Month: July 2018

Loonie Tumbles After Report Canada Excluded From NAFTA Talks

The Canadian Dollar legged 0.5% lower this evening after The National Post reported that the U.S. rejected attempts by Canada to take part in trade talks between the U.S. and Mexico.

American officials have taken the “highly unusual” step of rejecting Canada’s bid to take part in senior-level NAFTA talks between the U.S. and Mexico later this week, sources familiar with the trade negotiations said Monday.

One person said attempts by Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland to get a seat at the table in Washington Thursday were either ignored, or spurned outright by the office of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.

Another source said the request to be at the meeting was made in a low-key fashion “so as not to spark a diplomatic incident” and was followed by “a retreat to diplomatic silence.”

And the Loonie dumped…

The Mexican peso limped very modestly lower on the headlines.

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In Refusing To Defend Assange, Mainstream Media Exposes Its True Nature

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Last Tuesday a top lawyer for the New York Times named David McCraw warned a room full of judges that the prosecution of Julian Assange for WikiLeaks publications would set a very dangerous precedent which would end up hurting mainstream news media outlets like NYT, the Washington Post, and other outlets which publish secret government documents.

“I think the prosecution of him would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers,” McCraw said. “From that incident, from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and I think the law would have a very hard time drawing a distinction between The New York Times and WikiLeaks.”

Do you know where I read about this? Not in the New York Times.

“Curiously, as of this writing, McCraw’s words have found no mention in the Times itself,” activist Ray McGovern wrote for the alternative media outlet Consortium News. “In recent years, the newspaper has shown a marked proclivity to avoid printing anything that might risk its front row seat at the government trough.”

So let’s unpack that a bit. It is now public knowledge that the Ecuadorian government is actively seeking to turn Assange over to be arrested by the British government. This was initially reported by RT, then independently confirmed by The Intercept, and is today full mainstream public knowledge being reported by mainstream outlets like CNN. It is also public knowledge that Assange’s asylum was granted by the Ecuadorian government due to a feared attempt to extradite him to the United States and prosecute him for WikiLeaks publications. Everyone from President Donald Trump to Attorney General Jeff Sessions to now-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to ranking House Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff to Democratic members of the US Senate have made public statements clearly indicating that there is a US government interest in getting Assange out of the shelter of political asylum and into prison.

The New York Times is aware of this, and as evidenced by McCraw’s comments it is also aware of the dangerous precedent that such a prosecution would set for all news media publications. The New York Times editorial staff are aware that the US government prosecuting a publisher for publishing important documents that had been hidden from the public would make it impossible for the Times to publish the same kind of material without fear of the same legal repercussions. It is aware that the maneuvers being taken against Assange present a very real existential threat to the possibility of real journalism and holding power to account.

You might think, therefore, that we’d be seeing a flood of analyses and op-eds from the New York Times aggressively condemning any movement toward the prosecution of Julian Assange. You might expect all media outlets in America to be constantly sounding the alarm about this, especially since the threat is coming from the Trump administration, which outlets like the New York Timesare always eager to circulate dire warnings about. You might expect every talking head on CNN and NBC to be ominously citing Assange as the clearest and most egregious case yet of Trump’s infamous “war on the free press”. Leaving aside the issues of morality, compassion and human rights that come with Assange’s case, you might think that if for no other reason than sheer unenlightened self interest they’d be loudly and aggressively defending him.

And yet, they don’t. And the fact that they don’t shows us what they really are.

Theoretically, journalism is meant to help create an informed populace and hold power to account. That’s why it’s the only profession explicitly named in the United States Constitution, and why freedom of the press has enjoyed such constitutional protections throughout US history. The press today is failing to protect Julian Assange because it has no intention of creating an informed populace or holding power to account.

This is not to suggest the existence of some grand, secret conspiracy among US journalists. It’s just a simple fact that plutocrats own most of the US news media and hire the people who run it, which has naturally created an environment where the best way to advance one’s career is to remain perpetually inoffensive to the establishment upon which plutocrats have built their respective empires. This is why you see ambitious reporters on Twitter falling all over themselves to be the first with a pithy line that advances establishment agendas whenever breaking news presents an opportunity to do so; they are aware that their social media presence is being assessed by potential employers and allies for establishment loyalism. This also why so many of those aspiring journalists attack Assange and WikiLeaks whenever possible.

“Everyone hoping to gain admission to the cultural elite must now strenuously cultivate their social media so as to avoid controversy,” journalist Michael Tracey observed recently. “Eventually they will internalize controversy-avoidance as a virtue, not a societal imposition. Result: a more boring, conformist elite culture.”

A great way for an aspiring journalist to avoid controversy is to never, ever defend Assange or WikiLeaks on social media or in any media outlet, and certainly under no circumstances allow yourself to look like the sort of journo who might someday publish the sorts of materials that WikiLeaks publishes. An excellent way to prove yourself is to become yet another author of yet another one of the many, many smear pieces that have been written about Assange and WikiLeaks.

Mainstream media outlets and those who thrive within them have no intention of rocking the boat and losing their hard-earned privilege and access. Conservative mass media will continue to defend the US president, and liberal media will continue to defend the CIA and the FBI. Both will help advance war, ecocide, military expansionism, surveillance and police militarization, and none will leak anything that is damaging to the power structures that they have learned to serve. They will remain innocuous, uncontroversial defenders of the rich and powerful at all times.

Meanwhile, alternative media outlets are defending Assange ferociously. Just today I’ve seen articles from Consortium News, World Socialist Website, Disobedient Media, Antiwar and Common Dreams decrying the persecution of the most important government transparency advocate living today. Alternative media outlets and independent writers aren’t bound by establishment servitude, so the value of WikiLeaks is clear as day. One’s eyes are only blinded to the pernicious behaviors of power when power is signing one’s paycheck.

