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Authored by Sebastiaan Faber and Bécquer Seguín via TheNation.com,

“Now that the verdict’s out, it’s time to start getting along,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said at a press conference on October 18, repeating the rhyme—“después de la sentencia, convivencia”—as if it were a magic spell. Around the same time, half a million Catalans were converging on Barcelona, which for the previous four days had seen its airport occupied and highways blocked while violent clashes between protesters and riot police were increasing in intensity each night. Sánchez insisted on framing these clashes as an internal Catalan problem. “What’s at stake is not the territorial makeup of our country, but the Catalans’ ability to get along with each other,” he’d said a few days earlier.

One week of major protests, it appears, did not shake his government’s unwillingness to face reality: The Catalan crisis is something that affects the entire country, and it is far from over.

On October 14, the Spanish Supreme Court announced its much-anticipated ruling on the case against 12 Catalan leaders for their role in the 2017 referendum on Catalan independence. Nine were sentenced to between 13 and 9 years in prison; three more were sentenced to 18 months. The charges included sedition, misappropriation of government funds, and civil disobedience. Oriol Junqueras, the former vice president of Catalonia, received the longest sentence, 13 years, while eight other former Catalan ministers received sentences of 10-12 years and two civil society leaders, known as “the Jordis,” received nine years—all close to the maximum permitted by law. (For perspective, earlier this year the Supreme Court sentenced each of five men found guilty of a violent gang-rape—the “wolf pack” case—to 15 years in prison.) 

The verdict was the culmination of a two-year process initiated in October 2017, when Spain’s attorney general brought charges for rebellion, sedition, and misappropriation that prompted a judicial investigation and a public trial involving hundreds of witnesses. Had the court found Junqueras and the other leaders guilty of the charge of rebellion, the sentences could have been as high as 24 years, among the most severe first-time prison sentences allowable in Spain (the 12 Catalan leaders have been in preventive custody since the charges were announced nearly two years ago). Seven other leaders, including former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont, escaped that fate by going into exile elsewhere in Europe.

Yet to the disappointment of some Spanish conservatives, the court concluded in its ruling that Catalonia’s 2017 bid for independence – which included acts of nonviolent protest, a vote to “disconnect” Catalonia from Spain that violated parliamentary procedure, an illegal referendum, and a declaration of independence that was immediately “suspended” – did not rise to the level of rebellion. In fact, the court agreed with the defense that the referendum and the declaration of independence were never more than symbolic gestures, meant to pressure the national government in Madrid into negotiations over Catalonia’s status within Spain. The declaration of independence, the judges wrote, was “symbolic and ineffective,” and “never had any practical concreteness.” The prospect of independence was no more than a “reverie,” they added, “an artful deceit to mobilize the citizenry.” “It is clear,” the court concluded, “that the rebels lacked the most elementary means to…subdue the [Spanish] state.… And they knew it.” The court was likely referring to the warning, issued before October 1 by then–Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, that, were Catalan leaders to go through with the referendum, they would be charged and the region’s autonomy would be revoked.

The irony of the ruling is palpable to many Catalans and Spaniards alike. The trial made it all the way to the Supreme Court in the first place because it involved the charge of rebellion—a direct, violent, anti-constitutional challenge to the sovereignty of the state. Now, many observers say that the court’s ruling itself infringes on the sovereignty of the people: Its interpretation of “sedition”—a charge leveled at 9 of the 12 leaders on trial—appears to undermine the constitutional right to protest, possibly setting a troubling precedent, in which such a charge can be applied to such acts as organized attempts to block evictions. “The Court’s new description of sedition,” Joaquín Urías, professor of constitutional law, wrote in the magazine Contexto, “describes point by point any social campaign of civil disobedience.” This skewed interpretation of the law, he added, points to a political motivation: The court may be convinced that “its role is to save Spain’s sacred territorial unity by making an example out of those who dare challenge it.”

The ruling, for many, encapsulates the main problems with the current path of the Spanish legal system: growing restrictions on the right to protest and freedom of expression, as well as the judicialization of politics and the politicization of the judiciary. These developments harken back to the widely condemned “ley mordaza” (gag law), a criminal law reform in 2015 that gives the government the power to issue hefty fines for everything from “unauthorized protests” to photographing the police. (On Friday evening, police in Barcelona violently subdued and detained Albert García, a journalist from El País who was photographing their actions.) The ruling also revives anxieties over recent cases involving puppet shows, tweets, and song lyrics construed as “extolling terrorism,” a remarkably fuzzy legal category that has given prosecutors a green light to pursue heavy sentences.

Regarding Catalonia, one of the 17 autonomous regions in Spain’s quasi-federal makeup, the Spanish Supreme Court has been quick to step in, breaking with international legal precedent in Canada and the United Kingdom, where the courts have mostly seen questions of regional sovereignty as a political rather than a legal matter. In Spain, it was the conservative Partido Popular (PP) that first beckoned the courts to intervene. In 2006, it filed an appeal to the Constitutional Court to revoke Catalonia’s newly approved statute of autonomy, which had been jointly negotiated by the governing parties at the national and regional levels and approved by a regional referendum.

The court’s rejection of key elements of that statute, four years later, set off widespread protests in Catalonia. In the years that followed, pro-independence sentiment ballooned from around a quarter of Catalans to nearly half, a figure which, according to polls, still holds more or less true today. Pro-independence parties—which span the spectrum from conservative to left-radical—hold a narrow majority in the regional parliament. But discomfort with the Spanish state is more widespread. According to a late-September poll, around 70 percent of Catalans favor a referendum for self-determination, an option that is anathema to Madrid. And only a fifth of those polled believe the Supreme Court trial of the Catalan leaders has been fair.

