Category: zerohedge

New Video Emerges Of Tesla China Factory: “You Call That Construction? It’s A Half-Flooded Dirt Field”

It is Deja Vu for the Tesla China factory

It was the year 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the automaker secured a location and a local partner for a manufacturing plant in China. Bloomberg, at the time, learned that Shanghai could be the front-runner as Tesla reportedly signed a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” to invest in a $9 billion electric vehicle factory in the region.

Two and a half years later, the facility was never built and seemed more like a publicity stunt to boost the stock price.

Now it is Deja Vu, CNBC recently said Tesla had acquired an 864,885-square meter plot in Shanghai’s Lingang area for a manufacturing facility.

According to an official WeChat post from the government, land leveling has been completed, and construction could begin in the near term, the factory is expected to be completed and producing electric cars in late 2019. The article also reported a visit by Shanghai Mayor Ying Yong and Vice Mayor Wu Qing.

Since Musk first unveiled the automaker’s manufacturing plans for China, more than two and a half years ago, a new video has emerged showing the future site of the Tesla Gigafactory in China. As one social media user put it, “You call that construction? It is a half-flooded dirt field.”

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Martin Armstrong: The Use Of False Flags To Increase Power

Authored by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,

Historically, Hitler used a very famous event that was the origin of the term “False flag” back in 1933 to reinforce his power. The German False flag used by Hitler was known as the Reichstag Fire.

Hitler had a problem. He won less than 35% of the vote. 

The Reichstag Fire was an arson attack on the German parliament in Berlin on February 27th, 1933, one month after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Hitler’s government claimed it was set by Communists because the 1918 German Revolution which installed the Weimar Republic and resulted in the hyperinflation was a Communist movement which even asked the Russian to take Germany.

One man was prosecuted named Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council Communist, who was simply found near the building. A German court later decided that van der Lubbe had acted alone as was the case with Oswald in the Kennedy Assassination.

After the Reichstag Fire, a Decree was passed that the Nazi Party used as evidence that Communists were plotting against the German government. This event was critical in the establishment of Nazi Germany.

The very term Reichstag Fire in Germany has been ever since used to refer to False flag actions perpetrated by the government to promote their own interests to gain more power and infuriate the public for retribution that has ALWAYS resulted in the loss of civil rights necessary to catch the conspirators.

There is no doubt that this political tactic has been used countless times to gain more power.

The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was known to the government. The people from the previous attack drew pictures of the WTC on the cell walls in prison with airplanes crashing into them at the MCC in New York. The attack on WTC7 collapsed to hide evidence for it was never hit by any plane. Then the Pentagon was conveniently hit in the very room where all the records were that Rumsfeld swore he would investigate the missing billions in the budget.

They gained so much power from that event over taxes alone to make it all profitable.

As we look ahead, they desperately need another False flag to escape from the collapsing structure of Socialism.

A war will be very convenient to blame so expect this in the not so distant future.

This also is why they have to try to get rid of Trump – he is not one of them! They just have to always bash Trump even when the event was the funeral of George H. W. Bush as the Washington Post reported: Trump odd man out as presidents assemble for Bush funeral.

There is not an event that can take place without the media trying to tear Trump apart.

They are part of the agenda to remove any outsider to allow Washington to do what it does best – manipulate the people and False flags are very much a part of the agenda.

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WikiLeaks May Sue Conspiracy Theorist Louise Mensch

WikiLeaks has offered to sue anti-Trump neoconservative provocateur and former conservative UK MP, Louise Mensch, after she tweeted that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “committed espionage of military secrets under Putin’s direct orders.” 

The controversy began after Mensch, who admitted that years of taking hard drugs left her with “long-term mental health” issues, fired off a response to a tweet by the ACLU on Saturday linking to an article in which the civil rights organization asked Edward Snowden about blockchain technology. 

“What the hell is espionage against the United States committed on behalf of a homophobic fascist who kills journalists on his birthday? We asked @Snowden and his enabler @ACLU,” mocked Mensch.

After a few Twitter followers engaged Mensch, she lashed out again – tweeting that Snowden would be executed if he stepped foot back in the United States, as he “committed espionage of military secrets under Putin’s direct orders” – an assertion Mensch appears to have created out of thin air. 

