a "sorry chapter of
investigative excess."
The judges wrote that their decision:
"can only stand as a small reaffirmation of the proposition that there are bounds to the
interference that citizens must tolerate from the agents of their government -- even when
such agents invoke the mighty shield of the Constitution and claim official purpose to their
conduct."
Imagine if it were Devin Nunes subpoenaing the phone records of Adam Schiff, and Schiff's
private conversations with, say, a reporter at CNN...and then making them public.
The MSM would go BALLISTIC!!!!! Heads would have to roll in Congress, and elsewhere. It
would be top-of-the-page headline news 24/7.
But, because this is ALL ABOUT getting rid of the Bad Orange Man, what do we hear from the
MSM??? *crickets*
And the MSM wonders why Congress has a better approval rating among the American public
that they do.
Adam Schiff is the tip of the iceberg. Wanton disregard for the rule of law, all the while
espousing strict adherence to it, is rampant. While living among us, these Neo-liberals have
declared war on us. To them, any means are legitimate in 'defeating' us. They know they would
never win a direct confrontation with facts, so subversion, deception, and sabotage are their
methods of choice. They have co-opted media, education, and government into their ideology of
control. The vast majority of the populace will be subdued and programmed into believing and
doing anything. For all intents and purposes, we're already there.
" [T]hese irregularities, these misstatements, these omissions were not satisfactorily
explained, " said Barr in a lengthy interview with NBC , just one day after DOJ Inspector
General Michael Horowitz released the so-called FISA report.
"And I think that leaves open
the possibility to infer bad faith . I think it's premature now to reach a judgment on that,
but I think that further work has to be done and that's what Durham is doing," he added,
referring to US Attorney John Durham - who Barr hand picked to lead a concurrent investigation
into the 2016 US election.
Barr described Durham's role as "Looking at the issue of how it got started. He's looking at
whether or not the narrative of Trump being involved in the Russian interference actually
preceded July, and was it in fact what precipitated the trigger for the investigation."
"He's also looking at the conduct of the investigation," added Barr - who then said that he
instructed Durham to look just as carefully into the "post-election period."
"I did that because of some of the stuff that Horowitz has uncovered, which to me is
inexplicable. Their case collapsed after the election, and they never told the court, and
they kept on getting renewals on these applications. There was documents falsified in order
to get these renewals . There was all kinds of withholding of information from the court. And
the question really is 'what was the agenda after the election that kept them pressing ahead,
after their case collapsed?' This is the president of the Untied States!"
https://www.youtube.com/embed/sNhEYGLLS4U
Barr, who has characterized the FBI's actions during Trump-Russia investigation as spying ,
slammed the Obama DOJ and the press for the Russiagate narrative that President Trump and his
campaign colluded with Russia to win the election.
The potential timing of the Durham Report release and announcements of indictments for
Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Lynch and the rest of the traitors must horrify the demoncrats!
What do they have in common? So here's the deal - I am a dumb goyim that works in banking
and finance, which is about 50%+ dominated by the Chosenites.
They also rule politics and the Media, despite being 2% of the country.
What do you need to know? They lie. Repeatedly and boldly. Don't freak out, just
understand that culture does not believe in an afterlife where they are judged, so they lie
and steal everything in sight. That's this whole impeachment - crazy lies by sociopaths that
aren't afraid to lie.
If you know that going in, you can always protect yourself and even be decent business
allies (but not too close). That's where Trump has gone all wrong. His daughter even married
one of these goofballs who frankly is probably leaking all of the embarrassing stuff. Plan
accordingly.
Best part of the Barr interview..."The greatest charge is having an incumbent government
use the apparatus of the state to spy on political opponents and influence the outcome of the
election. This is the first time I am aware that the incumbent administration spied on a
presidential candidate."
You are exactly correct. The Horowitz review was initiated to look into how the DOJ and
FBI secured a Title-1 FISA surveillance warrant against U.S. person Carter Page. IG Horowitz
was never investigating the predicate claims that initiated the CIA/FBI operation known as
"Crossfire Hurricane". So how exactly would AG Barr and IG Horowitz be diverging on an aspect
to a predicate that Horowitz was never reviewing?
Additionally, IG Horowitz was never tasked or empowered to interview CIA officers who are
known to have been at the heart of the pre-July 2016 operation. Horowitz was/is focused on
the DOJ and FBI compliance with legal requirements for the FISA application that was
assembled for use in October 2016, and renewed throughout 2017. - The Conservative
Treehouse
Appearing on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," Maté
said Ukraine's efforts to tamper in the election are "no secret."
"Ukrainian officials -- they leaked information that exposed some apparent corruption by Paul Manafort and it was consequential.
It led to Paul Manafort's resignation
from the Trump campaign," he said. "And, the stated intent of Ukrainian officials was to weaken the Trump campaign because they
wanted to help elect Hillary Clinton ."
Yet, when Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told "Meet The Press" host
Chuck Todd Sunday that reports from various
media outlets indicated that former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko favored Clinton over now-President Trump, Todd accused him
of parroting Russian President
Vladimir Putin's talking points.
"Are you at all concerned that you've been duped?" Todd asked.
On the same network, anchor
Nicolle Wallace and her guest The Bulwark Editor-at-Large Charlie Sykes echoed Todd, agreeing that Kennedy "comes off as an addled
Russian asset on television" after "peddling Vladimir Putin's talking points."
"I don't understand the proactive work on behalf of Putin's Kremlin," said Wallace.
Maté told Carlson that what these pundits are trying to do is "conflate that with a different theory by Ukrainian meddling. Which
is not proven -- it's true."
"And, that is the one that Trump tried to put forward in this
phone call with Zelenksy where he appears to be saying that it wasn't Russia that was behind the
hacking of the DNC and that it might have been Ukraine," he continued.
"It's true there's no evidence for that theory, and it's fair enough to point out that. But. what's also ironic here is that the
people who are indignant about that claim by Trump are accepting the claim that Russia hacked the DNC," Maté stated, adding that
journalists should be demanding to see the underlying evidence used by U.S. intelligence to draw that conclusion.
Carlson said the mainstream media now accuses anyone who questions their narrative of being a "traitor to the country" and supporting
Russia. Julia Musto is a reporter for Foxnews.com
So CIA agent Carter Page joins Trump campaign and then do several "improper" moves like
travel to Moscow and contracts with Russian officials things in order to create a pretext for FBI
investigation. Which of course was promptly started. This is called false flag operation.
From comments: "He wasn’t a victim, he was an asset. When actors portray a victim, they
are ACTING!!!"
Notable quotes:
"... "The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses". - the esteemed Malcolm X. ..."
"... Seth Rich downloaded the emails on a potable drive. Was he Russian? ..."
"... DNC/ FBI/ CIA/ CNN/ NBC have merged into the 5 headed serpent. ..."
"... Roger Stone got some minor facts wrong and is facing jail time, Brennan and Comey outright lied to Congress, when are they going to jail? ..."
"... "June 2017, CIA told FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith that Carter Page was working for them (the CIA)." Clinesmith then changed that notification so he could submit the last (FISA) renewal. ..."
"... "Lets hope Carter Page spends the rest of his life sueing everyone..." lol Thats the meanest thing ive ever heard you say! O:) ..."
There are so many crooked actors and actresses hired by the MSM it is just pathetic. They
are not reporters, they are there only to put on a show for the masses.
"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the
innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the
minds of the masses". - the esteemed Malcolm X.
"June 2017, CIA told FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith that Carter Page was working for them
(the CIA)." Clinesmith then changed that notification so he could submit the last (FISA)
renewal.
1:52
- This is what a paid shill looks like. If the money is good, they'll read whatever is on the
prompter. Years from now when they're demonized by the corrupt media they'll scratch their
head and ask... What happened to integrity in our country???
If you asked me 20 years ago wether I would be watching Fox News to get the most rational
point of view in politics, I would have said you were crazy. Another great job Tucker! In my
opinion, you’re one of the best news men of our current time; questioning needless
wars, and calling out politicians, gvmnt officials and your counterparts at other news desks
with rational arguments. Well done sir!
Personally seen these types of things/cases in lower levels, police chiefs and officials,
judges, prosecutors, mayor, FBI, and so on. Not surprisingly it happens elsewhere. ...But
very disappointed of it all.
If I were an American citizen, I'd be very concerned about the utter incompetence of the
FBI that the IG report exposed. The dems don't seem to be bothered by this at all. Go
figure.
The Establishment has played this game many times before .. remember PM Harold Wilson was
put up as a Russian Agent .. sure they won that game but NOT this time .. they fear President
Trump because the have nothing over him .
The Democ-rats and the media (I repeat myself) are shamelessly LYING through their teeth
to the American People. There was NO Russian collision—it's a HOAX made by LOSERS who
can't accept their loss in 2016 so they were up to smear the winner, President Trump, by all
means, possible including Illegal surveillance, fraud and manipulation—ABUSE of
government power for political prosecution.
Steele dossier......fake evidence bought and payed for by the democrats and presented to
the FISA court by James Comey...........FELONY FELONY FELONY!......this one can’t be
talked away!
Tucker, thank you for being a constant drumbeat for the criminal activity undertaken by
the FBI and CIA to ultimately unseat a duly elected President. No rest until they are held
accountable.
How could the FBI be innocent? We saw the emails. We saw them cover up for Bill Gates,
Clinton, Epstein, Brunel, and all the others. We saw how they protected these abusers of
children. We saw how they worked to overthrow a sitting president. We saw how they protected
the Awan’s and Huma.
THE FIX WAS IN - People are saying that Nellie Orr the Russian Expert is best friends with
the IG's Horowitz wife - So nice - Bruce your husband is a lap dog and works for the FBI .
People should be outraged as the cover up continues . Just like OJ - they have 10 times the
evidence that would convict anyone else - have them charged , arrested , tried and jailed .
Different rules for corrupt politicians and their friends in law enforcement .
Michael Cohen In prison, Papadopulos went to prison, Flynn is going to prison, Roger Stone
is going to prison, Manafort is in prison and Devin Nunes and Rudy Giuliani are under
investigation.....Lock them up, lock them up!!!!
CIA tells FBI who in turn uses their corrupt media to spread the lies as truth. The less
intelligent among us believe them as gospel and thus we get "Russian Collusion, or Quid Pro
Quo, or Iraq has weapons of mass destruction " and on and on.....
Ukraine and Barisma may be corrupt, but after reading the summary of this report, this
country better not be calling any country corrupt. The USA is following Rome. Soon it will
die.
FBI is totally corrupted by it's unchecked power, these deep states have the guts to
repeatedly use FALSE Information again & again to spy on the opposition political party
presidential candidate campaign. The Fake News medias continue to cover for them, it is
sickening!
The FBI based on the IG report are either criminally liable for deceiving FISA courts, or
the most inept, bumbling criminal investigation agency ever. Looks like both to me. Any FBI
agent or employee who knew the FBI was breaking the law, and remained silent needs to be
fired immediately and prosecuted along with the principals, for aiding and abetting criminal
activity. This sounds like RICO violations.
if Carter Page didn't run the 2016 "Trump Election Campaign Committee of Moscow" from the
ROSNEFT bureau offices inside the Kremlin, where did Carter Page run the "Trump Election
Campaign Committee of Moscow" ?
Horowitz needs to stop being a wuss and tell the whole truth. His report is a big lie. The
whole thing was a political attack. It started with John McCain and he handed it off to Obama
and Crooked Hillary. There was no reason at all to investigate Trump. Is the IG part of the
deep state? Democrats are acting like this report is good news for them.
Steele was not the author of the fake dossier, DNC FusionGPS Glen Simpson was, and Steele
used as cover. Coming in the Durham findings. 17 FBI "mistakes" in a row all against Trump?
No bias? B S.
How Trump has "conned" the American tax payer: This is just a few of his fraud actions!He
set up a foundation to benefit the military, then him and his family pocketed our money.He
started a Fake University, then stole the money from the American people.He cheated on his
wives, then paid them to keep quiet so it wouldn't damage his chances in the election.He
stiffed 100's of worker's he hired and then made up an excuse y they didn't get paid
If Donald Trump was a Russian spy it would’ve been the deepest cover of any secret
agent ever....he came here after his lgb training as a young man and became a celebrity for
30 years before finally putting his dastardly plan to go from pageant owner to president into
action! If that were anywhere close to true the Russians did so much work I think they earned
the 4-8 years in the White House! I know that at this point I’d rather have Vladimir
Putin as President than any of the top democrats!
Folks..All this soap opera is just a smoke screen to hide what is really important and is
happening right now at this very minute. The Federal Reserve Banking cartel is pumping 100s
of billions of dollars into insolvent banks again like they did in 2008. This time it is more
and we taxpayers will again foot the bill. The banks are getting this money called REPO
loans. Watch your cash everyone as the Federal Reserve has only 1 product and that is
printing money( debt) that they will use to steal your assets and future.
There are many opinions about the Horowitz report. As with a prior report Horowitz lays
out damning evidence and then draws exactly the wrong conclusion. Why does he have to draw
ANY CONCLUSIONS? His job is to present the facts and the evidence and to let "We the People'
draw conclusions. Reminds me of Comey declaring that Hillary's actions were irresponsible but
not criminal. Why? She didn't act with intent. She was just incompetent! Tucker is absolutely
right! What does it matter what their motive was? Like Clinton, they behaved in a criminal
fashion.
Wow, even fake news NBC is pooping themselves over FISA mishandling. I predict whiplash
with how fast the fake news, drive-by media throws Comey, Clapper and Brennan under the bus
to protect Hillary and Obongo.
"... Significantly Wallerstein, arguing from history that the intervals between these brief periods of hegemony are periods in which several states compete for the 'succession'-France and the UK in the period after the Dutch moment had passed; Germany and the United States after 1850- suggested that the European Community would be competing with the East Asian bloc for hegemony. ..."
"... Also of interest is the fact that Russia, which didn't feature among the contestants for future hegemony in 1980, has now re-emerged in its ancient role as the 'eastern' version of expanding America, a mirror image with even more natural resources, a larger landmass and a natural affinity with China and the formerly Soviet states of central Asia. ..."
"... It might be argued that it is because the hubristic United States cannot bring itself to treat the potentially enormously powerful states of Europe as anything more than contemptible slaves that it is never going to re-establish its global position. On the other hand a case can be made that the current thrust of the United States is to re-establish its ownership of the rest of the hemisphere. It treats Canada as a sort of Puerto Rico with snow and oil. Only recently was Mexico was threatened on the improbable-in historical terms- that it allows the CIA to run its drug trade and supervise its Death Squads. ..."
"... US interference and arrogance is as evident as it has ever been. What is less evident is whether, for all its military and financial power, US policy against Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and their increasingly rebellious neighbours has any chance of succeeding. ..."
There is a sense in which everything on this blog comes back to international relations and
neo-con attempts to build "A New American Century." Which is to say hegemony and
globalisation.
Immanuel Wallerstein, who recently died and will be greatly missed, had some interesting
things to say about hegemonic powers.
He identified the Dutch Republic, for a brief period after emerging victorious from the
Thirty Years war in 1648, the United Kingdom, after Waterloo and up until the Crimean War and
the United States, from 1945 to 1973 as true hegemons with networks of alliances and
designated enemies.
He also makes the point that, long after states have ceased to be hegemonic, they remain
dominant in the areas of finance and culture.
So far as the United States is concerned it is hanging on in both those areas in which,
long after the paper in its Thuggerish foreign policy has been exposed, it retains enormous
influence though its media/entertainment businesses and Wall Street's command in finance. (It
is interesting here that The City, long after the UK has become a US puppet, still has
enormous power in the world of finance.)
Wallerstein prophesied (and this was in 1980) that the next contender for the position of
hegemon was likely to be an East Asian alliance of Japan, Korea and China.
Not a bad guess but one, like the end of US hegemony, made premature by the implosion of the
Soviet Union which provided the US with a new dawn and another chance-quickly blown- to
re-establish its hegemony. Which it did if not in fact then in its own mind in the shape of
the hubristic unipolar moment and Brother Fukuyama's End of History celebration.
Significantly Wallerstein, arguing from history that the intervals between these brief
periods of hegemony are periods in which several states compete for the 'succession'-France
and the UK in the period after the Dutch moment had passed; Germany and the United States
after 1850- suggested that the European Community would be competing with the East Asian bloc
for hegemony.
It is that prophecy which looks lame currently with the European countries probably more
under the domination of the United States than at any time in the past. Wallerstein was
writing at a period when it looked as if the the EEC strengthened by the accession of, inter
alia, the UK would be capable of throwing off the domination of the US and taking an
independent course of its own.
This is a dream, rather like that of the 'Social Europe' in which full employment, welfare
states, free education and regional development defy the spread of neo-liberal values and
strategies, which still leads a ghost like existence in the minds of Europhiles who don't get
out much and have never heard of Greece and the PIIGs.
Also of interest is the fact that Russia, which didn't feature among the contestants for
future hegemony in 1980, has now re-emerged in its ancient role as the 'eastern' version of
expanding America, a mirror image with even more natural resources, a larger landmass and a
natural affinity with China and the formerly Soviet states of central Asia.
It might be argued that it is because the hubristic United States cannot bring itself to
treat the potentially enormously powerful states of Europe as anything more than contemptible
slaves that it is never going to re-establish its global position. On the other hand a case
can be made that the current thrust of the United States is to re-establish its ownership of
the rest of the hemisphere. It treats Canada as a sort of Puerto Rico with snow and oil. Only
recently was Mexico was threatened on the improbable-in historical terms- that it allows the
CIA to run its drug trade and supervise its Death Squads.
As to the rest of central America and the southern continent: US interference and
arrogance is as evident as it has ever been. What is less evident is whether, for all its
military and financial power, US policy against Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and their
increasingly rebellious neighbours has any chance of succeeding.
It wrote in 2001 that the War on Terror was destined to end with Latin American militias,
wearing red armbands, patrolling the streets of Cleveland. Perhaps it will.
Wow, even fake news NBC is pooping themselves over FISA mishandling. I predict whiplash
with how fast the fake news, drive-by media throws Comey, Clapper and Brennan under the bus
to protect Hillary and Obongo.
Germany's manufacturing sector is suffering its steepest downturn for a decade after
industrial production fell 1.7 per cent in October, underlining how the powerhouse of the
eurozone's biggest economy is spluttering.
The figures, published on Friday by the Federal Statistics Office, mean that Germany's
manufacturing output has fallen 5.7 per cent in the year to October and indicate that the
sector is likely to keep weighing on overall eurozone growth in the fourth quarter.
"Far from bottoming out, Germany's industrial recession may be getting worse," said
Andrew Kenningham at Capital Economics. "The latest data support our view that a recession
is still more likely than not in the coming quarters."
And it was investment that was hit. The drop in German manufacturing in October was
concentrated in production of capital goods, including tools, buildings, vehicles,
machinery and equipment, which fell 4.4 per cent in the month. Production of intermediate
goods and consumer goods both increased.
After the fall of the DDR, the Western Germans thought they had everything sorted out:
capitalism had proved its supremacy over socialism, and History had ended. Their reward was
the Hartz Reforms of the early 2000s, which marked the end of German welfare state -- a token
to the German working class to remember what was its place for the forseeable future.
Germany is now entirely on the USA's hands. If the USA doesn't collapse, the liberal
financial architecture won't collapse, and the EU will be able to continue to exist in a
stagnated, 0-1% annual growth indefinitely and the European illusion will live on; if not,
Europe will go back to be a periphery of the world system, as it has been since the fall of
the Roman Empire in the West until the Second Industrial Revolution.
Speaking of Shane Gustafson: this is an excellent book:
Crisis amid Plenty: The Politics of Soviet Energy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev
(Princeton Legacy Library) Paperback – February 1, 1991
Although the Soviet Union has the most abundant energy reserves of any country, energy
policy has been the single most disruptive factor in its industry since the mid-1970s. This
major case study treats the paradox of the energy crisis as an essential part of larger
economic problems of the Soviet Union and as a key issue in determining the fate of the
Gorbachev reforms.
One of the theses of the book is that the Soviet industry had a "silo" structure: the
various components (exploration, drilling, production, transport, export) didn't coordinate
with one another and depended on the glue of communist party apparatchiks to keep the system
functioning. Gorbachev is said to have eliminated that glue and chaos ensued.
Schmoe@ 36
Re: "Due to an EU ruling related to foreign-affiliated pipelines (or some variation of
that), it will likely be forced to operate at 50% of capacity."
"... The sanctions against Russia are not that broad but they have impacted Russian energy E&P efforts in difficult to reach environments. ..."
"... That is just common sense...large Euro energy companies are partners in Nordstream and have invested billions...do you think they are just going to throw up their hands and say 'Ok we give up'...? ..."
"... And supposedly the owners of those ships [there is actually only one company in the world, Swiss-based Allseas, that operates these deep sea pipe-laying ships] are going to drop Nordstream because they don't want to lose potential US business in the Gulf of Mexico... ..."
"... That is bullshit...what pipelines are being planned for the Gulf...?...Zero... ..."
We shall see how strong. I'd put money on the Germans doing business with their natural
Eastern partners. Business is business, suzerain occupation since 75 years
notwithstanding.
Actually I harbor doubts about the strength of imperial ability, as the natural reaction
every time they use dollarweapon, is the weakening of the weapon...
That Good Man V Putin, I'm sure we all recall, recently spoke to this matter...signing off
with "they (or the dollar) will collapse soon."
zerohedge > "The Dollar Enjoyed Great Trust Around The World. But For Some Reason It Is
Being Used As A Political Weapon, Imposing Restrictions. Many Countries Are Now Turning Away
From The Dollar As A Reserve Currency. US Dollar Will Collapse Soon."
We will see on Nordstream 2 sanctions' effectiveness. Generally, US sanctions, when
aggressively enforced, are extremely effective (and lethal in many cases). The sanctions
against Russia are not that broad but they have impacted Russian energy E&P efforts in
difficult to reach environments.
I would also add that:
a) LNG prices are currently at incredibly low levels and if they hold at these levels
importation of LNG could minimize Germany's hit, and Qatar last week announced it will expands
its LNG export capabilities;
b) Russia / Gazprom did not finance Nordstream 2's construction; initially I believe Gazprom
did so but a consortium of 4 Netherlands (including Royal Dutch Shell), Austrian and German
companies later assumed the financing obligation;
c) Due to an EU ruling related to foreign-affiliated pipelines (or some variation of that),
it will likely be forced to operate at 50% of capacity.
Based on a) - c) there is much less than meets to eye for Nordstream 2.
A more likely outcome than violation of US sanction IMO is an asymmetric response from
Germany; perhaps the EU aviation authorities will deny whatever Band Aid Boeing puts our for
the 737 Max's MCAS system. Or Germany approves Huawei's 5g equipment.
I'm not sure how I missed those Nov 16 posts so thanks for forwarding. This quote will be
interesting:
"With some 85% of the pipeline already laid, new congressional sanctions aimed at
companies participating in the pipeline's construction will not stop it.
Instead, they will become a new bone of contention between the United States and
Europe.
That is just common sense...large Euro energy companies are partners in Nordstream and
have invested billions...do you think they are just going to throw up their hands and say 'Ok
we give up'...?
Even a child can see this Spiegel diarrhea for what it is...
And supposedly the owners of those ships [there is actually only one company in the world,
Swiss-based Allseas, that operates these deep sea pipe-laying ships] are going to drop
Nordstream because they don't want to lose potential US business in the Gulf of Mexico...
That is bullshit...what pipelines are being planned for the Gulf...?...Zero...
Yet the Russians are the world's gas and pipeline superpower and have more pipeline
projects in the works...
As if Allseas is going to risk their biggest customer for some bullshit US
sanctions...[they are also laying the Turkstream pipeline..."
Any company whose operations are all international will unfortunately have to think long
and hard about losing accessing to dollars. Open violations of US Sanctions are still almost
unheard of - Rosneft in Venezuala, Reliance Industries might now be buying Venezuelan oil -
so I would not be pollyanish about their power. Note that European companies will not use
Instinex out of fear of losing access to dollars.
Your questions are absolutely justified. The original story was written by Georg Mascolo,
the German Dana Milbank, i.e. the chief mouth piece of the intelligence services. This is an
obvious attempt to put pressure on Merkel to hamper relations with "Evil Russia" just prior
to a possible breakthrough in the Normandy talks. The German services, especially the BND,
are the last strongholds of Transatlanticism here, and they try to brace themselves against
any rapprochment between Russia and Germany. But this will be in vain. It's simply that the
geopolitical imperative is too strong: the two countries fit together perfectly in terms of
their respective needs and abilities.
"... "I'm opposed to conditioning the aid, and I would fight it no matter what," Engel told Al-Monitor. "The Democratic Party has traditionally been a pro-Israel party, and I see no reason for that to change now. If there are people who are Democrats who don't feel that way, then I don't think they should be elected president of the United States." ..."
"... Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is the most vocal proponent of conditioning Israeli military aid in the presidential race -- going even further left than J Street and all his primary opponents. At J Street's conference in October he said that some of the $3.8 billion in annual assistance "should go right now to humanitarian aid in Gaza." ..."
"... J Street has set any formal Israeli annexation of the West Bank as its red line for placing conditions on Israeli military aid. But it also supports the $38 billion memorandum of understanding. ..."
"... Shortly after the vote, Sanders campaign co-chair Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., as well as Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., asked colleagues to sign a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asking him to clarify whether Israel has used US military equipment while demolishing Palestinian homes in the West Bank. ..."
"... The letter, seen by Al-Monitor, notes that the Arms Export Control Act "narrowly conditions the use of transferred US-origin defense articles" and requires the president to inform Congress if the equipment is used for unauthorized purposes ..."
The Jews try to run US policy ..but lately the Dem base (and part of the party) has become
more pro Palestine.
Democratic (Jewish) lawmakers reckon with 2020 rhetoric on Israel aid
December 6, 2019
Presidential candidates who want to place conditions on Israeli military aid have prompted
pro-Israel House Democrats to go on the offensive.
REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
It's becoming harder and harder for pro-Israel Democrats on
Capitol Hill to ignore the increasingly critical voices of the US ally within their party and
the presidential race.
House Democratic leaders -- who happen to be some of the staunchest Israel supporters on
Capitol Hill -- this week added language supportive of the annual $3.8 billion military aid
package to Israel to a symbolic resolution that endorses a two-state solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The stalled resolution passed 226-188, largely along party lines, today. But pro-Israel
Democrats only came on board after House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel,
D-N.Y., added their new language to the bill. The new provision is a response to the fact
that several presidential candidates have come out of the woodwork in recent months with
calls to place conditions on the largest recipient of US military aid.
"I'm opposed to conditioning the aid, and I would fight it no matter what," Engel
told Al-Monitor. "The Democratic Party has traditionally been a pro-Israel party, and I see
no reason for that to change now. If there are people who are Democrats who don't feel that
way, then I don't think they should be elected president of the United
States."
When Engel's committee first advanced the resolution in July, Democratic leaders opted not
to put it on the floor, even as they passed another nonbinding resolution condemning the
pro-Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions movement 398-17, which was backed by the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
That changed last month after the Trump administration repealed a decades-old legal
opinion maintaining that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international
law.
"There are those on the far-left side of the Democratic Party -- and some of the
presidential candidates -- who are pushing for new conditions on aid, especially in their
interactions with Gaza, which is run by Hamas -- a terrorist organization," Gottheimer told
Al-Monitor.
An October poll from the liberal Center for American Progress found that 56% of
American voters, including 71% of Democrats, oppose "unconditional financial and military
assistance to Israel if the Israeli government continues to violate American policy on
settlement expansion or West Bank annexation."
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is the most vocal proponent of conditioning Israeli
military aid in the presidential race -- going even further left than J Street and
all his primary opponents. At J Street's conference in October he said that some of the $3.8
billion in annual assistance "should go right now to humanitarian aid in Gaza."
J Street has set any formal Israeli annexation of the West Bank as its red line for
placing conditions on Israeli military aid. But it also supports the $38 billion memorandum
of understanding.
Presidential hopefuls Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South
Bend, Indiana, have jumped on board with J Street's position. However, the current
front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden, has flatly ruled out conditioning the aid.
Notably, J Street did not oppose the effort to amend the Lowenthal resolution with the
military aid language. That said, progressive Democrats do not necessarily view that
provision as incompatible with calls to attach strings to that assistance. Congressional
Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., called the Engel language
"meaningless."
"It's just restating what current practice or current law is," Pocan told Al-Monitor. "We
don't really see it as affecting the bill one way or the other. At any time if we feel like
we're better off putting conditions on money and holding back money, Congress could always do
that with any country through the normal process."
Shortly after the vote, Sanders campaign co-chair Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., as well as
Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., asked colleagues to sign a letter to
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asking him to clarify whether Israel has used US military
equipment while demolishing Palestinian homes in the West Bank.
The letter, seen by Al-Monitor, notes that the Arms Export Control Act "narrowly
conditions the use of transferred US-origin defense articles" and requires the president to
inform Congress if the equipment is used for unauthorized purposes
"... Remember when Russia bombed Belgrade back to the middle ages, invaded and occupied Iraq, started an eighteen-year long quagmire in Afghanistan, created anarchy in Libya, funded and armed al-Qaeda in Syria, and expanded its bases right up to US borders? Neither do we. ..."
An alarmist headline out of US state-funded media arm Voice
of America : "Pentagon Concerned Russia Cultivating Sympathy Among US Troops". The story
begins as follows:
Russian efforts to weaken the West through a relentless campaign of information warfare
may be starting to pay off, cracking a key bastion of the U.S. line of defense: the military.
While most Americans still see Moscow as a key U.S. adversary, new polling suggests that view
is changing, most notably among the households of military members .
Remember when Russia bombed Belgrade back to the middle ages, invaded and occupied Iraq,
started an eighteen-year long quagmire in Afghanistan, created anarchy in Libya, funded and
armed al-Qaeda in Syria, and expanded its bases right up to US borders? Neither do we.
Nadler also said he would reject witnesses requested by the GOP, calling them "not relevant"
to the allegations.
For example, he said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), whom
the Republicans have requested as a witness, did not witness any of the actions and
therefore is not relevant to call as a witness.
Donald Trump is driven by desire to sweeten the balance sheet of the US as well as a deluded
belief in whatever it is that he thinks Israel stands for. Israel seeks to manipulate the
medieval barbarism of Saudi Arabia to further its fantasy of regional hegemony. They should
"wise up."
The Saudi who killed three people at Pensacola is representative of the breed.
It is time for a basic re-appraisal of our relationships in the ME. pl
It seems the Gulf Arab sheikhs and the Al Saud family have been writing big checks to all
the movers & shakers in the West, including the political and governmental elites, think
tank sinecures, and of course many media personalities.
Tony Balir became a wealthy man with the money of the sheikhs. In an earlier thread you
had posted, we read about the Lebanese man who was a conduit for Gulf arab money going to
Hillary's campaign. Then there was the post-9/11 Republican administration of George Bush who
along with the so-called liberal media and most members of Congress from both parties put a
complete kibosh on investigating any Saudi role with respect to the 11 out of 15 terrorists
of Saudi nationality.
We can see how Trump is already covering for the Saudis by saying the King was apologetic
and will compensate all those killed and injured by the Saudi airman in Pensacola.
When American and western leaders are so easily purchased by the sheikhs, how can we have
a re-appraisal of our relationships in the ME? The few who are calling for such a
re-appraisal like Tulsi Gabbard are being smeared as Russian bots.
Col Lang, you taught at West Point.
So I am wondering if you have a view of Tim Bakken's new book:
The Cost of Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, and Failure in the U.S. Military
I am not trying to argue here, I have only been at West Point as an athlete competing against
it.
Bakken book reviewed here:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/12/west-point-professor-builds-a-case-against-the-u-s-army/
If the USA withdraws support from the Saudis then the Saudis might stop pricing their oil
only in dollars. What effect would this have on the value of the dollar? Then again how much
oil is left in Saudi Arabia? The ARAMCO shares sell off doesn't seem to be doing great
buisness, maybe the market understands the situation better.
Would you have been in a position at the time to know if there there were any Carter
Doctrine contrarians within the FP/IC/DoD establishment in the late 70's? Curious how
extensive the debate over deeper ME engagement was at the time, or if it was all just a
knee-jerk reaction to Revolutionary Iran.
Power of Siberia is here. It's finished. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese
Premier Xi Jinping christened the pipeline to begin the month. Next month Putin will travel to
Turkey to join President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to open the first of four potential trains of the
Turkstream pipeline.
It is only Nordstream 2 that continues to lag behind because of insane levels of pressure
from the United States that is dead set against this pipeline coming online.
And the reason for that is the last of the major energy issues surrounding Gazprom needing
resolution this month, the gas transit contract between it and Ukraine's Naftogaz.
The two gas companies have been locked in legal disputes for years, some of which center on
Crimea's decision to break away from Ukraine and rejoin Russia in 2014. Most of them, however,
involve disputes over costs incurred during the previous and expiring gas transit contract.
The particulars today are ultimately irrelevant as these lawsuits have been used as nothing
more than blackmail to keep a new contract from getting signed. Ukraine has sued Gazprom in
courts, like in Sweden, that rule not by the tenets of contract law but rather through the lens
of social justice.
These have been political decisions that allowed Naftogaz to seize Gazprom's European
assets, further complicating any resolution to the conflict. These policies were pursued
aggressively by former Ukrainian President and long-time US State Department asset Petro
Poroshenko and they have done nothing to help Ukraine.
All they have done is strip-mine the country of its assets while keeping a war to prevent
the secession of the Donbass alive.
This dovetails with the external pressure applied to EU member states, like Denmark, to
delay if not outright thwart completion of Nordstream 2.
Opposition to Nordstream 2 in the US is all about leveraging influence in Ukraine and turn
it into a client state hostile to Russia sharing a border with Russia. If there's no gas
transit contract and there's no Nordstream 2 then US LNG suppliers can sell gas there and
deprive Russia of the revenues and the business.
It's truly that simple. But that strategy has morphed over the years into a convoluted chess
match of move/countermove in the vain hope of achieving something that looks like a victory.
But this isn't a game of real chess but rather a timed match.
Because the end of 2019 was always coming. And Ukraine would eventually have to decide as to
which direction it wanted to go. Moreover, that same choice was put in front of the EU who have
clearly, in the end, realized that the US under President Trump is not a long-term reliable
partner, but rather a bully which seeks its goals through threat and intimidation.
Stay with the US or green light Nordstream 2. The choice in Europe was clear. Nordstream 2
gets finished, as Denmark finally granted the final environmental permit for its construction
in October.
