Is Britain Backing South Africa’s Land Confiscations From White Farmers?

Update: In a truly stunning report, Theresa May’s government appears to be backing the Soviet-style policy of “land expropriation without compensation” aimed at dispossessing South Africa’s white farmers.

Breitbart London has seen a letter written by Harriet Baldwin MP, Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), to Sir Paul Beresford MP, who enquired what the government’s stance on the policy was on behalf of a concerned constituent.

“The British government understands the need for land reform in South Africa”, Baldwin asserted, adding that they “welcomed” promises from President Cyril Ramaphosa that “the process of land [re]distribution would be orderly within South African laws” and be carried out “without negatively affecting economic growth, agricultural production and food security”.

In a follow-up email to the constituent from the Africa Department (Central and Southern) of the FCO, also seen by Breitbart London and confirmed as “reflect[ing] Government policy on this issue” by the FCO newsdesk, the department confirms:

Theresa May is satisfied with having been told that “[the] process would be taken forward on a multi-party basis, through Parliament, and… within the bounds of the Constitution and carefully designed so as to avoid damaging food security or deterring investment”.

It appears the fact that one white farmer is being murdered every five days, and the fact that South Afriuca just changed its constitution to enable the compensation-less confiscation, and the fact that when these exact same actions of forced redistribution or more simply put – confiscation – were undertaken in Zimbabwe, the nation’s economy collapsed and social unrest exploded; are irrelevant to the British government, who instead, if this report is true, merely take the words of a clearly corrupt leader as sacrosanct (‘socialist activist’ Cyril Ramaphosa is one of South Africa’s richest men and has an estimated net worth of $550 million).

*  *  *

This report comes as it is becoming more and more clear that South Africa is going full Zimbabwe… and we know that did not end well.

Authored by Daniel Greenfield via Sultan Knish blog,

“Strongman politics are ascendant,” Barack Obama warned in South Africa. He spoke passionately about “the politics of fear and resentment” at the Mandela Lecture. He worried that we were entering a world, “where might makes right and politics is a hostile competition between tribes and races and religions.”

While the media used the remarks to attack Trump’s meeting with Putin, Obama had shared a stage with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa who had come to power promising to seize land from white farmers. Ramaphosa was the latest in a series of ANC strongmen, including his predecessor, an alleged rapist, beginning with the Communist terrorist whose legacy Obama was commemorating.

President Ramaphosa had vowed early on to seize land from white farmers without compensation. “The expropriation of land without compensation is envisaged as one of the measures that we will use to accelerate redistribution of land to black South Africans,” he had declared. And denied that such racist Communist tactics were unconstitutional. Now he’s moving to modify South Africa’s constitution.

Initially, the ANC, which is partnered with the South African Communist Party, had claimed that seizing land would not violate the law. Now it’s actually going to change the South African constitution.

“It has become pertinently clear that our people want the constitution to be more explicit about expropriation of land without compensation,” President Ramaphosa announced.

When your only rule is mob rule by ANC thugs, it doesn’t really matter what a piece of paper says.

“We will accelerate our land redistribution programme not only to redress a grave historical injustice, but also to bring more producers into the agricultural sector and to make more land available for cultivation,” Ramaphosa claimed in his State of the Nation address.

Zimbabwe had already made great strides in improving agriculture through land seizures.

Land was stolen from the farmers who knew how to work it and handed out to politically connected thugs. Soon the former “bread basket” of Southern Africa was starving. Black groups pleaded with the white farmers to remain. Rural Zimbabwe died. Hyperinflation made the currency worthless. A trillion dollars might not be enough to buy one egg. A former food exporter was forced to rely on food aid.

“If white settlers just took the land from us without paying for it,” Mugabe had declared, “we can, in a similar way, just take it from them without paying for it.”

Ramaphosa’s rhetoric is an echo of one of Africa’s worst racist strongmen. Land seizures won’t bring South African land into “full use”, as he claims. It will mean productive land falling into the hands of ANC thugs who will be too corrupt, incompetent and greedy to do the hard work of working the land.

South Africa’s agricultural sector will go the way of Zimbabwe.

Cyril Ramaphosa is one of South Africa’s richest men and has an estimated net worth of $550 million. How did a socialist student activist make a mint? The answer is an inevitable as it is unsurprising.

South Africa’s agricultural sector has been steadily in decline. Farms used to provide millions of jobs. Now they offer less than a million. Wheat planting has fallen to a third. Cotton to a tenth. A country that once exported wheat, is now importing millions of tons while its agriculture sector fails.

The decline of South Africa’s agriculture has gone hand in hand with what it euphemistically calls its land reforms. White farmers have been murdered or driven off their land. But land seizures, legal and illegal, with compensation or with a hatchet, haven’t made South African agriculture more productive.

Instead South Africa is becoming increasingly dependent on agricultural imports to feed its people.

Like Zimbabwe, South Africa is due to revisit the same implacable economic consequences of land seizures that took the Soviet Union down the road to famine and terror. Toward its end, the USSR, despite possessing territories that had once bulged with rich harvests, had gone deep into debt to buy food from the United States. The African National Congress’ Communist roots are taking South Africa down the same path as its fallen Communist masters. And with the same miserable results.

Comrade Ramaphosa, as Comrade Mandela liked to call him, is less of a strongman, than a weak man. More afraid of thugs like Julius Malema and the greed of his ANC comrades than of dooming his people to hunger. The ANC is populated with thugs who are impatiently waiting to loot South Africa’s corpse. And they’ve grown tired of pretending that they are anything more than a failed state’s Marxist mob.

The constitutional gambit is a desperate attempt to legitimize racist mob violence and ANC corruption. It takes the constant assaults on white farmers and tries to disguise lawlessness under the color of law.

