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Let the fearmongering begin…

In a joint statement from the alphabet soup of US intel agencies (DOJ, DOD, DHS, DNI, FBI, NSA, and GSA) on ensuring the security of the 2020 elections, officials would like you to know that while there is no current evidence of any threats, “foreign malicious actors” are out there hating you for your freedom and democracy and ready to meddle…

Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan, Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, FBI Director Christopher Wray, U.S. Cyber Command Commander and NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone, and CISA Director Christopher Krebs today released the following joint statement:

Today, dozens of states and local jurisdictions are hosting their own elections across the country and, less than a year from now Americans will go to the polls and cast their votes in the 2020 presidential election. Election security is a top priority for the United States Government. Building on our successful, whole-of-government approach to securing the 2018 elections, we have increased the level of support to state and local election officials in their efforts to protect elections. The federal government is prioritizing the sharing of threat intelligence and providing support and services that improve the security of election intelligence and providing support and services that improve the security of election infrastructure across the nation.

In an unprecedented level of coordination, the U.S. government is working with all 50 states and U.S. territories, local officials, and private sector partners to identify threats, broadly share information, and protect the democratic process. We remain firm in our commitment to quickly share timely and actionable information, provide support and services, and to defend against any threats to our democracy.

Our adversaries want to undermine our democratic institutions, influence public sentiment and affect government policies. Russia, China, Iran, and other foreign malicious actors all will seek to interfere in the voting process or influence voter perceptions.

Adversaries may try to accomplish their goals through a variety of means, including social media campaigns, directing disinformation operations or conducting disruptive or destructive cyber-attacks on state and local infrastructure.

While at this time we have no evidence of a compromise or disruption to election infrastructure that would enable adversaries to prevent voting change vote counts or disrupt the ability to tally votes, we continue to vigilantly monitor any threats to U.S. elections.

The U.S. government will defend our democracy and maintain transparency with the American public about our efforts. An informed public is a resilient public. Americans should go to trusted sources for election information, such as their state and local election officials. We encourage every American to report any suspicious activity to their local officials, the FBI, or DHS.

In past election cycles, reporting by Americans about suspicious activity provided valuable insight which has made our elections more secure. The greatest means to combat these threats is a whole-of-society effort.

In other words: be afraid, be very afraid, see something, say something – and do not question any crackdowns on your liberty and it is merely a temporary repression for your own good and to save democracy.

A housing affordability crisis, depressed wages, insurmountable debts, and a downturn in the economy have paralyzed US homeowners as their ability to move collapses. 

US homeowners in 2019 had spent an average of 13 years in their home, up from eight years in 2010, reported Redfin.

Across 55 metros Redfin analyzed, homeowners in all regions stayed in their home much longer versus 2010.

Salt Lake City, UT; Houston, TX; Fort Worth, TX; San Antonio, TX; and Dallas, TX were some of the metropolitan areas where homeowners were staying the longest as their economic mobility rotted away over the last decade or so.

Here are the top 18 cities where homeowners were staying in their homes the longest:

This means your home is your prison, and it’s possible new homeowners will be stuck in their new purchases for a much more extended period than ones before them after the next recession strikes. That is because many of the new homeowners are millennials with insurmountable debts. 

It’s not just mortgage debt that will hold back millennial homeowners from moving — their student loans, auto loans, and credit card debt will also be a significant factor. 

Plus, most millennials have been purchasing homes at the highest price extremes, they will have to wait for the Federal Reserve to blow up the housing bubble again before they can break even after prices fall in the next recession. 

With economic mobility among all homeowners deteriorating, this is the latest example that the “greatest economy ever” is merely a hoax. 

Authored by JD Heyes via NaturalNews.com,

The few times in our history when Congress has either voted to impeach a president or considered returning articles of impeachment, the process was handled very publicly.

Hearings were not held in secret. Testimony was not taken behind closed doors. Witnesses and evidence were presented out in the open so the American people, through various media of the day, were well aware of what was happening.

The reasons for the openness should be obvious, but alas, they are not for far too many Americans.

First of all, allowing someone accused of criminal activity to face his or her accuser is a fundamental legal principle of our founding. 

Secondly, secret trials were banned hundreds of years ago because they are the legal instruments of tyrants: Kings and dictators holding secret proceedings can present phony “evidence” in order to achieve convictions. 