Mass media outlets in America and around the world have fully discredited themselves with their failure to defend a publisher who actually holds power to account and brings facts into the light of truth to create an informed populace. Every day that goes by where they don’t unequivocally condemn any attempt to prosecute Assange is another day in the pile of evidence that corporate media outlets serve power and not truth. Their silence is a tacit admission that they are nothing other than stenographers and propagandists for the most powerful forces on earth.

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Netflix Offers Anti-Semite, Homophobe Farrakhan Documentary Starting August 1st

For executives at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, life is a constant battle to crackdown on free-speech that hurts people’s feelings (or asks uncomfortable questions) as ‘algos’ attempt to maintain a civil discourse on their platforms by ‘shadowbanning’ various conservative thoughts in an effort to placate their social-justice-seeking users.

For executives at Salesforce and Microsoft (and Google), it seems any interaction with the US government (ICE management to AI-assisted drone-executions) is unacceptable to a growing number of their employees and clients.

For executive at Amazon, questions are constantly being raised at how cozy its relationship is with the deeper darker state of the US government.

However, for Netflix executives, those worries do not seem to be problem for the millions of viewers (or is it?…given the most recent disappointment on growth).

Just a few weeks ago we noted the fact that Netlfix seemed ok to offer an Argentinian movie that contained a quite explicit child pornography scene.

And today, we discover that the video-streaming service will begin offering a film chronicling the life of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan on August 1 despite the activist’s penchant for resorting to anti-semitic and anti-gay slurs.

As National Review’s Jack Crowe reports, the documentary, The Honourable Minister Louis Farrakhan: My Life’s Journey Through Music, was produced in 2014 by Farrakhan’s son and chronicles the minister’s life as an activist and fringe political figure. The documentary will be released on August 1, according to a list of newly licensed films Netflix released this month. Farrakhan teased the Netflix release in a Monday tweet.

Farrakhan began his career as a civil-rights activist in the 1960’s and later gained notoriety for helping organize the first Million Man March in Washington, D.C. in 1995. But he has been criticized for frequent bigoted statements against Jews, gays, and others.

He routinely blames the socio-economic plight of African-Americans on a cabal of wealthy Jewish financiers

In 1984 Farrakhan said “The Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a good name. Hitler was a very great man.”

And just this March, at the Women’s March of all things, Farrakhan lashed out at Jews, calling them “the mother and father of apartheid” and slamming  “that Satanic Jew.”

Farrakhan has also criticized President Obama’s acceptance of homosexual “immorality” in harsh terms.

As a result, a number of liberal politicians and activists have been forced to distance themselves from him… but not, apparently, Netflix?

Perhaps we should celebrate Netflix’s adherence to protecting ‘free speech’, to feel comfortable inciting hatred and violence in the interests of allowing humans to express their free-will as to what they choose to pay attention to? Or perhaps, somehow in this twisted world of virtue-signaling, this is yet another odd example of the hypocrisy of today’s liberal cognoscenti.

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Whose Trade War Is It Anyway?

Authored by Valentin Schmid via The Epoch Times,

Everybody complains about Trump, but he wasn’t the one who started it…

War is aggression, often with the use of physical violence to conquer land, people, and power. Trade wars, though not quite as bad, also are aggressive in nature. Where two or more private parties want to transact freely, aggressive governments step in the way and prevent trade from happening with the threat of force.

In 2018, most of the mainstream media and the establishment powers blame President Donald Trump and his administration for starting a trade war, which – like real wars – can only produce losers on both sides. “How Much Damage Will Trump’s Trade War Do?” read a headline in The Atlantic, and countless other articles and official statements say similar things.

So the mainstream media and some politicians are pretending that trade was 100 percent free before Trump started to threaten the “free traders” of China, the European Union (EU), Mexico, and Canada with tariffs. The media paints Washington as the aggressor in this trade war. Trump shot first.

However, truth be told, this trade war did not start this year and certainly the United States isn’t the biggest aggressor. In real war terms, the Americans are now starting to shoot back after being under siege for decades and the whole world is complaining about this act of self-defense.

As Trump wrote in a tweet before meeting the EU’s Jean Claude Juncker on July 25, he doesn’t want a war, he just wants the other side to stop shelling the United States.

“The European Union is coming to Washington tomorrow to negotiate a deal on Trade. I have an idea for them. Both the U.S. and the E.U. drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies! That would finally be called Free Market and Fair Trade! Hope they do it, we are ready – but they won’t!”

When Did It Start, Who Started It?

If we take the definition of a trade war as stopping trade with force, through tariffs, duties, taxes, regulations, and restrictions on foreign investments, no government is innocent. They are all aggressors vis à vis the private sector, which would like to make win-win deals across the globe.

As economist Faustino Ballve notes in his “Essentials of Economics,” “In the market, the buyer as well as the seller gives less than he gets; otherwise no exchange would take place.” In the day and age of identity politics and rampant nationalism, it’s hard to believe that this also goes for the global market where private players don’t care much where the buyer or seller is from or how they look.

And it’s hard to keep track of which government started which tariff and kept it for how long. However, we can say for certain that with China’s ascent to the World Trade Organization (WTO), trade restrictions for Chinese goods worldwide were dramatically lowered while China was allowed to keep relatively high tariffs of around 10 percent on average.

The Worst Offender

So despite this pretty good deal, and also making some improvements, China has kept waging a trade war, restricting market access through force more than any other country involved in the current trade spats between the United States and the EU, or the United States and NAFTA. And this has been going on since 2001.

It still has simple average tariffs of 10 percent compared to the United States of 3.4 percent according to the most recent WTO data. When weighted according to the most traded goods, China still has more than double the rate of the United States at 3.5 compared to 1.6 percent according to the World Bank.

