Renowned author and journalist James Howard Kunstler thinks what has been happening for the last few years with the mainstream media’s coverage of President Trump borders on criminal activity. Kunstler explains, “What I am waiting for is if and when indictments come down from Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham…”
“I am wondering whether the editors and publishers of the Washington Post and New York Times and the producers at CNN and MSNBC are going to be named as unindicted co-conspirators in this effort to gaslight the country and really stage a coup to remove the President and to nullify the 2016 election. I say this as someone who is not necessarily a Trump supporter. I didn’t vote for the guy. I am not a cheerleader for the guy, but basically I think the behavior of his antagonists has been much worse and much more dangerous for the nation and the American project as a long term matter. I really need to see some action to hold people responsible for the acts they have committed…
I am not an attorney, and I have never worked for the Department of Justice, but it seems to me that by naming the publishers and editors of these companies as unindicted co-conspirators that allows you to avoid the appearance of trying to shut down the press because you are not going to put them in jail, but you are going to put them in disrupt. That may prompt their boards of directors to fire a few people and maybe change the way they do business at these places.”
Kunstler says things look unlike anything we have seen in the past because we are approaching a day of reckoning in our debt based monetary system. Kunstler says, “Yeah, I think you can see it happening now…”
“What seems to be resolving is some movement to some sort of a crack up of the banking system. What we are really stuck in is a situation where we’ve got too many obligations we cannot meet and too many debts that will never be repaid. We have been trying to run the country for the past 15 or 20 years on debt because we can no longer provide the kind of industrial growth that we have been used to . . . and have this massive consumer spending industry. So, we have been borrowing from the future to pay our bills today, and we are running out of our ability to borrow more…
I think we are going to lose the ability to support a lot of activities that we have been doing. It starts with energy and its relationship to banking and our ability to generate the kind of growth you need to keep rolling over debt. The reason debt will never be paid and obligations will never be met is we are not generating that sort of growth. Were just generating frauds and swindles. Frauds and swindles are fun while you are doing them and they seem to produce a lot of paper profits, but after a while, they prove to be false. Then you have to do something else. A great deal about our economy and our way of life is false and is going to fail. Then we are going to have to make other arrangements for daily life. . . .It will probably mean we will be organizing our stuff at much more of a local scale.”
On the 2020 Presidential Election, Kunstler predicts, “When all is said and done, I am not convinced there is enough there to convict President Trump of anything…”
“At the same time, there is probably going to be a lot of legal actions brought against the people who started this coup against him, and that’s going to be extremely disturbing to the Left.
I think one of the possibilities is we may not have a 2020 election. In some way or another, the country may be so disorderly that we can’t hold an election. There may be so much strife that we cannot handle the legal questions around holding the election, and it may be suspended. I don’t know what that means, but I am very impressed of the disorder that we are already in. It’s more of a kind of mental disorder between the parties, but it could turn into a lot of kinetic disorder on the ground and a lot of institutional failure.”
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with author and journalist James Howard Kunstler.
(You Tube has Demonetized this video – again. This means only long commercials play, if they play at all. (most skip long commercials) It must have some useful information in it, so, enjoy it!!)
Bill Ackman Says WeWork Is A “0”, SoftBank Should Cut Its Losses And Walk Away
How’s this for trenchant financial analysis from Bill Ackman, one of the boldest bold-faced names in the hedge fund business: SoftBank might end up writing down the entirety of its WeWork investment (including the $6 billion it just shelled out to wrest control of the firm away from Adam Neumann and his family).
Of course, that’s not exactly a cutting-edge call. WeWork’s unmatched fall from grace in August and September, which culminated with the shelving of its IPO and the collapse of a $6 billion JPM-led syndicated loan lifeline that was contingent on the offering, the company’s situation has gone from bad to worse. The company has been forced to put off a planned round of lease-signings and expansions, including possibly moving its headquarters to Manhattan’s Lord & Taylor Building, where the company holds an overpriced lease despite its former CEO owning a piece of the building. On the operations end, its business in China is bleeding capital, and the company has nearly $60 billion in long-term lease commitments, a number that is looking more daunting by the day.
But Ackman’s call arrives at a special time during the WeWork media dogpile. Ackman is only just recovering from a series of wrong-headed calls that nearly tanked his firm and career. Apparently, he thinks its finally “safe” to call WeWork a “0”, according to the FT. His LPs are no doubt watching.
And exactly how confident is Ackman? Pretty confident, he say.
“I think WeWork has a pretty high probability of being a zero for the equity, as well as for the debt,” the billionaire hedge fund manager said.
Ackman described Neumann as an amazing salesman (clearly, it takes a gifted charlatan to separate Masayoshi Son from his money), but that the company had become “enormously levered” too soon.
And speaking from experience, he warned SoftBank about continuing to throw good money after bad.
“As someone who has put good money after bad, I think this looks like putting good money after bad, and SoftBank should have walked away.”
At this point, Ackman and the others who have said SoftBank should expect to eat its entire investment are only a little more aggressive than the ratings agencies. Fitch Ratings warned on Tuesday that WeWork had “minimal headroom” to weather an economic slowdown or management misstep. SoftBank’s most recent cash infusion was “the effective minimum” the company needed to finance its existing operations and make it through a restructuring that is expected to cost 4,000 jobs.
Freedom of thought stands at a critical crossroads. Technological and psychological advances could be used to promote free thought. They could shield our inner worlds, reduce our mental biases, and create new spaces for thought. Yet states and corporations are forging these advances into weapons that restrict what we think.
To lose freedom of thought would be to lose something uniquely human. We share our basic emotions with animals. But only we can step back and ask “do I want to be angry?”, “do I want to be that person?”, “couldn’t I be better?”.
We can reflect whether the thoughts, feelings and desires that bubble up within us are consistent with our own goals, values and ideals. If we agree they are, then this makes them more truly our own. We can then act authentically.