Not surprisingly, last Monday’s verdict has unleashed a level of indignation that dwarfs the response to the Constitutional Court’s ruling nine years ago. Within hours of the verdict’s publication, thousands of citizens flocked to the Barcelona airport for an occupation that disrupted air travel for days. Since then, massive displays of peaceful protest, including a general strike on October 18, alternated with nightly acts of vandalism involving smaller groups of protesters who erected barricades, set dumpsters on fire, threw rocks, torched a dozen cars, and in some cases threw Molotov cocktails at riot police. The Catalan and Spanish police have reacted, according to Amnesty International and other observer organizations, with “excessive force” and “inappropriately deploying anti-riot equipment and munitions.” Rubber bullets—whose use is officially prohibited in Catalonia—have so far caused four protesters to lose an eye. Journalists trying to document police actions, like García from El País, have ended up clubbed or arrested.

The anger over police brutality is directed not just at the national leadership in Madrid but also at the Catalan government, which in a display of institutional schizophrenia encouraged citizens to protest the Supreme Court sentence while at the same time ordering the regional police to quash the protests. In fact, Catalan politicians—who after all were forced to admit during the trial that their promises had been empty—have lost much of their credibility and, with it, control of the situation. The coordination of the protests themselves has been diffuse. Some of the main actions, including the occupation of the airport, were directed through an app, “Democratic Tsunami,” whose origin is unclear and which can only be activated by direct contact with an already authorized user. On Friday, Spain’s national criminal court announced it would initiate an investigation of the Tsunami app for possibly aiding and abetting terrorism. Its websites in Spain were shuttered.

The Supreme Court’s verdict and the state’s reaction to the protests have sparked concern beyond Catalonia as well. On October 19, 42,000 people gathered in San Sebastián, in the Basque Country, to demand a political solution to Spain’s territorial question. A demonstration in Madrid calling for amnesty that drew 4,000 protesters ended in violent clashes with riot police. The newspaper Público reported that, once again, the police targeted journalists trying to cover their actions.

Meanwhile, many citizens and fellow journalists have criticized the mainstream Spanish media coverage of the protests. According to the journalist Miquel Ramos, the media have developed a taste for “riot porn.” Ramos also denounced the national media’s tendency to downplay the role of radical-right Spanish nationalists, whose actions have been legitimized by the rise of the far-right party Vox. On Spanish public television, he pointed out, militant right-wing groups brandishing neo-fascist paraphernalia have been euphemistically captioned as “constitutionalists” and “citizens with Spanish flags.” The media help shape Spaniards’ interpretation of the crisis but also reaffirm the country’s divergent universes. On October 19, for example, the front-page layout of the Madrid edition of the country’s largest paper, El País, was the same as the national edition—but the headline was not. “Violent Groups Extend Chaos in the Barcelona Downtown,” read the Madrid edition. The headline in the national edition said: “A Massive Pro-Independence March against the Supreme Court Verdict.”

All of this has taken place in the midst of an electoral campaign. On November 10, Spaniards will go to the polls for the fourth time in as many years, and the second time this calendar year, after attempts to form a progressive majority coalition failed. For the right, which continues to be haunted by corruption scandals, the escalation in Catalonia is a welcome opportunity to shore up votes. They have called for harsher measures in Catalonia, ranging from revoking its autonomy and taking over its regional police corps to declaring a state of exception.

Not to be outflanked in his commitment to Spanish unity, Socialist Prime Minister Sánchez, too, has tried to project the image of a hard-line nationalist, stubbornly sticking to the idea that this is a Catalan, not a Spanish problem. In the weeks leading up to the verdict, his government launched an international campaign to underscore the idea that Spain is a “consolidated democracy,” suggesting that anyone who dares doubt this fact is an “enemy of Spain.” Sánchez has refused to accept phone calls from Catalan President Quim Torra, demanding that Torra first “categorically condemn” this week’s “violence.” By “violence,” he was referring exclusively to the limited nightly acts of vandalism. Sánchez’s strategy, according to party leaders, has been to seek “moderation” in the face of extreme demands by conservative parties that he apply the National Security Law and invoke, like Rajoy did back in 2017, Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, which would place the government of Catalonia in the hands of the central government in Madrid.

So far, the hard-line tactic seems to be working better for the right than for the center-left. The PP, which took a beating at the April elections, is once again rising in the polls. Sánchez’s Socialists are set to lose some seats, although they are still projected to receive the most votes. As in April, Sánchez is expected to fall well short of a majority in Parliament. A progressive coalition with Unidas Podemos, the anti-austerity party founded only five years ago, proved too difficult to achieve earlier this year. Having Podemos in charge of certain ministries, Sánchez claimed, would have caused him “sleepless nights.” He may well decide instead to try to strike an agreement with those to his right. Earlier this month, Albert Rivera, the leader of Ciudadanos (Citizens), a young neoliberal and Spanish nationalist party, announced that he would lift his veto on negotiating with the Socialists.

Sánchez, however, may simply turn to the devil he knows. The “chaos” in Catalonia might provide him the perfect excuse for a “grand coalition” between the Socialist Party and the PP in the name of national unity. The move would signal an apparent restoration of the constitutional order that Unidas Podemos and other progressive movements have sought to challenge since the indignados movement in the spring of 2011, which arose in the wake of the economic crisis, austerity measures, and government corruption.

The Catalan “threat” to that order, journalist Guillem Martínez wrote this past weekend, has come to play a role similar to that of ETA, the armed Basque pro-independence group, whose presence helped justify restrictions on constitutional rights for much of Spain’s 40-year-old democracy.

Hate crimes in England and Wales have reached record levels.

According to the Home Office, there were 103,379 hate crimes in the 12 months to March this year, an increase of 10 percent on 2017/18. While increases in hate crime over the last five years have been mainly driven by improvements in crime recording, Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes that the Home Office has observed spikes in incidents following events such as the EU Referendum and the terrorist attacks in 2017.

