Month: January 2019

President Trump brushed off a report by the Washington Post stating that he “has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details” of his discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin – telling Fox News host Jeanine Pirro in a phone interview that he would be willing to release the details of a private conversation in Helsinki last summer. 

“I would. I don’t care,” Trump told Pirro, adding: “I’m not keeping anything under wraps. I couldn’t care less.”

“I mean, it’s so ridiculous, these people making up,” Trump said of the WaPo report. 

The president referred to his roughly two-hour dialogue with Putin in Helsinki — at which only the leaders and their translators were present — as “a great conversation” that included discussions about “securing Israel and lots of other things.”

“I had a conversation like every president does,” Trump said Saturday. “You sit with the president of various countries. I do it with all countries.” –Politico 

Trump on WaPo report and meeting with Putin to Pirro: “I meet with Putin, and they make a big deal. Anybody could have listened to that meeting, that meeting is open for grabs.” pic.twitter.com/fmcudado31

— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) January 13, 2019

In July an attempt by House Democrats to subpoena Trump’s Helsinki interpreter was quashed by Republicans. 

“The Washington Post is almost as bad, or probably as bad, as the New York Times,” Trump said.

When Pirro asked Trump about a Friday night New York Times report that the FBI had opened an inquiry into whether he was working for Putin, Pirro asked Trump “Are you now or have you ever worked for Russia, Mr. President?” 

“I think it’s the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked,” Trump responded. “I think it’s the most insulting article I’ve ever had written.”

Trump on the NYT article about the FBI counterintelligence investigation: “I think it’s the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked. I think it’s the most insulting article I’ve ever had written.” pic.twitter.com/F0QUu1oRhG

— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) January 13, 2019

Trump went on an epic tweetstorm Saturday following the Times article, defending his 2017 firing of former FBI Director James Comey, and tweeting that he has been “FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President. At the same time, & as I have often said, getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. I fully expect that someday we will have good relations with Russia again!”

I have been FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President. At the same time, & as I have often said, getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. I fully expect that someday we will have good relations with Russia again!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2019

Trump slammed the recent reports as “all nonsense.”  

via RSS http://bit.ly/2sma0Z2 Tyler Durden

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

Whether its CNBC, or The New York Times, or NPR, the mainstream media is clearly committed to using the current partial government shutdown to portray federal workers as beleaguered victims of the American political system.

But, in all cases I’ve encountered, these reports neglect to mention that on average, civilian federal workers make 17 percent more than similar workers in the private sector, according to a 2017-2018 report by the Congressional Budget Office. That’s total compensation, so we’re including both wages and benefits.

Considering that a year is 52 weeks long, an average federal worker would need to be completely without any income for nearly 9 weeks in order to just be reduced to equal standing with a similar private-sector worker. (17 percent of 52 weeks is 8.84 weeks.)

Source: Congressional Budget Office.

As of this writing, the current shutdown has only lasted three weeks, which means all those furloughed workers profiled in national news stories are likely still coming out ahead of their private-sector colleagues. Moreover, given that both Trump and Congress have committed to pay furloughed workers back pay, it’s a safe bet that federal workers will continue to enjoy a healthy advantage over private-sector workers when it comes to compensation.

Health benefits for most federal workers will also continue without interruption through the shutdown, as noted by NPR.

The Federal-Pay Advantage Is Larger for Lower-Income Employees

The disparity between private-sector work and federal jobs is largest at the lower end of the education scale.

According to the CBO’s report:

Federal civilian workers with no more than a high school education earned 34 percent more, on average, than similar workers in the private sector.

That’s just wages. They get far more in terms of benefits like healthcare and vacation time:

Average benefits were 93 percent higher for federal employees with no more than a high school education than for their private-sector counterparts.

The benefits for workers with a bachelors degree are 52 percent higher for federal workers than for their private-sector counterparts. Wages for federal workers in this group, however, are only five percent higher.

Only when we look at federal workers with PhDs and other advanced degrees, do we find some federal workers who actually make less than similar workers in the private sector. Wages among highly-educated federal employees were 24 percent less than in the private sector, according to the report. Benefits remained “about the same.”

So, most federal employees — especially the ones with less education — have a long way to go before facing the economic realities that private-sector employees — i.e., the net taxpayers — face on a daily basis.

Crowding Out Private Employment

Not content with manufacturing sympathy for federal workers, however, news organizations have also pointed to a decline in spending by federal employees as damaging to the economy.

A typical passage is one like this one from a CNBC article:

If the government shutdown lasts another two weeks, the total cost to the U.S. economy would exceed the price of building the proposed border wall.

Without federal spending, we’re told, GDP will suffer:

We estimated that this shutdown could shave approximately $1.2 billion off real GDP in the quarter for each week that part of the government is closed.

