Author: admin

Authored by Andrew Bacevich via TheAmericanConservative.com,

After all the failure, they still look at our wars in the Middle East as some kind of golden age…

I wish to call attention to an instructive essay about U.S. policy in the Middle East—instructive in the sense that it reveals the utterly impoverished nature of establishment thinking on this subject.

The title of the essay is “The US Has One Last Chance to Halt Its Withdrawal from the Middle East.” The author is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, who shall remain nameless since I bear him no ill will. Let us refer to him simply as X, in honor of George Kennan, author of a famous 1947 essay offering counsel on how to deal with the Soviet Union. Kennan published that essay under the pseudonym X. And so shall I refer to the author of “One Last Chance.”

Kennan’s purpose was to sound the alarm regarding the Soviet threat and to propose what came to be called the strategy of Containment. The purpose of our present-day Mr. X is to sound the alarm about the United States lowering its profile in the Middle East.

To avert that prospect, he proposes what can only be termed a strategy of staying-the-course-while-ignoring-the-facts.

X concedes that throughout the region, things have not gone especially well for the United States over the last couple of decades. He rightly notes that Americans are “still reeling from costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the continuing chaos in Syria, Yemen, and Libya.” He ever so briefly acknowledges that this is “a region where even pro-American governments are often undemocratic and can be disdainful of fundamental human rights” and “where billions of dollars are spent that would be better used at home.”

Of course, to say that the U.S. has expended billions in the Middle East is the equivalent of saying that my wife and I paid thousands for the home we purchased last year. While nominally correct, the statement is wildly misleading. X has an aversion to actual numbers. He prefers tidy generalizations to specifics.

Yet the essence of X’s argument boils down to this: setting aside these recent errors of judgment by George W. Bush and Barack Obama, U.S. policy in the region has actually been a smashing success. From the end of World War II until ever-so-recently, Washington pursued a course in the Middle East that was reasoned, careful, and eminently wise. “This bipartisan tradition of American leadership worked,” X asserts. While it might have been “imperfect, time-consuming and often unsatisfying,” the nation’s “vital interests in the region remained protected. The U.S. presence was sized to align with those interests, and we were not overextended.” X approvingly calls this a Pax Americana in the Middle East.

When one encounters a claim of an American-constructed Pax, the first rule is to look for what the writer leaves out. In this case, among the incidents and developments that our X totally ignores are these: treating Saudi Arabia as a de facto protectorate; CIA involvement in the 1953 overthrow of the Mossadegh regime; the pro-Israel tilt in U.S. policy dating from the 1960s, to include turning a blind eye to Israel acquiring a nuclear arsenal; the Iranian Revolution; various Arab-Israeli wars; oil “shocks” during the 1970s; the Beirut debacle of 1983; the U.S. role in destabilizing (and then abandoning) Afghanistan; Washington’s support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War; the rise of al-Qaeda; and the events of 9/11.

Admit these into the conversation and the question you confront is this one: what Pax? In truth, Pax Americana no more describes the postwar Middle East than the phrase “Long Peace” describes the Cold War. The purpose of such formulations is to preclude actual thinking, attaching labels to preempt analysis.

“It took many decades to build a Pax Americana in the Middle East,” X writes.

Not true: it took only a handful of hours—the time he invested in writing his essay. The Pax Americana is a figment of X’s imagination.

Yet once having conjured up his fictive Pax, X easily convinces himself that it can exist again, if only the next president—he writes off Trump as a total loss—will act to “reestablish American leadership in the Middle East, restore deterrence with our adversaries, and begin renewing trust with our partners and allies.” But what does “leadership” actually mean in this context? What will it entail? What will it cost? Once again, when it comes to specifics, X is essentially silent, offering only this: 

“The next commander in chief will require political fortitude to lead the United States back to its traditional role in the region, demonstrating what in previous generations was deemed a profile in courage.”

That and four bucks will get you a latte.

All of that said, I submit that X has written something worthy of reflection. Here on full display is a model of establishment thinking—heavy on clichés, light on substance, and short of memory.