You will find more infographics at Statista

When looking at the motivating factors behind these crimes, race is by far the most common – involved in 76 percent of offences. Although only accounting for 2 percent, crimes against transgender people rose dramatically in the last year, seeing a jump of 37 percent – the largest of the recorded factors. All types recorded an increase, and ‘sexual orientation’ had the second-largest proportional increase, at 25 percent.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

House of Commons Speaker John Bercow denied Boris Johnson’s government a meaningful vote on his EU Withdrawal Treaty on Monday after allowing Oliver Letwin to table an amendment designed to force the Government to withdraw it on Saturday.

That amendment passed and the vote was withdrawn. And the question now is what’s next?

The better question is why? Why did they do this when it raises the probability of a No-Deal Brexit given the ‘no extension’ rhetoric coming from the EU?

The answer should be self-evident. The EU will happily grant an extension if the right conditions are in place. And those conditions are simply anything that continues to pave the path towards overturning the 2016 Brexit Referendum vote.

The EU agreed to Boris Johnson’s deal last week because it was the closest thing to a perfect deal for them they would get in a reasonable time frame. The EU want a deal because it brings more certainty to the financial and investment situation across the continent.

What I wrote for Money and Markets on Friday still holds in my opinion:

The EU really thought they had this thing stitched up, as the Brits would say. But the war of attrition they waged against Brexiteers worked against them. Public opinion in the U.K. has hardened around a “No Deal” option and Nigel Farage’s sniping at the Tories’ mishandling of Brexit has been incredibly effective.

I have little doubt that this is what I or Nigel Farage would consider a good deal. In fact, it’s a terrible treaty that sees the U.K. give up most of its leverage in return for very few guarantees.

But it was a deal that was politically possible given the circumstances. And the movement by Brussels at the last minute is your clue that economic conditions on the European continent are far worse than they are letting on.

I’ve been banging on about this for months, Germany’s economy is crashing. As that continued and the domestic political pressure mounts on Angela Merkel, the leverage was rising on the U.K.’s side of the negotiations.

And since Johnson has done the politically unthinkable, get a deal from the EU, his opponents in Parliament are now trying to ensure that whatever happens next he will pay a terrible price politically for it.

The longer the uncertainty goes on the more likely it will be that Europe will enter the terminal phase of its brewing sovereign debt crisis. Markets are nearly paralyzed by Brexit at this point.

But we’re beginning to see the effects of Brexit fatigue on bond yields. The mother of safe-haven trades has waned in intensity now that the central banks have come in with new QE and liquidity guarantees.

Is this the beginning of the end of the massive bull market into any first-world sovereign debt? Similar technical reversals are in play all across European Bond yields.

So, something is breaking. It may be more that just Deutsche Bank.

So back to Bercow, Letwin and Brexit.

Bercow’s refusal to allow a vote on Parliamentary approval of the Withdrawal Agreement is a way to ensure that Parliament can attach amendments to the bill against the government’s wishes.

It’s not like Bercow hasn’t done this before. At every turn he’s interpreted the rule book to suit the agenda of those that want Brexit stopped at any cost.

The Guardian has a good rundown on this because, of course, they’ve been made privy to the Remainer plan to stop Brexit.

And the plan now is for Labour to work with Northern Ireland’s DUP to form an alliance against Johnson’s deal and work towards a Second Referendum.

Because that is what the price of Johnson’s deal will be to get a vote on the Withdrawal Agreement Bill through Parliament both a Second Referendum and the addition of the Customs Union.

Any attempt to get a customs union added to Johnson’s deal would probably need to involve former Tory MPs as well as the DUP. A source close to the group of 21 former Tories suggested they might be more interested in the deal being amended to make sure the UK does not crash out on no-deal terms. Most in the group are also keen to make a deal work rather than opt for a second referendum.

However, speaking to the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show,{Labour Brexit Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir} Starmer said he believes a second referendum was still possible. He also suggested Labour could vote for Johnson’s deal if a second referendum was added to the withdrawal agreement bill, despite the party’s fundamental objections to the terms of the UK’s proposed departure from the EU.

Keir Starmer can live with this deal, don’t kid yourself. What he wants, however, is to stop Brexit entirely and humiliate the Tories in the process. We have moved far beyond the appearance of doing the right thing for the British people and moved entirely into cynical machinations to thwart Brexit.

From the Guardian here’s the current Flowchart (before Bercow’s ruling):

Everything on the left-hand side is moot. It is the right side that is now in play.

Note how everything ends with 2nd referendum or an even worse version of BRINO — Brexit in Name Only.

This is why Guy Verhofstadt and the Brexit Steering Committee won’t recommend the Treaty for a vote to the European Parliament until next week. They are banking on events falling into place that leads us right back to the U.K. staying in the EU.

So, today, Johnson will put forth the bill. Bercow will allow a hundred and forty-seven Remain amendments. Johnson will likely pull the bill from a vote because it will be unacceptable.

The EU will grant an extension after that just as The Guardian suggests and then Johnson will be in hot water next week as Parliament, under Bercow, will likely seek to remove him from office and install a last-minute caretaker government to ensure a second referendum of BRINO vs. Remain are the only options.

The Tories that held their noses to get Brexit done and back Boris’ rotten treaty will have betrayed Northern Ireland and their voters for nothing.

Because there will be no General Election until the threat of Brexit is off the table in any meaningful way. This is purely a power play at this point and there is little anyone in the U.K. can do about it as every trick available has and will be used to stop it.

I said this a month ago, Brexit has devolved into random acts of vandalism. And I feel it’s quite clear that most commentators on this process are simply not cynical enough to understand the depth of that statement.

These people are full of envy and despite. They hate having lost the vote. They hate having to implement it. They hate the people for putting them in this position in the first place.

And their threats are nothing more than statements of their allegiance to the EU first and everyone else second.

Because if their allegiance was to the U.K. first they would back an election. They would trust the people to make the choice. But they won’t do that.

Their play now is to throw caution to the wind about what happens after the next General Election. It doesn’t matter that the people hate them. The new treaty or any one cooked up by a caretaker government will have no escape clause.