WikiLeaks jumped into the fray, replying to Mensch: “@snowden do you want us to sue this serial fabricator?“

To which Mensch defiantly replied: Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough, Stinky. PS: you’re not,” followed by “You would have standing to sue, though, as I will HAPPILY stipulate that you and @Snowden are essentially the same entity, twin assets of the Russian state, both traitors, both working under the direction of RIS. At least @Snowden didn’t add rape to the treason and espionage.”

Mensch has made various claims over the last few years which should serve as a cautionary tale for those considering hard drugs. In April, she suggested that Russia funded the Ferguson race riots, which began the day after a black man, Michael Brown, was gunned down by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. 

She has accused a laundry list of people of being Russian shills, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many others. 

In August of 2017, Mensch and journalist Claude Taylor proffered the conspiracy theory that President Trump’s defunct modeling agency was under investigation for potential sex trafficking, and that former President Bill Clinton was going to testify in the case. 

The pair claimed that there was at least one sealed indictment in the case, and that President Trump is “under multiple sealed indictments” in the Mueller investigation. 

The initial inkling of this outrageous story, mind you, came from one hoax of a source, who was intentionally trying to feed them the misinformation “out of frustration over the ‘dissemination of fake news.’” Taylor has since apologized for not vetting the source; Mensch has dug in her heels, saying she received the information a different source, which is funny because that would mean the exact allegation–which was made up out of thin air by an intentional hoaxer–is also being spread by someone else.

Indeed it’s a gnarly web of allegations and outright falsehoods. And, again, it’s another reason why, as I wrote last month, people like Louise Mensch should not have a Twitter checkmark, which grants users validity and adds weight to what they tweet. This is exactly how fake news starts. –FastCompany

Remember kids, 

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Ron Paul: Why The Senate Vote To End Yemen War Is So Important

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute,

Last week something historic happened in the US Senate. For the first time in 45 years, a chamber of the US Congress voted to pull US forces from a military conflict under the 1973 War Powers Act.

While there is plenty to criticize in the War Powers Act, in this situation it was an important tool used by a broad Senate coalition to require President Trump to end US participation in the Saudi war against Yemen. And while the resolution was not perfect – there were huge loopholes – it has finally drawn wider attention to the US Administration’s dirty war in Yemen.

The four year Saudi war on neighboring Yemen has left some 50,000 dead, including many women and children. We’ve all seen the horrible photos of school buses blown up by the Saudis – using US-supplied bombs loaded into US-supplied aircraft. Millions more face starvation as the infrastructure is decimated and the ports have been blocked to keep out humanitarian aid.

Stopping US participation in this brutal war is by itself a wise and correct move, even if it comes years too late.

The Senate vote is also about much more than just Yemen. It is about the decades of Presidential assaults on the Constitution in matters of war. President Trump is only the latest to ignore Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution, which grants war power exclusively to Congress. Yes, it was President Obama who initially dragged the US illegally into the Yemen war, but President Trump has only escalated it. And to this point Congress has been totally asleep.

Fortunately that all changed last week with the Senate vote. Unfortunately, Members of the House will not be allowed to vote on their own version of the Senate resolution.

Republican Leadership snuck language into a rule vote on the Farm Bill prohibiting any debate on the Yemen war for the rest of this Congressional session.

As Rep. Thomas Massie correctly pointed out, the move was both unconstitutional and illegal.

However as is often the case in bipartisan Washington, there is plenty of blame to go around. The Republicans were able to carry the vote on the rule – and thus deny any debate on Yemen – only because of a group of Democrats crossed over and voted with Republicans. Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer is being blamed by progressives for his apparent lack of interest in holding his party together.

Why would Democrats help a Republican president keep his war going? Because, especially when you look at Congressional leadership, both parties are pro-war and pro-Executive branch over-reach. They prefer it to be their president who is doing the over-reaching, but they understand that sooner or later they’ll be back in charge. As I have often said, there is too much bipartisanship in Washington, not too much partisanship.

Americans should be ashamed and outraged that their government is so beholden to a foreign power – in this case Saudi Arabia – that it would actively participate in a brutal war of aggression. Participating in this war against one of the world’s poorest countries is far from upholding “American values.” We should applaud and support the coalition in the Senate that voted to end the war. They should know how much we appreciate their efforts.