That delay moves the completion date out into 2020. And that now gives the US Senate one
last chance to stop the completion of the pipeline because everything else to this point has
failed, including the EU changing the rules on its gas pipeline rules to force Gazprom to
'unbundle' the pipeline from the gas flowing through it.
Germany amended that directive to allow Nordstream 2 to be regulated at the German federal
level and not at the EU level. This was as much of a win as could have been hoped for.
"The reason for the push is that this window is closing. A lot of Nord Stream is done
already. It will cost them dearly. I think if those sanctions pass [the companies] will shut
down, and I think the Russians will have to look for another way to do this if they can do
this," Risch said.
In reality the window has closed.
At the end of the day even if this legislation passes there will be no way to stop the
pipeline from being completed or the gas to flow through it. With so little of the pipeline
left to complete there is no practical way to stop it from happening. Risch and other US
senators are hoping to strand Nordstream 2 as an unfinished boondoggle but that's folly.
The German government wants this pipeline, therefore the German government will put up the
funds to ensure the contractors are paid and the pipeline completed.
There is a limit to the extent which sanctions can block commerce and once completed the US
will have no ability to sanction the gas flowing through the pipeline. It's a sad and pathetic
state of affairs that so much time, manpower and capital was wasted to stop a pipeline that is
necessary for Germany's future.
It also highlights the hypocrisy of US policy since there isn't a peep out of the US on
Turkstream, which will stitch NATO ally Turkey to Russia via 15.75 cm of natural gas every
year. Eventually it will replace the lost South Stream pipeline as the other trains are built
and contracted for.
All of the countries in eastern Europe are hungry for a piece of Turkstream's future. Serbia
Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy and Greece are all potential customers.
And all of these countries that currently get their gas from Ukraine are at risk if nothing
gets resolved between it and Russia. This is why the meeting between Putin and Ukrainian
President Zelensky is so important. It has the opportunity to begin reversing the damage done
to the basic fabric of Ukraine and Europe by agreeing to a path to ending the war in the
Donbass and coming to an agreement on gas transit.
There are more than $12 billion in lawsuits outstanding that Naftogaz has pending against
Gazprom. With Nordstream 2 a fait accompli that is all the leverage Zelensky has at that
meeting.
This game is a microcosm of the way the US foreign policy establishment uses Europe as the
battleground in the war against Russia. And given the way the political winds are shifting,
Europeans are getting very tired of it.
This is why gas storage facilities in Europe are full, there is real fear that Gazprom will
walk away from the talks with Ukraine and will wait out the completion of Nordstream 2. Gazprom
offered an extension of the current contract on the condition that Ukraine drop the
lawsuits.
Naftogaz said no. We'll see if Zelensky is smart enough to say yes.
Nadler also said he would reject witnesses requested by the GOP, calling them "not relevant"
to the allegations.
For example, he said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), whom
the Republicans have requested as a witness, did not witness any of the actions and
therefore is not relevant to call as a witness.
"... Remember when Russia bombed Belgrade back to the middle ages, invaded and occupied Iraq, started an eighteen-year long quagmire in Afghanistan, created anarchy in Libya, funded and armed al-Qaeda in Syria, and expanded its bases right up to US borders? Neither do we. ..."
An alarmist headline out of US state-funded media arm Voice
of America : "Pentagon Concerned Russia Cultivating Sympathy Among US Troops". The story
begins as follows:
Russian efforts to weaken the West through a relentless campaign of information warfare
may be starting to pay off, cracking a key bastion of the U.S. line of defense: the military.
While most Americans still see Moscow as a key U.S. adversary, new polling suggests that view
is changing, most notably among the households of military members .
Remember when Russia bombed Belgrade back to the middle ages, invaded and occupied Iraq,
started an eighteen-year long quagmire in Afghanistan, created anarchy in Libya, funded and
armed al-Qaeda in Syria, and expanded its bases right up to US borders? Neither do we.
Pentagon Alarmed Russia Is Gaining 'Sympathy' Among US Troops by Tyler Durden Sun, 12/08/2019 - 17:40 0
SHARES
An alarmist headline out of US state-funded media arm Voice
of America : "Pentagon Concerned Russia Cultivating Sympathy Among US Troops". The story
begins as follows:
Russian efforts to weaken the West through a relentless campaign of information warfare
may be starting to pay off, cracking a key bastion of the U.S. line of defense: the military.
While most Americans still see Moscow as a key U.S. adversary, new polling suggests that view
is changing, most notably among the households of military members .
Remember when Russia bombed Belgrade back to the middle ages, invaded and occupied Iraq,
started an eighteen-year long quagmire in Afghanistan, created anarchy in Libya, funded and
armed al-Qaeda in Syria, and expanded its bases right up to US borders? Neither do
we.
Perhaps American soldiers are simply sick and tired of the US military and intelligence
machine's legacy of ashes
across the globe and recognize the inconvenient fact that Russia most often has been on the
complete opposite side of Washington's disastrous regime change wars .
Nothing to see here...
The second annual Reagan National Defense Survey, completed in late October, found nearly
half of armed services households questioned, 46%, said they viewed Russia as ally .
Overall, the survey found 28% of Americans identified Russia as an ally, up from 19% the
previous year .
...While a majority, 71% of all Americans and 53% of military households, still views
Russia as an enemy, the spike in pro-Russian sentiment has defense officials concerned .
--
VOA
Perhaps US military households are also smart enough to know the Cold War is long over, and
only bad things can come from a direct confrontation with Russia, not to mention that
involvement in proxy war in Ukraine has nothing to do with America's national defense or to
"protect and defend the Constitution" .
To be expected, the VOA's presentation of the new poll which finds more service members are
'sympathetic' to Russia is heavy on the supposed 'Trump-Russia nexus' narrative and emphasizes
an uptick in Kremlin propaganda, while failing to acknowledge a failed legacy of 'endless wars'
and destabilizing US influence across the globe.
The poll itself claimed
the changing numbers were "predominantly driven by Republicans who have responded to positive
cues from [U.S.] President [Donald] Trump about Russia."
"There is an effort, on the part of Russia, to flood the media with disinformation to sow
doubt and confusion ," DoD spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Carla Gleason was cited in the VOA
report as saying. Ah yes, a few Kremlin-sponsored Facebook posts and Trump's expressed desire
for better relations with Putin, and suddenly the military too is 'pro-Putin'! apparently.
Perhaps the "doubt and confusion" comes via trillion dollar endless wars of regime change
and pointless occupations which cost American lives? In other words, this is not a 'Russia
problem' at all, but lies too close to home for Washington pundits and pollsters to admit.
* * *
Finally, we should ask, would US military members see in today's foreign policy adventurism
anything remotely resembling John Quincy Adams' famous 1821 admonition?
" But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the
freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will
commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her
example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even
the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication,
in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which
assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would
insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She
would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit..."
"... " Any president, any administration is justified in investigating corruption . There was serious evidence of real corruption concerning Hunter Biden. [He] was on the board of Burisma, the largest natural gas company in Ukraine. Do you know how much he was paid every month? $83,000 -- that's a million dollars a year," said Cruz - adding "The media ought to care if there is actual corruption ... Do you think Hunter Biden with zero experience justifies making ten times as much as the board member of Exxon Mobil? " ..."
"... Todd then asked Cruz: "Do you believe Ukraine meddled in the American election in 2016?" - to which Cruz replied "I do. And I think there is considerable evidence ." ..."
"... Todd then suggested that President Trump could have created "a false narrative" in order to hurt Cruz during the 2016 Republican primary - to which Cruz shot back: "Ha, ha, ha. Except that's not what happened. The president released the transcript of the phone call. You can read what was said in the phone call." ..."
"... "On the evidence, Russia clearly interfered in our election, but here's the game the media is playing because Russia interfered, the media pretends ..."
"... Media & Chuck Todd, having lied throughout the Russia "collusion" BS, now lie about Ukraine. And if Todd wants to be the mouthpiece for the Dems, then he should have the integrity to resign from the news business &push his propaganda as a paid DNC hack ..."
Resistance activist and NBC host Chuck Todd lost his cool on Sunday after Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-TX) said that Ukraine "blatantly interfered" in the 2016 US election.
Of note, less than three months before Donald Trump was elected, Ukrainian officials working
with a DNC operative leaked a " black
ledger " containing evidence of off-book payments to Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort -
leading to his disruptive ouster, while Ukraine's ambassador to the UK, Valeriy Chaly wrote in
an Op-Ed for
The Hill slamming Trump in the same month.
While Democrats have sought to ignore or downplay this as a 'debunked' theory, Republicans
aren't letting it go - nor are they giving the Bidens a pass for what looks like textbook
corruption while then-Vice President Joe Biden was in charge of the Obama administration's
Ukraine policy.
" Any president, any administration is justified in investigating corruption . There was
serious evidence of real corruption concerning Hunter Biden. [He] was on the board of Burisma,
the largest natural gas company in Ukraine. Do you know how much he was paid every month?
$83,000 -- that's a million dollars a year," said Cruz - adding "The media ought to care if
there is actual corruption ... Do you think Hunter Biden with zero experience justifies making
ten times as much as the board member of Exxon Mobil? "
Todd then asked Cruz: "Do you believe Ukraine meddled in the American election in 2016?" -
to which Cruz replied "I do. And I think there is considerable evidence ."
Todd then suggested that President Trump could have created "a false narrative" in order to
hurt Cruz during the 2016 Republican primary - to which Cruz shot back: "Ha, ha, ha. Except
that's not what happened. The president released the transcript of the phone call. You can read
what was said in the phone call."
"On the evidence, Russia clearly interfered in our election, but here's the game the media
is playing because Russia interfered, the media pretends
Media & Chuck Todd, having lied throughout the Russia "collusion" BS, now lie about Ukraine. And if Todd wants to be the mouthpiece for the Dems, then he should have the
integrity to resign from the news business &push his propaganda as a paid DNC hack
top 7 donors all obvious connections to global agenda.... and Ireland by association, but
curious who the corporatocracies are connected to Ireland -Usual suspects I presume ( with
"usual suspects" having a group of real actors in contrast to the poser JV team in
Eiremen
I cannot understand how any Democrat who is interested in winning in 2020 can think that
Biden is their best candidate. Similarly, I do not understand how any neoliberal can think
that backing Biden will save their positions in the party apparatus. If Biden is nominated
and is badly beaten, the dinosaurs now running the party will not be able to simultaneously
hold off the prog left while also holding the party together. But they seem bent on repeating
the same mistake the GOP made in 2012 with Romney.
If Biden had a better answer - or any answer - regarding Hunter, that would be one thing.
Like Kamala Harris's inability to respond to attacks on her Weed-For-Me-But-Not-For-Thee
stance, the media shield surrounding Borg-ists does not help them when they are unable to
avoid questions about actually existing reality.
In Uncle Sam Land, "freedom" has two meanings. Rich people are free to do as they like. The
rest of us are free to live under a bridge and starve.
We do have one right: The Right To Obey.
The whole society is organized around obedience, and the purpose of public education is to
make sure every one obeys. Modern schools are more accurately called "day prisons", with all
the cameras, metal detectors, armed police, isolation rooms, etc. I wonder how many people
realize that "lockdown" is straight out of the criminal prison system, and is now a regular
occurrence for little kids.
'Free World'? What exactly does that mean? What does 'Freedom' mean? I 'freely' admit I
simply have no idea what people mean when they urgently bleat words like that at me.
To me, freedom applies to an action. You are free to do this, or you are free to do that.
Which is, of course, actions that are constrained or allowed by various laws passed by local,
state, federal and/or international entities. I would suppose that the amount of freedom you
have depends on haw many laws have been passed in your own country to criminalize various
activities.
Has anyone done such an analysis, to define which countries have limited their citizens
behaviour? Simplistically, which countries have written the most laws?
I'll be willing to bet they are the 'democracies' that are most bellicose about protecting
'freedoms'. Let's face facts, politicians just love to keep passing laws, otherwise they have
no reason to exist. I unreasonably think there should be another superior law, that any
government should only be able to have so many laws. If they want to have yet another one,
take some other law away. Otherwise 'freedoms' are just being chipped away at,
constantly.
'Freedom', as a thing unto and onto itself, seems a completely meaningless concept. I keep
wondering why politicians aren't asked what they are talking about when they roar about
'freedom' as a general term.
but if you take away still viable American aerospace, automotive and pharmaceutical
industries among very few others, you will find a wasteland of financial speculations and
selling the snake oil
Lovely takes, Andrei. The people that need to read you see your name and immediately
retort, "Agent for Putin", Washington Post-style. Gets them off the hook from thinking
because after all, college deliberately taught them NOT to think. Most of the kids, they're
hopeless. They're hopeless idiots, they know nothing of the Constitution, they think all is
normal.
And they were fleeced by the academics that dumbed them down. Meanwhile, we have in
effect, been selling each other hamburgers (services) for the past 50 years. Also, they've
been selling the oil and gas right out from under our feet overseas and putting THAT in their
pockets even as we pay a world price for gasoline and finished product. Every other country
that produces crude gets a discount. Not us.
To steal a quote from a movie I watched once, they struck oil under our garden and all we
get is dead tomatoes. Our society is hollowed out, depraved, the women becoming more and more
hideous, all the institutions that held us together, deliberately broken. decay
everywhere.
As for the military? A reflection of our society. When I went into the Navy in 1975, it
was Stars and Stripes and we served in large part for Mom, Apple Pie and Chevrolet.
Today it is clear that the Stars and Stripes should be dollar signs over a defense
contractor logo. The rest? From where I sit today, for most kids, Mom is a divorced slut,
Apple Pie is a turd in a wax paper wrapper and Chevrolet is a bent shit can from China.
This isn't a society I'd defend as a nation worth defending. The feminists sit on their
fat, comfortable asses, made such on the labors of us White guys and they declare their
hatred. Only a moron or a kid that needs a shot at a job or trade or gets a kick out of
airplanes or such joins.
Our women in general aren't worth defending on the streets or the world. Not in the Blue
cities, they are hideous. Take care of your own woman and kids and community and hell with
the rest. There's no draft, the society mostly hates Vets, so it isn't for country most
serve.
It's to grab something, from a trade, to a pilot's license. A military based on that has
no staying power. And our corruptions and waste and outright theft in military procurement
for shitty weapons makes us ripe for the taking. And our talent is wasted building shitty
weapons and the second level builds shitty airliners.
Can't fly into space? We cannot fly, literally, to anywhere in the newest build out, the
Maxx. And we're depending on the Theranos of Aerospace, Spacex/Musk to get us to space?
Right! Except for the nukes, we're ripe, man.
Andrei, speaking of Musk, how the Hell does he smoke big fat doobies and keep his security
clearance when everyone else in Washington gets fired for getting near the stuff? Queer
privilege? I'm convinced the whole thing with Musk is a shell game. You?
Thanks for your work. Very good stuff, but we can't get those who need it to even look.
Our people are incapable of marching in the streets or even seeing why they should. Kudos to
those who did it to us. They did a fine job.
@Frederick V. Reed It has a dangerous set of nukes. The tripwires are and have always
been easy-sinkers like our surface ships. The psychos that run our policy have subs and silos
with missiles with lots of nukes...
I cannot understand how any Democrat who is interested in winning in 2020 can think that
Biden is their best candidate. Similarly, I do not understand how any neoliberal can think
that backing Biden will save their positions in the party apparatus. If Biden is nominated
and is badly beaten, the dinosaurs now running the party will not be able to simultaneously
hold off the prog left while also holding the party together. But they seem bent on repeating
the same mistake the GOP made in 2012 with Romney.
If Biden had a better answer - or any answer - regarding Hunter, that would be one thing.
Like Kamala Harris's inability to respond to attacks on her Weed-For-Me-But-Not-For-Thee
stance, the media shield surrounding Borg-ists does not help them when they are unable to
avoid questions about actually existing reality.
Questions about his crackhead son is an obvious trigger, and all Biden is doing is
telegraphing this opening to Trump. The President, who never got the memo that the job of
conservatives is to lose gracefully and repeatedly so long as the tax cuts flowed, will not
shrink from using this the way a loser like Romney would.
My guess is Democrats know they can't win in 2020, so they will sacrifice their most
expendable and/or most annoying.
Biden earned this 2020 shot by sheer longevity in the system, but since he will be a 2020
loser, why not put him in this unenviable position as the DNC nominee. John McCain served a
similar purpose in 2008 - when no GOP had a chance after GW Bush.
No one wanted the job, so falling on his sword with some sense of duty John McCain stood
up as best he could. He goosed the entire operation with his addition of Sarah Palin which
opened up new legions of GOP voters.
And exposed the hypocrisy of the Left at the same time - no one was more anti-women than
the Democrats who attacked both Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin with unrestrained venom.
Someone should be taking Joe Biden's car keys away not trying to give him an important
government position. His mental acuity was never above average seems to have degraded
significantly. Pity the corrupt DNC can not allow the likes of Gabbard or Yang to shine more
brightly.
You expose the most obvious flaw in Schiff's impeachment crusade. Trump did not need any
"dirt" on Biden in order to win 2020. Biden will dig his own 6 feet under abode on his own,
if he makes it to the DNC nomination.
In fact, Trump would have gone out of his way to make sure Biden was the DNC pick. Which
is why this entire impeachment charade continues to get no traction. It simply does not sound
in fact. Regardless of the trumped up charges we are now being exposed to.
The more realistic picture is Trump sweeping the path in front of Biden, with a broom like
in a curling match, making sure Biden gets the DNC nod.
First problem is that in order to be comparable they are converted into the same currency,
typically dollars. That's a problem because things don't cost the same in different
countries. If you want to measure strength of economy you need to measure the purchasing
power based on where the money is spend and not based on the costs of goods and services in
the US (which you inadvertently do when you convert GDP's in US dollar values).
Second problem is that GDP does not measure the 'size' of the economy. It measures how
much money is being pumped around within an economy and how often it is being pumped around
and then the assumption is made that this represents the size of the economy. It's very easy
to artificially increase this pumping around to inflate the apparent size of an 'economy'.
Companies do this routinely before IPO's for example. The perversions we now have
masquerading as stock markets are another. But mostly it is done by creating debt. When you
get a loan, you get money that mostly did not exist prior to you getting it. It's not
backed by anything but the expectation of profits (in the sense that you're expected
to manage to leverage the money into creating at least enough real economic value to back not
just the issue of your loan but also the interest, representing costs for the providers, and
provide your share of the compensation for those loan receivers who fail in this task, ie
provide backing for the previously non-existing money they received).
So in order to get a genuine measure of the economic power of an economy you need to rate
their GDP in terms of local purchasing power which puts Russia equal to Germany. But you also
need to account for the amount of debt in an economy as the money issued as debt for the most
part does not represent actual existing economic value but at best expected economic value
and at worst will not be recouped at all in which case you need to detract it from the GDP
numbers.
That gets far too complicated for most people who just want simple, reassuring numbers,
like comparing economies on GDP numbers based on dollar values. Dream on.
Here are some facts on the Russian economy:
– in 2018 approx. 82% of GDP was spend domestically and only about 18% exported (see
why purchasing power matters?)
– of that 18% exports about a third represented raw materials, so 6% of GDP
– oil and natural gas represented between 35% and 40% percent of raw material exports,
which means between 2% and 2,5% of GDP consisted of oil and gas exports.
– in 2018 Russia achieved a rare economical feat, a triple surplus. The total
government debt (which was only a few percent of GDP) was less than the surpluses on the
government bank accounts meaning there was no net debt. Instead there was a modest net
surplus. The second surplus was the annual government budget. In 2018 Russian government
spending was less than the government revenues that year. And thirdly, they had a trade
surplus, exporting more than they imported.
In case you failed to notice, they exported more than they imported even though only 18%
of GDP consists of exports. Given the other two surpluses they could import a lot more than
that if they wanted to or if they needed to .
They don't because they don't need to. Russia does not depend on the rest of the world to
keep its economy going. It is about as autarkic as it is nowadays possible to be.
Still it is true that Morales clings to power for too long... Generally the problem of the successor is almost an
irresolvable problem for left wing LA governments.
Economists' and statisticians' sign-on letter regarding the Bolivian elections
We the undersigned call for Bolivia's democratic institutions and processes to be
respected.
The Trump administration has openly and strongly supported the military coup of November
10 that overthrew the government of President Evo Morales. Everyone agrees that Morales was
democratically elected in 2014, and that his term does not end until January 22; yet many
outside of the Trump administration seem to accept the Trump-supported military coup.
Many people who supported the coup have claimed that Morales stole the election. This
story of fraud was given a very big boost by a statement issued by the Organization of
American States the day after the October 20 election, which it subsequently repeated in
similar forms. The statement, from the OAS Electoral Observation Mission for Bolivia,
announced "deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend
of the preliminary results after the closing of the polls." No evidence in support of this
statement was included. However, it was widely interpreted as an allegation of fraud, and
such allegations became common in the largest media since the election.
In fact, it is easy to show with election data, which is publicly available, that the
change in Morales' lead was neither "drastic" nor "hard to explain." There was a pause in the
"quick count" of the vote results -- when 84 percent of the votes were counted -- and
Morales' lead was at 7.9 percentage points. At 95 percent, his margin had increased to just
over 10 percent, which allowed Morales to win in the first round, without a runoff. By the
end, the official count showed a lead of 10.6 percent.[1]
It is not uncommon for election results to be skewed by location, which means that results
can change depending on when different areas' votes get counted. No one argued that there was
fraud in Louisiana's November 16 gubernatorial election, when the Democratic candidate John
Bel Edwards, pulled out a 2.6 percentage point victory, after being behind all night, because
he won 90 percent of the vote in Orleans County, which came in at the end of the count.
And the change in Morales' lead was not "drastic" at all; it was part of a steady,
continuous increase in Morales' lead for hours before the interruption.
This graph shows that the lead held by President Evo Morales (light blue dots) and by his
party in parliamentary elections (dark blue dots) rose at a steady rate for most of the vote
counting. There was no sudden surge at the end to put him over the 10 percent threshold.
The explanation for the increase in Morales' margin was therefore quite simple: the
later-reporting areas were more pro-Morales than earlier-reporting areas.
In fact, the final result was quite predictable on the basis of the first 84 percent of
votes reported. This has been shown through statistical analysis and also by even simpler
analysis of the differences in political preferences between later and earlier-reporting
areas.
We call upon the OAS to retract its misleading statements about the election, which have
contributed to the political conflict and served as one of the most-used "justifications" for
the military coup. We ask the Congress of the United States to investigate this behavior of
the OAS, and to oppose the military coup, the Trump administration's continuing support for
it, and the continuing violence and human rights violations of the de facto government.
Media outlets and journalists also have a responsibility to seek independent experts who
are at least familiar with the election data and can offer an independent analysis of what
happened, rather than simply take the word of OAS officials who have now repeatedly shown to
be wrong about this election.
Many lives may depend on getting this story straight.
Will UK voters really vote for the Republican party and our own Donald Trump?
There is so much about today's Conservative party that is very similar to the Republican
party in the US. To establish this, there is no better place to start than our future Prime
Minister for the next five years, if polls are to be believed.
Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are both inveterate liars. They lie when they have no need
to, just for effect. To take some recent examples. He told Andrew Marr that the Tories don't
do deals with other parties, when everyone can remember the Coalition government and the
Democratic Unionist Party. (Marr, as so often with interviewers, let that pass.) Johnson has
said that the extra money he has allowed for the health service is the biggest boost for a
generation. In fact it is smaller than the increase in spending from Labour from 2004
onwards. There are many like this. He has lied all his life, and been sacked from jobs twice
for doing so. He lies about lying! No UK politician in living memory has lied like this.
A consequence of that is you cannot trust a word he says. When he and his ministers say
that the NHS will not be part of any trade negotiations with the US, it means nothing. Brexit
puts the UK in a very weak position because the political costs of walking away, while the
costs for the US are zero. So of course the National Health Service and things that affect
the NHS will be part of any trade deal.
When he says that he will get a trade deal with the EU in just a year he is lying. It is
just not possible given the reasons the Conservatives want to leave the EU. So voters will
have to decide which lie he will choose: to break his undertaking not to extend the
transition period or to leave with no deal.
Like Trump, Johnson treats the economy, and the consequent wellbeing of everyone in it, as
a plaything for his own ends. With Trump this involves imposing tariffs because of his 15th
century understanding of economics. With Johnson he chose Brexit on a toss up about what
would advance his own ambitions. He then championed the hardest of Brexits because it
appealed to those who would vote him leader of his party. But there is a difference: Brexit
is far more harmful than anything Trump has managed.
Where Trump wants to increase coal production in the US, Johnson wants to stop any
increases in fuel duty. Johnson didn't attend a leaders debate on climate change.
Johnson, like Trump, is totally lacking in empathy for others, and is only interested in
himself. Johnson thought nothing of helping a friend beat up a journalist. His personal life
matters because it reflects the kind of person he is.
Like Trump, he has no time or respect for people who disagree with him. He shut down
parliament because it was getting in his way. In his manifesto he now threatens to curtail
the ability of the law to stop him doing what he and his party want. Johnson and the
Conservatives, like Trump and the Republicans, are a threat to democracy.
Like Trump, he and his party want a totally compliant media. They have put so much
pressure on the BBC that parts of it now do what they can to flatter Johnson and the
Conservative cause. They have threatened Channel4 because they put a block of ice in his
place when he failed to turn up to that leaders debate on climate change.
Like Trump, Johnson hates scrutiny. They both would much rather talk to an adoring party
faithful than take part in critical questioning. In this election, Johnson has avoided
questions from the press as much as he can, has avoided debates, and is avoiding an interview
with one of the best interviewers around.
One reason they both hate scrutiny is their inability to concentrate on the details, the
kind of details he got wrong such that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe remains in jail. This is one
reason they sent Gove rather than Johnson to do the climate change debate. Johnson is as
mentally unsuitable to be Prime Minister as Trump is to be President.
Republicans in Congress with few exceptions defend Trump. Conservative MPs do the same for
Johnson without exception, now that the few Conservatives with some attachment to One Nation
Conservatism have been driven out of the party. The Republicans never pretend to govern for
the whole country, but just for what some of them call Real America. The Conservatives with
Brexit have adopted the same policy. A narrow victory for Leave, obtained in the most dubious
referendum ever, has become a mandate for the hardest of Brexits, and with a referendum on
the final deal ruled out.
Both parties adopt divide and rule tactics, yet play the nationalist card for all its
worth. To conceal and distract from far right economic policies designed to help the 1%
wealthiest in the population, by a party financed by the even wealthier, they focus on
attracting votes from the xenophobic and racist. The Conservatives have seen off the threat
from the Brexit party by adopting the Brexit party. It was probably the votes of ex-Brexit
party members that helped secure Johnson his leadership.
The Republicans play the race card and the Tories play the immigration card, something
they have done since the turn of this century. Once you do that, it is inevitable that you
end up with a party leaders who are themselves racist. Whatever you think about Jeremy
Corbyn, it is Johnson who has expressed racial slurs like calling Muslim women letterboxes,
talked about black people as 'piccaninnies' with 'watermelon smiles', Nigerians as money
obsessed. (Not to mention his homophobic and sexist comments, and his description of working
class men as drunk, criminal and feckless, and what he originally wrote about Hillsborough
victims and single mothers.)
In the US Trump gets away with his behaviour among many because of his money and fame, and
in the UK Johnson gets away with it among many because of his class and jokes. Both are where
they are because they were given huge head starts, Trump through inheritance and Johnson
through class, and have subsequently had careers which are dotted with failure. But once you
see beyond the fame and jokes, they are both authoritarians who see nothing wrong in stoking
fears about minorities to get the majority to vote for them, and in abusing the constitution
to get their way. You might say that it is Trump not Johnson who is threatened with
impeachment, but I have lost count of the legal cases about his actions that have been
conveniently postponed for this election.
What too many commentators on this election fail to see is the potential irreversibility
of this decline into right wing authoritarian rule. With most newspapers pushing out
propaganda for the Conservatives and the BBC successfully tamed, the Conservatives now have a
sufficient block to any real scrutiny of their policies or behaviour. In the next five years
their manifesto suggests they hope to tame anyone else who gets in their way.
The Conservatives have ensured that enough people in this country see and read want they
want them to see and read. Soon we will see attempts to introduce nationwide voter ID simply
because it helps the Conservatives. It is wishful thinking to say 'if only we had another
Labour leader they would be miles ahead' - just remember Ed Miliband who lost an election
because the media conveniently decided austerity was good economics. [1]
Next year the people of the United States will have their chance to get rid of the worst
US president in living memory. We have the chance to stop our own Trump, Boris Johnson,
before he gets five years in which he could do irreversible harm to our economy, our
democracy, our union and our civil society. The danger in both countries is that they keep
their Trump/Johnson, and get locked into permanent authoritarian right wing rule similar to
what we see in Hungary and Poland.
Alarmist? Johnson shut down parliament to get his way! When Brexit fails to be the
promised land Johnson has promised and when the UK's potential fails to be unleashed, who
will the Conservatives blame for their own failure? How much will they give away to get a US
trade deal? Johnson, like Trump, is in the words of a BBC interviewer in braver times a
'nasty piece of work', whose only interest is in helping himself. It says a lot about what
the UK has become that he looks like getting elected to be Prime Minister.
[1] Of course there were other reasons Miliband lost. He was unpopular, like every Labour
leader over the past 40 years has been unpopular except the one who did a deal with the Tory
press. And in the final days he was said to be in the pocket of Alex Salmond, even though the
Scottish National Party have said they will never put a Tory PM into power so their
bargaining strength is zero. The broadcast media went with the Tory's SNP story rather than
Labour highlighting the (we now know very real) threat to the NHS.
The Democratic Party needs a nominee, but right now it has a train wreck instead. The
front-runner seems too old for the job and is poised to lose the first two primary season
contests. The woman who was supposed to become the front-runner on the basis of her policy
chops is sliding in the polls after thoroughly botching her health care strategy. The
candidate rising in her place is a 37-year-old mayor of a tiny, not-obviously-thriving
city.
Meanwhile several seemingly electable alternatives have failed to catch fire; the party
establishment is casting about for other options; and not one but two billionaires are
spending millions to try to buy delegates for a brokered convention which is a
not-entirely-unimaginable endgame for the party as it prepares to face down Donald Trump.
The state of the Democratic field reflects the weaknesses of the individual candidates,
but it also reflects the heterogenous nature of the Democratic coalition, whose electorate
has many more demographic divisions than the mostly white and middle-class and aging G.O.P.,
and therefore occasionally resembles the 19th-century Hapsburg empire in the challenge it
poses to aspiring leaders.
The theory of the Kamala Harris candidacy, whose nosedive was the subject of a withering
pre-mortem from three of my colleagues over Thanksgiving, was that she was well suited to
accomplish this unification through the elixir of her female/minority/professional class
identities -- that she would embody the party's diversity much as Barack Obama did before
her, and subsume the party's potential tensions under the benevolent stewardship of a
multicultural managerialism.
That isn't happening. But it's still reasonable for Democratic voters to look for someone
who can do a version of what Harris was supposed to do, and build a coalition across the
party's many axes of division.
And there's an interesting case that the candidate best positioned to do this -- the one
whose support is most diverse right now -- is the candidate whom Obama allegedly promised to
intervene against if his nomination seemed likely: the resilient Socialist from Vermont,
Bernie Sanders.
Like other candidates, Sanders's support has a demographic core: Just as Elizabeth Warren
depends on very liberal professionals and Joe Biden on older minorities and moderates, Bernie
depends intensely on the young. But his polling also shows an interesting
better-than-you-expect pattern, given stereotypes about his support. He does
better-than-you-expect with minorities despite having struggled with them in 2016, with
moderate voters and $100K-plus earners despite being famously left-wing, and with young women
despite all the BernieBro business.
This pattern explains why, in early-state polling, Sanders shows the most strength in very
different environments -- leading Warren everywhere in the latest FiveThirtyEight average,
beating Biden in Iowa and challenging him in more-diverse Nevada, matching Pete Buttigieg in
New Hampshire and leading him easily in South Carolina and California. ...
The DNC has once again put its thumb on the scales: they are ignoring their own criteria for
determining who is to be allowed into the next debate. They are doing everything possible to
ignore Gabbard and her efforts to raise the issue of US' pointless and futile perpetual wars.
"The DNC is notorious for putting its thumb on the scales not secret forces, just
institutional structure."
[Albeit true then it might not be obvious from your comment that ALL political parties are
gated communities that can make resources available to the anointed few. For an independent
candidate to be marginally successful in comparison then they must first either be well known
on their own or rich, but both are better. Prospective primary candidates must first access
petition signatures and then campaign financing. Higher office candidates have ordinarily
been through this vetting before when running for seats in state legislatures.]
Both proved the loose outfit
Operating in this century
with the Democrat name plate
Can be entered
by an outsider campaign
and maybe almost
Railroaded into
a Non core approved
Not core wanted
potus nom
Like McGovern in 72
Yes Jesse got stopped
And
Okay both Dean and Sanders
got de railed
Recall after McGovern
Thank the god of hell fire
George was crushed
Yup after the crush
Elite ex core types
Made moves
Indeed moves were made
of course
They were made
Moves are always made
It's a struggle not a triumphal march of the virtues thru the chaff
Not for nothing but Dean got ratf#cked (the scream audio file to those of us familiar with
compression and reverb was highly modified), and Edwards got "we are all still scared of Bill
Clinton's member" ed.
"The Democratic Party needs a nominee, but right now it has a train wreck instead. The
front-runner seems too old for the job and is poised to lose the first two primary season
contests. The woman who was supposed to become the front-runner on the basis of her policy
chops is sliding in the polls after thoroughly botching her health care strategy. The
candidate rising in her place is a 37-year-old mayor of a tiny, not-obviously-thriving
city..."
[We are cursed with an embarrassment of - wait a minute, wait a minute - I know it rhymes
with riches.]
Even Economists' seem to agree that the decline of labor power, the decimation of Unionism in
the US, has had a devastating effect on the existing quality of life, the opportunity for
economic mobility, and even longevity in the US. The society has been wringing it's hands
over how to bring back the salad days of the strong middle class afforded by representative
labor in the 50's and 60's.
Bernie Sanders platform represents all that was lost. There really is no difference
between Sanders proposals and the union contracts of yore. The election of Sanders along with
a unified Congress to enact his labor friendly proposals will restore the American middle
class.