But we may also conclude that some thoughts that pop into our heads are a force other than our own. You sit down to do your work and “Check Facebook!” flashes through your mind. Did that thought come from you or from Mark Zuckerberg?
The first threat comes from advances in psychology. Research has created new understandings of what influences our thoughts, behaviours, and decision making.
The second threat comes from the application of machine learning algorithms to “big data”. When we provide data to companies we allow them to see deep inside us. This makes us more vulnerable to manipulation, and when we realise our privacy is being compromised, this chills our ability to think freely.
The third threat comes from a growing ability to decode our thoughts from our brain activity.Facebook, Microsoft, and Neuralink are developing brain-computer interfaces. This could create machines that will read our thoughts. But creating unprecedented access to our thoughts creates unprecedented threats to our freedom.
These advances in technology and psychology are opening the doors for states and corporations to violate, manipulate, and punish our thoughts. So, what can we do about it?
We should use it to defend mental privacy. Otherwise conformity pressures will impede our free play of ideas and search for truth. We should use it to prevent our thoughts being manipulated, either through psychological tricks or through threatened punishment.
And we should use it to protect thought in all of its forms. Thought isn’t just what happens in our heads. Sometimes we think by writing or by doing a Google search. If we recognise these activities as “thought” then they should qualify for absolute privacy under the right to freedom of thought.
Finally, we should use this right to demand that governments create societies that allow us to think freely. This is where psychology can help.
We need to learn about how our minds work from an early age.
Better understanding our minds can help protect us from manipulation by others. For example, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between what we could call “rule-of-thumb” and “rule-of-reason” thinking.
Rule-of-thumb thinking involves effortless and ancient mental processes that allow us to make quick decisions. The price of this speed can be mistakes. In contrast, rule-of-reason thinking is a slow, consciously controlled process, often based in language. It takes longer, but can be more accurate.
This suggests that creating speed bumps in our thinking could help improve decision making. Clicking unthinkingly on content or adverts from corporations doesn’t allow us to exercise freedom of thought. We do not have time to work out if our desires are our own or those of a puppet master.
We must also change our environment into one that supports autonomy. Such an environment would allow us to create our own reasons for our actions, minimise external controls like rewards and punishments, and encourage choice, participation and shared decision making.
Technology can help create such an environment. But whose responsibility is it to implement this?
Taking action
Governments must help citizens learn from a young age about how the mind works. They must structure society to facilitate free thought. And they have a duty to stop those, including corporations, who would violate the right to freedom of thought.
Corporations must play their part. They should state freedom of thought as a policy commitment. They should perform due diligence on how their activities may harm freedom of thought. They could be required to declare the psychological tricks they are using to try and shape our behaviour.
And we the people must educate ourselves. We must promote and support free-thought values. We must condemn those turning one of our species’ greatest strengths, our sociality, into one of our greatest weaknesses by using it as a means of data extraction. We must vote with our feet and wallets against those who violate our freedom of thought.
All this assumes that we want freedom of thought. But do we? Many of us would literally rather electrocute ourselves than sit quietly with our thoughts.
Would many of us also prefer governments and corporations do our thinking for us, serving up predictions and nudges for us to simply follow? Would many of us be happy for freedom of thought to be limited if it led to increased security? How much do we want freedom of thought and what are we prepared to sacrifice for it?
Simply put, do we still want to be human? Or has the pain, effort and responsibility of one of our signature abilities, free thought, become too much for us to bear? If it has, it is neither clear what will become of us nor clear what we will become.
Deadspin Reporter Fired After Private-Equity Owners Ask Newsroom To “Stick To Sports”
Yesterday, the media blue-checkmark brigade threw a giant outrage party after the Gizmodo Media Group’s private-equity overlords (or whoever owns them now it’s getting really difficult to keep track) reportedly sent a memo to the Deadspin newsroom, asking them to “stick to sports” and avoid politics.
What prompted this memo? Well, earlier this week, the site’s editorial staffers published a post complaining about the new auto-play video ads being deployed across the historically money-losing suite of websites. That was followed by a tweet from the recently formed G/O Media Union encouraging readers to express their unhappiness with the ads to G/O’s PE bosses.
Needless to say, these bosses weren’t pleased, and ordered the post to be removed.
In response, the editorial team switched the featured article display on Deadspin’s website to feature only non-sports content. It was for this sin, apparently, that Petchesky was fired. He was, until today, the site’s longest-serving employee,
G/O Media has fired Deadspin’s longest-serving full-time employee, who wrote nearly 20,000 posts for the site over ten years. https://t.co/D6aLDc2xeq
For those who don’t read it, Deadspin, like the rest of the former Gawker Network sites, 100% bought in to producing “woke” content about politics, media after Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel won their legal crusade against the company, and Deadspin produced an endless of piddle of political content, often at the expense of its sports coverage.
It has been obvious for years that the site and its writers operate from squarely within the NYC-SF-DC media bubble, and it doesn’t take a genius businessman to understand that the overlap between that world, and the total addressable market for sports fans, is actually quite small. But that’s not surprising, since most of the writers ascribe to the same “woke” truisms, like the idea that Donald Trump is a reprehensible Russian spy, the number of possible genders is limitless and that businesses employing them have no right to prioritize things like profit over the whims of its reporting staff.
And not 24 hours later, yet another employee has unceremoniously departed. (though, to be fair, other recent departures, like former Deadspin EIC Megan Greenwall, quit). This time, Deadspin Editor Barry Petchesky tweeted Tuesday afternoon that he was fired for “not sticking to sports” like the bosses asked.
Hi! I’ve just been fired from Deadspin for not sticking to sports.
