US Africa Command (AFRICOM) has stated in a press release that an unarmed, likely a surveillance drone, or what AFRICOM calls it a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), was lost over Tripoli, Libya, last Thursday [Nov. 21].
AFRICOM’s statement doesn’t provide a lot of details of the incident, nor does it mention if the drone crashed because of technical failures or if it was shot down by rebel forces.
The military says the incident remains under investigation but noted that surveillance drones had been a crucial tool in counter-terror missions across Libya.
US military operations “are conducted in Libya to assess the ongoing security situation and monitor violent extremist activity,” the statement said.
In September, the US military carried out several airstrikes against ISIS groups in the country, killing dozens of militants. The airstrikes were some of the first bombing missions in more than a year.
We don’t want to speculate on the type of drone that was lost, but if we had to, it could’ve been the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper (price tag $16.9 million).
Oil-rich Libya was thrown into civil war nearly a decade ago when NATO forces overthrew Moammar Gadhafi. It’s been another great blunder in Western military forces who’ve spent the last several decades crusading around the Middle East, sparking wars across the continent.
The latest outbreak of fighting has been based in Tripoli. Since about 2015, Libya has seen its government splintered into two, one based in Tripoli and the other in the country’s east.
The eastern government forces have been attempting to recapture Tripoli since April, and fierce fighting in the capital continues into the late year.
Bloomberg Officially Enters 2020 Presidential Race To “Defeat Trump And Rebuild America”
In an announcement that has been teased for weeks, and two weeks after he unexpectedly filed paperwork to run in the 2020 Presidential race despite previously stating he has no interest in doing so, on Sunday morning former NYC mayor and billionaire, Mike Bloomberg, officially announced that he’s running for president as a Democrat. His agenda can be found at mikebloomberg.com
I’m running for president to defeat Donald Trump and rebuild America. We cannot afford four more years of President Trump’s reckless and unethical actions. He represents an existential threat to our country and our values. If he wins another term in office, we may never recover from the damage. The stakes could not be higher. We must win this election. And we must begin rebuilding America. I believe my unique set of experiences in business, government, and philanthropy will enable me to win and lead.
His campaign video is below:
Bloomberg reconsidered his decision from March not to run in 2020 as he saw the Democratic field “struggling to produce a front-runner to take on Trump” although it remains unclear how his presence in the field, which will only take away votes from moderate candidates, even as Bloomberg – a billionaire – has virtually no chance of winning but we digress.
And since Bloomberg just happens to own one of the world’s biggest wire and news services, which naturally blasted out the flashing red news as soon as it was public, we will be seeing a lot of these disclaimers from now on, especially in Bloomberg’s increasingly aggressive anti-Trump stories.
For those wondering, evey Bloomberg political piece from now one will carry the following:
Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News. He served as New York’s mayor for three terms and now funds a global philanthropic arm.
For those curious, here is how Bloomberg reports on Bloomberg:
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced he is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, offering his own mix of moderate policy stances and experience in business, government and philanthropy as the way to beat President Donald Trump.
Bloomberg, 77, called Trump “an existential threat to our country and our values” as he joined a crowded field of candidates, with fewer than three months before the Iowa caucuses. His late entry will create added difficulties as he seeks to build a campaign infrastructure and support in key states.
Bloomberg’s candidacy does raise the question who will buy the Bloomberg empire if its founder is elected president, as he will almost certainly have to divest it; in recent weeks Morgan Stanley has suggested that Microsoft is perhaps the most likely bidder,,, although realistically speaking that will hardly be an issue come next November.
So what does Bloomberg’s entrance in the race mean? Well, as Axios notes, the Democratic 2020 primary field is growing at a time when it should be shrinking, just three months before the Iowa caucuses, especially since a majority of Democratic voters have signaled that they’re already satisfied with the current slate of candidates, according to recent polling.
In his announcement, Bloomberg reported that Bloomberg (this will never get old) portrayed himself “as no-nonsense business and government leader, who created jobs at his own company, helped rebuild New York City after the Sept. 11 attacks and threw himself behind the biggest challenges facing the country, including climate change and gun control. Bloomberg founded Everytown for Gun Safety and Beyond Carbon on the climate front, and his announcement said that he has given $10 billion to charitable causes and that Bloomberg Philanthropies works in 129 countries.”
As we reported on November 8, Bloomberg’s late entry into the race gives him little time to catch up, so the former mayor plans to adopt an untested approach, bypassing the first four contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina – the traditional route to the nomination. Instead, he will focus on California and the other delegate-rich U.S. states voting in the March 3 Super Tuesday contests and later.
Bloomberg’s presence at the debates should make for some delightful vitriol as many of the Democratic candidates are rabid anti-wealth progressives, who have made billionaires – such as Bloomberg – the target of their campaigns. As Axios notes, “one of Bloomberg’s biggest advantages — his wealth — is also his biggest obstacle. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders will likely take aim at the new billionaire candidate, who in many ways represents the corporate culture their campaigns are taking on.”
“We say to Michael Bloomberg and other billionaires: ’Sorry, you ain’t gonna buy this election,’ ” Sanders said during a Nov. 9 campaign rally in Iowa.
So yes, Bloomberg is a Billionaire and he plans on spending a lot of it to become president: his campaign already announced a record-setting ad buy late last week, topping $34 million. That fueled criticism from some about self-funding a presidential campaign. In addition, Bloomberg has already made plans to spend $100 million on a digital advertising campaign against Trump in the battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He also announced plans to spend another $15 million to $20 million to register voters in competitive states, Bloomberg reported on Bloomberg (as we said, this will not get boring).
Separately, Bloomberg said he will not accept donations and will self-fund his campaign. So if the DNC keeps its individual donor requirements, this means that Bloomberg may not appear on any Democratic debate stage, although we are confident that will change.
Yet even if he spends billions on ads, does Bloomberg have any chance of defeating the other Democrats, let alone Trump? A Morning Consult poll with Bloomberg in the race found that just 4% of 2,225 registered Democratic voters would pick the former mayor as their first choice to take on the president next year.
According to PredictIt, after initially surging in the polls, Bloomberg has dropped to 5th place behind Bernie Sanders, even as that “other” mayor, Pete Buttigieg, is about to take over the Democratic primary lead:
When Bloomberg was mayor, Republicans derided his efforts to limit the consumption of sugary drinks as a “Big-Gulp ban” and a symbol of government overreach. His support of a “stop-and-frisk” policing policy as mayor has been criticized for targeting blacks and Hispanics, key Democratic constituencies. Last week, Bloomberg apologized for the “stop-and-frisk” policy in a speech to the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn.
Biden addressed the new rival in a CNN interview that aired Friday.
“I welcome the competition,” he said. “Watch me. Watch me. The idea that I’m not in better shape than Mayor Bloomberg physically and otherwise?” It was unclear just what the former vice president was trying to get at before he trailed off.
Over the last few weeks, we have been discussing the “QE, Not QE” rally. Regardless of what the Fed wishes to call their bond purchases, the market has interpreted the expansion of their balance sheet as a “QE” program. Given that investors have been “trained” by the Fed’s “ringing of the bell,” the subsequent 6-week advance was not surprising.
(I might have missed a couple of “trade deal” headlines but you get the drift.)
The important part of our discussion over the last several weeks has been twofold:
What are the expected returns from various asset classes during a QE program, and;
Hedging for a short-term correction given the rather extreme overbought condition that occurred.
This week, we updated our previous analysis for our RIAPro Subscribers (30-Day Free Trial)on historical QE programs to review how far each of these markets and sectors have responded so far. The results were quite surprising. (If you subscribe for a 30-day Free Trial you can read the entire report ‘An Investor’s Guide To QE-4 The Update’)”
“The bottom line is that the Fed has taken massive steps over the last few months to provide liquidity to the financial markets. As we saw in prior QEs, this liquidity distorts financial markets. The following table provides the original return projections by asset class as well as performance returns since October 14th. The rankings are based on projected performance by asset class and total.”
(Get the FREE trial to see the full table of all markets, sectors, and commodities.)
With QE-4 in play, the bias remains to the upside keeping our target of 3300 on the S&P 500 in place. This is particularly the case as we head further into the seasonally strong period combined with an election year cycle.
As shown in the chart below, the breakout to all-time highs was substantial, and regardless of your bias, this was a “bullish” advance and suggests higher prices in the short-term.
However, nothing travels in a straight line, and given the exceedingly overbought condition which currently exists, as we discussed previously, is why we hedged our portfolios. To wit:
“With the Fed engaged in pumping liquidity into the markets, and any day may also include a random market manipulation from a ‘Trump tweet,’ the most opportunistic method to hedge risk is to add a ‘short S&P 500’ index position to the portfolio.”
We currently still maintain our hedge at the moment.
Our short-term concern remains Trump’s “trade deal” dealings. The Chinese are stringing him along, now with calls for more meetings, even as he signs a bill which will directly infuriate the Chinese Government over their dealings with Hong Kong.
“China is out for “China’s” best interest and will not acquiesce to any deal which derails their long-term plans. In the short-term, they may ‘play the game’ to get what they need as a country, but in the long-run, they will protect their own interests.
The pressure is on the Trump Administration to conclude a ‘deal,’ not China. Trump needs a deal done before the 2020 election cycle; AND he needs the markets and economy to be strong. If the markets and economy weaken because of tariffs, which are a tax on domestic consumers and corporate profits, as they did in 2018, the risk of electoral losses rise.”