That might sound like a big number (to some people unfamiliar with federal finances), but it’s helpful to keep in mind that federal workers make up only 1.5 percent of the federal workforce. And not all of those are furloughed.

Moreover, since furloughed workers can eventually expect back pay, any bust in GDP right now will be followed by a boom in spending once the back pay is received.

The real cost to the private sector is in the form of industries that are paralyzed as a result of understaffed federal regulatory agencies. (As mentioned in this article about craft beer.) When the private sector isn’t allowed to function without regular certification and inspection from federal agents, that means shutdowns prevent the private sector from functioning. This, of course, isn’t an argument for more government spending. It’s an argument against a vast federal regulatory apparatus that can’t be counted on to perform the bare minimum of tasks it has promised to perform.

All of this is just a good reminder that these jobs should never have been federal jobs in the first place.  After all, many of these positions are already by definition “non-essential,” and from the national parks to the airports to the FBI, the federal workers are doing jobs that could easily be taken over by state and local authorities, or by the private sector.

Were that the case, no nationwide, system-wide shutdown all of countless nationwide agencies would be of any noticeable impact. The system would become less fragile, more flexible, more diverse, and less costly.

Also, many of the workers who now rely on federal paychecks would already be working in the private sector had the federal government not crowded these jobs out of the marketplace to begin with. Every time the federal government inserts itself as a monopolist regulator or service provider, federal agencies suck resources (in terms of both capital and human resources) out of the private sector. That means fewer new hires in the private sector, and it means lower wages for the employees left in the private sector who must foot the bills for federal agencies and employees. It also means higher prices for the private sector as government agencies bid up prices on everything from steel to petroleum.

Ultimately, all of the problems we’re being told about as a result of the government shutdown are problems caused by a federal government itself, which has inserted itself into every nearly every corner of daily life nationwide.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2Ft6Kmk Tyler Durden

With the partial federal government shutdown entering its twenty-second day on Saturday – breaking a record set by a shutdown in late 1995 to become the longest in US history – President Trump called in to Judge Jeanine Pirro’s show on Saturday night and revived his threat to declare a national emergency if Democrats don’t accede to his demands to fund at least part of his proposed border wall.

The shutdown began last month after Dems refused to support including $5.7 billion as part of a funding package for a handful of government agencies. They then reportedly rejected several compromise offers floated by the White House as Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced the wall as “immoral” and insisted that Dems wouldn’t vote to support a single dollar of funding for one of Trump’s core campaign promises.

Since then, Trump has wavered on whether he should call a national emergency to order the Army Corps. of Engineers to build the wall. According to one widely reported plan under consideration, Trump could tap funding allocated for disaster-relief efforts to build an even larger segment of the wall than what he had asked Congress. Though on Friday, Trump said “I would rather not” declare a national emergency, saying he’d rather see Congress act on an issue that the president has framed as a “humanitarian crisis.”

Instead of departing for Mar-a-Lago for the holidays, Trump opted to spend the last weeks of December in the White House waiting for Democrats to come to the table and cut a table (a period that was distinguished by a stream of furious presidential tweets). During his interview with Pirro, Trump affirmed what anybody who has been paying attention to his twitter feed likely suspected: He has not left the White House since the shutdown began. 

“I’ve been here virtually every night,” Trump said.

He then insisted that he has “the absolute right” to call a national emergency if the Democrats don’t “return from their vacation and act” (a reference to a trip to Puerto Rico taken by 30 Democrats where they’re meeting with lobbyists and seeing an exclusive production of “Hamilton”.

“I have the absolute right to call a national emergency,” Trump reiterated, adding “I’d rather see the Democrats come back from their vacation and act.” (The president may have been referring to reports that some 30 Democrats were in Puerto Rico this weekend, meeting with lobbyists and attending a special performance of the Broadway play “Hamilton.”)

But the president said he wanted to give Democrats the chance to “act responsibly”.

“I want to give them the chance to see if they can act responsibly…It’s a humanitarian crisis and its national security.”

With the shutdown on the cusp of entering its fourth week, some 800,000 federal workers on Friday received blank pay stubs, ratcheting up the political pressure on the administration to do something to end the shutdown, amounting to “bad politics” for the Dems (though opinion polling shows a majority of voters blame Trump for the shutdown after he said during a contentious meeting with Pelosi and Schumer that he would happily take responsibility for it).

“They think its politics, I think its bad politics. This country wants to have protection at the border,” Trump told Fox News.

Trump also took a few minutes to respond to a pair of reports published in the New York Times and Washington Post alleging that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence operation into whether Trump was a Russian asset, and that Trump had concealed transcripts of his conversations with President Putin from other members of his administration (likely for fear that his comments would be leaked without context).

A furious Trump blasted the NYT article as “the most insulting thing” ever written about him (admittedly a pretty high bar).