Deadspin and its staff have often feuded with another rival sports-media franchise: Barstool Sports. The feud has been fueled by stories like this one, criticizing Barstool’s ‘bro culture’ and accusing it of stealing content online, and claiming its “brand was built on harassing anyone who criticizes the site or just anyone who doesn’t look like fucking Dan Katz [the host of a popular Barstool podcastt].” Barstool’s founder David “El Presidente” Portnoy tweeted about the blue-checkmark’s “crying in their soup” over Petchesky’s media martyrdom on Thursday shortly after Petchesky took to twitter with the news.
Let me clarify @barry 100K per year. Full benefits. You are my butler and secretary. It’s not even hard. You just have to call my Amex black card guy and book my private planes and shit. Very easy https://t.co/hCeNI6uIKx
In response to the firing, another Deadspin reporter tweeted that the site’s new owner (and thus, her boss) was “a piece of shit.”
Let me clarify @barry 100K per year. Full benefits. You are my butler and secretary. It’s not even hard. You just have to call my Amex black card guy and book my private planes and shit. Very easy https://t.co/hCeNI6uIKx
Obviously, publicly declaring that your boss’s boss’s boss is a terrible human being for making editorial decisions that are well within his right to make – Deadspin’s staff can spare us the sanctimonious shpeil about editorial integrity and journalistic independence – probably isn’t the best career move. We imagine a full-on revolt followed by a mass exodus are at hand.
During the Senate hearing into Boeing on October 29, Senator Jon Tester told the company’s CEO Dennis Muilenburg:
“I would walk before I would get on a 737 MAX. I would walk.” He added:
“There is no way … You shouldn’t be cutting corners and I see corners being cut.”
That’s all fine and well, but the hearing, which continues today, Wednesday, lays bare a giant gap in US law: that of accountability. Muilenburg is the “ultimately responsible” in a chain of command that is responsible for killing 346 people. But he is still the CEO, even if he was demoted from the chairman of the board position. Which was taken over by another -10 year- veteran of the company by the way. Fresh insights galore.
If you are employed by a large company, you can sign off on such decisions, the ones that kill people, and walk away unscathed. It reminds one of Monsanto/Bayer, which just annnounced that the number of Roundup lawsuits against it went from 18,000 in July to 43,000 today. Bayer at the same time announced that its turnover rose by 6% in Q3. 43,000 lawsuits and they’re doing fine, thank you.
In that same vein, Boeing shares rose 2.4% last night after the hearing (“a sign investors were relieved.”) What the “investors” buying those shares may have missed is that India’s budget carrier IndiGo ordered 300 new aircraft from Airbus, at an initial cost of $33 billion -which will be subject to a juicy discount, but still-.
Now, Boeing is America’s biggest exporter. It’s also one of the cornerstones of Pentagon policy, a huge provider for the US military. So one can only expect the Senate to be lenient, to appear to be tough but let things more or less go. Still, the fact remains that Muilenburg et al made cost-cutting and other decisions that killed 346 people. But CNCB still labeled this a “brutal Senate hearing”. Yeah. Define ‘brutal’.
Maybe the thing is that those deaths were not in the US, but in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Think maybe the Senate is influenced by that? What do you think would have happened if two 737 MAX’s had fallen out of the sky in the US, even if only in deplorables’ territory? We can sort of imagine, can’t we?
And no, it’s not an all black and white picture, some people involved made some sense (via Seattle Times):
..at least one member of the Senate committee that grilled Muilenburg on Tuesday suggested the troubled aircraft shouldn’t be flying again until a much-maligned Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) oversight program retreats from its practice of delegating authority to Boeing and other aerospace manufacturers.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal — citing revelations in recent news reports of a Boeing engineer’s claims that the MAX’s safety was compromised by cost and schedule considerations, and that the company pushed to undercut regulatory oversight — pushed back against findings that the FAA’s practice of delegating more safety certification authority is only likely to increase.
“The story of Boeing sabotaging rigorous safety scrutiny is chilling to all of us — and more reason to keep the 737 MAX grounded until certification is really and truly independent and the system is reformed,” said Blumenthal, D-Conn.
But, you know, the entire narrative is about ‘the company’, not about the people in the company who make these fatal decisions. They can do whatever they want, secure in the knowledge they will never be held to account. For financial losses perhaps at some point, but not for the loss of life. At best, they’ll get fired and walk away with a huge bonus. And that’s just wrong.
And it’s not like there were no warning signs (via Seattle Times again, from Oct 3):
Seven weeks after the second fatal crash of a 737 MAX in March, a Boeing engineer submitted a scathing internal ethics complaint alleging that management — determined to keep down costs for airline customers — had blocked significant safety improvements during the jet’s development. The ethics charge, filed by 33-year-old engineer Curtis Ewbank, whose job involved studying past crashes and using that information to make new planes safer, describes how around 2014 his group presented to managers and senior executives a proposal to add various safety upgrades to the MAX.
The complaint, a copy of which was reviewed by The Seattle Times, suggests that one of the proposed systems could have potentially prevented the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people. Three of Ewbank’s former colleagues interviewed for this story concurred. The details revealed in the ethics complaint raise new questions about the culture at Boeing and whether the long-held imperative that safety must be the overarching priority was compromised on the MAX by business considerations and management’s focus on schedule and cost. Managers twice rejected adding the new system on the basis of “cost and potential (pilot) training impact,” the complaint states.
This one is from AP, Oct 18. These are just the most recent revelations, this stuff goes back years. Neither Boeing nor the FAA ever did anything, until the planes started falling from the skies:
A former senior Boeing test pilot told a co-worker that he unknowingly misled safety regulators about problems with a flight-control system that would later be implicated in two deadly crashes of the company’s 737 Max. The pilot, Mark Forkner, told another Boeing employee in 2016 that the flight system, called MCAS, was “egregious” and “running rampant” while he tested it in a flight simulator.