The Trojan horse of neo-liberal economics, and the defenestration of an independent press
into an oligopoly of lies, was able sell labor arbitrage as beneficial. Underselling American
production by Capitalists employing a Communist monopoly supplier of labor, at substandard
income, health, safety, and environmental conditions, against American workers, was sold as
benefit.
Forty years later, America is unrecognizable. Reduced to platitudes, paying homage to a
long lost civilization.
Yep, but before we could get there we first had to believe that corporate mergers were
necessary and good to achieve economies of scale rather than merely to bestow unbridled
monopoly power, monopsony power, and political power upon the biggest sharks in the tank.
Mergers were about owning Boardwalk and Park Place and globalization was about collecting
rents. Mergers crippled unions and globalization put them out of their misery with a final
death blow.
Vero Beach is awesome, as is most of the FL coasts when there are no hurricanes in town. I
checked Google Map and you are halfway between Daytona Beach and Ft Lauderdale and well away
from that Miami place. If I lived there then I would be fishing for tuna, cobia, wahoo, and
king mackerel every day.
2020 Democratic Candidates Wage Escalating Fight
(on the Merits of Fighting) https://nyti.ms/2Ds4OIC
NYT - Mark Leibovich - Nov. 30
For all the emphasis placed on the various divides
among the candidates, the question of "to fight or
not to fight" might represent the most meaningful contrast.
WALPOLE, N.H. -- Pete Buttigieg has a nifty politician's knack for coming off as a
soothing, healing figure who projects high-mindedness -- even while he's plainly kicking his
opponents in the teeth.
"There is a lot to be angry about," he was saying, cheerfully. Mr. Buttigieg, the
37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., was seated aboard his campaign bus outside a New
Hampshire middle school before a recent Sunday afternoon rally. He was sipping a canned
espresso beverage and his eyes bulged as he spoke, as if he was trying to pass off as
revelatory something he had in fact said countless times before.
"But fighting is not enough and it's a problem if fighting is all you have," he said. "We
fight when we need to fight. But we're never going to say fighting is the point."
In fact, these were fighting words: barely disguised and directed at certain Democratic
rivals. As Mr. Buttigieg enjoys a polling surge in Iowa and New Hampshire, he is trying to
prevent a rebound by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has leveled off in the polls after a
strong summer, and contain Senator Bernie Sanders, whose support has proved durable.
Both are explicit fighters, while Mr. Buttigieg, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
and some others warn that Democrats risk scaring off voters by relying too heavily on
pugnacious oratory, and by emphasizing the need to transform America rather than focusing
simply on ending the Trump presidency and restoring the country to some semblance of
normalcy.
As Mr. Buttigieg has sharpened this critique, however, he has adopted a more aggressive
tone himself -- a sly bit of needle-threading that has coincided with his rise. Mr. Biden,
too, has combined cantankerous language about beating Mr. Trump "like a drum" with more
uplifting rhetoric about "restoring the soul of America."
As Mr. Buttigieg spoke, Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders were holding rallies in which they
could scarcely utter two sentences without dropping in some formulation of the word "fight."
They spoke of the various "fights" they had led and the powerful moneyed interests they had
"fought" and how they would "keep fighting" all the way to the White House.
Mr. Sanders touted himself as the candidate who would "fight to raise wages" and was
"leading the fight to guarantee health care" and "fight against corporate greed." Ms. Warren
(fighting a cold) explained "why I got into this fight, will stay in this fight and why I am
asking others to join the fight."
Every politician wants to be known as a "fighter," even the placid young mayor who has
promised to "change the channel" on Mr. Trump's reality show presidency and all the rancor
that has accompanied it. But Mr. Buttigieg is also fighting against what he sees as the
political trope of fighting per se. He is presenting himself as an antidote to the
politics-as-brawl predilection that has become so central to the messaging of both parties
and, he believes, has sapped the electorate of any hope for an alternative. "The whole
country is exhausted by everyone being at each other's throats," Mr. Buttigieg said.
At a basic level, this is a debate over word choice. Candidates have been selling
themselves as "fighters" for centuries, ostensibly on behalf of the proverbial "you." It goes
back at least to 1828, when Andrew Jackson bludgeoned John Quincy Adams, his erudite
opponent, with the slogan "Adams can write but Jackson can fight." Populists of various
stripes have been claiming for decades to "fight for you," "fight the power," "fight the good
fight" and whatnot, all in the name of framing their enterprises as some cause that
transcends their mere career advancement.
In a broader sense, though, it goes to a stylistic divide that has been playing out for
nearly a year in the battle for the Democratic nomination. The split is most acute among the
top four polling candidates: you could classify Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders as the pugilists
in the field, whereas Mr. Buttigieg, he of the earnest manner and Midwestern zest for
consensus, fashions himself a peacemaker. Mr. Biden would also sit in the latter camp, with
his constant promises to "unite the country" and continued insistence -- oft-derided -- that
his old Republican friends would be so chastened by Mr. Trump's defeat that they would
suddenly want to work in sweet bipartisan harmony with President Joe.
For all the emphasis placed on the identity and generational partitions between the
candidates, the question of "to fight or not to fight" might represent a more meaningful
contrast. "This has been a longstanding intramural debate," said David Axelrod, the
Democratic media and message strategist, who served as a top campaign and White House aide to
former President Barack Obama. "It's what Elizabeth Warren would call 'big structural change'
versus what critics would call 'incremental change.'"
He believes the energy and size of the former camp has been exaggerated by the attention
it receives. "I think sometimes the populist left is overrepresented in places where
reporters sometimes spend a lot of time," Mr. Axelrod said. "Like on Twitter." ...
Apparently what happens in Iowa and New Hampshire stays in Iowa and New Hampshire. Here in
VA, which does not primary for the Democratic Party until Super Tuesday (March 3, 2020) the
only message coming through from Dems is Dump Trump. Since VA went for Hillary in 2016, then
it is unlikely that voters here will hold for Trump now, but not for lack of trying among
staunch Republican Party financial backers.
Fortunately enough for me though is that my happy life does not hinge on national
politics. VA will be a better place to live now that Republicans no longer control the
state's legislature nor executive branches. Sorry about the country, but it must live with
its own unique history of bad choices.
Here in MA, we pay particular attention to
our cranky neighbor NH because we know how
votes will go here at home, but not there.
NH is endlessly fascinating, and remote-ish.
With four electoral votes, it has one-third
more than Vermont. That's why it's important-ish.
Overall, the six New England states have an extra
twelve electoral votes, disproportionate to our
total population. Lately all Dem, except for a
stubborn pocket in Maine.
MA is also joined at the hip with NY,
sharing about a hundred miles of border,
and much political sensibility. It wasn't
always this way (except for the border part.)
I was growing up in western NY when Robert Kennedy
was foisted upon us as a Senator, mainly from NYC.
He with considerable NYC roots, but that god-awful
'Bahston' accent. In those days, western NY was
a GOP bastion, and still is to a lesser extent.
None the less, we are still joined at the hip.
Just not over the Yankees & the Red Sox.
Thanks. My wife is from CT. Is CT even more true blue than MA. A quandary for me as she was
raised devout Republican although her mother was a public school teacher.
All of New England is blue these days, except
for a portion of Maine. Only one GOPerson in
Congress these days, that being Susan Collins
of Maine, soon to be up for re-election.
'Sen. Susan Collins faces a potentially
difficult reelection campaign in 2020. ... J
Although (she does not yet have a primary challenger), Collins could be especially
vulnerable if she breaks with Trump -- she's the most moderate Republican in the Senate and
has had lukewarm intraparty support in the past, though it improved markedly after she voted
to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court last year.' ...
Primary Challenges Might Keep These Republican Senators
From Voting To Remove Trump https://53eig.ht/36mLHgu
New Housing and household durables
In as much as they increase
The labor productivity
of
Domestic production...
Are a worthy investment
Best financed with credit
The combo of productivity increases
and substitution of market products combined cut domestic labor time dramatically
Last century
He is protecting this text book, it is in the parenthesis (if you must).
His text book is a fraud, it explains very little about what is happening, contains
nothing about irregular gains to scale, nothing about value added network effect, assumes the
senate is a proportional democracy, never considers the regularity of generation default. The
text should be shunned, it is ten years behind the mathematicians.
Tax the Rich? Here's How to Do
It (Sensibly) https://nyti.ms/2NsILFP
NYT - Andrew Ross Sorkin - Feb. 25, 2019
Everyone, it seems, has ideas about new tax strategies, some more realistic than others.
The list of tax revolutionaries is long. ...
Whatever your politics, there is a bipartisan acknowledgment that the tax system is
broken. Whether you believe the system should be fixed to generate more revenue or employed
as a tool to limit inequality -- and let's be honest for a moment, those ideas are not always
consistent -- there is a justifiable sense the public doesn't trust the tax system to be
fair.
In truth, how could it when a wealthy person like Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of the
president, reportedly paid almost no federal taxes for years? Or when Gary Cohn, the former
president of Goldman Sachs who once led President Trump's National Economic Council, says
aloud what most wealthy people already know: "Only morons pay the estate tax."
If you pay taxes, it's hard not to feel like a patsy.
A New York Times poll found that support for higher taxes on the rich cuts across party
lines, and Democratic presidential hopefuls are offering plans to do it. But the current
occupant of the Oval Office signed a $1.5 trillion tax cut into law, so the political hurdles
are high.
Over the past month, I've consulted with tax accountants, lawyers, executives, political
leaders and yes, billionaires, and specific ideas have come up about plugging the gaps in the
tax code, without blowing it apart. ...
Patch the estate tax
None of the suggestions in this column -- or anywhere else -- can work unless the estate
tax is rid of the loopholes that allow wealthy Americans to blatantly (and legally) skirt
taxes.
Without addressing whether the $11.2 million exemption is too high -- and it is -- the
estate tax is riddled with problems. Chief among them: Wealthy Americans can pass much of
their riches to their heirs without paying taxes on capital gains -- ever. According to the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, unrealized capital gains account for "as much as
about 55 percent for estates worth more than $100 million." ...
The Congressional Budget Office estimates simply closing this loophole would raise more
than $650 billion over a decade.
As central as this idea is to the other suggestions, it is not an easy sell. Three
Republican senators introduced a plan this year to repeal the estate tax.
But this and other changes -- eliminating the hodgepodge of generation-skipping trusts
that also bypass estate taxes -- are obvious fixes that would introduce a basic fairness to
the system and curb the vast inequality that arises from dynastic wealth.
Increase capital gains rates for the wealthy
Our income tax rates are progressive, but taxes on capital gains are less so. There are
only two brackets, and they top out at 20 percent.
By contrast, someone making $40,000 a year by working 40 hours a week is in the 22 percent
bracket. That's why Warren Buffett says his secretary pays a higher tax rate.
So why not increase capital gains rates on the wealthiest among us?
One chief argument for low capital gains rates is to incentivize investment. But if we
embraced two additional brackets -- say, a marginal 30 percent bracket for earners over $5
million and a 35 percent bracket for earners over $15 million -- it is hard to see how it
would fundamentally change investment plans. ...
['Incentivizing investment'
leads to more income inequality.]
End the perverse real estate loopholes
One reason there are so many real estate billionaires is the law allows the industry to
perpetually defer capital gains on properties by trading one for another. In tax parlance, it
is known as a 1031 exchange.
In addition, real estate industry executives can depreciate the value of their investment
for tax purposes even when the actual value of the property appreciates. (This partly
explains Mr. Kushner's low tax bill.)
These are glaring loopholes that are illogical unless you are a beneficiary of them.
Several real estate veterans I spoke to privately acknowledged the tax breaks are
unconscionable.
Fix carried interest
This is far and away the most obvious loophole that goes to Americans' basic sense of
fairness.
For reasons that remain inexplicable -- unless you count lobbying money -- the private
equity, venture capital, real estate and hedge fund industries have kept this one intact.
Current tax law allows executives in those industries to have the bonuses they earn investing
for clients taxed as capital gains, not ordinary income.
Even President Trump opposed the loophole. In a 2015 interview, he said hedge fund
managers were "getting away with murder."
This idea and the others would not swell the government's coffers to overflowing, but they
would help restore a sense of fairness to a system that feels so easily gamed by the
wealthiest among us.
There are a couple of other things worth considering.
Let's talk about philanthropy
Nobody wants to dissuade charitable giving. But average taxpayers are often subsidizing
wealthy philanthropists whose charitable deductions significantly reduce their bills.
These people deserve credit for giving money to noble causes (though some nonprofits are
lobbying organizations masquerading as do-gooders) but their wealth, in many cases, isn't
paying for the basics of health care, defense, education and everything else that taxes pay
for.
Philanthropic giving is laudable, but it can also be a tax-avoidance strategy. Is there a
point at which charitable giving should be taxed?
I'm not sure what the right answer is. But consider this question posed by several
philanthropic billionaires: Should the rich be able to gift stock or other assets to charity
before paying capital gains taxes? ...
Finally, fund the Internal Revenue Service
The agency is so underfunded that the chance an individual gets audited is minuscule --
one person in 161 was audited in 2017, according to the I.R.S. And individuals with more than
$1 million in income, the people with the most complicated tax situations, were audited just
4.4 percent of the time. It was more than 12 percent in 2011, the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities reported.
The laws in place hardly matter: Those willing to take a chance can gamble that they won't
get caught. That wouldn't be the case if the agency weren't having its budget cut and losing
personnel. ...
'If you pay taxes, it's hard not to feel like a patsy.'
[I heartily disagree.]
'In 1927 in the court case of Compañía General de
Tabacos de Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue
a dissenting opinion was written by Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr. that included the following phrase ... :
One can at least imagine that,
back in the day (long ago?),
wealth would have been taxed,
but then with the rise of the
middle-class, taxes were extended
to those who had *income* if not
much wealth. Perhaps just as the
wealthy were hiring lawyers and
accountants, and making generous
political 'contributions' to
avoid taxes generally.
It really comes down to priorities. Are we a democracy, or not. Health care, education, etc.
for the citizens, or corporate welfare for the aristocracy.
This New York Times article on rising mortality had me thinking about regional
disparities. It's true that rising mortality is widespread, but the article also acknowledges
that mortality in coastal metros has improved 1/
It's Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy
A new study shows that death rates increased for middle-aged people of all racial and ethnic
groups.
The State of US Health, 1990-2016
Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Among US States
What we see is another red-blue divide. Compare population-weighted averages for states
that supported Clinton and Trump in 2016, and you see very different trends 3/
This is NOT simply a matter of declining regions voting for Trump. Look at the 4 biggest
states: in 1990 FL and TX both had higher life expectancy than NY, now they're well behind
4/
I'm not sure what lies behind this. Medicaid expansion probably plays a role in the past
few years, and general harshness of social policies in red states may matter more over time.
Divergence in education levels may also play a role 5/
What's clear, however, is that the US life-expectancy problem is pretty much a red-state
problem. In terms of mortality, blue states look like the rest of the advanced world 6/
I was struck by one line in this article: "Life expectancy in the coastal metro areas --
both east and west -- has improved at roughly the same rate as in Canada." Indeed, the
American death trip has been driven by only part of the country 1/
It's Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy
A new study shows that death rates increased for middle-aged people of all racial and ethnic
groups.
7:58 AM - 27 Nov 2019
And while the divergence is surely linked to growing regional economic disparities,
there's a pretty clear red-blue divide reflecting state policies. Consider NY v. TX 2/
In 1990 Texas actually had higher life expectancy, but now NY is far ahead. Surely this
has something to do with expanding health coverage, maybe also to do with environmental
policies. 3/
In general, progressive US states have experienced falling mortality along with the rest
of the advanced world. Red America is where things are different 4/
The NYT article has a graphical map
'Falling Life Expectancy' - that shows
death rate (age 25-64) declines in only
two states (CA & WY) with small increases
in 11 other states (OR, WA, AR, UT, TX, OK,
SC, GA, FL, IL & NY). Increases in all other
states. Hence, shorter life expectancies
in most states, regardless of region.
How does "death rate 25-64" relate to life expectancy?
[ Similarly, by dramatically improving the care of young children China dramatically
improved life expectancy. This was and remains a failing for India, even though India had a
far higher per capita GDP level than China before 1980. Amartya Sen has written about
this:
Anne is correct. Death rate 25-64 is throwing out the disease susceptible childhood years,
the suicides and automobile accidents of early adulthood, and also access to medical care for
the increased disease risks of advanced ages. What is left tells a story of alcoholism,
smoking, and fentanyl mostly along with healthcare access. Employment security matters in
both healthcare access and incidence of depression including adult suicide and drug use along
with a tendency to engage in risky activities just to pay the bills.
JAMA (& others who have done similar studies)
are just looking at data. Draw your own
conclusions? The media will draw theirs.
Fair to say, these are people dying NOT of old-age.
Americans' Life Expectancy Drops For Third Year In Row, Signaling There's 'Something
Terribly Wrong' Going On https://khn.org/MTAyNTQ4Mw via @khnews (Kaiser Health
News)
Americans' Life Expectancy Drops For Third Year In Row, Signaling There's 'Something
Terribly Wrong' Going On
Researchers say the grim new reality isn't just limited to rural deaths of despair, but
rather the numbers reflect that many different people living in all areas of the U.S. are
struggling. "We need to look at root causes," said Dr. Steven Woolf, the author's lead study.
"Something changed in the 1980s, which is when the growth in our life expectancy began to
slow down compared to other wealthy nations."
The New York Times: It's Not Just Poor White People Driving A Decline In Life
Expectancy
As the life expectancy of Americans has declined over a period of three years -- a drop
driven by higher death rates among people in the prime of life -- the focus has been on the
plight of white Americans in rural areas who were dying from so-called deaths of despair:
drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicide. But a new analysis of more than a half-century of
federal mortality data, published on Tuesday in JAMA, found that the increased death rates
among people in midlife extended to all racial and ethnic groups, and to suburbs and cities.
(Kolata and Tavernise, 11/26)
The Washington Post: U.S. Life Expectancy: Americans Are Dying Young At Alarming Rates
Despite spending more on health care than any other country, the United States has seen
increasing mortality and falling life expectancy for people age 25 to 64, who should be in
the prime of their lives. In contrast, other wealthy nations have generally experienced
continued progress in extending longevity. Although earlier research emphasized rising
mortality among non-Hispanic whites in the United States, the broad trend detailed in this
study cuts across gender, racial and ethnic lines. By age group, the highest relative jump in
death rates from 2010 to 2017 -- 29 percent -- has been among people age 25 to 34.
(Achenbach, 11/26)
Los Angeles Times: Suicides, Overdoses, Other 'Deaths Of Despair' Fuel Drop In U.S. Life
Expectancy
In an editorial accompanying the new report, a trio of public health leaders said the study's
insight into years of cumulative threats to the nation's health "represents a call to
action." If medical professionals and public health experts fail to forge partnerships with
social, political, religious and economic leaders to reverse the current trends, "the nation
risks life expectancy continuing downward in future years to become a troubling new norm,"
wrote Harvard public health professors Dr. Howard K. Koh, John J. Park and Dr. Anand K.
Parekh of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. (Healy, 11/26)
---
Changes in midlife death rates across racial and ethnic
groups in the United States: systematic analysis of vital statistics https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3096
British Medical Journal - August 15, 2018
'Men 65 years and older today have an average
life expectancy of 84.3 years. Life expectancy
outcomes get even better among younger men and
women according to the CDC's data. For instance,
one in 20 women who are 40 today will live to
celebrate their 100th birthday.'
American Academy of Family Physicians - December 10, 2018
"The latest CDC data show that the U.S. life expectancy has declined over the past few
years," said CDC Director Robert Redfield, M.D., in a Nov. 29 statement. "Tragically, this
troubling trend is largely driven by deaths from drug overdose and suicide.
Three new reports from the CDC indicate that the average life expectancy in the United
States has declined for the second time in three years.
Deaths from drug overdose and suicide were responsible for much of the decline, with more
than 70,000 drug overdose deaths reported in 2017.
As a result of overall increases in mortality rates, average life expectancy decreased
from 78.9 years in 2014 to 78.6 years in 2017.
"Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the nation's overall health, and these sobering
statistics are a wake-up call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often,
to conditions that are preventable." ...
More than 2.8 million deaths occurred in the United States in 2017, an increase of about
70,000 from the previous year. Death rates rose significantly in three age groups during that
period (i.e., in those 25-34, 35-44, and 85 and older) and dropped in 45- to 54-year-olds,
yielding an overall age-adjusted increase of 0.4 percent. That percentage represents a rise
from 728.8 deaths per 100,000 standard population to 731.9 per 100,000.
The 10 leading causes of death remained the same from 2016 to 2017: heart disease, cancer,
unintentional injuries, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer's disease,
diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, kidney disease, and suicide. Age-adjusted death rates
increased significantly for seven of the 10 causes, led by influenza and pneumonia (5.9
percent), unintentional injuries (4.2 percent) and suicide (3.7 percent). Death rates for
cancer actually decreased by 2.1 percent, while heart disease and kidney disease rates did
not change significantly. ...
Drug overdose death rates increased across all age groups, with the highest rate occurring
in adults ages 35-44 (39 per 100,000) and the lowest in adults 65 and older (6.9 per
100,000). ...
Free Market Drugs: A Key Part of Elizabeth Warren's Transition to Medicare for All
By Dean Baker
Earlier this month, Senator Warren put out a set of steps that she would put forward as
president as part of a transition to Medicare for All. The items that got the most attention
were including everyone over age 50 and under age 18 in Medicare, and providing people of all
ages with the option to buy into the program. This buy-in would include large subsidies, and
people with incomes of less than 200 percent of the poverty level would be able to enter the
Medicare program at no cost.
These measures would be enormous steps toward Medicare for All, bringing tens of millions
of people into the program, including most of those (people over age 50) with serious medical
issues. It would certainly be more than halfway to a universal Medicare program.
While these measures captured most of the attention given to Warren's transition plan,
another part of the plan is probably at least as important. Warren proposed to use the
government's authority to compel the licensing of drug patents so that multiple companies can
produce a patented drug, in effect allowing them to be sold at generic prices.
The government can do this both because it has general authority to compel licensing of
patents (with reasonable compensation) and because it has explicit authority under the 1980
Bayh-Dole Act to require licensing of any drug developed in part with government-funded
research. The overwhelming majority of drugs required some amount of government-supported
research in their development, so there would be few drugs that would be exempted if Warren
decided to use this mechanism.
These measures are noteworthy because they can be done on the president's own authority.
While the pharmaceutical industry will surely contest in court a president's use of the
government's authority to weaken their patent rights, these actions would not require
Congressional approval.
The other reason that these steps would be so important is that there is a huge amount of
money involved. The United States is projected to spend over $6.6 trillion on prescription
drugs over the next decade, more than 2.5 percent of GDP. This comes to almost $20,000 per
person over the next decade.
This is an enormous amount of money. We spend more than twice as much per person on drugs
as people in other wealthy countries.
This is not an accident. The grant of a patent monopoly allows drug companies to charge as
much as they want for drugs that are necessary for people's health or even their life,
without having to worry about a competitor undercutting them.
Other countries also grant patent monopolies, but they limit the ability of drug companies
to exploit these monopolies with negotiations or price controls. This is why prices in these
countries are so much lower than in the United States.
But even these negotiated prices are far above what drug prices would be in a free market.
The price of drugs in a free market, without patent monopolies or related protections, will
typically be less than 10 percent of the US price and in some cases, less than one
percent.
This is because drugs are almost invariably cheap to manufacture and distribute. They are
expensive because government-granted patent monopolies make them expensive. We have this
perverse situation where the government deliberately makes drugs expensive, then we struggle
with how to pay for them.
The rationale for patent monopolies is to give companies an incentive to research and
develop drugs. This process is expensive, and if newly developed drugs were sold in a free
market, companies would not be able to recover these expenses.
To make up for the loss of research funding supported by patent monopolies, Warren
proposes an increase in public funding for research. This would be an important move towards
an increased reliance on publicly funded biomedical research.
There are enormous advantages to publicly-funded research over patent monopoly-supported
research. First, if the government is funding the research it can require that all results be
fully public as soon as possible so that all researchers can quickly benefit from them.
By contrast, under the patent system, drug companies have an incentive to keep results
secret. They have no desire to share results that could benefit competitors.
In most other contexts we quite explicitly value the benefits of open research. Science is
inherently a collaborative process where researchers build upon the successes and failures of
their peers. For some reason, this obvious truth is largely absent from discussions of
biomedical research where the merits of patent financing go largely unquestioned.
In addition to allowing research results to be spread more quickly, public funding would
also radically reduce the incentive to develop copycat drugs. Under the current system, drug
companies will often devote substantial sums to developing drugs that are intended to
duplicate the function of drugs already on the market. This allows them to get a share of an
innovator drug's patent rents. While there is generally an advantage to having more options
to treat a specific condition, most often research dollars would be better spent trying to
develop drugs for conditions where no effective treatment currently exists.
Under the patent system, a company that has invested a substantial sum in developing a
drug, where a superior alternative already exists, may decide to invest an additional amount
to carry it through the final phases of testing and the FDA approval process. From their
vantage point, if they hope that a successful marketing effort will allow them to recover its
additional investment costs, they would come out ahead.
On the other hand, in a system without patent monopolies, it would be difficult for a
company to justify additional spending after it was already clear that the drug it was
developing offered few health benefits. This could save a considerable amount of money on
what would be largely pointless tests.
Also, as some researchers have noted, the number of potential test subjects (people with
specific conditions) is also a limiting factor in research. It would be best if these people
were available for testing genuinely innovative drugs rather than ones with little or no
incremental value.
Ending patent monopoly pricing would also take away the incentive for drug companies to
conceal evidence that their drugs may not be as safe or effective as claimed. Patent
monopolies give drug companies an incentive to push their drugs as widely as possible.
That is literally the point of patent monopoly pricing. If a drug company can sell a drug
for $30,000 that costs them $300 to manufacture and distribute, then they have a huge
incentive to market it as widely as possible. If this means being somewhat misleading about
the safety and effectiveness of their drug, that is what many drug companies will do.
The opioid crisis provides a dramatic example of the dangers of this system. Opioid
manufacturers would not have had the same incentive to push their drugs, concealing evidence
of their addictive properties, if they were not making huge profits on them.
Unfortunately, this is far from the only case where drug companies have not accurately
presented their research findings when marketing their drugs. The mismarketing of the
arthritis drug Vioxx, which increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes, is another
famous example.
We can try to have the FDA police marketing, but where there is so much money at stake in
putting out wrong information, we can hardly expect it to be 100 percent successful in
overcoming the incentives from the large profits available. There is little reason to think
that the FDA will be better able to combat the mismarketing of drugs, than law enforcement
agencies have been in stopping the sale of heroin, cocaine, and other illegal drugs. Where
you have large potential profits, and willing buyers, government enforcement is at a serious
disadvantage.
It is also worth mentioning that the whole story of medical care is radically altered if
we end patent monopolies on drugs and medical equipment, an area that also involves trillions
of dollars over the next decade. We face tough choices on allocating medical care when these
items are selling at patent protected prices, whether under the current system of private
insurance or a Medicare for All system.
Doctors and other health care professionals have to decide whether the marginal benefits
of a new drug or higher quality scan is worth the additional price. But if the new drug costs
roughly the same price as the old drug and the highest quality scan costs just a few hundred
dollars (the cost of the electricity and the time of the professionals operating the machine
and reading the scan), then there is little reason not to prescribe the best available
treatment. Patent monopoly pricing in these areas creates large and needless problems.
In short, Senator Warren's plans on drugs are a really huge deal. How far and how quickly
she will be able to get to Medicare for All will depend on what she can get through Congress.
But her proposal for prescription drugs is something she would be able to do as president,
and it will make an enormous difference in both the cost and the quality of our health
care.
NAFTA Was About Redistributing Upward
By Dean Baker
The Washington Post gave readers the official story about the North American Free Trade
Agreement, diverging seriously from reality, in a piece * on the status of negotiations on
the new NAFTA. The piece tells readers:
"NAFTA was meant to expand trade among the United States, Canada and Mexico by removing
tariffs and other barriers on products as they were shipped between countries. The pact did
open up trade, but it also proved disruptive in terms of creating new manufacturing supply
chains and relocating businesses and jobs."
This implies that the disruption in terms of shifting jobs to Mexico to take advantage of
low wage labor was an accidental outcome. In fact, this was a main point of the deal, as was
widely noted by economists at the time. Proponents of the deal argued that it was necessary
for U.S. manufacturers to have access to low cost labor in Mexico to remain competitive
internationally. No one who followed the debate at the time should have been in the last
surprised by the loss of high paying union manufacturing jobs to Mexico, that is exactly the
result that NAFTA was designed for.
NAFTA also did nothing to facilitate trade in highly paid professional services, such as
those provided by doctors and dentists. This is because doctors and dentists are far more
powerful politically than autoworkers.
It is also wrong to say that NAFTA was about expanding trade by removing barriers. A major
feature of NAFTA was the requirement that Mexico strengthen and lengthen its patent and
copyright protections. These barriers are 180 degrees at odds with expanding trade and
removing barriers.
It is noteworthy that the new deal expands these barriers further. The Trump
administration likely intends these provisions to be a model for other trade pacts, just as
the rules on patents and copyrights were later put into other trade deals.
The new NAFTA will also make it more difficult for the member countries to regulate
Facebook and other Internet giants. This is likely to make it easier for Mark Zuckerberg to
spread fake news.
We have no public industrial policy
Because we have a private corporate industrial policy that wants full reign
Even toy block models like
ole pro grass liberal brandishes
Warn what heppens to trade good producing wage rates when
Proximate borders open
to potential products
Built with zero rent earning
raw fingered foreign wage slaves
"... "There's a whole neoliberal agenda," she said, referencing the received free-market wisdom that cutting public budgets spurs economic growth. "And then the way that traditional theory has fomented it or not contested it -- there's been kind of a strange symbiosis between mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies." ..."
"... Dr. Mazzucato takes issue with many of the tenets of the neoclassical economic theory taught in most academic departments: its assumption that the forces of supply and demand lead to market equilibrium, its equation of price with value and -- perhaps most of all -- its relegation of the state to the investor of last resort, tasked with fixing market failure. She has originated and popularized the description of the state as an "investor of first resort," envisioning new markets and providing long-term, or "patient," capital at early stages of development. ..."
"... Emphasizing to policymakers not only the importance of investment, but also the direction of that investment -- "What are we investing in?" she often asks -- Dr. Mazzucato has influenced the way American politicians speak about the state's potential as an economic engine. In her vision, governments would do what so many traditional economists have long told them to avoid: create and shape new markets, embrace uncertainty and take big risks. ..."
Meet the Leftish Economist With a New Story About Capitalism
Mariana Mazzucato wants liberals to talk less about the redistribution of wealth and more
about its creation. Politicians around the world are listening.
By Katy Lederer
Mariana Mazzucato was freezing. Outside, it was a humid late-September day in Manhattan,
but inside -- in a Columbia University conference space full of scientists, academics and
businesspeople advising the United Nations on sustainability -- the air conditioning was on
full blast.
For a room full of experts discussing the world's most urgent social and environmental
problems, this was not just uncomfortable but off-message. Whatever their dress -- suit,
sari, head scarf -- people looked huddled and hunkered down. At a break, Dr. Mazzucato
dispatched an assistant to get the A.C. turned off. How will we change anything, she wondered
aloud, "if we don't rebel in the everyday?"
Dr. Mazzucato, an economist based at University College London, is trying to change
something fundamental: the way society thinks about economic value. While many of her
colleagues have been scolding capitalism lately, she has been reimagining its basic premises.
Where does growth come from? What is the source of innovation? How can the state and private
sector work together to create the dynamic economies we want? She asks questions about
capitalism we long ago stopped asking. Her answers might rise to the most difficult
challenges of our time.
In two books of modern political economic theory -- "The Entrepreneurial State" (2013) and
"The Value of Everything" (2018) -- Dr. Mazzucato argues against the long-accepted binary of
an agile private sector and a lumbering, inefficient state. Citing markets and technologies
like the internet, the iPhone and clean energy -- all of which were funded at crucial stages
by public dollars -- she says the state has been an underappreciated driver of growth and
innovation. "Personally, I think the left is losing around the world," she said in an
interview, "because they focus too much on redistribution and not enough on the creation of
wealth."
Her message has appealed to an array of American politicians. Senator Elizabeth Warren,
Democrat of Massachusetts and a presidential contender, has incorporated Dr. Mazzucato's
thinking into several policy rollouts, including one that would use "federal R & D to
create domestic jobs and sustainable investments in the future" and another that would
authorize the government to receive a return on its investments in the pharmaceutical
industry. Dr. Mazzucato has also consulted with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
Democrat of New York, and her team on the ways a more active industrial policy might catalyze
a Green New Deal.
Even Republicans have found something to like. In May, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida
credited Dr. Mazzucato's work several times in "American Investment in the 21st Century," his
proposal to jump-start economic growth. "We need to build an economy that can see past the
pressure to understand value-creation in narrow and short-run financial terms," he wrote in
the introduction, "and instead envision a future worth investing in for the long-term."
Formally, the United Nations event in September was a meeting of the leadership council of
the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, or S.D.S.N. It's a body of about 90 experts
who advise on topics like gender equality, poverty and global warming. Most of the attendees
had specific technical expertise -- Dr. Mazzucato greeted a contact at one point with,
"You're the ocean guy!" -- but she offers something both broad and scarce: a compelling new
story about how to create a desirable future.
'Investor of first resort'
Originally from Italy -- her family left when she was 5 -- Dr. Mazzucato is the daughter
of a Princeton nuclear physicist and a stay-at-home mother who couldn't speak English when
she moved to the United States. She got her Ph.D. in 1999 from the New School for Social
Research and began working on "The Entrepreneurial State" after the 2008 financial crisis.
Governments across Europe began to institute austerity policies in the name of fostering
innovation -- a rationale she found not only dubious but economically destructive.
"There's a whole neoliberal agenda," she said, referencing the received free-market
wisdom that cutting public budgets spurs economic growth. "And then the way that traditional
theory has fomented it or not contested it -- there's been kind of a strange symbiosis
between mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies."
Dr. Mazzucato takes issue with many of the tenets of the neoclassical economic theory
taught in most academic departments: its assumption that the forces of supply and demand lead
to market equilibrium, its equation of price with value and -- perhaps most of all -- its
relegation of the state to the investor of last resort, tasked with fixing market failure.
She has originated and popularized the description of the state as an "investor of first
resort," envisioning new markets and providing long-term, or "patient," capital at early
stages of development.
