Former fund manager and FX trader Richard Breslow has an uncomfortable message for the investing world today:
“It’s time to finally admit that fixed-income markets are the only ones capable of expressing an honest picture of the world.
And the picture they paint with 10-year Treasuries, bunds and JGBs at recession-level yields is something that can’t any longer be blithely explained away as some technical distortion. “
It doesn’t matter to — or perhaps it is better to say it is crucially indicative of — underlying sentiment, that no matter how much of this stuff profligate governments will be issuing, investors feel the urgent need to have them in their portfolio.
Via Bloomberg,
With all due respect to those positing much higher yields as a real risk given the hunky-dory view of the world from the large corner suite, we remain as mired in economic inequality as ever. With all of the threats that portends. And anxiety levels have not abated. I couldn’t care less what some statistic that anyone wishes to cite claiming that it isn’t true.
In truth, we are sliding further and further away from achieving any of those goals. Suddenly locking in 3 percent yields doesn’t seem so counterintuitive.
Equities can go to the moon. With the sovereign wealth funds picking winners and losers among supposed competitors and putting public monies behind their choices, how far down is big tech really going to go? On the day that Apple hit its valuation milestone, I was looking at the list of owners of the shares and suddenly wasn’t nearly as impressed.
Buying back shares, touting “adjusted earnings” and substituting M&A for actual investment makes these markets great investments, but hardly indicative of economies putting the thoughts of future recessions out of everyone’s minds.
There were three stories I read yesterday that really got me going.
A great read about a well-deserved victory lap by Morgan Stanley for having called a month ago the big-tech correction. In it they say that, after making the out-of-consensus prediction, their phones “were not ringing”. Apparently, the pull of confirmation bias precluded clients from wanting to hear another opinion. Is it true that you can’t be fired if you maintain that everyone you talked to agreed with the position? Anyway, as the sell-off took place, “inbound traffic picked up considerably”. This story is indicative of so much.
The second story was about Facebook wanting to team up with banks and share information to offer customer-service products. The shares of the company and the financial sector as a whole rose. How quickly we all forget. I know the first question I would ask the next time a banking regulator testifies that we are being too harsh.
Lastly, I was reading the gruesome accounts of the diplomatic blow-up between Canada and Saudi Arabia. It was appalling that so much of the analysis focused on what this could cost in trade. Concluding, it was affordable. I’m sure this is not what Keynes meant when he argued about the primacy of economics in guiding the world forward.
Since it has been a day of rethinking things, I’ve got another. As one dollar bull to another. The charts just won’t be convinced this thing is going anywhere anytime soon. The trading range of DXY, with its multiple tops, is just too compelling to ignore.
And the broader Bloomberg Dollar Index looks like it has already decided the rally has played out for now. Back to the drawing board.
Such important reality as is shown in this picture below is virtually unpublishable in mainstream US ‘news’media, because US ‘news’media need to deceive their public about the most important international realities — such as that the US imposed upon Ukraine a nazi regime against Russia, and the US now lies to accuse Russia for doing what Russia must do in order to protect itself from the US nazi regime next-door.
This picture is among many which were originally published in the excellent 4 July 2018 article by Asa Winstanley at The Electronic Intifada. His article was headlined “Israel is arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine”. That article focuses upon Israel’s strong support for the racist-fascist (or ideologically nazi) Government of Ukraine. (Click onto it to see the documentation — it’s Israeli nazis, against Russians, not against Jews, though they’re allied with ones that are against both, which is why the US did this — aiming to conquer ultimately Russia.)
How, then, can anybody believe the US ‘news’media, which hide these clear realities, instead of ever having reported them to the duped American public?
The US Government’s anti-Russian sanctions, and its NATO exercises with US missiles and tanks on and near Russia’s borders, are based upon the US government’s lies, not upon the truths that this photo represents and which will here be explained.
In US ‘news’media, the overthrow and replacement of Ukraine’s democratically elected government was ‘the Maidan Revolution’, or ‘the 2014 Ukrainian revolution’, not Obama’s coup in Ukraine. They lie blatantly, and they’ll never be truthful about their having done it. Thus, George Friedman, the founder and owner of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor, called it “the most blatant coup in history,” but only when speaking to a Russian publication — and, then, when he got flak from the US regime for having said that, he denied he had said it. The lies are that mandatory.
The person at the center of this photo above, is Andrei Biletsky (or “Beletsky”), whose Battalion is directly armed by US taxpayers (i.e., by the US Government). He has publicly stated the Battalion’s and his own ideology, as being “socialism” defined as “negation of democracy”; “racism” as being defined as “against Semites and the sub-humans they use”; and finally as being defined as affirmation of “imperialism” so as “to create a Third Empire [a Ukrainian Third Reich]”; and, here are just a few excerpts from his ideological statement, which is lifted from Hitler but with “Ukrainian” replacing “German”:
The main idea of mystical Social Nationalism is its creation, consisting not of piles of separate individuals united mechanistically into something called “Ukrainian” and the presence of Ukrainian passport, but instead a single National biological organism, which will consist of a new people — a physically, intellectually and spiritually more highly developed people. From the mass of individuals will thus come forth the nation, and the faint start of modern man: Superman.