A parliament in disgrace, a government neutered by over-reaching courts, and a treaty that leaves the U.K. in Zombieland neither free nor prosperous is what the next government will have to contend with with or without a second referendum.

And even if that government is a coalition between Johnson’s Tories and Farage’s Brexit Party, there won’t be any good will between them to present a unified front to the EU since Johnson’s whole Brexit strategy was to deliver BRINO while neutering the challenge Farage represents.

Party before country. Politics before the people. That’s the true story of Brexit.

*  *  *

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Authored by Tim Kirby via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

It is nice to finally have a US President who is not a career politician. There is some truth to the Republican/Libertarian trope that lifelong politicians who know nothing but politics are perhaps not the best people to be making decisions on the military, medicine or education as they don’t know about life beyond getting reelected and “working” with lobbyists. Trump’s business background has lead him to making a major policy change that the Mainstream Media has surprisingly ignored that could actually be very good for America’s future.

If we remember back to Trump’s presidential campaign, he rather brazenly promised that he would build The Wall and make the Mexicans somehow “pay for it”. Trump later claimed that through renegotiating trade deals (NAFTA) he ultimately fulfilled his promise, although some would debate this. The interesting thing about this moment in Trump history is that he demonstrated a very different, business oriented, way of thinking that wouldn’t have come from other Republicans/Democrats in Washington.

Candidate Trump was also very vocal on NATO spending and the spending of taxpayer money on the US’s many wars of luxury. President Trump hasn’t ended the Military Industrial Complex but he has been forcing NATO members to pay their dues, which are in the realm of tens of billions of dollars.

This is a much more “realist” perception of NATO by Trump. Officially the organization is a group of allies for self-defense but as we know factually it works like means for the US colonization of Europe. The US military does almost all the work, they project their bases onto the Europeans (never the other way around) and with the recent exception of Turkey all NATO members essentially bow down to any demands made by Washington, however in the past this has come at a price. Empire isn’t cheap and we all know who ultimately paid for the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japan after WWII – US taxpayers. The US has financed the farce of NATO, but Trump wants to change this.

Now breaking with over half a century of a particular tradition Trump is allowing 3000 US troops to go to Saudi Arabia on the Saudi’s dime. Now Trump is offering to provide NATO defense to vassals and “make them pay for it”. This profit-driven policy is a radical departure from the status quo and to be honest is a much wiser wiser way of doing things in the long term with one huge exception depending on your view.

If US forces are to be used under the influence of “market demands” that could really put a dent into the seemingly endless national debt. The US has by far the biggest most expensive military in the world and Washington’s vassals at this point have no other choice but to pay the master for protection, making maintaining US military dominance much cheaper. The only disadvantage (depending on your view) is that if Trump pushes for profitability as a key factor in military decisions/policy then we will never be able have another Vietnam.

There is no way the South Vietnamese could have afforded to pay for US security. Their resources would have run out in a matter of weeks or days. If Trump wants the US to act on a “no money no honey” policy then it makes intervention in a Vietnam-like scenario ultimately impossible. This is good for those of us who want a powerful but respectable America, but for the warhawks this is a nightmare. Financial viability as a key concern in military decisions could spell doom for the parties of war, at least while Trump or a like minded individual is in power.

The Russians have also made a major shift in defense policy. The Soviet Union with less money and a distinct lack of the world’s reserve currency played by similar rules during the Cold War – we will throw money, men and resources at any conflict we see fit in order to ultimately win. But today’s Russia is different and when they entered Syria they made it clear to Assad that they are there to “help” and that Assad’s army is going to have to fight its own battles on its own manpower and resources.

If Russia were to enter a long term expensive military conflict it could possibly sink the entire economy or eliminate for generations Moscow’s debt free status. Sending officially invited advisors and selling top-notch equipment – has no negative long term effects. Trump isn’t the only one who sees the value into playing geopolitics on a strict budget.

This decision by Trump to send troops to defend Saudi Arabia at cost or even for profit could have a much grander resonance than it would seem at first. And hopefully, finally, the burden of Empire can be moved from the shoulders of US taxpayers so that they can enjoy the fruits of that which they have financed for decades.

Over the weekend, Qantas conducted a research flight to test human limits on ultra-long haul commercial services.

Statista’s Niall McCarthy details  that the test flight involved a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner flying from New York to Sydney with 50 passengers onboard and it was expected to complete the 10,200-mile journey in 19-and-a-half hours.

If the research proves successful, Qantas hopes to start operating direct flights from Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane to New York and London by 2022.

Today, a Singapore Airlines flight connecting the city-state with Newark International Airport is the longest commercial flight worldwide, both in terms of distance and time. The journey is a mammoth 16,700 kilometers and lasts just under 19 hours. The route was in operation before with a four-engine A340-500 but it was eventually axed because it became unprofitable amid rising fuel prices.

It was eventually relaunched with a new fuel-efficient and ultra-long range Airbus A350-900. There are many ways of measuring the world’s longest flights with factors such as strong head winds having a major impact on the length of time an aircraft stays airborne. As a result, claims about the longest commercial flights have always proven controversial.

You will find more infographics at Statista

The infographic above provides an overview of the longest flights and it shows how the new Singapore Airlines route is undisputedly the world’s longest.

Authored by Renee Parsons via Off-Guardian.org,

Even before Rep. Tulsi Gabbard threatened to boycott the October 15th Dem debate as the DNC usurps the role of voters in the Democratic primacy 2020 election and with an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump on the table, the Swamp was stirred and its slimy muck may be about to come to the surface as never before.

If so, those revelations are long overdue.

It is no secret to the observant that since the 2016 election, the Democratic Party has been in a state of near-collapse, the victim of its own hubris, having lost their moral compass with unsubstantiated Russisgate allegations; those accusations continue as a futile exercise of domestic regime change.