In important ways, Dr. Mazzucato's work resembles that of a literary critic or rhetorician
as much as an economist. She has written of waging what the historian Tony Judt called a
"discursive battle," and scrutinizes descriptive terms -- words like "fix" or "spend" as
opposed to "create" and "invest" -- that have been used to undermine the state's appeal as a
dynamic economic actor. "If we continue to depict the state as only a facilitator and
administrator, and tell it to stop dreaming," she writes, "in the end that is what we
get."
As a charismatic figure in a contentious field that does not generate many stars -- she
was recently profiled in Wired magazine's United Kingdom edition -- Dr. Mazzucato has her
critics. She is a regular guest on nightly news shows in Britain, where she is pitted against
proponents of Brexit or skeptics of a market-savvy state.
Alberto Mingardi, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute and director
general of Istituto Bruno Leoni, a free-market think tank, has repeatedly criticized Dr.
Mazzucato for, in his view, cherry-picking her case studies, underestimating economic
trade-offs and defining industrial policy too broadly. In January, in an academic piece
written with one of his Cato colleagues, Terence Kealey, he called her "the world's greatest
exponent today of public prodigality."
Her ideas, though, are finding a receptive audience around the world. In the United
Kingdom, Dr. Mazzucato's work has influenced Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, and
Theresa May, a former Prime Minister, and she has counseled the Scottish leader Nicola
Sturgeon on designing and putting in place a national investment bank. She also advises
government entities in Germany, South Africa and elsewhere. "In getting my hands dirty," she
said, "I learn and I bring it back to the theory."
The 'Mission Muse'
During a break at the United Nations gathering, Dr. Mazzucato escaped the air conditioning
to confer with two colleagues in Italian on a patio. Tall, with a muscular physique, she wore
a brightly colored glass necklace that has become something of a trademark on the economics
circuit. Having traveled to five countries in eight days, she was fighting off a cough.
"In theory, I'm the 'Mission Muse,'" she joked, lapsing into English. Her signature
reference is to the original mission to the moon -- a state-spurred technological revolution
consisting of hundreds of individual feeder projects, many of them collaborations between the
public and private sectors. Some were successes, some failures, but the sum of them
contributed to economic growth and explosive innovation.
Dr. Mazzucato's platform is more complex -- and for some, controversial -- than simply
encouraging government investment, however. She has written that governments and state-backed
investment entities should "socialize both the risks and rewards." She has suggested the
state obtain a return on public investments through royalties or equity stakes, or by
including conditions on reinvestment -- for example, a mandate to limit share buybacks.
Emphasizing to policymakers not only the importance of investment, but also the
direction of that investment -- "What are we investing in?" she often asks -- Dr. Mazzucato
has influenced the way American politicians speak about the state's potential as an economic
engine. In her vision, governments would do what so many traditional economists have long
told them to avoid: create and shape new markets, embrace uncertainty and take big
risks.
... ... ...
Earlier in the day, she pointed at an announcement on her laptop. She had been nominated
for the first Not the Nobel Prize, a commendation intended to promote "fresh economic
thinking." "Governments have woken up to the fact the mainstream way of thinking isn't
helping them," she said, explaining her appeal to politicians and policymakers. A few days
later, she won.
Then she would advocate free banking, like Selgin. Better more efficient banking is a huge
and profitable investment for government.
So before the leftwards jump on her idea of investment, start here and explain why
suddenly, making finance more efficient for everyone is a bad idea.
Or ask our knee jerkers, before they jump on her ideas with all their delusions, why not
invest in dumping the primary dealer system? That is obviously inefficient and generates the
ATM costs we pay. Why not remove that with a sound investment f some sort?
Everything is through the eye of the beholder, for lelftwards it is the wonder of central
planning, for the libertariaturds it is about efficiency via decentralization.
Then comes meetup, and waddya know, each side brings a 200 page insurance contract they
want guaranteed before any efficiency changes are made. The meeting selects business as
normal. We will select business as normal, our economists will approve.
I am thrilled / s at the feeling of fulfillment I, well, feel, that an academic deems the
obvious. It definitely, indicates that we are approaching, wokeness !
Economists are beginning to evolve, again, almost, but not quite capturing the curl of the
real time world.
" There's a whole neoliberal agenda," she said, referencing the received free-market wisdom
that cutting public budgets spurs economic growth. "And then the way that traditional theory
has fomented it or not contested it -- there's been kind of a strange symbiosis between
mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies."
That is a deep vision that needs to be unpacked. My impression of traditional theory is
that it discourages the neoliberal, market deism.
In last night's leaders' debate, the audience laughed when Jeremy Corbyn said that
productivity gains could pay for a four-day week. This is an example of what I said recently
* – that we cannot have nice things because voters have resigned themselves to the
inadequacy of British capitalism.
And inadequate it is. The Office for National Statistics estimates that UK productivity is
one-fifth lower than that of the US, Germany or France and one-tenth lower than Italy's.
Closing some of this gap would allow for a cut in the working week with no loss of pay.
In this context, Labour's plans to reform corporate governance, including putting workers
on boards, are crucial. John McDonnell is bang right to say that giving workers a stake in
companies raises productivity: there is a ton of evidence for this. (Which of course is
wholly consistent with the likelihood that there are many other possible ways in which a
government might increase productivity.)
But how can this be? One answer lies in a classic article written 30 years ago by Michael
Jensen. Stock market-listed firms, he said, contain "widespread waste and inefficiency"
because an of "absence of effective monitoring" of bosses by shareholders. Giving workers
greater say can reduce this agency failure. This is partly because workers know the ground
truth of how the company is performing better than do external shareholders. But it's also
because many workers have more skin in the game than do fund managers; whereas workers lose
their jobs if the firm does badly, fund managers face less severe penalties.
At this stage, righties like to claim that the market can solve this problem.
There's a grain of truth in this: since Jensen's classic article, the number of stock
market-quoted firms has fallen and private ownership has risen. The market cannot, however,
so easily transfer companies into worker ownership in part because workers are
credit-constrained.
What's more, we know for sure that product market competition does not eliminate the
inefficiencies caused by agency failures. Nick Bloom and John Van Reenen show that there is
"a long tail of extremely badly managed firms." And Andy Haldane has said that "there is a
striking and widening divergence" between the most productive firms and the rest. This would
not be the case if market forces quickly drove inefficient firms out of the market.
As for what explains such differences, Haldane echoes Jensen:
"(A lack of) management quality is a plausible candidate explanation for the UK's long
tail of companies It is possible that current UK corporate governance practices may act as a
brake on innovative companies."
Fans of David Graeber's book Bull---- Jobs (of whom I am one) know one way in which bad
management manifests itself. "Managerial feudalism" means that intermediate bosses prefer to
create hierarchies of flunkeys rather than maximize profits. And inadequate oversight and
imperfect competition allow them to get away with this. Graeber's is a colourful way of
expressing what economists and equity investors have known for a long time – that
companies often grow at the expense of profits.
Now, in saying all this I'm not entirely endorsing Labour's position. My point is that
companies have not been effectively pursuing shareholder value, perhaps because, as John Kay
has said, such value can only be achieved obliquely. (I'm also unsure whether short-termism
is a problem.)
What I am saying, though, is that the notion that changing ownership might increase
productivity is far from risible. There's tons of evidence that it can do so, and mainstream
economists agree that there are failures of management and ownership: Jensen, Haldane and
Bloom are not Marxists.
The fact that an audience can laugh at Corbyn's claim to raise productivity, therefore,
tells us nothing about Labour policy. But it speaks volumes – and damning volumes at
that – about a political discourse that has become so debased as to put discussions
about productivity outside of mainstream politics.
In 2012, when economist Thomas Philippon was looking into some data, something odd caught
his attention.
His homeland, France, was undergoing another revolution, although a much different one: a
revolution in the country's telecommunication market. A new mobile operator, Free, had
entered the market and disrupted it almost overnight. The new operator slashed prices,
offering plans that hadn't been seen before in France.
France's three legacy mobile operators were forced to react and drop their own prices. It
didn't help. In only three months, Free's market share reached 4 percent. At the end of the
following year, its market share tripled. Today, Free controls 15 to 16 percent of the
market, making it France's third largest mobile operator. (If you add the six virtual
operators to the mix -- meaning companies who lease broadband space -- you'll get a total of
10 different mobile operators in a country with a population one-fifth the size of the United
States.)
"Digging deeper into that crystallized everything for me," says Philippon. "It was an
oligopoly based on three legacy carriers that lobbied very hard to prevent anybody from
getting a fourth (mobile) license. For 10 years they were successful. But then, in 2011, the
regulator changed and gave a license [to] Free. It wasn't a technological change or a change
in consumers' taste. It was purely a regulatory decision."
For French consumers, this one decision changed everything. Instead of paying $55 for a
1-gigabyte plan, the new prices for much better plans cost half that. And prices continued to
drop. Today, a Free 60-gigabyte plan costs only $12.
But Philippon wasn't just interested in what the new competition in the French telecom
industry said about French markets. Having lived in the United States since 1999, he compared
the French telecom revolution to the American market. The numbers blew his mind. While in
France the number of mobile operators was rising, in the US the number was getting smaller
(and that number might even decline further, if the planned Sprint-T-Mobile merger goes
through).
The result was a huge price gap between the two countries.
"France went from being much more expensive to much cheaper in two years," he says. "The
change in price was drastic -- a relative price move of 50 percent. In such a big market with
gigantic firms, that's a big change. And it was not driven by technology, it was driven by
pro-competition regulation." He immediately adds, just to emphasize the irony: "It happened
in France of all places, a country that historically had a political system that made sure
there wasn't too much competition. This is not the place where we expected this kind of
outcome."
The opposite was very surprising too: The level of competition in the United States, the
role model of free-market democracy, was declining.
Philippon, an acclaimed professor of finance at the New York University Stern School of
Business, kept pulling that thread. He gathered an overwhelming amount of data on various
markets, took a few steps back to look at the big picture, and then identified a pattern. The
result is "The Great Reversal," his recent book, in which he explores and explains when, why,
and how, as his subtitle puts it, "America Gave Up on Free Markets."
The telecom story is just one of many examples Philippon provides throughout the book of
non-competitive US markets, in which most or all of the power is concentrated in the hands of
a few big companies. It's a situation that makes it almost impossible for new competitors to
enter and lower prices for consumers. The airline market is another example, as is the
pharmaceutical industry, the banking system, and the big tech companies such as Google and
Facebook, who have no real competition in the markets they operate in.
The book's main argument has a refreshing mix of both right- and left-leaning economic
thinking. It goes like this: During the last 20 years, while the European Union has become
much more competitive, the United States has become a paradise for monopolies and oligopolies
-- with a few players holding most of the market share. As US companies grew bigger, they
became politically powerful. They then used their influence over politicians and regulators,
and their vast resources, to skew regulation in their favor.
The fight over net neutrality, to name one example, demonstrates it well.
"Guess who lobbied for that? It's a simple guess -- the people who benefited from it, the
ISP's [internet service providers]. And they are already charging outrageous prices, twice as
high [as] any other developed country," Philippon says.
This growing concentration of power in the hands of a few has affected everything and
everyone. It has inflated prices because consumers have fewer options. Wages are stagnant
because less competition means firms don't have to fight over workers. Financial investment
in new machinery and technology has plummeted because when companies have fewer competitors
they lose the incentive to invest and improve. It has driven CEO compensation up, and
workers' compensation down. It has caused a spike in inequality, which in turn has ignited
social unrest.
If all of this is too much to wrap your head around, Philippon puts a price tag on it:
$5,000 per year. That's the price the median American household pays every year for the lost
competition. That's the cost of the United States becoming a Monopoly Land.
How did this happen? According to Philippon, it's a story with two threads. The European
side of this story happened almost by mistake. The American side, on the contrary, was no
coincidence.
When the European Union was formed in the early 1990s, there was a lot of suspicion
between the member states, namely France and Germany. (Two World Wars tend to have that
effect.) This mistrust birthed pan-European regulators who enjoyed an unprecedented amount of
freedom, more powerful than any of the member countries' governments.
"We did that mostly because we didn't really trust each other very much," he says. Now, 20
years later, "it turns out that this system we created is just a lot more resilient towards
lobbying and bad influences than we thought."
At the same time in the United States, the exact opposite was happening. Adopting a
free-market approach, regulators and legislators chose not to intervene. They didn't block
mergers and acquisitions, and let big companies get bigger.
This created a positive feedback loop: As companies grew stronger, the regulators got
weaker, and more dependent on the companies they are supposed to regulate. Tens of millions
of dollars were channeled into lobbying. The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision gave
corporate money even more political influence.
At some point, big companies started using regulation itself to prevent new competitors
from entering the market.
The result wasn't free markets, but "the opposite -- market capture," says Philippon,
referring to a situation in which the regulator is so weak it depends completely on the
companies it regulates to design regulation.
Philippon is not the only one who's making these claims. A group of economists from the
University of Chicago Booth School of Business holds a similar view. They are called
Neo-Brandeisian, after the late Justice Louis Brandeis, who, a century ago, fought to broaden
antitrust laws. They believe the big tech companies, for example, managed to rig the system,
and fly under current antitrust regulation. They think it is time to break them apart.
But not everyone agrees with Philippon's narrative or his conclusions. Economists like
Edward Conard, author of "The Upside of Inequality," thinks Philippon's claim that big
companies are evidence of less competition is upside down. According to his criticism, it's
exactly the opposite: These companies became big and powerful because they innovate and give
a lot of value to consumers. He also argues that the conclusion that Europe is more
competitive and innovative than the United States is preposterous, given that the biggest
tech companies are American, not European.
Philippon addresses this counterclaim in his book. The United States is one giant market
of English speakers. Theoretically, if you have a good idea for a new product and you can
finance it, you have more than 300 million potential users on day one. In the EU, on the
other hand, there are 28 countries, with residents who speak 24 different languages. It's not
as simple.
Philippon, who by the age of 40 was named one of the top 25 promising economists by the
International Monetary Fund, also differentiates himself from the Chicago school of thought
in one important way: He's not dogmatic, he's pragmatic. Instead of a one-size-fits-all
solution to the problem, he suggests a more nuanced approach. This is exactly what makes his
case both unique and somewhat tricky to grasp. His approach is neither right nor left.
"The idea that free markets and government intervention are opposites, that's bogus. So
half of me agrees with the Chicago School and half disagrees," he says.
"But if you think that you can get to a free market without any scrutiny by the
government, that's crazy. That's simply untrue empirically. We need to make entry easier to
increase competition, that's the objective," he says. "And the way to do so sometimes means
more government intervention."
OK, but how do you do that? According to Philippon, each case is different.
"In some cases it will be by more intervention. Like maybe force Facebook to break from
WhatsApp. And sometimes it will be by less intervention. Kill a bunch of regulations and
requirements for small companies," he says.
The first idea, at least, has caught a lot of public attention during the last year, and
has been a talking point of the presidential campaigns of Senators Bernie Sanders and
Elizabeth Warren. Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg was recorded saying that if Warren wins, it
will "suck for us." Warren's plan for the big tech companies, for example, includes
"reversing mergers," which means uncoupling WhatsApp and Instagram from Facebook. Her plan
would also forbid Amazon being both a marketplace and a vendor at the same time.
But can any of these interventions actually happen? And if so, what would they mean for
American consumers? Those are more complicated questions.
If big tech companies were broken up, Philippon estimates that the average American
consumer won't be affected financially.
"Since people don't pay these companies directly, it won't change the bottom line for the
middle class, it won't have a big impact on people's disposable income," he says.
What would have a tremendous impact on Americans' lives and income is to keep on going
beyond the big tech companies. "We should go after the big ticket items -- telecom,
transport, energy, and healthcare. That's where you want action, but there is much less
bipartisan support for that," he says.
Something similar to the French telecom revolution is still far from happening in the
United States, but the fact that the 2020 campaign is already pushing competition-promoting
ideas back into the public discourse is a reason for cautious optimism, according to
Philippon. Nevertheless, he warns, we should not let this mild optimism mislead us.
"Free markets are like a public good: It is in nobody's interest to protect them.
Consumers are too dispersed and businesses love monopolies," he says. "So to take free
markets for granted, that's just stupid."
(Shaul Amsterdamski is senior economics editor
for Kan, Israel's public broadcasting corporation.)
(Hmmm. Our largest monthly bill is for 'telecom',
from Comcast, for TV, phone & internet service.
There's no competitive offering in our town.)
"...Our largest monthly bill is for 'telecom',
from Comcast, for TV, phone & internet service..."
[I got the same information from the service tech doing the annual clean and test on my
propane fireplace insert yesterday, in reference to his parents though. They were on Verizon
Fios for cable. He thought they should dump cable for a web-TV solution and just use cell
phones. Their bill was over $400/month. Mine is a little over $200/month for the same
service, which in both cases includes land line. In my zip code Verizon does not bundle Fios
with mobile. The only difference that I know is that we have neither any premium channels nor
DVR boxes and I assume that his parents must have both to run up a bill that high. When we
pony up for Fios Gb, then at least for three years our bill will fall below $100/month, then
return to a higher monthly yet if we do not take another new contract after that upgrade
contract ends. Verizon only makes new contracts when new services are added or upgraded.
Customers get next to no benefit for loyalty/retention. We have both Verizon and Comcast
available in our area. I have had both in my present home at different times, but hate
Comcast for failures on their part to provide tall vehicle clearance to pass down my driveway
until forced to do so by the power company whose poles they must use and for a duplicate
billing error where they billed me for two separate addresses and put me into collections for
the one that I never resided at since I never saw that bill or knew of it prior to the first
collections call.]
Bernie Sanders unveils plan to boost broadband
access, break up internet and cable titans https://cnb.cx/34TzaQw
CNBC - Jacob Pramuk - Dec 6
Bernie Sanders unveiled a plan Friday to expand broadband internet access as part of a
push to boost the economy and reduce corporate power over Americans.
In his sprawling "High-Speed Internet for All" proposal, the Vermont senator and
Democratic presidential candidate calls to treat internet like a public utility. His campaign
argues that the internet should not be a "price gouging profit machine" for companies such as
Comcast, AT&T and Verizon.
Sanders' plan would create $150 billion in grants and aid for local and state governments
to build publicly owned broadband networks as part of the Green New Deal infrastructure
initiative. The total would mark a massive increase over current funding for broadband
development initiatives. The proposal would also break up what the campaign calls "internet
service provider and cable monopolies," stop service providers from offering content and end
what it calls "anticompetitive mergers."
Sanders and his rivals for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination have pushed to
boost high-speed internet access for rural and low-income Americans, saying it has become a
necessity to succeed in school and business. The self-proclaimed democratic socialist has
unveiled numerous plans to root out corporate influence as he runs near the top of a jammed
primary field. ...
Aa excellent article that brings no new ideas to the debate but updates the debate to today.
One thing economist Thomas Philippon did not mention is that voters must turn out the
elected and get new ones who will vote to create more and vigorous competition instead of
oligopoly.
"... "There's a whole neoliberal agenda," she said, referencing the received free-market wisdom that cutting public budgets spurs economic growth. "And then the way that traditional theory has fomented it or not contested it -- there's been kind of a strange symbiosis between mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies." ..."
"... Dr. Mazzucato takes issue with many of the tenets of the neoclassical economic theory taught in most academic departments: its assumption that the forces of supply and demand lead to market equilibrium, its equation of price with value and -- perhaps most of all -- its relegation of the state to the investor of last resort, tasked with fixing market failure. She has originated and popularized the description of the state as an "investor of first resort," envisioning new markets and providing long-term, or "patient," capital at early stages of development. ..."
Meet the Leftish Economist With a New Story About Capitalism
Mariana Mazzucato wants liberals to talk less about the redistribution of wealth and more about
its creation. Politicians around the world are listening.
By Katy Lederer
Mariana Mazzucato was freezing. Outside, it was a humid late-September day in Manhattan, but
inside -- in a Columbia University conference space full of scientists, academics and
businesspeople advising the United Nations on sustainability -- the air conditioning was on
full blast.
For a room full of experts discussing the world's most urgent social and environmental
problems, this was not just uncomfortable but off-message. Whatever their dress -- suit, sari,
head scarf -- people looked huddled and hunkered down. At a break, Dr. Mazzucato dispatched an
assistant to get the A.C. turned off. How will we change anything, she wondered aloud, "if we
don't rebel in the everyday?"
Dr. Mazzucato, an economist based at University College London, is trying to change
something fundamental: the way society thinks about economic value. While many of her
colleagues have been scolding capitalism lately, she has been reimagining its basic premises.
Where does growth come from? What is the source of innovation? How can the state and private
sector work together to create the dynamic economies we want? She asks questions about
capitalism we long ago stopped asking. Her answers might rise to the most difficult challenges
of our time.
In two books of modern political economic theory -- "The Entrepreneurial State" (2013) and
"The Value of Everything" (2018) -- Dr. Mazzucato argues against the long-accepted binary of an
agile private sector and a lumbering, inefficient state. Citing markets and technologies like
the internet, the iPhone and clean energy -- all of which were funded at crucial stages by
public dollars -- she says the state has been an underappreciated driver of growth and
innovation. "Personally, I think the left is losing around the world," she said in an
interview, "because they focus too much on redistribution and not enough on the creation of
wealth."
Her message has appealed to an array of American politicians. Senator Elizabeth Warren,
Democrat of Massachusetts and a presidential contender, has incorporated Dr. Mazzucato's
thinking into several policy rollouts, including one that would use "federal R & D to
create domestic jobs and sustainable investments in the future" and another that would
authorize the government to receive a return on its investments in the pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. Mazzucato has also consulted with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New
York, and her team on the ways a more active industrial policy might catalyze a Green New
Deal.
Even Republicans have found something to like. In May, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida
credited Dr. Mazzucato's work several times in "American Investment in the 21st Century," his
proposal to jump-start economic growth. "We need to build an economy that can see past the
pressure to understand value-creation in narrow and short-run financial terms," he wrote in the
introduction, "and instead envision a future worth investing in for the long-term."
Formally, the United Nations event in September was a meeting of the leadership council of
the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, or S.D.S.N. It's a body of about 90 experts who
advise on topics like gender equality, poverty and global warming. Most of the attendees had
specific technical expertise -- Dr. Mazzucato greeted a contact at one point with, "You're the
ocean guy!" -- but she offers something both broad and scarce: a compelling new story about how
to create a desirable future.
'Investor of first resort'
Originally from Italy -- her family left when she was 5 -- Dr. Mazzucato is the daughter of
a Princeton nuclear physicist and a stay-at-home mother who couldn't speak English when she
moved to the United States. She got her Ph.D. in 1999 from the New School for Social Research
and began working on "The Entrepreneurial State" after the 2008 financial crisis. Governments
across Europe began to institute austerity policies in the name of fostering innovation -- a
rationale she found not only dubious but economically destructive.
"There's a whole neoliberal agenda," she said, referencing the received free-market
wisdom that cutting public budgets spurs economic growth. "And then the way that traditional
theory has fomented it or not contested it -- there's been kind of a strange symbiosis between
mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies."
Dr. Mazzucato takes issue with many of the tenets of the neoclassical economic theory
taught in most academic departments: its assumption that the forces of supply and demand lead
to market equilibrium, its equation of price with value and -- perhaps most of all -- its
relegation of the state to the investor of last resort, tasked with fixing market failure. She
has originated and popularized the description of the state as an "investor of first resort,"
envisioning new markets and providing long-term, or "patient," capital at early stages of
development.
In important ways, Dr. Mazzucato's work resembles that of a literary critic or rhetorician
as much as an economist. She has written of waging what the historian Tony Judt called a
"discursive battle," and scrutinizes descriptive terms -- words like "fix" or "spend" as
opposed to "create" and "invest" -- that have been used to undermine the state's appeal as a
dynamic economic actor. "If we continue to depict the state as only a facilitator and
administrator, and tell it to stop dreaming," she writes, "in the end that is what we get."
As a charismatic figure in a contentious field that does not generate many stars -- she was
recently profiled in Wired magazine's United Kingdom edition -- Dr. Mazzucato has her critics.
She is a regular guest on nightly news shows in Britain, where she is pitted against proponents
of Brexit or skeptics of a market-savvy state.
Alberto Mingardi, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute and director general
of Istituto Bruno Leoni, a free-market think tank, has repeatedly criticized Dr. Mazzucato for,
in his view, cherry-picking her case studies, underestimating economic trade-offs and defining
industrial policy too broadly. In January, in an academic piece written with one of his Cato
colleagues, Terence Kealey, he called her "the world's greatest exponent today of public
prodigality."
Her ideas, though, are finding a receptive audience around the world. In the United Kingdom,
Dr. Mazzucato's work has influenced Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, and Theresa May,
a former Prime Minister, and she has counseled the Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon on designing
and putting in place a national investment bank. She also advises government entities in
Germany, South Africa and elsewhere. "In getting my hands dirty," she said, "I learn and I
bring it back to the theory."
The 'Mission Muse'
During a break at the United Nations gathering, Dr. Mazzucato escaped the air conditioning
to confer with two colleagues in Italian on a patio. Tall, with a muscular physique, she wore a
brightly colored glass necklace that has become something of a trademark on the economics
circuit. Having traveled to five countries in eight days, she was fighting off a cough.
"In theory, I'm the 'Mission Muse,'" she joked, lapsing into English. Her signature
reference is to the original mission to the moon -- a state-spurred technological revolution
consisting of hundreds of individual feeder projects, many of them collaborations between the
public and private sectors. Some were successes, some failures, but the sum of them contributed
to economic growth and explosive innovation.
Dr. Mazzucato's platform is more complex -- and for some, controversial -- than simply
encouraging government investment, however. She has written that governments and state-backed
investment entities should "socialize both the risks and rewards." She has suggested the state
obtain a return on public investments through royalties or equity stakes, or by including
conditions on reinvestment -- for example, a mandate to limit share buybacks.
Emphasizing to policymakers not only the importance of investment, but also the direction of
that investment -- "What are we investing in?" she often asks -- Dr. Mazzucato has influenced
the way American politicians speak about the state's potential as an economic engine. In her
vision, governments would do what so many traditional economists have long told them to avoid:
create and shape new markets, embrace uncertainty and take big risks.
Inside the conference, the news was uniformly bleak. Pavel Kabat, the chief scientist of the
World Meteorological Organization, lamented the breaking of global temperature records and said
that countries would have to triple their current Paris-accord commitments by 2030 to have any
hope of staying below a critical warming threshold. A panel on land use and food waste noted
that nine species account for two-thirds of the world's crop production, a dangerous lack of
agricultural diversity. All the experts appeared dismayed by what Jeffrey Sachs, the S.D.S.N.'s
director, described as the "crude nationalism" and "aggressive anti-globalization" ascendant
around the world.
"We absolutely need to change both the narrative, but also the theory and the practice on
the ground," Dr. Mazzucato told the crowd when she spoke on the final expert panel of the day.
"What does it mean, actually, to create markets where you create the demand, and really start
directing the investment and the innovation in ways that can help us achieve these goals?"
Earlier in the day, she pointed at an announcement on her laptop. She had been nominated for
the first Not the Nobel Prize, a commendation intended to promote "fresh economic thinking."
"Governments have woken up to the fact the mainstream way of thinking isn't helping them," she
said, explaining her appeal to politicians and policymakers. A few days later, she won.
Reply Thursday, November 28, 2019 at 12:05 PM
"... Writing in the 1830s, as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, Honoré de Balzac anticipated the broader social concern: "The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime that has been forgotten, because it was properly carried out." Or, in the more popular paraphrase: behind every great fortune lies a great crime. ..."
"... In recent decades, this corporate lobbying has had two main effects. First, by erecting entry barriers to existing sectors, it protects incumbents and lowers their effective tax rates. This is a deadweight loss – a pure drag on economic growth that limits opportunities for everyone who is not already an oligarch. ..."
"... As U.S. public finances are eroded by oligarchy, so is the ability to fund essential infrastructure, improvements in education, and the kind of breakthrough science that brought America to this point. ..."
Our billionaire problem is getting worse. Any market-oriented economy creates
opportunities for new fortunes to be built, including through innovation. More innovation is
likely to take place where fewer rules encumber entrepreneurial creativity. Some of this
creativity may lead to processes and products that are actually detrimental to public
welfare.
Unfortunately, by the time the need for legislation or regulation becomes apparent, the
innovators have their billions – and they can use that money to protect their
interests.
This billionaire problem is not new. Every epoch, dating at least from Roman times,
produces versions of it whenever some shift in market structure or geopolitics creates an
opportunity for fortunes to be built quickly.
Writing in the 1830s, as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, Honoré de
Balzac anticipated the broader social concern: "The secret of great fortunes without apparent
cause is a crime that has been forgotten, because it was properly carried out." Or, in the
more popular paraphrase: behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
Prominent historical examples include the British East India Company, the Europeans who
built vast fortunes based on African slave labor in the West Indies, and coal mine
owners.
All became rich fast, and then used their political clout to get what they wanted,
including impunity for horrendous abuses. At their peak in the nineteenth century, railway
interests held sway over many or perhaps even most members of the British parliament.
The United States has long exhibited a particularly potent strain of the billionaire
problem. This is partly because America's founders, in their pre-industrial innocence, could
not imagine that money would capture politics to the extent that it has (or that was fully
apparent just a few decades later). Moreover, U.S. leaders were long willing to let private
enterprise take on new projects that elsewhere fell into the hands of the state.
The German post office, for example, built one of the most extensive and efficient
telegraph systems in the world. Samuel Morse urged Congress to do the same (or better). But
U.S. telegraph communication was instead developed privately – as was the telephone
system that followed, all of iron and steel, the entire railroad network, and just about
every other component of the early industrial economy.
When the U.S. government did become involved in economic activity, it was mostly to open
up new frontiers – creating more opportunity for individuals and private business.
In the aftermath of World War II, Vannevar Bush – a Republican who was also a top
adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt – cleverly argued that science represented
the next frontier, and hence constructed a winning political argument for the government to
act as a catalyst.
As Jonathan Gruber and I have argued recently in our book Jump-Starting America, the
post-war federal government's strategic investments in basic science spurred remarkable
private-sector innovation – including productivity gains and widely shared increases in
wages. Vast new fortunes were created.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. /VCG
Photo
The political consequences of America's post-war private-sector boom were felt within a
generation, and they were not always positive. From the 1960s, the U.S. experienced growing
anti-tax sentiment, strong pressure for deregulation (including for the financial sector),
and a lot more corporate money pouring into politics through every possible avenue.
In recent decades, this corporate lobbying has had two main effects. First, by
erecting entry barriers to existing sectors, it protects incumbents and lowers their
effective tax rates. This is a deadweight loss – a pure drag on economic growth that
limits opportunities for everyone who is not already an oligarch.
As U.S. public finances are eroded by oligarchy, so is the ability to fund essential
infrastructure, improvements in education, and the kind of breakthrough science that brought
America to this point.
Some of America's billionaires earn kudos for their philanthropy. At the same time, most
of them adopt a dog-in-the-manger attitude throughout their business operations –
digging deeper moats to protect profits or simply destroying smaller business at every
opportunity.
There is a second effect, which is more nuanced. In some entirely new sectors,
particularly in the digital domain, entry was possible at least during an early phase.
The entrepreneurs who built the first Internet companies were not able to put up effective
entry barriers – hence the runaway success (and greater billions) of more recent
companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Uber.
But now the controlling shareholders of these new behemoths operate pretty much in the
same way as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and the original J.P. Morgan once did. They
use their money to buy influence and resist any kind of reasonable restraint on their
anti-competitive and anti-worker behavior – even if it undermines democratic
institutions.
We will always have billionaires. Ex post regulation and higher rates of taxation are
appealing today but, looking forward, will they prove sufficient in a political system that
allows individuals to spend as much as they like to get whatever they want (and repeal
whatever they hate)? It's time for a new approach, as Gruber and I propose.
Big profits follow from big new ideas. That's why federal science funding should be
designed to include upside participation in the enterprises that will be created. The public
deserves much more direct participation in those profits. And the billionaires should have to
make do with fewer billions.
"The United States has long exhibited a particularly potent strain of the billionaire
problem. This is partly because America's founders, in their pre-industrial innocence, could
not imagine that money would capture politics to the extent that it has (or that was fully
apparent just a few decades later). "
A romanticization of the founders? I seem to recall their motivation was to counter revolt
against the galloping egalitarianism of the States, and incidentally, the guys in the room
were basically the billionaires of the day.
His subsequent complaints seem right on though, and pointing out the telegraph situation,
which rightly should have been a Post Office operation, is especially appreciated.
A romanticization of the founders? I seem to recall their motivation was to counter revolt
against the galloping egalitarianism of the States, and incidentally, the guys in the room
were basically the billionaires of the day.
[Simon Johnson's] subsequent complaints seem right on though, and pointing out the
telegraph situation, which rightly should have been a Post Office operation, is especially
appreciated.
POTUS races can be effectively
Operated with
Little people funded campaigns
Bernie proved that
And Liz
Yes spreading too thin
fielding 435 house races at once
or 34 Senate races etc
Big bucks will prevail over all
But winn8ng evening enough
It requires sustainable
Solid majorities
And protracted continuity
like the new deal maintained
Why ?
The bigger problem is the pre existing
State system
Progressives might get elected
to change The show
But
Deep Sam will resist mightily
Capitalism is a system
.of organized social production
That produces and reproduces
Along with itself
Typical human consequences
Among those typical human consequences
"Second, reports suggest that Trump's new demands are not based on any clear U.S. military
need. This leads us to the question of how Trump arrived at the new sum being sought from
South Korea."
"Polling shows that while Americans are increasingly skeptical of the U.S. intervention
into Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans do support the United States' current engagement in the
world and its commitments to allies."
"Polling" in the current militarized liberal media is questionable as is putting one's
finger on "clear U.S. military need".
It seems the source of "clear US military need" in Japan and Korea (Germany, France, EU
part of NATO, Libya, Somalia...) is media selling the meme that the US cannot "trust" them to
maintain the US" "rules based world order".
"Trust" an excuse to shoulder the "white man's burden".
Besides there are a lot of Lockheed coupons to be clipped.
In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled "The
White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands." In this poem, Kipling
urged the U.S. to take up the "burden" of empire, as had Britain and other European nations.
Published in the February, 1899 issue of McClure's Magazine, the poem coincided with the
beginning of the Philippine-American War and U.S. Senate ratification of the treaty that
placed Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines under American control. Theodore
Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, copied the poem and sent it to
his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, commenting that it was "rather poor poetry, but good
sense from the expansion point of view." Not everyone was as favorably impressed as
Roosevelt. The racialized notion of the "White Man's burden" became a euphemism for
imperialism, and many anti-imperialists couched their opposition in reaction to the
phrase.
