Gold’s Largest Inflows Since June 2009 Unleash Bullish “Golden Cross” Pattern

For the first time since Gold suffered a "death cross" in 2014, the largest 3-week inflows into gold funds since June 2009 have set up a so-called bullish "golden cross" pattern in the precious metal.

On the week, BofA's Michael Hartnett reports big precious metals inflows of $2.6bn as investors flee from stocks (equity outflows of $2.7bn).

This adds up to the largest 3-week inflows to gold ($5.8bn) since Jun’09 (Chart below) as inflows have coincided with Fed "talking-down" the US$ and rising investor fears of recession/Quantitative Failure.

This has maintained price pressure and pushed the 50-day moving-average above the 200-day moving-average, creating the so-called "Golden Cross" bullish trend pattern.

 

While obviously not guaranteed (2012 saw an upward-sloping 50DMA cross a upward-sloping 200DMA without trend gains), the last time a "golden cross" occurred coupled with major fund inflows was Feb 2009, which marked the start of a dramatic trend higher in the precious metal.

 

Charts: BofA, Bloomberg


via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/24sLodF Tyler Durden

Brickbat: Who You Gonna Call?

SignAngie Butler called Detroit 911 to report a man in an orange jumpsuit and holding a gun was standing on her front porch. But she could not get the dispatcher to send a police officer to her home. Officials with the Detroit police department say they are investigating the matter and will retrain any dispatchers who need it.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1TbgOBZ
via IFTTT

Marco Rubio Has Trouble Remembering How the Debate Over Libya Went

The Qaddafi/Trump debates were the high point of Amero-Libyan history on Earth-503.Back in 2011, Marco Rubio was a loud advocate of getting involved with the Libyan civil war. Here’s how he handled the topic when it came up in at tonight’s Republican presidential debate:

We didn’t topple Qaddafi. The Libyan people toppled Qaddafi. The only choice before America that this president had to make is, Does it happen quickly or does it take a long time? And I argued if it takes a long time, you’re going to have rebel forces emerge like these radical Islamists to take advantage of the vacuum. And that’s what happened.

We’ve been over this stuff before, but it bears repeating: This is a highly misleading account of how Marco Rubio sold the war. It was in no sense clear that Qaddafi was bound to be overthrown either “quickly” or in “a long time,” especially given that Rubio seems to define “a long time” to mean eight months. The argument for intervention was that if U.S. didn’t insert itself, Qaddafi would—in Rubio’s words—”get away with crushing [the rebellion] through brutal force.”

The Qaddafi regime, Rubio declared, “has brutally massacred its own people for simply expressing their desire to live in a free and peaceful Libya….We should unflinchingly support the Libyan people’s legitimate demands to build a freer and peaceful country.” He did not add, “Of course we all know that the revolution will succeed sooner or later.”

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1THQ3Vb
via IFTTT

Republican Candidates All Agree: Apple Should Be Obligated to Work for the FBI

Stop thinking so different!The narrative coming out of tonight’s debate will be all about Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz going hard after Donald Trump and actually landing punches, and whether it’s too late to make a difference. Also, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer pretty much ruined the debate every time a fight got interesting by throwing the discussion over to tiresome paternalistic Ohio Gov. John Kasich to blather away. Ben Carson was also there, like a palate-cleansing sorbet between subjects. He was always the last one asked a question on an issue (if he was asked anything at all).

Those waiting for the candidates to be asked about the fight between FBI and Apple over whether Apple can be forced to assist the government in weakening the security of dead San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook’s iPhone had to wait a very long time. It wasn’t until nearly the end that it was brought up. All the candidates except for Trump weighed in (but he had previously declared his support for the FBI and called for a boycott of Apple).

Disappointingly, but not surprisingly, none of the candidates believed there are any larger issues with what the FBI is asking. Both Rubio and Cruz say that Apple should cooperate and have accepted the claim that this order was just for this one phone. Apple has argued that what the FBI is asking (to weaken the level of security on the phone so that the FBI can attempt to brute force Farook’s passcode without risking the phone deleting its contents) is not a one-time request at all. Indeed, the feds want Apple’s help to access several other phones besides this one, according to the company.

There is absolutely no reason to think this is going to one-time request. It’s deliberately putting on blinders about the bigger picture. Rubio even repeated the Department of Justice’s talking points that Apple only cares about its branding, concluding his response with the applause line, “Their brand is not superior to the national security of the United States,” which utterly ignores the potential national security issues that could be a result of Apple actually doing what the FBI asks.

Apple actually points it out in the introduction to their legal response to the judge’s order that they filed today:

Since the dawn of the computer age, there have been malicious people dedicated to breaching security and stealing stored personal information. Indeed, the government itself falls victim to hackers, cyber-criminals, and foreign agents on a regular basis, most famously when foreign hackers breached Office of Personnel Management databases and gained access to personnel records, affecting over 22 million current and former federal workers and family members.

Nobody engaged with the First Amendment argument that Apple is being compelled to “speak” by being ordered to write code requested by the government. Cruz raised the Fourth Amendment and that the order is in full compliance, but this isn’t really a Fourth Amendment issue. Nobody is arguing that the government doesn’t have the authority to access the data. But Apple isn’t the owner of the phone, the county of San Bernardino is. Apple is being drafted to do work for the government (work that has the potential to compromise everybody’s security).