Social Nationalism is based on a number of fundamental principles that clearly distinguish it from other right-wing movements. This triad is: socialism, racism, imperialism.
I. Socialism. We fight to create a harmonious national community. …
On the principle of socialism follows our complete negation of democracy and liberalism, which generate rozbytthya Nation isolated on gray power unit and a crowd of famous personalities (ochlocracy). Instead, we put forward the idea of national solidarity, the natural hierarchy and discipline, as the basis of our new society. Not a “democratic vote” crowd, who cannot give councils to their own life, much less to the life of the State, but instead natural selection of the best representatives of the Nation — born-leaders as Ukraine’s leaders. …
II. Racism. All our nationalism is nothing — just a castle in the sand — without reliance on the foundation of blood Races. … If Ukrainian spirituality, culture and language are unique, it is only because our racial nature is unique. If Ukraine will become paradise on earth, it is only because our Race turned it so.
Accordingly, treatment of our national body should start with racial purification of the Nation. … The historic mission of our Nation, a watershed in this century, is thus to lead the White peoples of the world in the final crusade for their survival. It is to lead the war against Semites and the sub-humans they use.
III. Imperialism. We change the slogans “Independent Ukraine,” “United Ukraine” and “Ukrainians,” by an imperial nation that has a long history. … The task of the present generation is to create a Third Empire [a Ukrainian Third Reich] — Great Ukraine. … Any living organism in nature seeks to expand, reproduce itself, increase its numbers. This law is universal. … Suspension means extinction in nature — death. The slowdown in population growth leads to biological death of Nations, the suspension of political expansion, and decline of the state. … If we are strong, we take what is ours by right and even more, we will build a superpower empire — Great Ukraine. …
Social Nationalism raises to shield all old Ukrainian Aryan values forgotten in modern society. Only their recovery and implementation by a group of fanatical fighters can we lead to the final victory of European civilization in the world struggle.
This is being supported by the taxpayers of both the US and Israel, as well as of Netherlands, Poland, and other US allies who have contributed to Beletsky’s Azov Battalion, and who are funding Ukraine’s Government, which Obama installed in 2014.
For as long as America’s Democratic Party continues supporting and endorsing this Obama-installed nazi Government in Ukraine, America’s Republican Party will continue to be able to call this support by the US Government, of nazism in our time, bipartisan — because it is — but bipartisan unity on an issue doesn’t mean that the policy is correct, nor even that it isn’t both racist and fascist: nazi. It means merely that the media continue supporting it, instead of exposing it. They keep lying about it.
American ‘news’media keep saying that if Trump were to condemn and reject the government of Ukraine, he’d then be anti-American or even un-American. With rare exceptions, America’s media consistently support the US-installed Ukrainian regime. Because those exceptions are so rare, the American public, and the publics in US-allied countries, also support it. They’ve been, and are, deceived.
The Hill newspaper once was courageous enough to post an exceptional article “The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda” in which the links documented that on a thoroughly bipartisan conservative-‘progressive’ basis, the US Congress is essentially united in support of the Obama-created nazi regime in Ukraine. That is a grim situation, but it’s undeniably true, and it remains hidden instead of reported in American ‘news’media.
And that’s why the dumb coward Trump continues Obama’s policies like this, instead of condemns and cancels them — it’s why he doesn’t blame Obama for having stolen Ukraine, instead of blame Putin for having ‘stolen’ Crimea. If Trump really wanted to expose the lies of America’s ‘news’media, that’s the first of Obama’s hoaxes he would be exposing, directly to the American people, in a major address to the nation, accompanied with video clips showing the actual evidence, which would shock the nation and begin the real debate, which America’s aristocracy have been blocking.
With media like that, how can there ever be democracy in America? Will World War III be able to be avoided?
This article is being submitted to all US media, but it’s not likely to be published by many (if any).
So, please send this article along to all your friends, in order that this drop of truth, in the potentially explosive bucket of US ‘news’media lies about Russia, will have a chance to achieve some impact. The situation is basically similar about America’s attempt to take over Syria, but the more easily exposed lies are the ones about Ukraine; and the links here document those — which are sufficient to indicate the reality of today’s US Government: a Government which doesn’t actually represent the American people.
This is the nonfictional, historical, version of George Orwell’s fictional novel, 1984. It is happening, right now.
10 years ago, in early August 2008, the website Airbedandbreakfast.com went online, marking the birth of Airbnb.
Back then the three founders, Brian Cheky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk wanted to help short-term travelers find affordable accommodation and provide renters with an opportunity to make an extra buck by renting out spare rooms or even just the namesake airbed on the floor. However, as Statista’s Felix Richter notes, little did they know that 10 years later their little venture would be one of the hottest private companies in the world, valued at nearly $30 billion.
Over the years, Airbnb has developed into much more than what it was originally meant to be. These days you can rent millions of houses, apartments and rooms on the platform. For many young travelers is has become the favorite if not the only way to find accommodation when travelling.