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Roughly Half Of Millennials Have No Money Saved For A Down Payment

Millennials are on the cusp of surpassing baby boomers as the largest generational demographic in the US, yet a startling plurality of them are woefully under prepared to assume the typical trappings of adulthood – like starting a family and buying a home.

And in a detailed report published this week, analysts at ApartmentList illustrated just how wide of a gulf lies between millennials and their economic and financial goals. Perhaps the most surprising finding: Nearly half of millennial renters have zero money saved for a down payment – which doesn’t bode well for the housing market, where home prices have surpassed their pre-crisis highs (though signs of weakness are starting to emerge). And just 11% say they have $10,000 saved.

Millennials

To wit, 72% of millennial renters cite “affordability” as the biggest factor barring them from homeownership. Student debt is another factor: While 23% of college graduates might be able to scrape together enough for a down payment, that figure falls to 12% for those who are currently paying off student loans.

But these aren’t the only factors holding millennials back from home ownership. A handful of macroeconomic trends are also to blame: Much of the generation came of age during or in the aftermath of the Great Recession, resulting in limited opportunities and stagnant wage growth in the crucial early stages of millennials’ careers. Construction of new single-family homes has lagged significantly in recent years, leading to a severe shortage of starter homes.

Roughly 9 in 10 millennial renters want to purchase a home; but just 4.4% plan to do so within the next year:

Apartment

The “burden of affordability” primarily manifests in millennials inability to scrape together enough money for a down payment:

Millennials

And even if they can manage to save some money, the amount needed for a down payment is often larger than they think:

Down

And at the present average savings rate, most millennials will need more than two decades to save up enough for a down payment.

Down

Ironically, millennials with the highest incomes receive the most help from family for their down payments.

Millennials

And as we mentioned above, student-loan debt is one of the biggest obstacles absorbing all of the money that would otherwise be saved for a down payment.

Student

The upshot of this is that, instead of accumulating wealth in a home – which has always been the primary source of value for American families – millennials will continue throwing it away on rent, which offers them no return and no security later in life.

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Venezuela’s Crisis: What’s Oil Got To Do With It?

Authored by Carmen Elena Dorobăț via The Mises Institute,

After over three years of following the disastrous effects of socialism unfolding in Venezuela I can confidently say that 99% of the articles I’ve read on the issue will sooner or later point out that Venezuela’s crisis is not only surprisingly dire, but rather counterintuitive given that it is one of the most oil rich country in the world, with probably the largest proven reserves. As a result, most analyses will conclude that it is the current president’s incompetence on the one hand, and the fall in oil prices in the last 5 years on the other, that have brought about the collapse of the once-prosperous South American economy.

The latest example is the short video posted by The Economist, which, in summarizing Venezuela’s recent history, explains that “after Mr Chavez—who had spent generously when oil prices were booming—died in 2013, oil prices crashed and… Maduro inherited an economic crisis which he made worse with his ineptness. The country plunged into chaos.”

That the gravity of the situation is still surprising to most commentators when it should have been expected long ago is something I’ve discussed before. I would like now to focus on the implicit economic fallacy that underlines the assumption that a country is bound to be inherently prosperous if it owns significant natural resources, particularly oil.

First of all, it is merely an impression that Venezuela was indeed prosperous in a healthy way at some point in the past. The large-scale exploitation of its rich oil reserves, first discovered before the Spanish conquest, began only in 1910. Before, Simon Bolivar’s 1811 decree stated national ownership of all domestic mines and production was minimal at first. The beginning of the Venezuelan oil industry was also still plagued by government intervention, as drilling and refining were still only permitted via governmental concessions—usually offered to close friends of the 1920s Gómez administration. Later in 1975-76, a monopoly of oil production was handed to the state-owned enterprise Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), then the world’s third largest refiner after Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon, as the Venezuelan oil industry was fully nationalized.

Although foreign companies were allowed minority partnerships, the taxes they had to pay were significantly increased during the Chavez administration.

During this turbulent history, oil production waxed and waned, following state directives rather than market incentives, yet booming oil prices in the early 2000s allowed for large cash windfalls. But eventually after 2005 all revenues from it began to be rerouted by the government into Chavez’s lavish social missions, which covered everything from free health clinics to neighborhood basketball courts.

