Buchanan: Trump Should Close NATO Membership Rolls

Authored by Patrick Buchanan, op-ed via Tonwhall.com,

When Donald Trump meets with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg today, the president should give him a direct message:

The roster of NATO membership is closed. For good. The United States will not hand out any more war guarantees to fight Russia to secure borders deep in Eastern Europe, when our own southern border is bleeding profusely.

And no one needs to hear this message more than Stoltenberg.

In Tblisi, Georgia, on March 25, Stoltenberg declared to the world:

“The 29 allies have clearly stated that Georgia will become a member of NATO.”

As for Moscow’s objection to Georgia joining NATO, Stoltenberg gave Vladimir Putin the wet mitten across the face:

“We are not accepting that Russia, or any other power, can decide what (NATO) members can do.”

Yet what would it mean for Georgia to be brought into NATO?

The U.S. would immediately be ensnared in a conflict with Russia that calls to mind the 1938 and 1939 clashes over the Sudetenland and Danzig that led straight to World War II.

In 2008, thinking it had U.S. backing, Georgia rashly ordered its army into South Ossetia, a tiny province that had broken away years before.

In that Georgian invasion, Russian peacekeepers were killed and Putin responded by sending the Russian army into South Ossetia to throw the Georgians out. Then he invaded Georgia itself.

“We are all Georgians now!” roared uber-interventionist John McCain. But George W. Bush, by now a wiser man, did nothing.

Had Georgia been a NATO nation in 2008, the U.S. could have been on the brink of war with Russia over the disputed and minuscule enclave of South Ossetia, which few Americans had ever heard of.

Why would we bring Georgia into NATO now, when Tblisi still claims the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both of which Moscow controls and defends?

Are we not in enough quarrels already that could lead to new wars — with Iran in the Gulf, China in the South China Sea, North Korea, Russia in the Baltic and Black Sea, Venezuela in our own hemisphere — in addition to Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia where we are already fighting?

Among neocon and GOP interventionists, there has also long been a vocal constituency for bringing Ukraine into NATO.

Indeed, changes in the GOP platform in Cleveland on U.S. policy toward Ukraine, it was said, were evidence of Trumpian collusion with the Kremlin.

But bringing Ukraine into NATO would be an even greater manifestation of madness than bringing in Georgia.

Russia has annexed Crimea. She has supported pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass who seceded when the elected president they backed was ousted in the Kiev coup five years ago.

Kiev’s recent attempt to enter the Sea of Azov by sailing without formal notification under the Putin-built Kerch Strait Bridge between Russia and Crimea, proved a debacle. Ukrainian sailors are still being held.

No matter how supportive we are of Ukraine, we cannot commit this country to go to war with Russia over its territorial integrity. No Cold War president from Truman to George H. W. Bush would have dreamed of doing such a thing. Bush I thought Ukraine should remain tied to Russia and the Ukrainian independence movement was born of “suicidal nationalism.”

Trump has rightly demanded that Europeans start paying their fair share of the cost of NATO. But a graver question than the money involved are the risks involved.

Infographic: Defense Expenditures of NATO Countries | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has added 13 nations: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, and six Balkan countries — Bulgaria, Rumania, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania and Montenegro.

Also attending the NATO gathering in Tblisi a week ago were Sweden, Finland and Azerbaijan. Are these three also candidates for U.S. war guarantees?

The larger NATO becomes, the further east it moves, the greater the probability of a military clash that could lead to World War III.

Yet none of the nations admitted to NATO in two decades was ever regarded as worth a war with Russia by any Cold War U.S. president.

When did insuring the sovereignty and borders of these nations suddenly become vital interests of the United States?

And if they are not vital interests, why are we committed to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia over them, when avoidance of such a war was the highest priority of our eight Cold War presidents?

Putin’s Russia, once hopeful about a new relationship under Trump, appears to be giving up on the Americans and shifting toward China.

Last week, 100 Russian troops arrived in Caracas. Whereupon, The Wall Street Journal lost it: Get them out of our “backyard.” The Monroe Doctrine demands it.

Yet, who has been moving into Russia’s front yard for 20 years?

As the Scotsman wrote, the greatest gift the gods can give us is to see ourselves as others see us.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ODsP4a Tyler Durden

Elizabeth Warren Wants to Break Up Monopoly Seed Companies

WarrenIowKCMcGinnisZumaPressNewscomDemocratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) was on the hustings in Iowa last week seeking caucus votes among the state’s farmers. According to the The Washington Post, Warren called for breaking up Big Ag in the hope of appealing to her audiences.