Let me briefly sketch out an alternative narrative that more accurately captures our present predicament.

Since the end of World War II, successive administrations have sought to devise a formula for assuring American consumers access to Persian Gulf oil while also satisfying pressing domestic political interests. Over a period of decades, that effort succeeded chiefly in giving birth to new problems. Out of these multiplying difficulties came the 9/11 attacks and their immediate sequel, a “war on terrorism” meant to settle matters once and for all.

To state the matter bluntly, 9/11 was an expression of chickens coming home to roost, a massive strategic failure that the ensuing military campaigns beginning in 2001 and continuing to the present moment have affirmed. Given the dimensions of that failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X’s illusory Pax is essentially zero.

There is no going back to an imagined Golden Age of American statecraft in the Middle East. The imperative is to go forward, which requires acknowledging how wrongheaded U.S. policy in region has been ever since FDR had his famous tete-a-tete with King Ibn Saud and Harry Truman rushed to recognize the newborn State of Israel.

When the US economy finally starts to cool, and the inevitable recession arrives, the slowdown will affect different states differently. Some states, like Texas, are well-positioned to ride out the downturn thanks to the diversity of industry and low per-capita debt. Others, like Hawaii, will likely bear the brunt of the downturn, a “disaster” that we have discussed in the past.

Inspired by surveys claiming that a majority of executives at Fortune 500 companies expect a recession in 2020, Fit Small Business recently conducted a study to determine which states are best-equipped to survive the next recession, and which states are particularly vulnerable to a downturn. To arrive at their conclusions, the researchers factored in a wealth of data about states’ economies, including their product exports, housing costs, economic strength and diversity, individual debt-to-income ratios and median home values.

Using these data, they concluded that nearly all of the best states for surviving the recession are spread across the south and midwest. Why? Because these states benefit from diverse economies, and their low cost of living and low property prices make them more liveable.

 

Meanwhile, all the way down at the end of the list, we find Hawaii, the 48th most well-equipped state to survive the next recession.

Why is Hawaii so vulnerable? Well, for one, the state must import nearly all of its fuel, food and consumer staples, which drives up prices.

But that’s not the only reason. Another recent study warned that the slowdown in Hawaii’s economy started around the time when JPM’s Global Manufacturing PMI topped out in late 2017.

And that slowdown is getting more serious, as Hawaii’s tourism-dependent economy struggles with a slump in bookings, and by extension, a slump in tourist spending. The culprit is clear: the strong dollar has hurt tourism from abroad, while anxieties about a slowing economy have caused domestic spending to contract slightly.

And researchers with the state have forecast an increase in Hawaii’s unemployment rate over the coming years, expecting it to climb from its current level (2.8%) to 3.9% in 2022.

 

For Hawaii, the downturn has already begun.

Read Fit Small Business’s full report here.

Authored by David Harsanyi via NationalReview.com,

…but now it’s much more than a kooky conspiracy shouted from the margins. It’s headline news.

One of the most durable conspiracy theories of our times finds Vladimir Putin recruiting a billionaire media personality named Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency. In some iterations of the tale, Trump is willingly serving his Kremlin comrades; in others, he is merely the victim of kompromat. In every version he is an asset.

The basic account holds that Putin, who is apparently blessed with seer-like abilities, knew in the late 1970s that Trump, whose political positions would wildly fluctuate over 40 years, was presidential material, and that now, after decades of patiently waiting, the duo’s nefarious plan to cut taxes and place originalists onto the federal bench has finally come to fruition.

In a sprawling July 2018 New York piece headlined, “Will Trump Be Meeting with His Counterpart — Or His Handler? A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion,” Jonathan Chait offered a fully realized rendering of Trump’s potential sedition. Cobbling together every interaction the real-estate developer ever had with Russians — helpfully laid out in a handy Pepe Silvia–like flow chart — Chait posits that Trump might have become a Kremlin asset in 1987 when visited Moscow.

Chait was just asking questions. And I have no doubt the story seems highly “plausible” to partisans who suddenly treat every Russian-bought social-media ad as the next Pearl Harbor.