There is a lot of room for disappointment over “trade” with respect to the markets.
Trump continues to delay
The Chinese “push back” over Hong Kong, or
Trump reignites, or just fails to delay, tariffs.
The market will likely not respond kindly to any of these disappointments as invetors have already priced in the most optimistic of outcomes.
Recession Risk Isn’t Gone
With the Fed once again engaged in QE, each “dip is bought” as “FOMO” continues to prevail. As the markets push higher, investors now believe the risk of recession is now gone.
However, as I have noted previously, there is a vast difference between today and 2009 when the Fed first launched QE-1 namely trailing valuations were 13x versus 30x currently. Also, pretty much every other metric is reversed as well.
If the market fell into a recession tomorrow, the Fed would be starting with roughly a $4 Trillion balance sheet with interest rates 2% lower than they were in 2009. In other words, the ability of the Fed to ‘bailout’ the markets today, is much more limited than it was in 2008.
However, there is more to the story than just the Fed’s balance sheet and funds rate. The entire backdrop is completely reversed. The table below compares a variety of financial and economic factors from 2009 to the present.”
“The critical point here is that QE and rate reductions have the MOST effect when the economy, markets, and investors have been ‘blown out,’ deviations from the ‘norm’ are extended, and confidence is exceedingly negative.
In other words, there is nowhere to go but up.”
While such does not mean the market will crash tomorrow, next quarter, or next year, it does suggest that forward returns are likely going to become much harder to come by.
This is a point being dismissed by investors in the rush to chase markets higher. As we showed last week, investor sentiment swung from very “bearish” to “exceedingly bullish” in just a few short weeks.
“Enjoy it while it lasts, but think of how artificial it all really is and how to prepare yourself, at these lofty price levels, for the reversal that is as inevitable as night following day and vice versa. The stock market surely remains on wheels and is being driven by concentrated gains in certain large-cap names and a major shift in economic sentiment, with views that a ‘phase one’ trade agreement is coming our way soon.”
The problem is that there is not a “major shift” coming for the economy, at least not yet, as shown by the readings from our Economic Output Composite Index (EOCI).
There are a couple of important points to note in this very long-term chart.
Economic contractions tend to reverse fairly frequently from high peaks and those contractions tend to revert towards the 30-reading on the chart. Recessions are always present with sustained readings below the 30-level.
The financial markets generally correct in price as weaker economic data weighs on market outlooks.
Currently, the EOCI index suggests there is more contraction to come in the coming months, which will likely weigh on asset prices as earnings estimates and outlooks are ratcheted down heading into 2020.
Again, this is a long-term indicator, but currently, the deviation between stock prices and economic growth is somewhat concerning. Throughout history, stock prices always, without exception, have “caught down” to the economic data and not vice-versa.
Furthermore, as we noted for our RIAPro Subscribers on Friday in our daily market commentary:
“The chart below shows that the year over year change in continued claims (new and old claims), turned positive for the first time in this economic expansion. Positive readings have preceded all prior recessions since at least 1970, but it’s not a full-proof indicator as there have been a number of false signals.”
Furthermore:
“Leading Economic Indicators rose 0.3% year over year, which is the slowest rate of growth in a decade. The last 5 times the index went from positive to negative growth on a year over year basis resulted in four recessions (2008, 2001, 1990, and 1981) and one false signal (1996). On a monthly the basis the indicator was negative for the third month in a row. Since the data was first calculated in 1959, three consecutive monthly declines occurred 11 times and 7 of those 11, were followed by a recession within 6 months. Needless to say, this indicator is flashing a warning sign.”
If we overlay the 6-month average of the Leading Economic Index with our EOCI index we see clear warnings of potential recession risks heading into 2020.
The point here is that “risk” remains elevated, and when that “risk” is combined with investor “exuberance,” poor outcomes tend to occur. By the way, it’s not just individuals who are overly exuberant, but professionals as well. As David concluded:
“In barely more than a month, we have seen portfolio managers move from their highest cash levels and recession concerns in a decade to downright exuberance. The just-released [Bank of America Merrill Lynch] survey of institutional investors showed the biggest improvement in economic growth expectations in the year ahead since the poll began in 1994.”
This is purely “FOMO,” in action.
Where Does This Leave Our Hedges?
As noted last week, we hedged our long-equity positions with a short-market hedge. This was done in anticipation of a short-term correction due solely to the more extreme overbought technical conditions.
The correction this past week is likely not yet complete. Our short-term trading indicators are NOT oversold, but it is worth noting they are not as overbought as they were. This suggests the market could certainly muster a post-Thanksgiving rally.
Looking ahead, a subsequent pre-Christmas correction remains likely, particularly as the market drifts between one “trade deal” tweet, to the next.
For now, we continue to maintain our hedges as all of our indicators are still suggestive of a short-term reversal.
Longer-term, a deeper correction remains likely, particularly as we head into 2020. If economic and earnings data don’t begin to improve markedly, as currently expected by Wall Street, the current overvaluation of asset price is going to become more problematic to justify.
As Central Banks Spark Trading Floor Chaos, Women Are Placing The Blame On Gender Discrimination
As Central Banks have made a mockery out of trading floors worldwide, the blame of course winds up squarely on…
…gender discrimination?
That’s right: women are starting to desert the trading floor at banks, blaming “bias” and “microaggressions” as reasons for leaving their jobs as traders, according to Bloomberg. The outlet recently profiled women like Camilla Sutton, who left her job because she was often the only woman at top level meetings. She left her job as a trader to work for a company that aims to improve gender diversity.
Sutton said:
“Very senior women in the industry are going to be the only woman at the table at every table they’re sitting at. It becomes very tiring and exhausting for women who are at senior levels within the industry to continually be faced with the everyday microaggressions.”
Perhaps someone should tell her that women can’t break through the glass ceiling if they keep resigning after making it to higher level jobs – but, we digress…
Camilla Sutton
Other woman have complaints, too. Chau Pham, a former Morgan Stanley vice president in foreign-exchange sales, said she was fired without explanation 22 days after coming back from maternity leave. Stacey Macken, a broker, recently won a lawsuit against BNP Paribas after claiming she was paid less than male colleagues. On one occasion, she found a witch’s hat on her desk.
Was it halloween?
But, according to the article, current and former traders still say it is a tough industry for women due to the “daily grind” that wears them down – this includes being “interrupted constantly in meetings, getting short shrift in pay or working without female role models.”
Banks, meanwhile, continue to say that they are striving to hire and promote women. None of the 10 investment banks has a woman running currencies trading currently.
Meg Browne is another defector, having previously worked in foreign exchange for 30 years. She began her career as a trader for the New York Fed and then went on to HSBC and Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. She said she once went with her colleagues to a strip club in the 1990’s because “because I didn’t know how else to network with my bosses.”
“My worry is that things have not changed. It’s just more hidden,” she commented.
Other women in the industry say they were pushed toward sales, instead of trading, when they started. A fourth woman said she left forex traduing after taking a new role and being “bullied and undermined” by her boss.
She said: “I had a very hard experience. I never quite recovered from it.”
In the U.K., women make up more than 57% of the bottom pay quartile in finance and insurance and just over 30% of the top pay quartile. HSBC’s gap widened the second year it was required to report these numbers.
Sutton now works for “Women in Capital Markets”, which is a group aiming to accelerate gender diversity in the Canadian finance industry. She said that when she started in currencies, there were many women at junior levels of companies, all of whom disappeared.
Sutton said: “All of a sudden you put your head up and look around and go ‘Oh my gosh, where did all the women go? The days of a stripper walking onto a trade floor are completely behind us. There isn’t anything as obvious as that. What we face now are these somewhat subtle biases that are built into every single day.”
Catherine Flax was featured in a Bloomberg story three years ago about the rise of female currency traders. Now, she works as a management consultant, board member and adviser for “various organizations”. She wants banks to offer more “flexible ways of working” when it comes to hours.
We wonder if anyone ever told her that if you’re going to be a trader, you’re likely going to be at the behest of what time the markets are open…
Catherine Flax
Still, banks like JP Morgan say they are doing more to attract women, including setting up internal programs aimed at attracting female talent. JP Morgan had a female co-head of currency trading until March.
Goldman Sachs says it aims to make women 50% of its incoming analysts and has set up onsite childcare centers around the world that open at the start of the trading day.
Bank of America has a female head of global G10 FX options trading and a spokesman for the woman said that the company’s management team is more than 54% women and/or people of color.
In fact, females are in such demand that recruitment specialist Richard Hoar says they put headcount aside just to snap up any and all senior women as soon as they become available.
Yield-starved banks expanded lending to “relatively high-risk businesses” and to the property sector, as the Bundesbank considers house prices in many cities overvalued by 15% to 30%.
The “risks to financial stability have continued to build up in Germany,” the Bundesbank warns in its Financial Stability Report, published this week. One major risk highlighted by the central bank is that Germany’s current economic slowdown — the result largely of “unfavourable external economic developments” — could turn into an “unexpected economic downturn”.
The country’s export-led economy has barely grown in the last five quarters as global trade has slowed. If the situation gets much worse, it could trigger a “deterioration in the debt sustainability of enterprises and households,” which in turn could lead to cascading loan defaults and credit write-downs.