Of course, it doesn’t stop at tariffs. China has used other methods of restricting the flow of trade and putting foreigners at a disadvantage.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation calls this “innovation mercantilism”:

“When China pursues innovation-mercantilist policies―such as the acquisition of foreign technology enterprises leveraged by nonmarket, government-backed funds; forced transfer of technology or intellectual property (IP); IP theft; abuse of antitrust/antimonopoly policy; denial or restrictions of foreign firms’ access to Chinese markets; development of China-only standards; massive subsidies for Chinese firms; refusing to allow access to key resources (e.g., rare earth elements) unless companies locate in China; or any number of other unfair trade practices―such policies directly threaten the health and very viability of American (and other foreign) enterprises.”

According to the latest Enabling Trade Report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) from 2016, which takes some of these measures into account, China ranks 61 out of 136 nations for its role in enabling trade. The United States ranks 22nd with weighted average tariffs at the lowest point in the nation’s history.

So while far from perfect, the United States is much less aggressive than the trade war-waging nation of China. To come back to the real war analogy, all the Trump administration has done is say, “Stop shooting or we’ll shoot back.” The Trump administration never asked for favorable treatment, it merely asked for a level playing field especially with China. But the Chinese haven’t stopped shooting so the Trump administration is now shooting back.

Of course, like a real war, “shooting back” and hitting Chinese goods with tariffs is costly. Existing supply chains will be disrupted, some American industries will be hurt, so will some consumers. Others will benefit.

It is possible that tariffs are too crude a way to restore some way of equilibrium because centrally planning trade is as difficult as centrally planning other parts of the economy. However, it can be argued that following through with threats made in trade negotiations is the only way to stay credible and get the Chinese to stop shooting eventually.

Why is the mainstream media silent on these acts of trade war committed by the Chinese government? Why doesn’t it call on the Chinese to lower tariffs to U.S. levels? President Trump certainly won’t stand in the way of that.

What About the Others?

With NAFTA and the EU, it gets more complicated as both blocks don’t wage their trade wars as fierce as China and generally, trade with the two blocks has been more equitable, although the United States has sizeable trade deficits with both the EU and Mexico.

It’s important to note here that despite all the rhetoric about unfair trade, there are domestic factors also which can cause a country to become less competitive, and the United States has itself to blame for excessive taxation and regulation, which can also be the cause for trade deficits with more competitive countries.

The EU’s weighted average tariffs are the same as the United States at 1.6 percent and Canada, the United States, and Mexico scrapped most tariffs within NAFTA.

But despite the headline elimination of tariffs, there are still issues within NAFTA. From 1994 to 2016, there have been 35 complaints by American companies against Canada under the NAFTA dispute resolution framework, 22 against Mexico, and 20 against the United States. So again it looks like the United States is the least aggressive of the warring parties.

Although the issues are far less severe than with China, Canada and Mexico are also using force to gain an advantage in trade. Canada still has sky-high tariffs on agricultural products, for example, and subsidizes lumber companies with government resources to the detriment of American industry.

Despite the high trade deficit with Mexico, it is the most peaceful of the lot. The Trump administration sees more issues with it being used by foreign and domestic companies to manufacture cheaply in Mexico and then export duty-free to the United States, as American and German companies do with cars for example. Mexico is more of a supplier and a base rather than an aggressive war party.

Speaking about cars, the EU is the biggest aggressor, with tariffs of 10 percent on American car imports whereas EU carmakers can ship to the United States with a paltry 2.5 percent increase in prices.

And although the average tariffs are roughly similar in the EU and the United States, the EU has passed more than 250 harmful trade interventions in every year since 2009, many of which target the United States, according to World Trade Alert. A good example are hundreds of billions in agricultural subsidies and a convoluted set of rules for the standardization of products, like specific sizes for the seats of commercial truck drivers, which make it harder for foreign producers to ship to the bloc without modifications.     

Let’s Not Pretend  

Let’s not pretend the U.S. trading partners are interested in real free trade. Their elected or unelected representatives are more interested in benefiting their special interest groups than in genuine free trade in goods and services among private parties.

And these representatives will intervene with force in the market, wage war against the market to achieve these objectives, in many instances more forceful and for a longer time than the United States.

And let’s not pretend that Trump has started to threaten our partners with tariffs because he is a fan of them in and of themselves. He uses them as a negotiating tool, as a threat to get the other parties to reduce their acts of aggression. Trump wants free trade—and peace. In the case of the EU, this strategy seems to have worked, although agreements to talk about and work toward lower tariffs frequently remain just that: work and talk. 

And although the EU’s Juncker has made these important concessions to work towards lower tariffs excluding the sensitive auto sector, most of the other players don’t look to be interested in real free trade. Otherwise, they would have committed to Donald Trump’s offer at the G7 summit in June to drop all tariffs to zero—for everybody.

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Michigan Declares State Of Emergency After Cancer-Linked Toxin Found In Drinking Water

Michigan officials declared a state of emergency on Sunday after high levels of Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) were discovered in Kalamazoo County tapwater, reports Mlive.com

The declaration was made by Lt. Gov. Brian Calley (R), several days after the toxic compound was found in the water supply of Parchment and Cooper Township. 

“This declaration will allow the state to supply additional resources to help with response efforts and ensure the health and safety of residents in Parchment and Cooper Township,” Calley said in a statement, adding “This helps make sure that every resource that is possible is on the table and that we can work as expeditiously together as we possibly can.” 

“State and local officials and members of the community have been working in full partnership to ensure people in the area have safe water in the short, medium and long term,” Calley said.