Government statistics do show four companies now share 85 percent of the U.S. corn seed market, up from 60 percent in 2000, and 75 percent of the soybean seed market, up from about 50 percent in 2000. “Twenty years ago, 600 different outfits were selling seeds. Today, basically, it’s six,” Warren said.

The senator is not wrong about the steep decline in the number of seed companies. Throughout most of history, farmers chiefly saved their own seed and shared it with neighbors. That changed with the development of high-yielding hybrid corn in the early 20th century. Since hybrids don’t breed true, farmers began buying their seeds from developers each year. Around 200 seed companies came into existence to supply the market for hybrid seeds before 1940.

Consolidation of the seed breeding industry began after the passage of the Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA) in 1970. Prior to the PVPA, the courts had ruled that life couldn’t be patented. The PVPA created a voluntary program that conferred patent-like rights on seed developers, breeders, and owners of plant varieties. The goal was to encourage the development of new plant varieties by enabling breeders to recover research and development costs. Between 1970 and 1980, about 50 seed companies were acquired by chemical, food, and pharmaceutical firms.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that genetically modified bacteria could be patented and this extended to the genetically engineered products including crops. In the 1980s there were still some 200 independent seed companies, including many scores of biotech startups. A wave of mergers and acquisitions took off in the 1990s as firms like Monsanto and Syngenta transformed themselves into integrated life sciences companies.

Escalating costs due in part to regulation are part of what drove the consolidation of the seed industry that Warren is now decrying. By one estimate, it takes more than $130 million and 13 years to get a new biotech crop variety to farmers. Startup biotech companies cannot afford to shoulder those burdens. This resulted in six breeders eventually becoming the dominant sellers of genetically enhanced seeds and related agricultural chemicals to farmers. Farmers rapidly adopted the new biotech varieties and associated agronomic practices because of dramatic cost savings and benefits to the environment.

Warren’s worries about Big Ag are a bit behind the times. Competiton from a new wave of crop breeding startups is already taking off. These startups are using safe and simple genome-editing techniques to speedily develop new crop varieties with improved nutritional, yield, and pest and disease resistance characteristics. And since the U.S. Department of Agriculture has ruled that its expensive and onerous regulations for earlier biotech crops do not apply to the genome-edited crops, the startups can get their seeds to farmers much faster and at less cost.

The best way for Warren to achieve the goal of reducing the market shares of the big biotech crop companies is to make sure that environmental activists don’t succeed in preventing these new crop varieties from getting to farmers.

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Khashoggi’s Kids Have Received Multi-Million Dollar Homes, Massive Payouts From Saudi Governmment

Apparently, despite the Saudis alleged leaking of Jeff Bezos’ intimate texts as retribution for his newspaper’s aggressive coverage of the Khashoggi murder, the Amazon founder has remained unfazed, and on Tuesday, the Washington Post  published its latest scoop in the ongoing saga of murder and deception.

As the international outcry over Khashoggi’s killing, and the suspected involvement of Saudi Crown Prince MbS, continues to fade, WaPo reports that the kingdom has provided generous financial settlements to Khashoggi’s children, including multi-million dollar homes and five-figure monthly payouts, in what the paper describes as an arrangement to keep them from speaking out against the Kingdom.

Salah

Salah Khashoggi shakes hands with MbS

In addition, the two sons and two daughters of the slain former government insider-turned-dissident – whom the kingdom has said was accidentally murdered during a botched rendition attempt inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul (though WaPo’s reporting has established that US intelligence believes MbS personally ordered the hit) – could receive a payout worth tens of millions of dollars in a “blood money” settlement – that is, if they’re willing to forgive their father’s alleged killers.

If the men are convicted and sentenced to death, the Saudi system of justice could allow the Khashoggi family members to grant their father’s killers clemency as part of a “blood money” arrangement in which they might then be entitled to tens of millions of dollars.

It is unclear whether Khashoggi’s children would be required to forgive or absolve the killers to collect the payments.

Former Saudi officials and experts said that the royal court and government have incentives to seek such an agreement and avoid a situation in which only low-level operatives are executed for their role in a plot that was developed and orchestrated from high levels of government.

But with the trial’s conclusion still months away, the Kingdom has been doling out the payments and awards to “make a wrong right”. In return, the siblings have refrained from criticizing the kingdom, even neglecting to assign blame during an editorial published in the Washington Post.

Of course, Americans who have watched the hit TV show “the Sopranos” might recognize this tactic: During its heyday, the mafia routinely “took care” of the families of members murdered for suspected transgressions.