“I think it’s the most insulting thing I have ever been asked,” Trump said. “I think it’s the most insulting article I’ve ever had written and if you read the article you see that they found absolutely nothing.”

Trump said he would happily disclose details from his conversations with Putin, adding that “there was absolutely no conclusion.”

“I would. I don’t care,” Trump told Pirro, about disclosing details of those talks. “I had a conversation like every president does. You sit with the president of various countries. I do it with all countries.”

“Here’s the bottom line,” the president said. “There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. There was no anything. … It’s a witch hunt.”

Of course, any interview with Trump so close to the 2020 Iowa caucuses wouldn’t be complete without a few stray jabs at the incipient Democratic competition. Asked by the crop of challengers so far, Trump said he’s “not worried.”

And while VP Joe Biden appears to be leading the field, Trump described him as “weak”.

“I’m not worried. So far I love the competition. I love what I see,” he said.

[…]

“He’s weak,” Trump said of Biden.

Watch the interview below:

via RSS http://bit.ly/2Chphiv Tyler Durden

The US Air Force is putting China on notice as it announced Friday a new deployment of three B-2 Spirit stealth bombers to Hawaii for training in the Pacific. The nuclear-capable aircraft departed Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, and touched down at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, along with 200 support personnel airmen, as part of a U.S Strategic Command-led Bomber Task Force mission. 

One defense analyst recently called the increase in B-2 bomber deployments to Hawaii “China’s nightmare, and something Beijing should get use to.” 

“Deploying to Hawaii enables us to showcase to a large American and international audience that the B-2 is on watch 24 hours a day, seven days a week ready to protect our country and its allies,” military spokesman Lt. Col. Joshua Dorr said in a statement. Though a Pacific Air Forces Public Affairs press release did not expressly mention China, Beijing has reacted aggressively to a number of routine US long-range flyovers in the Pacific and South China Sea regions over the past year, including “close call” incidents involving Chinese intercept attempts of US vessels passing through what China claims as its own territorial waters. “Its presence in the Hawaiian Islands stands as a testament to enhanced regional security,” the US military statement continued. 

The Air Force statement further touted the B-2’s ability to “penetrate an enemy’s most sophisticated defenses,” as well as “put at risk their most valuable targets” due to its “low-observable, or stealth, characteristics”. The statement continued, “This training is crucial to maintaining our regional interoperability. It affords us the opportunity to work with our allies in joint exercises and validates our always-ready global strike capability.”

Previously, B-2 bombers were operational in Guam in support of regional allies at a moment of escalating tensions between North Korea and the US in 2017 over Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

Crucially, though this latest deployment is being described as “routine” it is only the second time the B-2 Spirits have been sent to Hawaii, and in the largest numbers, after an initial training run in the Pacific in October. At the time Maj. Gen. Stephen Williams, the director of air and cyberspace operations at the Pacific Air Forces headquarters, noted the bombers “helped ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific” — language frequently used by US officials in response to China’s condemnations of the recent uptick of American operational activity near southeast Asia. 

As recently as December Chinese officials issued threats against what was described as American military “meddling in China’s affairs”. For example Dai Xu –  President of the Institute of Marine Safety and Cooperation, and a PLA Air Force Colonel Commandant, recently stated: 

“If the U.S. warships break into Chinese waters again, I suggest that two warships should be sent: one to stop it, and another one to ram it… In our territorial waters, we won’t allow US warships to create disturbance.” 

“The US keeps meddling in China’s affairs, so why can’t China go to areas like Hawaii where the US is dominant,” he added. Xu was referring to the frequent Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs) conducted by the United States in the South China Sea.

Regarding the new B-2 deployment to Hawaii, it will be interesting to see just how close the advanced nuclear-capable stealth bombers come to airspace in which Beijing has issued prior threats to US planes. Last August, for example, a US Navy P-8A Poseidon reconnaissance plane flying over the regionally disputed Spratley Islands in the South China Sea was told “Leave immediately and keep out to avoid any misunderstanding” in a series of radio communicated warnings from the Chinese military. China has also told US allied forces like the armed forces of the Philippines, “Leave immediately or you will pay”.

The dramatic inflight recording of China’s warnings during an early August 2018 incident below (starts at :50 mark):

“Leave immediately”: A US Navy plane, with CNN aboard the flight, is warned over the South China Sea https://t.co/wEnvxKrGro pic.twitter.com/UB5MPX1gJj

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) August 10, 2018

In response to the belligerent Chinese radio communications to “leave immediately” the US crew cited that the plane was conducting lawful activities over international territory. Under international law, a country’s airspace is considered to be 12 nautical miles distant from the coastline of the nation. But Beijing has of late laid claim to more and more territory surrounding its controversial string of man-made artificial islands, and claiming further the skies above as sovereign Chinese airspace, which the US has refused to recognize. 