Which brings me to John Harwood, the DNC’s man in Washington. Piggybacking on a recent tweet by the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg, Harwood brings up Chait’s piece, arguing that that while “conservative media dismissed as ridiculous the idea that Russia might have cultivated Trump for decades, Fiona Hill, a leading US govt Russia expert, now makes clear it’s not ridiculous in the slightest.”

Here’s Harwood on Twitter:

Typing this out for those who’ve called it implausible

Q: why do you believe Putin was targeting Trump from his days as a businessman?

HILL: Because that’s exactly what Putin and others were doing. Again, he was part of a directorate in the KGB in Leningrad. That’s what they did exclusively, was targeting businessmen.

The quote Harwood highlights from Hill’s October 14 testimony specifically points to Putin’s role in exclusively “targeting” American businessmen in the late 1970s, not “for decades.” In an adjacent quote, in fact, Hill argues that everyone was targeted by Russians for decades — not that Trump was “cultivated,” as Harwood asserts — and that it was a mistake to focus only on meddling in relation to the president rather than on meddling in a broader perspective.

Here is Hill:

I firmly believe he was also targeting President Trump, and he was targeting all of the other campaigns as well. And I think that that was the mistake when the 2015 investigations were launched, not to take it from the point of view [of] what Russia was doing to target Americans, no matter who they were in the system.”

And again:

I think that there’s a good chance that was the case and that, you know — and, again, compromising material was being collected on a whole range of individuals. And it was most definitely being collected on Secretary, former First Lady and Senator Clinton as well.

And still again:

So, if Secretary Clinton had won, there would have been a cloud over her at this time if she was President Clinton. There’s been a cloud over President Trump since the beginning of his presidency, and I think that’s exactly what the Russians intended.

The context of her statements are a far cry from “Russia might have cultivated Trump for decades.” Of course, no one can dispute that Russians have been digging up dirt on prominent Americans citizens forever, but the word “cultivate” or “handler” — or any other term that intimates that the president is working for Russians — does not appear, even hypothetically, in any form in the transcript of Hill’s testimony.

Also, does anyone really believe that Harwood types in the media would be grappling with the “cloud” that Fiona Hill, “a leading US govt Russia expert,” now makes clear would be hovering over Hillary Clinton’s head as well, if she had won?

Even if Harwood had accurately conveyed Hill’s claims, we’ve now had three years of intense journalistic effort, wide-ranging congressional investigations, and an independent inquiry that have been unable to turn up a single instance in which Trump was compromised or colluded with Russians.

Anyone paying attention during the 2016 campaign was already well acquainted with the president’s views on Russia: Trump isn’t going to bash Putin because Trump respects Putin, and he strives to build friendly relations with Russia.

I’m sorry to say, Trump’s policies towards Putin differ very little from those of his predecessors. Perhaps no better, they are certainly no worse.

As many others have noted, it was Obama who mocked Romney’s claim that Russia was our most dangerous geopolitical foe.

It was also Obama who told Putin’s stooge Dmitry Medvedev that his administration would have more “flexibility” on missile defense after the 2012 election.

It was Obama who refused to offer lethal military assistance to Ukraine.

It was Obama who canceled the sale of American missile-defense systems to Poland and the Czech Republic to appease Russia.

It was the Obama administration, according to Bill Browder, one of the driving forces behind the Magnitsky Act, who spent two years trying to kill the Act before acquiescing to bipartisan pressure.

It was Obama, not Trump, who capitulated to Russia and gave in on accession to the World Trade Organization.

It was Joe Biden, not Mike Pence, who in 2009 told Medvedev that “the most important item on our agenda” was to restore Russia–U.S. relations after eight years of the Bush administration’s antagonism.

It was also Obama who abandoned the Syrian “red line,” leaving Russia’s allies to massacre thousands of civilians in a broader effort to appease the Iranians. Just because the 44th president habitually aligned the United States with the Islamic regime in Iran doesn’t mean he was a foreign Muslim interloper.