Officials detected a concentration of 1,587 parts per trillion of PFAS substances, while the EPA’s maximum recommended dose is 70 parts per trillion. Recent research by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, however, suggests that single-digit levels of the compounds can cause health problems, reports The Hill. 

Crews from Kalamazoo are currently working to flush Parchment’s water lines, which may stir up sediment and discolor the water – which residents are advised not to drink. In the meantime, officials are distributing water at Parchment High School.

PFAS compounds can be found in food packaging, commercial household products – especially those with Teflon and other nonstick surfaces. They are an emerging public health threat across Michigan – having contaminated the water supplies of over 20 communities across the state. 

The compounds can cause low infant birth weight, immune system issues, cancers, and thyroid hormone disruptions.

If humans,  or animals, ingest PFAS (by eating or drinking food or water than contain PFAS), the PFAS are absorbed, and can accumulate in the body. PFAS stay in the human body for long periods of time. As a result, as people get exposed to PFAS from different sources over time, the level of PFAS in their bodies may increase to the point where they suffer from adverse health effects.

Studies indicate that PFOA and PFOS can cause reproductive and developmental, liver and kidney, and immunological effects in laboratory animals. Both chemicals have caused tumors in animal studies. –EPA.gov

Meanwhile, water supplies in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New York and elsewhere have tested positive for elevated PFAS levels.

A 2013 analysis of data collected in 2007 found that around 20% of US water supplies contain PFOA, a more dangerous form of PFAS, while 28% of water supplies have some form of contaminant in the perflourinated compound family according to Quartz. 

Research also suggests that the toxins harm human health at much lower levels than the EPA threshold. According to David Andrews, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, there is debate in the toxicology community as to whether, like lead, there is actually no safe level of exposure, particularly in children who can accumulate more of it than adults and where some studies have suggested an association with behavioral and developmental problems.

PFOA is not currently regulated by the EPA, so state or local governments aren’t required to test for them. The EPA does set a recommended maximum exposure level for PFOA at 70 parts per trillion. But it’s nonbinding: states can choose to comply or not. In New Jersey, the local environment department has set the “acceptable” level at 14 ppt, the most stringent in the country (there is a lot of PFOA in New Jersey’s drinking water—the Environmental Working Group calculated the EPA’s testing method would have missed 75% of the contamination in that state). –Quartz

 

 

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Millennial Socialism: Stupid, Evil, Or Both?

Authored by Kurt Schlichter via Townhall.com,

Congratulations, oh most insufferable of generations – against all odds and confounding the experts, you have still somehow managed to make yourselves even more annoying. Apparently, the hep new jive among your tiresome cohort is “Democratic Socialism,” resurrecting a poisonous nineteenth-century political death cult and putting a kicky new spin on it to make it palatable for the suckers. It’s the political equivalent of hipsters who insist vinyl records are superior because they didn’t grow up forced to crank their tunes on that miserable format.

The “Democratic” part is some cunning rebranding. Just stick “Democratic” in front of something awful and it’s good-to-go. “Democratic haggis”? Yummy! “Democratic herpes”? Sexy! “Democratic Nazism?” Hey, what’s the difference? National socialism, democratic socialism? It’s really just a question of who runs the camps because regardless of the particular brand of socialism, there are always camps.

Always.

That these millennial Marxoids lack personal experience with socialism does not stop them from embracing it. After all, socialism’s biggest fans are always the people who aren’t trapped inside it. Remember the progs who always fly down to Havana and/or Caracas to party with the local caudillo? They always fly home again.

Today’s millennial socialist dilettantes might consider consulting with some of us who have personal experience with this ideological cancer, but millennials tend to prefer to rely upon their arbitrary feelz rather than on boring old facts, evidence, and history.

What the boring old facts, evidence, and history demonstrate, beyond any rational dispute, is that socialism is a bloodstained abomination with north of 100 million corpses to its accursed credit. The It Girl of the current commie/Democrat daisy chain, wide-eyed half-wit Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, doesn’t let bourgeois concepts like “knowing things” stop her from sharing her sophomore-grade insights all over the left-wing media, which is to say “the media.” Gulag Barbie is a clown, and even the late nite hack hosts stare back at her adolescent babbling, amazed as she tosses an incoherent word salad about her workers’ paradise.

Why, it will be just like Switzerland. Or Sweden. One of those. Like, are they different?

By the way, that’s satire (Def: “trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly”) in case you are, like her, too dumb to tell.

No one loves socialism quite like a moron who has never experienced it firsthand. No one hates it like someone who has seen it up close. I walked around in its ruins overseas; it’s an abattoir. My wife escaped it, though her granddad didn’t – he rotted in Castro’s prisons for nearly two decades because he refused to play ball with the reds. Then he died. Oh well, gotta break a few eggs to create a paradise where somebody else pays for your college, right?

Just remember that you are an egg.

The free stuff thing is a really big part of what today’s “Democratic Socialism” is –getting the leftist government to send people with guns to take the stuff you’ve worked for and give it to the people who like socialism.

Free college? Well, free for the people who vote for the democratic socialists.

Free healthcare? Well, free for the people who vote for the democratic socialists.

Free whatever they decide they want for free next? Well, free for…you get the idea.

Three guesses as to who gets stuck with the check for all this free stuff, because someone always gets stuck with the check because there is no such thing as free stuff. All those millennial mommies who read their theybies that insufferably stupid kiddie book The Giving Tree implanted the dual notions of entitlement and economic illiteracy into their useless spawn. The promise of socialism is that someone else will do the toiling – and that someone is always the people who reject socialism.

You guessed right! It’s normal Americans once again, the draft horses of America, who will be expected to carry their own weight as well as the weight of all the cool kidz in Brooklyn and ‘Frisco. But as my upcoming book Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy demonstrates in vicious and hilarious detail, Normals are getting tired of snobs who disrespect and despise them while simultaneously expecting them to maintain, feed, fuel, and defend this country all by themselves.