But considering the Northrop Grumman built B-2 stealth bomber is by design extremely difficult to detect by radar, allowing it to penetrate sophisticated enemy anti-air defenses, Beijing will have to find it first. 

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Authored by Bryan McDonald,

Fighting “Russian disinformation” in the West has become a lucrative business. But, in reality, you’re far more likely to encounter deceitful agitprop directed at Russia.

CP Scott remains a towering figure in the annals of British journalism. Editor of the then “Manchester Guardian” for an astonishing 57 years, he celebrated his paper’s centenary by laying down a set of legendary principles.

“Comment is free, but facts are sacred,” Scott intoned in the missive. Sadly, almost a hundred years later, facts are free and the right to spread disinformation is becoming sacred, as far as his successors are concerned. Particularly when it comes to coverage of Russia.

Yet another example came over the New Year break. Following a few weeks out of the spotlight after peddling an obviously fake story about Julian Assange/Paul Manafort meetings in London, Luke Harding reappeared. And he came armed with his particular brand of bulls*** and sloppiness.

A sensationalist interview with former Soviet spy ‘Viktor Suvorov‘ was full of fragile fact-checking and downright stupidity. For instance, presenting a pensioner, who defected from a different country almost 40 years ago, as an authority on how Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin operates today stretched credulity. And the piece was also riddled with factual errors, to boot.

For instance, Harding claimed Suvorov’s 1980’s book “Icebreaker” now “has broad acceptance among historians;” a tome which insists “Stalin had been secretly plotting an offensive against Hitler’s Germany” but first he “wanted Hitler to destroy democracy in Europe, in the manner of an icebreaker, thereby clearing the way for world communism.” In other words, not the version you learned at school.

Except, surprise, surprise, this statement on Suvorov’s book isn’t true. As one scholar pointed out, while demanding a correction from Harding, it’s more accurate to say the opposite is the case. Indeed, the scholar referenced, “Suvorov’s argument was rapidly countered by much of the established Russian historical community,” including Dmitry Volkogonov, “with the support of Western historians.“

Specialist in speciousness

We’ve been here before with Harding. He’s repeatedly weaved fantastical stories about Russia, and other subjects, for years. But, as the legendary ex-Moscow hack Mark Ames observes “literally nothing Harding publishes, no matter how demonstrably false and reckless, will ever hurt his journalism career. He’s a Made Man.“

Guardian hack Luke Harding was caught plagiarizing me, @yashalevine & others—and it had zero effect on his career advancement. If his latest “scoop” on Manafort/Assange is debunked, there will be zero consequences. Most of us still can’t fully grasp this https://t.co/8AeD8GRXh0

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) November 27, 2018

And, while he’s an especially blatant example, Harding is not alone in this. Because on the Russia beat, it seems Western journalists can pretty much get away with any transgressions, without suffering career damage. Instead, paradoxically, it often seems to even lead to professional progression.

Today, you hear a lot of hysteria concerning “Russian disinformation” in the West, but little or nothing, in mainstream media, on “disinformation about Russia,” something this writer has tried to cover in recent years. And it’s a lonely beat.

Indeed, as the Canadian academic Paul Robinson rightly notes, while “there’s a huge army of well-funded institutions and individuals now devoted to uncovering and countering ‘Russian disinformation,’ there seems to be little or no accountability for the false stories produced by Western sources (on Russia).“

And the examples are legion. With even the most heinous fakes failing to amount to any sort of setback for their promoters. Which suggests editors are more than happy to indulge the practice, because after all it’s only Russia and everyone knows Russia is “bad.“

Here are a few selected lowlights…

• Back in October 2015, with East/West tensions running high due to the Ukrainian war and Moscow’s reabsorption of Crimea, Politico dropped a bombshell. Its writer Ben Judah alleged that Vladimir Putin offered Poland the opportunity to divide Ukraine up between Warsaw & Moscow. But, we all breathed more easily after the source publicly disowned the story and the editor was shown to have failed to engage in even basic fact-checking. However, it was only a minor inconvenience for the author, who later fell into a Hudson Institute gig and plenty of CNN punditry.

• The following spring saw more ludicrous hackery. The Daily Telegraph reported that “Vladimir Putin’s girlfriend has given birth.” In Switzerland, no less. The story was never corroborated by any Russian (or any other) outlet & made no sense for various reasons. The reporter concerned currently enjoys the position of a senior foreign correspondent with the newspaper.