The Manchurian Candidate conspiracy theory is much like birtherism. Too many conservatives rationalized their anger over politics by convincing themselves that Obama wasn’t only a dangerous ideological adversary but a seditious and illegitimate one as well. (One of the people rightly pilloried for doing this was Donald Trump.) The only difference is that Democrats have mainstreamed this kind of destructive paranoia.

According to Gallup, the effects of substance abuse are felt by around half of all American families, with, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, only slight differences were recorded by the survey regarding race or sex.

46 percent of U.S. adults reported having dealt with substance abuse in their families. 18 percent said those were related just to alcohol, while 10 percent said their problems were related just to drugs. Another 18 percent said they had dealt with both.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Women were slightly more likely to report substance abuse being a problem in their families. The difference between non-Hispanic whites and nonwhites reporting problems with substance abuse were two percentage points for alcohol and just one percentage point for drugs.

That widened to 6 and 9 percent, respectively, between people reporting weekly church attendance and people seldom or never attending church service. Whether respondents held a college degree or not actually had a similar impact – people who did not go to or finish college were 7 percent more likely to report alcohol abuse and 4 percent more likely to report drug abuse in their families.

The highest discrepancies were actually recorded in terms of region. Easterners were 9 percent less likely to report alcohol abuse than Westerners, while Midwesterners were 10 percent less likely to report drug abuse than people in the West.

Authored by Daniel Lacalle,

A state-owned cryptocurrency is, in itself, a contradiction in terms. The main reason why citizens want to use cryptocurrencies or gold is precisely to avoid the government or central bank monopoly of money.

For a currency to be a world reserve of value, widespread means of exchange and unit of measure, there are many things that need to happen, but the first pillar of a world reserve currency is stability and transparency.

China cannot disrupt the global monetary system and dethrone the US dollar when it has one of the world’s tightest capital control systems, a lack of separation of powers and weak transparency in its own financial system.

The U.S. dollar is the most traded currency in the world, and growing according to the Bank of International Settlement. The Yuan is 4% of the currency trade. This is because the financial balance of the US is the strongest, legal and investor security is one of the strongest in the world, and the currency and capital markets are open and transparent.

Unfortunately for China, the idea of a gold-backed cryptocurrency starts from the wrong premise. China’s own currency, the Yuan, is not backed by either global use nor gold. At all. China’s total gold reserves are less than 0.25% of its money supply. Many say that we do not know the real extent of China’s gold reserves. However, this goes back to my previous point. What confidence is the world going to have on a currency where the real level of gold reserves is simply a guess? Furthermore, why would any serious government under-report its gold reserves if it wants to be a safe haven, reserve status currency? It makes no sense.

The Yuan is as unsupported as any fiat currency, like the U.S. dollar, but much less traded and used as a store of value. As such, a cryptocurrency would not be backed by gold either. Even if the government said it was, and deployed all its reserves to the cryptocurrency, what confidence does the investor have that such backing will be guaranteed when the evidence is that even Chinese citizens have enormous limits to access their own savings in gold?

China’s gold reserves are an insignificant fraction of its money supply. Its biggest weakness comes from capital controls, lack of open and independent institutions safeguarding investors and constant intervention in its financial market.

China’s Yuan may become a world reserve currency one day. It will never happen while capital controls remain and legal-investor security is limited.

Despite its initial resilience to an increasingly aggressive protest movement, Hong Kong’s housing market – previously one of the most unaffordable residential markets in the world – has started to weaken.

But in a story published on Tuesday, WSJ compared the HK housing market to the cartoon villian Wile E. Coyote. While pursuing the Road Runner, sometimes the coyote finds himself running on air, a realization that typically precipitates a steep fall.

If the protests don’t end soon, Hong Kong’s “gravity defying” real-estate market could experience something similar; both residential and commercial markets could be on the cusp of a seriously brutal contraction.

According to recent data, Hong Kong’s economy is in serious trouble. For the first time in a decade, the Special Administrative Region is in a recession. Business activity declined at the fastest pace in at least two decades in October.