One white farmer in South Africa has been murdered every five days. This ethnic cleansing has been going on with the same regular clockwork as the tributes to Nelson Mandela and his even more murderous wife. The racist violence, the murders, rapes and land seizures, the chants of, “Shoot the Boer” are backed by lies about a shadow white majority somehow still ruling South Africa even after all the years of ANC rule.

The media frequently repeats fake news statistics which claim that white farmers own 70% or more of the country’s farmland. The actual number is less than a quarter. Some of the best land in South Africa is already in black hands. And, just as in Zimbabwe, it hasn’t remedied the agricultural or social problems.

South Africa’s agricultural sector is already on its deathbed. Its corrupt economy is incapable of competing on the world stage. Its exports are not at issue, its ability to feed its own people is. Aggressive land seizures won’t do much more damage to South Africa’s economy, though it will discourage investors and drive out more white farmers, but will bring its society to its knees.

Meanwhile the plight of South Africa’s white farmers continues to be ignored. The ANC genocide has been slowly unfolding for a generation with the complicity of the same leftist leaders who covered up Communist genocides in the Soviet Union, Communist China and Cambodia. But this latest legitimization of land seizures by the ANC will only encourage a further outpouring of racist attacks on white farmers.

Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has urged helping the persecuted white farmers of South Africa receive political asylum. But while every “persecuted” group is fast tracked for asylum, the door still remains shut for a productive population that has been targeted for economic ethnic cleansing.

In his State of the Nation speech, President Ramaphos declared,

“We are building a country where a person’s prospects are determined by their own initiative and hard work, and not by the color of their skin, place of birth, gender, language or income of their parents.” Seizing land from people because of the color of their skin and giving it to those who haven’t worked for it is the opposite of that vision.

And yet it’s easy to see why Obama was so comfortable with a politician who could twist the language of equality to justify identity politics theft and the verbiage of tolerance to justify racial oppression.

South Africa, like the Soviet Union and Venezuela, like Cambodia and Cuba, is not just an atrocity, it’s a cautionary tale. Ideology, more than race, connects the scattered strands of the leftist killing fields. To pretend that what happened there cannot happen here would be ignoring the lessons of history.

And a new red famine is growing where the red blood of white farmers flows into the dying earth. 

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Erdogan’s Boycott Fails To Hurt iPhone Sales In Turkey: Report

After a week in which Turks were encouraged to engage in PR stunts like smashing, burning, and shooting their iPhones, and as the lira took a nose dive of 16% against the dollar after President Trump authorized doubling tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Turkey, it doesn’t appear these efforts have done much to significantly dent iPhone sales in Turkey

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan encouraged Turks to boycott Apple and other US electronic products this week: “If they have iPhone, there is Samsung on the other side. And we have our Venus and Vestel. We are going to produce enough for ourselves. We have to serve better quality goods than we are importing from them,” he urged in a Tuesday speech. 

But despite Turkish media giving the boycott extensive coverage and a spate of YouTube videos showing citizens burning dollar bills and destroying Apple’s iPhones, it appears Turks are still buying the US product. Or at least we could say there’s nothing substantive to prove the boycott is having the desired impact. 

via The New York Times

In a Saturday speech Erdogan declared his country would not be cowed by Washington: “We will not surrender to those who present themselves as a strategic partner while at the same time trying to make us a strategic target,” he said at a congress of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The two NATO allies are now in open economic war after Turkey has refused demands from the White House that it release American pastor Andrew Brunson, which the BBC has noted has become “a pawn in a personal feud” that’s now spiraled out of control. 

Erdogan accused Washington of conducting an “economic coup” against Turkey. He repeated the theme on Saturday, saying “Some people threaten us with economy, sanctions, foreign currency exchange rates, interest rates and inflation. We know your shenanigans and we will defy you.”

As Erdogan has also threatened return sanctions on the US, it appears he’s in a losing no-win situation even as the iPhone boycott received immense international media attention. 

Erdogan’s fiery boycott calls and US reaction…

Though limited to the level of anecdotal testimonial, Russian state-run Sputnik has surveyed a dozen or more iPhone salespersons and consumers at stores in Turkey.

Below are some of the highlights from these interviews:

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a salesman from one of Ankara’s mobile phone outlets told Sputnik that “both prices and a balance of purchases [in the city] remain unchanged” and that three out of ten customers are still interested in buying an iPhone, while the remaining seven customers prefer Samsung models and those made by other manufacturers.

And one Turkish iPhone customer interviewed believes that Erdogan’s call to abandon the US-made electronic goods is more emotional than real: “The turnover of funds in the Turkish electronics market amounts to millions of dollars, and swiftly pulling the plug will mean a full-fledged economic blow to mainly domestic entrepreneurs. No one seeks to implement this task,” the man identified only as Ali explained

A number of Turks said their feelings about purchasing or using an iPhone would not be altered based on coercion from the state, such as an engineer named Orhand, who said:

As far as I know, in terms of the number of the phones that have been sold the, iPhone occupies 7 percent of the market, but in terms of money iPhone accounts for 26 percent. These phones are very expensive for people to buy. Most Turks buy Samsung models, which occupy more than 50 percent of the country’s market.

Another consumer noted of her iPhone that she was “very disappointed with it because Apple is constantly updating my gadget without asking my permission” but balked at the idea that Erdogan’s call to boycott would have any effect on her decisions. 

A further young person interviewed said such demands to boycott from Ankara would like turn Turkey’s youth against the state: “But I am against the state, not me, deciding on what brand of a mobile phone people should use and what brand they should give up,” he said. 

Pricing for the iPhone X starts at 7,499 Turkish lira, which at the current exchange rate is now over $1,245. At such a price which had been high even before the lira’s dive there likely weren’t a flood of Turks lining up to get it in the first place.