It is this period that most commentators see as one of great Venezuelan prosperity. But this prosperity was illusory, a mere veneer for the consumption of capital that was occurring. Capital goods – especially those in the oil industry – were being misused and depleted through central planning. For a while, this created an apparent wave of prosperity and development that Joseph Stiglitz called “impressive” at the time and that Mises had long before likened to burning one’s own furniture to heat up the room. But as soon as capital wore out, the façade collapsed and the centrally planned mismanagement of the resources was revealed. No matter how rich in resources the country still is, those resources were and still are used inefficiently and wastefully.

Alternatively, Switzerland is very poor in mineral resources—or any natural resources, mind—and has not been plunged into an inflationary crisis. 

Chavez not only failed to eradicate poverty, as he claimed, but he laid the country squarely down the path of socialism and all its disastrous effects were merely magnified by Maduro. The latter is, contrary to its Western critics, not inept, but rather a committed and consistent socialist dictator, who only escalated and tightened, in good socialist fashion, government control over everything from currency and prices to political dissent and free speech. This, and falling world oil prices, certainly sped up the disintegration of the Venezuelan economy, but did not cause it.

What originally caused the Venezuelan crisis was not oil, nor can oil now be inherently its cure. The cause of Venezuela’s collapse is the stunting of domestic capital accumulation that began with monetary and social policies of the preceding century and whose effects are now fully felt. And it is the same brand of poor economic policies and government spending (albeit not in the same degree) that is sought after and implemented in the U.S. or Europe, where it is touted either as innovative, stimulating, or anti-cyclical.

In 1952, in The Plight of Underdeveloped Nations, Mises was discussing Iran’s plans to nationalize their oil industry and was pointing out the precise—and since unchanged—hypocrisy of the West in criticizing socialist policies they were themselves implementing at home:

If it is right for the British to nationalize the British coal mines, it cannot be wrong for the Iranians to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. If Mr. Attlee [Labour Party leader and prime minister of England from 1945–1951] were consistent, he would have congratulated the Iranians on their great socialist achievement. But no socialist can be or ever was consistent.

Mises’s further analysis in that essay—quoted below at length—can be used not only to cut through to the heart of the current Venezuelan problems, but to lay out the only solution for overcoming the crisis and allow for true prosperity. And as you might have guessed, it does not involve mentioning the large oil reserves at all:

What the underdeveloped nations must do if they sincerely want to eradicate penury and to improve the economic conditions of their destitute masses is to adopt those policies of “rugged individualism” which have created the welfare of Western Europe and the United States. They must resort to laissez faire; they must remove all obstacles fettering the spirit of enterprise and stunting domestic capital accumulation and the inflow of capital from abroad.

But what the governments of these countries are really doing today is just the contrary. Instead of emulating the polices that created the comparative wealth and welfare of the capitalistic nations, they are choosing those contemporary policies of the West which slow down the further accumulation of capital and lay stress on what they consider to be a fairer distribution of wealth and income. Leaving aside the problem whether or not these policies are beneficial to the economically advanced nations, it must be emphasized that they are patently nonsensical when resorted to in the economically backward countries. Where there is very little to be distributed, a policy of an allegedly “fairer” redistribution is of no use at all. […]

The problem of rendering the underdeveloped nations more prosperous cannot be solved by material aid. It is a spiritual and intellectual problem. Prosperity is not simply a matter of capital investment. It is an ideological issue. What the underdeveloped countries need first is the ideology of economic freedom and private enterprise and initiative that makes for the accumulation and maintenance of capital as well as for the employment of the available capital for the best possible and cheapest satisfaction of the most urgent wants of the consumers.

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Mueller Finally Releases Heavily Redacted Key Flynn Memo On Eve Of Sentencing

Having initially snubbed Judge Emmet Sullivan’s order to release the original 302 report from the Michael Flynn interrogation in January 2017, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has finally produced the heavily redacted document, just hours before sentencing is due to be handed down.

The memo  – in full below – details then-national security adviser Michael Flynn’s interview with FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka, and shows Flynn was repeatedly asked about his contacts with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and in each instance, Flynn denied (or did not recall) any such conversations.

The agents had transcripts of Flynn’s phone calls to Russian Ambassador Kislyak, thus showing Flynn to be lying.

Flynn pleaded guilty guilty last December to lying to the FBI agents about those conversations with Kislyak.

The redactions in the document seem oddly placed but otherwise, there is nothing remarkable about the content..