Many yield-starved banks have significantly expanded their lending to “relatively high-risk businesses” while simultaneously reducing their provisions against losses on lending. As the Bundesbank puts it, “there are signs that banks’ lending portfolios now include a higher share of enterprises whose credit ratings could deteriorate the most in the event of an economic downturn.”
The banks are also heavily exposed to the fast-growing domestic real estate market, one of the few in Europe to have avoided a slump in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Since then, prices have surged as investors, domestic and foreign, have poured funds into real estate, and banks have shifted their focus toward property transactions.
Last year alone, house prices in Germany grew at an average rate of 8%. The Bundesbank estimates that property prices in German towns and cities are overvalued by between 15% and 30%. According to the 2019 Global Real Estate Bubble Index, housing in Munich is now the most overpriced in the world.
If the economy’s slowdown turns into a downturn, as the Bundesbank fears, Germany’s property boom could turn to bust, leaving investors, banks and developers shouldering large losses. Yet for now, surveys suggest that both households and lenders expect prices to continue rising long into the future. As the central bank notes, even as Germany’s macroeconomic situation deteriorates, the persistently low interest rates not only help to mask that reality, they provide ideal conditions for the financial vulnerabilities to grow further.
Moody’s picked up the cue and has downgraded its outlook for German lenders from “stable” to “negative” as profitability and creditworthiness deteriorate in a negative interest rate environment. Its report, published on Thursday, warned that the already weak profitability of German banks will decline further over the next 12 to 18 months.
“Banks’ weak profitability will decline further as net interest income falls,” the report said. German banks have been dogged by low levels of profitability. As of 2018, banks in the country had an average return on equity (ROE) of just 2.4%, the second lowest level in the EU after Greece and sharply lower than the EU average (6.1%).
There are two main things that set Germany’s banking system apart from the rest of the EU:
Its two biggest banks are struggling. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, has notched up multiple quarters of heavy losses, has lost over 90% of its market value since 2007, and has faced numerous criminal investigations. Germany’s second largest lender, Commerzbank, was bailed out in the last crisis, is still partly state owned, and has seen its shares plunge in value by over 98% since 2007.
Germany is teeming with over a thousand unlisted savings banks and cooperative banks, which collectively account for over half of the banking system. These banks tend to be small, local and normally lend for productive purposes. Thanks to their prevalence, competition in Germany’s banking sector is more intense than in most other large developed economies, which translates into lower margins and profits. Many of these smaller lenders have borne the brunt of the ECB’s negative interest rate policy, which is as unpopular among the banks as it is among the country’s savers.
Even as the ECB pushed its deposit rate below zero, and as many bond yields have turned negative, customer deposits in Germany have continued to grow as most investors continue to shun equity investments. This has heaped yet further pressure on the banks’ already slender interest margins.
“Traditional commercial banks and in particular deposit-funded institutions will struggle to out-earn their costs in the continuing low interest rate environment, even though loan-loss provisions are unsustainably low,” Moody’s said. Even the ECB warned this week that falling bank profitability resulting from negative interest rates, which it itself is responsible for, poses one of the biggest threats to economic growth and financial stability in the region.
While many of Germany’s larger banks have passed on the cost of negative interest rates to their corporate clients, small banks, long accustomed to making money on the spread between the interest rate they pay on deposits and other funding sources, and the interest rate they charge on loans, realize that most of their retail customers won’t accept negative interest rates on their deposits. Rather than paying for depositing their funds or savings, those customers will yank their money out and put it elsewhere.
One tiny cooperative bank near Munich, Volksbank Furstenfeldbruck, took the leap this past week and became the first German lender to pass on the cost of negative interest rates to new retail customers with small deposits.
Meanwhile, the German government, in a bid to placate the country’s legions of long-suffering and increasingly irate savers, has even threatened to outlaw negative deposit rates altogether.
Trump Officials Meet With ‘Strongman’ Haftar’s Political Team In Major Libya Shift
Starting last April President Trump caught many in his own administration off guard when he unexpectedly thanked renegade General Khalifa Haftar for “securing Libya’s oil resources” at a moment the rebel leader assaulted the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli.
The public praise and phone call between Trump and the former CIA-backed warlord was a shock at the time given the US has maintained a policy of only recognizing the GNA in line with UN allies.
But now that continued recognition appears to be shifting fast after this week Trump admin officials held multiple meetings with an official representing Haftar’s political team named Aref al-Nayed, expected to hold a top leadership position once Tripoli is ‘liberated’ by Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA).
Khalifa Haftar, center, leader of the Libyan National Army, also holds American citizenship and is believed to be a longtime CIA asset, via AFP/Getty.
Revelation of the high level meetings has renewed speculation and confusion over the future of Washington policy in Libya, and if its priorities will shift to more open support of Haftar’s LNA, responsible for a renewed grinding civil war of the past two years which by this past summer had killed at least 1,000.
In two meetings with National Security Council officials in Washington this fall, Aref al Nayed, an Islamic scholar and former ambassador to the UAE, has pitched himself as a transitional political leader for Libya after Hifter, the military commander, “liberates” Tripoli, according to documents provided by Nayed and multiple sources with knowledge of the meetings.
And the report offers more on Nayed:
Nayed, who has previously announced that he is running for president of Libya, fiercely condemns the UN-backed GNA and portrays himself as a consensus choice who will be able to bring together Libya’s tribal factions under a so-called “National Unity Government.” NSC officials were “noncommittal” to Nayed’s proposal, according to a former senior U.S. official familiar with the meetings.
Despite the NSC saying’s it remains “noncommittal” it’s highly unusual for such a meeting to take place, tantamount to meeting with a rebel “opposition” group at a moment it’s trying to topple a US-recognized government.
The UAE’s front men in Libya are laying siege to the capital of Tripoli.
Aref Al-Nayed (left) UAE’s Bin Zayed (center) and Khalifa Haftar (right). Source: Libyan Express
Both Haftar and Nayed have the close support of the UAE, among the main weapons providers to the LNA forces.
It’s as yet unclear what other support from the US pro-Haftar forces have already received beyond the politically supportive statements issued by Trump last Spring.
As for Haftar, he’s long been described by many analysts as “the CIA’s man in Libya”— given he spent a couple decades living in exile a mere few minutes from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia during Gaddafi’s rule.
HM Opposition wants to increase day-to-day government spending by a massive £82.9bn a year, about 4pc of GDP – all of it funded by extra taxation. That’s almost double what was promised ahead of the 2017 election, when Labour pledged £48.6bn of extra annual spending.
An additional £55bn a year will go towards investment, another 3pc or so of GDP on green energy infrastructure, more council houses and other forms of capital spending. That will be financed by additional borrowing.
The £80bn-plus of extra taxation “won’t hit ordinary people”, says Labour, coming entirely from higher taxes on the City, other companies and those earning over £80,000.
On top of the figures above, the manifesto outlines a £400bn “national transformation fund”, which would “add to the government’s debt” but isn’t in the headline figures.
“That’s simply not credible,” says Paul Johnson, of the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Having presented the 1983 manifesto, Michael Foot ended up delivering Labour’s worst election result since the end of the First World War – resulting in his resignation and the Labour party splitting.
With three weeks to go until polling day, the Guardian spoke to candidates and officials in more than a dozen Labour-held constituencies.
One Labour candidate hoping to retain their seat in the West Midlands was extremely gloomy about their prospects, saying it “feels worse than last time”.
“It’s much more about Corbyn than Brexit,” they said. “I have people who are down as Labour supporters saying they won’t come out for me because of him. ”
Canvassers had detected a sharp gender and age divide. “Women and younger voters seem to be staying with us, and older men are more angry,” said another candidate.
Another candidate in a leave seat, who did not wish to be named, said he feared he would be hunting for a job after 13 December. “They don’t like Jeremy Corbyn and they don’t like our Brexit stance,” he said.
A colleague in a northern seat being heavily targeted by the Tories said it was “far too early to tell” and she was optimistic that the polls would narrow like last time. “I thought I was going to lose then, and I hung on. So let’s see if history repeats itself this time.”
Looking Like a Tory Blowout and Complete Collapse of Labour
Eurostat have released an interesting forecast about how long a person can expect to be active in the European labour market during his or her life. The data is measured in years and it’s based on someone who was 15-years-old in 2018.
On average, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy details, the expected duration of working life in the European Union was 36.2 years – 3.3 years longer than in 2000. In individual member states, it ranges from 31.8 years in Italy to 41.9 years in Sweden.
The critics of President Trump’s Iran policy have been proven wrong: the US sanctions are imposing significant pressure on the ruling mullahs of Iran and the ability to fund their terror groups.
Before the US Department of Treasury leveled secondary sanctions against Iran’s oil and gas sectors, Tehran was exporting over two million barrel a day of oil. Currently, Tehran’s oil export has gone down to less than 200,000 barrel a day, which represents a decline of roughly 90% in Iran’s oil exports.
Iran has the second-largest natural gas reserves and the fourth-largest proven crude oil reserves in the world, and the sale of these resources account for more than 80 percent of its export revenues. The Islamic Republic therefore historically depends heavily on oil revenues to fund its military adventurism in the region and sponsor militias and terror groups. Iran’s presented budget in 2019 was nearly $41 billion, while the regime was expecting to generate approximately $21 billion of it from oil revenues. This means that approximately half of Iran’s government revenue comes from exporting oil to other nations.