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What Truckers & Railroads Just Said About The US Economy

Authored by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,

It’s cyclical, stupid!

The transportation sector is a reflection of the goods-based economy in the US. Demand has been blistering across all modes of transportation. Freight shipment volume (not pricing… we’ll get to pricing in a moment) by truck, rail, air, and barge, according to the Cass Freight Index  jumped 10.6% in July compared to a year earlier. This pushed the index, which is not seasonally adjusted, to its highest level for July since 2007.

The dynamics in the transportation sector are “clearly signaling that the US economy, at least for now, is ignoring all of the angst coming out of Washington D.C. about the trade wars,” the report by Cass said.

The Cass Shipments Index does not include shipments of bulk commodities, such as grains or chemicals. But shipments of commodities were strong too, according to the Association of American Railroads. Excluding the carload category of coal, which is facing a structural decline in the US, carloads rose by 6.7% year-over-year, including grain, up 14.7%; petroleum & petroleum products, up 27%; and chemicals, up 4.6%. Of the 20 commodity carload categories, only five showed declines, including nonmetallic minerals, metallic ores, and the biggie, coal.

And intermodal traffic – shipments of containers and trailers via a combination of rail and truck – surged 6.9% in July compared to July last year, the AAR reported.

The pop in the Cass Shipments Index of 10.6% was the sixth double-digit increase so far this year. Only June had come in with a single-digit increase (7.2%):

Capacity in trucking is very tight. Some of the squeeze, especially among small trucking companies, earlier this year was triggered by the newly required Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs) that record drive times by truckers and thus help enforce the legal hourly limits truckers can drive. This hurt capacity and utilization earlier this year. But Cass points out:

[M]any of the truckers most adversely affected are now beginning to get some of the loss in utilization back, especially in the dry van and reefer (temperature control) marketplaces. The flatbed segment of trucking, however, is continuing to struggle with productivity after the adoption of ELDs.

Under pressure from this demand from shippers, tight capacity, and rising costs of diesel, pricing has been surging across the board.

The Cass Truckload Linehaul Index, which tracks per-mile full-truckload pricing but does not include fuel or fuel surcharges and is therefore not impacted by diesel price increases, jumped 10.2% in July, the largest year-over-year increase in the data going back to 2005:

One of the factors in creating pricing pressures is diesel. The US average retail price of diesel rose 24% at the end of July ($3.23) from a year ago, according to EIA data, but remains substantially below the range of the years before the Oil Bust:

The Cass Intermodal Price Index, which includes fuel prices, jumped 12.0% in June compared to a year ago, the 22nd month in a row of year-over-year increases, and the sharpest year-over-year increase since July 2011.

In aggregate, across all modes of transportation, the amount companies spent on shipping soared by 17.9% in July compared to July last year, according to the Cass Freight Expenditures index. This surge is a function of higher prices and fuel surcharges, as well as higher shipment volumes at those higher prices:

Retail sales – particularly e-commerce sales – have been strong all year. In July, retail sales jumped 6.4% from a year ago. That explains part of the surge in transportation demand. But industrial demand is hot too.

The Census Bureau reported yesterday that the combined value of distributive trade sales and manufacturers’ shipments for June – so lagging a month behind, but that’s as close as we can get – jumped 8.2% year-over year.

Some of this surge in shipments went into business inventories, which rose 4.2% year-over-year to a record $1.94 trillion. This number is important in the cyclicality of the goods-based economy. At some point, when sales growth tapers off, these record inventories are perceived as too high, and the inventory reduction mode sets in across industries, which causes orders to drop and then shipments to drop. This was one of the factors leading to the last transportation recession. And the way inventories are going now, it will be one of the factors leading to the next transportation recession.

But for now, there is a capacity squeeze, so everyone speeds up orders to get their stuff in time, which tightens the squeeze, increases inventories, pushes up demand for transportation, and inflates pricing.

Demand from the industrial sector shows up in demand for flatbed trailers that haul equipment and supplies for the revived oil-and-gas drilling boom, construction, manufacturing, etc. Demand surged just as capacity tightened, and suddenly the DAT Flatbed Weekly Barometer, cited by Cass, spiked. The spike, as the chart below shows, was historic and blistering, but there is no infinite spike or endless exponential increase, as the recent plunge toward the mean shows. In this barometer, values above 50 (blue line) indicate demand exceeds capacity (click to enlarge):

As the above charts show, transportation is an notoriously cyclical industry that experienced a “transportation recession” from 2015 through much of 2016, just as a lot of capacity had been added, while business inventories were suddenly deemed too high and orders slowed in the goods-based sector, which caused demand for transportation to drop and pricing to collapse. Suddenly there was no more talk about a shortage of drivers.

Cass points out that the capacity squeeze and price increases are unlikely to become permanent: “We are confident that the increased spending on equipment, technology, and people will eventually result in increased capacity in most transportation modes.”

“Increased spending” may be an understatement. Trucking companies are responding to the capacity squeeze: In July, their orders for Class 8 trucks soared 187% from a year ago, to 52,250 units, the highest number of monthly orders ever. Truck manufacturers, which had been laying off people during the transportation recession, now have their own capacity squeeze that goes all the up the supply chain. “It is a bizarre occurrence and it will not be resolved soon,” FTR Transportation Intelligence explained. Read… Cyclical Heavy-Truck Industry Soars to Cloud 9  

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Afghan “Viceroy”? Trump Mulling Blackwater Founder Erik Prince’s Plan To Privatize Longest War

Alexander the Great couldn’t do it. Genghis Khan couldn’t do it. Neither could the British Empire nor NATO and the US military machine. But Erik Prince thinks he can stabilize Afghanistan with his latest mercenary empire? 