Carson said things, and nobody cared. Nobody notices what Carson says until he gets weird (there was something about fruit salad at some point). Kasich got creepy by fleshing out something he mentioned about encryption in a previous debate: He thinks the president, Apple, and security folks should “sit down in a back room” and hash out all of our privacy issues without the public even knowing about it. Mind you, there have been “back room” meetings on this all along and it became public because Apple said no and the FBI had no way to compel them other than to go to the courts. The idea that the government should secretly be deciding how much cybersecurity Americans should be allowed is flat out bonkers, so we should all be glad he’s not a serious candidate.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1TCfFSj
via IFTTT

Do Americans Live In A False Reality Created By Orchestrated Events?

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Most people who are aware and capable of thought have given up on what is called the “mainstream media.” The presstitutes have destroyed their credibility by helping Washington to lie—“Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction,” “Iranian nukes,” “Assad’s use of chemical weapons,” “Russian invasion of Ukraine,” and so forth. The “mainstream media” has also destroyed its credibility by its complete acceptance of whatever government authorities say about alleged “terrorist events,” such as 9/11 and Boston Marathon Bombing, or alleged mass shootings such as Sandy Hook and San Bernardino. Despite glaring inconsistencies, contradictions, and security failures that seem too unlikely to be believable, the “mainstream media” never asks questions or investigates. It merely reports as fact whatever authorities say.

The sign of a totalitarian or authoritarian state is a media that feels no responsibility to investigate and to find the truth, accepting the role of propagandist instead. The entire Western media has been in the propaganda mode for a long time. In the US the transformation of journalists into propagandists was completed with the concentration of a diverse and independent media in six mega-corporations that are no longer run by journalists.

As a consequence, thoughtful and aware people increasingly rely on alternative media that does question, marshall facts, and offers analysis in place of an unbelievable official story line.

The prime example is 9/11. Large numbers of experts have destroyed the official story that has no factual evidence in its behalf. However, even without the hard evidence that 9/11 truthers have provided, the official story gives itself away. We are supposed to believe that a few Saudi Arabians with no technology beyond box cutters and no support from any government’s intelligence service were able to outwit the massive surveillance technology created by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and NSA (National Security Agency) and deal the most humiliating blow to a superpower ever delivered in human history. Moreover, they were able to do this without the President of the United States, the US Congress, and the “mainstream media” demanding accountability for such a total failure of the high-tech national security state. Instead of a White House led investigation of such a massive security failure, the White House resisted for more than one year any investigation whatsoever until finally giving in to demands from 9/11 families that could not be bought off and agreeing to a 9/11 Commission.

The Commission did not investigate but merely sat and wrote down the story told to it by the government. Afterwards, the Commission’s chairman, co-chairman, and legal counsel wrote books in which they said that information was withheld from the Commission, that the Commission was lied to by officials of the government, and that the Commission “was set up to fail.” Despite all of this, the presstitutes still repeat the official propaganda, and there remain enough gullible Americans to prevent accountability.

Competent historians know that false flag events are used to bring to fruition agendas that cannot otherwise be achieved. 9/11 gave the neoconservatives, who controlled the George W. Bush administration, the New Pearl Harbor that they said was necessary in order to launch their hegemonic military invasions of Muslim countries. The Boston Marathon Bombing permitted a trial run of the American Police State, complete with shutting down a large American city, putting 10,000 armed troops and SWAT teams on the streets where the troops conducted house to house searches forcing the residents out of their homes at gunpoint. This unprecedented operation was justified as necessary in order to locate one wounded 19 year old man, who clearly was a patsy.

There are so many anomalies in the Sandy Hook story that it has generated a cottage industry of skeptics. I agree that there are anomalies, but I don’t have the time to study the issue and come to my own conclusion. What I have noticed is that we are not given many good explanations of the anomalies. For example, in this video made from the TV news coverage, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaHtxlSDgbk the video’s creator makes a case that the person who is the grieving father who lost his son is the same person outfitted in SWAT clothes at Sandy Hook following the shooting. The person is identified as a known actor. Now, it seems to me that this is easy to test. The grieving father is known, the actor is known, and the authorities have to know who the SWAT team member is. If these three people, who can pass for one another, can be assembled in one room at the same time, we can dismiss the expose claimed in this one video. However, if three separate people cannot be produced together, then we must ask why this deception, which raises questions about the entire story. You can watch the entire video or just skip to the 9:30 mark and observe what appears to be the same person in two different roles.

The “mainstream media” has the ability to make these simple investigations, but does not. Instead, the “mainstream media” calls skeptics “conspiracy theorists.”

There is a book by Professor Jim Fetzer and Mike Palecek that says Sandy Hook was a FEMA drill to promote gun control and that no one died at Sandy Hook. The book was available on amazon.com but was suddenly banned. Why ban a book?

Here is a free download of the book: http://ift.tt/1YmZedC I have not read the book and have no opinion. I do know, however, that the police state that America is becoming certainly has a powerful interest in disarming the public. I also heard today a news report that people said to be parents of the dead children are bringing a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer, which is consistent with Fetzer’s claim.

Here is a Buzzsaw interview with Jim Fetzer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-W3rIEe-ag If the information Fetzer provides is correct, clearly the US government has an authoritarian agenda and is using orchestrated events to create a false reality for Americans in order to achieve the agenda.