Even though Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, boasts about the country’s self-sufficient economy, several of Iran’s leaders recently admitted the dire economic situation that the government is facing. Speaking in the city of Kerman on November 12, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani acknowledged for the first time that “Iran is experiencing one of its hardest years since the 1979 Islamic revolution” and that “the country’s situation is not normal.”
“Although we have some other incomes, the only revenue that can keep the country going is the oil money. We have never had so many problems in selling oil. We never had so many problems in keeping our oil tanker fleet sailing…. How can we run the affairs of the country when we have problems with selling our oil?”
Thanks to the US policy of “maximum pressure,” the Islamic Republic’s overall economy has taken a major beating as well. Lately, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has again adjusted its forecast for Iran’s economy and pointed out that Iran’s economy is expected to shrink by 9.5% rather than 6% by the end of 2019.
One of the reasons behind IMF’s gloomy picture of Iran’s economy is linked to the Trump administration’s decision not to extend its waiver for Iran’s eight biggest oil buyers; China, India, Greece, Italy, Taiwan, Japan, Turkey and South Korea. Instead of showing economic growth in 2019, Iran’s economy would be 90% of its size by the end of 2019 in comparison to two years ago, based on a recent report from the World Bank.
Iran’s national currency, the rial, also continues to lose value: it dropped to historic lows. One US dollar, which equaled approximately 35,000 rials in November 2017, now buys you nearly 110,000 rials.
In addition, the Islamic Republic appears to be scrambling to compensate for the loss of revenues it is encountering. A few days ago, for example, Iran’s leaders tripled the price of gasoline. It appears a sign of desperation to generate revenues in order to fund their military adventurism in the region and support their proxies and terror groups.
This increase immediately led people to rise up against the government. In the last few days, several Iranian cities have become the scenes of widespread protests and demonstrations. The protests first erupted in Ahvaz and then spread to many other cities in the Khuzestan province as well as in the capital Tehran, and Kermanshah, Isfahan, Tabriz, Karadj, Shiraz, Yazd, Boushehr, Sari, Khorramshahr, Andimeshk, Dezful, Behbahan and Mahshahr.
Tehran’s diminishing resources have also caused Iranian leaders to cut funds to the Palestinian terror group Hamas and the Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah. Hamas was forced to introduce “austerity plans” while Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, has also called on his group’s fundraising arm “to provide the opportunity for jihad with money and also to help with this ongoing battle.”
To the likely dismay of Washington’s critics, President Trump’s Iran policy has been heading in the right direction. By escalating economic sanctions, the ruling mullahs and their proxies are going bankrupt. Other nations now need to join the US by also adopting a “maximum pressure” policy — even if they would rather continue to do business with Iran and undermine President Trump’s administration — to them, a “twofer”. If Iran succeeds in developing its nuclear weapons breakout capability, in the end it will be used to blackmail precisely them.
Ukraine, Trump, & Biden – The Real Story Behind “Ukrainegate”
Authored by Eric Zuesse,
Since this news-report is going to be especially harsh regarding today’s Democratic Party in the United States, readers should be aware that until that Party nominated Hillary Clinton in 2016, this writer was, and consistently voted as, a Democrat, and that I have never been, and never could be, a Republican. In no way does this article reflect a Republican viewpoint. It is not partisan — not favoring one person’s viewpoint over any other’s. (Though it does favor trustworthy evidence over untrustworthy hearsay and witnesses, etc.) This article is written by a consistent progressive, which means a person whose top value is truth, nothing else than 100% honesty and reflecting only personally verified sources, real facts. Intense care has therefore been taken in checking and cross-checking and validating information before accepting here anything as constituting information instead of as being disinformation (which is sadly rampant). The following article is written only because it reports what my own independent researches have found to be the actual case regarding what is now commonly called “Ukrainegate” (the focus of the impeachment-proceedings against U.S. President Donald Trump).
PART ONE: TRUMP’S 25 JULY 2019 PHONE-CALL TO ZELENSKY
The ‘news’-media and the Democrats have been grossly misrepresenting what the “Ukrainegate” narrative and the impeachment proceedings against the current U.S. President are all about; and, as a result of this widespread misinformation, ABC News headlined on November 18th, “70% of Americans say Trump’s actions tied to Ukraine were wrong: POLL”, and reported that “32%, say they made up their minds about impeaching the president before the news broke about Trump’s July phone-call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which Trump urged his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.” This poll found that 100% of the 506 scientifically sampled respondents had heard at least some of the impeachment hearings, and that 51% of them agreed with the statement, “President Trump’s actions were wrong and he should be impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate,” while 6% agreed instead with “President Trump’s actions were wrong and he should be impeached by the House but NOT removed from office by the Senate.” 25% agreed instead with “President Trump’s actions were NOT wrong.”
However, far more was actually involved in this phone-call than allegations against the Bidens; and those allegations regarding the Bidens have themselves been grossly misrepresented in the press, as this article will show, and will document in its links to the actual and most trustworthy evidence in the case. (Of course, the very best evidence is the call itself, and that will therefore be the first thing linked to and discussed here.)
Furthermore, the American public should have been far more skeptical about the Ukrainegate narrative than they were, because, at first, Democrats were trying to use, as their ground on which to impeach Trump — and thereby to install the current Vice President Mike Pence as being America’s President — Trump’s having colluded with Russia in order to win the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, but that effort failed because it was false and was based on highly questionable evidence, supplied largely through a firm, Crowdstrike, that the Democratic National Committee had hired in order to find dirt against then-candidate and now-President Trump. Now the Democrats’ ground, for replacing President Donald Trump by his Vice President Mike Pence, is that in Trump’s 25 July 2019 phone-call to Ukraine’s new President Volodmyr Zelensky, Trump supposedly pressured Zelensky to have Joe Biden investigated.
One of the first signs of a liar is that the person switches his story — changes to a new and different reason for ‘justifying’ his actions (in this case, impeachment) — and this clearly is being done now by the Democrats and the ‘news’-media, in order to replace President Donald Trump by his Vice President Mike Pence. Consequently: Americans are insufficiently suspicious against the present impeachment hearings. Americans need to examine carefully beyond the mere surface — much deeper. The links here are provided in order to facilitate the reader’s direct access to the highest quality (i.e., most trustworthy) evidence in the case, so that the reader may see, on one’s own, what the ‘news’-media do not report.
25 September 2019 was when a clear and copyable version of the transcript of that complete July 25th phone conversation finally became published, online, by Rhode Island’s Providence Journal; and here is the only passage in the complete transcript where Trump mentioned Biden (three times, in fact — the only three times that the word “Biden” appears in the entire transcript):
Rudy [Giuliani] very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him, that would be great. The former ambassador [to Ukraine] from the United States, the woman [Marie Yovanovitch], was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the [U.S.] Attorney General [William Barr] would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.
What “prosecution,” of whom, for what, and why? The media ignore those questions. when they aren’t simply assuming an answer to them. But no such answer ought to be assumed. Nor should these important questions be ignored. Here, the answers to those questions will be documented.
Furthermore, elsewhere in that conversation, Trump said:
I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike. I guess you have one of your wealthy people. The server, they say Ukraine has it.
Zelensky responded by asserting that “the next prosecutor general [in Ukraine] will be 100% my person” and that “he or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company [Crowdstrike] that you mentioned in this issue.” Nothing at all was said by Zelensky about any Biden, at any point in the entire phone-call. It wasn’t mainly about the Bidens such as the press alleges to be the case.
In fact: the “favor” that Trump was asking about wasn’t concerning the Bidens, but it instead concerned the investigation that Trump’s Attorney General (referenced here when Trump said “whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great”) is now heading, into the question of why Obama’s FBI and entire intelligence community had proceeded with the highly suspect Christopher Steele and Crowdstrike report that the Democratic National Committee had hired under Obama in order to come up with allegations to use against Trump, and why the Obama Administration never demanded to inspect the DNC’s own server in order to examine the key physical evidence in the alleged Russiagate case against Trump — much less, what testimony and evidence Julian Assange might have in the alleged Russiagate case. What did Trump mean when he said “The server, they say Ukraine has it”? Did Trump actually think that Zelensky could supply that physical evidence? What did he mean? What was he asking of Zelensky when Trump said, “The server, they say Ukraine has it”?
One can’t understand the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump unless one understands accurately what was happening in Ukraine and what the motivations were of the persons who were involved in U.S.-Ukraine policy, first under U.S. President Barack Obama, and then under his successor Donald Trump. Information will be presented here, about those matters, which probably won’t come up in the House impeachment hearings. These matters are likelier to be publicly discussed afterward, when the case goes to the Senate, but might be too ‘sensitive’ to be brought up even there — especially if they make both Democratic and Republican officials look bad, such as, for example, if both Democrats and Republicans had participated in a February 2014 coup against, and overthrowing, Ukraine’s democratically elected Government, and — if that happened, as we will show it did — how this fact might affect Trump’s relationship with Zelensky. So: a lot is to be shown here, and this will be information that the ‘news’-media have been hiding from the public, not reporting to the public.