“I think it will make Erik Prince billions of dollars while he loses the war for us,” a congressional aide told The Atlantic of the Blackwater founder’s plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan.

Prince has been shopping his plan all around Washington for the past year which calls for major draw down of Pentagon train and assist forces and their replacement by private contractors, but now it appears President Trump may actually be entertaining the idea

The Atlantic issued a detailed weekend report which reveals Trump and his top foreign policy advisors are set to consider the plan during an upcoming Camp David meeting on Friday.

Prince  the brother of billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos  has over the past years since selling his mired-in-controversy Blackwater group (now Academi) begun a new mercenary empire in China called Frontier Services Group (FSG), in a market where Western firms of necessity find themselves working closely with Chinese state authorities. He’s reportedly had success in securing security and logistics contracts in Africa and China, and has since at least 2017 lobbied both top US generals and Congressional leaders to consider massive privatization of the now fast approaching two decade long quagmire. 

His plan involves multiple thousands of contractors overseen by a “viceroy” reporting directly to the White House, and with a private air force to boot.

The Atlantic, which has seen the full presentation and photographed select slides, presents the details as follows:

Prince calls his proposal “A Strategic Economy of Force.” It entails sending 5,500 contractors to Afghanistan to embed with Afghan National Security Forces, and appointing a “viceroy” to oversee the whole endeavor. Prince said some version of the idea had been percolating in his mind since he first went to Afghanistan in 2002; he knew then, he said, that the Pentagon wasn’t going to be able to resolve this. But it wasn’t until the Trump administration that he felt it really had a shot; “There are some phone calls where it’s not even worth wasting the electrons on,” he said when I asked why he hadn’t proposed this idea during the Obama administration. Obama approved a substantial troop increase for Afghanistan in his first term.

Calling it the potential “Wollman Ice Rink moment of the Trump administration” in reference to Trump’s quickly rehabilitating the now iconic New York central park rink in 1986 after years of utter disrepair and millions of city dollars wasted, Prince is pitching both massively reduced American taxpayer costs and small footprint counterterror operations that will bring lasting peace to the war-torn country. 

The Atlantic report continues

Under Prince’s plan, the viceroy would be a federal official who reports to the president and is empowered to make decisions about State Department, DoD, and intelligence community functions in-country. Prince was vague about how exactly this would work and which agency would house the viceroy, but compared the job to a “bankruptcy trustee” and said the person would have full hiring and firing authority over U.S. personnel. Prince wants to embed “mentors” into Afghan battalions. These mentors would be contractors from the U.S., Britain, Canada, South Africa—“anybody with a good rugby team,” Prince quipped. Prince also wants a “composite air wing”—a private air force—to make up for deficiencies in the Afghan air capabilities.

Photograph from page of Prince’s presentation. Image source: The Atlantic

According to multiple recent reports, the top generals and advisors overseeing Afghan war policy hate the plan, including McMaster, Mattis, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, as well as Tillerson, all of which worry Prince’s claimed ability to bring costs to “less than 8% of what the USG spends now” is a fantasy

The Atlantic notes of the key objections around Washington, “One is that they believe Prince is downplaying how much it will truly cost, and the other is that they assume allies will ditch the U.S.-led effort once a switch is made to contractors instead of uniformed troops.” And critics further say that it “will lead to a moral and legal quagmire, as contractors from around the world fighting in place of U.S. forces present a host of possible problems.” 

Like in prior Iraq scandals that nearly brought down Blackwater, there’s the questions of: “What happens if a Canadian, for example, kills an Afghan civilian while fighting as a contractor under the leadership of the American ‘viceroy’? What if the contractors get in a real bind — does the U.S. send our military in to help them?”

Prince attempted to address some of these questions and more during a Friday MSNBC appearance in which Andrea Mitchell happily gave the notorious war profiteer lengthy air time to pitch to the American public

Meanwhile, competing for Trump’s attention is billionaire investor and Cerberus co-founder Stephen Feinberg, which counts as among his holdings mammoth military contractor DynCorp.

Feinberg’s plan for allowing the private contractor sector to shoulder the burden of security in Afghanistan has reportedly been pitched in face to face meetings with Trump in the Oval Office, something which Prince has yet to do. 

According to The Atlantic:

Feinberg, on the other hand, has met with Trump, as well as with Kushner. One senior administration official said Feinberg has met more than once with Trump in the Oval Office. Through his investment firm Cerberus Capital, Feinberg controls the huge military contractor Dyncorp. He is also a confidant of Trump and has known him from business circles since before Trump became president. Feinberg was considered for a czar-type position overseeing an intelligence review earlier this year, but the idea was stymied by a vehement backlash from the intelligence community. Feinberg does not have an intelligence background.

Feinberg is proposing ideas similar to Prince’s; Prince said the two were 95 to 98 percent in agreement, though “he wrote his thing, I wrote mine.”

One source for The Atlantic report said Feinberg is angling to be the ‘viceroy’ described in Prince’s plan.

When Prince was confronted over the obvious conflict of interest in attempting to stabilize and secure a war zone while simultaneously seeking a profit, he responded, “And let me flip that on its head even more. Before anyone throws that accusation, I think they should interview all the former generals, all the former Pentagon generals, and all the boards they serve on, and all their recommendations … advocating for the Pentagon $50 billion approach to continue on like we’ve been doing for the last 16 years. Which one is it going to be? I’m happy to have that debate.”

Or perhaps as one commentator wrote: “What if — hear me out — instead of privatizing the war in #Afghanistan, we ended it”…”Crazy, I know.”

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“You Put Your Politics Before Us” – Benghazi Survivor Lashes Out At Brennan As Former CIA Boss Says ‘May Sue Trump’

Former CIA Director John Brennan said on Sunday that he is strongly considering legal action after the Trump administration revoked his security clearance last week. 