It seems to me that Fetzer’s facts can be easily checked. If his facts check out, then a real investigation is required. If his facts do not check out, the official story gains credibility as Fetzer is one of the most energetic skeptics.

Fetzer cannot be dismissed as a kook. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, has a Ph.D. from Indiana University and was Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota until his retirement in 2006. He has had a National Science Foundation fellowship, and he has published more than 100 articles and 20 books on philosophy of science and philosophy of cognitive science. He is an expert in artificial intelligence and computer science and founded the international journal Minds and Machines. In the late 1990s, Fetzer was asked to organize a symposium on philosophy of mind.

For an intelligent person, the official stories of President Kennedy’s assassination and 9/11 are simply not believable, because the official stories are not consistent with the evidence and what we know. Fetzer’s frustration with less capable and less observant people increasingly shows, and this works to his disadvantage.

It seems to me that if the authorities behind the official Sandy Hook story are secure with the official story, they would jump on the opportunity to confront and disprove Fetzer’s facts. Moreover, somewhere there must be photographs of the dead children, but, like the alleged large number of recordings by security cameras of an airliner hitting the Pentagon, no one has ever seen them. At least not that I know of.

What disturbs me is that no one in authority or in the mainstream media has any interest in checking the facts. Instead, those who raise awkward matters are dismissed as conspiracy theorists.

Why this is damning is puzzling. The government’s story of 9/11 is a story of a conspiracy as is the government’s story of the Boston Marathon Bombing. These things happen because of conspiracies. What is at issue is: whose conspiracy? We know from Operation Gladio and Operation Northwoods that governments do engage in murderous conspiracies against their own citizens. Therefore, it is a mistake to conclude that governments do not engage in conspiracies.

One often hears the objection that if 9/11 was a false flag attack, someone would have talked.
Why would they have talked? Only those who organized the conspiracy would know. Why would they undermine their own conspiracy?

Recall William Binney. He developed the surveillance system used by NSA. When he saw that it was being used against the American people, he talked. But he had taken no documents with which to prove his claims, which saved him from successful prosecution but gave him no evidence for his claims. This is why Edward Snowden took the documents and released them. Nevertheless, many see Snowden as a spy who stole national security secrets, not as a whistleblower warning us that the Constitution that protects us is being overthrown.

High level government officials have contradicted parts of the 9/11 official story and the official story that links the invasion of Iraq to 9/11 and to weapons of mass destruction. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta contradicted Vice President Cheney and the official 9/11 story timeline. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has said that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was the subject of the first cabinet meeting in the George W. Bush administration long before 9/11. He wrote it in a book and told it on CBS News’ 60 Minutes. CNN and other news stations reported it. But it had no effect.

Whistleblowers pay a high price. Many of them are in prison. Obama has prosecuted and imprisoned a record number. Once they are thrown in prison, the question becomes: “Who would believe a criminal?”

As for 9/11 all sorts of people have talked. Over 100 police, firemen and first responders have reported hearing and experiencing a large number of explosions in the Twin Towers. Maintanence personnel report experiencing massive explosions in the sub-basements prior to the building being hit by an airplane. None of this testimony has had any effect on the authorities behind the official story or on the presstitutes.

There are 2,300 architects and engineers who have written to Congress requesting a real investigation. Instead of the request being treated with the respect that 2,300 professionals deserve, the professionals are dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.”

An international panel of scientists have reported the presence of reacted and unreacted nanothermite in the dust of the World Trade Centers. They have offered their samples to government agencies and to scientists for confirmation. No one will touch it. The reason is clear. Today science funding is heavily dependent on the federal government and on private companies that have federal contracts. Scientists understand that speaking out about 9/11 means the termination of their career.

The government has us where it wants us—powerless and disinformed. Most Americans are too uneducated to be able to tell the difference between a building falling down from asymetrical damage and one blowing up. Mainstream journalists cannot question and investigate and keep their jobs. Scientists cannot speak out and continue to be funded.

Truth telling has been shoved off into the alternative Internet media where I would wager the government runs sites that proclaim wild conspiracies, the purpose of which is to discredit all skeptics.


via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1oLChom Tyler Durden

China May Have Found A “Solution” To Its Massive Bad Debt Problem

Last April, China had an idea about how to boost the country’s dying credit impulse.

As we’ve been at pains to explain for more than a year, China is attempting to do the impossible. They need to deleverage and re-leverage all at the same time. Efforts to rein in the mammoth shadow banking system after years of expansion put pressure on an economy that was already decelerating and by the end of 2014, Beijing was struggling to figure out how to keep credit flowing without embedding more risk into the system.

One idea was to supercharge the country’s nascent ABS market which was barely producing $50 billion in supply per year (for context, consider that the US auto loan-backed ABS market alone saw $125 billion in issuance last year).

As Reuters noted at the time, the idea was simple: “By making it easier for banks to repackage and resell receivables – such as loan repayments on mortgages, car loans and credit cards – the government hopes to free up banks’ balance sheets so they can lend more to the real economy.”

In other words, offload the credit risk to investors who are searching for yield and once your book is unencumbered, make more loans, then package and sell them to investors, and around you go. It’s the “virtuous” originate-to-sell model and it works great – until it doesn’t.