What’s more, King Salman reportedly personally approved the payments and the gifts of the multi-million dollar homes last year.

The Khashoggi siblings have refrained from any harsh criticism of the kingdom, even as their father’s death provoked global outrage and widespread condemnation of the heir to the Saudi throne, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The delivery of homes and monthly payments of $10,000 or more to each sibling were approved late last year by King Salman as part of what one former official described as an acknowledgment that “a big injustice has been done” and an attempt “to make a wrong right.”

But the royal family is also relying on its wealth to help contain the ongoing fallout from the killing and dismemberment of the prominent Saudi journalist and Washington Post contributing columnist who was targeted for articles that were often critical of the government.

A Saudi official described the payments as consistent with the country’s long-standing practice of providing financial support to victims of violent crime or even natural disasters and rejected the suggestion that the Khashoggi family would be obligated to remain silent. “Such support is part of our custom and culture,” the official said. “It is not attached to anything else.”

Despite the kingdom’s generosity, the siblings reportedly don’t see eye to eye on the payments. Khashoggi’s two daughters are said to support the family taking a more aggressive stance against the House of Saud and MbS, while Salah Khashoggi, Khashoggi’s eldest son, is been the most amenable to compromise. He’s the only one of the four siblings who still resides in Saudi Arabia with his family, living in a multi-million dollar compound in Jiddah.

Salah appeared in an infamous photograph shaking MbS’s hand last year. But while the Kingdom had hoped the photo would convey the ruling family’s contrition over the murder, critics derided it as an example of coercion. Salah, who works as a banker in Jiddah, hasn’t spoken out one way or the other.

And since he intends to remain in the kingdom with his family, he and his siblings have every reason to stay quiet. After all, they are facing a very stark choice: Speak out and risk the life of their brother, while also losing the financial settlements, or stay quiet, take the money, and move on with their lives.

Meanwhile, in the clearest sign that the international financial services community, which famously boycotted MbS’s Saudi Future Investment Initiative forum – aka “Davos in the Desert” – late last year, has dropped its moralistic stance, Goldman CEO David Solomon is reportedly on his way to the kingdom to try and strengthen the bank’s business ties with its leaders. Solomon is the first Wall Street CEO to travel to the kingdom since the Khashoggi incident, but given revelations about Aramco’s profitability, and Goldman’s role in advising on Aramco’s plans to buy Sabic, the opportunity for banks to reap massive profits will likely prove too alluring to ignore.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2WH3g50 Tyler Durden

If You Thought It Couldn’t Get Any Worse For Chicago…

Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

This is the second post in a week on Chicago’s epic financial train wreck. That’s a lot of attention and it probably won’t happen again, given the target-rich world we live in.

But, jeeze, talk about not learning from past mistakes.

This latest chapter begins with the Chicago mayoral race and the two candidates’ stances on the Jussie Smollett controversy – one is on his side, the other on that of the Chicago PD.

That’s interesting but otherwise irrelevant.

The race is between two African American women, one gay and the other presumably not, one from deep in the local political machine, the other from outside it. So far so good. The tent is getting bigger, more categories of people can aspire to high office, go Chicago.

But this is also apparently irrelevant, because when it comes to saving the city from pension-driven financial collapse, well, here’s a snippet from today’s Wall Street Journal:

There’s little daylight between the two Democrats on policy. Both support higher taxes to pay for pensions, though they differ on which levies to increase. Ms. Lightfoot this week endorsed a value-added tax on legal and accounting services. She’s also proposed an increase in the city hotel tax—already among the highest in the nation—and a real-estate transfer tax. Ms. Preckwinkle is supporting Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s proposal for a graduated state income tax. Both oppose modifying worker pensions and want to impose a moratorium on charter schools.

Trailing in the polls, Ms. Preckwinkle and her supporters have resorted to weaponizing identity politics. Last weekend U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush smeared Ms. Lightfoot at a Preckwinkle rally as a killer of black people and champion of police because she has served on the Chicago Police Board and Police Accountability Task Force. “Everyone who votes for Lori, the blood of the next young black man or black woman who is killed by the police is on your hands,” Mr. Rush declared.

Ms. Preckwinkle declined to denounce the comment. She may believe fomenting racial discord will help her turn out the vote in the city’s heavily black South and West sides, where she performed well during the primary. Thus, Ms. Preckwinkle may not want to be seen supporting the police investigation of Mr. Smollett, who claims to be innocent and a victim of racial discrimination.

The Journal reporter concludes:

“Neither candidate appears likely to arrest the city’s spiral into insolvency. But stopping its descent into cynicism and racial grievance may be an equal imperative.”