In a Sunday interview with NBC‘s Chuck Todd, Brennan blasted Trump for what he calls an “egregious abuse of power and authority,” adding that he’s “been contacted by a  number of lawyers” who have advised him on legal options – including the possibility of an injunction to stop more clearances from being revoked. 

On Wednesday, the White House announced that it was revoking Brennan’s clearance, and that the status of other former officials was under review. Critics have accused the White House of trying to silence political opponents (who appear in front of millions of people each week on cable news networks – though CNN ratings did just get smoked by Ancient Aliens), while more clearances are on the chopping block. 

“Trump says he is reviewing security clearances for nine other individuals: James Clapper, James Comey, Michael Hayden, Sally Yates, Susan Rice, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and Bruce Ohr. Some have been publicly critical of the president, while others are linked to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference,” wrote the Washington Post on Wednesday. 

Brennan’s firing has been criticized by over a dozen former top intelligence officials, as well as 60 ex-CIA members who condemned the action. 

On Thursday, Brennan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, claiming Trump is trying to silence him. Trump, meanwhile, revoked Brennan’s clearance for what he called “unfounded and outrageous allegations” against his administration, while also announcing that the White House is evaluating whether to strip clearances from other former top officials. 

Trump later told the Wall Street Journal his decision was connected to the ongoing federal probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and allegedly collusion by his presidential campaign.

“I call it the rigged witch hunt, (it) is a sham,” Trump said in an interview with the newspaper on Wednesday. “And these people led it.”

“It’s something that had to be done,” Trump added. –Reuters

Writing in the New York Times, Brennan – who led the CIA under President Obama, called Trump’s denials of collusion with Russia “Hogwash,” and vowed not to be silenced.

“The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of ‘Trump Incorporated’ attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets,” Brennan wrote in the Times.

Mr. Trump clearly has become more desperate to protect himself and those close to him, which is why he made the politically motivated decision to revoke my security clearance in an attempt to scare into silence others who might dare to challenge him. -John Brennan

On Wednesday, Brennan tweeted that Trump’s move “should gravely worry all Americans” as it is “part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump to suppress freedom of speech & punish critics.”

“I will not relent,” he concludes…

Late Friday, Brennan said in his first live TV interview since being stripped of his clearance that Trump is “drunk with power,” before admonishing Congressional GOP. 

“Are the Republicans on the Hill who have given him a pass going to wait for a disaster to happen before they actually find their backbones?” Brennan said.

On Saturday, Trump tweeted: “Has anyone looked at the mistakes that John Brennan made while serving as CIA Director? He will go down as easily the WORST in history & since getting out, he has become nothing less than a loudmouth, partisan, political hack who cannot be trusted with the secrets to our country!”

Meanwhile, Benghazi survivor and former Army ranger Kris Paronto – who lost his security clearance years ago after telling his account of the Benghazi attack – slammed Brennan in a Thursday tweet which reads: “My principles are greater than clearances too John, especially when you and the @CIA kool-aid drinkers punished us for not going along with the Benghazi cover-up story in order to protect you, @HillaryClinton ‘s & @BarackObama ‘s failures. You put your politics before us.” 

Discussing the petition signed by former officials, Paronto said: “Of course the former @CIA and @ODNIgov directors sign a petition, because they want the continue to feel they are above the law and above us common folk….no more eltists, rules apply to you just like everyone else.”

Remember when two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee called for Brennan’s resignation in 2014 when the CIA was busted spying on Congress?

Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) became the first senator to make the call when he issued a statement declaring that he had “no choice but to call for the resignation of CIA Director John Brennan.”
“The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee computers,” he said.

This grave misconduct not only is illegal, but it violates the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of separation of powers,” Udall continued. “These offenses, along with other errors in judgment by some at the CIA, demonstrate a tremendous failure of leadership, and there must be consequences.”

Remember in 2013 when the New York Times published Glenn Greenwald’s op-ed entitled “By Nominating John Brennan, Obama Is Ignoring War Crimes” ?

Greenwald describes how Brennan’s support for Bush-admin-era “torture, rendition and warrantless eavesdropping” were criminal acts, and that:

“following Obama’s lead, the country has decided to ignore the fact that it committed grievous crimes as part of the “War on Terror.” Obama’s Orwellian decree that we must “look forward, not backward” has convinced huge numbers of citizens to sweep this all under the rug and pretend it never happened. That is what explains how Brennan went from radioactive and unconfirmable in 2008 to uncontroversial in 2013.” –Glenn Greenwald via NYT

And despite all that, Brennan is now a hero to the same people just a few years later. What changed?

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Who Reads Financial Reports? Nobody!

A major debate has broken out in the aftermath of Trump’s suggestion to cut down on the number of earnings reports public companies should present to the investing public, from quarterly to semi-annual. And while there are many salient points on both sides of the argument, one interesting tangent that has gotten little attention is how often do investors actually use the information provided by corporations to make informed decisions.

Now, according to a recent article by accountant Baruch Lev we have the surprising answer: not much. In fact not much at all: as he writes in a recent blog post, “take a guess: how many 10-K (annual report) downloads gets the average public company? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Not quite. Would you believe 28? Here are Loughran and McDonald.”

And while Trump’s suggestion to cut back on “short-termism” is likely accurate, if a far better way to express it is not in eliminating quarterly reporting but cutting back on management guidance, perhaps it is also time for investors to take advantage of the information companies provide them in the public realm. Because as of this moment, they certainly refuse to do that.