In any event, despite comments from the likes of ANZ’s Zhao Hao who said “there is a huge demand from banks alone to securitise assets,” the plan didn’t work.

Why? Because China’s NPLs were rising at a rapid clip as the economy continued to deteriorate. Banks didn’t want to lend more and risk further imperiling their balance sheet and even if they did, demand for credit was hardly robust in an economy struggling with an acute overcapacity problem. “With the evidence mounting that the country is experiencing an economic slowdown, Chinese banks don’t want to lend, so they don’t need to sell ABS to free up more room for lending,” Ji Weijie, senior associate at Beijing-based China Securities Co. said in June. “Plus with rising bad loans, banks are reluctant to move good assets off their balance sheets.”

Right. Fortunately, China now has a solution for that rather vexing problem. Beijing will simply allow banks to securitize their NPLs.

China will allow domestic banks to issue up to 50 billion yuan ($7.7 billion) of asset-backed securities based on their non-performing loans, the first quota for such sales since 2008,” Bloomberg reports, citing the ubiquitous people familiar with the matter. “The quota, which will initially be allocated mainly to China’s largest banks, will allow lenders to remove non-performing loans from their balance sheets at a time when asset quality is deteriorating and the economy is slowing, the people said, asking not to be named as the plan isn’t public.”

If this goes as planned it could allow banks to remove as much as CNY150 billion in bad loans from their books. While that may sound “relatively significant” to quote Sanford C. Bernstein’s Zhou Min, it’s probably not significant at all if you look at it in the context of the size of China’s banking system and the likely real NPL ratio which is probably much closer to 10% than it is to the headline prints. 

Of course China will also need to find buyers for this paper and with the likes of Kyle Bass shouting from the rooftops about credit risk, it’s difficult to see how Chinese banks are going to get anyone excited about buying their non-performing assets especially in an evironment where the situation is expected to deteriorate continually going forward. 

Also, it’s not at all clear that even if China’s banks do find buyers, they will use the balance sheet slack to lend to the real economy. Yes, China created an unbelievable $500 billion in debt last month, but TSF data is notoriously difficult to interpret (i.e. it would probably be a mistake to take that figure and attribute it solely to either banks’ willingness to lend or the real economy’s enthusiam to borrow). More importantly, this may be just another effort to manage the numbers. That is, if you engineer an epic TSF boom and then allow banks to dispose of their NPLs via ABS issuance, that’s just another way to fudge the NPL data. The souring debt hasn’t gone away. It’s just someone else’s responsibility. 

Meanwhile, China’s shadow banking system continues to find new ways to obscure risk. As we wrote earlier this month, mid-tier Chinese banks are using DAMPs to make new loans that they can carry on their books as “investments” and “receivables” against which they do not hold much in the way of reserves. For instance, at Industrial Bank, the size of the “investment receivables” book doubled during 2015 and now sits at a massive $267 billion or, as Reuters noted at the time, more than its entire loan book and equivalent to “the total assets in the Philippine banking system.”

Of course these are all just channel loans. It’s the same basic story: banks are finding innovative ways to lend outside of their official loan books and by carrying a non-trivial percentage of their credit risk as something that doesn’t count towards NPLs, they are obscuring risk. And on a massive scale. 

“Banks are increasingly turning to so-called directional asset-management plans issued by brokerages and the subsidiaries of mutual-fund providers to channel lending,” Bloomberg wrote on Wednesday, adding that “the amount of money placed in such products jumped 70 percent last year to 18.8 trillion yuan ($2.9 trillion), outpacing the 17 percent growth for trust assets.”

“These new shadow channels work like trusts. The structure typically involves a bank investing proceeds from its wealth-management products in a directional plan that will then lend to a borrower chosen by the bank,” Bloomberg continues. “This allows banks to extend credit while circumventing restrictions on certain borrowers — such as local government financing vehicles — as well as capital requirements on regular loans.”

As we said three weeks ago, this isn’t exactly the same as ABS issuance. That is, the bank retains the credit risk here. The brokers are just the middlemen. “If you talk to a bank, they’ll say it’s somebody else’s credit risk,” Macquarie ‘s Matthew Smith told Bloomberg. “But the ultimate credit risk doesn’t disappear. The brokers for sure are not taking this on in exchange for a few basis points, so ultimately the banks are still holding onto this credit risk. If it all goes bad, the brokers don’t have the balance sheet to support it, and somebody else has to come in and take it over.”

Or, as we put it: “…but that’s just semantics. You can call them “assets” or “investments” or “receivables” or whatever the hell else, but at the end of the day, these are loans. And the bank shoulders the entirety of the credit risk.”

But again, because of these are carried on banks’ books, you won’t see them show up in the NPL column – even if they go bad.

The takeaway from all of this is that trying to pin down credit risk at Chinese banks is an endless game of “Whack-a-Mole”. Beijing is constantly working to allow banks to shift and reclassify “assets” and/or transfer credit risk either to some entity where it can’t be tracked or at least to areas of the balance sheet where it effectively disappears. As Moody’s Stephen Schwartz puts it “every time they clamp down on one area, the financing pops up in another.”


via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1RrAZrC Tyler Durden

Why Hillary Clinton Cannot Beat Donald Trump

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

This morning, I read a fantastic article by Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs titled: Unless the Democrats Run Sanders, a Trump Nomination Means a Trump Presidency. Several months ago, I would have disagreed with this statement, but today I think it’s entirely accurate.