“So I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly),” wrote Forkner, then Boeing’s chief technical pilot for the 737. The exchange occurred as Boeing was trying to convince the Federal Aviation Administration that MCAS was safe. MCAS was designed at least in part to prevent the Max from stalling in some situations. The FAA certified the plane without fully understanding MCAS, according to a panel of international safety regulators.
Forkner also lobbied FAA to remove mention of MCAS from the operating manual and pilot training for the Max, saying the system would only operate in rare circumstances. FAA allowed Boeing to do so, and most pilots did not know about MCAS until after the first crash, which occurred in October 2018 in Indonesia.
As I covered extensively before the issue at hand is that Boeing, in order to cut costs, among other things, decided to have just one -active- “angle-of-attack” sensor (which measures the angle of the plane vs income air, it’s located at the bottom front of the fuselage) on the plane. All it takes is one bird flying into it to compromise and/or deactivate that sensor. And then neither the software not the pilots know what to do anymore. But yeah, it’s cheaper… One sensor won’t do, nor will two, you need at least three in case one is defective. But yeah, that costs money. Seattle Times once again:
Boeing’s chief engineer for commercial airlines acknowledged that the company erred by not specifically testing the potential for a key sensor to erroneously cause software on the 737 Max to drive down the plane’s nose. In both fatal crashes, faulty data from one of two angle-of-attack sensors, which measure the pitch of the plane against the oncoming stream of air, caused the 737 Max’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, to drive down the jet’s nose, which pilots struggled to counteract before ultimately entering a fatal dive.
John Hamilton, vice president and chief engineer of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, told senators that the company “did test the MCAS uncommanded inputs to the stabilizer system, due to whatever causes was driving it, not specifically due to an AOA sensor.’’ Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, the Senate Commerce Committee’s top Democrat, asked if he now thought that was wrong. “In hindsight, senator, yes,’’ Hamilton replied.
They didn’t test the hardware at all, they tested the software! And all they have to say is that that was wrong. But only in hindsight! And then they tried to fix the mess they created with a new software program, MCAS, but didn’t even tell the pilots it existed. I kid you not! They did this because it might have required pilots to do more training, which raises the price of a plane, and they were already losing out to Airbus.
And lest we forget, this all happened because when Boeing was busy spending its capital on buying back its own shares, Airbus had developed a new plane to accommodate a much more energy-efficient -though larger- engine. When Boeing figured that out, they had neither the time nor the money left (because of the share buybacks) to develop their own new plane.
So what they did was they stuck such an engine (which they did have) onto a 737 model that was not equipped for the much bigger and heavier load. That in turn lead them to work on a software solution to lift the nose of the plane despite that load, which might have worked in theory but was always a bad idea, something in the vein of putting a giraffe’s neck on a hummingbird.
But Muilenburg and his people kept pushing it all, because they knew they had been caught awfully wanting, and they needed that more cost-efficient plane. And this is how all the ensuing mess started. It was all because of money. Of the execs being caught with their pants down, and trying to hide their naked hairy asses.
And then, as I started out this essay, they are still not held accountable. The company will face billions in ‘repair’ damages, some of them may lose their jobs or bonuses, but none will be held responsible for the deaths of those 346 people.
That is just not right. Not in the case of Monsanto, and not in that of Boeing. Not all Boeing planes are disasters, but the 737 definitely is. Donald Trump a few months ago suggested they should just rebrand the plane, give it another name, do some expensive PR work and bob’s your uncle. But let me ask you, would you fly on a 737, even if under another name? Far as I know, all they did was change the software, not the hardware.
Plus, the other day some airline, was that in South Korea?!, grounded a whole bunch of 787’s because of cracks on their wings. Look, I’m not saying Boeing’s in trouble. I’m just saying Boeing’s in deep trouble. But then, you know, they’ll kick out Muilenburg and some other guys, and a few FAA heads will retire, and they’ll declare the rotten apples gone, and we’re off to a whole new start. Yay! But the 346 people will still be dead.
Nio’s CFO Unexpectedly Resigns Just Weeks After Company Makes Massive Job Cuts
Everything is just fine and dandy in the world of EVs.
As we anxiously await Tesla’s 10-Q for an explanation of the company’s “surprising” profit, competitor Nio is continuing an exceptionally dismal 2019 that has so far included shareholders being decimated and four vehicles catching fire (that we know about).
In addition to the company’s stock being down roughly about 80% since the beginning of the year, Nio unexpectedly announced on Monday that its CFO, Louis T. Hsieh, was resigning.
The company said in a press release that the CFO “tendered his resignation as chief financial officer of the Company for personal reasons, effective October 30, 2019.”
Hsieh had been with the company for a little over 2 years, joining in May of 2017.
Tesla investor Baillie Gifford is also an investor in Nio, having paid $670 million to buy more than 100 million shares of Nio in 2018 and early 2019. They are now down more than 80% mark-to-market on their Nio stake.
Recall, almost one month ago to the day, we reported that Nio was making massive cuts, slashing its global headcount by more than 20% to 7,800 by the end of the third quarter. This is down from over 9,900 in January 2019.
The company said in late September that the slashing of jobs was “in response to the overall tempered market conditions” in a statement. It also said at the time that it had implemented “comprehensive efficiency and cost control measures” as a result of market conditions.
The company also said it would pursue more restructuring, including spinning off some non-core businesses by year end.
We’re going to venture a guess and say this strategic realignment may not be going as planned…
The prepared statement of the latest UkraineGate whistle-blower is well worth the read. It tells you all you need to know about why the Deep State apparatchiks are coming out of the woodwork in a massive assault on America’s duly elected president.
They are deathly afraid Trump will begin to dismantle a far-flung Empire which has
…wreaked havoc around the world,
…bled America’s fiscal accounts dry, and
…fostered unspeakable prosperity among the beltway’s legions of empire-supporting agencies, contractors, think tanks, foreign lobbies, NGO’s and K-street racketeers.