• In the summer of 2015, the Times of London ran a ridiculous claim that Moscow was helping East Ukrainian rebels to make a “dirty bomb” for use in their conflict with Kiev. The single source was Ukraine’s SBU (successor to the KGB in Ukraine), which obviously had skin in the game and isn’t exactly known for straight shooting. Anyway, no chemical weapons have been used in Donbass, thankfully, but we also haven’t seen a retraction. Meanwhile, the rookie reporter involved now has a plum role at George Soros’ Open Society and visitors to his Twitter account are first greeted with “a short history of Russian disinfo.” Which amounts to Alanis Morissette levels of irony.

• In May of the same year, The Daily Beast warned how Russia would launch a full scale invasion of Ukraine that summer. It didn’t happen, but it wasn’t an impediment for the two reporters involved. One was later hired by CNN as a contracted “Russia expert,” despite the fact he’s never been to Russia and can’t speak Russian. The other went on to work for US state broadcaster RFE/RL, where part of his duties have been selectively quoting parts of RT opinion pieces in attempts to label them untrue or misleading.

• In December 2017, Newsweek stunned its readers by announcing “Putin is preparing for World War Three,” subtitled “yeah, that’s bad” for reasons known only to its editors. The piece, written by the magazine’s Moscow correspondent, was based on two anonymous British sources, who may or may not exist, and a Russian opposition rent-a-gob with zero access to Putin’s circle. The author remains Newsweek’s Moscow Bureau Chief.

• Almost concurrently, Foreign Policy’s reporter in the capital wrote a long whinge about problems she had acquiring contacts associated with the Russian government. She correctly pointed out that the Russian capital’s Western “hack pack” are shunned by powerful people here. However, she failed to explain why (it’s simply because they aren’t taken seriously and it’s widely believed they don’t cover Russia fairly). In the end, the whole thing blew up in her face when Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova pointed out that she never tried to contact her department and failed to attend a single briefing over a seven month period, post-accreditation. Soon after, our hero was hired by the Washington Post.

• A few months later, Ben Nimmo, a lobbyist at NATO’s Atlantic Council adjunct and a former press officer for the military alliance, labeled Twitter user Ian Shilling a “Russian troll.” Soon after, Shilling turned up on UK TV to prove he was a real British person, who merely opposes London’s foreign policy. Nimmo hasn’t apologized and continues to be cited as an “expert on Russian disinformation” by mainstream media outlets, who rarely, if ever, inform readers of his NATO ties. Or his more recent work with “Integrity Initiative,” a UK government-funded “info wars” project.

• Around the same time, the notorious “Gerasimov Doctrine” fake took flight among the Western “Russia Watcher” community. Coined by Mark Galeotti, a British pundit, the trope was based on a poor translation of a 2013 Russian-language essay and pushed by the likes of Molly McKew and CNN’s Jim Sciutto. Meanwhile, serious Russia analysts tried to explain such a document didn’t exist and were largely ignored. The Financial Times should have listened because its Foreign Desk made fools out of themselves via a wordy article titled “Valery Gerasimov, the general with a doctrine for Russia.” The author is still in situ as Moscow bureau chief.

• This past November, the Times of London alleged that the Kremlin is running 75,000 informants in London. The figure was based on data from the Henry Jackson Society, a neoconservative lobby group. It later turned out that the ‘research‘ involved just 16 interviews. The correspondent behind the pieces seems to specialize in hysterical, and factually loose, splashes concerning Russia. Presumably this is what his editors want.

Numerous other examples exist but more are hardly needed to show how there seems to be no penalty for getting Russia wrong in Western media. And, on the contrary, it’s hardly a conspiracy theory to suggest it’s actively encouraged.

Which means, of course, disinformation about Russia is far more common, organized and influential than notional “Russian disinformation.” Particularly on social networks, but prevalent too in supposedly “respectable” media.

Nevertheless, don’t hold your breath waiting for the usual think tank “info war” chancers to issue reports, dripping with condemnation. Because this isn’t about delivering truth in the news, it’s about keeping control of the narrative.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2H7BaNz Tyler Durden

In a dangerous moment of escalating rhetoric between two global powers, Russia has slammed recent British defense statements suggesting the UK is seeking to establish new military bases in the Caribbean and southeast Asia.

On Friday the Russian foreign ministry called prior statements regarding post-Brexit military expansion by UK defense secretary Gavin Williamson “of a counter-productive, destabilizing and frequently provocative nature” and said should such plans proceed, Russia could “take appropriate retaliatory measures.” The veiled threat could mark the beginning of a “new Cold War” arms and base-race between Moscow and the West, given that it signals Russia’s willingness to respond to any UK bases reestablished in former British empire locations with its own aggressive revitalization of old Soviet bases. 

“The pronouncements by the UK defense secretary in favor of further militarizing the British policy cause at least bewilderment,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, according to state-run TASS.