Third, the accused are permitted legal representation of their own so they can challenge the prosecution’s witnesses and alleged “evidence.”

None of these founding principles are being applied to the current “impeachment inquiry” involving President Donald Trump.

Democrats, led by Rep. Adam Schiff of California, are holding the inquiry behind closed doors. They are bringing in ‘witnesses’ whose testimony is being sequestered – even as Schiff has been accused of leaking the contents of some witness testimony completely out of context. 

Also, no one on the president’s legal team has been able to question any of the witnesses Democrats have called in to testify. So he doesn’t know what’s being said — other than what Schiff is leaking to the “mainstream media,” which is dutifully reporting what they’ve been provided, sans corroboration.

It’s the most un-American legal process one could ever have envisioned. Worse, this is supposedly involving an impeachment process — one that, theoretically, could involve the removal of a duly elected president 63 million Americans voted for. (Related: “Ukraine” whistleblower suddenly not going to testify before Adam Schiff’s secret committee — so what’s the “impeachment inquiry” really for?)

We will rue the day we allow our country to be stolen from us

In short, nothing about this process should be held in secret. Communist countries and others who are run by dictators have secret ‘legal’ proceedings, but clearly none that would involve the leader of the country.

Democracies don’t operate that way and our unique American republic was never supposed to operate in the dark. 

Granted, if the Democrat-controlled House ever does return actual articles of impeachment against President Trump, that will be conducted in the open. But knowing how secretive Democrats have been thus far, it’s a safe bet they’ll attempt to present as “evidence” the “testimony” of so-called “witnesses” who, thus far, have only appeared behind closed doors.

It’s been said that ‘impeachable offenses’ are whatever the House of Representatives say they are in order to satisfy the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” impeachment requirement. But clearly the processes employed against Trump are partisan in nature and not based on any semblance of historical precedent.

As Americans, we can’t allow this process to be warped — by one political party and the media. The future of our country is far too important. 

“President Trump is a disruptor. That makes some people very happy, and it makes some people very mad,” former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said during a Friday speech at the American Enterprise Institute.

“But if we are a country that lives by the rule of law, we must all accept that we have one president at a time, and that president attained his office by the choice of the American people.

“No policy disagreement with him, no matter how heartfelt, justifies undermining the lawful authority that is vested in his office by the Constitution. … What’s at stake is not President Trump’s policies. What’s at stake is the Constitution,” she added.

She’s exactly right. Nothing is worth losing our country. As long as we continue to have unimpeded free elections, there is always a chance to fix things. 

After more than a decade since the subprime mortgage market triggered the 2008 financial meltdown, the strict lending standards placed on new homeowners post-crisis have disintegrated in the last three years.

Homebuyers with low credit scores, gig-economy jobs, and high-debt loads (sounds like millennials), can now obtain mortgages and participate in the American dream of owning a home.

Putting unqualified people back into homes is the latest example of stupidity from Wall Street, but the lack of oversight from the Federal Reserve and government. 

The rapid surge of non-qualified, or non-QM bonds, is happening as cracks in the housing market have appeared. For instance, the housing price growth of major cities in the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Index has stalled. Delinquency rates of these unconventional loans have also started to tick higher. 

“It’s obviously disturbing this late in the cycle to see originations for these loans at the kind of level they’ve kicked up to,” Daniel Alpert, managing partner at Westwood Capital, told Bloomberg. “The housing market is not quite ready for a big infusion of this product.”

Banks, who are underwriting these unconventional loans, are doing so through weakening standards very late in an economic expansion. The expectation is that a recession could arrive as early as next year, could lead to a further tick up in delinquency rates.

The non-QM bond market is nowhere near the size of the subprime bond market of 2007/08. 

“It’s not the subprime we remember from 2006 to 2007,” said Mario Rivera, managing director of the Fortress Credit Funds business, which has bought non-QM bonds. “It’s more of a second or third inning of non-QM. We’re getting the best collateral before the more aggressive lending comes in.”

Bloomberg says the size of the non-QM bond market is about $27 billion, a tiny fraction compared to the $10 trillion mortgage-bond market. Back in 2007, the subprime mortgage bond market was approximately $1.8 trillion right before it imploded. 

