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Chinese premier Li Keqiang was quoted on state television by Reuters on Thursday as saying the economy could face tremendous downward pressure in 2020.

Li said the downward pressures could be even greater than what was seen in 2019; he made no mention of the possible trade resolution with the US would correct economic growth. 

He said the government would implement monetary and fiscal policies to keep the economic expansion within a consistent range throughout 2020. This could be the latest confirmation that China’s GDP could slip underneath 6%.

A similar warning was echoed by an advisor to the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) last week, who said China’s economy might not recover for the next five years.

Liu Shijin, a policy adviser to the PBoC, said the country’s GDP will decelerate through 2025 and could print in a range of 5 to 6%. 

Shijin warned that excessive monetary policy is failing to stimulate the economy and could cause it to decelerate in the year ahead. 

Last month, we noted that China’s credit growth plunged to the weakest pace since 2017 as a continued collapse in shadow banking, weak corporate demand for credit, and seasonal effects all signaled that China’s economy, nevertheless, the global economy, will continue to slow in 2020. 

A further deceleration in China’s economy could ruin the party for equity bulls, who have already priced in a massive 2016-style rebound in the global economy for 1Q20. A slowing China means the world could fail to rebound, though we don’t discount the stabilization narrative.

With China’s economy unlikely to sharply rebound early next year, global investors could find themselves repricing growth in the near term as global equities are at all-time highs thanks to massive money printing by central banks. 

To gain more color on China’s extended slowdown, Fathom Consulting’s China Momentum Indicator (CMI) provides a more in-depth view of China’s economic activity than the official Chinese GDP statistics. 

CMI is based on ten alternative indicators for economic activity; some of those indicators include railway freight, electricity consumption, and the issuance of bank loans.

Fathom has stated that in CMI, the calculation of the index avoids measuring construction activity, and instead focuses on shadow measures of economic activity. The consulting group says this allows the index to be “less prone to manipulation than the headline GDP figures.”

“In 2014, when China’s traditional growth model was running out of steam and vulnerabilities were rising, authorities toyed with credit tightening and an enforced rebalancing. But at the end of 2015, when growth slowed too sharply, they quickly threw in the towel, resorting to the old growth model of credit-fuelled growth. With growth once again slowing, and past precedent suggesting credit has neared its limit, China finds itself at a crossroad,” Fathom recently said.

China’s failure to stimulate its economy suggests CMI will continue a downward trajectory that has been underway for the last decade.

We’ve recently outlined the bust of the global auto industry has weighed down the Chinese economy. With no signs of an upswing in the auto market, China’s economy will remain depressed in the years ahead.

As China’s economy slows, global commodity prices are stuck in a deflationary spiral. 

China’s slowing economy warns that global equities have mispriced growth for early 1Q20. 

Looking for signs of life in the Chinese economy — there aren’t any at the moment.

Société Générale’s latest report shows employment in China contracting across manufacturing and non-manufacturing, outlining how the slowdown is broad-based.

Bloomberg has compiled a list of long-time China watchers that are warning about an extended slowdown. 

George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University’s China Centre and author of “Red Flags: Why Xi’s China is in Jeopardy:” 

In the spirit of self-criticism, I’d say my best call on the economy was an early spot of the huge demographic shift that kicked off in earnest in 2012, an abiding assertion that China’s elevated growth rates could not be sustained, and anticipation of a financial crisis that turned up in 2015-16. Worst call was thinking that crisis might turn into a ‘Minsky Moment’ for China, as per 2007-08, and failing to integrate properly the tools the state has to prevent catastrophic failure.

I expect China to flirt with officially recorded growth of around 6%, but the reality is that the tempo of growth is ratcheting down to somewhere between 3% and 4%. In 2020, perhaps 5.8% to 6%, officially, not least because the economic news has to remain upbeat ahead of the CCP centenary in 2021. The consequences of over-indebtedness, demographic change, inadequate wealth transfer and income redistribution policies, and stagnant total factor productivity growth associated with institutional flaws are the main drags on growth. The 2020s will be a challenging time for China.

Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs Group chief economist who coined the term BRIC: 

The BRICs path assumed China would grow 5% a year in the decade 2020-29 and I have no reason for changing this. If it does, and so long as the renminbi doesn’t decline a lot in value, then by the end of the decade, China will be very close to being as big in current dollar terms as the US.

As this decade nears its end, China has major problems positioning itself in the world. As evidenced by the Uighur situation, China’s approach to life now gets much more global attention than when it was smaller. In the coming decade, China has to somehow develop a more subtle and sophisticated stance on many of these issues, and I am not sure Beijing fully realizes this yet.

Edward Yardeni, president and chief investment strategist at Yardeni Research: 

Demography is starting to really weigh on China’s growth. China is rapidly evolving into the world’s largest nursing home.

They are going to have to provide a social safety net for these folks who are going to get older and need health care. If they don’t do that, they are going to depress their consumers. When you want to be a superpower, there are a lot of factors that matter, and demography is certainly one of them.

The biggest takeaway is China produced 60% of the world’s debt over the last ten years and is the biggest driver in global economic growth. A slowing China means the global economy will likely remain stagnate in 2020. 

Authored by David Brennan via Newsweek.com,

Former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev has urged President Donald Trump’s administration to re-engage with Russia on landmark arms control treaties, warning that the collapse of Cold War-era nuclear weapon limits threatens global catastrophe.

Speaking with Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, Gorbachev lamented America’s withdrawal from two key arms control treaties signed during the Cold War—the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABMT) during President Geroge W. Bush’s tenure, and the more recent withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

Russia has also since suspended participation in the INF Treaty, prompting concerns of a new arms race. The infographic below, provided by Statista, shows the estimated global nuclear weapons arsenals as of December 2017.

STATISTA

Gorbachev is a prominent advocate of nuclear disarmament. He told the Asahi he is “still praying for” the destruction of all nuclear weapons, noting that the number of warheads in Russia and the U.S. has reduced by more than 80 percent since the peak years of the Cold War.

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But he warned that this “peace dividend” is now at risk with the collapse of the ABMT and INF Treaty. It is also unclear whether New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty)—the successor to START I that Gorbachev helped craft—will be renewed when it expires in 2021.

The Trump administration said last year that it would ditch the 1987 INF Treaty, which banned ground-launched nuclear and conventional missiles with ranges from 310 miles 3,417 miles. The White House accused Russia of violating the deal by developing the SSC-8 missile.

But Gorbachev blamed Washington for the development. “The decision by the United States to withdraw from the INF threatens to unleash a sequence of events that would move to undo” the post-Cold War peace dividend, he said.

“Out of the three principal pillars of global strategic stability—the ABMT, INF and START—only one is left,” he added, noting that the future of New START is far from certain.

Russia has said it is willing to renew the agreement, but the Trump administration is yet to make a decision.

“What’s behind the United States’ decision to withdraw from the INF is their striving to free themselves of any obligations with respect to weapons and obtain absolute military supremacy,” Gorbachev said.

“That is an illusory aim, an unfulfilled hope. Hegemony by one single country is not possible in today’s world. The result would be destabilization of the global strategic situation, a new arms race and all the randomness and unpredictability of global politics. The security of every country, including the United States, will suffer as a result.”

Russia is responsible for the termination of the INF Treaty. The United States engaged Russia since 2013 to return it to compliance with the treaty but Russia chose to retain and deploy its non-compliant missile system rather than eliminate it and preserve the treaty.

A State Department spokesperson told Newsweek that the U.S. “remains committed to effective arms control that advances U.S., allied, and partner security, is verifiable and enforceable, and includes partners that comply responsibly with their obligations.”

The spokesperson explained that Trump has “directed us to think more broadly than New START and include both China and Russia in our next steps. We stand ready to engage with both Russia and China on arms control negotiations that meet our criteria.”

“The Administration is evaluating the possibility of an extension of the New START Treaty, taking into account the threats we face today, the changing security environment, and Russia’s statement that it has no preconditions to extension.”

Gorbachev said the U.S. must bear responsibility for nuclear proliferation, given it was the first nation to harness the technology.

“They told our leaders in talks that they had developed the bomb. They said this to intimidate us, so we would bow down to America,” he told the newspaper.

“Their obsession with weapons is crazy.”

Gorbachev called on both the U.S. and Russia to “restore the movement toward a world without nuclear weapons.”

Both nations have signalled additional investment in their nuclear arsenals, including a fresh focus on low-yield, tactical nuclear weapons. Such warheads have a more local impact, reducing the danger of escalation and subsequent mutually assured destruction (MAD).

Though MAD has kept nuclear states at peace for decades, Gorbachev said it offers no guarantee for the future.

“Nuclear deterrence will not protect the world from a nuclear accident or from nuclear terrorism, but would keep it under a constant threat,” he told the Asahi.

“The key to resolving security issues lies not in weapons, but in politics,” he added, bemoaning the freeze in bilateral relations between Washington and Moscow. “Despite everything, I believe that this is still within our capabilities,” he added.

As for Trump, the Cold War leader said, “I hear from the current president of the United States that they are the richest country, that they have more money than anybody else, so there is going to be a new arms race. Who is America planning to fight, however? The first country to come to mind, of course, is Russia.”

“We should never let ourselves embark on a course of developing nuclear weapons again and of a new arms race,” Gorbachev warned.

“We have to stop working on pipe dreams, and engage with realpolitik. We don’t need an apocalypse! We need peace!”

While Nancy Pelosi threatens to withhold articles of impeachment passed Wednesday night by the House, Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman says that President Trump isn’t technically impeached until the House actually transmits the articles to the Senate.

Feldman, who testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment proceedings earlier this month, argues in a Bloomberg Op-Ed that the framers’ definition of impeachment “assumed that impeachment was a process, not just a House vote,” and that “Strictly speaking, “impeachment” occurred – and occurs — when the articles of impeachment are presented to the Senate for trial. And at that point, the Senate is obliged by the Constitution to hold a trial.”

If the House does not communicate its impeachment to the Senate, it hasn’t actually impeached the president. If the articles are not transmitted, Trump could legitimately say that he wasn’t truly impeached at all.

That’s because “impeachment” under the Constitution means the House sending its approved articles of to the Senate, with House managers standing up in the Senate and saying the president is impeached.

As for the headlines we saw after the House vote saying, “TRUMP IMPEACHED,” those are a media shorthand, not a technically correct legal statement. So far, the House has voted to impeach (future tense) Trump. He isn’t impeached (past tense) until the articles go to the Senate and the House members deliver the message. -Noah Feldman

Pelosi, meanwhile, won’t transmit the articles until the Senate holds what she considers a “fair” trial.

Roughly modeled after England’s impeachment procedures, the framers in Article I of the constitution gave the House “the sole power of impeachment,” while giving the Senate “the sole power to try all impeachments.”

Article II outlines says the president “shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

There’s more:

But we can say with some confidence that only the Senate is empowered to judge the fairness of its own trial – that’s what the “sole power to try all impeachments” means.

If the House votes to “impeach” but doesn’t send the articles to the Senate or send impeachment managers there to carry its message, it hasn’t directly violated the text of the Constitution. But the House would be acting against the implicit logic of the Constitution’s description of impeachment.

A president who has been genuinely impeached must constitutionally have the opportunity to defend himself before the Senate. That’s built into the constitutional logic of impeachment, which demands a trial before removal.

To be sure, if the House just never sends its articles of impeachment to the Senate, there can be no trial there. That’s what the “sole power to impeach” means.

In closing, Feldman says “if the House never sends the articles, then Trump could say with strong justification that he was never actually impeached,” adding “And that’s probably not the message Congressional Democrats are hoping to send.”

Authored by Helen Partz via CoinTelegraph.com,

Iran’s President has proposed to create a Muslim cryptocurrency as one of a number of means to confront the economic dominance of the United States.

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

Speaking at an Islamic conference in Malaysia on Dec. 19, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called Muslim nations to strengthen financial and trade cooperation and to cut their reliance on U.S. dollar, according to a report by The Associated Press (AP).

New Muslim cryptocurrency to confront “U.S. economic hegemony”

As Rouhani argued that U.S. economic sanctions are the “main tools of domineering hegemony and bullying” of other nations. Rouhani put forward the establishment of a special banking and financial system among Muslim nations that use local currencies for trade. Local reports confirm that Rouhani proposed the creation of a cryptocurrency as part of the effort.

As reported by the AP, Rouhani said:

“The Muslim world should be designing measures to save themselves from the domination of the United States dollar and the American financial regime.”

Malaysia supports Iranian President’s idea to create an alternative to the U.S. dollar

The conference was also attended by leaders of major Muslim countries including Turkey, Qatar and host Malaysia, while Saudi Arabia and Pakistan withdrew from the conference.

The idea of the Iranian President has reportedly met with support from Malaysia alone to date, as the country’s Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, endorsed the initiative, as reported by local publication Free Malaysia Today. The official noted that this was the first time that Iran and Turkey are considering the opportunity of creating an alternative to the U.S. dollar. He said:

“We can use our own currencies or have a common currency.”

Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan apparently criticized the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, arguing that the platform that connects the Muslim world together demonstrated a “lack of implementation.” Erdogan also outlined that Muslim countries needed to focus on Islamic financing, suggesting the establishment of a special working group.

Other countries trying to bypass U.S. sanctions with crypto

A number of global jurisdictions have been considering the creation of a cryptocurrency to dodge sanctions by the U.S. to date. As reported by Cointelegraph in late September, authorities in North Korea announced their intention to issue a digital currency, with experts believing that the initiative aims to help the country to bypass sanctions by the U.S..

Meanwhile, Venezuela is apparently one of the most popular examples of countries trying to circumvent U.S. sanctions using their own crypto. Launched in February 2018, the Petro became the world’s first national oil-baked cryptocurrency.

Tonight’s Democratic debate – the final one of 2019 – features seven candidates; the four leading candidates Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren, as well as Andrew Yang, Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer.

Of the remaining candidates, who won’t be there? Cory Booker, Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, Michael Bloomberg, Deval Patrick, Michael Benne, and Marianne Williamson.

“The pressure on the candidates to manufacture drama will be considerable,” notes Politico, which is hosting the event along with PBS NewsHour.

With less than two month until the Iowa caucuses, and some candidates having seen their polls (and odds) collapse, tonight’s anti-Trump get-together will be their last chance for redemption before the news cycle calms a little.

Source: Bloomberg

Here are the topics that The Hill thinks will come up.

Impeachment

The debate comes exactly one day after the House voted to impeach President Trump. The issue will now go to the Senate where a trial will be held. Three of the candidates on stage, Warren, Sanders, and Klobuchar, will be called back to Washington for the trial. Expect them to field questions about the topic. Biden could also face questions given Trump’s call for Ukraine to investigate him and his son, which kicked off the impeachment inquiry.

Diversity

While he did not make the debate stage, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) has led the charge in calling for more diversity on the debate stage. Booker and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro were joined by all of the candidates appearing on Thursday’s debate in requesting the Democratic National Committee lower the qualification standards for debates in January and February. The topic could come up, given the attention it’s gotten in the run-up to the forum.

Labor rights

The Democratic Party has long maintained strong connections to the labor movement in the U.S., and those ties were on display earlier this week when all of the candidates pledged not to cross the picket line if Sodexo and Unite Here Local 11 did not come to an agreement. The candidates could receive some questions on how they would work with labor groups as president.

Environment

The issue of combatting climate change could also come up, given California’s struggle this year with wildfires. Environment advocate Greta Thunberg has also been in the news recently after being named Time’s Person of the Year. President Trump attacked her on Twitter after she received the award, saying she needed to work on anger management issues. Biden jumped to Thunberg’s defense, saying “What kind of president bullies a teenager?”

Health Care

The topic has played a role in most of the primary debates, with the progressive candidates pushing for a “Medicare for All” plan, while centrist candidates have advocated for building upon the Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare. Expect this topic to come up as one of the party’s currently most hotly contested issues.

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Watch live (due to start at 2000ET):

Farmers in Argentina are finding out the wonderful benefits of taxation and government micromanagement first hand. Just three days after the government hiked export taxes for farmers, it is considering doing it again, causing outrage on the Pampas crop belt.

A bill sent to lawmakers proposes that taxes on soybean shipments could hike to 33%, according to Bloomberg. That compares to 30% currently and 24.7% last week. Corn and wheat would rise to 15%, from 12% currently and just 6.7% last week.

President Alberto Fernandez will need opposition votes to get the legislation through congress, despite holding a majority in the senate. Approval could come by the end of the month, should he get the votes he needs. The bill also contains a provision to reduce rates for exports with “added value”, meaning that soy meal and oil may be charged less than 33% “in a boon to crushers that have lost competitiveness and seen idle capacity rise after the differential with raw beans was scrapped last year.”

Argentina is a top exporter of soy meal, used as animal feed, and soy cooking oil. So far, it is unknown whether or not beef, the nation’s other major export, will be considered a value added product. 

This move comes after Fernandez raised taxes on Saturday, which was just days after he took office. The hikes caused outrage among rural farmers and leaders who claimed they weren’t told it was coming. They also warned that output could suffer as a result. 

One of Argentina’s biggest farm associations, CRA, said: “We are deeply worried about the latest measures.” 

Farmers are concerned that, despite Fernandez’s intentions to revive the economy, that he’s instead creating a hostile attitude toward farmers. Profit margins will suffer as a result of corn and wheat shipments being charged 15% – this could force farmers out of crop rotation strategies that came about in recent years to plant cheaper soybeans instead. 

The effects of the tax hikes will be most prevalent next year, as this season’s wheat is already being harvested. It’s also too late to change plans for soybeans and corn. According to Jacob Christy, a trader at Andersons Inc., farmer selling could slow “considerably” and there could be an impact on global markets, despite some commodity traders already anticipating the increase. 

Authored by Sharyl Attkisson Via sharylattkisson.com

If you’ve watched the current impeachment proceedings with something beyond a passing interest, you might have heard the controversy over Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) secretly obtaining and then releasing phone records of political rival Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and journalist John Solomon.

Critics say such an alleged invasion of citizens’ privacy and rights for political purposes is beyond the pale.

But Democrats argue that Schiff didn’t really target Nunes or Solomon in his information dragnet. He says their calls were merely picked up incidentally because they spoke to two people who are targets: the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani or Lev Parnas, a figure charged with violating campaign finance violations.

However, Schiff’s controversial release of information naming Nunes and Solomon provides a window into how the FBI secretly operates to obtain information on Americans for whom they have no explicit permission to wiretap or monitor.

Believe it or now, intelligence agencies can use one legal wiretap to monitor as many as 25,000 people for which there was no wiretap justification.

The following is an excerpt from my reporting on Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson that explains this phenomenon.

Through a single warrant, government agents can capture phone calls, texts, emails and bank records from people “two hops” away. That means all of the suspected spy’s direct contacts— “one hop” —and everybody who contacts those people or even visits their Facebook pages or websites—two hops. 

In this way, one analysis found intel agencies can use one legal wiretap to access to 25,000 people’s phones. Consider at least a half dozen Trump officials were caught in the FBI surveillance dragnet, according to news reports: campaign chair Manafort, multiple “transition officials” including Lt. General Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner, and adviser Carter Page— who was wiretapped over and over though never charged with anything.

Sidney Powell (former prosecutor and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s attorney): And what most people don’t understand is, they don’t just get everything they want against Carter Page, they get everything they want against every person who communicated with Carter Page, and against every person who communicated with that person. So it goes out what’s called two hops. 

Sharyl: And that would allow them to find intelligence from someone nowhere near the original center that they went to the FISA Court about? 

Sidney Powell: Exactly. They could have all kinds of banking records and personal information on tens of thousands of people by virtue of those FISA applications. 

Sharyl: —including Trump who was known to be one or two hops away from surveilled targets. 

On top of that, at least four key anti-Trump figures have admitted in testimony and interviews accessing sensitive, protected intelligence of US citizens—including Trump associates—under the Obama administration. All say they were guarding national security, had no political motives, and didn’t leak the information. As the 2016 campaign peaked, Obama official Samantha Power’s name was on hundreds of attempts to reveal the identities of Americans caught up in secretly-gathered intelligence. Obama adviser Susan Rice also took part. And Obama officials Sally Yates and James Clapper admit having reviewed intel gathered on US political figures. 

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) : Did either of you ever review classified documents in which Mr. Trump, his associates or members of Congress had been unmasked? 

Clapper: Well, yes. 

Sharyl: Do you think Democrats and Republicans alike have, in your view, abdicated responsibility when it comes to oversight of our intelligence community? 

Liz Hempowicz: Yeah, yeah, I think so. I don’t think this is a problem with one party. 

Liz Hempowicz is director of public policy at the watchdog Project on Government Oversight. She blames Congress for doing a poor job watching over the work of the government’s spies. 

Liz Hempowicz: I think as a body, Congress has kind of been very comfortable giving the intelligence community a wide deference, and I don’t think the intelligence community has earned that.

Sharyl: In short, why do you think it is that Congress, members of both parties, wouldn’t be taking a harder look at the alleged surveillance abuses? 

Liz Hempowicz: Well I think it’s a difficult issue to conduct oversight over, and I think once you get pushback from the intelligence communities and they wave around words like “national security” and “security threat,” I think it becomes a more difficult area for members of Congress to kind of use some of their political capital. 

Hempowicz adds that alleged surveillance abuses aren’t new. Long before the Trump era, with special counsel Mueller heading up the FBI, US political figures were swept up in wiretaps, the contents improperly leaked to the media California Congresswoman Jane Harman in 2009and Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich in 2011. 

In 2013, Director of National Intelligence Clapper denied mass spying on Americans. 

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon): Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

Clapper: No sir. 

But when NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the opposite, Clapper apologized and said he’d been confused by the question. In 2014, the CIA got caught spying on Senate staffers, though CIA Director John Brennan had explicitly denied it. He—too— then apologized. 

And the government has spied on journalists: James Rosen, then of Fox News—now with Sinclair, The Associated Press, and, as I allege in a federal lawsuit, on my work as an investigative correspondent at CBS News. 

Finally, in 2016, there was a striking election year uptick in government agents combing through a sensitive NSA database of intel on innocent US citizens.

In 2013, there were 9,500 searches involving 198 Americans. By 2016, that number escalated to 30,355 searches of 5,288 Americans. 

Which brings us back to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or FISA admonishment in October 2016. Judge Collyer also slammed the FBI for a major violation: giving raw intelligence about Americans to unnamed third party contractors. 

Sharyl: And the names of these three contractors are blacked out?

Sidney Powell: They’re blacked out. You cannot tell from the decision who they are. But the American people need to be jumping up and down, demanding to know the answers to that.

Sharyl: Because it would tell us what? 

Sidney Powell: Well it’s going to tell us who was given special privileges by James Comey to go in and get all this information. It will tell us who’s behind the unmaskings. 

The court said the FBI’s failures had been “the focus ofconcerns since 2014.” All of that contradicts assurances from FBI Director Comey “Nobody gets to see FISA information of any kind unless they’ve had the appropriate training and have the appropriate oversight.”

Former FBI Director Comey’s successor Christopher Wray has made similar claims. 

Wray: No evidence of any kind of abuse. 

In the end, Powell argues that neither the FBI nor Special Counsel Mueller— as ex-FBI Director —can fairly investigate matters that intersect with allegations about their own agencies and colleagues. 

Sharyl: Assuming for the sake of argument that what you say is correct, I think people might say, “But maybe there was no premise for the Russia investigation. But so many people surrounding Trump, and so many people who’ve been looked at have either pled guilty or been found to have done something else in the past. Doesn’t that validify the investigation that was done?” 

Sidney Powell: Absolutely not. Not unless we’re going to revert to the practice of Russia itself, and the KGB agent who said, “Find me the man and I’ll find the crime to pin on him.” 

Hempowicz has a slightly different take— that Mueller’s probe is important and so far has proven fair. But she agrees that someone should also be unraveling any surveillance abuses.

Sharyl: How would you describe, in a nutshell, why this is important? 

Liz Hempowicz: I don’t think the intelligence community has accurately shown that there are benefits of this pervasive surveillance of American citizens. I just haven’t seen them kind of show their work like a fourth grader would have to do in math to prove that they’ve gotten the right answer.

After issuing her blistering comments in 2016, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge required the Justice Department to devise new rules to better protect Americans’ privacy rights. The court approved a proposal made by the Trump Justice Department in March 2017.

Watch the full Full Measure report by clicking the link below:

http://fullmeasure.news/news/politics/russia-probe-02-11-2019

Support Attkisson v. DOJ and FBI

In the peak days of the European financial crisis, when Spanish banks were on the verge of collapse and were desperate for depositor funding as the ECB scrambled to come up with a viable rescue scheme, one bank – the soon to be insolvent Bankia – had a “clever” idea: offer a Spiderman Beach Towel in exchange for a €300 deposit.

Fast forward 7 years when the cash-strapped banks of another country have come up with a similar trick to entice depositors: a growing number of small local banks across China have conceived of a “brilliant” scheme to lure new depositors: handing out servings of expensive pork as a reward for opening an account, the SCMP reports.

As we discussed in recent months, China’s smaller banks were hit by a perfect storm of falling rates and declining state support, which culminated in bank runs and the nationalization of several small and medium banks. And since there is little hope that the status quo will change any time soon, Chinese banks – which on top of everything are facing a $400 billion liquidity shortfall in January  – are forced to go to greater lengths to attract new deposits, since they generally earn less money from lending and have fewer funding options than their larger peers.

Unlike Spain, Chinese banks are offering a product which is in great demand for the nation that is reeling as a result of “pig ebola”: pork. Indeed, as SCMP adds, the fact that pork could be seen as a desirable reward for opening a bank account also speaks to the country’s massive shortage of its favorite staple meat.

Who knew the intersection of the supply and demand curves would be marked by a pound of pork.

On Monday, clients who deposited 10,000 yuan (US$1,430) or more in a three-month time deposit at the Linhai Rural Commercial Bank in Duqiao in Zhejiang province were then eligible to enter a lottery to win a portion of pork ranging from 500 grams (18 ounces) to several kilograms.

“The money is still my own, and the interest is good. I’m happy to receive a piece of pork in addition,” one female client, who deposited around 20,000 yuan (US$2,900), was quoted as saying by the Metropolitan Express. Unfortunately for said client, she failed to grasp that any bank that is resorting to such ham-headed measures to boost depositor interest will likely not be around for long, and her entire deposit will likely vaporize in the coming weeks.

In any case, the gimmick is working: according to the Express, the bank distributed 1,097 deposit rewards on Monday after scores of mostly elderly clients queued up in front of the bank from early that morning.

“It was quite a good idea and very popular among locals, especially the elderly,” said a bank staff member, who did not offer his name. He also refused to comment on how much money the bank had received in new deposits due to the promotion.

In retrospect, it is a brilliant solution: instead of offering higher rates which only accelerate the banks insolvency as these require higher payouts on deposits, the bank is instead making a one-time payment, and the novelty of the “handout” is enough to get substantial new deposits.

Other rural commercial banks in northern China’s Hebei province and western China’s Guizhou province have also launched similar pork rewards programs. Dushan Rural Commercial Bank, located in the remote mountainous county in Guizhou, offered a coupon for 10 yuan (US$1.4) worth of pork for every 10,000 yuan of new deposits.

The reason behind China’s infatuation with pork is familiar: the outbreak of African swine fever, which is reported to have killed over 100 million pigs in China, has sent the price of pork skyrocketing, with November’s consumer price index rising 4.5 per cent from a year earlier, up from a 3.8 per cent gain in October, in large part due to a 110.2 per cent increase in the price of pork.

There were some signs of improvement: China’s pig population actually expanded in November for the first time in a year, while the price of pork price has fallen in recent weeks. The pig population in 400 counties monitored by China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs grew 2% in November from October, the first monthly rise since November 2018, while the number of breeding sows rose 4% from a month earlier. Wholesale pork prices last week fell back 0.8 per cent from the previous week, the fourth straight weekly decline, according to the latest data released by the Ministry of Commerce on Wednesday.

China’s pig population, though, is around 40% smaller than it was a year ago, according to data from China’s agriculture ministry.

Still, despite recent signs of improvement, experts said the crisis may worsen further next year before it improves.

“It depends on what you mean on whether the worst is over because it’s already killed most of [China’s pigs]. There aren’t as many pigs to kill as there were before,” said E. Wayne Johnson, a veterinarian consultant at Enable AgTech Consulting in Beijing.

“We expect that there will be outbreaks in the wintertime because it’s very difficult to clean the trucks, particularly in the north of China, and the virus is preserved by cold weather. Plus, you have the fact that the infected pigs are continuing to go into the slaughterhouses, and everybody sends their trucks to the slaughterhouse. So the disease is being spread on the highways just as it was a year ago. There’s no reason to think that it’s over with.”

With peak seasons for pork consumption just around the corner – with celebrations for the winter solstice this week, the new year holiday on January 1 and the week-long Lunar New Year holiday starting on January 25 – the pressure on the price of pork is set to increase due to limited supplies. To alleviate the coming demand surge, on Tuesday, the government announced that it would release an additional 40,000 tonnes of frozen pork reserves on Thursday, on top of the previous round of 40,000 tonnes released a week ago.

China also announced earlier this month that it would waive import tariffs on some pork shipments from the United States. In total, China will purchase over 3 million tonnes of pork this year, more than twice as much as last year, confirmed Commerce Ministry spokesman Gao Feng at the end of last month.

Beijing has also called for a relaxation of restrictions on pig farming on land normally reserved for forests, with the land only returning to forestry production after the pork supply crisis
has been resolved, according to a document from the National Forestry and Grassland Administration dated Monday and seen by the South China Morning Post.

“These [recently announced] measures are very positive and effective moves,” said Wang Zuli, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Agriculture Sciences. “But pork reserves have been unable to fully resolve the supply problem, so it is hard to say whether the measures are sufficient.”

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

“This goofy ass Trump letter is gonna get more outraged coverage than the bombshell report on the entire Afghanistan war being a lie and frankly I don’t know if I can handle that right now,” popular Youtube commentator Kyle Kulinski tweeted today.

The post was just one of the many observations that Kulinski tosses into the Twitterverse every day, presented in his typical casual, offhand way without any self-significance. But if you actually pause and think about what he’s saying here, how true it is and what it says about the mass media institutions which people rely upon to form their worldviews, it’s actually a damning indictment of our entire society.

It is a fact that far more news media energy is going into one trivial aspect of an impeachment agenda that will with absolute certainty fail to remove Trump from office than there is for the known fact that the US government fought to suppress indisputable proof that American officials have been consistently lying about an 18-year military occupation which continues to this day. This fact should, by itself, be sufficient to completely discredit the mainstream press. This one tiny piece of information, that there’s vastly more buzz about an irrelevant impeachment sideshow than there is over the Afghanistan Papers, should in and of itself cause everyone to regard the entire establishment media complex with the same amount of respect as it gives the Flat Earth Society.

This last week teaches us that temporarily freezing and then unfreezing future military aid to one of our many far-flung client states is huge national emergency but the government systematically lying about every aspect of the longest war in US history is a forgettable non-issue

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) December 15, 2019

But it doesn’t. People are so hypnotized by the endless drama of the mass media news churn that all context and sense of proportionality is lost to them. They stand transfixed by the latest kayfabe combat between the two puppets in America’s two-headed one-party system like an infant distracted from the cause of its outrage by a set of shiny, dangling keys.

The public’s total immersion in whatever sparkly clickbait drama gets served before them by the waiters and waitresses of corporate news media enables the narrative managers responsible for manipulating public thought to simply pace mainstream attention away from inconvenient news stories, even after reporting on those very news stories themselves the day before.

This ability to memory-hole attention away from inconvenient truths using the drama of the relentless news churn is the final line of defense for the establishment propaganda machine, and, much like a video game, they save the hardest boss fight for last. Even if a little truth manages to squeak past the wall of billionaire-controlled media employees who are conditioned to understand that they’ll only be able to advance their careers by promoting narratives which favor the establishment upon which those billionaires have built their respective kingdoms, even if that truth then squeaks past the steadily thickening walls of government secrecy, past the increasingly overt infiltration of media organizations by powerful government agencies, and past the empire’s increasingly aggressive war on oppositional journalism, it still has to face the final boss fight of news churn memory-holing. And boy, it’s almost unbeatable.

A lot of dissident-minded optimists got hopeful that maybe once the lies of the Iraq war were exposed, people would lose trust in the political/media class which deceived them about such a massively significant atrocity. These hopes were of course dashed as public attention was simply paced on to the next new, shiny thing, and then on to another and then on to another, and on now to the point where everyone’s babbling about impeachment over some political shenanigans with Ukraine and Joe Biden without hardly anybody bellowing in unmitigated rage that this same party refused to impeach Bush over mountains of literal war crimes. There is no actual correlation between a story’s newsworthiness and the amount of news coverage it ends up getting, so the still earth-shakingly consequential repercussions of Bush administration’s malfeasance have been eclipsed by today’s set of sparkly keys.

pic.twitter.com/hegi7qnWzi

— Mrs Clinton Kildepstein (@BandaidC) December 17, 2019

This infuriating tactic has been employed time and time again against inconvenient truths which miraculously managed to surmount the many other roadblocks which obstruct people’s understanding that they do not live in a free or just society but a murderous, oppressive and exploitative one. They are able to employ this immensely crucial strategic advantage because the social engineers whose employers benefit from the status quo don’t just work to manipulate information, but narratives as well.

It doesn’t matter how much information gets leaked to the public by whistleblowers, how much information the public gains access to via successful Freedom of Information Act requests, how much information is brought to public attention by investigative journalists combing through documents to connect the dots on the behavior of the powerful, as long as the establishment can manipulate or suppress any narratives that might get told about that information. No matter how much truth gets exposed about the depravity of the powerful, it won’t make one drop of difference in terms of public accountability if nobody’s talking about it. We see this in the way narratives still depict Trump as a Russian stooge despite the information about his many reckless escalations against Russia being publicly available, we see it in the way mainstream media is suppressing all discussion about the OPCW scandal, and we are now seeing it in the way the Afghanistan Papers are being memory-holed despite their temporarily featuring as front-page mainstream news.

This is all proof that simply getting information published isn’t enough. As important as whistleblowers, investigative journalists and leak publishing outlets like WikiLeaks are, by themselves they’re completely impotent, because all they do is reveal information while leaving the control of the dominant narrative in the hands of the establishment spinmeisters. There is no truth that could possibly be exposed that is so damning and so salacious that it couldn’t be manipulated away by establishment narrative control.

This doesn’t mean there’s no hope of ever awakening a critical mass to the fact that they live in a society which is ruled by oligarchs who benefit from keeping everyone else poor and powerless and profit from deceiving us into sending our children overseas to murder other people’s children. All it means is that we need to approach the problem with a very specific focus. It isn’t enough to simply expose the truth; we need to expose the truth while forcefully driving home the message that the media organizations which people rely on to form their entire understanding of the world have been deceiving them.

How To Defeat The Empire

“What I do advocate, in as many different ways as I can come up with, is a decentralized guerrilla psywar against the institutions which enable the powerful to manipulate the way ordinary people think, act and vote.”https://t.co/4F5dWaURdq

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) September 10, 2019

Yes, expose the truth, but do it while also saying “Look! See? This proves that the mainstream media have been lying to you this entire time! They lie to you about everything!” Drive this point home constantly, as often as possible. The propaganda machine is only able to manipulate people away from inconvenient truths when people trust it; if you can weaken their trust in the plutocratic media and the political class which regurgitates their narratives, you will cripple the machine’s ability to manipulate them in that way.

It’s not enough to simply expose the truth. You must also fully, repeatedly and consistently expose the ones who are telling lies.

This is simply a matter of an adjustment of focus. Far too many truth-tellers think it’s enough to keep their energy close to their chests and mildly speak truths as correctly as they can into the information ecosystem. This is like being in a cage fight and thinking it’s enough to simply have a good fighting stance. We are being attacked by an enemy who seeks to destroy our ability to understand and respond sensibly to our world, so we need to fight back. We need to be moving our feet and ducking and weaving and throwing strikes in combinations, not just standing there with a textbook-perfect fighting posture.

It’s not enough to be right, we’ve also got to win. We win by pouring our energy into sowing distrust in the establishment propaganda machine, mocking it, ridiculing it, showing everyone how absurdly phony it is, until everyone’s laughing at it and treating it with the same amount of deference that they give to flat-earthers. When we’ve accomplished that, that’s how we’ll know that we’ve won. And from there it will be possible to build a healthy world based on truth.

*  *  *

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