The socialist cheerleaders don’t want to be normal. Normality requires work. They want to be part of an elite that will run things from their progressive urban coastal enclaves, and in socialism there’s always a lot of running things going on. But they always assume that once the revolution comes, they will be the ones running things, clothed in government authority and making all the economic decisions that individuals and their companies make today. None of them imagine they will be the ones stuck with the dirty jobs – they dream of being commissars, not garbagemen.

SJWism is perfect training for the aspiring cog in the totalitarian oppression machine – policing campuses for forbidden thought teaches them the skills they can put into action policing society for forbidden thought. I wrote about what these wannabe Bolsheviks will do if they aren’t stopped in my novels People’s Republic and Indian Country, which depict both the nightmarish world they seek to create and the proper response to tyranny by American patriots.

Spoiler: All Normal American citizens should take advantage of their First and Second Amendment rights to act to prevent leftist tyranny – at least, until some majority of leftist judges decides that the rights of free speech, a free press, and to keep and bear arms don’t actually exist just because they are there in the text, but the right to force others to give you free stuff and to “pronoun justice” do exist because of penumbras and emanations and reasons.

Now, democratic socialists will always deny that getting on the pathway to tyranny will lead to tyranny, and they will always tell you that true socialism has never been achieved. Basically, their argument is that we should throw out the ideology that brought the world the freest and most prosperous country in human history and instead give an ideology that has failed every single time it’s been attempted yet another shot because they are tired of paying for the things they want.

This is not a compelling argument for Normals, who have enough life experience to realize that things that fail every single time they are tried are certain to fail again.

Socialism’s perfect record of failure, misery, and slaughter is kind of a problem for them, so they pivot and distract, playing an ideological shell game by claiming that what they really want isn’t socialism. Why, they just to be more like Canada! This, of course, begs the question of why they call themselves “socialists” if they don’t want socialism.

But Normals are woke; they prefer their freedom and abundant toilet paper. They know that the current socialist fad is a lie, because socialism is built on lies. The democratic socialists keep promising Denmark and Norway, and but they always deliver Cuba and Venezuela.

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US Debt Sales To Surge: Treasury Raises 2018 Borrowing Need To $1.33 Trillion

America’s funding needs are starting to grow at a dangerous pace.

Even before the NYT reported of Trump’s startling suggestion of a further $100 billion tax cut in the form of an inflation-adjusted capital gains tax cost basis which mostly benefits the wealthy, earlier today the U.S. Treasury said it expects to borrow $56 billion more during the third quarter than previously estimated, while market participants expect shorter-dated Treasuries to absorb the brunt of the new supply as the Trump administration grapples with a mushrooming budget deficit.

In the Treasury’s latest quarterly Sources and Uses table, it revealed that it expects to issue $329 billion in net marketable debt from July through September, and $56 billion more than the $273 billion estimated three months ago, in April. assuming an end-of-September cash balance of $350 billion, matching its previous estimate. It also forecast $440 billion of borrowing in the final three months of the year, with a $390 billion cash balance on December 31.

The borrowing estimate for the third quarter is the highest since the same period in 2010 and the fourth largest on record for the July-September quarter, according to Reuters. In the second quarter, net borrowing totaled $72 billion, slightly below the earlier prediction of $75 billion.

The US fiscal picture continues to darken as a result of rising social security costs, military spending and debt service expenses while corporate tax income is declining after last year’s tax reforms. As a result, the federal budget deficit is expected to reach $833 billion this year, up from $666 billion in the budget year ended last September, a number that is well below the net funding demands for the US Treasury.

The new projections put total net borrowing at $769 billion for the second half of 2018 and a whopping $1.33 trillion for the whole year. The federal budget deficit totaled $607 billion through the first nine months of the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, up 16% compared with $523 billion from the same period a year earlier. In late June, the CBO forecast that total government spending would exceed revenue by $1 trillion in 2020. That would suggest that the net financing need of the US in two years could be as high as $1.5 trillion.

Yields on 10-year Treasurys rose to session highs of almost 2.98% following the release of the borrowing outlook according to Bloomberg data, although the bulk of today’s move was in anticipation of a surprise announcement by the BOJ. Meanwhile, the 2-year yield was steady around 2.67%, near the lows for the day.

“Because of surprising declines in corporate tax revenues, the federal deficit is constantly under discussion this month,” FTN rates strategist Jim Vogel told Reuters. Adding to the supply of bonds hitting the market, the Fed is also trimming its vast holdings of Treasury debt as part of Quantitative Tightening, with some $40BN in monthly reductions in the third quarter.

* * *

On Wednesday, as part of its quarterly refunding announcement, the Treasury will detail how it expects to spread the new supply across bond maturities ranging from one month to 30 years. As we discussed over the weekend, bond analysts expect faster increases in maturities out to five years, which could push their yields up at a quicker pace than those for longer-dated securities, resulting in further flattening of the yield curve.

According to Reuters, the Treasury is expected to increase sales of 2 and 3 Year notes by $1 billion a month, similar to its increases in the second quarter. Securities maturing in 7 to 30 years should increase at a rate of $1 billion per quarter, resulting in ever increasing supply to fund Trump’s fiscal program. Some estimate that five-year note sales could also ramp up by $1 billion more per month compared with the same amount for the whole of the second quarter.

While one outcome of emphasizing short-dated supply will be further bond flattening, short- and intermediate-dated debt is seen as having strong demand and relatively attractive rates. Avoiding a similar sharp boost in supply of long-term rates avoids a large increases in yields that could create an economic drag.