Whether out of common sense, naiveté or just contrariness, the Donald has dared to question and disrupt the Empire’s core policy on the Ukraine/Russia file. And that’s apparently exactly why the whistleblower de jour, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, wrote his now ballyhooed memos.
He feared that Trump’s appropriate desire to get to the bottom of the well-documented Ukrainian involvement in the Obama Administration’s illegal spying on his 2016 presidential campaign would undermine the bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill for Washington’s utterly wrong-headed Ukraine policy.
Stated more crudely, Washington overthrew the duly elected government of Ukraine in early 2014 because its leader was deemed too cozy with Moscow. And in the vanguard of that illegal meddling in the governance of a sovereign foreign state was Obama’s state department led by neocon Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland, Washington’s self-appointed roving proconsul John McCain and at length Vice-President Joe Biden.
After aiding a motley phalanx of ultra-nationalists, crypto-Nazi and political fortune seekers in overthrowing President Viktor Yanukovych, Washington has stood-up what are essentially puppet governments. The purpose has been to cause maximum abrasion with Putin and Russia; and at a cost of billions in aid from the US and other western agencies designed to prop up the economic basket case and cease pool of corruption which passes for the Ukrainian economy.
The Deep State narrative turns these realities on their head, of course, claiming that the mess in Ukraine is all the doing of the demonic Vladimir Putin. Accordingly, the very safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE and Springfield MA is allegedly on the line in a territory on Russia’s doorstep, which has historically been a meandering set of borders in search of a country when it was not otherwise a willing vassal and economic adjunct of Mother Russia.
As it happens, Lt. Colonel Vindman is a vociferous partisan of Washington’s Big Lie about the Russian ogre, and was virtually a fifth column operative in the viper’s nest of neocons at the Donald’s national security council. In fact, Vindman reported to Russophobe Fiona Hill, who reported to the Walrus of Forever War himself, John Bolton.
So despite all the Democrats’ crocodile tears for the constitution and rule of law, Vindman’s beef wasn’t really about their whole abuse of power canard. Nor did it touch upon the risible Dem/MSM nonsense that in asking a foreign government to undertake a legitimate action (an investigation of the corrupt use of taxpayers money by the former Vice President) Trump was committing a violation of U.S. election laws.
To the contrary, the gravamen of the colonel’s concern was domestic politics and the possibility that in withholding the $380 million of pending Ukrainian aid (which should have been zero in the first place) and pressing the Biden investigation, Trump would alienate Capitol Hill Democrats and leave the Deep State’s policy of using the Ukraine as an anti-Putin battering ram high and dry.
“…. I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine…. “I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained.”
“This would all undermine U.S. national security. Following the call, I again reported my concerns to NSC’s lead counsel.”
Folks, Lt. Col. Vindman was not elected to nothin’. If he’s a proud 20-year veteran of the US Army and diplomatic service as he claims, fine. But his job is to implement policy as decided by the elected representatives of the people, not to free lance in the cause of the Empire group-think in which he is obviously and hopelessly steeped.
So let’s cut to the chase: The policy he feared the Donald might be jeopardizing by his pressure tactics with President Zelensky has been a travesty from start to finish. The Ukraine has no bearing on America’s homeland security whatsoever, and the policies of its government vis a vis Russia or any of its other neighbors are none of Washington’s cotton picking business.
You can’t be more emphatic about the utter irrelevancy of Ukraine to America’s homeland security. Even at the pre-coup peak in 2013 it had a miniscule GDP of $185 billion, which has since plunged by 30% to $130 billion. Even if Putin were foolish enough to annex the approximate 30 million Russian-hating Ukrainians outside of the Russian-speaking eastern Donbas region, which he surely is not, it wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans in the strategic equation.
Ukraine amounts to just 8% of Russia’s pint-sized GDP and is actually worthless to the Kremlin. That’s because the cost of occupation and pacification of the non-Russian speaking majority of the country would vastly outweigh whatever industrial and material output it might steal from the Ukrainians.
Besides, what in the hell is wrong with Washington when it gets all hot and bothered about a no-count territory plagued with economic failure and which generates annually about two days worth of US output?
Moreover, even if you have warm and fuzzy regard for the rights and liberties of the Ukrainian “nation”, which has existed only infrequently as an independent state with wildly variant borders during the last 800 years, the question remains. Namely, how in the world can it be argued that its people were not better off in 2013 under an elected government of the Regions party that tilted toward Russia compared to the economic calamity which exits today and is only saved from complete collapse by US and European subventions?
So here’s where the Deep State’s hegemonic “sole super-power” world view comes in. Washington’s Ukraine policy has nothing to do with homeland security or prevention of military attack on American shores.
Instead, it is based on policing the world and demonizing the rump-state of Russia which emerged after the Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history in 1991. What was left was a decimated economy with half the former population and a current day GDP of $1.6 trillion, which is actually less than the GDP of the New York metro area. Still, the Warfare State needs palpable “enemies” and adversaries—no matter how tendentious the case— to justify its massive fiscal drain ($1.1 trillion counting everything) on US taxpayers, both current and unborn; and it also needs expansive missions like spreading the blessings of democracy, prosperity and western culture to the far corners of the earth.
And that’s not our hyperbole in the slightest; it’s essentially the content of Vindman’s whistleblower testimony to Shifty Schiff’s Star Chamber proceedings today.
Thus, when it comes to the blatant lie that Russia is an expansionist power, Vindman’s purple prose would make even the late war-mongering Senator from Arizona proud:
Since 2008, Russia has manifested an overtly aggressive foreign policy, leveraging military power and employing hybrid warfare to achieve its objectives of regional hegemony and global influence. Absent a deterrent to dissuade Russia from such aggression, there is an increased risk of further confrontations with the West. In this situation, a strong and independent Ukraine is critical to U.S. national security interests because Ukraine is a frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression.