Here is the blog post by Baruch Lev who explains “Who Reads Financial Reports? Nobody.” This article first appeared at the Lev End Of Accounting Blog

For several years I have argued, based on comprehensive statistical evidence, that corporate financial reports―quarterly and annual statements―have lost most of their relevance and usefulness to investors. Corporate earnings, in particular, are no longer a reliable measure of enterprise value change, nor are they indicators of future performance and growth. In fact, as I have shown on this blog (“The Unbearable Lightness of Earnings,” April 15, 2018), even if you could predict all the public companies that will meet or beat analysts’ consensus estimates next quarter you will barely cover your transaction costs.

Some, though by no means all, of those exposed to my message, still find it unbelievable. “There is still lost of valuable information in financial reports,” is a comment I often hear, though without much evidential support. An article of faith, so to speak.

So how surprised I was to read a recent study by Tim Loughran and Bill McDonald, both respected finance researchers who developed a widely-used software system for textual analysis. Loughran and McDonald documented the number of downloads of annual financial reports (10-Ks) from the SEC EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval) server log.*  EDGAR is the go to place for corporate financial reports. All public companies have to file their SEC reports through EDGAR, and the SEC makes these filings immediately public. So, if you are an analyst, investor, or a researcher, you go to EDGAR for your information.

So, take a guess: how many 10-K (annual report) downloads gets the average public company? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Not quite. Would you believe 28? Here are Loughran and McDonald (p. 3):

“The punchline of our paper is the surprisingly low number of investors who access the annual reports of publicly-traded companies at the time of their initial filing. The average publicly-traded firm has its annual report requested from the EDGAR site only 28.4 total times by investors on the day of the filing and the following day [28.9 times in five days]. On its filing date, the median publicly-traded firm has only nine 10-K requests.”

28? 9? There are many more people working at the FASB―the accounting regulator―than financial report readers.

Loughran and McDonald mention GE (General Electric) with 40% of its shareholders being retail investors, and with a large pool of retired employees who presumably are interested in the company’s finances. Yet, in June 2, 2015, the Wall Street Journal quoted GE’s CFO noting that its 2013 annual report was downloaded only 800 times from GE’s website during the entire year.

The 10-Ks of large companies with many investors and analysts are downloaded more frequently, of course than 28 times, but not much more. The 20% largest U.S. companies get, on average, 96.2 total 10-K downloads during the filing day and the subsequent four days. 10-Q (quarterly reports) are downloaded even less frequently.

And, as we all know, downloading a document doesn’t necessarily mean that you read and carefully analyze it. All this led the researchers to conclude (p. 4): “Investors do not appear to be trading on information contained in the 10-K at the time of its filing.” That’s what I was saying for quite some time. Most of the accounting-based information is stale by the time it is published, and doesn’t reflect economic reality. No wonder investors shun this information.

In my recent book, The End of Accounting, I (with Feng Gu) devote seven chapters to a detailed statistical analysis demonstrating the sharp decline in the usefulness of corporate accounting information (we also discuss the reasons for the downfall as well as propose improved alternative information). I almost feel that all this evidential effort is redundant in the face of investors’ rejection of financial reports, as documented by Loughran and McDonald. Voting with the feet is the most effective way of voting.  In forthcoming posts on this blog I will discuss more timely and reliable sources of information for investors.

* See Loughran and McDonald, 2018, The use of EDGAR filings by investors, Journal of Behavioral Finance, forthcoming.

Baruch Lev is the Philip Bardes Professor of Accounting and Finance at the Stern School of Business, NYU

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Omerosa Flip-Flops Again: “Not A Racist” Trump Is Now “Looking To Start A Race War”

During her time in Washington, Omerosa Manigault Newman (OMGMAN) appears to have mastered one of the most important attributes of being a politician: the ability to say something completely contradictory of something you have said before with utterly zero shame or cognition of ever having thought differently.

Having already been caught in a lie about whether she heard President Trump use the N-word – claiming in her new book that someone told her pollster Frank Luntz heard Trump say it, which Luntz denied, while later telling NPR that she personally heard Trump say it. Luntz has denied this, calling Omarosa’s fact checking “Very shoddy work.” 

And been called out by the President himself for her hypocrisy:

Today’s jaunt through the Sunday political shows – as she hawks her unhinged book about her time on the campaign and in the White House with Trump – sees OMGMAN claim that President Trump is “disingenuous” in his efforts to help the African-American community, and accused the president of wanting to start a race war.

“We have a lot to lose right now,” Manigault Newman said on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation,” referencing Trump’s appeal to African-American voters during the 2016 campaign.

“I believe he wants to start a race war in this country,” she added.

As The Hill reports, OMGMAN, who rose to fame on “The Apprentice” and was fired from the administration in December, argued she was as an advocate for the black community during her time in the White House.

“Every single time he had some type of issue with the community, I was there,” she said. “The one thing I realized once I was there was he was disingenuous to his commitment to diversity.”

OMGMAN said Trump is a “performer,” and that he’s more interested in using minority leaders as props than for in-depth conversations.

Of course, the only problem with all these ‘horrific’-sounding accusations is that they are 100% diametrically opposed to what she said just eight months ago during an interview with ABC’s Nightline in December 2017, where she vigorously defended Trump against accusations that he doesn’t like people of color.

“Donald Trump is racial, but he is not a racist,” she said. “The things that he says, the types of pushback that he gives, involve people of color. These are racial exchanges,” she added.

“Yes, I will acknowledge many of the exchanges — particularly in the last six months — have been racially charged. Do we then just stop and label him as a racist? No.”

So to sum up, OMGMAN – who was called “the worst hire ever made” after being fired from the Clinton White House, has now been fired from a Republican White House for “significant integrity issues,” has now flip-flopped from vigorously defending Trump as “not a racist” in Dec 2017 to exclaiming – during her book promotion tour – that not only is he a racist but he is “trying to start a race war” in America.

Still – source integrity doesn’t matter to a headline-hungry media desperate to distract from Trump’s soaring approval numbers (especially among the black community).
 