Luckily for Airbnb, its rise coincided with a steep increase in city tourism. In cities such as London, Paris or New York, where hotel rooms are often hard to find and/or expensive, Airbnb has become an affordable and popular way to experience cities in a less touristy way.
The following chart, based on data from AirDNA, shows which cities are particularly popular on Airbnb.
While the platform has been opposed by the hotel industry pretty much from the start, it has also drawn a fair amount of criticism from residents of popular city trip destinations for exacerbating the shortage of affordable housing in many areas.
A criticism that doesn’t seem entirely unfair, considering the number of objects listed in some cities.
It is impossible for anyone who even occasionally visits the news to ignore just how dramatically the world has changed in the last 10 years. The epicentre of the crumbling world order that we have all known was the global financial crisis. It literally shook the foundations of the Western world and the institutions that upheld it – and today they are now falling down one by one. Will the European Union be one of them as its own existential threats continue to mount?
Political systems such as democracy are now known to be failing the world over to some degree or another and all of a sudden, many of us have started to wonder about a world without those structures we took so much for granted. Unfortunately, others have embraced this new found fragility more eagerly than others and with frightening consequences.
It, therefore, should come as little surprise that the past decade has been assessed as a period defined by systemic dysfunction and political change. As we enter the next decade this dysfunction will characterize the momentum of a decade’s worth of disruption and one regional area of change will undoubtedly be the European Union.
There is no point in researching for material in this article with the assistance of the hatemongering MSM rags typified by the likes of the Daily Mail, Express, Telegraph et al. We have looked at many articles, periodicals and predictions – and there has been for some time a growing belief amongst many in the financial and geopolitical environments that the future prospects of the European Union is at best ‘challenging’ but more likely dismal.
In March 2017, TruePublica published a prediction of the near future in “New World Disorder” – an article that took the view there were substantial changes to some of the world’s normally stable institutions and political systems. As for the EU, we wrote:
“With Britain’s recent EU referendum result came the realisation that the rules-based system on the continent had failed. Rising discontent is gathering at an unstoppable pace, much to the alarm of the ruling elite. A federalised state dreamt up by America and handed to Germany with the intention of destroying national identities, borders and sovereign rights are slowly turning into a nightmare as the 28 nation bloc enters what can only be described as a disintegration phase. In the meantime, the EU intends to make it a mistake that the British will regret and fall to their knees.”
At this precise moment, the EU is united in this approach and Britain is indeed preparing to fall to its knees. However, the truth for the future of the EU is not just about Britain where its own prospects look far worse than even some of the most pessimistic had predicted.
A document leaked to Germany’s Der Spiegel last year revealed that the German defence ministry set out what it saw as its worst-case scenario for the year 2040. In it, they predicted that:
“EU enlargement has been largely abandoned, and more states have left the community … the increasingly disorderly, sometimes chaotic and conflict-prone, world has dramatically changed the security environment.”
Der Spiegel went on to say that:
“The journalists to whom the document was leaked have omitted any details of what Germany is planning to do about the EU’s possible collapse and fragmentation.”
That the document exists at all is a sign of the increased tension in the global system, especially within the EU. What is alarming is that within the report, even this scenario is already regarded as ‘over-optimistic.’ The belief from within the German establishment is clear – that the EU will quite simply not survive.
Just a month ago, Politico.eureported that the French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said that Europe is in “a state of decomposition – it’s falling apart before our eyes” – he said. And typical of the general theme in this article, Le Maire spelt it out: “member countries are closing in on themselves, trying to find national solutions.” Various meetings have since been held between the French and German finance ministers and the reality is that they (and therefore their governments) do not see eye-to-eye. In fact, Macron’s proposals have been flatly rejected, not just by the German political elite but by the electorate.
Business Insider reported back in May that Billionaire investor George Soros publicly stated that Europe is in the midst of an “existential crisis” and it is at genuine risk of ceasing to exist as we currently know it.
Soros effectively argues that some in the bloc have moved so far away from its founding goals that the EU can no longer sustain itself in its current state.
“There is no longer any point in ignoring the reality that a number of European Union member countries have explicitly rejected the EU’s goal of “ever closer union.”
And Soros, like so many, predicts the fracturing of Europe, but not necessarily a collapse. “Instead of a multi-speed Europe, the goal should be a ‘multi-track Europe’ that allows member states a wider variety of choices. This would have a far-reaching beneficial effect.” Since his assertions back in May, just three months ago, the EU project has declined further as populism, protectionism and isolationism has become ever more prevalent in more EU member states.
The London School of Economics recently published an article by European Politics and Policy. Its view is similar in content to many economic forecasts. It concludes that partial exits by individual member states would sap the EU from within. Rather than experiencing a sudden collapse, the EU would instead sink slowly into oblivion.
“the EU might instead suffer a slow decline driven by ‘partial exits’ from aspects of European integration. The best-case scenario may be one in which the EU continues to limp ahead in the years to come, but with many members rather grudgingly accepting it as the least unattractive option.”