Wow! That’s just bellicose rubbish. A “frontline state and bulwark”my eye. In fact, during the years since 1991 when Washington has invaded and virtually destroyed upwards of a dozen sovereign countries, Russia hasn’t invaded anyone! But the reference to 2008 does tell you exactly where Vindman is coming from. He’s obviously referring to Russia’s thwarting of Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia in August 2008.
That incident has been spun by the Deep State ever since as Russian aggression when it was just the opposite.
To wit, it was an aggressive military invasion by Georgia designed to reclaim the break-away republic of South Ossetia. The real culprit was its mercurial leader and Washington tool, Mikheil Saakashvili, who had been egged on by Senator McCain and the usual cast of neocons with the promise of Washington military help, which fortunately did not happen.
But a subsequent 1,000 page report by an independent EU fact-finding mission led by a renown Swiss diplomat makes clear that the Georgian accusations of Russian aggression were completely fabricated.
“It was Georgia which triggered off the war when it attacked (South Ossetian capital) Tskhinvali” said Heidi Tagliavini, the mission head, in a statement. Although the EU commission tactfully avoided using the word “lie,” the report implies that Saakashvili did not tell the truth about how the war started.
The same is true of the so-called annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s support for the breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine.
As to the former, the population of Crimea is overwhelmingly Russian, and for 171-years from 1783 to 1954 it was an integral province of Czarist Russia. It got arbitrarily assigned to the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic by Khrushchev after he won the post-Stalin power struggle in 1954 as a reward to his compatriots in Kiev—even though less than 15% of the population was Ukrainian.
After the US funded, supported and instantly recognized coup in Kiev in February 2014 and the immediate passage of virulent anti-Russian legislation by the putsch, the Russian-speaking population of Crimea voted overwhelmingly (87%) to return to Mother Russia. The so-called coercive annexation by Russia is a figment of War Party propaganda, and implies a willingness to use American money and arms to enforce the dead hand of the Soviet Presidium.
And the same story goes for the Donbas. The largely Russian speaking population of this industrial region, which is highly integrated with the Russian economy, wants to be separated from the Ukrainian nationalists in Kiev who have launched a vicious war to subdue them.
But if the Donbas were to be partitioned or even if it voted to join the Russian Federation, so what?
The honest truth of the matter is that Europe is flush with partitioned states. These include Slovakia and the Czech Republic as well as the manifold offspring of Yugoslavia including North Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia, which, at the insistence of Washington, got further carved up by the partition of Kosovo.
That is to say, once Washington upended the tenuous political/ethnic balance of post- Soviet Ukraine by supporting the nationalist coup, there was still no reason that the Yugoslav model of partition could not have settled the matter.
In fact, the 5-year war on the Donbas—which has killed upwards of 20,000 and brought economic and fiscal ruin to both the region and Ukraine as a whole—wouldn’t have lasted more than a few weeks without the promise of western economic and military aid and political support.
The needless tragedy there is not the fruit of Russian aggression. It’s the consequence of Washington meddling, including all the corruption which has flowered after Ukraine was turned into a Washington vassal and found it necessary to hire Washington lobbyists and racketeers like Hunter Biden and Devon Archer (then Secretary of State John Kerry’s former campaign bundler) to keep the cash flowing.
Needless to say, the Deep State slathers this toxic reality in a narrative that is pure hogwash. And Colonel Vindman has it down pat: Namely, under the tutelage, money and political and military cover of the Washington Imperium, Ukraine is to be brought into the “Euro-Atlantic community” as a splendid new democracy.
The bolded term, of course, is an undisguised euphemism for NATO:
In spite of being under assault from Russia for more than five years, Ukraine has taken major steps towards integrating with the West. The U.S. government policy community’s view is that the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky and the promise of reforms to eliminate corruption will lock in Ukraine’s Western-leaning trajectory, and allow Ukraine to realize its dream of a vibrant democracy and economic prosperity.
The United States and Ukraine are and must remain strategic partners, working together to realize the shared vision of a stable, prosperous, and democratic Ukraine that is integrated into the Euro-Atlantic community.
Here’s the thing. The expansion of NATO to the very doorstep of Russia was the most colossal mistake of the post-cold war period. And the War Party’s insistence that this should to taken all the way to the incorporation of Ukraine and Georgia—-historic vassals of Russia—actually trespasses upon the very border of insanity.
Indeed, the father of containment and the intellectual architect of NATO in the late 1940s, the great George F. Kennan, hit the nail on the head when lightweight Clintonistas like Strobe Talbot and Madeleine Albright launched the NATO expansion process in the 1990s:
”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.”
“What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ”X,” defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years. ”I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.
”And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,” said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ”It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”
He couldn’t have been more right about the substance of what would happen. But little did even Kennan realize that once in motion any even tepid effort to question or stop it–per the Donald’s campaign rhetoric about the obsolescence of NATO–would actually provoke a Deep State assault on American democracy itself
So there’s your Deep State at work. It isn’t some kind of sinister conspiracy lurking deep in the shadows of the national security machinery.
To the contrary, it’s right there in the broad daylight of the Imperial City. It is populated by hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers like Colonel Vindman who make a career of drinking the Cool Aid, collecting a pay check from the state and propagating the policies of Empire First—policies which are immoral, illegal, unaffordable and have absolutely nothing to do with protecting America’s liberty, prosperity and security inside the great ocean moats, which once upon a time birthed a peace-loving Republic.
We have no illusions, of course, that the Donald is a peace-lover. He’s self-evidently first and foremost a Donald-lover.
Still, what is underway in Washington—first with the RussiaGate hoax and now with UkraineGate and impeachment—is an extra-constitutional political lynching, and one that has turned Washington’s desperate, mendacious Dem pols into complaisant handmaids of the Deep State.
So Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman isn’t some kind of whistle-blowing hero. He’s just another mindless cog in the wheel of Empire talking his own book and thereby abetting the political mob that is now threatening the very constitution he was sworn to uphold.
Crashing To Earth: Masa Son Speaks To “Almost Empty” Room At “Davos In The Desert”
Last year, Wall Street firms scrambled to distance themselves from the Saudi Arabia and its young Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman after Salman (allegedly) ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist and dissident expatriate Jamal Khashoggi. Fast forward one year, all was seemingly forgiven, and MbS’s “Davos in the Desert” 2019 has reportedly been packed with luminaries from across the industry.
Which means there’s no excuse for this:Bloomberg reported Wednesday that the conference hall was nearly empty on Wednesday when SoftBank Group Executive Chairman Masayoshi Son took to the stage as part of a panel with four speakers. Apparently, after WeWork’s sudden implosion left the telecoms/VC giant holding one of the biggest bags of odious excrement ever assembled in the history of…capitalism.
Masayoshi Son
Still, SoftBank and its Saudi-backed Vision Fund have already doubled down on the firm’s WeWork bet, pumping billions more into the struggling company and seizing control by installing new SoftBank-approved executives as WeWork scrambles to stave off an imminent bankruptcy.
The WeWork mess, along with Uber’s disastrous IPO, seriously damaged Son’s reputation as one of the most successful momentum investors in recent years.
Despite being one of the main attractions in year’s past, Son was relegated to a very minor speaking role, briefly opening up to say a few words about artificial intelligence and entrepreneurship (SoftBank has invested in several AI startups) without saying much at all about the kingdom’s commitment to his second Vision Fund iteration (for the record, the Saudis have reportedly backed out of financing V2, leaving its future highly uncertain). Saudi Arabia committed $45 billion of the $100 billion for the first Vision Fund.
The poorly attended panel “underscores to some extent the diminished appeal of his Vision Fund idea,” as well as the reputations of both Son and SoftBank.
Son’s poorly attended panel underscores to some extent the diminished appeal of his Vision Fund idea, which less than two years ago emerged as one of the kingdom’s boldest and certainly most expensive bets to help diversify its economy. As the Vision Fund copes with the controversy around co-working company WeWork, prime backers Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates remain undecided as to whether to invest in Vision Fund 2.
The contrast with Son’s previous appearance at the conference two years ago is striking, BBG added.
The contrast with Son’s previous appearance two years ago at the Future Investment Initiative, Saudi Arabia’s flagship investment conference, is striking. Then, Son was all smiles as he sat on a panel with the kingdom’s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and made a commitment to participate in the country’s $500 billion futuristic city, known as Neom.
In the aftermath of the WeWork IPO fiasco, Goldman Sachs and others have reduced their loan exposure to the Vision Fund. And we can’t blame them: After all, Uber and WeWork aren’t the only highly speculative, wildly overvalued Silicon Valley plays in SoftBank’s portfolio.
JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon has been running around Washington claiming that mid-September’s repo rumble was the result of the post-crisis regulatory environment. He now says that his bank had the spare cash and was willing to cash in on double digit repo rates but it was government rules which prevented that from happening. It’s unclear (but we can, and I will, guess) why he didn’t make the same claim and warn everyone on Friday, September 13, before the seasonal low point in liquidity that everyone knew was there.
It wasn’t until quite a while afterward during that period when a stunned financial world was still trying (and failing) to make sense of what had happened.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that this isn’t the first time Wall Street has complained about these very same regulations. They’ve been against them from the very beginning. What’s different now is that they have a very public event about which nobody has any real answers to rally support. It all sounds pretty plausible (it always sounds plausible, yet never explains most of the facts).
Suddenly, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin seems to be siding with the banks. Having spoken directly with Mr. Dimon recently, Secretary Mnuchin today says:
The banks have raised an issue around intra-day liquidity, and that is something that makes sense for regulators to look at.
That issue they’ve raised is something called the Supplemental Leverage Ratio, or SLR. It was created and applied to Global Systemically Important Bank organizations, or G-SIB. The FDIC, in particular, had pushed for the SLR because quite rightly the agency wasn’t very thrilled about the prospects for having to absorb potential deposit liabilities of huge banks sporting enormous leverage getting shut out of wholesale funding markets.
The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 demonstrated conclusively this wasn’t a trivial possibility.
To put it simply, regulators would require designated G-SIB’s (there are 8 in the US) to hold an additional liquidity buffer (SLR) based upon their reported leverage (one lesson authorities did learn from Bear, Lehman, and the rest). It would be a liquidity surcharge which would have to be met by a set percentage of holdings in unencumbered cash and highly liquid assets like UST’s over and above other regulatory (like Basel 3’s LCR) and good standing requirements.
If any G-SIB bank wanted to employ more leverage, more power to them. The regulation was an attempt to recognize partly the risks to others beyond the one bank involved in doing so. Regardless of capital ratios, worthless capital ratios, beyond a preset threshold the more leverage the greater the SLR; more liquid assets including cash and Treasuries need to be held as further liquidity reserves.
So, again, blaming the SLR along with Basel 3’s Liquidity Coverage Ratio sounds like a plausible excuse for September’s repo malfunction. JP Morgan, as its CEO now says, wanted to act but couldn’t because his bank’s SLR surcharge was the primary impediment.
We also know this because they said essentially the same thing in September…2018. Again, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that early on last year the banks were supporting regulatory efforts to make changes to what is now the e-SLR (the “e” stands for “enhanced” while there is room for debate about whether that’s the proper use of that particular word in this context). Martin J. Gruenberg, an FDIC board member, spoke in Washington last September to that effect:
On April 11 of this year [2018], the Federal Reserve Board and the OCC released a joint notice of proposed rulemaking, or NPR, to make changes to the enhanced supplementary leverage ratio capital requirement applied to the eight U.S. G-SIBs and their federally insured bank subsidiaries. The changes would have the effect of reducing the capital requirement. They are not technical fixes. They would significantly weaken constraints on financial leverage in systemically important banks put in place in response to the crisis.