The statements were aimed specifically at Defence Secretary Williamson’s remarks to the Sunday Telegraph last last month, which evoked controversy by suggesting Britain take aggressive steps toward a post-Brexit expansion as a “global player” all the while waxing nostalgic about the glory days of the world-wide British Empire. This included floating the idea of establishing UK bases in the Caribbean and Asia, and vowing to build at least two foreign bases “in a couple of years.”

“This is our biggest moment as a nation since the end of the Second World War, when we can recast ourselves in a different way, we can actually play the role on the world stage that the world expects us to play,” the British Conservative MP and Secretary of State for Defence said. “For so long — literally for decades — so much of our national view point has actually been colored by a discussion about the European Union.”

Williamson also suggested a new reversal of policies active during the final decades of the decline of the British Empire, saying under his watch the 1960s policy of pulling back from areas “east of Suez” has been scrapped and expressed a desire to “recast” the UK’s role and leadership in the world. 

Concerning military bases, perhaps the more controversial part of his Dec. 30 interview, he proposed Singapore or Brunei in the Pacific – deep in what China consider’s its sphere of influence – as potential sites for a base, asserting that “if we have economic interests there, we should have a military interest there.” He also mentioned a potential base in the small South American country of Guyana, or on Montserrat in the Caribbean islands.

But on Friday Russia blasted the comments, saying according to Reuters: 

Of course, Britain like any other country is independent when it comes to its military construction plans. But against the backdrop of overall rising military and political tensions in the world… statements about the desire to build up its military presence in third countries are counter-productive, destabilizing and possibly of a provocational nature.

And alarmingly the Russian foreign ministry statement warned: 

In the event of any measures that pose a threat to Russia’s security or that of its allies our country reserves the right to take appropriate retaliatory measures.

However, as Reuters notes, “Russia has military bases in several countries across the former Soviet Union and operates military facilities in Syria.”

But it remains that the drastic potential step of re-opening Soviet-era bases in Cuba and Vietnam would indeed be seen as a provocative move toward serious escalation with the West.

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Authored by Tom Luongo,

Europe’s dreams of integration are slipping away as the people wake up from the nightmare erected for them…

As we approach Act IX of the Yellow Vest protests in France and the threats of creating bank runs we get the news that both Presidents Trump and Macron will not be attending the convocation of globalists known as the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Trump’s not attending because it’s clear he’s no longer a member of The Davos Crowd and Macron isn’t because any public appearance by him will double the number of people donning high visibility safety gear and taking to the streets.

It almost feels like we’ve reached Peak Davos, with these announcements. But, clearly neither of these men are invited because in the minds of The Davos Crowd they no longer figure in their long-term plans.

Macron not attending is also a sign his government will be sacrificed on the altar of the Yellow Vests in the near future.

The Yellow Vest protests will have to be dealt with in a substantive manner that goes far beyond a few temporary injunctions against higher taxes. They are now vandalizing another symbol of middle class oppression in France, speed cameras.

All of the governments of Europe are broke. And the speed camera is simply another in a long line of instances of them trying to squeeze blood from the now impoverished and shrinking middle class.

The symbology of them smashing speed cameras and demanding their money from the banks cannot be clearer. When you take everything from someone, when he has nothing left to lose, he becomes free.

Free to strike the root, as we libertarians like to say. Go after not just the immediate source of your anger, but the root cause of it. Macron and his Prime Minister Edouard Philippe don’t have any other answer than to crack down harder.

The Wrong Brexit

It will not work. And, at some point the police will side with the people and that will be that. Macron’s disinvitation to Davos should surprise no one then.

But, France isn’t the only problem facing the EU at the moment.

It is becoming clearer by the day that Theresa May has failed to secure a yes vote for her Brexit deal. And that the most likely outcome now is a no-deal, hard Brexit.

The kind of Brexit that is the stuff of nightmares for The Davos Crowd.

A hard Brexit will not be easy for anyone, but the alternatives are far worse in the long-run. May’s deal violates British sovereignty at a level that even EU membership doesn’t.

And that was the stated goal of the EU’s lack of negotiating all along, to scare any other uppity rabble in Italy, Spain, France, etc. that the EU is inevitable and eternal.

So, don’t even bother trying to beat us, because we are invincible.

But, they aren’t. From the beginning all the leverage was on the U.K.’s side in the Brexit talks. Theresa May, either through incompetence or complicity, refused to use that leverage. It was like watching Mitt Romney run for President against Obama and refusing to attack Obama for his horrific track record.

Why? Because Romney was working for the same team, in the end.

Davos-opoly

And that team is now staring at a full-scale revolt against the one parliamentary body that gives them legitimacy in the eyes of the world, that of the European Union’s.

It’s no secret that a large swatch of MEP’s are in the pay of George Soros. It’s no secret that they introduce legislation and formal rebukes to punish countries for not towing The Davos Crowd’s party line.