Take up the White Man's burden --
Send forth the best ye breed --
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild --
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Take up the White Man's burden
In patience to abide
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit
And work another's gain
Take up the White Man's burden --
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard --
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah slowly) to the light:
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
"Our loved Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden-
Have done with childish days-
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
Source: Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden: The United States & The Philippine
Islands, 1899." Rudyard Kipling's Verse: Definitive Edition (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1929).
"Russia is an Oligarchy. Putin is the richest man in the world."
Russia is an oligarchy. Like the USA and all Western countries. Oligarchy is the "rule of
the few", the rule of elite. We know that this is where any state (or mass party) lands due
to the "Iron law of oligarchy". So what's new ?
FYI the USA is a neoliberal plutocracy, which is pretty bad, degraded form of oligarchy.
And it is currently experiences its deep crisis as neoliberal ideology is dead, and economics
entered the phase of a secular stagnation.
This created the situation in which neoliberal elite can't rule "as usual" and
"deplorable" do not want to live "as usual".
Such a situation is called a Classic Marxism a "revolutionary situation" and there is
something in this definition. That's why we got Trump. So he is just a sign of the deep
crisis of the USA neoliberal plutocracy.
In any case this is adeep political crisis. In this sense "impeachment Kabuki theatre" is
just a tip of the iceberg and manifests the same problem
Presence on the political stage of people with noticeable senility problem like Biden and
increased age of politicians in general is yet another sign of the same (can probably be
called "Soviet Politburo syndrome").
But only completely brainwashed by neoliberal propaganda person can claim the Putin is "the
richest man in the world"
Putin is way too clever to get into such a trap, when a person became Western powers
marionette (like corrupt Yanukovich became ) because they can pull the strings and confiscate
the ill gotten wealth anytime. BTW it was Biden, who threatened Yanukovich that if he uses
force against protesters, his Western banks stored wealth is gone. We know what happened next
with the help of Victoria Nuland.
Like Kissinger aptly said, neoliberal oligarchs are always pro-Western oligarch, because
they have nowhere to go to store their wealth.
That means that Putin is "the richest man in the world" level of thinking can be viewed as
typical for a person with severe senility problem due to his/her age.
This statement actually does not even deserve a comment, because person with such level of
mental degradation can't understand argument of the other side.
"The story that has emerged in the impeachment hearings is one of extortion and bribery."
Ralph Nader and conservative constitutional scholar Bruce Fein have put together a
succinct series of audio topics on these and other good articles of impeachment, some which
are probably much more serious but would have also applied to most other recent
presidents.
It comes to mind that since most of Ralph and Bruce's articles equally apply to previous
Democratic presidents, and expose institutional disfunction among all the branches, that
Leadership may be pursuing this rather narrow inquiry to avoid some kind of self
incrimination unpleasantness.
Yes, the reason Democrats haven't gone after Trump for his more obvious forms of criminality
is most likely that they are guilty of the same forms of corruption.
Has anyone checked out what O'Bomber has been up to lately. It turns out that he's been
cashing out (no quid pro quo there!) And he's been hobnobbing with the wealthy folks who own
the Democratic Party and in his spare time he's been criticizing the Left!
"Equipped with fame, wealth, and a vast reservoir of residual goodwill Obama now has more
power to do good in an hour than most of us do in a lifetime. The demands of etiquette and
propriety notwithstanding, he no longer has intransigent Blue Dog senators to appease, donors
to placate, or personal electoral considerations to keep him up at night. When he speaks or
acts, we can be reasonably certain he does so out of sincere choice and that the substance of
his words and actions reflect the real Barack Obama and how he honestly sees the world.
It therefore tells us a great deal that, given the latitude, resources, and moral authority
with which to influence events, Obama has spent his post-presidency cozying up to the global
elite and delivering vapid speeches to corporate interests in exchange for unthinkable sums
of money.
Though often remaining out of the spotlight, he has periodically appeared next to various
CEOs at events whose descriptions might be read as cutting satire targeting the hollowness of
business culture if they weren't all-too real. As the world teeters on the brink of
ecological disaster, he recently cited an increase in America's output of oil under his
administration as a laudable achievement.
When Obama has spoken about or intervened in politics, it's most often been to bolster the
neoliberal center-right or attack and undermine the Left." https://jacobinmag.com/2019/11/obama-socialism
But to EMichael and his ilk, it was all Republicans' fault that O'bombers didn't get much
done O'Bomber's eye on his personal prize--his post-presidential earning potential--never
figured in!!!
'Senate Intel Committee Chairman @SenatorBurr: "Every
elected official in the Ukraine was for Hillary Clinton. Is that very different than the
Russians being for Donald Trump?"
"You considered Russia meddling with just the preference they had before you knew the rest
of it. Apply the same standard to Ukraine. The President can say that they meddled because they
had a preference, the elected officials, that's not the current people."
Q: Is there any evidence that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election? BURR: I don't think
there's any question that elected officials in Ukraine had a favorite in the election.
Q: Would you consider that meddling? BURR: I mean, you'll have to define meddling, but that
was something that was publicly out there.'
The interview concluded with a long passage in which Burr does some tap-dancing that would
have shamed the Nicholas Brothers.
And the interview itself is even more preposterous given the news that the very committee
that Burr chairs already has dismissed the whole Ukrainian fantasy has groundless....
Even Burr now is parroting the absurd notion that a preference for Hillary Rodham Clinton on
the part of the Ukrainian leadership in 2016 -- a preference they shared with practically every
other government on the planet, then and now -- is somehow mysteriously equivalent to the
Russian ratfcking. They're all lost now, amazingly so. It will confound future historians, who
will wander through whatever's left, kicking the rubble ahead of them and wondering how
everybody had been so easily turned."
China suspends Hong Kong visits by U.S. military ships, aircraft, sanctions U.S. NGOs
BEIJING -- The Chinese government has decided to suspend reviewing applications to visit
Hong Kong by U.S. military ships and aircraft starting Monday, foreign ministry spokesperson
Hua Chunying said.
China will also take sanctions against some U.S. non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for
their role in the disturbances in Hong Kong, Hua said at a press conference.
The NGOs include the National Endowment for Democracy, National Democratic Institute for
International Affairs, International Republican Institute, Human Rights Watch and Freedom
House.
A lot of facts and evidence have shown that the aforementioned NGOs supported anti-China
rioters in Hong Kong in various ways, abetted their extreme and violent criminal behavior and
incited separatist activities for "Hong Kong independence", Hua said, adding that these
organizations bear major responsibilities for Hong Kong's chaotic situation and should be
sanctioned and pay their price.
The spokesperson said the United States has seriously violated the international law and
basic norms governing international relations, and interfered in China's internal affairs by
signing the so-called Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 into law despite
China's firm opposition.
"China urges the U.S. to correct its mistake and stop meddling in Hong Kong affairs or
interfering in China's other internal affairs by any word and act," Hua said.
China will take further necessary actions in accordance with the development of the
situation to firmly defend the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong and safeguard national
sovereignty, security and development interests, she said.
"... Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli spy and alleged "handler" of Robert Maxwell, told the authors of a new book, Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales , that Epstein ran a "complex intelligence operation" at the behest of Mossad. ..."
"... Believing that Epstein planned to marry his daughter, Maxwell introduced him and Ghislaine Maxwell to Ben-Menashe's Mossad circle. ..."
"... "See, fucking around is not a crime. It could be embarrassing, but it's not a crime. But fucking a fourteen-year-old girl is a crime. And he was taking photos of politicians fucking fourteen-year-old girls -- if you want to get it straight. They would just blackmail people, they would just blackmail people like that." ..."
Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad asset who was used by Israeli intelligence to blackmail
American politicians, according to a former Israeli spy.
Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli spy and alleged "handler" of Robert Maxwell, told the
authors of a new book, Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales , that Epstein ran a "complex
intelligence operation" at the behest of Mossad.
Believing that Epstein planned to marry his daughter, Maxwell introduced him and Ghislaine
Maxwell to Ben-Menashe's Mossad circle.
"Maxwell sort of started liking him, and my theory is that Maxwell felt that this guy is
going for his daughter," Ben-Menashe said.
"He felt that he could bless him with some work and help him out in like a paternal
[way]."
Israeli intelligence bosses gave the green light and Epstein then became a Mossad asset.
"They were agents of the Israeli Intelligence Services," said Ben-Menashe.
When it became clear that Epstein wasn't very competent at doing much else, his primary role
became "blackmailing American and other political figures."
"Mr. Epstein was the simple idiot who was going around providing girls to all kinds of
politicians in the United States," said Ben-Menashe.
"See, fucking around is not a crime. It could be embarrassing, but it's not a crime. But
fucking a fourteen-year-old girl is a crime. And he was taking photos of politicians fucking
fourteen-year-old girls -- if you want to get it straight. They would just blackmail people,
they would just blackmail people like that."
There's also a Mossad connection to a different kind of sex offender; Harvey Weinstein.
Weinstein
reportedly hired ex-Mossad agents to suppress allegations against him. Working for an
Israeli firm called Black Cube, these agents pressured witnesses and tried to intimidate
journalist Ronan Farrow in order to "bury the truth" about Weinstein's activity.
Jeffrey Epstein worked for Mossad, which is blackmailing every politician around the world
that it can, but most especially those in the United States of America and Britain.
Trump Was 'Only One' To Help Prosecutor In 2009 Epstein Case
And while Democrats have suggested that
the new evidence may implicate President Trump - who once called Epstein a "Terrific guy" who
"likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side" (yet
reportedly kicked the billionaire pedophile out of his Mar-a-Lago club for trying to recruit
an underage girl) others are focusing on the Clintons.
A the
NY Post detailed in 2016, Epstein and the Clintons are close .
Epstein has spent the bulk of his adult life cultivating relationships with the worlds
most powerful men. Flight logs show that from 2001 to 2003, Bill Clinton flew on Epsteins
private plane, dubbed The Lolita Express by the press, 26 times . After Epsteins arrest in
July 2006, federal tax records show Epstein donated $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation that
year.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Superdelegate daughter Christine quipped on Twitter "It is
quite likely that some of our faves are implicated but we must follow the facts and let the
chips fall where they may."...
...
And what about Trump?
Following a 2018 financial settlement between Florida attorney Bradley Edwards - who
represented one of Epstein's accusers, only to be later sued by Epstein, Edwards claimed that
Donald Trump was the 'only person' who provided assistance when Edwards served subpoenas and
notices to high-profile individuals connected to Epstein.
Edwards: The only thing that I can say about President Trump is that he is the only
person who, in 2009 when I served a lot of subpoenas on a lot of people, or at least gave
notice to some pretty connected people, that I want to talk to them, is the only person who
picked up the phone and said, let's just talk. I'll give you as much time as you want. I'll
tell you what you need to know, and was very helpful , in the information that he gave, and
gave no indication whatsoever that he was involved in anything untoward whatsoever, but had
good information. That checked out and that helped us and we didn't have to take a
deposition of him in 2009...
...In January 2016, Vice.com ran
Silverstein's story on Trump's ties to Epstein, which framed them as more social - including
dinner parties, two plane trips, and Epstein hanging out at Trump's Mar-a-lago resort in Palm
Beach, Florida. As
Radar reported last April, "According to an investigation by Radar, Trump was among
dozens of renowned New Yorkers who knew Epstein socially but ostracized him after Palm Beach
police uncovered the financiers sleazy double life, " adding that Trump "once barred child
molester Jeffrey Epstein from his famed Mar-a-lago club after the presidential candidate
caught him hitting on a young girl."
Russia, Israel and Saudi Arabia: Jeffrey Epstein 'Found a Niche -- Blackmailing American
and Other Political Figures' For Foreign Powers, According to His Ex-Spy Handler
By Dylan Howard
December 5, 2019
Shameless pedophile Jeffrey Epstein inherited his espionage business from ex-girlfriend
Ghislaine Maxwell, whose father British media magnate Robert Maxwell, was a super spy for
Israel's Mossad. Here, in another excerpt from the newly released book "Epstein: Dead Men
Tell No Tales," former Israeli spy Ari Ben-Menashe tells how Epstein ran a complex
intelligence operation.
Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli spy and alleged "handler" of Robert Maxwell said of
Epstein: "Maxwell introduced him to us, and he wanted us to accept him as part of our
group.
Ben-Menashe claimed that Epstein and
Ghislaine were already dating in the late 1980s, and that Maxwell Senior grew fond of
the young upstart.
"Epstein was hanging around with Robert Maxwell and the daughter was hanging around
there too, and that's how they met," he told author James Robertson in an interview from
Montreal. "Just two young souls, they met."
"Maxwell sort of started liking him, and my theory is that Maxwell felt that this guy
is going for his daughter," Ben-Menashe said. "He felt that he could bless him with some
work and help him out in like a paternal [way]."
According to the former spy, the ultimate order to embrace Epstein and involve him in
the ongoing arms deals came from "the bosses" at Israeli intelligence headquarters.
"They were agents of the Israeli Intelligence Services," he told James
Robertson.
"Later on [Ghislaine] got involved with Israeli intelligence together with him. But
not in this arms deal with Iran business," Ben-Menashe also told Zev
Shalev , former CBS News executive producer and investigative journalist for the
website Narativ.
"These guys were seen as agents. They weren't really competent to do very much. And
so they found a niche for themselves -- blackmailing American and other political
figures."
He told Robertson, "Mr. Epstein was the simple idiot who was going around providing
girls to all kinds of politicians in the United States. See, ******* around is not a crime.
It could be embarrassing, but it's not a crime. But ******* a fourteen-year-old girl is a
crime. And he was taking photos of politicians ******* fourteen-year-old girls -- if you
want to get it straight. They would just blackmail people, they would just blackmail people
like that."
Ben-Menashe is a mysterious Iranian-born Israeli businessman who claims to have worked for
Mossad from 1977 to 1987,
The Sun reported this week. He was arrested in 1989 in the US on arms dealing charges but
was acquitted in 1990 after a jury accepted he was acting on behalf of Israel. Israel tried
to distance themselves from him, with government sources saying he never had anything to do
with intelligence services, although other news reports -- in both the US and Israel --
confirmed he did. He later wrote a book called Profits of War: Inside the US-Israeli Arms
Network and in the early 1990s claimed that Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's dad, worked for
Mossad.
But there remains more questions than answers about how Epstein came to be one of the most
horrifying villains the modern world has ever known -- a shameless pedophile who built a
network of child sex abuse around the globe. But in this case, the rot of evil goes even
deeper than that.
How did Epstein pull off his sex trafficking scheme?
Who was a participant, and who might have helped him?
These questions -- and more -- linger still, even after inmate 76318–054 was found
dead at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City...
Complacency certainly allowed Obama to do virtually nothing during his final seven years.
Fortunately the complacency got reduced due to the 2016 election, else Obama would have
pushed through TPP.
During the Obama years the mantra was, "Don't worry, be happy." And the elites were happy.
The rest of us, not so much, which is why we got Trump.
The NRS social grades are a system of demographic classification used in the United
Kingdom. They were originally developed by the National Readership Survey (NRS)
Grade Social class ..... Chief income earner's occupation
A upper middle class ... Higher managerial, administrative or professional
B middle class ......... Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1 lower middle class .. Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or
professional
C2 skilled working class Skilled manual workers
D working class ........ Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers
E non working .......... State pensioners, casual and lowest grade workers, unemployed with
state benefits only
The grades are often grouped into ABC1 and C2DE; these are taken to equate to middle class
and working class, respectively. Only around 2% of the UK population is identified as upper
class, and this group is not separated by the classification scheme. ...
Hmmm. Social castes in 'Brave New World',
Aldous Huxley, 1931, British intellectual & author
(Wikipedia)
Alphas and Betas
Alphas and Betas are at the top of the caste system, and perform the more intellectual jobs.
Unlike the lower castes, Alphas and Betas are not clones, allowing for more individual
personalities. ...
Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons
The lower three castes do more menial and standardized work. ...
Economy Adds 266,000 Jobs in November, Unemployment Edges Down to 3.5 Percent
By Dean Baker
The share of women in payroll employment is likely to exceed 50 percent in December.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy added 266,000 jobs in November.
While this figure is inflated by the return of roughly 50,000 striking GM autoworkers, upward
revisions to the prior two months' data brought the three-month average to a solid 205,000.
The unemployment rate edged down to 3.5 percent, returning to a 50-year low.
The job growth was widely spread across industries. Manufacturing added 54,000 jobs,
somewhat more than the number of returning strikers. It appears that the sector may again be
on a modest growth path, with the number of jobs up 13,000 from its level three months ago
and 76,000 from its year-ago level. Food manufacturing is providing the bulk of these gains,
adding 19,300 jobs in the last three months and 25,900 over the last year.
Health care added 45,200 jobs in November after adding just 11,900 in October. Job growth
for the two months together falls slightly below the 34,500 average for the last year.
Restaurants added 25,300 jobs, roughly its average for the last year. The high-paying
professional and technical services sector added 30,600 jobs, after three months of weak
growth.
Construction employment remains weak, with the sector adding just 1,000 jobs in November.
Job growth has averaged just 5,600 a month since June. Support activities for mining, which
has been losing jobs since February, lost another 5,700 jobs in November. Employment in that
sector is now down 23,700 (6.6 percent) over the last year. Retail added 2,000 jobs for the
month, but employment is still down 31,400 (0.2 percent) over the last year.
In spite of the strong job growth and low unemployment rate, there continues to be no
evidence of accelerating wage growth. The average hourly wage increased 3.1 percent over the
last year. The annual rate of growth over the last three months (September, October, and
November), compared to the prior three months (June, July, August), was just 3 percent.
Women's share of payroll employment edged closer to 50 percent in November, with the
figure now standing at 49.992 percent, up from 49.977 percent in October. This should mean
that the share will cross 50 percent in December.
The data in the household survey was generally positive. The overall
employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) remained at a recovery high of 61.0 percent for the
third straight month. The EPOP for prime-age workers (ages 25 to 54) also remained at its
recovery high of 80.3 percent. The EPOP for prime-age men edged up 0.2 percent to 86.7
percent, a high reached in March, while the EPOP for women slipped 0.1 percentage point to
74.1 percent, which is still a full percentage point above its year-ago level.
The average duration of unemployment spells fell in November, as did the share of the
long-term unemployed. There was a modest increase of 0.1 weeks in the median duration.
Perhaps the most disturbing item in this report was the dip in the share of unemployment
due to voluntary quits from 14.5 percent to 13.3 percent. This is extraordinarily low, given
the 3.5 percent unemployment rate. On the other hand, it is consistent with what we're seeing
with wage growth, which remains modest, and with no evidence of acceleration.
Another discouraging item in the household data is the decline in the share of the
workforce that chooses to work part-time. This fell by 15,000 in November. For the year
average to date, this figure is up by less than 0.5 percent, meaning that it is dropping as a
share of total employment. The share of voluntary part-time employment had increased sharply
after the Affordable Care Act took effect, the recent decline is likely an indication of the
increasing difficulty of getting health care coverage outside of employment.
[Graph]
This should be seen as a mostly positive report. The pace of job growth clearly has slowed
some from its 2018 rate, but with the economy presumably approaching full employment, this
was inevitable. The major downside is that workers seem to remain insecure about their
employment prospects, as evidenced by the low quit rates and the relatively modest pace of
wage growth.
The truth is that good, middle class jobs are very difficult to get. Almost impossible.
You are very lucky being a retiree with Vanguard funds chest ;-)
Recent graduates are in a very bad position, with only graduates from Ivy league colleges
resume not being instantly tossed into waist basket.
McJobs, Amazon warehouse jobs, Home Depot jobs, low level construction jobs (in $15-$20
per hour range), etc are available for graduates. But that's it. Looks like the USA is
looking now like a big amazon warehouse.
People over 50 are actually doomed, if they lost the job, to much lower standard of
living. Even if they are professionals.
Donald Trump Boasts About Taxing Middle Class for "Billions and Billions"
By Dean Baker
This was in the context of the tariffs he has imposed on imports from China. According to
the Washington Post, * Trump boasted:
"I like what's happening right now. We're taking in billions and billions of dollars."
Tariffs of course are taxes on imports. The evidence is overwhelming that the vast majority
of these taxes are being borne either by consumers or retailers in the United States. According
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics ** the price of imports from China has fallen just 1.6
percent over the last year. This means that people in the United States are paying the
overwhelming majority of the tariffs that run as high as 25 percent and apparently Donald Trump
is very happy about that.
Could Tax Increases Speed Up the Economy?
Democrats Say Yes https://nyti.ms/2RlDbJx
NYT - Jim Tankersley - December 5
WASHINGTON -- Elizabeth Warren is leading a liberal rebellion against a long-held economic
view that large tax increases slow economic growth, trying to upend Democratic policymaking
in the way supply-side conservatives changed Republican orthodoxy four decades ago.
(Warren Would Take Billionaires Down
a Few Billion Pegs https://nyti.ms/2CtMPRN
NYT - November 10)
Generations of economists, across much of the ideological spectrum, have long held that
higher taxes reduce investment, slowing economic growth. That drag, the consensus held, would
offset the benefits to growth from increased government spending in areas like education.
Ms. Warren and other leading Democrats say the opposite. The senator from Massachusetts,
who is a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, contends that her
plans to tax the rich and spend the revenue to lift the poor and the middle class would
accelerate economic growth, not impede it. Other Democratic candidates are making similar
claims about their tax-and-spend proposals. Some liberal economists go further and say that
simply taxing the rich would help growth no matter what the government did with the
money.
Democrats in the past, including the party's 2016 nominee, Hillary Clinton, have argued
that a more modest combination of tax increases and spending programs would expand the
economy. But no Democratic nominee before Ms. Warren had ever proposed so many new taxes and
spending programs, and leaned so heavily into the argument that they would be, in economist
parlance, pro-growth.
That argument tries to reframe a classic debate about the economic "pie" in the United
States by suggesting there is no trade-off between increasing the size of the pie and
dividing the slices more equitably among all Americans.
Ms. Warren has proposed nearly $3 trillion a year in new taxes on businesses and
high-earners, largely focused on billionaires but sometimes hitting Americans who earn
$250,000 and above per year. The taxes would fund wide-reaching new government spending on
health care, education, and family benefits like universal child care and paid parental
leave.
Last month, Ms. Warren wrote on Twitter that education, child care and student loan relief
programs funded by her tax on wealthy Americans would "grow the economy." In a separate post,
she said student debt relief would "supercharge" growth.
The last batch of economists to disrupt a political party's consensus position were
conservative -- the so-called supply-siders who built influence in the late 1970s and gained
power in the Reagan administration. Previous Republican presidents had focused on keeping the
budget deficit low, which constrained their ability to cut taxes if they did not also cut
government spending. Supply-siders contended that well-targeted tax cuts could generate big
economic growth even without spending cuts. ...
Ms. Warren is making the case that the economy could benefit if money is redistributed from
the rich and corporations to uses that she and other liberals say would be more productive.
Their argument combines hard data showing that high levels of inequality and wealth
concentration weigh down economic growth with a belief that well-targeted government spending
can encourage more Americans to work, invest and build skills that would make them more
productive.
They also cite evidence that transferring money to poor and middle-class individuals would
increase consumer spending because they spend a larger share of their incomes than wealthy
Americans, who tend to save and invest.
"The economy has changed, our understanding of it has changed, and we understand the
constricting effects of inequality" on growth, said Heather Boushey, the president of the
Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a think tank focused on inequality.
Inequality has widened significantly in America over the last several decades. The
Congressional Budget Office estimates that the incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans more
than tripled from 1979 to 2016, before taxes and government transfer payments are taken into
account. For the middle class, incomes grew 33 percent. More than a decade after the
recession, wage growth for the middle class continues to run well behind previous times of
economic expansion, like the late 1990s.
Research by the economist Emmanuel Saez and colleagues shows that the last time such a
small sliver of Americans controlled such a large share of the nation's income and wealth was
in the late 1920s, just before a stock market crash set off the Great Depression. World Bank
researchers have warned that high levels of inequality are stifling growth in South Africa,
which has the globe's worst measured inequality.
"We have an economy that isn't delivering like it used to," said Ms. Boushey, who advised
Hillary Clinton's 2016 Democratic presidential campaign. "That's leading people to say let's
re-examine the evidence."
The contention that tax and spending increases can lift economic growth is not the only
challenge to traditional orthodoxy brewing in liberal economic circles. Some Democrats have
also embraced modern monetary theory, which reframes classic thinking that discourages large
budget deficits as a drag on growth. Its supporters, including Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the economist Stephanie Kelton, an adviser to Senator Bernie
Sanders of Vermont, argue that the United States government should be spending much more on
programs to fight inequality, like a federal job guarantee, without imposing new taxes.
Some of the inequality-focused economists say they are hoping to build new economic models
to predict the effects of their policies, though they acknowledge few of those models exist
yet. Instead, they rely on evidence about the likely effects of individual programs, added
together.
Many economists who study tax policy contend that Ms. Warren's plans -- and other large
tax-and-spend proposals from Democratic candidates this year -- would hurt the economy, just
as classic economic models suggest.
"Some elements of the large increase in government spending on health and education
proposed by Senator Warren would promote economic growth" through channels like improved
education, said Alan Auerbach, an economics professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, who has written some of the most influential research in the profession on the
relationship between tax rates and growth.
But, he said, "I am very skeptical that these growth effects would offset the negative
effects on growth of the higher taxes, particularly given that the spending increases are not
specifically targeted toward enhancing growth."
Ms. Warren disagrees. In the latest Democratic debate, she said the spending programs
funded by her wealth tax would be "transformative" for workers. Those plans would raise
wages, make college tuition-free and relieve graduates of student debt, she said, adding, "We
can invest in an entire generation's future."
An emerging group of liberal economists say taxes on high-earners could spur growth even
if the government did nothing with the revenue because the concentration of income and wealth
is dampening consumer spending.
"We are experiencing a revolution right now in macroeconomics, particularly in the policy
space," said Mark Paul, an economist who is a fellow at the liberal Roosevelt Institute in
Washington. "We can think of a wealth tax as welfare-enhancing, in and of itself, simply by
constraining the power of the very wealthy" to influence public policy and distort markets to
their advantage.
Taken together, Ms. Warren's proposals would transform the role of federal taxation. If
every tax increase she has proposed in the campaign passed and raised as much revenue as her
advisers predict -- a contingency hotly debated among even liberal economists -- total
federal tax revenue would grow more than 50 percent.
The United States would leap from one of the lowest-taxed rich nations to one of the
highest. It would collect more taxes as a share of the economy than Norway, and only slightly
less than Italy.
Mr. Sanders's plan envisions a similarly large increase in tax levels. Former Vice
President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s proposals are much smaller in scale: He would raise taxes on
the wealthy and corporations by $3.4 trillion over a decade, in order to fund increased
spending on health care, higher education, infrastructure and carbon emissions reduction.
If Ms. Warren's tax program is enacted, said Gabriel Zucman, an economist at Berkeley who
is an architect of her wealth tax proposal, "in my view, the most likely effect is a small
positive effect on growth, depending on how the revenues are used."
Another economist who has worked with the Warren campaign to analyze its proposals, Mark
Zandi of Moody's, said he would expect her plans to be "largely a wash on long-term economic
growth."
Researchers at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College projected this summer that Ms.
Warren's wealth tax and spending policies would generate a 1.7 percent increase in the size
of the economy. A preliminary study of a wealth tax like Ms. Warren's proposal, by the Penn
Wharton Budget Model, found that it would reduce the size of the economy by a similar 1.7
percent. The model uses the sort of classic methodology that liberals are now rebelling
against and did not evaluate Ms. Warren's spending proposals.
Historical experience offers few parallels for assessing the economic effects of a
taxation-and-spending program on the scale of Ms. Warren's ambitions. A 2002 study of wealth
taxes in rich countries found that those taxes, most of which have since been abandoned,
reduced economic growth slightly on an annual basis.
Conservative economists roundly disagree that large tax increases can spur faster growth,
even those who say government spending on paid leave and child care may get more Americans
into the labor force. They say a wealth tax on the scale of Ms. Warren's proposal would
greatly reduce savings and investment by the rich.
"What a wealth tax does is, it directly taxes savings," said Aparna Mathur, an economist
at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who favors a narrow paid leave program and
whose research finds benefits from reducing tax rates on business and investment. "If you're
taxing savings, you're implicitly taxing investment. So how can that possibly be
pro-growth?"
The supply-side economists' plans were similarly denounced -- George Bush called them
"voodoo economic policies" while running for president in 1980 -- but in time dominated
Republican proposals.
Some members of the new liberal revolt against tax orthodoxy welcome the comparison to the
supply-side uprising.
"While I think that the supply-siders were wrong, and were always wrong, they were
reacting to very real economic problems in the 1970s," said Michael Linden, the executive
director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal policy and advocacy group. "There was
something really wrong with the economy at the time. I think there is now."
China-Russia east-route natural gas pipeline in operation
HARBIN -- The China-Russia east-route natural gas pipeline was put into operation on
Monday.
At the gas-distributing and compressing station in the city of Heihe, northeast China's
Heilongjiang Province, the data screen was switched on, indicating parameter variations of
the gas passage. The station is the first stop after the Russia-supplied natural gas enters
China.
The pipeline is scheduled to provide China with 5 billion cubic meters of Russian gas in
2020 and the amount is expected to increase to 38 billion cubic meters annually from 2024,
under a 30-year contract worth 400 billion U.S. dollars signed between the China National
Petroleum Corp (CNPC) and Russian gas giant Gazprom in May 2014.
The cross-border gas pipeline has a 3,000-km section in Russia and a 5,111-km stretch in
China.
Shao Hua, general manager of Heihe City Natural Gas Development Co., Ltd. of China Gas,
said that the border city of Heihe still largely relies on coal for heat. With the
Sino-Russian natural gas pipeline's operation, the city now has access to a stable supply of
clean energy.
Heihe has registered 30,000 households for switching to natural gas for heating. It will
take one year to complete full coverage of the gas network in the city, according to the
company.
China's natural gas consumption reached 280.3 billion cubic meters in 2018. The country's
demand for natural gas will continue to soar toward 2040, outstripping domestic output by
around 43 percent, according to an International Energy Agency report.
China aims to raise the use of natural gas to 10 percent of the country's energy mix by
2020 and 15 percent by 2030, said the National Development and Reform Commission.
How Russia-China Gas Pipeline Changes Energy Calculus
By Olga Tanas, Anna Shiryaevskaya and Dan Murtaugh - Bloomberg
Russia is pivoting its energy business to the east. The world's largest exporter of
natural gas has built an enormous pipeline running from Siberia to the Chinese border to feed
China's insatiable energy appetite. The new conduit, called the Power of Siberia, is part of
a plan by Russian President Vladimir Putin to reduce his country's dependence on gas markets
in Europe and tap into the fast-growing economies of Asia. For China, whose domestic energy
production can't keep up with demand, the pipeline offers a vital new source of
supply....
Another fun chart with oil prices and the implicit price deflator. Oil used to mostly
follow the implicit deflator, until 2014.
The index start is different so there is some data discrepency, but it is clear that we
have become an oil economy, we dig it up and sell it to more advanced economies, just like
Nigeria.
Further, it you were to include the median home price over the housing bubble you will see
that median, aggregate home price rose with oil, mainly because oil is about 15% of the input
to home construction, and oil tripled in price.
The true home bubble was in California and Florida, a result we discovered in about 2010,
and was reported on this blog.
We knew what was happening with oil shocks and chose to ignore it so we could have a nice
Dean Baker style narrative. That is, we knew the truth and preferred the deception, which we
also knew at the time. Ex post it is obvious our fake narrative resulted in increased
inequality, which we have now proven.
We, the folks on this blog, were a natural experiment, mostly a natural experiment of
boomers faking it, in full knowledge of the consequences. We got the expected result, low
real GDP growth while interest charges, as a percentage of real growth, going through the
roof.
Now we have another natural experiment. Either the price deflator has to drop rapidly, or
oil has to rise dramatically or we get an MMT moment. Dunno the outcome. But we are really
good at having the MMT moments. We can show that we have become better MMTers as each
generation gains more technology and knowledge applied to central banking.
"... The existence of the bubble and the fact that it was driving the economy could both be easily determined from regularly published government data, yet the vast majority of economists were surprised when the bubble burst and it gave us the Great Recession. This history should lead us to ask what other simple things economists are missing. ..."
Simple Economics that Most Economists Don't Know
By Dean Baker
Economists are continually developing new statistical techniques, at least some of which
are useful for analyzing data in ways that allow us to learn new things about the world.
While developing these new techniques can often be complicated, there are many simple things
about the world that economists tend to overlook.
The most important example here is the housing bubble in the last decade. It didn't
require any complicated statistical techniques to recognize that house prices had sharply
diverged from their long-term pattern, with no plausible explanation in the fundamentals of
the housing market.
It also didn't require sophisticated statistical analysis to see the housing market was
driving the economy. At its peak in 2005 residential construction accounted for 6.8 percent
of GDP. This compares to a long-run average that is close to 4.0 percent. Consumption was
also booming, as people spent based on the bubble generated equity in their homes, pushing
the savings rate to a record low.
The existence of the bubble and the fact that it was driving the economy could both be
easily determined from regularly published government data, yet the vast majority of
economists were surprised when the bubble burst and it gave us the Great Recession. This
history should lead us to ask what other simple things economists are missing.
For this holiday season, I will give three big items that are apparently too simple for
economists to understand.
1) Profit shares have not increased much -- While there has been some redistribution in
before-tax income shares from labor to capital, it at most explains a small portion of the
upward redistribution of the last four decades. Furthermore, shares have been shifting back
towards labor in the last four years.
2) Returns to shareholders have been low by historical standards -- It is often asserted
that is an era of shareholder capitalism in which companies are being run to maximize returns
to shareholders. In fact, returns to shareholders have been considerably lower on average
than they were in the long Golden Age from 1947 to 1973.
3) Patent and copyright rents are equivalent to government debt as a future burden –
The burden that we are placing on our children through the debt of the government is a
frequent theme in economic reporting. However, we impose a far larger burden with
government-granted patent and copyright monopolies, although this literally never gets any
attention in the media.
To be clear, none of these points are contestable. All three can all be shown with widely
available data and/or basic economic logic. The fact that they are not widely recognized by
people in policy debates reflects the laziness of economists and people who write about
economic policy.