Nonbank mortgage lenders have largely underwritten these unconventional loans, but large banks like JPMorgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group AG, and Citigroup Inc. have been entering the space since 2016.  

Recent non-QM borrowers have had credit scores at or below 700, many have provided income statements rather than tax returns. Fitch Ratings analysis warns non-QM borrowers are susceptible to income fluctuations. 

Fitch added that non-QM bonds have a lot more safeguards than the subprime ones did in 2007.

“There’s a lot more cushion, as there should be,” said John Kerschner, head of U.S. securitized products at Janus Henderson Group Plc. “You can get some comfort that even if defaults inch up, the losses from those defaults aren’t going to be egregious.”

And while the non-QM bond market won’t lead to the next financial armageddon like what was seen a decade ago, it certainly demonstrates that Wall Street is willing to create the same financial products that led up to the last crisis. 

The latest report from journalist John Solomon reveals that the Obama State Department saw Joe and Hunter Biden’s brewing Burisma scandal as a “Biden problem” during the 2016 US election, and specificialy coached now-recalled US Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch on how to answer awkward questions about it.

***

Authored by John Solomon of John Solomon Reports (emphasis ours)

In recent interviews, Joe Biden has distanced himself from his son’s work at a Ukrainian gas company that was under investigation during the Obama years, with the former vice president  suggesting he didn’t even know Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings.

There is plenty of evidence that conflicts with the former vice president’s account, including Hunter Biden’s own story that he discussed the company once with his famous father.

There also was a December 2015 New York Times story that raised the question of whether Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma posed a conflict of interest for the vice president, especially when Joe Biden was leading the fight against Ukrainian corruption while Hunter Biden’s firm was under investigation by Ukrainian prosecutors.

But whatever the Biden family recollections, the Obama State Department clearly saw the Burisma Holdings investigation in the midst of the 2016 presidential election as a Joe Biden issue.

Memos newly released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Southeastern Legal Foundation on my behalf detail how State officials in June 2016 worked to prepare the new U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, to handle a question about “Burisma and Hunter Biden.”

In multiple drafts of a question-and-answer memo prepared for Yovanovitch’s Senate confirmation hearing, the department’s Ukraine experts urged the incoming ambassador to stick to a simple answer.

“Do you have any comment on Hunter Biden, the Vice President’s son, serving on the board of Burisma, a major Ukrainian Gas Company?,” the draft Q&A asked.

The recommended answer for Yovanovitch: “For questions on Hunter Biden’s role in Burisma, I would refer you to Vice President Biden’s office.”

The Q&A is consistent with other information flowing out of State. As I reported yesterday, when a Burisma representative contacted State in February 2016 to ask for the department’s help in quashing the corruption allegations, Hunter Biden’s role on the company’s board was prominently cited.

And a senior State Department official who testified recently in the impeachment proceedings reportedly told lawmakers he tried to warn the vice president’s office that Burisma posed a conflict for Joe Biden but was turned aside.

There are no laws that would have prevented Hunter Biden from joining Burisma, even as his father oversaw Ukraine policy for the President Obama.

And the corruption investigations launched in 2014 by British and Ukraine authorities involving Burisma and its owner Mykola Zlocvhevsky involved activities that pre-dated Hunter Biden’s arrival on the board. They were settled in late 2016 and early 2017.

Some of Biden’s media defenders have falsely suggested the investigations were dormant. They were not.

The real public interest question involves Joe Biden. Federal ethics rules require government officials to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest, and ethics experts I talked with say the vice president should have recused himself from issues affecting Burisma.

That became poignantly public when Biden leveraged the threat of canceling $1 billion in U.S. aid in March 2016 to get Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who just happened to oversee the Burisma probe. A month before the firing, Shokin escalated the corruption probe against Burisma by seizing the company owner’s property and assets.

Shokin says he was making plans to interview Hunter Biden and insists he was fired because he refused to stand down on the Burisma probe. Joe Biden insists he prompted Shokin’s firing because he believed the prosecutor was ineffective.

There are more memos and documents to be released in the coming months under the FOIA lawsuit I filed with the Southeastern Legal Foundation that may shine light on what actually happened.

But one thing is already clear: long before President Trump or his attorney Rudy Giuliani tried to make political hay out of the Burisma investigation, career State officials already saw it as an issue for Joe Biden.