The market, however, is bearish on all Treasuries across the curve and as we showed over the weekend, the latest CFTC data showed that speculators last week have put on record aggregate Treasury short positions in five-year, 10-year and 30-year Treasuries futures, while also expanded to their short two-year note position.

Finally, investors will be looking for clues when the Treasury plans to introduce new two-month bills and five-year Treasury inflation-protected securities, as both have been discussed recently by the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, even if many don’t see these as being introduced this quarter.

Source: US Treasury

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Here’s Why The U.S. Will Soon Make A Face-Saving Exit From Syria

Authored by Elijah Magnier, Middle East based chief international war correspondent for Al Rai Media

The Syrian army is conducting its southern campaign with the pacification of the last two percent of the Qunietra province that remains under the control of the “Islamic State” (ISIS) terrorist group. That will free tens of thousands of troops of the Syrian army and its allies from the burden of fighting in the south of the country and will mark a turning point in the seven years of war imposed on the Levant. 

The whole of Syria will be liberated from the territorial control of militias and jihadists. What remains of occupied Syria is under the control of two countries: territories held by the US and Turkey in the north. However, these occupations do not seem tenable, particularly now that the Kurds, in control of 23% of Syria, have decided to respond positively to the Syrian President’s call to engage in dialogue or face war. 

This means the US cannot stay for much longer in Syria; it will find a face-saving way to leave very soon.

The US presence in Syria had several aims:

  • To divide Syria and establish a Kurdish state in the north under the name of Rojava, under the US military “protection”, like Iraqi Kurdistan during Saddam Hussein era. The US was not against a Kurdish state to include Syria and Iraq. However, Iraqi Kurdistan, under Masood Barzani, dashed its hopes of independence when he refused to follow US advice to postpone a move to break away for 18 months. Barzani’s premature decision to separate from Iraq was confronted with a strong reaction from Baghdad troops who took control of Kurdistan’s borders and resources.
  • Leave the rest of Syria in an endless bloody war between Salafi-Takfiri jihadists and other groups. This war was meant to advance the cause of ISIS, whose enemies were not the distance US (notwithstanding the proximity of US troops) but closer to hand (ISIS set his objective to fight and eliminate the “nearer enemy” — mainly Shia, secular and Sunni who disagree with its “state” versus al-Qaeda traditional goal of prioritising the “far enemy” although this objective was not prioritised in the Levant): Lebanon, Jordan, and the rest of the Middle East. ISIS advances would have been detrimental to the “Axis of Resistance” (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah) or at least would have interrupted the flow of weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon (from Iran through Syria). Hezbollah would have been cornered into the south of Lebanon, a Shia enclave surrounded by Israel on one side and a hostile government to the north with Takfiri ruling in the other parts of the country.

The US came to Syria not exclusively for oil but also to serve Israel by eliminating an enemy state or several enemies altogether. However, the war in Syria did not go as planned and today the Damascus government is in control of all Syrian territory except for the north. This notwithstanding any ISIS insurgency that may continue to be operational not only in Syria but also in any other parts of the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt is the best example– the state is on solid ground but suffers continuous terrorist attacks).

Moreover, the Putin-Trump meeting in Helsinki boosted the confidence of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a settlement — Moscow promised to protect Israel’s borders with Israel (1974 line). The Russian President argued that Assad’s government had maintained its borders with the occupied Golan heights for over 40 years without any incident.

Therefore, Israel has concluded that its security needs can be met with the continued presence of Assad in power, and by the presence of Russian military police on its borders in addition to the UNDOF (UN Disengagement Forces established by the UNSC resolution 350 in May 1974 to monitor the ceasefire between Israel and Syria). When this condition is met, there will be no reason for US forces to continue to occupy the al-Tanf Iraq-Syria crossing and al-Hasaka province where Kurdish forces are based.

Meanwhile, Assad confidently delivered an ultimatum to the Kurds: “either negotiate, or you will be faced with war”. The Syrian president said this because he is aware that Idlib, the north-western city under Turkish control, will not capitulate without fighting.

A military operation has started in rural Latakia to remove dangers to the coastal province, where jihadists sporadically attack Syrian positions and other villages in the area. Several armed drones were recently launched from this area against the Russian military base in Hmeymim and were shot down by the Russian base defense system before reaching their target.

Jan Egeland, the head of the UN’s humanitarian task force for Syria says that in Idlib “there are two million people including the Internally Displaced Refugees”. There are more than 40,000 jihadists and their allies who won’t put down their weapons without a fight (Jabhat al-Nusra aka Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, Hurras el-Deen, Jund al-Aqsa, Ahrar al-Sham and many others) .

Jabhat al-Nusra, aka Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham preparing for the forthcoming Idlib battle. Image via ejmagnier.com

Sources in Damascus confirmed the battle of Idlib will most probably happen in September. “When the air force and artillery start pounding jihadists positions, Idlib will be under fire. The Syrian army has studied and established several safe corridors for civilians to leave Idlib either north or south of the city and its rural area to avoid civilian casualties”.

Turkey is aware that the Syrian government can no longer be stopped.  Turkey will have to withdraw and will have to let go of the jihadists in the north because Assad is determined to liberate all of Syria by all means.

Kafar’rum “military council threatening – following rumours related to the forthcoming battle of Idlib, to kill anyone who thinks of reconciling with the central government forces”. Image and translation via Elijah Magnier

Turkey’s primary concern is to stop the Kurds from having a state. This coincides with Assad’s goal of preventing the partition of Syria. In keeping this goal, a Kurdish delegation has visited Damascus to initiate dialogue with the central government, with the consent of the US leadership.