Wrong, WSJ. The financial spiral is everything. Chicago is experiencing an already catastrophic rate of out-migration, as people who can afford to (a.k.a. the tax base) move to less rapacious places. And the two mayoral candidates both oppose scaling back union benefits while proposing much higher taxes and more stringent regulations, which will turbo-charge the descent into financial chaos.

And this, recall from the post that appeared here a few days ago, comes as both Chicago and its host state Illinois begin massive and sustained borrowing campaigns to cover existing shortfalls.

The conclusion? They can only behave this way in a financial market that assumes no matter how badly they mess up, national taxpayers will be coerced into saving them and their investors. Look up “moral hazard” in the dictionary and you might find a picture of the Illinois state seal.

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Erdogan Disputes Election Results After AKP Stunning Loss Of 3 Largest Cities

It’s official, or maybe not quite — as perhaps predictably the AK party plans to challenge the stunning defeat: Erdogan’s party has lost Turkey’s three largest cities, Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, to the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP.

Ballots in the crucial local election were completely tallied on Tuesday, and the upset represents a huge setback for the president and his party amid a continued bleak and worsening economic situation.

People walk past by AK Party billboards with pictures of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and mayoral candidate Binali Yildirim in Istanbul, Turkey, via Reuters/RFI

The final results now with 100% of the ballots counted as reported by the semiofficial Anadolu news agency put opposition candidate for mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, at 48.79%, barely inching out rival AKP candidate Binali Yildrim’s 48.51%. And in the capital of Ankara, CHP’s Mansur Yavas won with 50.93% of the vote, compared to AKP’s Mehmet Ozhaseki’s 47.12%.

Shooting back against critics who point out the local races were clear and biting indictments of Erdogan’s leadership amid an ailing and troubled economy, and further amid worsening relations with the United States and the West, a representative of the Turkish presidency tweeted: “They will never learn. AK Party won 44.3% and the coalition won 51.6% of the votes.” Spokesman Ibrahim Kalin lashed out further as part of the statement: “Erdogan has his mandate until 2023. Stop presenting your wishful thinking as fact and analysis.”

The AKP spokesman, Omer Celik, claimed early on Tuesday that there were significant voting tally discrepancies between polling and the actual vote — enough to cause AKP to lodge objections. 

Specifically, according to the BBC:

The AKP alleges irregularities, and is challenging the results in every Istanbul district. Officially the CHP is ahead by 25,000 votes in the city.

Giant AKP victory posters have gone up in Istanbul.

The secularist CHP (Republican People’s Party) condemned that move, accusing the Islamist-rooted AKP of trying to steal the result.

The AKP is also contesting the CHP victory in Ankara.

Parts of the largely government-controlled media are reporting allegations that stolen ballots hindered the party’s performance.

In the past, Turkish opposition parties have failed to mount a successful challenge to election results.

But few predicted that AKP would escape the downward spiraling economy unscathed:

The polls posed a major challenge for Erdogan, given a backdrop of high inflation and rising unemployment sparked by a major currency crisis last year.

Earlier this month, official statistics showed that in the last two quarters of 2018, the Turkish economy slipped into its first recession in a decade, as inflation and interest rates soared due to the currency meltdown.

In February, inflation stood at just under 20 percent, while the Central Bank’s main interest rate is currently 24 percent.

According to The New York Times, this could delay formal certification for up to a little over a week:

The head of that council, Sadi Guven, said in Ankara on Tuesday that it had shared preliminary results with political parties. For now, he said, the council will give certificates of election to candidates whose victories are not subject to appeals, which can be submitted until 3 p.m. Tuesday.

The council will rule on those challenges within eight days, he added.

However, the AKP promised to recognize the validity of the process and outcome. “The process is legitimate. Everyone should respect it,” Celik said at the party’s headquarters in Ankara. “We will respect the results regardless of the outcome, as it is our people’s choice.”

* * * 

previously 

Chaos erupted late on Sunday when President Erdogan’s ruling AKP party was looking certain to lose control of the capital, Ankara, while both AKP and the opposition CHP party claimed victory in Istanbul in the culmination of a critical municipal vote that is testing the popularity of Turkey’s executive president.

As reported by various news wires, preliminary results showed the opposition flipping the capital Ankara and surrounding areas from Erdogan’s alliance, and taking control of some of Turkey’s key Mediterranean coastal cities. In a stunning (or perhaps not, after all this is Turkey) to what appears to be an extreme close vote, even before the final figures were announced, Erdogan’s ally and former prime minister Binali Yildirim said he won the race in Istanbul, Turkey’s commercial hub, a claim rejected by the opposition, which said it won.