One thing Clinton supporters remain in complete denial about (other than the fact most Americans who don’t identify as Democrats find her to be somewhere in between untrustworthy and criminal), is that a significant number of Sanders supporters will never vote for Hillary. Forget the fact that I know a few personally, I’ve noticed several interviews with voters who proclaim Sanders to be their first choice but Trump their second. Are they just saying this or do they mean it? I think a lot them mean it.

Mr. Robinson’s article is a brilliant deep dive into what a real life Trump vs. Clinton matchup would look like, not what clueless beltway wonks want it to look it. What emerges is a convincing case that the only person who could stand up to Trump and defeat him in November is Bernie Sanders. I agree.

So without further ado, here are a few excerpts:

Instinctively, Hillary Clinton has long seemed by far the more electable of the two Democratic candidates. She is, after all, an experienced, pragmatic moderate, whereas Sanders is a raving, arm-flapping elderly Jewish socialist from Vermont. Clinton is simply closer to the American mainstream, thus she is more attractive to a broader swath of voters. Sanders campaigners have grown used to hearing the heavy-hearted lament “I like Bernie, I just don’t think he can win.” And in typical previous American elections, this would be perfectly accurate.

 

But this is far from a typical previous American election. And recently, everything about the electability calculus has changed, due to one simple fact: Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee for President. Given this reality, every Democratic strategic question must operate not on the basis of abstract electability against a hypothetical candidate, but specific electability against the actual Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

 

Here, a Clinton match-up is highly likely to be an unmitigated electoral disaster, whereas a Sanders candidacy stands a far better chance. Every one of Clinton’s (considerable) weaknesses plays to every one of Trump’s strengths, whereas every one of Trump’s (few) weaknesses plays to every one of Sanders’s strengths. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, running Clinton against Trump is a disastrous, suicidal proposition.

 

Her supporters insist that she has already been “tried and tested” against all the attacks that can be thrown at her. But this is not the case; she has never been subjected to the full brunt of attacks that come in a general presidential election. Bernie Sanders has ignored most tabloid dirt, treating it as a sensationalist distraction from real issues (“Enough with the damned emails!”) But for Donald Trump, sensationalist distractions are the whole game. He will attempt to crucify her. And it is very, very likely that he will succeed.

 

This campaigning style makes Hillary Clinton Donald Trump’s dream opponent. She gives him an endless amount to work with. The emails, Benghazi, Whitewater, Iraq, the Lewinsky scandal, ChinagateTravelgate, the missing law firm recordsJeffrey EpsteinKissingerMarc RichHaitiClinton Foundation tax errorsClinton Foundation conflicts of interest“We were broke when we left the White House,” Goldman Sachs… There is enough material in Hillary Clinton’s background for Donald Trump to run with six times over.

 

Even a skilled campaigner would have a very difficult time parrying such endless attacks by Trump. Even the best campaigner would find it impossible to draw attention back to actual substantive policy issues, and would spend their every moment on the defensive. But Hillary Clinton is neither the best campaigner nor even a skilled one. In fact, she is a dreadful campaigner. She may be a skilled policymaker, but on the campaign trail she makes constant missteps and never realizes things have gone wrong until it’s too late.

 

Everyone knows this. Even among Democratic party operatives, she’s acknowledged as “awkward and uninspiring on the stump,” carrying “Bill’s baggage with none of Bill’s warmth.” New York magazine described her “failing to demonstrate the most elementary political skills, much less those learned at Toastmasters or Dale Carnegie.” Last year the White House was panicking at her levels of electoral incompetence, her questionable decisionmaking, and her inclination for taking sleazy shortcuts. More recently, noting Sanders’s catch-up in the polls, The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin said that she was a “rotten candidate” whose attacks on Sanders made no sense, and that “at some point, you cannot blame the national mood or a poor staff or a brilliant opponent for Hillary Clinton’s campaign woes.” Yet in a race against Trump, Hillary will be handicapped not only by her feeble campaigning skills, but the fact that she will have a sour national mood, a poor staff, and a brilliant opponent.

 

Every Democrat should take some time to fairly, dispassionately examine Clinton’s track record as a campaigner. Study how the ‘08 campaign was handled, and how this one has gone. Assess her strengths and weaknesses with as little bias or prejudice as possible. Then picture the race against Trump, and think about how it will unfold.

 

It’s easy to see that Trump has every single advantage. Because the Republican primary will be over, he can come at her from both right and left as he pleases. As the candidate who thundered against the Iraq War at the Republican debate, he can taunt Clinton over her support for it. He will paint her as a member of the corrupt political establishment, and will even offer proof: “Well, I know you can buy politicians, because I bought Senator Clinton. I gave her money, she came to my wedding.” He can make it appear that Hillary Clinton can be bought, that he can’t, and that he is in charge. It’s also hard to defend against, because it appears to be partly true. Any denial looks like a lie, thus making Hillary’s situation look even worse. And then, when she stumbles, he will mock her as incompetent.

 

Charges of misogyny against Trump won’t work. He is going to fill the press with the rape and harassment allegations against Bill Clinton and Hillary’s role in discrediting the victims (something that made even Lena Dunham deeply queasy.) He can always remind people that Hillary Clinton referred to Monica Lewinsky as a “narcissistic loony toon.” Furthermore, since Trump is not an anti-Planned Parenthood zealot (being the only one willing to stick up for women’s health in a room full of Republicans), it will be hard for Clinton to paint him as the usual anti-feminist right-winger.