In all three Kurdish enclaves (Afrin, Kobani, and Jazeera), there was a “Democratic Autonomous administration” under the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed branch, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). With the loss of Afrin to Turkey, the remaining two enclaves become connected one to another; they now host several US military bases and airports.

The central Kurdish city is Qamishli (in al-Jazeera canton); it still hosts a large Syrian Army force. The Kurds never clashed with the Syrian army (a few small incidents were registered years ago) and do not seek to separate from Syria but are aiming for a decentralised canton. The Kurdish delegation asked Damascus to take up its responsibility as a central government and thus be responsible for the upkeep and restoration of the Euphrates Dam and its upkeep and restoration (following severe damage inflicted during the battle with ISIS), the distribution of potable water, electricity supply, and the reconstruction of houses, schools, and hospitals.

The Syrian government responded by citing amendments to the Constitution in 2012: articles 130 and 131 called for “decentralisation and financial and administrative independence of local governance structures”, in keeping with the legislative Decree 107 of October 2011.

The Kurds agreed on Decree 107 but contested the way it was implemented and the lack of authority given to local representatives and the appointed governor. They have also contested the power given to the government minister in charge of overseeing the administration of all provinces.

Turkey is building buffer walls in the villages of Sarman and TalToukan in the eastern & southern CS of Idlib, to separating them from areas controlled by the Syrian Army, around the 12 Turkish checkpoints in context of the upcoming mil operation via @Syrian_Uruk/Anadolu

The interpretation of the existing laws, their implementation and force were one of the main subjects of discussion between the two delegations. The distribution of wealth (mainly gas and oil) was discussed, and it was agreed to resume discussion of all unresolved points in future meetings.

Damascus considers that the meeting was successful, indicating the will of the Kurds to remain under the umbrella of the central government in one country. They also accept Russia as a guarantor for the deal as well as for a wider political solution in the country.

The Kurds offered to place substantial forces under the command of the Syrian Army to help and assist any war against terrorists and jihadists, in particular against the remains of ISIS and al-Qaeda and their allies in the north of the country. Damascus welcomes this initiative and will undoubtedly benefit from the offer.

It is too early to talk about a final deal between Damascus and Qamishli.

However, it is clear that discussions have begun well and are on the right track. The Kurds have accepted that the US will not be around forever to protect them, and therefore they need to protect themselves by returning to the arms of the central government, where they belong.

With the end of the war in the south and the Kurdish initiative, it is only a matter of time and circumstances before the US finds a quiet way out of Syria, ending their occupation and accepting that their “regime change” operation has failed miserably.

It could well be that the US would like to see from close at hand how Syria and Russia will deal with Idlib. Nevertheless, there is no doubt about the outcome of the battle: Syria is walking towards the end of its long and bloody war.

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Opioid-Related Deaths In Maryland Are “Staggering”, New Report

Maryland’s opioid crisis is showing limited signs of abating with the latest report highlighting a record number of fentanyl-related deaths.

According to the report, published last week by the Maryland Department of Health, the number of drug and alcohol-related intoxication deaths occurring in the state jumped 9 percent between 2016 and 2017, reaching a record high of 2,282. In fact, this is the seventh consecutive year of increases in the overall rate of substance-related deaths.

Baltimore Business Journal notes that “illegal and prescription opioids” are the primary causes of the opioid crisis in all 24 Maryland counties.

Though heroin-related deaths declined by 134 to 1,078 overall from 2016 in Maryland, fentanyl-related deaths continue to surge, increasing from 1,119 in 2016 to 1,594 in 2017, according to Maryland health officials. The agency’s statistics include deaths in 2017 and the first three months of 2018.

“While Maryland is starting to see a decline in heroin-related deaths, fentanyl-related deaths continue to rise in staggering numbers,” said Maryland Department of Health Secretary Robert R. Neall in a statement.

Neall emphasized that Marylanders with an addiction problem need to “immediately seek treatment” and consult with officials about acquiring naloxone, a drug that is used to reverse an overdose from opioids.

Baltimore Business Journal said data from the first quarter of 2018 showed that there were 653 unintentional drug and alcohol-related intoxication deaths across the state. There were 579 opioid-related deaths, 500 of which involved fentanyl.

The epicenter of the opioid crisis is Baltimore City

State officials say the data shows that fentanyl — considered many times more potent than morphine and heroin — combined with cocaine or heroin is the leading cause in overall overdoses in 2017 and the first quarter of this year.

Dr. Leana Wen, Baltimore City Health Commissioner, said: “there is no question we are at a state emergency and a public health crisis here in Baltimore.” She also said fentanyl deaths in Baltimore City had increased 5,000 percent from 2013.

Gary Tuggle, Baltimore Police Department Acting Commissioner, said: “overdose victims…getting younger and younger…as young as 13, 14 years old.”

The report also showed:

  • The number of fatal heroin overdoses in Maryland appears to be decreasing — after increasing each year since 2011. Overdoses involving heroin have decreased since the third quarter of 2017. The percentage of all overdose deaths involving heroin has also decreased from 58 percent of all overdose deaths in 2016 to 36 percent of all overdose deaths in the first quarter of 2018.

  • Prescription drug-related deaths remained relatively flat from 2016 to 2017, dropping by five from 418 to 413. The number of prescription drug-related deaths remained the same in the first quarter of 2018 compared to the same time period in 2017 with 104.

  • Eighty-eight percent of all intoxication deaths that occurred in Maryland in 2017 were opioid-related — heroin, prescription opioids and nonpharmaceutical fentanyl.

  • Statistics show that cocaine-related deaths are also up from 464 in 2016 to 691 in 2017.

  • Baltimore City had by far the most intoxication deaths of any jurisdiction with 761 in 2017.

Dr. Wen said the alarming amount of overdose deaths indicates the strong need for more funding for treatment and the continued stockpiling of naloxone.