Geopolitical Futures is an organisation that charts the course of the international geopolitical system and has accurately predicted the crisis in the EU, the economic decline of China and the re-emergence of Russia. Their view is one of continued erosion of the entire EU project.
Virtually no country will be left untouched by the rising social, political, cultural and economic tensions throughout the (European) Continent. But under this continued instability will lurk a perhaps more troubling development: Germany, concerned with the EU’s disintegration and anxious about the economic calamity it could portend, is going to have to work harder to keep the bloc together.
GF takes the view that the writing in on the wall for the EU. It is suffering from multiple structural problems the elite have fundamentally failed to recognise or deal with effectively.
Europe’s problem is no longer primarily its economy – it is a crisis of trust. The European middle and lower classes have lost faith in the elite’s ability to effectively manage the economy and to understand the cultural tensions that have emerged. Large segments of the population will be disaffected by economic inequality, and there will be little the EU can do about it.
The consequence is the GF forecasts that trust, not just amongst people but amongst EU nations will continue to erode and that friction between them is inevitable.
“What we can say is that our forecast for Europe is one of continuity: National and regional movements will continue to erode the social, political and economic systems in Europe.”
Don’t forget, this prediction is for this year only and has so far been right on the button.
CapX monitors thousands of news sources, blogs, academic papers and think-tank publications to find the most important facts and trends. Their view is just as grim.
“The common thread across all these stalled attempts at eurozone reform is a reluctance on the part of national authorities to pursue genuinely European solutions. What this means in practice is that if and when a new crisis comes, there will be no common European response. Individual eurozone countries will be largely left to fend for themselves while EU leaders, as in the last crisis, seek to make decisions largely on the hoof. The question now is for how long eurozone leaders can get away with it? And the answer is not, perhaps, for much longer. A scan of the horizon suggests it is all too possible to identify the triggers for what could quickly become a eurozone and wider EU collapse.”
That ‘scan’ takes the view that some things are indeed predictable and inevitable and CapX says that the threats highlighted are quite broad but identified currently as; the decline of the Chinese economy, the growing threat of trade wars, current bank indebtedness and sovereign debt. Any one of these structural issues could lead to a major recession. This time, however, the EU would not be able to withstand the economic shock. CapX, a global financial specialist believes the Euro will bring down Europe. And it concludes:
“Brexit was a mere footnote in a much more fundamental period of European upheaval. British negotiators may strain every sinew to get a deal, only to discover the entity they’ve agreed it with soon no longer exists.”
Then there are those who physically backed Brexit with their money on the basis that the European Union was not going to survive.
Jim Mellon stood out among investors in 2016 as a public backer of Britain’s exit from the European Union. And the chairman of the Burnbrae Group forecasted another breakup. Mellon predicts the euro will become a future casualty of a rising anti-establishment tide, causing the currency union to splinter within the next five years.
“Brexit is going to be a sideshow to the problems of Europe that are becoming more and more evident,” Mellon said. “The euro as it stands at the moment is just a very inappropriate mechanism — I give the euro between one and five years of life.”
At this point, there are so many more pieces of evidence, heaps of opinion and predictions as to the demise of the EU. The fact is that the EU27 is indeed going through existential challenges.
This has been brought about through the common themes that cause political change everywhere.
The failure of neoliberal capitalism in Europe is the same reason why we have Trump in America, Brexit and a quarter of EU member states supporting right-wing populists. Immigration and the terrorism it imports is a serious concern amongst the people of the EU. Corporatism, corruption, economic stagnation, a doomed currency, the threat of a calamitous recession are all serious threats as well. But by far, the biggest threat is the electorate themselves who have proved time and time again that they don’t like the fact that the EU is undemocratic.
Any single one of these threats is an existential one and the likelihood of one of them happening is very high indeed and Britain could then be well placed to profit from the disorder that brings!
The St. Louis County prosecutor who oversaw the investigation of the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri lost his bid for reelection Tuesday night.
In his first contested primary since the 2014 shooting that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch became another incumbent prosecutor to be ousted by a progressive candidate. Wesley Bell, a Ferguson City Council member with experience as a municipal judge, unseated McCulloch in the Democratic primary for the position.
Bell rose to prominence in a wave of Black leaders who were elected after the Ferguson protests highlighted a glaring lack of diversity in local government. He has since helped establish new police accountability and court reforms in Ferguson, efforts he now hopes to replicate through countywide office.
“People realize the need for change, they realize the need for criminal justice reform,” Bell, 43, said. “When we talk about reforming the cash bail system or ending mass incarceration, I wouldn’t call those radical. I would call those policies that work and help people.”
Udi Ofer, director of the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice, hailed Bell’s victory as “a milestone for the movement to hold prosecutors accountable for fueling mass incarceration.”
“It is yet another example that the politics of mass incarceration are changing,” he continued. “Voters are hungry for candidates who support criminal justice reform. They are rejecting tough-on-crime politics, and embracing policies such as bail reform and ending mandatory minimums. Smart justice is winning. And the elections in November will further prove this point.”