Profit Shares
It is common to see discussions where it is assumed that there has been a large shift from
wages to profits, and then a lot of head-scratching about why this occurred. In fact, the
shift from wages to profits has been relatively modest and all of it occurred after 2000,
after the bulk of the upward redistribution of income had already taken place.
If we just compare end points, the labor share of net domestic product was 64.0 percent in
2019, a reduction of 1.6 percentage points from its 65.6 percent share in 1979, before the
upward redistribution began. If, as a counter-factual, we assume that the labor share was
still at its 1979 level it would mean that wages would be 2.5 percent higher than they are
now. That is not a trivial effect, but it only explains a relatively small portion of the
upward redistribution over the last four decades.
It is also worth noting the timing of this shift in shares. There was no change in shares
from 1979 to 2000, the point at which most of the upward redistribution to the richest one
percent had already taken place. The shift begins in the recovery from the 2001
recession.
This was the period of the housing bubble. The reason why this matters is that banks and
other financial institutions were recording large profits on the issuance of mortgages that
subsequently went bad, leading to large losses in the years 2008-09. This means that a
substantial portion of the profits that were being booked in the years prior to the Great
Recession were not real profits.
It would be as though companies reported profits based on huge sales to a country that
didn't exist. Such reporting would make profits look good when the sales were being booked,
but then would produce large losses when the payments for the sales did not materialize,
since the buyer did not exist. It's not clear that when the financial industry books phony
profits it means there was a redistribution from labor to capital.[1]
There clearly was a redistribution from labor to capital in the weak labor market
following the Great Recession. Workers did not have enough bargaining power to capture any of
the gains from productivity growth in those years. That has been partially reversed in the
last four years as the labor share of net domestic income has risen by 2.4 percentage
points.[2] This still leaves some room for further increases to make up for the drop in labor
share from the Great Recession, but it does look as though the labor market is operating as
we would expect.
Returns to Shareholders Lag in the Period of Shareholder Capitalism
It is common for people writing on economics, including economists, to say that companies
have been focused on returns to shareholders in the last four decades in a way that was not
previously true. The biggest problem with this story is that returns to shareholders have
actually been relatively low in the last two decades.
If we take the average real rate of return over the last two decades, it has been 3.9
percent. That compares to rates of more than 8.0 percent in the fifties and sixties. Even
this 3.9 percent return required a big helping hand from the government in the form a
reduction in the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.
The figure for the last two decades is somewhat distorted by the fact that we were
reaching the peak of the stock bubble in the late 1990s, but the story is little changed if
we adjust for this fact. If we take the average real return from July of 1997, when the price
to earnings ratio was roughly the same as it is now, it is still just 5.7 percent, well below
the Golden Age average when companies were supposedly not being run to maximize shareholder
value.
It is striking that this drop in stock returns is so little noticed and basically does not
feature at all in discussions of the economy. Back in the late 1990s, it was nearly
universally accepted in public debates that stocks would provide a 7.0 percent real return on
average in public debates.
This was most evident in debates on Social Security, where both conservatives and liberals
assumed that the stock market would provide 7.0 percent real returns. Conservatives, like
Martin Feldstein, made this assumption as part of their privatization plans. Liberal
economists made the same assumption in plans put forward by the Clinton administration and
others to shore up the Social Security trust fund by putting a portion of it in the stock
market. The Congressional Budget Office even adopted the 7.0 percent real stock returns
assumption in its analysis of various Social Security reform proposals that called for
putting funds in the stock market.
Given the past history on stock returns and the widely held view that returns would
continue to average close to 7.0 percent over the long-term, the actual performance of stock
returns over the last two decades looks pretty disappointing from shareholders' perspective.
It certainly does not look like corporations are being run for their benefit, or if so, top
executives are doing a poor job.
One of the obvious factors depressing returns has been the extraordinary run up in price
to earnings ratios. A high price to earnings ratio (PE) effectively means that shareholders
have to pay a lot of money for a dollar in corporate profits. When PEs were lower, in the
1950s and 1960s, dividends yields were in the range of 3.0 -5.0 percent. In the recent years
they have been hovering near 2.0 percent. When the PE is over 30, as is now the case, paying
out a dividend of even 3.0 percent would essentially mean paying out all the company's
profits as dividends. Clearly that cannot happen, or at least not on a sustained basis.
While shareholders have not done well by historical standards in recent decades, CEO pay
has soared, with the ratio of the pay of CEOs to ordinary workers going from 20 or 30 to 1 in
the 1960s and 1970s, to 200 or 300 to 1 at present. There is a story that could reconcile
soaring CEO pay with historically low stock returns.
Corporations have increasingly turned to share buybacks as an alternative to dividends for
paying out money to shareholders. The process of buying back shares would drive up share
prices. Part of this is almost definitional, with fewer shares outstanding, the price per
share should go up. If buybacks push up share prices enough to raise the price to earnings
ratio, then in principle other investors should sell stock to bring the PE back to its prior
level. But if this doesn't happen, then buybacks could increase PEs.
That would of course imply huge irrationality in the stock market, but anyone who lived
through the 1990s stock bubble and the housing bubble in the last decade knows that large
investors can be exceedingly irrational for long periods of time. Anyhow, if share buybacks
do raise PEs there would be a clear story whereby CEOs could drive up their own pay, which
typically is largely in stock options, to the detriment of future shareholders, which would
explain both soaring CEO pay and declining returns to shareholders.
Whether this story of share buybacks raising PE is accurate would require some serious
research (I'd welcome references, if anyone has them), but what is beyond dispute is that the
last two decades have provided shareholders with relatively low returns. That seems hard to
reconcile with the often repeated story about this being a period of shareholder
capitalism.
Patents and Copyright Monopolies Are Implicit Government Debt
There is a whole industry dedicated to highlighting the size and growth of the government
debt, largely funded by the late private equity billionaire Peter Peterson. The leading news
outlets feel a need to regularly turn to the Peterson funded outfits to give us updates on
the size of the debt.
When presenting the horror story of a $20 trillion debt and the burden it will impose on
our children, there is never any mention of the burden created by patent and copyright
monopolies. This is an inexcusable inconsistency.
Patent and copyright monopolies are mechanisms that the government uses to pay for
services that are alternatives to direct spending. For example, instead of granting drug
companies patent monopolies and software developers copyright monopolies, the government
could just pay directly for the research and creative work that was the basis for these
monopolies. There are arguments as to why these monopolies might be better mechanisms than
direct funding, but these arguments don't change the fact they are mechanisms the government
uses for paying for services.
While we keep careful accounting of the direct spending, we pretend the implicit spending
by granting patent and copyright monopolies does not exist. This makes zero sense, especially
given the size of the rents being created by these monopolies.
In the case of prescription drugs alone, we will spend close to $400 billion (1.8 percent
of GDP) this year above the free market price, due to patent protections and other monopolies
granted by the federal government. This is considerably more than the $330 billion in
interest that the Congressional Budget Office projected we would spend on the $16.6 trillion
in publicly held debt in 2019.[3]
And this figure is just a fraction of the total rents from patent and copyright
monopolies, which would include most of the payments for medical equipment, computer software
and hardware, and recorded music and video material. Since these payments dwarf the size of
interest payments on the debt, it is difficult to understand how anyone concerned about the
burdens the government was creating could ignore patents and copyrights, while harping on
interest on the debt.
As I have often argued there are good reasons, especially in the case of prescription
drugs, for thinking that direct funding would be a more efficient mechanism than patent
monopolies. In the case of prescription drugs, direct funding would mean that all findings
would be immediately available to all researchers worldwide. If drugs were sold at free
market prices, it would no longer be a struggle to find ways to pay for them. And, we would
take away the incentive to push drugs in contexts where they are not appropriate, as happened
with the opioid crisis. (See "Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy
Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer," for a fuller discussion - it's free. * )
While the relative merits of patent/copyright monopolies and direct funding can be
debated, the logical point, that these monopolies are an implicit form of government debt,
cannot be. It shows the incredibly low quality of economic debate that this fact is not
widely recognized.
The Prospect for Simple Facts and Logic Entering Economic Debate in the Next Decade
The three issues noted here are already pretty huge in terms of our understanding of the
economy. The people who write in a wide range of areas should be aware of them, but with few
exceptions, they are not.
Unfortunately, that situation is not likely to change any time soon for a simple economic
reason, there is no incentive for people who write on economic issues to give these points
serious attention. They can continue to draw paychecks and get grants for doing what they are
doing. Why should they spend time addressing facts and logic that require they think
differently about the world?
As has been noted many times, there is no real consequence to economists and people
writing about the economy for being wrong. A custodian who doesn't clean the toilet gets
fired, but an economist who missed the housing bubble whose collapse led to the Great
Recession gets the "who could have known?" amnesty.
Given this structure of incentives, we should assume that economists and others who write
on economics will continue to ignore some of the most basic facts about the economy. That is
what economics tells us.
[1] Since income is supposed to be matched by output in the GDP accounts, the
corresponding phony entry on the output side would be the loans that subsequently went bad.
These loans were counted as a service when they were issued. Arguably, this was not accurate
accounting.
[2] This rise in labor share appears in the net domestic income calculation, but not in
the net domestic product figure. The reason is that there has been a sharp drop in the size
of the statistical discrepancy over the last four years, as output side GDP now exceeds the
income side measure. It is common to assume that the true figure lies somewhere in the
middle, which would mean the increase in labor share is likely less the 2.4 percentage points
calculated on the income side.
[3] This subtracts out the $50 billion in interest payments remitted from the Federal
Reserve Board.
This simple conception generalized deans
Bean hunt for rents
How might one do this
Well first make up a rate of interest
And take a system wide wage snap shot
From mines oceans forests and fields
Thru factories warehouses ultilities
boats and trains
To barber shops malt shops and convenience stores
Mark up the wage cells of your matrix
By your invented rate of interest
Now compare this vector to the 've tor of actual prices
You get a vector of rents aka profits of enterprise and residuals
An unprecedented frenzy of debt sales around the world is threatening to cool this year's
hot returns on corporate bonds.
Companies have sold a record $2.43 trillion so far this year across currencies, surpassing
previous full-year records. Investors rushed to snap up all this debt because they were
desperate for yield as central banks cut rates. That has pushed up valuations.
Now, some troubling signs for the direction of those valuations are converging. Recent
data suggest that the worst may be over for the global economy, which means many central
banks could have less reason next year to guide down borrowing costs. That will all make it
harder to top the double-digit returns that some investors scored on corporate bonds this
year.
---
Wealthy made some real money betting on our government bailouts, in Europe an the US. Now the
yields are gone, where to? China, the only rational central banker left means, park your
money in China.
What this means now is that things will only get more complicated for Beijing from here on
out. Chinese President Xi Jinping bet on letting the people of Hong Kong decide, and they
did. Only it was against him.
We'll return to the political situation in Hong Kong momentarily, but before we do,
another major development, this time on the business front.
On Tuesday, Alibaba executed a slam-dunk secondary offering in Hong Kong, raising $12.9
billion. That easily surpassed Uber's $8.1 billion IPO in May, making it the biggest public
offering of 2019. For those who were predicting the death of Hong Kong -- and they've been
doing that for decades, (and Kyle Bass and others are still at it) -- that again appears to
be premature.
---
Clueless reporting. Xi came out of this looking great. He has one country three systems, he
now has a sound central banking, investment is flowing in, not out. They are immune from
sanctions, and even the trade tariffs are expanding Chinese influence in Asia, Iran, Russia
and China can look forward to a new global banking system, absent the dollar. Belt and
suspenders is moving forward.
I like it, I have no priors, I can point this fact without contradiction. Go Xi.
Col. Lang wrote an excellent post on
'Who "debunked" the Biden conspiracy theories?' . I would like to suggest a companion post on
'Who defines "the national interests of the United States" '.
Fiona Hill appears to be part of the Borg, not really sure which part she's affiliated.
Some have called her a 'sleeper agent', but a sleeper for whom? British Intelligence agent of
influence? Or an Israeli agent of influence, or maybe a Daniel Pipes trained NEOCON agent of
influence? Any way one spins it, Fiona Hill has been undermining POTUS Trump while she was
part of his NSC and his advisory team. Why her intense hatred of Putin? Does he happen to
know through his nation's intelligence exactly who she is and whom she may be working on
behalf of? The Skripal incident showed just how much that the British Government and Crown
hate Russia. But why the intense British hatred of Russia, why?
Questions, so many questions regarding Ms. Hill and who she really works for.
"This was a debate over policy. Trump's critics may not have liked the policy he was
pushing. But as former Defense Intelligence Agency official Pat Lang noted on his blog last
week,
the statute in question applies only to "intelligence activities" but "does not include
differences of opinions concerning public policy matters."
That's what this fight is about, said Lang . Speaker after speaker at the hearings asserted
that Trump's views did not comport with official national policy. But the president sets that
policy, Lang said, not the diplomats.
"They think they are the people who set national policy and the president is this figurehead
who is guided by all these people around him who agree on everything," he said. "The president
doesn't need to use the State Department at all to conduct foreign policy." ' Paul Mulshine
-------------
Actually, I was too minimal in speaking of "diplomats." Vindman is not a diplomat and there
are many other actors in this drama of Borgist angst (foreign policy establishment ) who are
not diplomats.
For one thing a large percentage of the Drones at the State Department are civil service
employees rather than Foreign Service Officers, and although they do not play well together
they agree on the ultimate authority of the Supremacy Clause (non-existent) in the US
Constitution that gives the State Department dominion over all the Lord created. A career
ambassador's wife once lectured me that the US Army should change the cap badge that officers
wear because it looks too much like the Great Seal of the United States which in the State
Department can only be displayed by Ambassadors. I told her that she should petition the
Secretary of the Army in this matter.
Various departments of government, media, academia, thinktankeries, etc., all have heavy
infestations of folks who went to graduate school together in poly sci in all its branches, or
who wish to be thought worthy of such attendance. They specialize in group think, conformity,
and conformism, even to the solemn dress they affect. The four in hand tie knot is pretty much
mandatory for serious consideration for inclusion in the Borg. It indicates a certain preppy
insouciance and faux disregard for details of dress.
Trump's casual disregard for all that enrages the Borg who thought they had "won it all"
long ago and that they would have a Borgist neocon to deal with in Hillary.
Hillary's Foundation has lost millions recently, which has Hillary pursing her lips like
she's been using a lemon for her lipstick. I mean, worse than fish-lips, Hillary's pursing
expression.
Too bad that we can't form some cement shoes for the Borg and toss them into the east
river AKA the Atlantic, or send them back to hell from where they originated!
OT:
This afternoon my wife and I turned on the TV to watch football. We were flipping through
channels and came upon some local ABC affiliate (WMUR) which had on a documentary which
mentioned the Medal of Honor and a Catholic chaplain in Vietnam. Needless to say we stayed on
that channel. Long story short, it was one of the most powerful things we've ever watched. We
were both in tears by the end (nb: I don't cry easily) and we were changed from having
watched it. We immediately went online to purchase copies for family members. It was recently
released.
As the Borg like to say "We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our
own." They have done this with the four in hand tie knot which was previously worn by giants
like George Kennon and Chip Bohlen. Yet now, the midgetry prevails.
Colonel...This is another Reason why I appreciate your levels of Experience and knowledge
with SST..Thank you for doing that...I always come away with New Insight..and Understanding
of Real Dynamics..what has Progressively Developed inside the State.Department.with its
Influence On so Much POLICY...and .is as You say...The BORG..and Their Own Culture.your
Article put that all into a Big Picture for Me..(Connecting the Data..) .It.as you aptly
Described. is a Universal.Sect..and...At The National Level...They are Cyber Borgs..Shciff
Shapers..and that Whole Colony has Been Exposed.,,, Bad Products and All....
Fiona Hill appears to be part of the Borg, not really sure which part she's affiliated.
Some have called her a 'sleeper agent', but a sleeper for whom? British Intelligence agent of
influence? Or an Israeli agent of influence, or maybe a Daniel Pipes trained NEOCON agent of
influence? Any way one spins it, Fiona Hill has been undermining POTUS Trump while she was
part of his NSC and his advisory team. Why her intense hatred of Putin? Does he happen to
know through his nation's intelligence exactly who she is and whom she may be working on
behalf of? The Skripal incident showed just how much that the British Government and Crown
hate Russia. But why the intense British hatred of Russia, why?
Questions, so many questions regarding Ms. Hill and who she really works for.
First, Trump was going to destroy democracy. That didn't persuade voters. Now it's he'll
destroy civilization itself...and the planet. When that doesn't work where will they go next?
He'll destroy to Solar System? The Universe? How do such people get into power in the first
place? Oh yeah, San Francisco.
Translation: The Pelosi Crime Family will be out of business if DJT is re elected. The
days of foreign aid kickbacks and influence peddling will come to an end. Who does this
******* Trump think he is putting country before personal gain.
Bread and circus. The swamp is full and Clinton is not in jail. The southern border is
wide open. We're sending more troops to the Middle East. The status quo is completely intact.
If it weren't for the hysterics you'd think Obama was still president. The only thing that's
changed is Trump's wife doesn't have a ****.
Federal authorities have indicted two Russian cybercriminals who allegedly lead a
shadowy organization called "Evil Corp" that has stolen more than $100 million using a
powerful malware that has spread to more than 40 countries.
now... how come the FBI, (NOT to mention, CIA, and the rest of the alphabet soup agencies)
are not spending their efforts and monies to pursue this ENRON, (LOGO LOOK-A-LIKE) company,
instead of initiating an illegal coup d'etat against the president of USA?
-----
Members of Evil Corp are living a lavish lifestyle, funded by the life savings of their
victims.
If Maksim Yakubets, who used the online identity of 'Aqua', ever leaves the safety of
Russia he will be arrested and extradited to the US.
Well duh.... lol !
Why would he....????
Wouldn't it make sense to make a deal with... "lord Putin" to cease this shield of
protection ?.... hmmm I wonder why...
Ask some Biden guy...
Oh wait... the US Gov. and alphabet agencies are supposed to be doing so, yes ?
Hmm ever wonder why google changed its name to "alphabet"... suspicious minds want to know
... -lol
St. Nancy the hypocrite a reporter asked Pelosi yesterday if she acts from hatred of Trump.
She responded that having been raised as a Catholic she does not hate anyone because we are
taught to hate the sin and love the sinner. Well, pilgrims, Catholics are expected to practice
their religion through both faith and deeds and to accept the teaching of the Church...
SOFTWARE. A law has passed requiring electronic gadgets to have Russia software in them. The
BBC idiotically
says : "Others have raised concerns that the Russian-made software could be used to spy on
users". "Idiotically" because one of the reasons for the law is
that US-made software
is
spying on users .
I think Warren is running for treasury secretary in a Biden administration. The theory
being that that will be her reward for stopping Sanders. Everybody has an angle. Except
Bernie. Can someone show me his angle?
-two, how does Warren look in the light of Sanders and a few newer types like AOC or Omar?
If there is no Sanders, she is the nominal left, a former Republican which shows how right
wing Team Blue is. Zebras don't change their stripes, but I think what is and isn't
acceptable does change. The three I mentioned moved the perceptions of enough people who
otherwise would support Warren. Warren is a day late and a dollar short in 2019. Okay, she's
$0.02, but she is still short of where she would need to be to take her advantages over
Sanders to next level.
-Misinterpreting popularity. One of the more detailed ratings of Warren a few years
indicated she wasn't wildly popular in Taxachusetts, but she was very popular with a narrow
subset of women around the country. In a sense, she is trying to grow from this group instead
of understanding a big tent is the only way forward if you aren't an effective incumbent or
VP. Its similar to Clinton's 90's worship of "soccer moms" (surburban white women), basically
the only group that outpaced or met expectations in support for Bill and company. Instead of
recognizing problems with the generic Democratic coalition, they worked to make their friends
really like them.
-not recognizing, the importance of sitting out in 2016. She didn't win friends. She
relied on msm punditry instead of recognizing politicians and elections are about pushing,
not waiting for David Brooks to weigh in. She failed a basic leadership test because she was
afraid of offending Hillary Clinton who was going to collapse over the finish line and then
have been on the defense before she was even inaugurated.
Clinton apparently has super-special powers for sniffing out Russian mischief-makers that
mere mortals like us cannot comprehend.
Also, she says that she refuses to go away because "that is what her adversaries want". I
knew that Hillary was a narcissist, but this takes being a sore loser to a whole other level.
Somebody like this as president would be just as bad as Trump, and Hillary would have the
entire DNC leadership apparatus to carry out her royal decrees.
It has long required the support of the wealthy -- and a certain level of personal wealth --
to run for president of the United States. In 2016, billions of
dollars were raised by Donald Trump's and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaigns. But the
rich control much
of this cash flow . In 2014, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the
top .01 percent of all income earners in the United States accounted for 29 percent of all
political committee fundraising.
There are many reasons why this is a dangerous thing. But a big one is accountability.
"My party's not known for worrying about the deficit or the debt too much but it's time
for us to start getting into that," Mayor Pete says in NH town hall in response to voter
anxious about debt. Says everything his campaign has proposed is paid for.
Mayor Pete expanded on this in the gaggle: "I believe every Presidency of my lifetime
has been an example of deficits growing under Republican government and shrinking under
Democratic government, but my party's got to get more comfortable talking about this
issue"
"And we shouldn't be afraid to demonstrate that we have the revenue to cover every cost
that we incur in the investments that we're proposing."
Looks like MMT is not a McKinsey-approved management tool.
Buttigieg (D)(2): "The trips to war zones that Pete Buttigieg rarely talks about" [ABC].
Missed this at the time: "But what the 37-year-old South Bend mayor didn't mention, and
virtually never discusses in his run for the nation's highest office, were other trips to
Afghanistan and Iraq years prior to his military deployment, when he was a 20-something
civilian contractor for the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company . Buttigieg worked
for McKinsey from 2007 to 2010, after completing post-graduate studies at Oxford. In his
memoir, 'Shortest Way Home,' he mentions his involvement in domestic projects for the firm like
doing energy efficiency research in the U.S., and goes into particular detail about one that
involved analyzing North American grocery prices. But when it comes to his work abroad with
McKinsey, he only drops hints about working on 'war zone economic development to help grow
private sector employment' in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also refers to a 'safe house' in
Baghdad. The book doesn't say exactly when or how long Buttigieg was in either country." •
So Mayo Pete was (?) a spook? No reporting on this; the story just disappeared.
"My party's not known for worrying about the deficit or the debt too much but it's time
for us to start getting into that," Mayor Pete says in NH town hall in response to voter
anxious about debt. Says everything his campaign has proposed is paid for.
Mayor Pete expanded on this in the gaggle: "I believe every Presidency of my lifetime
has been an example of deficits growing under Republican government and shrinking under
Democratic government, but my party's got to get more comfortable talking about this
issue"
"And we shouldn't be afraid to demonstrate that we have the revenue to cover every cost
that we incur in the investments that we're proposing."
Looks like MMT is not a McKinsey-approved management tool.
Buttigieg (D)(2): "The trips to war zones that Pete Buttigieg rarely talks about" [ABC].
Missed this at the time: "But what the 37-year-old South Bend mayor didn't mention, and
virtually never discusses in his run for the nation's highest office, were other trips to
Afghanistan and Iraq years prior to his military deployment, when he was a 20-something
civilian contractor for the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company . Buttigieg worked
for McKinsey from 2007 to 2010, after completing post-graduate studies at Oxford. In his
memoir, 'Shortest Way Home,' he mentions his involvement in domestic projects for the firm like
doing energy efficiency research in the U.S., and goes into particular detail about one that
involved analyzing North American grocery prices. But when it comes to his work abroad with
McKinsey, he only drops hints about working on 'war zone economic development to help grow
private sector employment' in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also refers to a 'safe house' in
Baghdad. The book doesn't say exactly when or how long Buttigieg was in either country." •
So Mayo Pete was (?) a spook? No reporting on this; the story just disappeared.
"... I was shocked and disappointed that the three "constitutional scholars" called by the Democratic majority were shrill, angry, exaggerated and thoroughly partisan. Their job was not to discuss the evidence against President Trump, but to provide the panel and the American people with clear and dispassionate insight into the minds of the Founders, the history of the three previous impeachment proceedings and how it applies to the current matter. ..."
"... In contrast, Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, at least grasped the danger of partisan hijacking. With no small bit of humor, he noted the angry mood that has infected the nation, joking that even his dog is angry. He focused on the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, arguing it was the closest parallel to the present situation with Donald Trump--precisely because of the heavy partisanship in the current situation. ..."
"... The Founders did not contemplate nor provide for this post WWII expansion of the unelected and equally unresponsive fourth branch of government. We can thank JFK for weaponizing them once he granted government employees the right to unionize. And that is what we saw on display yesterday- weaponized government workers versus the rest of us. ..."
"... Let us recall that during the Cold War, in fact from 1920 to 1991 , Ukraine was part of the USSR. Did this fact damage U.S. national security or the U.S. national interest? Not to any significant degree, as betoken by the fact that the U.S. is widely acknowledged to have won the Cold War, as betoken by the breakup of the USSR. ..."
Having spent most of Wednesday listening to the "scholars" testifying about the Constitutional
standards for impeachment, I came away more convinced than ever that Alexander Hamilton was
absolutely right when he warned in Federalist Papers 65 of the danger of the matter of
impeachment of a President becoming hostage to partisan passions.
Hamilton wrote:
"A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired
than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction
are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from
the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar
propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the
society itself. The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the
passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or
inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions,
and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on
the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be
regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of
innocence or guilt.
"The delicacy and magnitude of a trust which so deeply concerns the political reputation and
existence of every man engaged in the administration of public affairs, speak for themselves.
The difficulty of placing it rightly, in a government resting entirely on the basis of
periodical elections, will as readily be perceived, when it is considered that the most
conspicuous characters in it will, from that circumstance, be too often the leaders or the
tools of the most cunning or the most numerous faction, and on this account, can hardly be
expected to possess the requisite neutrality towards those whose conduct may be the subject of
scrutiny."
Hamilton was primarily discussing the role of the Senate as the impartial jury hearing
evidence of impeachable crimes following the passage of articles of impeachment by the House of
Representatives. But the fundamental issue of partisan fury is really what is at stake.
I expected partisan fury from the Democratic and Republican members of the House Judiciary
Committee, but I was shocked and disappointed that the three "constitutional scholars" called
by the Democratic majority were shrill, angry, exaggerated and thoroughly partisan. Their job
was not to discuss the evidence against President Trump, but to provide the panel and the
American people with clear and dispassionate insight into the minds of the Founders, the
history of the three previous impeachment proceedings and how it applies to the current
matter.
I was most shocked by the shrill and anger from Dr. Karlan of Stanford, who is clearly an
accomplished legal scholar, but let her partisan passions color her presentation in a way that
only contributed to the sense that the critical issue of presidential impeachment has been
thoroughly hijacked--as Hamilton warned--by partisanship, factionalism and ulterior
motives.
In contrast, Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, at least grasped the danger of
partisan hijacking. With no small bit of humor, he noted the angry mood that has infected the
nation, joking that even his dog is angry. He focused on the impeachment of President Andrew
Johnson, arguing it was the closest parallel to the present situation with Donald
Trump--precisely because of the heavy partisanship in the current situation.
Turley also expressed alarm at the speed with which the impeachment has been carried out and
at the lack of consideration of exculpatory evidence. In his tone, he brought a degree of
serious scholarship to an otherwise kangaroo process. And to make matters clear, he told the
panel that he did not support President Trump, did not vote for him, and is not himself caught
up in the passions of partisanship on either side of the aisle. A President should not be
impeached over an abrasive personality and a tendency to punch back first and ask questions
later. If that was the standard, Donald Trump would be guilty as charged.
The denigrating of the impeachment process into a partisan circus is not what the Founders
intended. Hamilton spoke clearly but the Democrats and their constitutional scholars were tone
deaf. Very disappointing for our nation.
Hamilton was perhaps the greatest genius America has produced, with the possible exception of
Ben Franklin. They would both be shocked and appalled by these partisan "scholars". Good God,
the level of intelligence in this nation has fallen precipitously since those days. Almost as
much as our morals.
Open hearings allow all of us to make up our own minds- about both content and delivery. This
was a major fail yesterday. Turley has been warning about the expansive growth of the
unelected fourth branch of government even during the Obama era when he was testifying
against activist interpretation of express Obamacare terminology.
The Founders did not contemplate nor provide for this post WWII expansion of the unelected
and equally unresponsive fourth branch of government. We can thank JFK for weaponizing them
once he granted government employees the right to unionize. And that is what we saw on
display yesterday- weaponized government workers versus the rest of us.
Where do we go next is the only discussion worthy of having. We should by now have moved
well beyond shock and alarm. How do we limit and diminish a weaponized, unelected government
workforce, who can over turn every single fundamental precept of our constitutional framework
of governance. Suggestions please - we are at a critical juncture.
Action plan: Identify and defang. What say you, Professor Turley?
1. Col. Lang wrote an excellent post on
'Who "debunked" the Biden conspiracy theories?' .
I would like to suggest a companion post on 'Who defines "the national interests of the
United States" '.
Motivation: Per the number one story of the 2019-12-04 NYT ,
House Democrats on Tuesday (12-03) asserted that
President Trump abused his power
by pressuring Ukraine to help him in the 2020 presidential election,
releasing an impeachment report that found
the president "placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States ."
Leaving aside the obvious politics of this, I repeat the question in the title
of my suggested post.
The assumption of Dems and most of the MSM seems to be that Ukraine is somehow "vital to the
U.S. national security".
Really?
Let us recall that during the Cold War, in fact from 1920 to
1991 , Ukraine was part of the USSR.
Did this fact damage U.S. national security or the U.S. national interest?
Not to any significant degree, as betoken by the fact that the U.S. is widely acknowledged to
have won the Cold War, as betoken by the breakup of the USSR.
So if Ukraine was not essential to U.S. national security when the USSR was a very real and
potent threat,
why is Ukraine now considered, by so many of the ersatz "elite", now "vital to U.S. ..."?
I think that is a question worth justifying and asking.
2. Over and over again, we are told that the request for investigations of Ukraine are
purely "for Trump's personal political gain".
Again, really?
Again, citing Col. Lang's excellent post
'Who "debunked" the Biden conspiracy theories?' ,
there are plenty of questions about the U.S./Ukraine connection, and related events in
Ukraine, that deserve to be asked and answered.
And not just by the MSM, that has made it more than clear that they are only interested in,
and willing to, give one side of the story vis-a-vis Ukraine.
C.f. John Solomon's columns, where he has pointed out many issues warranting
investigation,
also the issues Rudy Giuliani keeps raising.
Here is a suggestion:
The left in America has a policy of floating public petitions on various issues, inviting
Americans to "sign up" to endorse their favorite points of view.
I think it would be good if a petition could be floated
That would make it clear that Trump's request for investigations was not just
"for his personal political gain",
but something many Americans desire, but that the MSM and Dems have stonewalled,
calling such concerns "debunked conspiracy theories."
There aren't enough flags in the world for Nancy Pelosi to surround herself with that can
mask the blatant tyranny of her majority's actions in the House of Representatives. I've
never witnessed so much intellectual dishonesty, hypocrisy and destruction of democracy as I
have since the POTUS' stunning victory in 2016. Leftists point to Clinton's popular vote lead
in that election, ignoring that Trump shrewdly campaigned with the Constitutional reality in
mind of the role the Electoral College plays in the outcome.
Democrats are driving us perilously close towards another civil war, which leads me to
take back everything I ever said about gun control. I would've never dreamed before now that
there could come a time when we'd have to take up arms against tyranny in the United States.
Tragically, it just may come to that before too long if the corruption, unfairness and abuse
continues.
I disagree. I believe Dr. Karlan of Stanford and the other two professors, Noah Feldman of
Harvard and Michael Gerhardt The University of North Carolina School of Law, have done a
great service to the Republic. To wit:
1. They have shown that all three, but especially Dr. Karlan, are, due to their temperament,
completely unqualified to be elevated to the Federal Judiciary - at any level.
2. They have shown that Academia, espeically as represented by professors from two elite,
private, tax exempt institutions, are peopled by individuals who are both vicious and highly
partisan.
3. That these bastions of alleged elite and principled thought, which consume billions in
direct and indirect federal subsidies, are both lead by and produce second rate leaders
fosued upon conformity to ideology. They are unconcerned with things such as economic
influences on political events nor conditions of US citizens in our federal republic. They
show more admiration of the conduct of foreign affairs by an institutional bureaucracy loyal
to itself and it's interpretation of the Constitution than they do to the powers
specificly granted to the elected President therein.
These are great services from the Triumvirate of Academia, for they show that we can
safely cut these elite instituion subsidies by the billions; that degrees given by these
instituions are of dubious value; and that firms hiring employees educated there my bring the
closed minded partisianship and all that entails into the workplace. So thank you Dr. Kaplan,
Mr. Feldman and Mr. Gerhadt. You have all done us all a great service.
To Donald J. Trump I reccomned you call Betsy Devos and tell her to double down
immediately. Then you need to direct every agency to audit every grant given to every one of
these universities to see that they are actually following the law. Since, unlike aid to
Ukriane, these dispursements of the taxpayer's money DO come with strings attached.
"This is not just about our national interests to protect elections or make sure Ukraine
stays strong and fights the Russians so we don't have to fight them here"
smart but not wise
I first became aware of Karlan during Bush v. Gore.
She clerked for Justice Blackmun, who said she wrote the dissent for him in Bowers v,
Hardwick. That dissent eventually became law when Bowers was overruled in Lawrence v.
Texas.
Karlan told Politico in 2009: "It's no secret at all that I'm counted among the LGBT
crowd". She has described herself as an example of a "snarky, bisexual, Jewish women".
I have a question for those knowledgeable about Constitutional law.
If the president is impeached would he be able to use all the facilities of the executive
branch to aid in his defence? For example, to use the FBI or Justice dept to investigate his
accusers. On the one hand it seems to me that this could be allowed as being a defence of the
office of the presidency; on the other hand I could see where it would be considered as using
his office for personal "gain".
If this question has been answered in another post I apologize.
There must be something else going on between now and Christmas for the Democrats to be in
such a rush to Impeach the President with no fact based witnesses within their case. Whatever
it may be it must be a doozy. Listening to legal scholars yesterday left me thinking, Wow,
now I know what the Salem Witch Trials were like with 3/4 stating hang him in many ways and
1/4 offering reasonable advice as he believed there was no case but maybe there will be if
they try harder. So it's off to the Senate and that is not a slam dunk.