Aside from perhaps Flynn’s incredulity at the media attention…

Flynn is set to be sentenced in that federal court on Tuesday.

Of course, as Christina Laila notes, the real crime is that Flynn was unmasked during his phone calls to Kislyak and his calls were illegally leaked by a senior Obama official to the Washington Post.

*  *  *

Full document below

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Japan Returns To Militarism

Authored by Brian Cloughley via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

On December 11 Japan’s Kyodo News Agency reported that “Japan plans to effectively upgrade its helicopter carriers to enable them to transport and launch fighter jets.” Concurrently the Indian Ministry of Defence noted that in the course of a large exercise being held in India by the US and Indian air forces, “two military pilots from Japan are also taking part in the exercise as observers.” There was also a Reuter’s account of Tokyo’s plans “to boost defence spending over the next five years to help pay for new stealth fighters and other advanced US military equipment.”

Coincidentally, these developments were reported in the same week as the anniversary of the Nanking Massacre of 1937-38, which remembrance was totally unreported by the Western media but remembered in China where “over a period of six weeks, Imperial Japanese Army forces brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of people” and wreaked further death and destruction there and throughout Asia until 1945. They killed or otherwise caused the deaths of countless millions.

There was another anniversary in early December — that of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when 2,400 Americans were killed.

President Roosevelt had declared that “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

The date has not lived in infamy, or indeed in any other way so far as the New York Times or the Washington Post are concerned, because neither’s front pages mentioned Pearl Harbor on either December 7 or 8.

A few days later, however, the Post reported that “Japan will announce plans to buy 40 to 50 [Lockheed Martin] F-35s over the next five years but may ultimately purchase 100 planes [which cost about $100 million each]. That will have the added benefit of mollifying President Trump, who has complained about the US trade deficit with Japan as well as the cost of stationing tens of thousands of U.S. troops here.” And the NYT headlined that “Japan to Ramp Up Defense Spending to Pay for New Fighters, Radar.”

The message is that Japan is embarking on a military spending surge which is totally inconsistent with the provisions of its Constitution, but entirely in line with the anti-China alliance that is being forged by Washington with various nations.

At the end of the Second World War, Japan was devastated and reeling from US operations in the Pacific that culminated in two atomic bomb attacks. It had to be rebuilt, and the generous United States helped its former deadly enemy to rise from the ashes.

As officially recorded, “Between 1945 and 1952, the US occupying forces, led by General Douglas MacArthur, enacted widespread military, political, economic, and social reforms . . . In 1947, Allied advisors essentially dictated a new constitution to Japan’s leaders. Some of the most profound changes in the document included… renouncing the right to wage war, which involved eliminating all non-defensive armed forces.”

There have not as yet been any amendments to Japan’s Constitution about waging war, and most Japanese people consider conflict undesirable.

The Constitution is precise in stating that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

It could not be clearer: given its own fundamental principles, Japan cannot maintain armed forces. Yet a recent report indicates that “According to Japan’s 2018 Defense White Paper, the total strength of the Self-Defense Forces stands at 226,789 personnel,” including 138,126 in the army, 42,289 in the navy and 46,942 in the air force — or, to use the descriptions employed to fudge the fact that these are military forces with offensive capabilities, they are the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (SDF), the Japan Maritime SDF (18 submarines, 37 destroyers; two more on the way), and the Japan Air SDF (260 advanced combat aircraft).

That is a potent military force, and under the government of Shinzo Abe it will continue to be enlarged and developed with the warm approval of the United States with which Japan has a Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security.

When Abe was re-elected head of his party in September he declared that “It’s time to tackle a constitutional revision,” and everyone knows what “revision” he wants to make. As reported by Asahi Shimbun “He is proposing to add a clause to Article 9, which bans the use of force in settling international disputes, to explicitly permit the existence of Japan’s military, now called the Self-Defense Force.” And if he succeeds in having that amendment approved, it will be downhill all the way from there.

Japan has territorial disputes with China and Russia, the former about sovereignty over some islands in the South China Sea, and that with Russia concerning the Kuril Island chain, which is inhabited by Russians, having been handed over to the Soviet Union a short time before the end of World War Two. The US Navy and Air Force, in Washington’s self-assumed role as Führer of the world’s oceans, continue to challenge China in the South China Sea in its confrontational “Freedom of Navigation” operations, and as recently as December 6 was involved in a similar naval fandango when, as the CNN headline had it: “US warship challenges Russia claims in Sea of Japan.”