Media investigations in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting revealed that St. Louis County and towns like Ferguson used petty fines to squeeze revenue from poor and minority residents, and jailed them when they couldn’t afford it. In fact, Bell was a municipal judge in a small town that was one of several in St. Louis County sued for its predatory bail practices.
In the years since Ferguson, reform-minded district attorney candidates, funded by deep-pocketed donors and riding a wave of increased public attention, have beat incumbents in places like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Houston.
McCulloch, though, didn’t appear to be going anywhere. He ran unopposed in 2014, and Bell was a heavy underdog going into tonight’s election. As The Appeal noted, McCulloch outraised Bell 6-1.
But the fallout from his numerous controversial decisions during the investigation of Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Brown, finally caught up with him.
McCulloch had deep family ties to law enforcement, leading to calls for him to appoint a special prosecutor, which he refused to do.
During the unrest that followed the grand jury’s decision, McCulloch lambasted Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D-Mo.) for relieving the Ferguson Police Department of duty.
His long tenure was marked by similar previous episodes. At one point, McCulloch wanted to prosecute Axl Rose for a riot at a Guns’n’Roses show in Riverport.
McCulloch inadvertently helped spark a national movement. On Tuesday night his political career came to an end because of it.
Two years ago, Austin Petersen, a former cable news producer at the then-tender age of 35, came in second place behind Gary Johnson in the race to secure the Libertarian Party presidential nomination—one that would end up being three times more successful than any of its predecessors, however otherwise frustrating.
Last July, Petersen announced that he was leaving the L.P., without rancor, for the opportunity to confront one of the Democratic Party’s most vulnerable senators, Claire McCaskill. He would be reinforcement for the lonely libertarianish likes of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), talking Constitution and debt and free trade at a time when those once-bedrock conservative values are in open retreat. The only catch? He would have to beat a crowded Republican field for a coveted seat.
Tonight, emphatically, that did not happen.
At the denouement of a campaign in which he was known mostly as the candidate who auctioned off machine guns and periodically got banned from social media platforms, Petersen finished on the business end of an old-fashioned rout. Ninety minutes after polls closed, establishment frontrunner and state Attorney General Josh Hawley was declared the victor, with well over 50 percent vote in an 11-candidate primary field. With 1,687 of 3,228 precincts reporting as of 10:45 p.m. ET, Petersen was struggling near the bottom of a three-way race for a distant second, with 8.1 percent of the vote, compared to Air Force veteran Tony Moretti’s 9.1 percent and 2016 senatorial challenger Kristi Nichols’s 8.1.
Petersen, the onetime producer of Fox Business Network’s Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano, had run on being “Pro-Life. Pro-Liberty. Pro-Constitution.” His campaign in recent weeks had emphasized the demerits of President Donald Trump’s pro-tariffs agenda, as well as continuing to stress his own Second Amendment bonafides.
Though Petersen lagged in the GOP endorsement race, he did all right with key figures in his former home at the Libertarian Party. New York gubernatorial candidate Larry Sharpe issued a late-campaign testimonial, and newly elected L.P. Vice Chair Alex Merced tweeted that “if things don’t go your way tonight there is a home for you and your supporters to continue the fight in the LP with @yefeth into the general election.”
So is there a future for A.P. in the L.P.? On last night’s episode of Fox Business Network’s Kennedy, Petersen was asked point blank whether he was “going back to the Libertarian Party.” His answer? “I’m going to stick with the Republican Party, because my people asked me to, and because I believe it’s the party of abolitionism and the party of freedom, and I will work to make America free again.”
“So,” Kennedy nevertheless persisted, “you will not run for president on the Libertarian ticket in 2020?”
Petersen’s response: “No, I will leave that to my betters.”
Reason has interviewed Petersen several times over the years, including Nick Gillespie’s podcast when the candidate first announced 13 months ago:
If the US government prosecutes Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, it will mark a point of no return.
We’ll never know what “average” Germans thought on November 11, 1938, the day after Kristallnacht. Perhaps a few recognized it for what it was: a turning point, an acceleration of Germany’s descent into hell. America’s Crystal Night looms, and if it occurs, only a few will recognize it for what it is.
The fate of Julian Assange is the fate of one man, but it is also the fate of one of our most important freedoms. There won’t be shattered plate glass from vandalized businesses littering the streets, synagogues smashed, graves unearthed, or people herded onto trains. But his prosecution by the US government would destroy an inestimable value, one enshrined in the First Amendment, for which generations of Americans have fought and died: the right of the people and its press to inform the people and to hold their government to account.
Aside from armed resistance and revolution, the one defense individuals have against governments is intellectual: the concept of individual rights. There is an argument as to whether those rights come from our Creator (Thomas Jefferson) or from our basic nature as humans and the requirements of our survival (Ayn Rand). Despite starting from different premises, both arguments lead to the same conclusion: individuals have inherent, inalienable, inviolable rights, and the only legitimate function of government is to protect those rights.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were explicit attempts to delineate a set of principles that recognized individual rights and tried to restrain government power. Though real-world implementation has fallen short, often far short, they were towering conceptual achievements.