So, it is with great strategic and tactical acumen that Italy’s Matteo Salvini targeted May’s European Parliamentary elections as the rallying point for the Euroskeptic movement.

These three things — France, Brexit, May’s Elections — together represent a potential trifecta of suck for The Davos Crowd. Trump attending would add to their misery.

Given the situation do you think Trump would not delight in tweaking these fatuous oilgarchs mercilessly while there? It is one of the true pleasures of his presidency, even if the rest of it is a hot mess.

I’m truly sorry he’s not going.

But as I said the other day, the more these problems come into focus the higher the probability that these events will unnerve financial markets past the point of no return.

And given the fragile stability crafted by central banks over the last decade since Lehman Bros., it won’t take much in the current environment to tip that scale into full-blown panic.

That’s the lesson of the year-end weakness in stocks. We had a classic panic cycle out of risk-on assets (stocks) into risk-off assets (bonds and gold). The next phase of this will be a realignment of those categories as tangible assets become the preferred asset classes and debt is looked upon as worthless — because it is.

And those who truck in debt and endless financialization of everything will be the ones most exposed to the breakdown. And that’s what will be the hot topic of conversation this year at Davos.

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Authored by Maj. Danny Sjrusen via AntiWar.com,

The president says he will bring the troops home from Syria and Afghanistan. Now, because of their pathological hatred of Trump, mainstream Democrats are hysterical in their opposition.

If anyone else were president, the “liberals” would be celebrating. After all, pulling American soldiers out of a couple of failing, endless wars seems like a “win” for progressives. Heck, if Obama did it there might be a ticker-tape parade down Broadway. And there should be. The intervention in Syria is increasingly aimless, dangerous and lacks an end state. Afghanistan is an unwinnable war – America’s longest – and about to end in outright militarydefeat. Getting out now and salvaging so much national blood and treasure ought to be a progressive dream. There’s only one problem: Donald Trump. Specifically, that it was Trump who gave the order to begin the troop withdrawals.

Lost in the haze of their pathological hatred of President Trump, the majority of mainstream liberal pundits and politicians can’t, for the life of them, see the good sense in extracting the troops from a couple Mideast quagmires. That or they can see the positives, but, in their obsessive compulsion to smear the president, choose politics over country. It’s probably a bit of both. That’s how tribally partisan American political discourse has become. And, how reflexively hawkish and interventionist today’s mainstream Democrats now are. Whither the left-wing antiwar movement? Well, except for a few diehards out there, the movement seems to have been buried long ago with George McGovern.

Make no mistake, the Democrats have been tacking to the right on foreign policy and burgeoning their tough-guy-interventionist credentials for decades now. Terrified of being painted as soft or dovish on martial matters, just about all the “serious” baby-boomer Dems proudly co-opted the militarist line and gladly accepted campaign cash from the corporate arms dealers. Think about it, any Democrat with serious future presidential aspirations back in 2002 voted for the Iraq War – Hillary, Joe Biden, even former peace activist John Kerry! And, in spite of the party base now moving to the left, all these big name hawks – along with current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – are still Democratic stalwarts. Heck, some polls list Biden as the party’s 2020 presidential frontrunner.

More disturbing than the inconsistency of these political hacks is the vacuousness of the supposedly liberal media. After Trump’s announcement of troop withdrawals, just about every MSNBC host slammed the president and suddenly sounded more hawkish than the clowns over at Fox News. Take Rachel Maddow. Whatever you think of her politics, she is – undoubtedly – a brilliant woman. Furthermore, unlike most pundits, she knows a little something about foreign policy. Her 2012 book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power was a serious and well-researched critique of executive power and the ongoing failure of the wars on terror. Drift was well reviewed by regular readers and scholars alike.

Enter Donald Trump. Ever since the man won the 2016 election, Maddow’s nightly show has been dominated the hopeless dream of Russia-collusion and a desire for Trump’s subsequent impeachment. Admittedly, Maddow’s anti-Trump rhetoric isn’t completely unfounded – this author, after all, has spent the better part of two years criticizing most of his policies – but her zealousness has clouded her judgment, or worse. Indeed, that Maddow, and her fellow “liberals” at MSNBC have now criticized the troop withdrawals and even paraded a slew of disgraced neoconservatives – like Bill Kristol – on their shows seems final proof of their descent into opportunistic hawkishness.

One of the most disturbing aspects of this new “liberal” hawkishness is the pundits’ regular canonization of Jim Mattis and the other supposed “adults” in the room. For mainstream, Trump-loathing, liberals the only saving grace for this administration was its inclusion of a few trusted, “grown-up” generals in the cabinet. Yet it is a dangerous day, indeed, when the supposedly progressive journalists deify only the military men in the room. Besides, Mattis was no friend to the liberals. Their beloved President Obama previously canned “mad-dog” for his excessive bellicosity towards Iran. Furthermore, Mattis – so praised for both his judgment and ethics – chose an interesting issue for which to finally fall-on-his-sword and resign. U.S. support for the Saudi-led starvation of 85,000 kids in Yemen: Mattis could deal with that. But a modest disengagement from even one endless war in the Middle East: well, the former SECDEF just couldn’t countenance that. Thus, he seems a strange figure for a “progressive” network to deify.