With the Phase 1 partial trade deal hanging in the balance, Beijing has been quietly pressing Washington to accept more tariff rollbacks and cancellations. And it looks like President Trump may have found a way to acquiesce to these demands without losing face.

Bloomberg reports that a Thursday press conference scheduled Thursday in Beijing will reveal the results of a joint government crackdown on fentanyl smuggling in China. US and Chinese law enforcement came together to bust up a major smuggling ring, per the report.

If all goes as planned, this could be a major political win for President Trump. Many of Midwestern swing states (like Ohio) have taken the brunt of the spike in drug-related deaths caused by fentanyl seeping into the heroin supply. It has been an elusive goal: Trump accused President Xi of going back on his promise to crack down on the production of fentanyl and its analogues.

In true Communist Party fashion, a show trial of the smugglers arrested in the bust will be broadcast on Chinese television. Then officers from China and the US will deliver briefings on the investigation and the results.

As BBG points out, a “win” on fentanyl will help Trump sell a trade deal to hardliners within his administration (hardliners like Peter Navarro, who has cited fentanyl as one of China’s seven deadly sins).

Still, Beijing denies Chinese fentanyl is being shipped to Mexico, though it has been widely documented that drug cartels in Mexico use Chinese fentanyl to spike kilos of traditional heroin, while increasingly selling pure fentanyl by the kilo. Though the press conference and bust are good, it would be better if Beijing promised to be more vigilant about banning “analogues” – chemical cousins of fentanyl that aren’t illegal but have the same basic effect.

Circling back to the tariffs, Bloomberg reports that Beijing has asked Trump to pledge to not only withdraw threats of new tariffs, but to pull back tariffs on $110 billion in imports imposed in September.

As we’ve noted in earlier posts, rolling back tariffs is a hard sell in the Trump Administration, where Trump’s top hard-line trade advisors see tariffs as a critical enforcement tool. Beijing has lied to the US before (they lied to Obama for years), and without some mechanism to hold the Chinese accountable, any trade deal wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on.

Beijing argues that if it’s going to make major concessions like increasing farm purchases and cracking down on IP theft, the US should also give up something significant. Plus, markets would undoubtedly interpret any tariff relief as a positive for global growth.

To reach a deal, China and the US must simultaneously remove the existing additional tariffs at the same ratio, which means that tariffs to be removed should be in proportion to how much agreement has been reached. https://t.co/ciDfb7Z8VI

— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) November 5, 2019

Some fear Beijing is clinging to the hope that Washington will drop all the tariffs – numerous White House insiders have insisted to the press that this is a non-starter, and that Trump is convinced that the bulk of the tariffs must remain intact for years.

At the end of the day, whatever Beijing decides regarding the tariffs – whether it can live with some of them for a brief time, or not – could determine whether the partial deal is signed, or not.

Authored by Peter Earle via The American Institute for Economic Research,

The deadline of yet another, and perhaps the most insidious, element of the post-9/11 initiatives (a partial list of which includes the establishment of the Transportation Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and a never-ending international war against a nebulously-defined, noncorporeal enemy, “terror”) is less than one year from coming to fruition.

Beginning no later than October 1, 2020, citizens of all US states and territories will be required to have a Real ID compliant card or US passport to board a commercial plane or enter a Federal government facility.

Pundits citing the inevitability of what amounts to a national ID card have, regrettably, been vindicated.

To be sure, some states have resisted, but dependence upon Federal aid and other programs administered from Washington D.C. makes their ultimate surrender and compliance inevitable. 

Looking back, Social Security Numbers and the cards bearing them broke ground for the path to a national identification system — thank you, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For decades there have been pointed reminders that the cards were intended to be account numbers and not integrated into a government registry of American citizens. 

Repeated efforts, starting in the 1970s, to forge identifiers from the Social Security system have been rebuffed: in 1971, 1973, and 1976. The Reagan Administration indicated its “explicit oppos[tion]” to a national identification system. Both the Clinton healthcare reform plan (1993) and a provision of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 requiring Social Security Numbers on driver’s licenses were rejected (the latter in 1999) to some extent upon the basis of tacitly constituting national identifiers for Americans.

There are any number of reasons why the alleged tradeoff between liberty and security that a national ID card represents are being misrepresented. Any system designed, maintained, and run by human beings is ultimately flawed, and in any case corruptible. The existing documents from which the information fed into the Real ID program are eminently vulnerable to forgery. To provide just one example: tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of Americans don’t have verifiable, “official” birth certificates.