But while the Hong Kong economy recorded its worst performance to date last month, in the real-estate market, transactions – i.e. home sales – actually rose in October (though we’d wager that most of this is simply speculators and investors hoping to take advantage of a slight dip in prices).

Still, HK remains one of – if not the most – unaffordable housing markets.

Commercial real-estate has taken a bigger hit. In October, local property agency Midland IC&I recorded only 242 registrations of commercial and industrial businesses, the second-lowest figure since 1996.

Savills, another real-estate agency, found that rents for stores in prime shopping centers around Hong Kong have fallen by more than 15% in the year to September.

HK home prices have more than doubled over the past ten years, and after all of this growth, a dip in property prices might help alleviate some of the economic inequality plaguing Hong Kong.

The only problem is that the banks who are on the hook for these mortgages might risk getting saddled with heavy losses. Since few buildings in the commercial real-estate market are owner occupied, falling commercial rents risk the most immediate harm to banks balance sheets. And there’s one bank that is the most exposed to Hong Kong, it’s UK-based HSBC.

Though residential could do some harm as well.

Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

Just prior to a war, the majority of people in the nations that are about to become involved tend to assume that another nation is threatening theirs, whist their own leaders are doing all they can to avoid conflict. This is almost never the case.

The “etiquette” of starting wars is for leaders to claim to their people that the last thing they want is war, but the enemy is goading them into armed conflict and, at some point, retaliation becomes “unavoidable.”

The reason for this etiquette is that, almost invariably, the people of a nation have no desire to go to war.

But if that’s the case, why is world history filled with warfare taking place on a regular basis?

Well, truth be told, there are two groups of people who tend to relish war – the military and the political leaders.

I’ve often quoted Randolph Bourne as saying, “War is the health of the state.” He was quite correct. The larger the nation, the greater the need political leaders have for warfare. After all, there’s no situation in which a people feel more greatly that they need their leaders to take charge, than in a time of war.

Political leaders, after all, thrive on taxation and the oppression of basic rights. And they can get away with taxing a people more heavily during a war. They can also remove basic freedoms “temporarily” in order to keep the people “safe.”

Then, when the war is over, taxes never seem to return to their previous low and freedoms never fully return. With each conflict, the state ratchets up its power over the people.

And in modern times, there’s an additional incentive. Since the end of World War II, the US military-industrial complex has been displeased with the fact that peacetime means diminished revenue for them. Increasingly, they’ve contributed heavily to election campaigns for both major parties in every election.

The repayment for those contributions has always been the same – the political class must find excuses to create a new conflict as soon as another one ends, ensuring the continued revenue of the complex.

This has resulted in the US becoming the first and only country that’s in a consciously created state of perpetual warfare. The cost of this, in 2018, was roughly $600 billion – 54% of all federal discretionary spending.

Much of that cost goes to the maintenance of some 800 military bases across the globe, but the military-industrial complex is forever seeking opportunities for expansion, and having been paid for it with campaign funds, political leaders need to find excuses for new conflicts with regularity.

Presently, world leaders are doing their best to deflect taunts by the US. The self-appointed “world’s policeman” is wagging its finger at North Korea with regard to nuclear weapons development, at Venezuela, seeking to replace their leader with an American puppet, at China with regard to islands in the South China Sea and at a host of countries in the Middle East. To each of these, US leaders have said that armed aggression by the US “cannot be ruled out.” And, “All options are on the table.”

As stated above, the peoples of these countries tend to have no desire to go to war. But political leaders have a vested interest in warfare. In addition, military leaders have a stake in the game.

Imagine having graduated from West Point and having spent your military career as an undistinguished desk jockey. By the time you’ve risen to the rank of general, all you’ve done is push pencils. And yet, the reason you joined up in the first place was to become a military leader, with a chest full of battle ribbons.

This is the conundrum that taunts the more sociopathic military leaders – the George Pattons and the Douglas MacArthurs – who, once they’ve been given a command, tend to become carried away in their zeal to create their own legacy through armed combat. The greater the bloodletting, the greater the victory.