  • TURKEY’S BINALI YILDIRIM SAYS HE WON THE RACE IN ISTANBUL
  • TURKEY OPPOSITION’S KILICDAROGLU SAYS WON IN ISTANBUL

When Yildirim declared victory, the state-run news agency reported a margin of less than 0.1 percentage point between him and his main rival Ekrem Imamoglu. That means that out of some 10 million ballots cast in the city, the difference was about 5,000 votes according to Bloomberg.

Adding to the confusion, and calls that Erdogan has stolen the election, when Yildirim spoke, the state-run news agency showed 98.8 percent of votes tallied, and then stopped reporting updated results for Istanbul after he declared victory. The opposition candidate said the result was manipulated and the party’s leader also claimed victory in televised remarks.

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25% of Millennials no longer having sex due to financial problems

My grandfather was just a toddler when soldiers came home from World War One in 1918.

They brought the deadly Spanish Flu with them, which killed well over 50 million worldwide.

As a young adult, my grandfather struggled through the Great Depression with the rest of the world.

And just as things started looking up, World War II broke out.

Lucky for me, he survived it all.

After the war, my grandfather took a job as a teacher. And on that single salary he was able to buy a house, provide for his family, afford a car, and have a secure pension for when he retired.

His wife (my grandmother) started a small hair salon in the family living room to earn money on the side.

They saved nearly every penny they ever earned. They never went into debt.

And they invested conservatively, often buying short-term government savings bonds that paid  over 4% by the late 1950s– well above the rate of inflation.

This wasn’t just my grandparents’ experience either.  Back then, this was the fundamental promise of America: you were rewarded for working hard and saving money.

But now things are entirely different.

For starters, cost of living is totally out of control. My grandfather’s teaching salary was more than enough to support his family in a comfortable, middle class lifestyle.

Today that would be almost impossible.

More often than not, it takes two working parents to make ends meet in a typical household.

Census statistics show that just 25% of married households with children were dual income in 1950. Today it’s nearly 70%.

Plus, to even qualify for a lot of jobs today, you must have a university degree… which carries its own enormous costs.

Even after adjusting for inflation, a typical university education in the US costs over five times as much as it did in 1960, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

A typical young person today emerges from university with student debt exceeding $40,000. And millions of young people have student debt exceeding $100,000.

Speaking of debt, my grandparents had none. And they had plenty of cash savings, as was typical of their generation.

But today’s median household (according to Federal Reserve data) has racked up consumer debt exceeding $30,000, with a bank balance of less than $5,000.

And that bank balance earns a pitiful interest rate of just 0.02%. So even for people who have savings, the interest they earn doesn’t keep up with inflation.

Housing costs are also out of control.

Home prices are near record highs, making it extremely difficult for young people to afford a  down payment.

And rents have been steadily rising for years, far outpacing the rate of inflation (and lackluster wage increases.)

Perhaps that’s why a survey from Zillow last year found that nearly 25% of 24-36 year olds were living with their parents. They simply can’t afford their own housing.

Coincidentally, a study from the University of Chicago last year showed that roughly 25% of people in their 20s reported having zero sex in the previous 12 months, almost the same amount as people living with Mom and Dad.

While this might sound comical, it matters: young people are putting off children as well.

In fact, the US fertility rate is now at its lowest level in DECADES, well below the amount necessary to maintain a stable population.

It’s simply too expensive to have kids.

When my grandparents starting having children, the hospital bill was about $100.

Today it can easily be more than 100x that amount. And the cost of rearing a child today through the age of 18 can now exceed $200,000, not including university tuition.

Then there are retirement challenges as well.

Back in my grandparents’ era, it was common for workers to have well-funded private pensions.

Today private pensions are nearly extinct. And of the few that still exist, about 25% are insolvent.

Public pensions (as we discuss frequently) are in terrible condition, with a mutli-trillion dollar funding gap worldwide.

And then there’s Social Security, which is in such financial ruin that even the Social Security Administration admits the program’s trust funds will run out of money in 2034.

I also think back to how easily my grandmother was able to start her own hair salon. She bought a pair of scissors one day and started cutting hair in her living room. Simple.

Today you’d have to navigate a mountain of permits, licenses, bureaucracy, and legal liability, the cost of which is prohibitive for most people who dream about starting their own business.

Unsurprisingly, Census data show that the number of new startups in the US continues to decline.

This is a long way from the original Promise of America, where the average person could work hard, save money, and afford to retire.