And where did that “e” come from in the first place? Way back in July 2017, Wall Street was lobbying for changes to the same regulatory paradigm back then, too. What I wrote at the time was:
Released on June 12 [2017], it suggested that the SLR might be reformulated to make it less imposing. The SLR was initially proposed so that the risk-weighting shenanigans (regulatory capital relief) would at least be exposed by this measure of true(r) leverage. It takes Tier 1 capital divided by the sum of on-balance sheet assets plus off-balance sheet exposures. There is still a large gray area in that latter variable.
Banks want now to deduct certain cash and liquid assets (including UST’s) from it. The result of which is supposed to, in Treasury’s estimation, unlock significant liquidity potential of the global banking system from just American operations. It is, in other words, the official acceptance of at least part of the idea that one big problem in the economy is insufficient liquidity (no sh@#).
The banks succeeded and Secretary Mnuchin’s Treasury Department issued its favorable report that very June. Most attention was focused on what it said about the so-called Volcker Rule while the more complex (and more relevant) SLR, e-SLR, and G-SIB designations remained, pardon me, in the shadows.
To sum up: Wall Street has hated almost every single post-crisis regulation that has been implemented, though in some cases they’ve been right to do so. However, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the e-SLR or G-SIB rules had anything to do with the repo market outbreak in September 2019.
What’s been constant is the banking system’s ongoing efforts to remove these kinds of regulations. At the same time, problems in the repo market have been nearly as constant. Yet , you didn’t hear a single thing about the SLR during any of the other outbreaks simply because no one paid any attention to those prior bouts of repo market illiquidity.
There was no opportunity, therefore, to pin the regulation on something bad.
The only thing that changed, in its aftermath, was that the public for once had no choice but to look at the repo market and the funding environment. With attention now fixed and no plausible answers being offered, all of a sudden it’s now evidence against a regulation banks have been actively opposing for years.
Shocking, I know.
As is the fact that May 29, 2018, had more to do with these repo market woes than anything about the SLR and the like. If that particular constraint was such a major issue in September, why wasn’t it in May 29 the prior year when the Treasury market began to embarrass Mr. Dimon and his prediction of 4% and even 5% 10-year UST yields? Repo rates were elevated at that time, too.
Obviously, in the middle of 2018, the head of JP Morgan, the bank allegedly suffering under the unfair imposition of out-of-touch regulators, saw no reason why the US and global economy wouldn’t soar in an all-but-guaranteed inflationary breakout (interest rates had nowhere to go but up). Implicit in that view was a resilient and robust global financial system flourishing without the hint of liquidity issues.
Dimon opposed the SLR (and LCR) when he fully believed things were really good, and he opposes the SLR now that he’s not so sure and he has something bad with which to blame. And he will oppose the SLR tomorrow if things really do turn around, and especially if they don’t.
So, is it that Dimon had no idea what was really going on during 2018 at his own bank, and has therefore come around to thinking some version of the SLR is to blame for getting 2019 all wrong? Or, is it because he had and has no real idea of the liquidity system that after being caught totally off-guard by pretty much everything he is cynically seeking to settle a longstanding score about the one thing he does know well?
When I came up with the zoo analogy to try to describe what’s going on, I didn’t realize just how well it would fit the times. What’s worse, the financial media will now be filled with stories about how it must be that Dimon is right! A real zoo.
Therefore, nothing will change even if the SLR does get changed.
Russia test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile from a new nuclear-powered submarine, the defense ministry said, describing the test as successful.
A video posted by the Defense Ministry shows the vessel launching an RSM-56 Bulava missile from a submerged position in the White Sea, according to the TASS news agency on Wednesday. The missile reached its target on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East region.
“For the first time ever, a seaborne Bulava ballistic missile was test-fired from the latest Project Borei-A strategic missile-carrying submarine Knyaz Vladimir,” the ministry said, according to the state-backed news agency.
The Russian Ministry of Defense posted a video of the apparent test on YouTube.
The Bulava’s “dummy warheads reached the range within the established time, which was registered by data recording equipment,” the ministry added.
The firing area was closed down for shipping, the report said.
In this file photo, Russian nuclear submarine, the Yuri Dolgoruky, drives in the water area of the Sevmash factory in the northern city of Arkhangelsk on July 2, 2009. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AFP/Getty Images)
According to the Moscow Times, the missile was fired from the Knyaz Vladimir submarine, which is expected to be supplied to the Russian navy in December. Russia is planning to construct about 10 other, similar submarines by 2027.
The Knyaz Vladimir will carry up to 16 ICBMs of the RSM-56 Bulava type. Each missile is expected to carry between four and six nuclear warheads, the Moscow Times noted.
In September, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the country’s military to conduct a “symmetrical response” to a recent U.S. test of a cruise missile.
Putin said he told the government to “analyze the level of threat posed by the aforementioned actions of the United States toward our country and take comprehensive measures to prepare a symmetrical response,” CNN reported.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with members of the Security Council in Moscow, Russia on Aug. 23, 2019. (Sputnik/Alexey Nikolsky/Kremlin via Reuters)
In August, Russia test-fired Sineva and Bulava ballistic missiles from submarines in the polar region of the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea on Aug. 24 as part of combat training, the Defense Ministry said in a statement.
The Sineva, a liquid-fueled intercontinental missile, was fired from the Tula submarine, while a Bulava, Russia’s newest solid-fueled missile, was launched from the Yuri Dolgorukiy submarine, the ministry said.
The missiles hit targets at training grounds in the northern Arkhangelsk region and on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East, the ministry said.
“During the launches, the specified technical characteristics of submarine ballistic missiles and the efficiency of all systems of ship missile systems were confirmed,” it said.