 

Trump will capitalize on his reputation as a truth-teller, and be vicious about both Clinton’s sudden changes of position (e.g. the switch on gay marriage, plus the affected economic populism of her run against Sanders) and her perceived dishonesty. One can already imagine the monologue:

 

“She lies so much. Everything she says is a lie. I’ve never seen someone who lies so much in my life. Let me tell you three lies she’s told. She made up a story about how she was ducking sniper fire! There was no sniper fire. She made it up! How do you forget a thing like that? She said she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the guy who climbed Mount Everest. He hadn’t even climbed it when she was born! Total lie! She lied about the emails, of course, as we all know, and is probably going to be indicted. You know she said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! It was a lie! Thousands of American soldiers are dead because of her. Not only does she lie, her lies kill people. That’s four lies, I said I’d give you three. You can’t even count them. You want to go on PolitiFact, see how many lies she has? It takes you an hour to read them all! In fact, they ask her, she doesn’t even say she hasn’t lied. They asked her straight up, she says she usually tries to tell the truth! Ooooh, she tries! Come on! This is a person, every single word out of her mouth is a lie. Nobody trusts her. Check the polls, nobody trusts her. Yuge liar.”

 

Trump will bob, weave, jab, and hook. He won’t let up. And because Clinton actually has lied, and actually did vote for the Iraq War, and actually is hyper-cosy with Wall Street, and actually does change her positions based on expediency, all she can do is issue further implausible denials, which will further embolden Trump. Nor does she have a single offensive weapon at her disposal, since every legitimate criticism of Trump’s background (inconsistent political positions, shady financial dealings, pattern of deception) is equally applicable to Clinton, and he knows how to make such things slide off him, whereas she does not.

Here’s another example. If Hillary tries to hit Trump on his Mexican/Muslims comments, Trump can accurately point out she called inner city blacks “super predators.”

Nor are the demographics going to be as favorable to Clinton as she thinks. Trump’s populism will have huge resonance among the white working class in both red and blue states; he might even peel away her black support. And Trump has already proven false the prediction that he would alienate Evangelicals through his vulgarity and his self-deification. Democrats are insistently repeating their belief that a Trump nomination will mobilize liberals to head to the polls like never before, but with nobody particularly enthusiastic for Clinton’s candidacy, it’s not implausible that a large number of people will find both options so unappealing that they stay home.

Yep, many Sanders supporters will never vote for Hillary. In fact, more than a few will vote for Trump.

Trump’s various unique methods of attack would instantly be made far less useful in a run against Sanders. All of the most personal charges (untrustworthiness, corruption, rank hypocrisy) are much more difficult to make stick. The rich history of dubious business dealings is nonexistent. None of the sleaze in which Trump traffics can be found clinging to Bernie. Trump’s standup routine just has much less obvious personal material to work with. Sanders is a fairly transparent guy; he likes the social safety net, he doesn’t like oligarchy, he’s a workaholic who sometimes takes a break to play basketball, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. Contrast that with the above-noted list of juicy Clinton tidbits.

 

Trump can’t clown around nearly as much at a debate with Sanders, for the simple reason that Sanders is dead set on keeping every conversation about the plight of America’s poor under the present economic system. If Trump tells jokes and goofs off here, he looks as if he’s belittling poor people, not a magnificent idea for an Ivy League trust fund billionaire running against a working class public servant and veteran of the Civil Rights movement. Instead, Trump will be forced to do what Hillary Clinton has been forced to do during the primary, namely to make himself sound as much like Bernie Sanders as possible. For Trump, having to get serious and take the Trump Show off the air will be devastating to his unique charismatic appeal.

 

Trump is an attention-craving parasite, and such creatures are powerful only when indulged and paid attention to. Clinton will be forced to pay attention to Trump because of his constant evocation of her scandals. She will attempt to go after him. She will, in other words, feed the troll. Sanders, by contrast, will almost certainly behave as if Trump isn’t even there. He is unlikely to rise to Trump’s bait, because Sanders doesn’t even care to listen to anything that’s not about saving social security or the disappearing middle class. He will almost certainly seem as if he barely knows who Trump is. Sanders’s commercials will be similar to those he has run in the primary, featuring uplifting images of America, aspirational sentiments about what we can be together, and moving testimonies from ordinary Americans. Putting such genuine dignity and good feeling against Trump’s race-baiting clownishness will be like finally pouring water on the Wicked Witch. Hillary Clinton cannot do this; with her, the campaign will inevitably descend into the gutter, and the unstoppable bloated Trump menace will continue to grow ever larger.

 

Of course, the American people are still jittery about socialism. But they’re less jittery than they used to be, and Bernie does a good job portraying socialism as being about little more than paid family leave and sick days (a debatable proposition, but one beside the point.) His policies are popular and appeal to the prevailing national sentiment. It’s a risk, certainly. But the Soviet Union bogeyman is long gone, and everyone gets called a socialist these days no matter what their politics. It’s possible that swing voters dislike socialism more than they dislike Hillary Clinton, but in a time of economic discontent one probably shouldn’t bet on it.