There are many instances of U.S. coups that the Government lied about and that afterward had negative blowback. The 1953 U.S. coup against Iran’s democratically elected Government wasn’t revealed to the American public until decades after it had happened. It had long been alleged to have been a ‘democratic revolution’ in Iran. Our Government and media have been lying to us for a long time, and not only about ‘WMD in Iraq’. We shall be documenting here that that 1953 coup in Iran (and other similar instances by the U.S. Government) is being repeated (yet again) in the case of the February 2014 U.S. coup that occurred in Ukraine. The regime is very effective at lying, at deceiving, at manipulating, its public, no less now than it was then. Without understanding the reality of Obama’s coup in Ukraine, there is no way of honestly explaining Ukrainegate. The 1953 Iran coup produced, as blowback, the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Obama’s 2014 coup in Ukraine likewise is having its blowbacks, but of different types.
PART TWO: TRUMP’S PURPOSE IN THE 25 JULY 2019 CALL TO ZELENSKY
The argument to be presented here is that Trump, in this phone-call, and generally, was trying not only to obtain help with evidence-gathering in the “Crowdstrike” matter (which A.G. Barr is now investigating, and which also is the reason why Trump specifically mentioned “Crowdstrike” at the only instance in the phone-call where he was requesting a “favor” from Zelensky), but to change the policy toward Ukraine that had been established by Obama (via Obama’s coup and its aftermath). This is a fact, which will be documented here. Far more than politics was involved here; ideology was actually very much involved. Trump was considering a basic change in U.S. foreign policies. He was considering to replace policies that had been established under, and personnel who had been appointed by, his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama. Democrats are extremely opposed to any such changes. This is one of the reasons for the renewed impeachment-effort by Democrats. They don’t want to let go of Obama’s worst policies. But changing U.S. foreign policy is within a President’s Constitutional authority to do.
Trump fired the flaming neoconservative John Bolton on 10 September 2019. This culminated a growing rejection by Trump of neoconservatism — something that he had never thought much about but had largely continued from the Obama Administration, which invaded and destroyed Libya in 2011, Syria in 2012-, Yemen in 2015-, and more — possibly out-doing even George W. Bush, who likewise was a flaming neocon. Trump’s gradual turn away from neoconservatism wasn’t just political; it was instead a reflection, on his part, that maybe, just maybe, he had actually been wrong and needed to change his foreign policies, in some important ways. (He evidently still hasn’t yet figured out precisely what those changes should be.)
For example, on 15 November 2019, the impeachment focus was on the testimony of Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump had recently (in May 2019) fired as the Ambassador to Ukraine. Democrats presented her as having been the paradigm of professionalism and nonpartisanship in America’s foreign service. She was actually a neoconservative who had been appointed as an Ambassador first by President George W. Bush on 20 November 2004, after her having received an M.S. from the National War College in 2001. Obama appointed her, on 18 May 2016, to replace Geoff Pyatt (shown and heard in this video confidentially receiving instructions from Obama’s agent controlling Ukraine-policy, Victoria Nuland) as the Ambassador to Ukraine. Obama had selected Yovanovitch because he knew that (just like Pyatt) she supported his polices regarding Ukraine and would adhere to his instructions. Yovanovitch was part of Obama’s team, just as she had previously been part of George W. Bush’s team. All three of them were staunch neoconservatives, just as Ambassador Pyatt had been, and just as Victoria Nuland had been, and just as Joe Biden had been.
A neoconservative believes in the rightfulness of American empire over this entire planet, even over the borders of the other nuclear superpower, Russia. Obama’s standard phrase arguing for it was “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation”, meaning that all other nations are “dispensable.” This imperialistic belief was an extension of Yale’s ‘pacifist’ pro-Nazi America First movement, which was supported by Wall Street’s Dulles brothers in the early 1940s, and which pro-Nazi movement Trump himself has prominently praised. Unlike the progressive U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had planned the U.N. in order to be the anti-imperialist emerging first-ever global world government of nations, which would democratically set and ultimately enforce international laws of a new global federation of nations — a global democratic federation of sovereign republics — neoconservatives are U.S. imperialists, who want instead to destroy the U.N., and to extend American power over the entire world, make America not only the policeman to the world but the lawmaker for the world, and the judge jury and executioner of the world, the global dictator. The U.N. would be weakened to insignificance. This has gradually been occurring. It continued even after what had been thought to have been the 1991 end of the Cold War, and after Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his deceptive rhetoric. Yale’s John Bolton was the leading current proponent of the America First viewpoint, much more straightforward in his advocacy of it than the far wilier Obama was; and, until recently, Trump supported that unhedged advocacy for the neoconservative viewpoint: U.S. imperialism. Regarding the campaign to take over Russia, however, he no longer does — he has broken with Bolton on that central neoconservative goal, and he is trying to reverse that policy, which had been even more extreme than Obama’s policy towards Russia was (which policy had, in fact, produced the coup in Ukraine).
When the Cold War had supposedly ended in 1991, it ended actually only on the Russian side, but secretly it continued and continues on as policy on the American imperialists’ side. The neoconservative side, which controlled the U.S. Government by that time (FDR’s vision having been destroyed when Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981), has no respect whatsoever for Russia’s sovereignty over its own land, and certainly not over the land of Russia’s neighbors, such as Ukraine, which has a 1,625-mile border with Russia. Neoconservatives want U.S. missiles to be pointed at Moscow all along Russia’s border. That would be as if Russia had wanted to position Russian missiles all along Canada’s and Mexico’s borders with the U.S.; it would disgust any decent person, anywhere, but neoconservatives aren’t decent people. Neoconservatives (U.S. imperialists) seek for all of Russia’s neighbors to become part of the U.S. empire, so as to isolate Russia and then become able to gobble it up. All neoconservatives want this ultimately to happen. Their grasp for power is truly limitless. Only in the tactical issues do they differ from one-another.
In her testimony behind closed doors to Senators, on 11 October 2019, Yovanovich stated her views regarding what America’s policies toward Ukraine should be, and these were Obama’s policies, too; these views are the neoconservative outlook [and my own comments in brackets here will indicate her most egregious distortions and lies in this key passage from her]:
Because of Ukraine’s geostrategic position bordering Russia on its east, the warm waters of the oil-rich Black Sea to its south, and four NATO allies to its west, it is critical to the security of the United States [this is like saying that Mexico and Canada are crucial to the security of Russia — it’s a lie] that Ukraine remain free and democratic [meaning, to neoconservatives, under U.S. control], and that it continue to resist Russian expansionism [like Russia cares about U.S. expansionism over all of the Western Hemisphere? Really? Is that actually what this is about? It’s about extending U.S. imperialism on and across Russia’s border into Russia itself] Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea [but, actually, “Clear and convincing evidence will be presented here that, under U.S. President Barack Obama, the U.S. Government had a detailed plan, which was already active in June 2013, to take over Russia’s main naval base, which is in Sevastopol in Crimea, and to turn it into a U.S. naval base.”], its invasion of Eastern Ukraine, and its defacto control over the Sea of Azov, make clear Russia’s malign intentions towards Ukraine [not make clear Russia’s determination not to be surrounded by enemies — by U.S.-stooge regimes. For Russia to avoid that is ‘malign’, she says]. If we allow Russia’s actions to stand, we will set a precedent that the United States will regret for decades to come. So, supporting Ukraine’s integration into Europe and combating Russia’ s efforts to destabilize Ukraine [Oh, America didn’t do that destabilization?] have anchored our policy since the Ukrainian people protested on the Maidan in 2014 and demanded to be a part of Europe and live according to the rule of law [But Ukrainians before Obama’s takeover of Ukraine in February 2014 didn’t actually want to be part of the EU nor of NATO, and they considered NATO to be a threat to Ukraine. “In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean ‘protection of your country,’ 40% said it’s ‘a threat to your country’.”] That was U.S. policy when I became ambassador in August 2016 [after Obama’s successful coup there took over its media and turned Ukrainian opinion strongly against Russia], and it was reaffirmed as that policy as the policy of the current administration in early 2017. [Yes, that’s correct, finally a truthful assertion from her. When Trump first came into office, he was a neoconservative, too.]The Revolution of Dignity [you’ll see here the ‘dignity’ of it] and the Ukrainian people’s demand to end corruption forced the new Ukrainian Government to take measures to fight the rampant corruption that long permeated that country’s political and economic systems [and that still do, and perhaps more now than even before].
That’s just one example — it’s about the role of Ambassador Yovanovitch. But the focus of Ukrainegate isn’t really that. It’s not Yovanovitch. It is what Trump was trying to do, and what Joe Biden was trying to do, and what Obama had actually done. It is also about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, because this is also about contending dynasties, and not only about contending individuals. Trump isn’t certain, now, that he wants to continue being a full-fledged neoconservative, and to continue extending Obama’s neoconservative policies regarding Ukraine. So: this is largely about what those policies actually were. And here is how Joe Biden comes into the picture, because Democrats, in trying to replace President Donald Trump by a President Mike Pence, are trying to restore, actually, Barack Obama’s policy in Ukraine, a policy of which the Bidens themselves were very much Obama’s agents, and Mike Pence would be expected to continue and extend those policies. Here will be necessary to document some personal and business relationships that the U.S. news-media have consistently been hiding and even lying about, and which might not come up even in the expected subsequent Senate hearings about whether to replace Trump by Pence:
PART THREE: THE CENTRALITY OF UKRAINIAN OLIGARCH IHOR KOLOMOYSKY
The real person who was the benefactor to, and the boss of, Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, at the Ukrainian gas-exploration company Burisma Holdings, was not the person that the American press says was, Mykola Zlochevsky, who had been part of the Ukrainian Government until Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in February 2014, but it was instead Ihor Kolomoysky, who was part of the newly installed Ukrainian Government, which the Obama Administration itself had actually just installed in Ukraine (and that phone-conversation appointing Ukraine’s new leader is explained here), in what the head of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor has correctly called “the most blatant coup in history.” (Here’s more explanation of that coup which was done by Obama.)