"... There is no longer any doubt. The people who are not elected and don't represent the American people are lunatics. Look at the hubris on display here with Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan. ..."
"... With these low grade sub-standard people like Karlan it really is time to drain the swamp but make certain the drain isn't plugged. Keep in mind too that this impeachment movement against President Trump is being led by Jewish participants including Kaplan who is Jewish. ..."
"... This would make sense considering American Jewish oligarchs are working with Ukrainian Jewish oligarchs. It is pathological as to just how much Jews hate Russia. ..."
There is no longer any doubt. The people who are not elected and don't
represent the American people are lunatics. Look at the hubris on display here with Stanford
law professor Pamela Karlan.
Is it any wonder that today in America
universitystudents are confused and compromised . It is probably true to a certain extent that
what Kaplan is saying in public is probably to degrade President Trump on Ukraine, however, the
Russians are paying very close attention.
These are the kind of "low-intellect dinosaurs" behind U.S. foreign policy calling
themselves "professors" who are responsible for "educating" American youth.
With these low grade sub-standard people like Karlan it really is time to drain the swamp
but make certain the drain isn't plugged. Keep in mind too that this impeachment movement
against President Trump is being led
by Jewish participants including Kaplan who is Jewish.
This would make sense considering American Jewish oligarchs are working with Ukrainian
Jewish oligarchs. It is pathological as to just how much Jews hate Russia.
"... What is the Democratic Party today? Well, it's the cheerleading squad for "seventeen" government agencies that add up to the craftily-labeled "intel community ," a warm-and-fuzzy coalition of snoops, false witnesses, rogue lawfare cadres, seditionists, and bad-faith artists working sedulously to hide their previous misdeeds with ever-fresh ones. They're the party against free speech, the party against due process of law, the party determined to provoke war with Russia. They're the party of sexual confusion, sexual hysteria, and sexual conflict, the party of kangaroo courts, cancel culture, erasing boundaries (including national borders), and of making up rules for all that as they go along -- like the Nazis and Soviets used to do. The ideas and policies they advocate are so comprehensively crazy that their old support of slavery looks quaintly straightforward in comparison. ..."
"... The party's propaganda arms at The New York Times , the WashPo , and cable news networks worked up a frenzy of distractions and ruses this past week -- for instance the "bombshell" that International-Man-of-Mystery Joseph Mifsud was not a hireling of the FBI. Of course, nobody ever claimed he was. Rather, he is suspected of being an agent of the Italian intel service with links to British intel, both used by the CIA as beards for its nefarious activities around its own election meddling of 2016. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Democratic caucus has been busy with ersatz impeachment proceedings, which are invidiously scheduled to continue next week as a smokescreen to conceal the Horowitz findings . It's been a frantic campaign for them at a fraught moment in this long saga -- but the odor of desperation is thick and rank. ..."
The last time the Democratic Party blew up in a presidential election year was 1860. It had evolved from Jefferson's 1800 bloc
of yeoman farmers to Andrew Jackson's rowdy caucus of frontier populists in the 1830s, and settled into a slough of pro-slavery apologists
by the 1850s, including two do-nothing Democratic presidents, Pierce and Buchanan. The party held a nominating convention in the
spring of 1860 and couldn't come up with a candidate when a claque of southern "fire-eaters" walked out. They tried again a few months
later and cracked up into three separate parties with three nominees -- and of course Mr. Lincoln won the election. The result was
the bloodiest war in US history.
That's one way to drain a swamp. Historical obfuscators might say the Civil War was a lofty, legalistic quarrel over "state's
rights," but of course it was really about the intolerable depravity of slavery. A hundred years later, the mysterious inversions
of history converted the old slaver's party into the Civil Rights party. That had a good fifty-year run. It included a hearty side-dish
of anti-war sentiment, and a general disposition against the Big Brother treatment of citizens, including especially the overreach
of the CIA and the FBI.
What is the Democratic Party today? Well, it's the cheerleading squad for "seventeen" government agencies that add up to the craftily-labeled
"intel community ," a warm-and-fuzzy coalition of snoops, false witnesses, rogue lawfare cadres, seditionists, and bad-faith artists
working sedulously to hide their previous misdeeds with ever-fresh ones. They're the party against free speech, the party against
due process of law, the party determined to provoke war with Russia. They're the party of sexual confusion, sexual hysteria, and
sexual conflict, the party of kangaroo courts, cancel culture, erasing boundaries (including national borders), and of making up
rules for all that as they go along -- like the Nazis and Soviets used to do. The ideas and policies they advocate are so comprehensively
crazy that their old support of slavery looks quaintly straightforward in comparison.
It's taken a while for the full efflorescence of these political pathologies to present. But now they are finally on display for
all to see in what is supposed to be a climactic impeachment melodrama. The impeachment process itself has revealed the party's genius
for inventing new debaucheries of law and government misconduct -- the latest being Rep Adam Schiff's blatantly illegal cadging of
his opponents' phone logs. And now, after three years of unchallenged wickedness, they literally face the moment of truth.
That is, when all the many players in this grand game of Gotcha have to face the consequences of what they have done. The Horowitz
report is necessarily limited to the DOJ inspector general's narrow mission scope: the IG can only interview current employees of
the agency and its stepchild, the FBI, which means that key players in the Gotcha game such as former FBI director Comey, former
acting director McCabe, fired special agent Peter Stzrok and notably ex-CIA director John Brennan were outside of Mr. Horowitz's
sphere of operations. His scope was also supposedly limited to the issues around FISA warrant mischief -- though those complex shenanigans
may have led the IG to other related dodges, cons, and crimes outright. The IG has no real law enforcement powers. He can only refer
or recommend further action. Nevertheless, a great miasma of anxiety oppresses the Democratic Party now as it awaits whatever Mr.
Horowitz has to say about these matters.
The party's propaganda arms at The New York Times , the WashPo , and cable news networks worked up a frenzy of distractions and
ruses this past week -- for instance the "bombshell" that International-Man-of-Mystery Joseph Mifsud was not a hireling of the FBI.
Of course, nobody ever claimed he was. Rather, he is suspected of being an agent of the Italian intel service with links to British
intel, both used by the CIA as beards for its nefarious activities around its own election meddling of 2016. House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi's Democratic caucus has been busy with ersatz impeachment proceedings, which are invidiously scheduled to continue next week
as a smokescreen to conceal the Horowitz findings . It's been a frantic campaign for them at a fraught moment in this long saga --
but the odor of desperation is thick and rank.
Of course, behind the Horowitz report loom the specters of Barr & Durham. Whatever they've been up to has been hermetically sealed
in a globe of silence even more oppressive and nightmarish for the Dems than the IG's inquiry. Barr & Durham are able to make things
stick, most crucially genuine criminal culpability for the entire RussiaGate fiasco and all of its offshoots, including the most
recent "Whistleblower" caper -- a patently treasonous scheme. Who knows if and when indictments start raining down, but there's a
chance that it will be a very hard rain indeed.
I'm not so sure that the Democratic Party can survive the washing away of its beloved narrative by that hard rain.
They are also faced with a field of manifestly lame presidential candidates, especially the current leader of the pack, Joe Biden,
fumbling and doddering his way down the campaign trail in an apparent effort to dodge being investigated for the grifts of his Veep
years. All this may be enough to put the party down, like a dog that has peed on the carpet one time too many. Somebody else, from
some other hastily assembled party, may have to stand against Mr. Trump in 2020.
"What is the Democratic Party today? Well, it's the cheerleading squad for "seventeen" government agencies that add up to the
craftily-labeled "intel community," a warm-and-fuzzy coalition of snoops, false witnesses, rogue lawfare cadres, seditionists,
and bad-faith artists working sedulously to hide their previous misdeeds with ever-fresh ones. They're the party against free
speech, the party against due process of law, the party determined to provoke war with Russia. They're the party of sexual confusion,
sexual hysteria, and sexual conflict, the party of kangaroo courts, cancel culture, erasing boundaries (including national borders),
and of making up rules for all that as they go along -- like the Nazis and Soviets used to do. The ideas and policies they advocate
are so comprehensively crazy that their old support of slavery looks quaintly straightforward in comparison."
Joe Biden I keep saying that Joe Biden is IMO a nasty bully masquerading as a benevolent,
highly experienced and wise curmudgeon with deep roots in the Labor Unions. He is none of those
things. In evidence of that he yesterday advanced menacingly toward a man who had the audacity
to challenge the "Joe Biden" show and narrative.
This was in Iowa. The man told him he (Biden) was too old to be president (He is). The man
questioned the probity of Joe's narcotics addled son''s appointment to the board of directors
of a corrupt enterprise in Ukraine.
Joe was visible enraged and it seemed for a minute that he would attack this citizen.
e at The American Conservative say we're for a 'Main Street' conservatism . There's
perhaps no better example of what that means than this 10 minute segment from
Tucker Carlson's primetime show last night. Carlson, chairman of TAC's advisory board, dared to
go after GOP mega-donor Paul Singer for his thoroughly awful "vulture capitalism" practices --
and the Republican politicians who take his money and remain silent. It was a truly remarkable
segment, especially to appear on Fox News.
For the uninitiated, Paul Singer is a New York hedge fund manager who has made billions by
purchasing sovereign debt from financially distressed countries. He'd offer struggling foreign
governments a lifeline for their debt, then hound them with costly litigation to make a
handsome profit on repayment with interest, not unlike a vulture feeding off a carcass --
hence, vulture capitalism. Singer's vulture capitalism isn't limited to foreign countries,
though; his hedge fund, Elliot Management, also racks up quite the profit by "investing" in
struggling U.S. companies, often off-shoring good paying American jobs in the process.
Much of Carlson's exposé centered around Singer's involvement with the outdoors
retailer Cabela's. For many Americans, Cabela's is a yearly staple for hunting and fishing
gear. For residents of Sidney, Nebraska, population 6,282 and Cabela's corporate headquarters,
it was the economic engine of the flourishing town. For Singer, it was yet another way to add
to his bloated net worth. Elliot Management took an ownership stake in Cabela's in 2015, and
quickly pushed the board to sell the company. Despite its relative health, Cabela's caved to
Elliot Management's wishes, and sold to competitor Bass Pro Shops a year later. Just one week
after the merger, amidst surging Cabela's stock prices, Singer's hedge fund cashed out -- to
the tune of $90 million up front.
Of course, things didn't work out so well for the town of Sidney. With Bass Pro Shops taking
ownership of Cabela's, many good paying jobs in Sidney disappeared -- and many residents were
forced to move. Those who didn't leave town quick enough were stuck, as housing prices
collapsed. Sidney, once one of the rare thriving small towns surviving the "brain drain," found
itself decimated by a New York billionaire who probably never stepped foot in a Cabela's.
Yet the story is not just about another small town fallen prey to a changing economy,
because Singer is not just another hedge fund manager. He was the second biggest donor to the
GOP in 2016, and has pumped millions of dollars into Republican campaigns. Accordingly, he
demands outsized influence over Republican congressmen -- as Carlson noted, Nebraska Sen. Ben
Sasse has been silent on the situation in Sidney. But a closer look at Singer's political
investments is revealing as to his brand of "conservatism". He has bankrolled numerous neoconservative
foreign policy shops , advocated for more
permissive immigration policies , and has been a longtime
supporter of pro-LGBT organizations and causes . It's no surprise that he vehemently
opposed President Trump's ascendance in 2015.
If you're not yet DVR-ing the 8pm Fox News timeslot, you should be. Last night's segment was
the latest evidence that Tucker Carlson is perhaps the only voice on cable news unafraid to
call out those on his own side -- even those who are very powerful like Paul Singer. For too
long, conservatives have been beholden to moneyed interests that feel no obligation to the
country around them. 'Main Street' conservatism, by contrast, sides with the people in places
like Sidney, Nebraska over the culturally progressive, interventionist, market absolutists in
the centers of power -- regardless of which major party receives their dollars.
about the
author Emile A. Doak, senior development associate, coordinates The American
Conservative 's fundraising efforts. He is a graduate of Georgetown University, where he
studied political philosophy and theology. Prior to joining TAC , Emile worked in
education, teaching and managing college preparation courses for high school students. He and
his wife reside in their hometown of Herndon, Virginia.
"... "Fifty years of shareholder primacy," wrote the Financial Times, "has fostered short-termism and created an environment of popular distrust of big business." ..."
"... The rise of stock options to compensate corporate managers entrenched shareholder value by aligning the interests of managers and shareholders. Companies began sacrificing productive investments, environmental protections, and worker security to ensure shareholder returns were maximised. The fear of stock market verdicts on quarterly reports left them no choice. ..."
"... This account fits a widespread belief that financiers and rentiers mangled the postwar golden era of capitalism. More importantly, it suggests a simple solution: liberate companies from the demands of shareholders. Freed from the short-term pursuit of delivering shareholder returns, companies could then return to long-term plans, productive investments, and higher wages. ..."
"... In the 1960s, a group of firms called the conglomerates were pioneering many of the practices that later became associated with the shareholder revolution: aggressive mergers, divestitures, Leverage buy-outs (LBOs), and stock repurchasing. ..."
"... These firms, such as Litton Industries, Teledyne and LTV revolutionised corporate strategy by developing new techniques to systematically raise money from financial markets. They wheeled and dealed their divisions and used them to tap financial markets to finance further predatory acquisitions. Instead of relying on profits from productive operations, they chased speculative transactions on financial markets to grow. ..."
"... With fortunes to be made and lost, no manager could ignore the stock market. They became increasingly concerned with their position on financial markets. It was in this context that corporate capitalism first spoke of the desire to 'maximise shareholder value'. While sections of the corporate establishment were put on the defensive, the main reason for this was not that shareholders imposed their preferences on management. Instead, it was competitor managers using the shareholder discourse as a resource to expand and gain control over other firms. Capital markets became the foundation of a new form of financialised managerial power. ..."
"... Third, the notion of shareholder primacy helped to offload managerial responsibility. An amorphous and often anonymous 'shareholder pressure' became the explanation for all manner of managerial malpractice. Managers lamented the fact they had no choice but to disregard workers and other stakeholders because of shareholder power. Rhetorically, shareholders were deemed responsible for corporate problems. Yet in practice, managers, more often than not, enrolled shareholders into their own projects, using the newly-formed alliance with shareholders to pocket huge returns for themselves. ..."
"... Amorphous? Anonymous? Anybody who faced one of Milken's raiders, or paid Icahn's Greenmail, would disagree. Nelson Putz, er, Peltz just forced P&G to start eating into the foundation of the business to feed his greed. There's nothing amorphous or anonymous about activist shareholders, especially when they take over a company and start carving it up like a Thanksgiving turkey. ..."
"... Corporations are artificial creations of the state. They exist in their current form under a complex series of laws and regulations, but with certain privileges, such as Limited Liability Corporations. It is assumed that these creatures will enhance economic activity if they are given these privileges, but there is no natural law, such as gravity, that says these laws and regulations need to exist in their current form. They can be changed at will be legislatures. ..."
"... The semantics of "shareholder primacy" are problematic. The word "shareholder" in this formula echoes the kind problems that whirl around a label like "farmer". ..."
"... I believe "shareholder primacy" is just one of many rhetorical tools used to argue for the mechanisms our Elites constructed so they could loot Corporate wealth. There is no misunderstanding involved. ..."
"... This fits within a Marxist analysis as the material conditions spurred the ideological justifications of the conditions, not the ideology spurring the conditions. ..."
"... I think about stock markets as separate from companies and I'm wrong. Each of the stock exchanges I have heard of started off when 4-5 local companies invested a few thousand each in renting a building and a manager to run an exchange hoping it would attract investment, promote their shares and pay for itself. ..."
By Sahil Jai Dutta, a lecturer in political economy at the University of Goldsmiths, London and Samuel Knafo, a Senior Lecturer
in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex. Originally published at the
PERC blog
In the late 1960s, a young banker named Joel Stern was working on a project to transform corporate management. Stern's hunch was
that the stock market could help managers work out how their strategies were performing. Simply, if management was effective, demand
for the firm's stock would be high. A low price would imply bad management.
What sounds obvious now was revolutionary at the time. Until then profits were the key barometer of success. But profits were
a crude measure and easy to manipulate. Financial markets, Stern felt, could provide a more precise measure of the value of management
because they were based on more 'objective' processes, beyond the firm's direct control. The value of shares, he believed, represented
the market's exact validation of management. Because of this, financial markets could help managers determine what was working and
what was not.
In doing this, Stern laid the foundation for a 'shareholder value' management that put financial markets at the core of managerial
strategy.
Stern would probably never have imagined that these ideas would 50 years later be castigated as a fundamental threat to the future
of liberal capitalism. In recent times everyone from the
Business Roundtable group of global
corporations, to the Financial Times
, to the British Labour Party has lined
up to condemn the shareholder ideology.
"Fifty years of shareholder primacy," wrote the Financial Times, "has fostered short-termism and created an environment
of popular distrust of big business."
It is not the first time Stern's creation has come under fire. A decade ago Jack Welsh, former CEO of General Electric declared
shareholder value " probably the dumbest
idea in the world ". And 15 years before then, British political commentator Will Hutton, among others, found paperback fame
with his book The State We're In preaching much the same message.
To critics, the rise of shareholder value is a
straightforward story , that has been told
over and over again.
Following a general crisis of postwar profitability in the late 1970s, corporate managers came under fire from disappointed shareholders
complaining about declining returns. Shareholder revolts forced managers to put market capitalisation first. The rise of stock
options to compensate corporate managers entrenched shareholder value by aligning the interests of managers and shareholders. Companies
began sacrificing productive investments, environmental protections, and worker security to ensure shareholder returns were maximised.
The fear of stock market verdicts on quarterly reports left them no choice.
This account fits a widespread belief that financiers and
rentiers mangled the postwar golden era of capitalism. More importantly, it suggests a simple solution: liberate companies from
the demands of shareholders. Freed from the short-term pursuit of delivering shareholder returns, companies could then return to
long-term plans, productive investments, and higher wages.
In two recent
articles , we have argued that this
critique of shareholder value has always been based on a misunderstanding. Stern and the shareholder value consultants did not aim
to put shareholders first. They worked to empower management. Seen in this light, the history of the shareholder value ideology appears
differently. And it calls for alternative political responses.
To better understand Stern's ideas, it is important to grasp the broader context in which he was writing. In the 1960s, a
group of firms called the conglomerates were pioneering many of the practices that later became associated with the shareholder revolution:
aggressive mergers, divestitures, Leverage buy-outs (LBOs), and stock repurchasing.
These firms, such as Litton Industries, Teledyne and LTV revolutionised corporate strategy by developing new techniques to
systematically raise money from financial markets. They wheeled and dealed their divisions and used them to tap financial markets
to finance further predatory acquisitions. Instead of relying on profits from productive operations, they chased speculative transactions
on financial markets to grow.
These same tactics were later borrowed by the 1980s corporate raiders, many of which were in fact old conglomerators from the
1960s. The growing efficiency with which these raiders captured undervalued firms on the stock market and ruthlessly sold off their
assets to finance further acquisitions put corporate America on alert.
With fortunes to be made and lost, no manager could ignore the stock market. They became increasingly concerned with their
position on financial markets. It was in this context that corporate capitalism first spoke of the desire to 'maximise shareholder
value'. While sections of the corporate establishment were put on the defensive, the main reason for this was not that shareholders
imposed their preferences on management. Instead, it was competitor managers using the shareholder discourse as a resource to expand
and gain control over other firms. Capital markets became the foundation of a new form of financialised managerial power.
These changes made the approach of management consultants championing shareholder value attractive. The firm founded by Stern
and his business partner Bennett Stewart III took advantage of the situation. They sold widely their ideas about financial markets
as a guideline for corporate strategy to firms looking to thrive in this new environment.
As the discourse and tools of shareholder value took hold, they served three distinct purposes. First, they provided accounting
templates for managerial strategies and a means to manage a firm's standings on financial markets. The first and most famous metric
for assessing just how much value was being created for shareholders was one Stern himself helped develop, Economic Value Added (EVA).
Second, they became a powerful justification for the idea that managers should be offered share options. This was in fact an old
idea floated in the 1950s by management consultants such as Arch Patton of McKinsey as a means to top-up relatively stagnant managerial
pay. Yet it was relaunched in this new context as part of the promise to 'align the interests of managers with shareholders.' Stock
options helped managerial pay skyrocket in the 1990s, a curious fact for those who believe that managers were 'disciplined' by shareholders.
Third, the notion of shareholder primacy helped to offload managerial responsibility. An amorphous and often anonymous 'shareholder
pressure' became the explanation for all manner of managerial malpractice. Managers lamented the fact they had no choice but to disregard
workers and other stakeholders because of shareholder power. Rhetorically, shareholders were deemed responsible for corporate problems.
Yet in practice, managers, more often than not, enrolled shareholders into their own projects, using the newly-formed alliance with
shareholders to pocket huge returns for themselves.
Though shareholder demands are now depicted as the problem to be solved, the same reformist voices have in the past championed
shareholders as the solution to corporate excesses. This was the basis for the hope around the '
shareholder spring ' in 2012, or the
recent championing of activist shareholders as '
labour's last weapon' .
By challenging the conventional narrative, we have emphasised how it is instead the financialisation of
managerialism,
or the way in which corporations have leveraged their operations on financial markets, that has characterised the shareholder value
shift. Politically this matters.
If shareholder demands are understood to be the major problem in corporate life, then the solution is to grant executives more
space. Yet the history of shareholder value tells us that managers have been leading the way in corporate governance. They do not
need shielding from shareholders or anyone else and instead need to be made accountable for their decisions. Critiques of shareholder
primacy risk muddying the responsibility of managers who have long put their own interests first. Perhaps the reason why executives
are now so ready to abandon shareholder primacy, is because it never really existed.
Imagine if all corporations were equally owned by the entire population? Then shareholder primacy would just be representative
democracy, no?
But, of course, corporations are not even close to being equally owned by the entire population and part of the blame must
lie with government privileges for private credit creation whereby the need to share wealth and power with the entire population
is bypassed – in the name of "efficiency", one might suppose.
But what good is the "efficient" creation of wealth if it engenders unjust and therefore dangerous inequality and levies noxious
externalities?
"An amorphous and often anonymous 'shareholder pressure' became the explanation for all manner of managerial malpractice."
Amorphous? Anonymous? Anybody who faced one of Milken's raiders, or paid Icahn's Greenmail, would disagree. Nelson Putz,
er, Peltz just forced P&G to start eating into the foundation of the business to feed his greed. There's nothing amorphous or
anonymous about activist shareholders, especially when they take over a company and start carving it up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Shareholder primacy or Creditor Primacy? Creditors, or bond holders, appear to be the more powerful. Shareholders have no legal
recourse to protect their "ownership." Bondholders do have legal recourse. Either way, many corporations more serve up their than
serve their customers and the general public. There is this belief that if a corporation is profitable, that's good but does not
include a public interest (for example Monsanto and Roundup.)
Managers used to fear the creditors more than shareholders, that's very much true.
But that has gone out of the window recently, as debt investors just chase return, so it's seller's world, and few of them
(debt investors) want to take losses as they are much harder to recoup than before. So extend and pretend is well and alive.
In other words, one of the byproducts of QE is that the company management fears no-one, and is more than happy to do whatever
they want.
The problem is the agency. If we assume that we want publicly traded companies (which IMO is not a given), the current incentives
are skewed towards management paying themselves.
The problem with things like supervisory boards, even if they have high worker representation, is that those are few individuals,
and often can be (directly or indirectly) corrupted by the management.
The "shares" incentive is just dumb, at least in the way it's currently structured. It literally gives only upside, and often
even realisable in short/medium term.
Corporations are artificial creations of the state. They exist in their current form under a complex series of laws and
regulations, but with certain privileges, such as Limited Liability Corporations. It is assumed that these creatures will enhance
economic activity if they are given these privileges, but there is no natural law, such as gravity, that says these laws and regulations
need to exist in their current form. They can be changed at will be legislatures.
This is why I despise the Citizens United decision which effectively gives these artificial creations the same rights as people.
I don't believe that Thomas Jefferson would have found that to be "a self-evident truth." I think that Citizens United will be
regarded as something akin to the Dred Scott decision a century from now.
Shareholder primacy is an assumption that hasn't been challenged over the past couple of decades, but can be controlled by
society if it so desires.
The semantics of "shareholder primacy" are problematic. The word "shareholder" in this formula echoes the kind problems
that whirl around a label like "farmer".
A shareholder is often characterized in economics texts as an individual who invests money hoping to receive back dividends
and capital gains in the value and valuation of a company as it earns income and grows over time. Among other changes -- changes
to the US tax laws undermined these quaint notions of investment, and shareholder.
The coincident moves for adding stock options to management's pay packet [threats of firing are supposed to encourage the efforts
of other employees -- why do managers needs some kind of special encouragement?], legalizing share buybacks, and other 'financial
innovations' -- worked in tandem to make investment synonymous with speculation and shareholders synonymous with speculators,
Corporate raiders, and the self-serving Corporate looters replacing Corporate management.
This post follows a twisting road to argue previous "critique of shareholder value has always been based on a misunderstanding"
and arrives at a new critique of shareholder value "challenging the conventional narrative." This post begins by sketching Stern's
foundation for 'shareholder value' with the assertion imputed to him: "if management was effective, demand for the firm's stock
would be high. A low price would imply bad management." The post then claims "What sounds obvious now was revolutionary at the
time." But that assertion does not sound at all obvious to me. In terms of the usual framing of the all-knowing Market the assertion
sounds like a tautology, built on a shaky ground of Neolilberal economic religious beliefs.
I believe "shareholder primacy" is just one of many rhetorical tools used to argue for the mechanisms our Elites constructed
so they could loot Corporate wealth. There is no misunderstanding involved.
"But that assertion does not sound at all obvious to me."
I think you're severely understating this. I'd call it total [family blogging family blog]. As you go on to imply, it takes
an act of pure faith, akin to religious faith in Dawkins' sense of belief in the face of evidence to the contrary, to assume or
assert this nonsense, except insofar as it's tautological – if the purpose of management is to have a high share price, then obviously
the latter reflects the effectiveness of the former.
Well, we're all stakeholders now. There probably isn't much value to merely being a shareholder at this point. First let's
ask for a viable definition of "value" because it's pretty hard to financialize an undefined "value" and nobody can financialize
an empty isolated thing like the word "management". Things go haywire.
What we can do with this seed of an idea is finance the preservation and protection of some defined value. And we can, in fact,
leverage a healthy planet until hell freezes over. No problem.
This fits within a Marxist analysis as the material conditions spurred the ideological justifications of the conditions,
not the ideology spurring the conditions.
Easy to bust this open by legislating against limited liability. Corporates were not always limited liability, but it was promoted
as a means to encourage formation of risky businesses that would otherwise never develop due to risk averse owners or managers.
This was promoted as a social compact, delivering employment and growth that would otherwise be unattainable. Like everything
in life, human greed overcomes social benefits.
Governments world wide would and should step up and regulate to regain control, rather than fiddling at the margins with corporate
governance regulation. They won't, because powerful vested interests will put in place those politicians who will do their bidding.
Another nail in the democracy coffin. The only solution will be a cataclysmic event that unites humanity.
I think about stock markets as separate from companies and I'm wrong. Each of the stock exchanges I have heard of started
off when 4-5 local companies invested a few thousand each in renting a building and a manager to run an exchange hoping it would
attract investment, promote their shares and pay for itself.
I remember when one of the major components of the Hong Kong Exchange, Hutchison, had a bad year and really needed some
black magic to satisfy the shareholders, the Deputy Chairman abandoned his daytime job and spent trading hours buying and selling
for a fortnight to contribute something respectable for the annual accounts. Somebody paid and never knew it.
This was at the start of creative accounting and the 'anything goes' version of capitalism that the article connects with Litton
Industries, Teledyne and LTV but was infecting the entire inner circle of the money.
St. Nancy the hypocrite a reporter asked Pelosi yesterday if she acts from hatred of Trump.
She responded that having been raised as a Catholic she does not hate anyone because we are
taught to hate the sin and love the sinner. Well, pilgrims, Catholics are expected to practice
their religion through both faith and deeds and to accept the teaching of the Church...
First, Trump was going to destroy democracy. That didn't persuade voters. Now it's he'll
destroy civilization itself...and the planet. When that doesn't work where will they go next?
He'll destroy to Solar System? The Universe? How do such people get into power in the first
place? Oh yeah, San Francisco.
Translation: The Pelosi Crime Family will be out of business if DJT is re elected. The
days of foreign aid kickbacks and influence peddling will come to an end. Who does this
******* Trump think he is putting country before personal gain.
Bread and circus. The swamp is full and Clinton is not in jail. The southern border is
wide open. We're sending more troops to the Middle East. The status quo is completely intact.
If it weren't for the hysterics you'd think Obama was still president. The only thing that's
changed is Trump's wife doesn't have a ****.
As the Chicago revolution took hold, Bork's views crept into the judiciary. Eventually in a
fit of activism, the courts did away with the prohibition on predatory pricing. In its 1993
decision in Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation , the United
States Supreme Court completely re-imagined the Robinson-Patman Act.
The case originally involved the tobacco oligopoly controlled by six firms. Liggett had
introduced a cheap generic cigarette and gained market share. When Brown & Williamson saw
that generics were undercutting their shares, it undercut Liggett and sold cigarettes at a
loss. Liggett sued, alleging that the predatory behavior was designed to pressure it to raise
prices on its generics, thus enabling Brown & Williamson to maintain high profits on
branded cigarettes.
In its decision, the Court held that in order for there to be a violation of the Clayton Act
and the Robinson-Patman Act, a plaintiff must show not only that the alleged predator priced
the product below the cost of its production but also that the predator would be likely to
recoup the losses in the future. The recoupment test dealt a death blow to predatory pricing
lawsuits because it is, of course, impossible to prove a future event.
The Supreme Court parroted Bork, noting that "predatory pricing
schemes are rarely tried, and even more rarely successful ." The Court also argued that it was
best not to pursue predatory pricing cases because doing so would "chill the very conduct the
antitrust laws are designed to protect."
The result has been severe. After 1993, no plaintiff alleging predatory pricing has
prevailed at the federal level, and most cases are thrown out in summary judgement. The DOJ and
FTC have completely ignored the law and ceased enforcing it.
Through judicial activism and executive neglect, the laws regarding antitrust and predatory
pricing have become odd relics, like those on greased pigs and cannibalism.
Predatory pricing is symptomatic of the broader problems when it comes to antitrust. Today,
except in extreme circumstances such as outright monopoly, courts are unlikely to block mergers
over an increase in market concentration. The Supreme Court has now tilted so far the other way
that it prefers to allow too much concentration rather than too little. It made this clear in
its Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko LLP decision, where
it stated its preference for minimizing incorrect merger challenges rather than preventing
excessive concentration.
In the Trinko case, for example, Justice Scalia suggested that those who enforce
antitrust laws ought to be deferential to firms with monopoly power, which are "an important
element of a free market system."
Scalia continued: "Against the slight benefits of antitrust intervention here, we must weigh
a realistic assessment of its costs ." The opportunity to acquire monopoly power and charge
monopoly prices is "what attracts 'business acumen' in the first place," he said, and "induces
risk taking that produces innovation and economic growth." He wrote that the "mere possession
of monopoly power, and the concomitant charging of monopoly prices, is not only not unlawful;
it is an important element of the free-market system."
The result of all this has been an increase of monopolies. Professor John Kwoka reviewed
decades of merger cases and concluded that "recent merger control has not been sufficiently
aggressive in challenging mergers." The overall effect has been "approval of significantly more
mergers that prove to be anticompetitive."
The Sherman Act and the Robinson-Patman Act may be deeply misguided; perhaps they should
even be repealed. But they haven't been. Passing new legislation is the proper way to change
laws one disagrees with. Getting rid of them in practice via judicial activism or an an
unwilling executive is not democratic.
The death of antitrust and predatory pricing reflects not only a failure of jurisprudence
but of economics. For all the claims of up-to-the-minute economic sophistication that activist
judges have used in the field of antitrust, the scholarship on predatory pricing is wildly out
of date. Brooke made Robinson-Patman irrelevant by citing "modern" economic
scholarship, yet the research the Supreme Court relied on goes back to studies by John McGee
and Roland Koller, published in 1958 and 1969 respectively.
Predatory pricing has only become more rational in a world where winner-take-all platforms
are happy to sustain short-term losses for the sake of long-term market share gains. What they
lose on one side with free shipping or below cost products, they make up for in other parts of
their business.
The rationality of predatory pricing is not some new economic finding. Almost 20 years ago,
Patrick
Bolton , a professor at Columbia Business School, wrote that "several sophisticated
empirical case studies have confirmed the use of predatory pricing strategies. But the courts
have failed to incorporate the modern writing into judicial decisions, relying instead on
earlier theory no longer generally accepted."
According to Bork, predatory pricing didn't work in theory, but does it work in practice?
Antitrust experts remember the Brooke case, but none seem to recall what actually
happened to the companies involved in the lawsuit.
After the Supreme Court decision left it without any legal remedy, Liggett succumbed to
pressure from Brown & Williamson and raised its prices. The entire industry raised prices
too. In the end, Liggett was not able to attract enough market share and ended up selling most
of its brands to Phillip Morris a few years later. Ever since, the tobacco oligopoly has raised
prices in lockstep twice a year with no competition. No company is foolish enough to lower
prices for fear of predatory pricing.
The losers from the judicial activism of Brooke are consumers and the rule of law.
The winners are the oligopolies and monopolies who protect their markets.
When it comes to enforcing antitrust, it's worth remembering the words of Robert Bork. As he
wrote in 1971 in his seminal piece " Neutral
Principles and Some First Amendment Problems ," "If the judiciary really is supreme, able
to rule when and as it sees fit, the society is not democratic."
The Supremes have been the Federal legislature since 1803. Recommending restraint is the
same thing as ordering one party in a legislature to surrender to the opposite party
regardless of majorities.
Monopolization is the core of Free Market economics. Free, literally, means free to become
a monopoly, free to practice vulture capitalism, free to use superior capitalization to
destroy competition, free to move your factory to China.
Free Market is a buzz phrase among bankers and other well-to-do to increase their income
at your expense instead of through superior production, design, and advertising methods. If
you want to know why we live in such a dysfunctional economy, its because we've abandoned
competitive capitalism for a free market economy.