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How Desperate Is Elon?

Authored by Eric Peters via EricPetersAutos.com,

Elon can’t sell his cars – so he is suing to make people buy them…

Or at least, suing to compel the government to keep on paying people to buy them – if that distinction amounts to any meaningful difference.

Canada had a law – like the one in the U.S. – which greatly subsidized the individual purchase of Teslas and other electric cars via rebates bestowed upon those who did buy them. These purchaser subsidies amounted to several thousand dollars each, and worth a lot more to Tesla, et al, since without them the incentive to buy an electric car dims considerably.

When the subsidies dried up in Denmark, so did Tesla’s sales – by 94 percent. That’s not a typo. With the subsidy in place, 2,738 Teslas were sold in 2015. With the subsidies gone, 176 Teslas were sold the following year.

Elon has admitted openly that he can’t do “business” without these subsidies: “Clean energy vehicles” – as he styles them – “aren’t attractive enough to compete without some form of taxpayer-backed subsidy.”

Elon’s language is always a little fuzzy. The subsidies are not “taxpayer-backed,” which implies something akin to consensual approval. They are government enforced transfer payments, the funds mulcted from unwilling taxpayers. What the government “gives back” – i.e., the subsidy – is taken out of the hide of some other victim. And the receiver of the subsidy is artificially advantaged at the expense of someone else.

In any event, when the government of Ontario, Canada announced this week that it planned to eliminate the subsidies  for EVs – at least, those which pay people with other people’s money to buy Teslas – Elon and his lawyers ran to the courts for succor. Time to call Saul!

“The decision has already inflicted substantial harm on Tesla Canada in the form of lost sales,” the brief contends.

And, it’s true – in the same way that’s it true a burglar is harmed by a homeowner with a baseball bat, who successfully runs the burglar out of his house before the burglar can make off with the TV set.

The real harm has been caused by Elon.

He has singlehandedly perverted the market for electric cars – which aren’t an intrinsically stupid idea – by stupidly building them to be high-performance and luxurious, which has made them much too expensive to be anything other than low-volume indulgences for the virtue-signaling affluent. And – because of the Lemming Effect – steered almost every other car manufacturer in the same stupid direction.

There is only one electric car on the market which stickers for less than $30,000 – and only does so by $10. It is the $29,990 Nissan Leaf.

The next most “affordable” electric car is the $36,620 Chevy Bolt.

In both cases, this is at about twice as much as an IC-engined economy sedan such as the Hyundai Elantra I am test driving this week (base price $16,950).

But electric cars don’t have to cost twice as much as IC economy cars.

They cost as much as they do only in part because they are electric cars. The other part is the cost of Me-Tooing Tesla’s electric cars. Because Teslas are quick and slick and full of gadgets, the manufacturers of other electric cars feel compelled to compete with Teslas, by designing their cars to a similar standard.

They must also be quick – or at least not be “slow” – regardless of the efficiency/cost benefit of slowness, which after all is what electric cars should be about, assuming they are about costing you less to drive than an IC-engined economy car or at the very least, not twice as much.

And if they aren’t about costing less, then why bother? 

Or rather, why subsidize?

One can make a blanket moral indictment against any subsidy for anything since a subsidy is by definition the giving over of money not earned by free exchange to a thief-by-proxy – in order to benefit him at the expense of unwilling victims.

But subsidizing high-performing/high-cost electric cars for virtue-signaling affluent people who ought to be buying their own cars is a species of obnoxiousness akin to rent-controlled luxury apartments in Manhattan. Marie Antoinette is said to have suggested that starving Parisians ought to eat cake – but she at least had the decency not to insist they pay for her cake, too.

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Facebook “Mistakenly” Censors Conservative Education Company For “Hate Speech Violations” 

Facebook says it “mistakenly” removed several videos and censored the reach of conservative educational organization PragerU, short for Prager University. 

On Friday, Prager tweeted evidence that they were being “heavily censored” by Facebook – writing “Our last 9 posts are reaching 0 of our 3 million followers. At least two videos were deleted last night for “hate speech” including our recent video with @conservmillen.

For reference, here’s one video deemed too “hateful” for Facebook – which suggests that when society tries to force men to feminize in order to eliminate “toxic masculinity,” it only creates a more toxic environment vs. encouraging men to harness their inherent masculinity for the sake of good. 

Facebook responded 8 hours afte Prager University’s original tweet with an apology, writing in a tweet: “We mistakenly removed these videos and have restored them because they don’t break our standards. This will reverse any reduction in content distribution you’ve experienced. We’re very sorry and are continuing to look into what happened with your Page.”

PragerU produces short educational videos on a wide varierty of topics from a conservative perspective. While not typically covering current events, Prager provides counterpoints to many liberal talking points – including oppression of women, climate change, gun ownership and trust in the media. In 2017, Google restricted of demonitized 37 PragerU videos, which the university challenged in a lawsuit that was later dismissed by a district court judge. 

Considering the recent high-profile ban of controversial conservative Alex Jones in a seemingly coordinated attack by YouTube, Facebook, Apple and several other social media companies and online services. After resisting calls to ban Jones, Twitter finally handed the Infowars host a week-long suspension for “abusive behavior.” 

President Trump weighed in on the matter on Saturday, tweeting “Social media is totally discriminating against Republican/conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others.” 

Trump called censorship “a very dangerous thing.” 

Trump went on to question “who is making the choices” regarding censorship, “because I can already tell you that too many mistakes are being made. Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!”

On Saturday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted to CNN’s Brian Stelter that Twitter employees have “more left-leaning” bias, though he claims the San Francisco, CA company operates in a neutral manner.

“We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is…is more left-leaning,” said Dorsey.