Today’s Dems are less than a bona fide opposition party offering zero policy solutions, unrecognizable from past glories and not the same political party many of us signed up for many years ago. Instead, the American public is witnessing a frenzied, unscrupulous strategy.

Desperate in the denial of its demise, confronting its own shadow of corruption as the Dems have morphed into a branch of the CIA – not unlike origins of the East German Stasi government.

It should not be necessary to say but in today’s hyper volatile political climate it is: No American should be labelled as anything other than a loyal American to be deeply disturbed by the Democrat/CIA collusion that is currently operating an unprecedented Kangaroo Court in secret, behind closed doors; thus posing an ominous provocation to what remains of our Constitutional Republic.

As any politically savvy, independent thinking American might grasp, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and their entire coterie of sycophants always knew that Russiagate was a crock of lies.

They lied to their willing Democratic rank n file, they lied to American public and they continue to lie about their bogus Impeachment campaign.

It may be that whistleblower Ed Snowden’s revelations about the NSA surveillance state was the first inkling for many Americans that there is a Big Problem with an out-of-control intelligence community until Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned that Trump was being ‘really dumb” in daring to question Intel’s faulty conclusion that Russia hacked the 2016 election.

“Let me tell you. You take on the intelligence community = they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Inescapably, Schumer was suggesting  that the Congress has no oversight, that there is no accountability and that the US has lost its democratic roots when a newly elected President does not have the authority to question or publicly disagree with any of the Intel agencies.

Since the 2016 election, there has been a steady drumbeat of the US Intel’s unabashed efforts to undermine and otherwise prevent a newly elected President from governing – which sounds like a clear case of insubordination or some might call it treasonous.

The Intel antipathy does not appear to be rooted in cuts to a favorite social services program but rather protecting a power, financial and influence agenda that goes far deeper and more profound than most Americans care to contemplate.

Among a plethora of egregious corporate media reactions, no doubt stirred by their Intel masters, was to a July, 2018 summit meeting between Russian President Putin and Trump in Helsinki emblematic of illegitimate censures from Intel veterans and its cronies: 

“Trump sides with Putin over US Intelligence” – CNN

“Did Trump Commit Treason at Putin Meeting?” – Newsweek, and

“Trump Slammed Over Disgrace, Disgusting Press Conference with Putin” – Newsweek.

Not one praised Trump for pursuing peace with Russia.

And yet, fellow Americans, it is curious to consider that there was no outrage after the 911 attacks in 2001 from any member of Congress, President Bush or the Corporate Media that the US intelligence community had utterly failed in its mission to keep the American public safe.

There was no reckoning, not one person in authority was held accountable, not one person who had the responsibility to ‘know’ was fired from any of the Intel agencies. Why is that?

As a result of  the corrupt foundation of the Russiagate allegations, Attorney General Bob Barr and Special Investigator John Durham appear hot on the trail with law enforcement in Italy as they have apparently scared the bejesus out of what little common sense remains among the Democratic hierarchy as if Barr/Durham might be headed for Obama’s Oval Office.

Barr’s earlier comment before the Senate that “spying did occur’ and that ‘it’s a big deal’ when an incumbent administration (ie the Obama Administration) authorizes a counter-Intelligence operation on an opposing candidate (ie Donald Trump) has the Dems in panic-stricken overdrive – and that is what is driving the current Impeachment Inquiry.

With the stark realization that none of the DNC’s favored top tier candidates has the mojo to go the distance, the Democrats have now focused on a July 25th phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which Trump allegedly ‘pressured’ Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden’s relationship with Burisma, the country’s largest natural gas provider.

At issue is any hanky panky involving Burisma payments to Rosemont Seneca Partners, an equity firm owned by Joe’s errant son, Hunter, who served on Burisma’s Board for a modest $50,000 a month.

Zelenskyy, who defeated the US-endorsed incumbent President Petro Poroshenko in a landslide victory, speaks Russian, was elected to clean up corruption and end the conflict in eastern Ukraine.  The war in the Donbass began as a result of the US State Department’s role in the overthrow of democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

Trump’s first priority on July 25th was Crowd Strike, a cybersecurity firm with links to the HRC campaign which was hired by the DNC to investigate Russian hacking of its server. 

The Dems have reason to be concerned since it is worth contemplating why the FBI did not legally mandate that the DNC turn its server over to them for an official Federal forensic inspection. 

One can only speculate…those chickens may be coming home to roost.

Days after an anonymous whistleblower (not to be confused with a real whistleblower like Edward Snowden) later identified as a CIA analyst with a professional history linked to Joe Biden, publicly released a Complaint against Trump. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the initiation of an ambiguous Impeachment Inquiry campaign with little specificity about the process.  The Complaint is suspect since it reads more like a professionally prepared Affidavit and the Dems consider Pelosi’s statement as sufficient to initiate a formal process that fails to follow the time-honored path of a full House vote predicating a legitimate impeachment inquiry on to the Judiciary Committee.

Of special interest is how the process to date is playing out with the House Intelligence Committee in a key role conducting what amounts to clandestine meetings, taking depositions and witness statements behind closed doors with a still secret unidentified whistleblower’s identity and voice obscured from Republican members of the Intel Committee and a witness testifying without being formally sworn in – all too eerily similar to East Germany.

The pretense of shielding the thinly veiled CIA operative as a whistleblower from public exposure can only be seen as an overly-dramatic transparent performance as the Dems have never exhibited any concern about protecting real whistleblowers like Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Bill Binney, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Julian Assange, Jeffrey Sterling and others who were left to fend for themselves as the Obama Administration prosecuted more true, authentic whistleblowers than any other administration since the Espionage Act of 1917.

As the paradigm shift takes its toll on the prevailing framework of reality and our decayed political institutions, (the FBI and DOJ come to mind as the Inspector General’s report is due at  week’s end), how much longer does the Democratic Party, which no longer serves a useful public purpose, deserve to exist?