One cannot even begin accurately to understand the impeachment proceedings against America’s current President Donald Trump (“Ukrainegate”), unless one first knows and understands accurately what the relationships were between Trump and the current Government of Ukraine, and the role that the Obama Administration had played in forming that Government (installing it), and the role that Hunter Biden had been hired to perform for his actual boss at Burisma, Kolomoysky, soon after Obama (via Obama’s agent Victoria Nuland) had installed Ukraine’s new Government.
As I had written on 28 September 2019, “In order to understand why Ukraine’s President Voldomyr Zelensky doesn’t want the dirt about Joe Biden to become public, one needs to know that Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at Burisma Holdings was, at least partly, Zelensky’s boss and benefactor until Zelensky became Ukraine’s President, and that revealing this would open up a can of worms which could place that former boss and benefactor of both men into prison at lots of places.”
That article, at the phrase “dug up in 2012,” discussed and linked to a careful 2012 study of Burisma which had actually been done in Ukraine by an investigative nonprofit (Antac) funded by America’s billionaire George Soros (who was another major funder of the 2014 Ukrainian coup, as well as of Barack Obama’s political career itself) in order to help to bring down Yanukovych. However, what this study found was not the incriminating evidence against Zlochevsky which had been hoped. It found instead that the person who owned the controlling interest in Burisma was not really the Yanukovych-supporter Mykola Zlochevsky; it was, in fact, the Ukrainian billionaire Ihor Kolomoysky, who supported Yanukovych’s overthrow. Kolomoysky, shortly after the coup, became appointed as the governor in a region of Ukraine, by the Obama Administration’s post-coup Ukrainian Government. Obama’s financial backer Soros knew, or should have known, that Zlochevsky had sold almost all of his Burisma holdings to Kolomoysky in 2011, but Obama’s Administration was nonetheless trying to get the newly installed Ukrainian Government to prosecute Zlochevsky because Zlochevsky was associated with the Ukrainian President whom Obama had just overthrown. Hunter Biden’s function was to help to protect Mr. Kolomoysky against being targeted by the newly installed Government in the anti-corruption campaign that the Obama Administration and the EU were pressing upon that new Ukrainian Government. Hunter Biden was to serve as a U.S. fixer for his new boss Kolomoysky, to deflect the anti-corruption campaign away from Kolomoysky as a target and toward Zlochevsky as a target. And Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, followed through on that, by demanding that Ukraine prosecute Zlochevsky, not Kolomoysky.
Soros isn’t really against corruption; he is against corruption by countries that he wants to take over, and that he uses the U.S. Government in order to take over.Neoconservatism is simply imperialism, which has always been the foreign-affairs ideology of aristocrats and of billionaires. (In America’s case, that includes both Democratic and Republican billionaires.) So, it’s just imperialism in America. All billionaires who care at all about international relations are imperialists; and, in America, that’s called “neoconservative.” The American issue regarding Ukraine was never actually Ukraine’s corruption. Corruption is standard and accepted throughout the U.S.-and-allied countries; but against countries they want to take over it becomes a PR point in order to win acceptance by the gulls, of their own country’s imperialism and its own associated corruption. “Our country’s corruption is acceptable, but yours is not,” is the view. That’s the standard imperialist view. Neoconservatism — imperialism anywhere, actually — is always based on lies. Imperialism, in fact, is part of nationalism, but it is excluded by patriotism; and no nationalist is a patriot. No patriot is a nationalist. Whereas a nationalist supports his country’s billionaires, a patriot supports his country’s residents — all of them, his countrymen, on a democratic basis, everyone having equal rights, not the richest of the residents having the majority or all of the rights. A nationalist is one-dollar-one-vote; a patriot is one resident one vote. The only people who are intelligently nationalist are billionaires and the agents they employ. All other nationalists are their gulls. Everyone else is a patriot. Ordinarily, there are far more gulls than patriots.
Information hasn’t yet been published regarding what Trump’s agent Rudolph Giuliani has found regarding Burisma, but the links in the present article link through to the evidence that I am aware of, and it’s evidence which contradicts what the U.S.-and-allied press have been reporting about the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine. So: this information might be what Trump’s team intend to reveal after the Democratic-Party-controlled House of Representatives indicts Trump (send to the Republican Senate a recommendation to replace him by Mike Pence as America’s President), if they will do that; but, regardless, this is what I have found, which U.S.-and-allied news-media have conspicuously been not only ignoring but blatantly contradicting — contradicting the facts that are being documented by the evidence that is presented here. Consequently, the links in this article prove the systematic lying by America’s press, regarding Ukrainegate.
After the Soros-funded Antac had discovered in 2012 that Kolomoysky ruled Burisma, the great independent Australian investigative journalist who has lived for 30 years in and reported from Moscow, John Helmer, headlined on 19 February 2015 one of his blockbuster news-reports, “THE HUNT FOR BURISMA, PART II — WHAT ROLE FOR IGOR KOLOMOISKY, WHAT LONDON MISSED, WHAT WASHINGTON DOESN’T WANT TO SEE”, and he linked there not only to Ukrainian Government records but also to UK Government records, and also to corporate records in Cyprus, Panama, and elsewhere, to document that, indeed, Kolomoysky controlled Burisma. So, all of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-reporting, which merely assumes that Zlochevsky controlled this firm when Hunter Biden became appointed to its board, are clearly false. (See this, for example, from Britain’s Guardian, two years later, on 12 April 2017, simply ignoring both the Antac report and the even-more-detailed Helmer report, and presenting Zlochevsky — Kolomoysky’s decoy — as the appropriate target to be investigated for Burisma’s alleged corruption.) So: when Joe Biden demanded that Ukraine’s Government prosecute Zlochevsky, Biden was not, as he claims he was, demanding a foreign Government to act against corruption; he was instead demanding that foreign Government (Ukraine) to carry out his own boss, Barack Obama’s, agenda, to smear as much as he could Viktor Yanukovych — the Ukrainian President whom Obama had overthrown. This isn’t to say that Yanukovych was not corrupt; every post-Soviet Ukrainian President, and probably Prime Minister too, has been corrupt. Ukraine is famous for being corrupt. But, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Zlochevsky was corrupt. However, Kolomoysky is regarded, in Ukraine, as being perhaps the most corrupt of all Ukrainians.
Perhaps Kolomoysky’s major competitor has been Victor Pinchuk, who has long been famous in Washington for donating heavily to Bill and Hillary Clintons’ causes. For example, on 11 March 2018, the independent investigative journalist Jeff Carlson, bannered “Victor Pinchuk, the Clintons & Endless Connections” and he reported that
He is the founder of Interpipe, a steel pipe manufacturer. He also owns Credit Dnipro Bank, some ferroalloy plants and a media empire.
He is married to Elena Pinchuk, the daughter of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.
Pinchuk’s been accused of profiting immensely from the purchase of state-owned assets at severely below-market prices through political favoritism.
Pinchuk used his media empire to deflect blame from his father-in-law, Kuchma, for the September 16, 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze. Kuchma was never charged but is widely believed to have ordered the murder. A series of recordings would seem to back up this assertion.
On April 4 through April 12 2016, Ukrainian Parliamentarian Olga Bielkov had four meetings – with Samuel Charap (International Institute for Strategic Studies), Liz Zentos (National Security Council), Michael Kimmage (State Dept) and David Kramer (McCain Institute).
Doug Schoen filed FARA documents showing that he was paid $40,000 a month by Victor Pinchuk (page 5) – in part to arrange these meetings.
Schoen attempted to arrange another 72 meetings with Congressmen and media (page 10). It is unknown how many meetings took place.
Schoen has worked for both Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Schoen helped Pinchuk establish ties with the Clinton Foundation. The Wall Street Journal reported how Schoen connected Pinchuk with senior Clinton State Department staffers in order to pressure former Ukrainian President Yanukovych to release Yulia Tymoshenko – a political rival of Yanukovych – from jail.
The relationship between Pinchuk and the Clintons continued.
A large network of collaborators, all connected to NATO’s PR agency the Atlantic Council, were also discussed and linked to; and, in one of the video clips, Victoria Nuland headed a panel discussion in Munich Germany at which numerous leading Democratic Party neoconservatives, and neoconservative foreign leaders, discussed how wonderful the “Deep State” is, and praised the Republican neocon John McCain, who had helped Victoria Nuland to install the fascist Government of Ukraine.
Joe Biden’s campaign for president, as well as his defence against charges of corrupt influence peddling and political collusion in the Ukraine, are being promoted in Washington by the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk through the New York lobbyist, candidate adviser and pollster, Douglas Schoen (left).
This follows several years of attempts by Pinchuk and Schoen to buy influence with Donald Trump, first as a candidate and then as president; with Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani; and with John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Adviser in 2018 and 2019. Their attempts failed.