CNN stated that the US had sent the guided missile destroyer USS McCampbell “to Peter the Great Bay to challenge Russia’s excessive maritime claims and uphold the rights, freedoms, and lawful uses of the sea enjoyed by the United States and other Nations.”

It is hardly coincidental that “Peter the Great Bay is the largest gulf in the Sea of Japan, also known as the East Sea, and home both to the Russian city of Vladivostok and the Russian Navy’s Pacific Fleet.” Little wonder that the US wants to challenge Russia in that region — and of course it is entirely fortuitous that this maritime provocation comes after Ukraine’s naval incursions in the Kerch Strait, which were intended to encourage domestic and international support for Ukraine’s President Poroshenko. (Russia called a meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the affair, but that descended into an insult offensive by the US.)

It is apparent that Washington intends to continue challenging China and Russia in waters some 8,000 to 11,000 kilometres from the US West Coast, centred on a country in which the US has a vast military presence, with the Seventh Fleet being based in Yokosuka, the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force in Okinawa and some 150 combat aircraft of the USAF at three major air bases.

Along their borders in the Asia-Pacific region both China and Russia face increasingly confrontational US military manoeuvres which are intended to provoke them to take action. For the moment, Japan’s “self-defence” forces are constitutionally forbidden to get involved in anything that would involve the “threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes”. But the moment after Shinzo Abe succeeds in having Japan’s constitution amended, just watch developments, because Washington will welcome Japan’s return to militarism and will encourage it to join in its military provocations.

It’ll be just like the old days in Nanking and Pearl Harbor.

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Christopher Steele Admits He Was Hired To Help Hillary Challenge 2016 Election

Former UK spy Christopher Steele admitted in a London court that he was hired to help Hillary Clinton contest the results of the 2016 election in case Trump won, according to the Washington Times.  

Steele assembled an anti-Trump “dossier” of opposition research investigative firm Fusion GPS, which was in turn hired by DNC law firm Perkins Coie LLP. The document used “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure,” and “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin,” according to Vanity Fair. In other words, Hillary Clinton – through Steele and other intermediaries – was working with Russians against Donald Trump. 

He said the law firm Perkins Coie wanted to be in a position to contest the results based on evidence he unearthed on the Trump campaign conspiring with Moscow on election interference.

His scenario is contained in a sealed Aug. 2 declaration in a defamation law suit brought by three Russian bankers in London. The trio’s American attorneys filed his answers Tuesday in a libel lawsuit in Washington against the investigative firm Fusion GPS, which handled the former British intelligence officer.

In an answer to interrogatories, Mr. Steele wrote: “Fusion’s immediate client was law firm Perkins Coie. It engaged Fusion to obtain information necessary for Perkins Coie LLP to provide legal advice on the potential impact of Russian involvement on the legal validity of the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election.

“Based on that advice, parties such as the Democratic National Committee and HFACC Inc. (also known as ‘Hillary for America’) could consider steps they would be legally entitled to take to challenge the validity of the outcome of that election.” –Washington Times

During the election, Clinton told voters that Donald Trump would “threaten democracy” if he didn’t promise to accept the results of the 2016 election – after Trump suggested he might not accept the results of a “rigged” contest. 

Now listen to Hillary when she thought she was going to win the election:

Meanwhile Clinton was open to challenging the election more than ten months after her historic loss – if only there were a way. “There are scholars, academics, who have arguments that it would be, but I don’t think they’re on strong ground. But people are making those arguments. I just don’t think we have a mechanism,” Clinton told NPR in September 2017. 

The dossier Steele produced was used as the basis for an FBI FISA surveillance warrant application to spy on members of the Trump campaign. Notably, the agency never told the FISA court that the dossier their application hinged on was paid for by the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, although it did indicate that it was opposition research. 

The mainstream media used still-unverified key claims within the dossier to fuel a conspiracy theory that President Trump conspired with the Russian government to win the 2016 US election. 

Meanwhile, as we reported earlier Monday, FBI and CIA sources told a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter that they didn’t believe a key claim contained in the “Steele Dossier,” the document the Obama FBI relied on to obtain a surveillance warrant on a member of the Trump campaign.