Low-income consumers are struggling to make ends meet despite the “greatest economy ever,” and if a recession strikes or the employment cycle continues to decelerate — this could mean the average American with insurmountable debts will likely fall behind on their debt servicing payments, according to a UBS report, first reported by Bloomberg. 

UBS analyst Matthew Mish wrote in a recent report that 44% of consumers don’t make enough money to cover their expenses.

The new survey asked 2,100 respondents in the US about their current financial situation, at least 40% of the respondents said they experienced a credit problem, if that was a rejection of a credit card or a missing payment, or perhaps defaulting on a balance that was due, this was a 3 percentage-point increase from last year, the survey found. 

Mish has written before that lower-income consumers have seen very little net worth improvement in the last decade. They’ve increased their debt burdens significantly through credit cards, auto loans, and student debt. 

As the federal funds rate drops, consumers are being squeezed by record-high credit card rates.

Given the high leverage of lower-income consumers, the next cyclical downshift in the consumer credit cycle could be much worse than the Dot Com bust, Mish noted in July.

Mish writes in the current report that there are no signs, as of yet, of an imminent downturn in the consumer credit cycle. 

The analyst wrote that the UBS indicator that determines if consumer credit is turning stood at .10 through late September. High scores of the index are often associated with deteriorating consumer health, in 2001 and 2007 recessions, the indicator was approximately .70.  

Mish said in the last six months, only 17% of consumers reported an improvement in their financial well-being. 

As we’ve noted in the last several months, successful transmission of weakness from a manufacturing recession has filtered into services and employment. This means that the economic slowdown in the US has already broadened, now affecting consumers, and will lead to waning consumer health in the late year — just in time for the holiday season. 

“The lower-income cohort led the deterioration, suggesting the lower-tier consumer remains under disproportionate pressure,” Mish wrote.

As the US economy cycles lower through 4Q, lower-income consumers are already coming under pressure. 

Already, the percentage of student loans that are 90 days or more delinquent has jumped from a year ago. Auto loan delinquencies remain elevated from last year. 

And it’s when the consumer shifts into a holding pattern, pulling back on all spending, that is when the broader economic downswing will be seen. A reminder, consumers account for 70% of US GDP.

 

Authored (satirically) by CJ Hopkins vis The Unz Review,

So, it looks like that’s it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have “hacked,” or “influenced,” or “meddled in” our democracy. Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up a last-minute military coup, it’s four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration camps, gigantic banners with the faces of Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public schools, National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death’s heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.

We probably should have seen this coming.

That’s right, as I’m sure you are aware by now, president-in-exile Hillary Clinton has discovered Putin’s diabolical plot to steal the presidency from Elizabeth Warren, or Biden, or whichever establishment puppet makes it out of the Democratic primaries. Speaking to former Obama adviser and erstwhile partner at AKPD Message and Media David Plouffe, Clinton revealed how the godless Rooskies intend to subvert democracy this time:

“I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.”

She was referring, of course, to Tulsi Gabbard, sitting Democratic Member of Congress, decorated Major in the Army National Guard, and long shot 2020 presidential candidate. Apparently, Gabbard (who reliable anonymous sources in the Intelligence Community have confirmed is a member of some kind of treasonous, Samoan-Hindu, Assad-worshipping cult that wants to force everyone to practice yoga) has been undergoing Russian “grooming” at a compound in an undisclosed location that is probably in the basement of Mar-a-Lago, or on Sublevel 168 of Trump Tower.

In any event, wherever Gabbard is being surreptitiously “groomed” (presumably by someone resembling Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love), the plan (i.e., Putin’s plan) is to have her lose in the Democratic primaries, then run as a third-party “spoiler” candidate, stealing votes from Warren or Biden, exactly as Jill Stein (who, according to Clinton, is also “totally a Russian asset”) stole them from Clinton back in 2016, allowing Putin to install Donald Trump (who, according to Clinton, is still being blackmailed by the FSB with that “kompromat” pee-tape) in the White House, where she so clearly belongs.

Clinton’s comments came on the heels of a preparatory smear-piece in The New York Times, What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To?, which reported at length on how Gabbard has been “injecting chaos” into the Democratic primaries. Professional “disinformation experts” supplied The Times with convincing evidence (i.e., unfounded hearsay and innuendo) of “suspicious activity” surrounding Gabbard’s campaign. Former Clinton-aide Laura Rosenberger (who also just happens to be the Director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, “a bipartisan transatlantic national security advocacy group” comprised of former Intelligence Community and U.S. State Department officials, and publisher of the Hamilton 68 dashboard) “sees Gabbard as a potentially useful vector for Russian efforts to sow division.”

The Times piece goes on to list an assortment of unsavory, extremist, white supremacist, horrible, neo-Nazi-type persons that Tulsi Gabbard has nothing to do with, but which Hillary Clinton, the Intelligence Community, The Times, and the rest of the corporate media would like you to mentally associate her with.

Richard Spencer, David Duke, Steve Bannon, Mike Cernovich, Tucker Carlson, and so on. Neo-Nazi sites like the Daily Stormer. 4chan, where, according to The New York Times, neo-Nazis like to “call her Mommy.”

In keeping with professional journalistic ethics, The Times also reached out to experts on fascism, fascist terrorism, terrorist fascism, fascist-adjacent Assad-apologism, Hitlerism, horrorism, Russia, and so on, to confirm Gabbard’s guilt-by-association with the people The Times had just associated her with. Brian Levin, Director of the CSU Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, confirmed that Gabbard has “the seal of approval” within goose-stepping, Hitler-loving, neo-Nazi circles. The Alliance for Securing Democracy (yes, the one from the previous paragraph) conducted an “independent analysis” which confirmed that RT (“the Kremlin-backed news agency”) had mentioned Gabbard far more often than the Western corporate media (which isn’t backed by anyone, and is totally unbiased and independent, despite the fact that most of it is owned by a handful of powerful global corporations, and at least one CIA-affiliated oligarch). Oh, and Hawaii State Senator Kai Kahele, who is challenging Gabbard for her seat in Congress, agreed with The Times that Gabbard’s support from Jew-hating, racist Putin-Nazis might be a potential liability.