“We have not even seen the peak of this epidemic,” Dr. Wen told Baltimore Business Journal in a phone interview last week. “We don’t know what that peak is and when it’s going to be.”

When questioned about Dr. Wen’s concern about the report’s timing, state health officials said “new data, which takes additional time to compile and confirm, has been added to the 2017 report in order to make it more comprehensive. The department continuously modifies the report as additional substances and data sets emerge, in an effort to provide a complete overview of the heroin and opioid epidemic.”

Earlier this month, we revealed how the CDC’s Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report indicated that the third wave of the opioid epidemic is here, as new opioid synthetics that are many more times as potent as morphine and used to tranquilize elephants are attributing to the latest surge in deaths. As for Baltimore, well, Dr. Wen said it best: “We have not even seen the peak of this epidemic,” which means the opioid crisis in Maryland and Baltimore is about to get a whole lot worse.

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What The GDP Report Won’t Tell You About The Economy

Authored by Danielle DiMartino Booth via LinkedIn.com,

Surveys are starting to show a clear trend of corporate executives becoming much less confident. 

Something is amiss in Corporate America. Both national and regional surveys reveal a sinking sense that the economy’s tailwinds are shifting to headwinds. The downtrodden confidence is a curiosity given many economists’ forecasts calling for second-quarter growth to have accelerated to a 4.2 percent annualized rate, the fastest since 2014.

Soft though the survey data may be, the numbers don’t lie. If something doesn’t give — and fast — what follows is sure to be damaging to the real economy.

The University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey for July revealed that the business outlook had slumped to the lowest level in over two years. Odds are pretty good this number was dragged down by those with the highest incomes, many of whom are likely also business owners and corporate executives who’ve been on the front line of the rising costs to run their businesses.

But there may be more than meets the eye among those whose incomes rank in the top third of households. While the majority of these respondents expressed concern over the tariffs, what they’re reading, hearing and seeing may be dampening their outlooks even further. As things stand, it’s as if January never happened, a month in which confidence was so high, the “news heard” among high income earners hit a 20-year high. By the beginning of July, “news heard” had slid to minus 18, the lowest in two years. The six-month, 79-point swing is so severe it rivals August 2011, when the euro crisis shook world markets, Standard & Poor’s stripped the U.S. of its AAA credit rating and households were rattled by the debt ceiling debacle.

Are things really all that bad? Alcoa Corp. Chief Executive Roy Harvey certainly seems to think so. In the aluminum giant’s post-earnings conference call last week, Harvey explained that rather than benefit, the company is suffering from U.S.-imposed tariffs despite the original intent of the effective tax imposition on imports. The required “primary aluminum,” a key input for further processing into products Alcoa makes, comes from its own Canadian smelters, where tariffs have been levied. The firm’s raw materials costs have thus increased, crimping profits and leaving executives with the poor choice of paying tariffs on its own imports or selling its Canadian production outside the U.S. at lower margins. In addition, much of the increased domestic demand for aluminum has been satisfied by antiquated and inefficient production capacity that had been taken offline, further depressing profits.

Alcoa is among the minority of companies that have said tariffs are responsible for tempering their earnings outlooks. (Some of the concerns over trade eased after President Donald Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Wednesday that they agreed to suspend new tariffs while continuing talks.) Most blame the strengthening dollar. Nevertheless, the law of unintended consequences is apparent in the first two regional Federal Reserve surveys released for July.

The first out was the New York Fed’s Empire report, which covers the New York area. Planned capital expenditure and technology spending sank in July, falling to the lowest in 11 months. A similar survey from the Philadelphia Fed echoed those results, with the outlook for employment falling to the lowest in 17 months, and the outlook for “business activity” dropping to the lowest since March 2016. The portion of the survey covering new orders and backlogs tumbled to the lowest since February of that same year.

Is Seeing, Reading and Hearing Believing? Today’s News Drives Today’s Business Outlook

Bleakley Financial Group Chief Investment Officer Peter Boockvar posed some difficult questions in the wake of the survey’s conclusion that while current activity remains brisk, the future is less promising: “Is it the tariffs? A stronger dollar? Did we pull a lot of activity into the second quarter because of supply constraints where everyone was double ordering?”

Anecdotal evidence certainly suggests as much, with firms reporting that they’ve been stockpiling for months to head off possible price increases brought on by future tariffs. In last week’s two-day testimony to Congress, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell expressed concern that the tariffs would compel companies to ratchet back activity. As if on cue, the day after his testimony, the Fed’s Beige Book of economic activity had this to say: “Manufacturers in all Districts expressed concern about tariffs and in many Districts reported higher prices and supply disruptions that they attributed to the new trade policies.”

The Cleveland and New York District Feds, in particular, reported activity had already taken a hit. As is the case with Alcoa, the New York area engages in a good amount of trade with Canada, and manufacturers corroborated that costs had increased. Meanwhile, panic buying is reported to have pulled activity forward in the Cleveland region: “In some cases, manufacturers noted a rush to purchase metals in anticipation of additional price increases.”

Consider the starting point for many companies. Last year’s weak dollar and natural disasters had many struggling to satisfy overseas demands and the massive needs required to rebuild. Labor and raw material costs were already on the rise to correct for the imbalances. The tariffs were the insult to injury many manufacturers could simply not afford.

“The actual economic impact will really come down to time,” cautioned Boockvar. “The longer this goes on, the more actual business activity will be negatively affected.”

To Boockvar’s point, the collapse in business sentiment suggests many companies don’t foresee the ability to withstand further blows to their ability to profitably conduct business. Businesses are saying as much.

*  *  *

Danielle DiMartino Booth is CEO and Director of Intelligence at Quill Intelligence LLC.

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