Today, the system is no longer designed to provide any of that.

Wages and savings don’t keep pace with inflation. Debt has exploded. People are working harder and becoming less prosperous. And retirement is anything but secure.

These problems can’t be fixed in a voting booth. Or by waiting for the Bolsheviks to engineer prosperity for all. And certainly not by following the status quo.

A better solution is to walk a different path altogether– one of self-reliance and independence.

For example, you CAN secure your retirement. Not by relying on a broken pension, but by taking matters into your own hands with a more robust structure like a solo 401(k).

You can obtain a top quality university education by studying abroad at a fraction of the price.

You can start a new business in a tax-advantaged jurisdiction (like Puerto Rico, where you can pay just 4% tax on your profits).

There are countless solutions to fix these challenges. It just takes a little bit of education and the will to take action.

Source

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Bernie, Kamala, and Probably Beto Raised More Money in the First Quarter Than Gary Johnson Did During Entire 2016 Campaign

||| Staton Rabin/ZUMA Press/NewscomThe first quarter for presidential campaign fundraising ended March 31, and though the reporting deadline is April 15, three candidates have already spilled digits:

* Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) has raised $18 million from 900,000 donors.

* Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) has raised $12 million from 218,000 donors.

* Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) of South Bend, Indiana, has raised $7 million from 159,000 donors.

Now, there’s a whole lot that we don’t know yet, including how much the campaigns spent on acquiring those donations (or on other activities), and, obviously, the totals from the other 368 people running for president. Beto O’Rourke, to name one competitor, raised $6.1 million from 128,000 donors in the first 24 hours of his campaign, narrowly topping Sanders’s initial $5.9 million from 223,000; he’ll likely be north of Harris. There’s also the issue of differential timing:

Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) is facing fundraising challenges that have already led in part to her finance director resigning. All this furious interest at a time when even recent campaign cycles were in their embryonic stages:

Still, we can make one assertion with confidence: In just the first three months of the year before the election, several 2020 Democratic contenders will shatter the record fundraising haul over the entirety of the 2016 campaign by Libertarian Gary Johnson.

||| Matt WelchJohnson and running mate Bill Weld in 2016 raised over $11 million—the Federal Elections Commission says $11.2 million; OpenSecrets has it at $11.9 million (neither included total number of donors). The money dwarfed Johnson’s 2012 haul of just under $2 million, and cleared by a comfortable margin the inflation-adjusted 1980 total for Ed Clark and David Koch of $7.7 million in 2016 dollars (of which a reported $6.2 million came from Koch himself).

So the Libertarian Party glass-half-full interpretation is, getta load of those great trendlines, both in presidential fundraising and votes! The half-empty analysis, on the other hand, is brutal: The largely unknown 37-year-old mayor of the country’s 301st largest city, currently polling at around seventh place and in the low single digits, will likely break the L.P.’s all-time presidential fundraising record more than 17 months before the 2020 election. When two-party emotions run high, nontraditional candidates die.

Or maybe not! Predicting anything in American politics is a mug’s game, and who knows what, say, a Justin Amash Libertarian presidential candidacy could do to the cruel fundraising math of 2019. Speaking of which, here’s a long Michigan Live profile from this week on the libertarian Republican’s L.P. flirtation, and also Kennedy asked Amash about it on her eponymous Fox Business Network program last night:

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CNN, WaPo Demand That Trump Further Escalate Tensions With Russia

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

CNN has aired a segment in which pundit Fareed Zakaria tells the network’s audience that the US president has “been unwilling to confront Putin in any way on any issue” and asks “will Venezuela be the moment when Trump finally ends his appeasement?”

The segment is a near-verbatim reading of Zakaria’s Washington Post columnfrom a couple of days prior, so that’s two massive prongs through which this false and pernicious narrative is being driven into mainstream consciousness claiming that the Trump administration has been far too dovish toward Moscow, rather than dangerously hawkish as is actually the case.

Zakaria begins his segment by describing the Trump administration’s (completely illegitimate) efforts to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, then describing Russian efforts to counter this agenda as an attempt to “taunt the United States.” He then spends the rest of the segment asking if Trump will be brave and patriotic enough to further escalate tensions against a nuclear superpower. Zakaria concludes by implying that if Trump fails to increase world-threatening nuclear tensions to effect yet another US regime change intervention in yet another oil-rich country, it will be because he is a Kremlin agent.

“The big question for Washington is: Will it allow Moscow to make a mockery of another U.S. red line?” Zakaria said.