 

But even if it was correct to say that Sanders was “starting to” lose (instead of progressively losing less and less), this should only motivate all Democrats to work harder to make sure he is nominated. One’s support for Sanders should increase in direct proportion to one’s fear of Trump.

 

And if Trump is the nominee, Hillary Clinton should drop out of the race and throw her every ounce of energy into supporting Sanders. If this does not occur, the resulting consequences for Muslims and Mexican immigrants of a Trump presidency will be fully the responsibility of Clinton and the Democratic Party. To run a candidate who can’t win, or who is a very high-risk proposition, is to recklessly play with the lives of millions of people. So much depends on stopping Trump; a principled defeat will mean nothing to the deported, or to those being roughed up by Trump’s goon squads or executed with pigs’ blood-dipped bullets.

Trump vs. Clinton will appear to most Americans as a choice between something new and risky, and something old and corrupt. In 2016, who do you think the public will choose?

If Democrats foolishly nominate Hillary Clinton, they will be the only ones to blame for a Trump Presidency.


via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1KP7yk5 Tyler Durden

Jihadists Are Selling CIA-Supplied Weapons On Facebook

Once upon a time, roughly two year ago, the US would vehemently deny that any of its weapons made their way to ISIS, Al Nusra, and the various other jihadist groups operating in the middle east and which the US is, supposedly, targeting for eradication as part of the Syria proxy war. Then, little by little it was revealed that not only is the US not targeting said groups, which led to the Russian bombing campaign unleashed in September, but that it was actively arming them.

And nowhere is this more obvious than in a Facebook page called “The first weapons market in the Idleb countryside” which showcases posts with photographs of weapons, claimed to be CIA-supplied, inviting buyers to contact page administrators privately using popular messaging application Whatsapp to discuss sales and transactions.

Think of it as a Alibaba for ISIS, in which the CIA is the main supplier.

As The Foreign Desk News’ Lisa Daftari explains, Jihadists in Syria are using Facebook as a marketplace to buy, sell and barter a wide variety of American-made weapons and munitions ranging from rocket launchers to machine guns.

An AGS-17 Soviet-era grenade launcher is listed for $3,800 and below that a thermal camera made by Oregon-based company FLIR, is listed alongside posts advertising the sale of 105mm cannon shells.

Weapons like TOW and MANPAD missile launchers, which the CIA has provided to rebel groups in Iraq and Syria, and can pose serious threats to civilian and military jets, are also advertised on the page.

Throughout the course of the Syrian Civil War, efforts by the U.S. to arm so-called “moderate rebels” with heavy weapons have largely fallen flat due to fears that they will end up with groups such as Al Qaeda or even ISIS.

Buyers can also make requests for specific weapons, as one post on the page says, “Quick friends, I need a gun with a silencer.”

Page members are linked to jihadist groups Ahrar Al-Sham and the Islamic Front, the former allegedly linked to Al-Qaeda


via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1Lh55P7 Tyler Durden

Guest Post: Will A “Socialist” Government Make Americans Freer?

Submitted by Jason Kuznicki via Foundation for Economic Education,

“Socialism” is a weasel word.

Consider that the adjective “socialist” applies commonly — even plausibly  to countries with vastly different ex ante institutions and with vastly different social and economic outcomes. Yet Canada, Norway, Venezuela, and Cuba can’t all be one thing. Does socialism mean substantial freedom of the press, as in Norway? Or does it mean the vicious suppression of dissent, as in Venezuela?

We need more clarity here before we decide whether socialism is a worthwhile social system, and whether, as Will Wilkinson recommends, we ought to support a socialist candidate for president.

An approach that clearly will not do is to apply the term “socialism” to virtually all foreign countries. Shabby as that definition may be, some do seem to use it, both favorably and not. The result is that “socialism” has grown popular largely because a lot of people have concluded that the American status quo stinks. Maybe it does stink, but that doesn’t endow “socialism” with a proper definition.

Let’s see what happens when we drill down to the level of institutions.

Now, we might personally wish that the word “socialism” meant “the social system in which the state owns the means of production and runs the major industries of the nation.”

This is a workable definition: It has a clear genus and differentia; it includes some systems, while excluding others; and it’s not obviously self-referential. It’s also the definition preferred by many important political actors in the twentieth century, including Vladimir Lenin.

Lenin’s definition was not a bad one. But it’s far from the only current, taxonomically proper definition of socialism. As Will Wilkinson rightly notes, socialism also commonly means “the social system in which the state uses taxation to provide an extensive social safety net.”

And yet, as Will also notes, “ownership of the means of production” and “provision of a social safety net” are logically independent policies. A state can do one, the other, both, or neither. Of these four possibilities, there’s only one that can’t plausibly be called a socialism and not a single state on earth behaves this way!

Better terms are in order, but I know that whatever I propose here isn’t going to stick, so I’m not going to try. Instead I want to look at some of the consequences that may arise from our fuzzy terminology.

One danger is that we may believe and support one conception of “socialism” only to find that the agents we’ve tasked with supplying it have had other ideas all along: We may want Norway but get Venezuela. Wittingly or unwittingly.

Before we say “oh please, of course we’ll end up in Norway,” let’s recall how eager our leftist intelligentsia has been to praise Chavez’s Venezuela — and even declare it an “economic miracle until the truth became unavoidable: The “miracle” of socialism in Venezuela turned out to be nothing more than a transient oil boom. Yet leftist intellectuals are the very sorts of people who will be drawn, by self-selection, to an administration that is proud to call itself socialist.