Pinchuk has been paying Schoen more than $40,000 every month for eight years. The amount of money is substantially greater than Biden’s son Hunter Biden was paid by Pinchuk’s Ukrainian rival Igor Kolomoisky through the oil company Burisma and Rosemont Seneca Bohai, Biden’s New York front company.
Pinchuk’s message for the Democratic candidates and US media, according to Schoen’s Fox News [4] broadcast in August, is: “Stop killing your own, stop beating up on your own frontrunner, Joe Biden.”
On November 12th, the New York Times headlined “Ukraine’s President Seeks Face-to-Face Meeting With Putin” and reported that Zelensky is now sufficiently disturbed at the declining level of the EU’s and Trump Administration’s continuing support for Ukraine’s Government, so that Zelensky is desperately trying to restore friendly relations with Russia. The next day, that newspaper bannered “A Ukrainian Billionaire Fought Russia. Now He’s Ready to Embrace It.” This report said: “Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine’s most powerful figure outside government, given his role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn back toward Russia.” Kolomoysky, in other words, who had been on Obama’s team in Ukraine, no longer is on the U.S. team under Trump. A reasonable inference would be that Kolomoysky increasingly fears the possibility of being prosecuted. Continuation of the Obama plan for Ukraine seems increasingly unlikely.
Here are some crimes for which Kolomoysky might be prosecuted:
Allegedly, Kolomoysky, on 20 March 2015, brought to a board meeting of Ukraine’s gas-distribution company UkrTransNafta, of which Kolomoysky was a minority shareholder, his hired thugs armed with guns, in an unsuccessful attempt to intimidate the rest of the board to impose Kolomoysky’s choice to lead the company. Ukraine’s President, Petro Poroshenko, soon thereafter, yielded to the pressure from Ukraine’s bondholders to fire Kolomoysky as a regional governor, and then nationalized Ukraine’s biggest bank, PrivatBank, which had looted billions of dollars from depositors’ accounts and secreted the proceeds in untraceable offshore accounts, so that the bank had to be bailed out by Ukraine’s taxpayers. (Otherwise, there would have been huge riots against Poroshenko.)
Zelensky is squeezed between his funder and his public, and so dithers. For example, on 10 September 2019, the Financial Timesreported that “The IMF has warned Ukraine that backsliding on Privatbank’s nationalisation would jeopardise its $3.9bn standby programme and that officials expect Ukraine to push for recovery of the $5.5bn spent on rescuing the bank.” Stealing $5.5B is a big crime, and this was Obama’s Ukrainian Government. Will it also be Trump’s?
There are others, but those could be starters.
So, both Kolomoysky and Zelensky are evidently now considering to seek Moscow’s protection, though Kolomoysky had previously been a huge backer of, and helped to fund, killing of the Donbassers who rejected the Obama-imposed Russia-hating Ukrainian regime.
Any such prosecutions could open up, to international scrutiny, Obama’s entire Ukrainian operation. That, in turn, would expose Obama’s command-complicity in the ethnic cleansing operation, which Kolomoysky’s co-planner of the 2 May 2014 massacre inside the Odessa Trade Unions Building, Arsen Avakov, euphemistically labelled the “Anti Terrorist Operation” or “ATO,” to eliminate as many as possible of the residents in the former Donbass region of Ukraine, where over 90% of the voters had voted for Yanukovych.
PART FOUR: TRUMP’S MANY POLICY-DILEMMAS REGARDING UKRAINE
If Putin offers no helping hand to Zelensky, what will happen to Ukraine, and to Ukrainians? Might Trump finally campaign for the United States to become one of the “States Parties” to the International Criminal Court, so that Obama, Nuland, Soros, and others who had overthrown Ukraine’s democratically elected Government could be tried there? How would Trump be able to immunize himself for such crimes as his own 14 April 2018 unprovoked missile-attack against Syria? How likely is it that he would ever actually become a supporter of international law, instead of an imperialist (such as he has always been) and therefore opponent of international law? He, after all, is himself a billionaire, and no billionaire has ever fought for international law except in an instance where he benefited from it — never for international law itself. Trump isn’t likely to be the first. But here’s how it could happen:
Donald Trump has surrounded himself with neoconservatives. There’s not much distance between his policies toward Ukraine versus Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s. However, after Trump becomes impeached in the House (if that happens) and the impeachment trial starts in the Republican U.S. Senate, there will then be a perfect opportunity for Trump to embarrass the Democratic Party profoundly by exposing not only Joe Biden but Biden’s boss Obama as having caused the war in Ukraine. In order for him to do that, however, he’d also need to expose the rot of neoconservatism. Nobody in Washington does that, except, perhaps the rebelling Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard, and she’s rejected in the national polls now by the public within her own Party. Neoconservatism is the uniform foreign-policy ideology of America’s billionaires, both Republican and Democratic, and this is why Washington is virtually 100% neocon. In America, wealth certainly doesn’t trickle down, but ideology apparently does — and that’s not merely neoliberalism but also its international-affairs extension: neoconservatism. Nonetheless, if a Trump re-election ticket were Trump for President, and Gabbard for Vice President, it might be able to beat anything that the Democrats could put up against it, because Trump would then head a ticket which would remain attractive to Republicans and yet draw many independents and even the perhaps 5% of Democrats who like her. Only Sanders, if he becomes the Democratic nominee (and who is the least-neoconservative member of the U.S. Senate), would attract some of Gabbard’s supporters, but he wouldn’t be getting any money from the 607 people who mainly fund American politics. The 2020 U.S. Presidential contest could just go hog-wild. However, America’s billionaires probably won’t let that happen. Though there are only 607 of therm, they have enormous powers over the Government, far more than do all other Americans put together. The U.S. Supreme Court made it this way, such as by the 1976 Buckley decision, and the 2010 Citizens United decision.
So: while justice in this impeachment matter (and in the 2020 elections) is conceivable, it is extremely unlikely. The public are too deceived — by America’s Big-Money people.
And you know, I’ll say this to President Trump. You want to investigate Joe Biden? You want to investigate Hunter Biden? Go at it. Do it. Do it hard. Do it dirty. Do it the way you do, do it. Just don’t do it by asking a foreign leader to help you in your campaign. That’s your job, it’s not his.
My goal in these hearings is two things. One is to get an answer to Colonel Vindman’s question [“Is it improper for the President of the United States to demand a foreign government investigate a United States citizen and political opponent?”]. And the second coming out of this is for us as a Congress to return to the Ukraine policy that Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy both support, it’s not investigations, it’s the restoration of democracy in Ukraine and the resistance of Russian aggression.
He wants a return to Obama’s anti-Russian Ukraine-policy. Though Zelensky had won Ukraine’s Presidency by a record-shattering 73% because he had promised to end the war (which the U.S. had started), America’s Deep State are refusing to allow that — they want to force him to accept more U.S.-made weapons and more U.S. training of Ukraine’s troops in how to use them against its next-door neighbor Russia.
Furthermore, in some respects, Trump is even more neoconservative than Obama was. Trump single-handedly nullified Obama’s only effective and good achievement, the Iran nuclear deal. Against Iran, Trump is considerably more of a neocon than was Obama. Trump has squeezed Iranians so hard with his sanctions as to block other countries from buying from and selling to Iran; and this blockade has greatly impoverished Iranians, who now are rioting against their Government. Trump wants them to overthrow their Government. His plan might succeed. Trump’s biggest donor, Sheldon Adelson, hates Iranians, and Trump is his man. On Iran, Trump remains a super-neocon. Perhaps Adelson doesn’t require him to hate Russians too.
Furthermore, on November 17th, the same day when riots broke out in Iran against Iran’s Government, Abdullah Muradoğlu headlined in Turkey’s newspaper Yeni Safak, “Bolivia’s Morales was overthrown by a Western coup just like Iran’s Mosaddeg”, and he presented strong circumstantial evidence that that coup, too — which had occurred on November 10th — had been a U.S. operation. How could Trump criticize Obama for the coup against Ukraine when Trump’s own coup against Bolivia is in the news? America is now a two-Party fascist dictatorship. One criminal U.S. President won’t publicly expose the crimes of another criminal U.S. President who was his predecessor.
The next much-discussed witness that the Democrats brought forth to testify against Trump was America’s Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, on November 20th. Sondland was a hotels and real-estate tycoon like Trump. Prior to Trump’s becoming President, Sondland had had no experience in diplomacy. At the start of 2017, “four companies registered to Sondland donated $1 million to the Donald Trump inaugural committee”; and, then, a year later, Trump appointed him to this Ambassadorial post. Sondland evasively responded to the aggressive questioning by Senate Democrats trying to get him to say that Trump had been trying to “bribe” Zelensky. Then, the Lawfare Blog of the staunchly neoconservative Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes headlined “Gordon Sondland Accuses the President of Bribery” and Wittes asserted that “today, Amb. Gordon Sondland, testifying before the House in the ongoing impeachment inquiry, offered a crystal clear account of how President Trump engaged in bribery.” But Sondland provided no evidence except his opinion, which can be seen online at “Opening Statement before the United States House of Representatives”, when he said:
Fourth, as I testified previously, Mr. Giuliani’s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky. Mr. Giuliani demanded that Ukraine make a public statement announcing investigations of the 2016 election/DNC server and Burisma. Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the President of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the President.