In 1933, the year Hitler assumed power, the government began enacting laws that restricted Jews’ rights to earn a living, gain an education, or work in the civil service. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship and forbade them from marrying non-Jewish Germans.
Kristallnacht’s hooliganism was encouraged by the German authorities, and none of the perpetrators bore any legal consequences. More than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and deported to concentration camps. The government would not protect Jews from the depredations of thugs and the government itself was a thug. Kristallnacht was a point of no return: Jews no longer had any legally enforceable rights. Soon enough no German would.
In America, there is no one villain or group that one can point to as responsible for the erosion of rights. Begun the day the Constitution was ratified, it’s been a gradual process. We’ve reached the point where only a few of the rights guaranteed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights still receive any measure of government solicitude.
Property and contract rights are out the window; the government routinely abridges them. You have no right to your own income, or to conduct your legitimate business or trade free from government regulation and interference. Much of the Bill of Rights is either irrelevant now or has been rendered a dead letter. In terms of individual rights, only the Second Amendment’s much infringed right to bear arms, and the First Amendment—the prohibition against the government establishing a religion, free speech, press, and assembly, and the right to petition the government—are still hanging by a thread.
Which is why the fate of Julian Assange takes on such significance. While the government has prosecuted those like Chelsea (formerly Brad) Manning who have stolen government secrets and classified information, it has not prosecuted the press individuals and organizations who have published them. That is WikiLeaks’ business model: it receives, vets, and publishes stolen information, often from governments.
The government has not gone after publishers because it would be a frontal assault on the First Amendment that it would probably lose. Any exception would swallow the general rule of press freedom. Say the Supreme Court recognized an exception: classified information whose publication would constitute an imminent and grave threat to the security of the United States. Who decides what’s an imminent and grave threat? The government would have the power to classify whatever information it pleases under that exception and put those who publish it at risk of prosecution, their only recourse years of costly litigation spent arguing that the information didn’t fit the exception.
Many Trump admirers resist the notion that their man is interested in the acquisition and use of power, but his and members of his administration’s hostility to individual civil liberties belies that resistance. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a gung-ho supporter of the civil-liberties-eviscerating-government-power-expanding War on Drugs and civil asset forfeiture.
In the latter, a government seizes assets it claims were involved with crimes and makes their owners jump through myriad legal hoops—including proving the negative that their assets weren’t involved in a crime—even if the owners themselves were never convicted, or even charged, with a crime. Assets that are not “acquitted”—cars, cash, boats, houses, etc.—are kept and used by the government. President Trump has endorsed civil asset forfeiture, and has extended it outside America’s borders via an executive order (see “By Imperial Decree,” SLL, 1/2/18).
Trump’s Secretary of State and former director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo has fashioned a legal approach the administration might use, in a case against WikiLeaks and Assange, to slither around the First Amendment. In April, still director of the CIA, he delivered a speech in which several passages demanded, but never received, careful parsing from the mainstream media. They are still obsessing over a February Trump tweet in which he declared the US media an “enemy of the people.” This is considered a threat to the First Amendment, but Pompeo’s speech was mostly ignored.
Pompeo called WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” Most press organizations, and almost all that consistently challenge the state, are non-state. WikiLeaks has published state secrets, undoubtedly considered hostile acts by those states, but how is it an intelligence service? Pompeo is arguing that WikiLeaks cannot be considered part of the press, consequently it’s not protected by the First Amendment.
As for the “abetted by state actors like Russia,” WikiLeaks has consistently denied it received the DNC emails from Russia, and nobody has proven otherwise. The best technical evidence indicates those DNC emails were directly downloaded to a portable storage device, indicating an inside job, and not remotely hacked, by Russians or anyone else.
Pompeo argued that “we have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.” This is straight from Orwell: you are free to say what you want, as long as you don’t say anything against the government. He claimed that WikiLeaks “pretended that America’s First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice,” and, “they may have believed that, but they are wrong.” Now where would WikiLeaks get such a crazy idea? How about the plain language of the First Amendment?
Finally, Pompeo threatened: “To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.” Any government “secrets” the press publishes with the full approval of the government probably aren’t going to be terribly revealing. It’s the secrets the government doesn’t want revealed, the ones that are generally “misappropriated,” that reveal the most important secrets, which an informed and free people must know if they are to call their government to account.
From the excerpts quoted above, and the video of the relevant part of speech below, make up your own mind as to who’s perverting the Constitution.
Freedom of the press protects the rights of the press, but more importantly protects the right of all of us to be informed, especially about what was once considered “our” government. It amplifies the freedom of speech. Even a small newspaper reaches more people than someone shouting from a street corner.
If Assange and WikiLeaks are tried and convicted in a US court as “a non-state hostile intelligence service,” the government can slap that label on any person or organization publishing or otherwise disclosing its secrets. The case would probably make its way to the Supreme Court. If the court accepted the Pompeo exception to the First Amendment, freedom of the press and speech would become two more of the Constitution’s dead letters.