“The United States and Russia have taken opposing, incompatible stands on this issue. And as with Syria, there is a danger that, if Washington does not back its words with deeds, a year from now, we will be watching the consolidation of the Maduro regime, supported with Russian arms and money.”

Yes Fareed, there is a real “danger” that if the Trump administration you liberal pundits claim to oppose doesn’t act like the reckless madman you claim he is and tempt hot war with a nuclear superpower in order to effect regime change in a sovereign nation, that regime change agenda will fail. Very, very dangerous to not flirt with nuclear war over US resource control agendas.

“The administration has been tough on Russian involvement in Venezuela,” said Zakaria.

“Trump himself has even declared, ‘Russia has to get out.’ But that is an unusual statement from Trump, who has almost never criticized Putin and often sided with Russia on matters big and small.”

Zakaria goes on to cite the Obama administration’s ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, who claimed in a Washington Post article that, contrary to the Trump administration’s claims of being hawkish toward Russia, “Even on small issues of little relevance to American national interests, Trump sides with Putin.”

“I have never alleged collusion or conspiracy between Russia and Trump, writing merely that we should wait to see what evidence special counsel Robert S. Mueller III presented,” Zakaria concludes, trying to shelter himself from the ridicule that is being directed at the debunked Russiagate conspiracy while simultaneously promoting it.

“But the real puzzle remains: Why has Trump been unwilling to confront Putin in any way on any issue? And will Venezuela be the moment when Trump finally ends his appeasement?”

You could not ask for a more perfect illustration of just how dangerous and toxic this years-long Russiagate psyop has been. Even after the Mueller investigation concluded with no mass arrests, no sealed indictments, no further indictments and no evidence of Russian collusion, the mass media war propagandists are attempting to use the Russia hysteria they’ve already manufactured via the collusion narrative to create demand for more escalations against Russia. Fragmenting and undermining Russia and shoving it off the world stage has been an agenda of opaque US government agencies since the fall of the Soviet Union, and steps have been taken into a new cold war to effect this agenda for more than five years now, long before liberals in America spent any part of their day thinking or caring about Vladimir Putin. Mass media outlets like CNN and WaPo have been actively facilitating this agenda by promulgating these false narratives, and they are playing an instrumental role in convincing the US populace to keep their foot off the brake pedal in an accelerating and world-threatening new cold war.

Trump has already greatly escalated tensions with Russia by implementing a Nuclear Posture Review with a much more aggressive stance against Russia, withdrawing from the INF treaty, bombing and illegally occupying Syria, arming Ukraine, staging a coup in Venezuela, and many, many other hawkish actions taken against the interests of Russia’s geostrategic and economic interests. It is an indisputable fact that Trump has been more aggressive toward Russia than any other president since the fall of the Berlin wall. But the Russiagate narrative enables the war propagandists to not only ignore these escalations and the danger they pose to all life on earth, but to demand more and more of them.

Stephen Cohen, one of the foremost experts on US-Russia relations in America, made the following observation way back in April of 2017 in an interview with Democracy Now:

I think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least since the Cuban missile crisis. And arguably, it’s more dangerous, because it’s more complex. Therefore, we — and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington these — and, in my judgment, factless accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in American-Russian relations, we have an American president who’s being politically crippled by the worst imaginable — it’s unprecedented. Let’s stop and think. No American president has ever been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we’re talking about here, or that his associates have committed treason.

Imagine, for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. And for the viewers who are not of a certain age, the Kennedy administration was presented — and the evidence, by the way, was presented to us; they showed us the surveillance photos. There was no doubt what the Soviets had done, putting missile silos in Cuba. No evidence has been presented today of anything. Imagine if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been crippled. And the only way he could have proved he wasn’t was to have launched a war against the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear war.

To be clear, we came within a hair’s breadth of total nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nobody likes to think about how close we all came to losing literally everything, and we didn’t find out exactly how close we came until years later, but armageddon came *this* close to happening. The primary risk of nuclear war isn’t that one will be planned and carried out in the hope of one side emerging victorious, it’s that something can go cataclysmically wrong as a result of miscommunication or misunderstanding in the midst of complex and confusing escalating tensions. This almost happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Due to his extensive knowledge of the dynamics in play, Cohen saw all this coming long before anyone else, and accurately predicted the waves of cold war escalations we’ve seen since. Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard recently confirmed his prediction, tweeting,

“Short-sighted politicians and media pundits who’ve spent last two years accusing Trump as a Putin puppet have brought us the expensive new Cold War and arms race. How? Because Trump now does everything he can to prove he’s not Putin’s puppet — even if it brings us closer to nuclear war.”