Adam Smith (yes, that Adam Smith) noted in Wealth of Nations that if you put
two competing businessmen in a room together, not only do they get along just fine, their
conversation quickly turns to the subject of how they can work work together to rig markets
and screw the consumer for moar profitt.
Adam Smith was a much more interesting and sophisticated thinker than the B-school
Cliffs Notes version.
I think we could us more purist views of capitalism in conversations about capitalism. The
kinds of behaviors engaged designed to put others out of business described in the article
is not exemplary of capitalism.
The purpose of capitalism is not explicated with models of destroying competition. And
it certainly does not have mechanisms in which the government acts as an arm of business.
The notion that the business of "America" (the US) is business is misleading. Because when
it comes the government of the US her role is to ensure fair play. And power dynamics used
to destroy the ability of another to tap into the available market share is not a
capitalist principle. When one reads about the level and kinds of antics that corporate
boards and CEO's play to damage competition, to include the use of campaign funds to "buy"
or influence unique favors at cost to consumers - then we are talking about kind of faux
"law of the jungle". Bailing out business but not the defrauded customers of those same
businesses -- mercantilism not capitalism.
And it is these types of behaviors guised as capitalism, that fuels liberal demands for
a system of governance that is more akin to communism and socialism. They note the abuses,
but apply the wrong remedy.
I would agree that predatory pricing actually undercuts better pricing, improved
products or innovation (product creativity).
Conservatives are outraged, still, that Democrats refused to confirm Bork to the Supreme
Court.
Never mind the fact the Democrats were fully within their rights not to confirm, advise
and consent does not mean rubber stamp, Bork was the guy who actually carried out Nixon's
Saturday Night Massacre. Why would conservatives want a corrupt and unethical person like
this in the Supreme Court in the first place?
Conservatives' outraged is very ironic considering Reagan still got to nominate another
candidate, which the Dems confirmed. Meanwhile in a completely unprecedented and vindictive
move, Republicans denied a Democratic president outright his right to a Supreme Court
appointment. There is no comparison between these two episodes.
Said it before and I'll say it again, Warren's personal ambition is often what
manifests her poor political instincts. Why did she claim Native American Heritage? Why did
she endorse HRC in 2016? Why did she ambiguously support, then unambiguously back away from,
M4A?
This trend leads me to suspect that she will not easily back out of the race, and
cannot be trusted finally to endorse Sanders in 2020 any more than she could be in 2016. I
suspect, in any case, that many of her voters would not default to Sanders but to Buttigieg
in any case. They seem to be mostly white professionals between 30-60yrs old who make
$120,000/year.
Wow, Sanders has really been pulling ahead of Warren if the polls over the past few days
are to be believed. I am hoping that this trend continues. Warren's overly-complicated
healthcare proposal which she decided to backpedal on at the last moment seems like it has
really cost her.
I kind of wonder at this point why Warren decided to run for president in the first place.
She seems like the type of person who would rather follow than lead, and would be ill-suited
to be president as she would be forced to take a position on something. Warren would have
been better served to be clear about what her actual positions are instead of trying to have
it both ways. Her constant mind-changing and backpedaling in response to whomever has the
political upper-hand at the moment has angered both the DNC establishment as well as the
progressive left.
Or, as Abraham Lincoln put it in a letter to "Mr FJ Hooker" as he was contemplating a push
across the Rappahannock in the wake of Lee's move westward in June 1863,
"like a bull stuck across a fence that cannot gore to the front or kick to the rear"
I think it was you, Lambert, who drew my attention to "Rich and Tracey's Civil War
podcast", and I am grateful.
I think Warren is running for treasury secretary in a Biden administration. The theory
being that that will be her reward for stopping Sanders. Everybody has an angle. Except
Bernie. Can someone show me his angle?
Does anyone know how the delegates are allocated based on the 15% threshold?
For example, today's CA poll has Sanders at leading with 24% and Warren the only other
candidate above 15% (at 22%).
My preliminary search says if you get x% of the vote, you get x number of delegates .
So what happens to the 56% of delegates that correspond to votes for people other than
Sanders and Warren? Or do Sanders and Warren split them somehow?
The Michael Flynn sentencing hearing is cancelled while the judge considers the issue of
exculpatory material
By Robert Willmann
New attorneys for Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.) entered appearances in his court case in June
2019. He had signed a plea bargain agreement with the office of "special counsel" Robert
Mueller on 30 November 2017, and under that agreement, a criminal charge consisting of a single
count was filed. He pled guilty to it in court the next day. A sentencing hearing began on 18
December 2018, but went off the rails and was to be continued at a later date.
On 30 August 2019, Flynn's new lawyers filed a request (a motion) that the prosecutors for
the federal government turn over exculpatory material that they likely had access to and had
not disclosed to him earlier. The motion also asked the judge to issue an order that the
prosecutors show cause why they should not be held in contempt of court for not turning over
the material that might be favorable and helpful to Flynn. Several papers were filed by both
sides on the issue after that.
A sentencing hearing had been reset to 18 December 2019. However, as a result of the
documents filed about the request for exculpatory material, Judge Emmet Sullivan decided not to
have a court hearing on the motion, but instead would decide it on the documents that had been
filed with the court clerk. The last paper was filed on the issue on 4 November 2019. Normally,
both the prosecution and defense file memoranda about an upcoming sentencing hearing. Since 18
December was approaching, they filed a joint motion to reschedule the filing of memos and any
sentencing hearing--
"11/27/2019 Minute Order as to Michael T. Flynn granting 140 Joint Motion to Modify Briefing
Schedule. The Court hereby Suspends the briefing schedule for the supplemental sentencing
memoranda. The Court hereby Vacates the sentencing hearing previously scheduled for December
18, 2019 until further Order of this Court. Signed by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on 11/27/2019.
(Lcegs1) (Entered: 11/27/2019)"
The request for disclosure of exculpatory material may or may not be granted. But the fact
that a month has gone by, and now more time is needed, means that it is being given serious
consideration.
Tucker Carlson has been making comments like this for a long time. And he's not a
libertarian. He believes in regulated capitalism.
What we might be seeing is a the beginning of the two parties flipping from left to right
on economic issues. The social issues just obscure it, as they were designed to do.
I wonder if the powers at be at Fox News allow Tucker to go on these rants because they
know two things:
1.) 99% of bought and paid for Republican politicians will never do anything about this
except perhaps some lip service here and there.
2.) The fact that it's on Fox News will cause the Vichy left to not believe it's real or
perhaps a Russian phy op against American capitalism. Thus outside of the Sanders camp there
will be no push/support for any change.
Tucker has CHANGED his views on lots of things. Like I have. To be able to admit you were
wrong is a big deal. He supported the Iraq War. I didn't. In retrospect, he realized he did
this because of group think cool kids thing. Then he realized that he had been conned, He
doesn't like being conned. I thought Obama's speech was the opposite of John Edwards "2
Americas". Obama was delivering a "con" I.e. "We are all One America". So now Tucker and I,
from different sides, are more skeptical. I started questioning my groupthink Democratic
viewpoint in 2004. Slowly I realized that I too had been conned. So some of those on the
"right" and Some of those on the "left" have sought other ports to dock in as we figure this
all out. Naked Capitalism is one of those docks. So soon we should introduce Tucker to
Yves.
As I have frequently pointed out to my once-upon-a-time "liberal" friends, Tucker Carlson
is often these days a worthwhile antidote to the collective yelpings & bleatings of the
brain-snatched amen corner on MSNBC & CNN. In this instance (and others) his observations
are rational and clearly articulated. He makes sense! And he is on the correct (not far
right) side of the topic. The continuing Iraq/Syria catastrophe, PutinGate and the hedge fund
hooligan Paul Singer are just three recent examples. His arguments (and his snark) are well
played. Alas, following these sensible segments, he is still a Fox guy and is obliged to
revert to Fox boilerplate for most of the rest of the night. But in our present crackbrained
media environment, be thankful for small mercies such as Tucker's moments.
Thanks for the post. I probably would have missed this without you.
There are a couple things that are interesting to me. First, why does Tucker Carlson call
out Ben Sasse for accepting a maxed out campaign contribution from Paul Singer? The Governor
of Nebraska then and now is Pete Ricketts. His father (Joe – TD Ameritrade, Chicago
Cubs) is a "very good friend" of Paul Singer. Everyone believes Pete Ricketts wants to run
for US Senate and the nearest opportunity is Ben Sasse's seat. More than meets the eye?
Two, a longtime director of Cabela's is Mike McCarthy of McCarthy Capital. [Former
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel worked for McCarthy.] ES&S (electronic voting machines)
is owned by McCarthy Group, LLC.
Financialization is a term sometimes used in discussions of financial
capitalism which developed over recent decades, in which financial leverage tended to
override capital (equity) and financial markets tended to dominate over the traditional
industrial economy and agricultural economics.
Financialization is a term that describes an economic system or process that attempts
to reduce all value that is exchanged (whether tangible, intangible, future or present
promises, etc.) either into a financial instrument or a derivative of a financial
instrument. The original intent of financialization is to be able to reduce any
work-product or service to an exchangeable financial instrument... Financialization also
makes economic rents possible...financial leverage tended to override capital (equity)
and financial markets tended to dominate over the traditional industrial economy and
agricultural economics...
Companies are not able to invest in new physical capital equipment or buildings
because they are obliged to use their operating revenue to pay their bankers and
bondholders, as well as junk-bond holders. This is what I mean when I say that the
economy is becoming financialized. Its aim is not to provide tangible capital
formation or rising living standards, but to generate interest, financial fees for
underwriting mergers and acquisitions, and capital gains that accrue mainly to insiders,
headed by upper management and large financial institutions. The upshot is that the
traditional business cycle has been overshadowed by a secular increase in debt.
Instead of labor earning more, hourly earnings have declined in real terms. There
has been a drop in net disposable income after paying taxes and withholding "forced
saving" for social Security and medical insurance, pension-fund contributions
and–most serious of all–debt service on credit cards, bank loans, mortgage
loans, student loans, auto loans, home insurance premiums, life insurance, private
medical insurance and other FIRE-sector charges. ... This diverts spending away from
goods and services.
In the United States, probably more money has been made through the appreciation of
real estate than in any other way. What are the long-term consequences if an
increasing percentage of savings and wealth, as it now seems, is used to inflate the
prices of already existing assets - real estate and stocks - instead of to create new
production and innovation?
"This was a debate over policy. Trump's critics may not have liked the policy he was
pushing. But as former Defense Intelligence Agency official Pat Lang noted on his blog last
week,
the statute in question applies only to "intelligence activities" but "does not include
differences of opinions concerning public policy matters."
That's what this fight is about, said Lang . Speaker after speaker at the hearings asserted
that Trump's views did not comport with official national policy. But the president sets that
policy, Lang said, not the diplomats.
"They think they are the people who set national policy and the president is this figurehead
who is guided by all these people around him who agree on everything," he said. "The president
doesn't need to use the State Department at all to conduct foreign policy." ' Paul Mulshine
-------------
Actually, I was too minimal in speaking of "diplomats." Vindman is not a diplomat and there
are many other actors in this drama of Borgist angst (foreign policy establishment ) who are
not diplomats.
For one thing a large percentage of the Drones at the State Department are civil service
employees rather than Foreign Service Officers, and although they do not play well together
they agree on the ultimate authority of the Supremacy Clause (non-existent) in the US
Constitution that gives the State Department dominion over all the Lord created. A career
ambassador's wife once lectured me that the US Army should change the cap badge that officers
wear because it looks too much like the Great Seal of the United States which in the State
Department can only be displayed by Ambassadors. I told her that she should petition the
Secretary of the Army in this matter.
Various departments of government, media, academia, thinktankeries, etc., all have heavy
infestations of folks who went to graduate school together in poly sci in all its branches, or
who wish to be thought worthy of such attendance. They specialize in group think, conformity,
and conformism, even to the solemn dress they affect. The four in hand tie knot is pretty much
mandatory for serious consideration for inclusion in the Borg. It indicates a certain preppy
insouciance and faux disregard for details of dress.
Trump's casual disregard for all that enrages the Borg who thought they had "won it all"
long ago and that they would have a Borgist neocon to deal with in Hillary.
Hillary's Foundation has lost millions recently, which has Hillary pursing her lips like
she's been using a lemon for her lipstick. I mean, worse than fish-lips, Hillary's pursing
expression.
Too bad that we can't form some cement shoes for the Borg and toss them into the east
river AKA the Atlantic, or send them back to hell from where they originated!
OT:
This afternoon my wife and I turned on the TV to watch football. We were flipping through
channels and came upon some local ABC affiliate (WMUR) which had on a documentary which
mentioned the Medal of Honor and a Catholic chaplain in Vietnam. Needless to say we stayed on
that channel. Long story short, it was one of the most powerful things we've ever watched. We
were both in tears by the end (nb: I don't cry easily) and we were changed from having
watched it. We immediately went online to purchase copies for family members. It was recently
released.
As the Borg like to say "We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our
own." They have done this with the four in hand tie knot which was previously worn by giants
like George Kennon and Chip Bohlen. Yet now, the midgetry prevails.
Colonel...This is another Reason why I appreciate your levels of Experience and knowledge
with SST..Thank you for doing that...I always come away with New Insight..and Understanding
of Real Dynamics..what has Progressively Developed inside the State.Department.with its
Influence On so Much POLICY...and .is as You say...The BORG..and Their Own Culture.your
Article put that all into a Big Picture for Me..(Connecting the Data..) .It.as you aptly
Described. is a Universal.Sect..and...At The National Level...They are Cyber Borgs..Shciff
Shapers..and that Whole Colony has Been Exposed.,,, Bad Products and All....
Fiona Hill appears to be part of the Borg, not really sure which part she's affiliated.
Some have called her a 'sleeper agent', but a sleeper for whom? British Intelligence agent of
influence? Or an Israeli agent of influence, or maybe a Daniel Pipes trained NEOCON agent of
influence? Any way one spins it, Fiona Hill has been undermining POTUS Trump while she was
part of his NSC and his advisory team. Why her intense hatred of Putin? Does he happen to
know through his nation's intelligence exactly who she is and whom she may be working on
behalf of? The Skripal incident showed just how much that the British Government and Crown
hate Russia. But why the intense British hatred of Russia, why?
Questions, so many questions regarding Ms. Hill and who she really works for.
Yes, I know, pilgrims, the Haredim have a right to live however they please, just as Mormon
schismatics, cloistered monks and the Amish/Mennonites do, but it is nevertheless interesting
that this woman and those like her emerge into the "light" of the 21st Century as though they
had just come from the womb.
As many of you know I was the chief intelligence liaison from DIA to the IDF General Staff
intelligence service for seven years. Because of that I spent a lot of time in Israel wandering
around when not working and talking to IDF people about the Haredim among other things.
I don't think I ever ran into an IDF officer who had other than disdain for the Haredim. A
lot of the IDF were kibbutzniks, products of structured life on a collective farm in a
socialist secular setting. They thought the Haredim were ignorant freeloaders who used their
cultist beliefs to hide out from the draft while collecting comfortable stipends from the
government as "religious scholars."
In some Haredi groups the women shave their whole bodies and when out in public accompanied
by a male relative wear funny looking curly synthetic hair wigs. This was interesting.
Chacun a son gout the old maid said as she kissed the cow. pl
There are many of these groups in Quebec, I think the most radical of them congregate there
because of laws protecting them from sending their children to normal schools or integrating
them in any way into normal life, most prominently and infamously the Lev Tahor group. There
is a particularly radical community of 3000 of them right outside of Montreal, formed in the
60s. I always found the wig thing interesting, as a connection to the Islamic practice of
hijab. Very semitic. Ever heard of the "Haredi Burqa Sect"?
They had a village outside of Monroe NY, where I grew up for a while. The women did indeed
wear weird synthetic wigs, I used to see them at the grocery store. I remember they refused
to pay taxes for public services. They weren't particularly well liked but then they weren't
a part of the community, just adjacent. The Hasid community itself looked like a bombed out
wasteland the few times I passed through it. They didn't care for outsiders. That whole area
of NY is weird, so they fit in a way.
In my opinion, Tucker Carlson represents a very real and very active right-libertarian
view that has been consistently present within the Republican Party for decades. Anti-war,
anti-imperialist, anti-big business/pro-small business, and of course, anti-big union. Robert
Taft comes to mind. I don't share their "ideologies" but as a self-described socialist, I am
deeply attracted to their criticisms. And criticisms ARE important and necessary, even if the
solutions are left wanting. I dearly hope that his popularity is a sign of the realignment of
politics, where issues of class and war become commonplace and issues of "to impeach or not
to impeach" fall by the wayside. I recognize that my hopes may not turn to realities.
But for an employee it makes no difference if they work for a big or small business (only
big business on average is LESS exploitative if anything – if for no other reason but
they can afford to be – some of the worst exploitation out there is employees working
for small business owners).
Exactly, right libertarian. Within the libertarian spectrum there are real and then royal
libertarians, Tucker is of the latter. http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html
What are his immigration views? Are people motivated to come here because this global vulture
octopus thing has ruined their home market?
I think Warren is running for treasury secretary in a Biden administration. The theory
being that that will be her reward for stopping Sanders. Everybody has an angle. Except
Bernie. Can someone show me his angle?
-two, how does Warren look in the light of Sanders and a few newer types like AOC or Omar?
If there is no Sanders, she is the nominal left, a former Republican which shows how right
wing Team Blue is. Zebras don't change their stripes, but I think what is and isn't
acceptable does change. The three I mentioned moved the perceptions of enough people who
otherwise would support Warren. Warren is a day late and a dollar short in 2019. Okay, she's
$0.02, but she is still short of where she would need to be to take her advantages over
Sanders to next level.
-Misinterpreting popularity. One of the more detailed ratings of Warren a few years
indicated she wasn't wildly popular in Taxachusetts, but she was very popular with a narrow
subset of women around the country. In a sense, she is trying to grow from this group instead
of understanding a big tent is the only way forward if you aren't an effective incumbent or
VP. Its similar to Clinton's 90's worship of "soccer moms" (surburban white women), basically
the only group that outpaced or met expectations in support for Bill and company. Instead of
recognizing problems with the generic Democratic coalition, they worked to make their friends
really like them.
-not recognizing, the importance of sitting out in 2016. She didn't win friends. She
relied on msm punditry instead of recognizing politicians and elections are about pushing,
not waiting for David Brooks to weigh in. She failed a basic leadership test because she was
afraid of offending Hillary Clinton who was going to collapse over the finish line and then
have been on the defense before she was even inaugurated.
Clinton apparently has super-special powers for sniffing out Russian mischief-makers that
mere mortals like us cannot comprehend.
Also, she says that she refuses to go away because "that is what her adversaries want". I
knew that Hillary was a narcissist, but this takes being a sore loser to a whole other level.
Somebody like this as president would be just as bad as Trump, and Hillary would have the
entire DNC leadership apparatus to carry out her royal decrees.
Federal authorities have indicted two Russian cybercriminals who allegedly lead a
shadowy organization called "Evil Corp" that has stolen more than $100 million using a
powerful malware that has spread to more than 40 countries.
now... how come the FBI, (NOT to mention, CIA, and the rest of the alphabet soup agencies)
are not spending their efforts and monies to pursue this ENRON, (LOGO LOOK-A-LIKE) company,
instead of initiating an illegal coup d'etat against the president of USA?
-----
Members of Evil Corp are living a lavish lifestyle, funded by the life savings of their
victims.
If Maksim Yakubets, who used the online identity of 'Aqua', ever leaves the safety of
Russia he will be arrested and extradited to the US.
Well duh.... lol !
Why would he....????
Wouldn't it make sense to make a deal with... "lord Putin" to cease this shield of
protection ?.... hmmm I wonder why...
Ask some Biden guy...
Oh wait... the US Gov. and alphabet agencies are supposed to be doing so, yes ?
Hmm ever wonder why google changed its name to "alphabet"... suspicious minds want to know
... -lol
The financial struggles of the U.S. shale industry are
becoming increasingly hard to
ignore,
but drillers in Appalachia are in particularly bad shape.
The Permian has recently seen
job
losses
, and for the first time since 2016, the hottest shale basin in the world has seen job
growth lag the broader Texas economy.
The industry is cutting back amid heightened
financial scrutiny from investors, as debt-fueled drilling has become increasingly hard to justify.
But E&P companies focused almost exclusively on gas, such as those in the Marcellus and Utica
shales, are in even worse shape. An IEEFA
analysis
found
that seven of the largest producers in Appalachia burned through about a half billion dollars in
the third quarter.
Gas production continues to rise, but profits remain elusive.
"Despite booming
gas output, Appalachian oil and gas companies consistently failed to produce positive cash flow
over the past five quarters," the authors of the IEEFA report said.
Of the seven companies analyzed, five had negative cash flow, including Antero Resources,
Chesapeake Energy, EQT, Range Resources, and Southwestern Energy. Only Cabot Oil & Gas and Gulfport
Energy had positive cash flow in the third quarter.
The sector was weighed down but a sharp drop in natural gas prices, with
Henry
Hub
off by 18 percent compared to a year earlier. But the losses are highly problematic. After
all, we are more than a decade into the shale revolution and the industry is still not really able
to post positive cash flow. Worse, these are not the laggards; these are the largest producers in
the region.
The outlook is not encouraging.
The gas glut is expected to stick around for a
few years. Bank of America Merrill Lynch has repeatedly warned that unless there is an unusually
frigid winter, which could lead to higher-than-expected demand, the gas market is headed for
trouble. "A mild winter across the northern hemisphere or a worsening macro backdrop could be
catastrophic for gas prices in all regions," Bank of America
said
in
a note in October.
The problem for Appalachian drillers is that Permian producers are not really interested in all
of the gas they are producing. That makes them unresponsive to price signals. Gas prices in the
Permian have plunged close to zero, and have at times turned negative, but gas production in Texas
really hinges on the industry's interest in oil. This dynamic means that the gas glut becomes
entrenched longer than it otherwise might. It's a grim reality plaguing the gas-focused producers
in Appalachia.
With capital markets growing less friendly, the only response for drillers is to cut back. IEEFA
notes that drilling permits in Pennsylvania in October fell by half from the same month a year
earlier. The number of rigs sidelined and the number of workers cut from payrolls also continues to
pile up.
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The negative cash flow in the third quarter was led by Chesapeake Energy (-$264 million)
and EQT (-$173 million), but the red ink is only the latest in a string of losses for the sector
over the last few years. As a result, the sector has completely fallen out of favor with investors.
But gas drillers have fared worse, with share prices lagging not just the broader S&P 500, but
also the fracking-focused XOP ETF, which has fallen sharply this year. In other words, oil
companies have seen their share prices hit hard, but gas drillers have completely fallen off of a
cliff. Chesapeake Energy even
warned
last
month that it there was "substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern." Its
stock is trading below $1 per share.
Even Cabot Oil & Gas, which posted positive cash flow in the third quarter, has seen its share
price fall by roughly 30 percent year-to-date.
"Even though Appalachian gas companies
have proven that they can produce abundant supplies of gas, their financial struggles show that the
business case for fracking remains unproven,"
IEEFA concluded.
Tags
Business Finance
This has no small strategic significance: previously, for foreign sales, Russia was
dependent on customers in Europe who are all, to a greater or lesser extent, subject to
pressure from the war party.
Added to which transport was affected by Kiev's whims. Turkstream (scheduled to start next month) and
the two pipelines to Germany help with the second problem and this one with the first. Sooner
or later, Russia-China pipelines would have appeared but I think Ishchenko's
argument that the Western war on Russia speeded up the process is credible.
(Come to think of it, now that Putin's hand is imagined everywhere, maybe it's time to
consider that he's the American war party's real backer; after all, everything it's touched has
turned to dust: from the forever wars, to Iran's increased influence, to the Russia-China
alliance and now the furore in the USA over Ukraine – itself another disastrous
project.)
I have long thought that paul singer is representative of the worst people in the world
(argentina wtf)
and I'm glad carlson put his face up there so many times for his victims to see, in case he
ever ventures out of mordor undisguised. For all the money he has, a truly worthless pos, as
the closing comment made so clear. Good for Carlson, though, almost seems like actual
journalism. Kudos.
Glad to see someone in the MSM point out the obvious .Carlson called out Singer, but in
doing so he also called out the Republican Party, specifically Sen. Ben Sasse from Nebraska.
It will be interesting to see if Sasse is reelected.
Nebraskans – R and D both – should toss Sasse to the curb. He's angered
regular bat-poo crazy Republicans by his "never Trump" blather, then angered Nebraska
Democrats (both of us) by voting Trump/GOP well over 90 percent of the time.
Add to this his folksy BS appearances in the media and his execrable books, and he's a
classic empty suit. Closer to a straight Republican Mayor Pete than any thing else –
over-credentialed, over-ambitious and under performing.
Our Nebraska Democratic Party problem is two-fold: incredibly thin bench for decent
candidates and preponderance of Clinton/Obama/HRC leftovers running the state party. Will be
knocking on doors for Bernie come 2020 but state races are iffy at best.
Tucker has good sense. Perhaps Paul Singer is probably retiring from vultury. He's old and
it's a nasty fight. Singer is at the end of a 30 year stint of dispossessing other people.
Being vicious really isn't enough to keep the federal government at bay. Nor are his bribes.
There has been an unspoken policy of dispossessing poor and middle class people. Why? Is the
United States actually looking at a specific future? That wouldn't align with the free market
– tsk tsk. Or would it? Live free, die free. Somebody needs to define the word "free".
Did TPTB decide to deindustrialize this country that long ago? That's when they attacked the
unions. And the consensus might have been, "Go for it; get it while you can." So Paul Singer
did just that, along with other creepy people like Mitt Romney. Because once the country has
been hosed out by these guys we won't be pushing the old capitalist economy at all. We will
be pushing a globally connected, sustainable economy. Paul Singer is just a dung beetle. And
our government didn't want to discuss it because they would have had to create a safety net.
If we despise Singer, we must also despise Congress.
If we despise Singer, we must also despise Congress. -Susan the Other
Agreed. I think you can argue Congress (and the Executive Branch) have done more to help
the Chinese middle class than the American middle class over the last 30 years. Co-locating
our industrial base with the CCP on communist soil should be looked upon as the most radical
policy in our history but is not. Imagine if at the height of the Cold War we had told
Kruschev hey..how about you make all the stuff we need and we'll pay you $20 or $30T in trade
surplus over a number of years in hard currency which you can then parlay into geopolitical
power in Africa, South America, the ME and else where. What would the America of the fifties
think of this policy?
>Because once the country has been hosed out by these guys we won't be pushing the old
capitalist economy at all. We will be pushing a globally connected, sustainable economy.
Tucker Carlson Tears into Vulture Capitalist Paul Singer for Strip Mining American Towns
Posted on
December 5, 2019
by
Yves Smith
In a bit of synchronicity, Lambert gave a mini-speech tonight that dovetails with an important Tucker
Carlson segment about how hedge funds are destroying flyover. As UserFriendly lamented, "It is beyond sad
that Tucker Carlson is doing better journalism than just about anywhere else." That goes double given that
Carlson has only short segments and TV isn't well suited to complicated arguments.
Lambert fondly recalled the America he grew up in in Indiana, before his parents moved to Maine, where
most people were comfortable or at least not in perilous shape, where blue collar labor, like working in a
factory or repairing cars, was viewed with respect, and where cities and towns were economic and social
communities, with their own businesses and local notables, and national chain operations were few. Yes,
there was an underbelly to this era of broadly shared economic prosperity, such as gays needing to be
closeted and women having to get married if they wanted a decent lifestyle.
I'm not doing his remarks justice, but among other things, the greater sense of stability contributed to
more people being able to be legitimately optimistic. If you found a decent job, you weren't exposed to
MBA-induced downsizings or merger-induced closures. Even in the transitional 1970s, Lambert got his first
job in a mill! He liked his work and was able to support himself, rent an apartment, and enjoy some modest
luxuries. Contrast that with the economic status of a Walmart clerk or an Amazon warehouse worker. And even
now, the small towns that remain cling to activities that bring people together, as Lambert highlighted in
Water Cooler earlier this week:
Please watch this clip in full. Carlson begins with an unvarnished description of the wreckage that
America's heartlands have become as financial predators have sucked local businesses dry, leaving shrunken
communities, poverty and drug addiction in their wake.
Readers may wonder why Carlson singles out hedge funds rather than private equity, but he has
courageously singled out one of the biggest political forces in DC, the notorious vulture capitalist Paul
Singer, best known for his pitched battles with Peru and Argentina after he bought their debt at
knocked-down prices. Carlson describes some US examples from his
rapacious
playbook, zeroing on Delphi, where Singer got crisis bailout money and then shuttered most US
operation, and Cabela's, where a Singer-pressured takeover wrecked one of the few remaining prosperous
American small towns, Sidney, Nebraska. Not only are former employees still afraid of Singer, but even
Carlson was warned against taking on the famously vindictive Singer.
Kev said; "It will also slit your throat tomorrow."
This, aggressive mergers and acquisitions, has been going on for a very long time and everybody
always says that but I have yet to see any wealthy person suffer more than a small loss of a point or
2.
The fact is thats where we are at with capitalism. Money MUST become more money. There are no
outside considerations not even human life.
We all talk about robots going rogue and killing off humanity. Well money is already doing that.
Sound of the Suburbs, your comment suggests that this is the way things are and that there is nothing
to do about it, but that is wrong. It's not inherent to markets or to nature. In fact, "it's not even
hard" because we have agreed to it as part of the social contract, and created policies that enable it.
We can reverse the calculation by changing the tax rules, accounting rules, and legal liability rules and
this calculation reverses. TLDR; vote Bernie.
Which "we" are you talking about? You assume an entity with agency, when there is no such thing.
How do YOU suggest "WE" rewrite the non-existent "social contract?" Or change the tax rules, the
accounting rules, the Delaware corporations law, the Federal Codes of Civil and Criminal Procedure,
the current contents of the Code of Federal Regulations, the United States Code and all the other
trappings of legitimacy that give "us" the looting we suffer and remove any access to 'agency" to
re-fix things? I hope Bernie wins/is allowed to win, but he would need the skills of a Machiavelli and
Richelieu and Bismarck to "drain the swamp" of all the horrible creatures and muck that swirls there.
Not to say it's not worth trying "our" mope-level damndest to make it happen.
That said – it doesn't seem to me that Cabelas was 'forced' to sell. Singer owned less than 12% of the
stock. Is he to blame for either managerial greed, or lack of cojones? I'm not praising Singer, just saying
ISTM that he had couldn't have succeeded there without the greed or cowardice of management. I could be
wrong.
Carlson said this behavior is banned in the UK, how does that work?
Tthis is standard operating procedure for takeovers and greenmail in the US. First, 11% is going to be
way way above average trading volumes. Second, unless management owns a lot of shares or has large blocks
in the hands of loyal friends, many investors will follow the money and align with a greenmailer.
When a hostile player is forced to announce that he has a stake >5% by the SEC's 13-D filing
requirement, managements start sweating bullets. "Activist" hedge funds regularly make tons of trouble
with 10% to 15% stakes. CalPERS was a very effective activist investor in its glory years (not even
hostile but pushing hard for governance changes) with much smaller stakes.
The New York Post, which is very strong on covering hedge funds, confirms Carlson's take. From a 2016
article:
Hedgie Paul Singer hit another bull's-eye with his Cabela's investment.
Singer's Elliott Management bought an 11 percent stake in the hunting supply chain last October and
pressed the Springfield, Mo., chain to pursue strategic alternatives -- including a sale.
On Monday, his suggestion was heeded as the 55-year-old company said it agreed to a $5.5 billion,
$65.50-per-share takeover offer from rival Bass Pro Shops.
For Singer, who purchased much of his Cabela's stake at between $36 and $40 a share, Monday's news
means that the fund gained roughly 72 percent on its investment.
The same story depicts Singer as able to exert pressure with even smaller interests:
The hedge fund had an 8.8 percent stake in the company and was expected to net $58 million in
profits, The Post reported.
Elliott, which in June announced a 4.7 stake in PulteGroup, named three board members to the
Atlanta-based homebuilding company.
Last Thursday, it readied a new target, taking an 8.1 percent stake in Mentor Graphics, a
Wilsonville, Ore.-based developer of electronic design automation software.
Since then, shares of the company have risen 6 percent, to $26.24.
Mentor represents a "classic" Elliott investment, a source close to the matter told The Post,
adding that it is a "perfect time" for the company to sell itself.
You have a gift for explaining these things to people with a lot of education but not in finance. I
was confused by this, too, until I read your comment.
A beautiful public performance today by the Paris Opera's striking ballet dancers & orchestra. France's strike vs. austerity is bringing art back into the streets.
<img alt="Faith could bring us together. But too often it divides us" src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/191121180252-20191121-fractured-states-religious-leaders-large-169.jpg"> Faith could bring us together. But too often it divides us Younger evangelicals, those under 45, have been slowly but steadily moving away from Trump during the past two years or so, unhappy about his example. A key topic that has driven them away is immigration. Loving your neighbor as yourself has always been a bedrock Christian value. And Trump's stance on immigrants (especially those of color) has upset the younger generation of evangelicals, with two-thirds of them saying in surveys that immigrants strengthen our country, bringing their work ethic and talents with them from Mexico or Central America or Syria. Climate change is another issue that has caught the imagination of younger evangelicals. "I can't love my neighbor if I'm not protecting the earth that sustains them and defending their rights to clean water, clean air, and a stable climate," Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, a national organizer for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, told Grist . Needless to say, Trump's contempt on this subject grates badly on these young Christians. Perhaps naively, Americans have always looked to the presidency for exemplary moral behavior, and when there are obvious personal or moral failures, as with Nixon and Clinton, there is disappointment, even anger. But if you're a Christian -- and I lay claim to this for myself -- you understand that it's human to fail at perfect behavior. There is always forgiveness. And, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "Humility is endless."
Jim's Editor's Notes are solely crowdfunded via PayPal
However, in addition to those thinks tanks funded by the state, there was a rapidly growing number of privately-owned analytical centers that were funded by special interests who decided to use these entities to advance their own agendas, thus indirectly influencing American domestic and foreign policies by launching various campaigns.
December 8, 2019 © Photo: Wikimedia For all of 2019 December has been a magnet. A number of major geopolitical issues come to head this month and many of them have everything to do with energy. This is the month that Russian gas giant Gazprom was due to finish production on three major pipeline projects – Nordstream 2, Turkstream and Power of Siberia.
<img alt="Faith could bring us together. But too often it divides us"
src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/191121180252-20191121-fractured-states-religious-leaders-large-169.jpg">