Personally, I’d like to debate a few of the new “Cold Warriors” over at MSNBC or CNN and ask a simple series of questions: what on the ground changed in Syria or Afghanistan that has suddenly convinced you the US must stay put? And, what positivist steps should the military take in those locales, in order to achieve what purpose exactly? Oh, by the way, I’d ask my debate opponents to attempt their answers without uttering the word Trump. The safe money says they couldn’t do it – not by a long shot. Because, you see, these pundits live and die by their hatred of all things Trump and the more times they utter his name the higher go the ratings and the faster the cash piles up. It’s a business model not any sort of display of honest journalism.

There’s a tragic irony here. By the looks of things, so long as Mr. Trump is president, it seems that any real movement for less interventionism in the Greater Middle East may come from a part of the political right – libertarians like Rand Paul along with the president’s die hard base, which is willing to follow him on any policy pronouncement. Paradoxically, these folks may find some common cause with the far left likes of Bernie Sanders and the Ocasio-Cortez crowd, but it seems unlikely that the mainstream left is prepared to lead a new antiwar charge. What with Schumer/Pelosi still in charge, you can forget about it. Given the once powerful left-led Vietnam-era protest movement, today’s Dems seem deficient indeed on foreign policy substance. Odds are they’ll cede this territory, once again, to the GOP.

By taking a stronger interventionist, even militarist, stand than Trump on Syria and Afghanistan, the Democrats are wading into dangerous waters. Maybe, as some say, this president shoots from the hip and has no core policy process or beliefs. Perhaps. Then again, Trump did crush fifteen Republican mainstays in 2015 and shock Hillary – and the world – in 2016. Indeed, he may know just what he’s doing. While the Beltway, congressional-military-industrial complex continues to support ever more fighting and dying around the world, for the most part the American people do not. Trump, in fact, ran on a generally anti-interventionist platform, calling the Iraq War “dumb” and not to be repeated. The president’s sometimes earthy – if coarse – commonsense resonated with a lot of voters, and Hillary’s hawkish establishment record (including her vote for that very same Iraq War) didn’t win her many new supporters.

Liberals have long believed, at least since McGovern’s 1972 trouncing by Richard Nixon, that they could out-hawk the Republican hawks and win over some conservatives. It rarely worked. In fact, Dems have been playing right into bellicose Republican hands for decades. And, if they run a baby-boomer-era hawk in 2020 – say Joe Biden – they’ll be headed for another shocking defeat. The combination of a (mostly, so far) strong economy and practical policy of returning US troops from unpopular wars, could, once again, out weigh this president’s other liabilities.

Foreign policy won’t, by itself, tip a national election. But make no mistake, if the clowns at MSNBC and “liberal” hacks on Capitol Hill keep touting their newfound militarism, they’re likely to emerge from 2020 with not only smeared consciences, but four more years in the opposition.

*  *  *

Danny Sjursen is a US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]

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Today’s emerging markets are tomorrow’s powerhouses, according to a recent forecast from Standard Chartered, a multinational bank headquartered in London.

The bank sees developing economies like Indonesia, Turkey, Brazil, and Egypt all moving up the ladder – and by 2030, it estimates that seven of the world’s largest 10 economies by GDP (PPP) will be located in emerging markets.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

COMPARING 2017 VS. 2030

To create some additional context, Visual Capitalists’s Jeff Desjardins has compared these projections to the IMF’s most recent data on GDP (PPP) for 2017. We’ve also added in potential % change for each country, if comparing these two data sets directly.

Here’s how the numbers change:

Possibly the biggest surprise on the list is Egypt, a country that Standard Chartered sees growing at a torrid pace over this timeframe.

If comparing using the 2017 IMF figures, the difference between the two numbers is an astonishing 583%. This makes such a projection quite ambitious, especially considering that organizations such as the IMF see Egypt averaging closer to 8% in annual GDP growth (PPP) over the next few years.

THE ASCENT OF EMERGING MARKETS

Egypt aside, it’s likely that the ascent of emerging markets will continue to be a theme in future projections by other banks and international organizations.

By 2030, India will be the second largest economy in PPP terms according to many different models – and by then, it will also be the most populous country in the world as well. (It’s expected to pass China in 2026)

With the divide between emerging and developed economies closing at a seemingly faster rate than ever before, this should be seen as an interesting opportunity for all investors taking a long-term view.

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