Dorsey’s CNN appearance was the latest stop in Twitter’s rehabilitation road-show after evidence emerged that they had been “shadow banning” conservative users through a variety of methods; including hiding tweets from followers and hiding conservative users from search results.

And while Silicon Valley social media companies and their defenders may argue that “it’s a private platform, if you don’t like it, start your own Twitter,” – journalist Tim Pool points out the flaw in that logic: 

Perhaps social media companies should, as President Trump says, “Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!”  

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Is Poland The Next Turkey? Spotlight On The Zloty And External Debt

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

Emerging markets have taken it on the chin. Is Poland next?

Murray Gunn, Head of Global Research at Elliott Wave International, asks “Is Poland the next Turkey?”

Our outlook for the Polish Zloty suggests that Poland’s developing authoritarianism is likely to accelerate.

In case you have been living on Mars over the last few years and have missed what is going on, people around the world are becoming increasingly angry. This is especially true in the periphery of Europe, where countries like Turkey and Hungary are ruled by governments with an intolerance for people who disagree with them. After long negative trends in social mood, the so-called “populist revolution” has also resulted in the election of governments in Italy and Poland that have radical agendas. In Poland’s case, one policy of the ruling Law and Justice Party (nothing sinister about that name, eh) is to overhaul the judicial system by forcing judges to retire early. This, the European Union argues, is aimed at increasing political influence in the Polish legal system. On Monday, the EU stepped up threats of legal action against the Polish government which remains intransigent on the matter. It’s looking very probable that Poland is on the road to becoming internationally isolated.

Indeed, the chart of the Polish zloty versus the Euro suggests that Poland may be in for the same treatment as Turkey. A multi-year consolidation ended at the beginning of this year. It looks like EUR-PLN is entering a strong advance which should see the pair explode higher. Be prepared for that to be accompanied with a further breakdown in international relations with Warsaw.

The above via email. I do not have a link. The chart, as delivered, had an arrow pointing up. I edited the chart, adding a “? and put in arrows up and down.

Polish Zloty 1999-Present

The above chart better shows the the volatility of the Zloty.

  • Between May 2001 and January 2004 the Zloty declined 33% vs. the Euro.

  • Between January 2004 and May 2008, the Zloty rallied 54%.

  • Between May 2008 and January 2009 the Zloty declined 35%

Poland Battles With EU

Bloomberg offers a Quick Take: How to Understand Poland’s Battles With the EU.

Almost three years into Poland’s populist revolution, the European Union is fighting with its most populous eastern member on two fronts. The bloc is edging toward suing the country over a judicial revamp and has recommended launching an unprecedented disciplinary process that could lead to penalties against the Polish government for failing to respect democratic standards. At stake is the value of Polish assets, with the zloty usually weakening when conflicts with the EU escalate, and the cohesion of the union itself.

What triggered EU action?

A law passed by Poland’s parliament went into effect, forcing out about two-fifths of Supreme Court justices and giving politicians more sway over a council that decides on court appointments. The law seriously jeopardizes independence of “all parts of the Polish judiciary,” according to the Venice Commission, which advises the Council of Europe human-rights group on constitutional law.

What are the possible penalties?

If four-fifths of EU members approve, Poland’s legal standards would be placed under monitoring by national governments in the Council of the EU. If the breach were to persist, fellow members could suspend certain rights that Poland enjoys as part the EU, including its voting rights in collective decisions. Such escalation, however, would require unanimous support from the bloc’s 27 other countries.

Does Poland have any allies?

Yes. It enjoys the support of Hungary, whose prime minister, Viktor Orban, has been steering his country on a similarly illiberal course. If it comes to a vote on sanctions, more nations may side with Poland in the spirit of supporting a fellow maverick state. Other former-communist nations such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania have strayed from the EU mainstream by rejecting refugees or moving to make it harder for officials to be prosecuted.

Does that mean sanctions are unlikely?

Through Article 7, yes. However, as the standoff escalates, the EU is separately considering limiting access to development funds in the post-2020 budget for countries that disrespect the bloc’s values. That could hit Poland hard since it’s the biggest net beneficiary of the EU’s budget, which may total 1.28 trillion euros ($1.5 trillion) in the 2021-2027 period. The money has helped power the Polish economy, contributing as much as a percentage point of growth to gross domestic product each year.

What could this dispute mean for markets?

While Poland’s economic performance has been robust, the zloty has lagged behind most eastern European peers. The currency has proven vulnerable when the conflict has escalated, as shown during street protests in July 2017 or when concerns about Poland’s sovereign ratings have mounted amid the dispute. More criticism from the European Commission is likely to undermine Poland’s status as a safe investment bet.

External Debt

Poland’s external debt is as bad as Turkey’s. If the EU does limit assistance to Poland, the Zloty is highly likely to come under pressure. The Zloty may come under pressure regardless, based on external debt concerns.

Yet, Poland is not Turkey. It is a member of the EU and nothing can be done about that, ever. Poland can voluntarily leave the EU, but it cannot be kicked out.

It takes unanimous agreement to make major changes, including trade deals. That is a huge, fundamental design flaw of the EU.

A bet against the Zloty vs the Euro seems like a reasonable idea, but it may take time to play out. I have no position in the idea and do not plan one.

Toothless Tiger

Flashback May 17, 2017: EU Opens Article Seven Process Against Poland.

I called the EU a “toothless tiger“.

My closing comment was “Dear EU: Talk is cheap. What are you going to do about any of this?

Clearly the answer was nothing.

Polish Black Hole

For the ironic side of this discussion, please see EU Spent a Trillion Dollars of “Cohesion Money” Seeking Unity: Where’s Is It?

Short answer: There is no unity, but a lot of money vanished in a Polish black hole. The curious aspect is “Both Donor and Recipient Countries are Unhappy“.

EU discontent is high and rising.

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