“Clearly there’s something about her and her policies that attracts and appeals to these type of people who are white nationalists, anti-Semites, and Holocaust deniers.”

But it’s not just The New York Times, of course. No sooner had Clinton finished cackling than the corporate media launched into their familiar Goebbelsian piano routine, banging out story after television segment repeating the words “Gabbard” and “Russian asset.” I’ve singled out The Times because the smear piece in question was clearly a warm-up for Hillary Clinton’s calculated smear job on Friday night. No, the old gal hasn’t lost her mind. She knew exactly what she was doing, as did the editors of The New York Times, as did every other establishment news source that breathlessly “reported” her neo-McCarthyite smears.

As I noted in my previous essay, 2020 is for all the marbles, and it’s not just about who wins the election. No, it’s mostly about crushing the “populist” backlash against the hegemony of global capitalism and its happy, smiley-faced, conformist ideology. To do that, the neoliberal establishment has to delegitimize, and lethally stigmatize, not just Trump, but also people like Gabbard, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn … and any other popular political figure (left, right, it makes no difference) deviating from that ideology.

• In Trump’s case, it’s his neo-nationalism.

• In Sanders and Corbyn’s, it’s socialism (or at least some semblance of social democracy).

• In Gabbard’s, it’s her opposition to the Corporatocracy’s ongoing efforts to restructure and privatize the Middle East (and the rest of the entire planet), and their using the U.S. military to do it.

Ask yourself, what do Trump, Sanders, Corbyn, and Gabbard have in common? No, it’s not their Putin-Nazism … it’s the challenge they represent to global capitalism. Each, in his or her own way, is a symbol of the growing populist resistance to the privatization and globalization of everything. And thus, they must be delegitimized, stigmatized, and relentlessly smeared as “Russian assets,” “anti-Semites,” “traitors,” “white supremacists,” “fascists,” “communists,” or some other type of “extremists.”

Gabbard, to her credit, understands this, and is focusing attention on the motives and tactics of the neoliberal establishment and their smear machine. As I noted in an essay last year, “the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or small-scale) is to resist the temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible.” This will not save her, but it is the best she can do, and I applaud her for having the guts to do it. I hope she continues to give them hell as they finish off her candidacy and drive her out of office.

Oh, and if you’re contemplating sending me an email explaining how these smear campaigns don’t work (or you spent the weekend laughing about how Hillary Clinton lost her mind and made an utter jackass of herself), maybe check in with Julian Assange, who is about to be extradited to America, tried for exposing U.S. war crimes, and then imprisoned for the remainder of his natural life.

If you can’t get through to Julian at Belmarsh, you could ring up Katharine Viner at The Guardian, which has ruthlessly smeared Assange for years, and published outright lies about him, and is apparently doing very well financially.

And, if Katharine is on holiday in Antigua or somewhere, or having tea with Hillary in the rooftop bar of the Hay-Adams Hotel, you could try Luke Harding (who not only writes and publishes propaganda for The Guardian, but who wrote a whole New York Times best-seller based on nothing but lies and smears). Or try Marty Baron, Dean Baquet, Paul Krugman, or even Rachel Maddow, or any of the other editors and journalists who have been covering the Putin-Nazi “Attack on America,” and keeping us apprised of who is and isn’t a Hitler-loving “Russian asset.”

Ask them whether their smear machine is working… if you can get them off the phone with their brokers, or whoever is decorating their summer places in the Hamptons or out on Martha’s Vineyard.

Or ask the millions of well-off liberals who are still, even after Russiagate was exposed as an enormous hoax based on absolutely nothing, parroting this paranoid official narrative and calling people “Russian assets” on Twitter. Or never mind, just pay attention to what happens over the next twelve months. In terms of ridiculous official propaganda, spittle-flecked McCarthyite smears, and full-blown psychotic mass Putin-Nazi hysteria, it’s going to make the last three years look like the Propaganda Special Olympics.

*  *  *

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

Gone are the days of boys fantasizing about sneaking into the girls locker room, at least in Eastern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. 

That’s because the Eastern Lancaster County School District voted this past week to create non-gender specific facilities instead of traditional gender-specific locker rooms, according to Fox 29. The policy was unanimously passed on the first student day of the 2019-2020 school year.

The $2.4 million plan for Garden Spot High School will include four “zones” that hold a total of 48 changing rooms and 76 private showers. The showers can also double as changing rooms, since they will be private, making a total of 124 total changing rooms. 

The Board commented: “This District policy states that multi-user locker rooms and restrooms will be separated based on biological sex. But the idea behind the policy is much deeper. We’ve worked hard to arrive at a solution that balances varied interests – which is why we’re systematically converting multi-user facilities into a series of single-user facilities.” 

Starting this year, there are also 13 single-user restrooms being made available to students. 

“ELANCO prides itself in not simply providing reasonable accommodations to those who need them, but going above and beyond to provide extraordinary accommodations for all its students,” the board continued. 

The restrooms only mark a first step in a “much larger inclusivity initiative” that will include specified classrooms for teams to meet during competition, when they would normally meet in a locker room. We’re sure those classrooms will smell terrific the next day. 

The rooms “will have entry points in public areas of schools so that any student, regardless of assigned sex and gender identity can access them.”

Also, athletes will no longer be able to change in these rooms. The Board stated: “Because nobody will change in any classroom, including these team classrooms, both sexes can be present. This really helps, for instance, when we have a girls’ team coached by a male, or vice versa.”

The initiative comes after backlash last year when the Board allowed a transgender boy to use the boys’ restroom and locker room during gym class. 