And people can become radicalized after being issued their Real ID card. 

The Real ID also represents the “last mile” in the ability of the state to track individuals in real time. With various electronic, social media, and cellphone tracking measures, there is always a delay; and one can choose not to use social media, not to own a cellphone, and opt into other methods of extricating oneself from the prying eyes of the NSA or other government agencies. But the Real ID — in particular, coupled with biometrics — fulfills Orwellian conceptions of the total surveillance state. 

Expect it, over time, to be leveraged against individuals with outstanding traffic tickets, tax disputes, child or spousal support arrears, or behind on loan payments. Access to national parks and historic sites may be tied to it. Recent proposals pushing compulsory voting are a step closer to realization and enforcement with the establishment of a mandatory government ID card. Census data, drug prescriptions, and even library borrowing choices and habits are likely to eventually be linked with personal data associated with the new ID requirement. And if the Real ID is eventually accessible by the private sector, many individuals with innocuously-tainted personal histories may become effectively unemployable. 

Indeed: the worst US government infringements upon the life, liberty, and the much referred to “pursuit of happiness” of American citizens over the last two centuries — and mostly within the last two decades — will be vastly easier and more efficient to accomplish with the imposition of a mandatory identification requirement. 

I will here make two wagers — both of which I sincerely hope to lose.

First, within five years of the establishment of the Real ID program (October 2020, or whenever it is ultimately established) either a forgery, an enforcement error, corruption, or some combination of those will lead to its sterility in preventing (or commission of) the very forms of terrorism or crime it portends to.

Something awful will happen despite (or perhaps employing) the Real ID cards and program. At that point, revocation will not be an option: “reform,” taking the form of increased funding, a larger bureaucracy, and quite possibly greater legal restrictions will instead be piled on. 

Second, within ten years of the establishment of the Real ID program it will be required to purchase tickets for and/or board trains and buses that cross state lines. It may also be required at tolls and state crossings in personal vehicles.

I hope both of those predictions are wrong, but as Americans we have been here before. Liberty has yet to win out over increased security despite the ineffectiveness of each and every such tradeoff to date.

Relatedly: where is the media attention? Has a single newspaper headline — let alone a three- or five-minute spot within the incessant droning of the 24/7 media cycle — been dedicated to the impending arrival of an American national ID program? The increasingly partisan, mindless political banter would be tolerable if, occasionally, the media served its role as public tocsin.

The answer to the question regarding what Americans will give up for a measure of security, and in this case a tremendously dubious measure of security, is now clear. Both the Federal requirement that citizens require a passport for domestic travel and the meek acceptance of it by citizens and state officials lead to an irrefutable conclusion: America is, and hasn’t for some time, been the land of the free. Less is it the home of the brave. 

Most Americans have ‘little to no trust’ in the impeachment inquiries against President Trump, and think that the best way to remove him from office would be to let the voters decide at the ballot box next November, according to a Monmouth University Poll published Tuesday.

According to the survey, 73% of those polled have little to no trust in how the House impeachment inquiry has been conducted to date, while 59% say it would “make more sense” to wait until next year’s election. The same poll found just 44% of Americans think that Trump should be impeached and removed from office.

“Even many who would like to impeach Trump seem to feel that beating him at the polls in 2020 is actually a better strategy for ousting him from office,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.

What’s more, 71% of respondents think it’s unlikely the Senate would vote to remove Trump – which, as Nancy Pelosi warned, would simply empower Republicans after Democrats can’t tank Trump for asking Ukraine to investigate whether former VP Joe Biden and his son Hunter engaged in a quid-pro-quo to personally enrich themselves.

That said, just over half of Americans think its a good idea for the House to conduct the inquiries, even if many of those people have ‘little to no trust’ in it!

Those who approve of the job Trump is doing rose to 42% from 41% in September, while 51% disapprove, down from 53% in September.

Of those who approve, 62% can’t think of anything he could do that would cause them to stop supporting him.

Methodology: The Monmouth University Poll was sponsored and conducted by the Monmouth University Polling Institute from Oct. 30 to Nov. 3 with a national random sample of 908 adults age 18 and older. The margin of error for the total sample is ± 3.3.