There’s some resemblance to a “motte-and-bailey” process here: they cultivate the rich, desirable fields of the bailey, until they are attacked, at which point they retreat to the well-fortified motte. The easily defensible motte is the comfortable social democracy of northern Europe, which we all agree is pretty nice and happens to have quite a few free-market features. The bailey is the Cuban revolution.

This motte-and-bailey process does not need to be deliberate; it may be the result of a genuinely patchwork socialist coalition. No one in the coalition needs to have bad faith. An equivocal word is all that’s needed, and one is already on hand.

Even when we look only at one country, the problem remains: We may only want some institutional parts of Denmark — and we may want them for good reasons, such as Denmark’s relatively loose regulatory environment. But what we get may only be the other institutional parts of Denmark — such as its high personal income taxes. (Worth noting: Bernie Sanders has explicitly promised the higher personal income taxes, while his views on regulation are anything but Danish.)

Will thinks that electing someone on the far left of the American political spectrum could be somewhat good for liberty, but I’m far from convinced. Remember what happened the last time we put just a center-leftist in the White House: By the very same measures of economic freedom that Will uses to tout Denmark’s success, America’s economic freedom ranking sharply declined. And that decline was the direct result of Barack Obama’s left-wing economic policies. We got a larger welfare state and higher taxes, but we also got much more command-and-control regulation.

Faced with similar objections from others, Will has already performed a nice sidestep: He has replied that voting for Sanders is — obviously — just a strategic move: “Obviously,” he writes, “President Bernie Sanders wouldn’t get to implement his economic policy.” Emphasis his.

To which I’d ask: Do you really mean that Sanders would achieve none of his economic agenda? At all? Because I can name at least two items that seem like safe bets: more protectionism and stricter controls on immigration. A lot of Sanders’s ideas will indeed be dead on arrival, but these two won’t, and he would be delighted to make a bipartisan deal that cuts against most everything that Will, the Niskanen Center, and libertarians generally claim to stand for. Cheering for a guy who would happily bury your legislative agenda, and who stands a good chance of actually doing it seems… well, odd.

There is also a frank inconsistency to Will’s argument: The claim that Sanders will make us more like Denmark can’t be squared with the claim that Sanders will be totally ineffective. Arguing both is just throwing spaghetti on the wall — and hoping the result looks like libertarianism.

Would Sanders decriminalize marijuana? Or reform the criminal justice system? Or start fewer wars? Or spend less on defense? Or give us all puppies? I don’t know. Obama promised to close Guantanamo. He promised to be much better on civil liberties. He promised not to start “dumb wars” or bomb new and exotic countries. He even promised accountability for torture.

In 2008, I made the terrible mistake of counting those promises in his favor. We’ve seen how well that worked out.

It’s completely beyond me why I should trust similarly tangential promises this time around — particularly from a candidate like Sanders, whose record on foreign policy is already disturbingly clear. None of the rest of these desiderata have anything to do with state control over our economic life, which would appear to be the one thing the left wants most of all. (Marijuana: illegal in Cuba. Legal in North Korea. Yay freedom?)

Ultimately, I think that electing someone significantly further left than Obama will not help matters in any sense at all, except maybe that it will show how little trust we should put in anyone who willingly wears the socialist label. The only good outcome of a Sanders administration may be that we’ll all say to ourselves afterward: “Well, we won’t be trying that again!”

Now, I am prepared to believe, exactly as Will writes, that “‘social democracy,’ as it actually exists, is sometimes more ‘libertarian’ than the good old U.S. of A.” That’s true, at least in a few senses. Consider, for instance, that Denmark isn’t drone bombing unknown persons in Pakistan using a type of algorithm that can’t seem to deliver interesting Facebook ads. (One could say that, as usual, Denmark is letting us do their dirty work for them, with their full approval, but I won’t press the point.)

Either way, that’s still a pretty low bar, no? Meanwhile, there remains plenty of room for us to imitate some other bad things — things that we aren’t doing now, but that Denmark is doing, like taxing its citizens way, way too much. The fact that these things are a part of the complex conglomerate known as northern European social democracy doesn’t necessarily make them good, exactly as remote control assassination doesn’t become good merely by virtue of being American.

In short: Point taken about social democracy. At times, some of it isn’t completely terrible. But that only gets us so far, and not quite to the Sanders slot in the ballot box.

It seems interest in "socialism" is peaking once again…

 


via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1Q62bM5 Tyler Durden

The 10th GOP Debate Begins: And Then There Were 5 – Live Feed

With the field down to the fantastic five, tonight's GOP debate – the last chance to hatchet your opponent before Super Tuesday – should be a real deathmatch. With The Donald so far ahead, Kasich and Carson have nothing to lose and Rubio and Cruz will be lobbing soundbite-grenades at one another as well as taking aim at Trump. In light of Trump's comments on Tuesday night, "it's going to be an amazing two months… we might not even need the two months, folks, to be honest," the gloves must come off.

Dead men walking?

 

 

Carson goes negative early… "Our nation is heading off the abyss of destruction."

The debate is due to start at 830ET (Live Feed)… (via Telemundo – Spanish translation overlay)


via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1par4h4 Tyler Durden