The Board said: “To be absolutely clear, we seek to accommodate any student in need of an accommodation because we believe accommodations can help all students to thrive. We also want to preserve bodily privacy in spaces that exist to provide privacy from those with the opposite anatomy. Some might say it’s an impossible task to balance all those interests. But it is one we’re working to implement.” 

The Board concluded: “While this involves a significant investment. It is a worthwhile one that will serve students, coaches and the school well for many years to come.” 

Authored by Joakim Book via The Mises Institute,

Clarity is a virtue, and if overlooking critical nuances can mean readers end up more confused after reading one’s work, that’s not very useful, to put things mildly.

Earlier this month, Justin Fox at The New York Times made a splendid illustration of this blunder; his piece amounted to saying mostly unsubstantiated things about “the” state of economics while renouncing clarity in favor of confused concepts and histories. Fox reviews two books: NYT writer Binyamin Appelbaum ’s The Economist’s Hour and The Marginal Revolutionaries by long-term student of fin de siècle Vienna and University of Alabama historian Janek Wasserman. Having not yet finished Wasserman’s biography of the Austrian school and its early economists, I don’t know if the below inaccuracies stem from his misinterpretations of these authors or from errors in the discussed works themselves.

Consider the following illustrative paragraph. Fox writes that the 1871 marginal revolution

made Vienna a leading Continental outpost of the market-oriented ‘neoclassical’ economics that also became dominant in Britain and eventually the United States. But the Austrian school also had some unique properties. One was a fascination with entrepreneurs, expressed most famously in Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 account of the ‘creative destruction’ of business failure and creation. Another was a skepticism of the mathematical tools used by neoclassical economists elsewhere. Most pronounced of all was a disdain for government management of the economy.

Fox is right that late-19th century Vienna was a thriving hub of intellectual achievements in arts, culture, philosophy, legal theory as well as economic thought. Describing it as an “outpost of the market-oriented ‘neoclassical’ economics,” or believing that the neglected brands of emerging so-called Austrian Economists were calling the shots is quite a stretch.

Let’s unpack this a bit.

Strike 1: The Austrian School as “Neoclassical”

First, the vacuous and perilous term “neoclassical” economics is misused here — as in modern times when employed as a slur for any economic thinking that displeases the author. Thorstein Veblen is usually credited with having invented the term in 1899/1900, a pesky three decades after the marginal revolution. He specifically considered — and attacked — the economics of Alfred Marshall, professor of political economy in Cambridge between 1885 and 1908, whose textbook Principles of Economics was widely used in England. Tony Aspromourgos, the historian of economic thought, biographer of Adam Smith, and — full disclosure — my former professor at the University of Sydney, writes that early users of the term “all place[d] Marshall at the centre of a neoclassical economics.” If the term ever referred to anything concrete and specific, it was the economics of Marshall.

Jaffé’s oft-cited article further separated Menger, Jevons and Walras from one another and clearly illustrated the modern mistake of lumping them together as co-originators of the Marginal Revolution: Menger refrained from using mathematical expositions; Menger’s conception of marginal unit is vastly different from Jevons and even moreso from Walras; Schumpeter singled out Walras as user of general equilibrium, in stark contrast to Jevons or Menger.

Strike 2: Vienna as an Outpost of Market-Oriented, Anti-Government Ideas

Any sweeping statement of the complicated and diverse intellectual environment of pre-WWI Vienna is going to miss its mark. Implying that it was somehow dominated by “market-oriented” economists is entirely incorrect. We can point to many distinguished intellectuals whose persuasions were rather the opposite: Otto Neurath, a frequent sparring partner to the actual-Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk in the halls of University of Vienna, whose ideas for socialized economies were shared widely among intellectuals. Indeed, Neurath was in charge of centrally planning the Bavarian socialist economy during its brief socialist rule in 1918-19; Hans Kelsen, the founder of legal positivism, the legal doctrine that traces validity of laws to correct governmental procedures regardless of content; Otto Bauer, the Austro-Marxist and socialist party secretary in the 1900s and 1910s whose bolshevist persuasions all but ensured an Austrian union with Moscow.

For decades, the nickname for Austria’s finest city was “Red Vienna,” suggesting that perhaps the intellectual environment of these early Austrian economists was something other than “a disdain for government management.”

Strike 3: Entrepreneurship and Schumpeter

This association of entrepreneurs with Schumpeter is particularly dreadful. Fascination with entrepreneurs as drivers of economic change is indeed a signum of Austrian economics — a line of thinking that harks back through early generations of Austrians and even to Richard Cantillon. It preceded Schumpeter by decades, and continues today largely independent of Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction.”

Schumpeter’s economics, whose national origin was Austria, is thoroughly Walrasian – following Walras’ general equilibrium methods, rather than Menger’s subjectivism. His entrepreneurship theories are not Austrian.

Be Nuanced, Stop Fudging

Piece by piece, Fox’s confusing paragraph has unraveled. Scrutinized properly, it makes very little sense. Throwing words together in an under-analyzed mish-mash don’t make them informative, let alone true.

The final objection that might be laid against Fox’s version of market-loving economists’ dominance is precisely its pretend dominance. Pre-Keynesian Marshallian economics was briefly popular in England, and some select market practices that twentieth-century economists advanced have filtered through to policy-makers. But by and large, this threat of Rule-By-Economist seems largely imaginary.

On political discussions ranging from rent control or tariffs and free trade to raising top marginal tax rates, economists of all political persuasions overwhelmingly line up on one side — with politicians, the intellectuals and actual real-world policies on the other. Meanwhile, several countries in the OECD are on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve (stifling activity while raising less taxes than they could have). The distinguished Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, an 89-year-old economist who was put in charge of a committee in the 1990s to update and liberalize Sweden’s bloated public sector – and so has actually had some political influence – has campaigned for abolished rent control for over half a century. Without any success whatsoever.

To pretend, against that background, that economists rule the political roost seems incredible. Fox should take note.