I asked the President, what do you want from Ukraine? The President responded, nothing. There is no quid pro. The President repeated, no quid pro. No quid pro quo multiple times. This was a very short call. And I recall that the President was really in a bad mood. I tried hard to address Ambassador Taylor’s concerns because he is valuable and [an] effective diplomat, and I took very seriously the issues he raised. I did not want Ambassador Taylor to leave his post and generate even more turnover in the Ukraine Mission.”
The testimony of all of these people was entirely in keeping with their neoconservatism and was therefore extremely hostile toward anything but preparing Ukraine to join NATO and serve on the front line of America’s war to conquer Russia. Trump might be too stupid to understand anything about ideology or geostrategy, but only if a person accepts neoconservatism is the anger that these subordinates of his express toward him for his being viewed by them as placing other concerns (whether his own, or else America’s for withdrawing America from Obama’s war against Russia) suitable reason for Congress to force Trump out of office. Given that Trump, even in Sondland’s account, did say “The President responded, nothing. There is no quid pro. The President repeated, no quid pro. No quid pro quo multiple times,” there is nothing that’s even close to a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard which is provided by their personal feelings that Trump had a quid-pro-quo about anything regarding Ukraine — a policy of Obama’s that Trump should instead firmly have abandoned and denounced as soon as he became President. Testimony from his own enemies, whom Trump had been stupid enough to have appointed, when he hadn’t simply extended Obama’s neoconservative policies and personnel regarding Ukraine, falls far short of impeachable. But right and wrong won’t determine the outcome here anyway, because America has become a two-party, one-ideology, dictatorship.
This is what happens when billionaires control a country. It produces the type of foreign policies the country’s billionaires want, rather than what the public actually need. This is America’s Government, today. It’s drastically different than what America’s Founders had hoped. Instead of its representing the states equally with two Senators for each, and instead of representing the citizens equally, with proportional per-capita representation in the U.S. House, and instead of yet a third system of the Electoral College for choosing the Government’s Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief, it has become thoroughly corrupted to being, in effect, just one-dollar-one-vote — an aristocracy of wealth controlling the entire Government — exactly what the Founders had waged the Revolution in order to overthrow and prevent from ever recurring: a dictatorial aristocracy, as constituting our Government, today.
* * *
PS: Though I oppose almost everything that the hearings’ Ranking Minority Member, the neoconservative (and, of course, also neoliberal) Republican Devin Nunes, stands for, I close here with his superb summary of the hearings, on November 21st, in which he validly described the Democrats’ scandalously trashy Ukrainegate case against Trump (even though he refused to look deeper to the issues I raise in this article — he dealt here merely with how “shoddy” the case the Democrats had presented was):
Throughout these bizarre hearings, the Democrats have struggled to make the case that President Trump committed some impeachable offense on his phone call with Ukrainian president Zelensky. The offense itself changes depending on the day ranging from quid pro quo to extortion, to bribery, to obstruction of justice, then back to quid pro quo. It’s clear why the Democrats have been forced onto this carousel of accusations. President Trump had good reason to be wary of Ukrainian election meddling against his campaign and of widespread corruption in that country. President Zelensky, who didn’t even know aid to Ukraine had been paused at the time of the call, has repeatedly said there was nothing wrong with the conversation. The aid was resumed without the Ukrainians taking the actions they were supposedly being coerced into doing.
Aid to Ukraine under President Trump has been much more robust than it was under President Obama, thanks to the provision of Javelin anti-tank weapons. As numerous witnesses have testified, temporary holds on foreign aid occur fairly frequently for many different reasons. So how do we have an impeachable offense here when there’s no actual misdeed and no one even claiming to be a victim? The Democrats have tried to solve this dilemma with a simple slogan, “he got caught.” President Trump, we are to believe, was just about to do something wrong and getting caught was the only reason he backed down from whatever nefarious thought crime the Democrats are accusing him of almost committing.
I once again urge Americans to continue to consider the credibility of the Democrats on this Committee, who are now hurling these charges for the last three years. It’s not president Trump who got caught, it’s the Democrats who got caught. They got caught falsely claiming they had more than circumstantial evidence that Trump colluded with Russians to hack the 2016 election. They got caught orchestrating this entire farce with the whistleblower and lying about their secret meetings with him. They got caught defending the false allegations of the Steele dossier, which was paid for by them. They got caught breaking their promise that impeachment would only go forward with bipartisan support because of how damaging it is to the American people.
They got caught running a sham impeachment process between secret depositions, hidden transcripts, and an unending flood of Democrat leaks to the media. They got caught trying to obtain nude photos of President Trump from Russian pranksters pretending to be Ukrainians, and they got caught covering up for Alexandra Chalupa, a Democratic National Committee operative, who colluded with Ukrainian officials to smear the Trump campaign by improperly redacting her name from deposition transcripts, and refusing to let Americans hear her testimony as a witness in these proceedings. That is the Democrats pitiful legacy in recent years. They got caught.
Meanwhile, their supposed star witness testified that he was guessing that President Trump was tying Ukrainian aid to investigations despite no one telling him that was true, and the president himself explicitly telling him the opposite, that he wanted nothing from Ukraine. Ladies and gentlemen, unless the Democrats once again scramble their kangaroo court rules, today’s hearing marks the merciful end of this spectacle in the Impeachment Committee, formerly known as the Intelligence Committee. Whether the Democrats reap the political benefit they want from this impeachment remains to be seen, but the damage they have done to this country will be long lasting. Will this wrenching attempt to overthrow the president? They have pitted Americans against one another and poison the mind of fanatics who actually believe the entire galaxy of bizarre accusations they have levelled against the president since the day the American people elected him.
I sincerely hope the Democrats in this affair [end this] as quickly as possible so our nation can begin to heal the many wounds it has inflicted on us. The people’s faith in government and their belief that their vote counts for something has been shaken. From the Russia hoax to this shoddy Ukrainian sequel, the Democrats got caught. Let’s hope they finally learn a lesson, give their conspiracy theories a rest, and focus on governing for a change. In addition, Mr. Chairman, pursuant to House Rule XI, clause 2(j)(1), the Republican members transmit a request to convene a minority day of hearings. Today you have blocked key witnesses that we have requested from testifying in this partisan impeachment inquiry. This rule was not displaced by H.Res.660, and therefore under House Rule 11 clause 1(a), it applies to the Democrats impeachment inquiry. We look forward to the chair promptly scheduling an agreed upon time for the minority day of hearings so that we can hear from key witnesses that you have continually blocked from testifying.
I’d also like to take a quick moment on an assertion Ms. Hill made in the statement that she submitted to this Committee, in which she claimed that some Committee members deny that Russia meddled in the 2016 election. As I noted in my opening statement on Wednesday, but in March, 2018, Intelligence Committee Republicans published the results of a year long investigation into Russian meddling. The 240 page report analyzed 2016 Russian meddling campaign, the US government reaction to it, Russian campaigns in other countries and provided specific recommendations to improve American election security. I would [have] asked my staff to hand these reports to our two witnesses today just so I can have a recollection of their memory. As America may or may not know, Democrats refused to sign on to the Republican report. Instead, they decided to adopt minority views, filled with collusion conspiracy theories. Needless to say, it is entirely possible for two separate nations to engage in election meddling at the same time, and Republicans believe we should take meddling seriously by all foreign countries regardless of which campaign is the target.
The latest (2019) Reuters international survey in which over 2,000 people in each one of 38 countries were asked whether they agree that “You can trust most news most of the time” shows that the United States scores #32 out of the 38, at the very top of the bottom 16% of all of the 38 countries surveyed, regarding trust in the news-media. Reuters had previously found, in their 2018 edition, that, among Americans, “those who identify on the left (49%) have almost three times as much trust in the news as those on the right (17%). The left gave their support to newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times while the right’s alienation from mainstream media has become ever more entrenched.” In the 2019 edition, what had been 49% in America rose now to 53%, and what had been 17% sank now to 9%: the billionaires’ (i.e., mainstream) media are trusted almost only by liberals here. What the media report is considered trustworthy almost only by liberals, in today’s America. By 53% to only 9% — an almost 6 to 1 ratio — the skeptics of the billionaires’ press are Republicans. Of course, if the media are distrusted, then the nation can’t be functioning as a democracy. But the media will be distrusted if they lie as much as America’s do. Untrusted ‘news’-media are a sure indication that the nation is a dictatorship (such as it is if the billionaires control the media). In America, only liberals think that America is a democracy and therefore might possess the basic qualification (democracy) to decide what nations need to be regime-changed (such as America did to Iran, Iraq, Libya, Honduras, Bolivia, and is still trying to do to Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran again, Syria, and Yemen; but not to — for examples — Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Israel); and which ones don’t (such as America’s governmentally-annointed ‘allies’, including some barbaric dictatorships). Liberals trust America’s dictatorship as if it were instead a democracy. Conservatives do not; nor, of course, do progressives. FDR’s vision, of a United Nations which would set and enforce the rules for international relations (neither the U.S. nor any other country would do that), is now even more rejected by the Democratic Party than it is by the Republican Party. And the politically topsy-turvy result is Democrats trying to impeach the Republican Trump for his trying to cut back on Obama’s imperialistic (anti-FDR) agenda. Trump, after all, didn’t do the coup to Ukraine; Obama did.