Just the prosecution of Assange and WikiLeaks would have a chilling effect. Not that most of the US’s supine mainstream and social media would be chilled. The mainstream media that have spoken out about Assange and WikiLeaks have come down on the side of the government. The social media companies, de facto arms of the government, are shutting down politically incorrect voices. Neither mainstream or social media have anything to lose from the termination of First Amendment freedoms because they don’t say, or allow anyone else to say, anything the powers that be don’t want heard.
Trump is a wild card on WikiLeaks and Assange. WikiLeaks’ disclosure of the DNC emails helped his campaign. He praised it back then, but now appears ready to prosecute. Trump administration officials and Trump himself often say one thing while Trump does another. It is not a given that Assange will be either extradited by the British government or prosecuted in the US.
Few totalitarian regimes take their people’s rights away all at once. It’s done gradually to reduce dissent, until that Kristallnacht moment where it’s impossible to evade the reality: there are no rights left. If the Trump administration prosecutes Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, that sinking feeling in your stomach will be the realization that the last remnant of your rights are gone, that the government and Trump are your enemies.
If Assange and WikiLeaks are prosecuted, who will dare tell the truth about the government? Trump will have destroyed one of the last vestiges of individual rights—and the freedom that goes with it—that once made America great.
As US re-imposes sanctions on Iran, former two-term Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has spoken out against the current US hegemony.
As RT notes, Ahamdinejad says the dollar is one of the major pillars of US dominance over global finance and trade; calling for change in the current world order.
The former leader of the Islamic Republic tweeted on Monday, that “The use of the US Dollar as the standard unit of currency in global markets and the world banking system is the key strength of the American Empire. Things need to change, current orders should be reordered.”
The use of the US Dollar as the standard unit of currency in global markets and the world banking system is the key strength of the American Empire. Things need to change, current orders should be reordered.#Newworldorder#DollarDictatorship
Seemingly confirming Ahmadinejad’s warning, President Trump reiterated his warnings against breaking Washington’s sanctions, saying in a tweet that “Anyone doing business with Iran will NOT be doing business with the United States. I am asking for WORLD PEACE, nothing less!”
The Iran sanctions have officially been cast. These are the most biting sanctions ever imposed, and in November they ratchet up to yet another level. Anyone doing business with Iran will NOT be doing business with the United States. I am asking for WORLD PEACE, nothing less!
Facebook has assumed additional political police powers, disrupting a planned counter-demonstration against white supremacists, set for August 12th in Washington, on the grounds that it was initiated and inspired by “Russians” as part of a Kremlin campaign to “sow dissention” in the U.S.
The Facebook intervention is a qualitative escalation of the McCarthyite offensive launched by the Democrat Party and elements of the national security state, and backed by most of the corporate media, initially to blame Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat on “collusion” between Wikileaks, “the Russians” and the Trump campaign to steal and publicize embarrassing Clinton campaign emails.
After failing to produce one shred of hard evidence to support their conspiracy theory, the anti-Russia hysteria mongers switched gears, focusing on the alleged purchase of about $100,000 in Facebook ads by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a St. Petersburg-based Russian company, over a multi-year period.
The problem was, most of the ads had no direct connection to the presidential contest, or were posted after the election was over, and many had no political content, at all. The messages were all over the place, politically, with the alleged Russian operatives posing as Christian activists, pro- and anti-immigration activists, and supporters of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Special prosecutor Robert Mueller was forced to flip the script, indicting 13 Russians for promoting general “discord” and undermining “public confidence in democracy” in the United States – thus creating a political crime that has not previously been codified in the United States.
In doubling down on an unraveling conspiracy tale, the Mueller probe empowered itself to tar and feather all controversial speech that can be associated with utterances by “Russians,” even if the alleged “Russians” are, in fact, mimicking the normal speech of left- or right-wing Americans — a descent, not into Orwell’s world, but that of Kafka (Beyond the Law) and Heller (Catch-22).
Facebook this week announced that it had taken down 32 pages and accounts that had engaged in “coordinated and inauthentic behavior” in promoting the August 12 counter-demonstration against the same white supremacists that staged the fatal “Unite the Right” demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, a year ago. Hundreds of anti-racists had indicated their intention to rally against “Unite the Right 2.0” under the banner of Shut It Down DC, which includes D.C. Antifascist Collective, Black Lives Matter D.C., Hoods4Justice, Resist This, and other local groups.
Facebook did not contend that these anti-racists’ behavior was “inauthentic,” but that the first ad for the event was purchased by a group calling itself “Resisters” that Facebook believes were behaving much like the Internet Research Agency. “At this point in our investigation, we do not have enough technical evidence to state definitively who is behind it,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy . “But we can say that these accounts engaged in some similar activity and have connected with known I.R.A accounts.”
Chelsea Manning, whose prison sentence for sending secret documents to Wikileaks was commuted by President Obama, said the counter-protest was “organic and authentic”and that activists had begun organizing several months ago. “Folks from D.C. and Charlottesville have been talking about this since at least February,” Manning told The New York Times.