The Post‘s Greg Miller told an audience at an October event that the FBI and CIA did not believe that former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 election to pay off Russia-linked hackers who stole emails from key Democrats, reports the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross. 

“We’ve talked to sources at the FBI and the CIA and elsewhere — they don’t believe that ever happened,” said Miller during the October event which aired Saturday on C-SPAN. 

We literally spent weeks and months trying to run down… there’s an assertion in there that Michael Cohen went to Prague to settle payments that were needed at the end of the campaign. We sent reporters to every hotel in Prague, to all over the place trying to – just to try to figure out if he was ever there, and came away empty. -Greg Miller

Meanwhile, Trump is still living under the spectre of Russian collusion, while Hillary Clinton actually colluded Russians in her plan to challenge the 2016 election.

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Here ‘s The Reason Why Oracle “Beat” Earnings In Three Words

After the close, Oracle reported Q2 results for the quarter ended Nov 30 which just barely beat consensus estimates, reporting sales of $9.562BN vs expectations of $9.53BN, down from $9.589BN a year ago, and EPS of $0.80 vs consensus of $0.78.

So far so good, and superficially these results were enough to boost the stock to $48 or 5% higher, after hours.

However, a more detailed look below the surface revealed that not all is as well as the headline scanning algos would like to believe.

For one thing, the only reason the company beat EPS forecasts of $0.78 is because of Oracle’s massive buybacks, as the company bought back another $10 billion of its stock in the second quarter, following a repurchase of $10 billion in Q1. As a result, ORCL’s diluted shares outstanding decline by 466 million from 4.283 billion to 3.817 billion. Had ORCL not repurchase roughly 210MM in shares in the current quarter, its EPS would have been a 2 cent miss of 76 cents.

There’s more.

Not only did Oracle benefit from the generosity of its creditors, as the company’s net debt rose to $9 billion at the end of Q2 vs a net cash position of $7 billion at the start of the fiscal year, and used the proceeds to repurchase $20 billion in stock in the first two quarters, but Oracle’s income tax provision also tumbled, from 21.7% in Q2 2017 to just 15.9% in the current quarter. As a result even though the company’s pre-tax income declined 2% to $2.774 billion, its after-tax net income actually rose by 5% to $2.333 billion.

And a little more.

Looking at the company’s diluted GAAP EPS reveals a far more modest number of just $0.61. And yet, the non-GAAP EPS number is materially higher, or $0.80. Why? Because as a result of constant, recurring “one-time, non-recurring” charges, including a $143MM restructuring addback, $424MM in amortization of intangibles, and $303MM in added back stock-based comp (and various other items), the company’s pre-tax net income rose from $3.1BN GAAP to $4.1BN non-GAAP, boosting the company’s operating margin from 32% to 43%. Finally apply a 18.6% non-GAAP tax rate (much lower than the 25.2% a year earlier), and one gets a net income number of $3.061BN, almost unchanged from the $2.96BN a year ago, but as a result of the 466MM share drop, the non-GAAP EPS jumped from $0.69 to $0.80.

And that’s how – between buybacks, non-GAAP adjustments, and a lower tax rate – Oracle’s unchanged revenue and declining GAAP net income resulted in a 19% increase in non-GAAP EPS.

What about the company’s business lines?

Here finally, there was some undoctored good news, with revenue from cloud services and licence support, the company’s largest segment, growing 3%, to $6.64 billion from $6.46 billion (although note that Oracle stopped reporting its cloud revenue separately earlier this year, despite the close attention the figure had received as an indicator of the company’s attempted transformation).

That was all the good news; the bad news is that all the company’s other revenue lines: Cloud license and on-premise license, Hardware, and Services all posted declines of -9%, -5% and -5% respectively.

Finally, since Oracle realized that betting the house on just this aggregated cloud number may be risky, it also disclosed that total revenue in constant currency terms would have grown 2%. What was it as reported? Down $27 million to $9.562 billion.

In any case, for now at least, the company’s triple-play bezzle of fudging GAAP numbers, tax rates and, of course, buying bank $10BN in stock, was enough to fool the algos if only in the after hours, sending Oracle’s stock price 5% higher. Once humans have had time to pore through the numbers, we don’t expect this upside “beat” to persist.

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