This is how depraved the mass media are. They’re willing to lull the populace into complacency with the formation of a new cold war that threatens everyone they love, even get them demanding direct confrontation, all to please their plutocratic owners, their military-industrial complex sponsors, and the intelligence agencies with which they are aligned. They’re willing to risk getting us all killed for money and crude oil.

If we’re going to begin bringing our society and ecosystem into health, we’re going to have to find a way to extricate the influence of these toxic manipulators from the minds of the greater populace. As long as they’re able to propagandize the majority into consenting to even the most insane omnicidal agendas, we’ll never be able to use our superior numbers against the malignant manipulations of the few who would rule us. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and right now it’s the evil fingers that are pulling the strings of empire lackeys like Fareed Zakaria.

*  *  *

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Supreme Court Turns Away Georgia Cash Bail Challenge

Jail cellOn Monday, the Supreme Court showed its reluctance to wade into bail reform efforts by turning away a challenge to how Georgia’s system’s cash demands can leave poor people trapped behind bars even though they haven’t yet been convicted.

The court denied to hear Maurice Walker v. City of Calhoun, Georgia, a case challenging how long courts and jails in the state can hold a person after they are arrested if they cannot afford the bail amount that’s demanded on a schedule.

Walker was arrested in September 2015 in Calhoun for being a pedestrian under the influence of alcohol. He was ordered to pay a bail of $160 if he wanted to be free. Calhoun was indigent and had a monthly income of $530 of Social Security disability payments. He ended up spending six days in jail before being released. It could have ended up even longer. Calhoun’s court only heard requests for bail reductions or pretrial releases on Mondays and this happened around Labor Day. Mind you, the sentence for the crime here, if he were to be found guilty, doesn’t even call for jail, just a fine of up to $500. So because he couldn’t afford his bail, he actually faced more severe punishment than the crime itself warranted.

Walker, represented by the Southern Center for Human Rights, sued, arguing that it was a violation of his constitutional rights to be kept stuck in jail for a week for a misdemeanor offense solely because he didn’t have the cash to pay for bail.

Since the suit, Calhoun has changed its policy so that people who cannot afford bail will see a judge within 48 hours in order to make the case that bail should be lowered or that they should be released. But nevertheless the legal challenge continued, asking the federal courts to weigh in on whether even 48 hours was too long to have to wait to see a judge if you can’t afford your bail.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta upheld the 48-hour policy, and the Supreme Court has declined to consider the timeframe (the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief supporting Walker’s side, which you can read here).

This is the second time in the last six months that the Supreme Court has turned away a case asking justices to determine the parameters of how cash bail may or may not be used. In November, the court declined to hear a case that was almost the opposite of this Georgia case. In New Jersey, a defendant, represented by a bail bond industry insurance underwriter, sued for the right to pay bail for pretrial freedom. The courts in New Jersey have mostly eliminated cash bail in favor of a system of pretrial monitoring to make sure defendants return to court. The defendant wanted to exercise the right to pay a cash bail and forgo monitoring by the courts. In that case, a federal appeals court ruled that having a right to request pretrial release is not the same as having a right to cash bail. New Jersey was permitted to eliminate money demands as long as it had a robust system to release defendants.

Read more about the Walker case here and more about bail reform efforts around the country here.

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Watch Live: Sterling Rises Ahead Of Theresa May Brexit Next Steps Statement

After a marathon seven-hour Cabinet meeting, UK PM Theresa May is set to deliver a statement on the future of Brexit.

As The Guardian’s Jennifer Ranking earlier explained:

So no deal is off the table?

Not yet. No deal is the legal default, so cannot be ruled out.

While the EU would probably grant an extension, officials in Brussels are not certain the prime minister will ask for one. EU leaders will not force the UK into a long extension if it does not seek one or refuses to meet the terms, say people close to the process. Some fear May would placate her party over taking part in European elections.

“If the prime minister said she wanted a no deal, we wouldn’t be able to stop her jumping off the cliff,” the EU diplomat said.

Cable started to rise ahead of the statement as some suggested she would soften her stance to a no-deal Brexit.

“Hearing rather cryptically that the PM’s statement will represent a softening of her red lines – but not on free movement,” Steven Swinford of The Telegraph said on Twitter.

“Make of that what you will, we’ll know soon enough.”

Watch live feed here…

May’s speech comes as Emmanuel Macron said the EU “will not be hostage to a political crisis in the UK” as he warned MPs against assuming a long extension to Article 50 is possible.

The French president said the EU agreeing to a lengthy Brexit delay long beyond April 12 should “not (be taken) for granted”.

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