“This was a legitimate Facebook event that was being organized by Washington, D.C. locals,” says Dylan Petrohilos, of Resist This. Petrohilos was one of the defendants in the Trump inauguration “riot” prosecutions. He protested Facebook’s disruption of legitimate free speech and assembly. “DC organizers had controlled the messaging on the no UTR fb page and now FB made it harder for grassroots people to organize,” he tweeted. The organizers insist the August 12 counter-demonstration — “No Unite the Right 2 – DC” — is still a go, as is the white supremacist rally.
Whoever was first to buy a Facebook ad — the suspected Russian “Resisters,” or Workers Against Racism, who told the Daily Beast they decided to host their own anti-“Unite the Right 2.0” event because they thought “Resisters” was an “inexperienced liberal organizer” – there was no doubt whatsoever that the white supremacists would be confronted by much larger numbers of counter-demonstrators, in Washington. Nobody in Russia needed to tell U.S. anti-racists to shut the white supremacists down, or vice versa. The Russians didn’t invent American white supremacy, or the native opposition to it. Even if Mueller, Facebook, the Democratic Party and the howling corporate media mob are to be believed, the “Russians” are simply mimicking U.S. political rhetoric and sloganeeriing – and weakly, at that. The Workers Against Racism thought the “Resisters” weren’t worth partnering with, but that the racist rally must be countered. The Shut It Down DC coalition didn’t need the “Resisters” to crystallize their thinking on white supremacism.
The Democratic Party and corporate media, speaking for most of the U.S. ruling class — and actually bullying one of its top oligarchs, Mark Zuckerberg — is on its own bizarre and twisted road to fascism. (Donald Trump’s proto-fascism is the old fashioned, all-American type that the white supremacists want to celebrate on August 12.) With former FBI Director Robert Mueller at the head of the pack, they have created a pseudo legal doctrine whereby “Russians” (or U.S. spooks pretending to be Russians) can be indicted for launching a #MeToo campaign of mimicry, echoing the rhetoric and memes indigenous to U.S. political struggles, while the genuine, “authentic” American political voices — the people who are being mimicked — are labeled co-conspirators in a foreign-based “plot,” and their rights to speech and assembly are trashed.
That’s truly crazy, but devilishly clever, too. If “Russian” mimics (or cloaked spooks) can reproduce the vocabulary and political program of U.S. dissent, then all of us actual U.S. lefties can be dismissed as “dupes of the Russians” or “co-conspirators” in the speech crimes of our mimics — for sounding like ourselves.
As we previously noted, these stories of supposed North Korean betrayal by NBC, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal are egregious cases of distorting news by pushing a predetermined policy line. But those news outlets, far from being outliers, are merely reflecting the norms of the entire corporate news system.
The stories of how North Korea is now violating an imaginary pledge by Kim to Trump in Singapore are even more outrageous, because big media had previously peddled the opposite line: that Kim at the Singapore Summit made no firm commitment to give up his nuclear weapons and that the “agreement” in Singapore was the weakest of any thus far.
That claim, which blithely ignored the fundamental distinction between a brief summit meeting statement and past formal agreements with North Korea that took months to reach, was a media maneuver of unparalleled brazenness. And big media have since topped that feat of journalistic legerdemain by claiming that North Korea has demonstrated bad faith by failing to halt all nuclear and missile-related activities.
Commercial satellite imagery from August 3 indicates additional dismantlement activities are ongoing at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station since last observed. At the vertical engine test stand, used for testing and development of engines for ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles, the North Koreans have continued to tear down the steel base structure and appear to be removing fuel and oxidizer tanks from dismantled bunkers.
At the launch pad, work on the rail-mounted processing/transfer structure used to support rocket launches continues, with two-thirds of the west wall and a third of the north wall having been removed, and its components remain on the adjacent ground. While the launch pad activity seems to be related to dismantlement, as it stands right now, we cannot rule out the possibility that it could be the beginning of a project to modify the structure for other purposes.
While dismantlement of the vertical engine test stand represents a fulfillment of Chairman Kim’s agreement with President Trump conveyed publicly during the post-Singapore Summit press conference, activity at the launch pad appears to go beyond that commitment. These activities, however, must be viewed cautiously as “first steps” since neither are presently permanent or irreversible. The demolition of the test stand’s concrete foundations, launch pad’s gantry tower, pad foundation and exhaust deflector, etc., would represent more permanent and irreversible actions as there is no known facility with equivalent capabilities elsewhere in the country. The coming months should provide more firm indications whether these are indeed the “first steps” in reducing the North Korean ballistic missile threat.
As we concluded previously, a media complex so determined to discredit negotiations with North Korea and so unfettered by political-diplomatic reality seriously threatens the ability of the United States to deliver on any agreement with Pyongyang. That means alternative media must make more aggressive efforts to challenge the corporate press’s coverage... and today’s news seems positive (but we will see what spin it gets).
The St. Louis County prosecutor who oversaw the investigation of the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri lost his bid for reelection Tuesday night.
Two years ago, Austin Petersen, a former cable news producer at the then-tender age of 35, came in 