In a leadup to active conflict, such generals tend to be like pit bulls on tight leashes – straining to be released so that they can fulfil their destiny.

In almost every case, there are players on both sides who fit this description. As a result, all that’s needed is a small spark to set off armed conflict.

And generally, the provocation that begins a war is a small one. For World War I, all that was necessary was for an archduke of Austria to be assassinated, by a Bosnian teenager, while riding in an open car.

Within a month, Austria-Hungary and Serbia entered into war. All over Europe, people were astonished at how quickly other countries took up sides. France, Russia, Great Britain and, later, Japan, Greece and the US all teamed up against Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy and even the Ottoman Empire.

Before the war ended, some four years later, some seventy million military personnel had been involved, plus countless civilians – and all due to a shot fired by a young malcontent.

In most all such cases, when a military retaliates against a minor act of aggression, the people of the respective countries hope that the scuffle will be brief, and life can return to normal. But that’s almost never the way it plays out. Invariably, there are those political and military leaders on both sides who revel in the conflict and are determined to demonstrate that they themselves will emerge as the unquestioned victors.

The technical starting point of any major war is, in fact, incidental. Most any excuse will suffice. What’s necessary is two opponents, each of whom accuses the other of attempting to foment aggression. At that point, all that’s needed to light the spark is a young soldier or agitator with an itchy trigger finger, or a politician with a show of bravado, or a military leader who chooses to break from his orders to stand down.

In many cases, if the war does not start spontaneously, a false-flag incident suffices. One country creates an event which it purports is an act of aggression by its opponent. (The recent events in the Strait of Hormuz have a distinct false-flag odour about them.)

Again, the actual catalyst matters little. Once the rattling of sabres begins, as it has, presently, in the Middle East, all that’s required to create a major war is a slipup or a nudge.

*  *  *

The US government is overextending itself by interfering in every corner of the globe. It’s all financed by massive amounts of money printing. However, the next financial crisis could end the whole charade soon. The truth is, we’re on the cusp of a global economic crisis that could eclipse anything we’ve seen before. That’s exactly why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent new report with all the details. Click here to download the PDF now.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman says Sen. Elizabeth Warren “represents the worst in politicians,” and that “she doesn’t know who the fuck she’s tweeting” after the Massachusetts Democrat’s latest salvo against the rich.

A new ad by Warren, titled “Elizabeth Warren Stands Up to Billionaires,” targets Cooperman, along with former CEO of TD Ameritrade Joe Ricketts, former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel according to CNBC.

In it, Cooperman – who joked in September that “they won’t open the stock market if Elizabeth Warren is the next president – has the words “CHARGED WITH INSIDER TRADING” superimposed over his face.

“As far as the accusations of insider trading, I won the case. She’s disgraceful. She doesn’t know who the f— she’s tweeting. I gave away more in the year than she has in her whole f—-ing lifetime,” Cooperman told CNBC on Wednesday.

Days before breaking out in tears on CNBC over the American political divide, sent Warren a Halloween letter in which he said she’s treating him like “a parent chiding an ungrateful child.”

Warren hit back, tweeting “Leon is wrong. I’m fighting for big changes like universal child care, investing in public schools, and free public college.”

Leon is wrong. I’m fighting for big changes like universal child care, investing in public schools, and free public college.

We can do all of that with a #TwoCentWealthTax. Leon can and should pitch in more—so that every kid has the same opportunities he did to succeed. https://t.co/38fJSXKKCJ

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 31, 2019

Other business titans, including J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, have taken on Warren for her attacks on the wealthy.

Her war with business leaders has led to her crafting a strong group of supporters that have propelled her in the polls.

After being behind the Democratic front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden, by at least 30 points in May, she has surged to being only six points from catching up to his lead, according to a Real Clear Politics polling average. -CNBC

Interestingly, Warren’s poll numbers started tanking after Warren unveiled her wealth tax plan and cooperman said “Her policies are counter-productive, they’re negative for capitalism…you don’t make the poor people rich by making the rich people poor.”

Now, for fun, the inverse of Warren’s odds against the Dow: