Tag: finance

Listen up border fags: because of your wanton proclivity for doing drugs, snorting cocaine through straws and/or inhaling crack smoke through glass pipes, you don’t get to have a country. Your borders are meaningless and you should permit any Mexican or Central American pavement slob into your country — because of your sins and because your government conducts wars abroad.

This is, essentially, what Enrique Morones, head of Border Angels, said to Tucker Carlson tonight — exposing his 2nd grade IQ level and childish penchant to say stupid things.

There is no argument that could assuage the American people into believing it should not control its borders. Only high level retard ‘thinkers’ on the left, communist shills, and anti-American anarchists believe unfettered immigration into cash-strapped border towns is a good idea. Ergo, anyone who suggests otherwise is instantly reduced to looking like Barney Rubble ‘motoring’ his vehicle over rugged terrain.

In short, quit doing coke and bombing brown people, then you can enjoy a national border.

 

Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com

via http://ift.tt/2j7VwF5 The_Real_Fly

A couple of weeks ago we highlighted the protests that had engulfed Mexico after the finance ministry announced plans to raise gasoline prices by 20.1% starting January 1st.  While many people have looted gas stations and/or threatened to burn them down altogether, the latest protesting strategy of pissed off Mexican motorists is to seize control of border crossings with the United States and allow for a free flow of motorists into Mexico.  According to the AP, over the weekend roughly 50 protesters were able to take control of the Otay Mesa crossing that connects San Diego to Tijuana as border officials abandoned their posts.

Protesters took control of vehicle lanes at one of the busiest crossings on the U.S. border Sunday to oppose Mexican gasoline price hikes, waving through motorists into Mexico after Mexican authorities abandoned their posts.

 

Motorists headed to Mexico zipped by about 50 demonstrators at the Otay Mesa port of entry connecting San Diego and Tijuana, many of them honking to show support. The demonstrators waved signs to protest gas hikes and air other grievances against the government of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.

 

Other protests closed southbound traffic for hours at the San Diego-Tijuana San Ysidro port of entry, the busiest crossing along the 2,000-mile border, and halted southbound traffic at one of two crossings in Nogales, Arizona. U.S. Customs and Border Protection and California Highway Patrol officers closed southbound Interstate 5 to block access to the San Ysidro crossing, diverting traffic several miles east to the Otay Mesa port of entry.

 

Despite a free flow of motorists into Mexico,  U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials confirmed that inspections were normal for all travelers entering the U.S. from Mexico.

Of course these latest protests follow reports from last week that Mexico’s drug cartels have been looting Pemex oil and gas pipelines in an effort to create their own brand new black market for petroleum products.  With a modest upfront capital investment of $5,000 – $8,000, the cartels have realized they can tap directly into state-owned gas pipelines and withdraw seemingly unlimited supplies of gasoline which they then sell along the highway at a discount to official government prices.  It’s a win-win situation whereby the drug cartels make 100% profit margins and citizens get “cheap” fuel.

The black market is booming. Several states experienced gasoline shortages at the end of last year as more thieves tapped into state-owned Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) pipelines. The pilfered fuel was sold to drivers hoping to save money. Pipeline theft in 2015 increased sevenfold, to more than 5,500 taps, from just 710 in 2010. Pemex attributes the company’s 12-year slide in crude production in part to the growth in illegal taps.

 

The drug cartels have turned to fuel theft as a side business worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year, and crime groups focused solely on gasoline robbery have sprung up, says Alejandro Schtulmann, president of Empra, a political-risk consulting firm in Mexico City. “You only need to invest $5,000 or $8,000 to buy some specific equipment, and the outcome of that is huge earnings.”

 

Fuel theft creates a vicious cycle: The theft increases costs for Pemex and makes the official gasoline supply more scarce, contributing to higher prices for legal consumers. Theft amounts to about $1 billion a year, says Luis Miguel Labardini, an energy consultant at Marcos y Asociados and senior adviser to Pemex’s chief financial officer in the 1990s. “If Pemex were a public company, they would be in financial trouble just because of the theft of fuel,” he says. “It’s that bad.”

Of course, the biggest loser in this whole situation continues to be Enrique Peña Nieto who has basically become the least popular President in Mexico since one-party rule ended in 2000.

All this is creating headaches for Enrique Peña Nieto, whose popularity was already the lowest of any president since one-party rule ended in 2000. Peña Nieto is limited to a single term, and polls show potential candidates from his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) trail populist opposition leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the race for the mid-2018 presidential election. López Obrador has made the jump in gasoline prices his latest rallying cry against the administration.

 

“This is definitely going to have consequences for the PRI,” says Jorge Chabat, a political scientist at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching, a university based in Mexico City. “Frankly, I don’t see any way that they can win in 2018.”

If all else fails, we hear that the tequila served in Tijuana is a very good, cheap and highly combustible alternative to gasoline.

via http://ift.tt/2jkfHmN Tyler Durden

This important topic we cover in our book Splitting Pennies is possibly THE MOST importact topic in teaching personal finance, and probably the most misleading concept peddled by Wall St. 

Let’s face it – Wall St. has a reason to mislead investors, especially retail investors – because they’re on the other side of the trade!  That’s right.  When you lose – they win.  And due to hedging, they can’t actually lose.  

The secret world of hedging – Wall St. doesn’t want you to know about because like the insurance industry, it allows investors to protect themselves.  “Options” are thought of as “Risky” which is a highly potent meme that is reinforced by the regulators:

THE RISK OF LOSS IN TRADING COMMODITY INTERESTS CAN BE SUBSTANTIAL. YOU SHOULD

THEREFORE CAREFULLY CONSIDER WHETHER SUCH TRADING IS SUITABLE FOR YOU IN LIGHT OF

YOUR FINANCIAL CONDITION. IN CONSIDERING WHETHER TO TRADE OR TO AUTHORIZE

SOMEONE ELSE TO TRADE FOR YOU, YOU SHOULD BE AWARE OF THE FOLLOWING:

IF YOU PURCHASE A COMMODITY OPTION YOU MAY SUSTAIN A TOTAL LOSS OF THE PREMIUM

AND OF ALL TRANSACTION COSTS.

IF YOU PURCHASE OR SELL A COMMODITY FUTURES CONTRACT OR SELL A COMMODITY OPTION

OR ENGAGE IN OFF-EXCHANGE FOREIGN CURRENCY TRADING YOU MAY SUSTAIN A TOTAL LOSS

OF THE INITIAL MARGIN FUNDS OR SECURITY DEPOSIT AND ANY ADDITIONAL FUNDS THAT

YOU DEPOSIT WITH YOUR BROKER TO ESTABLISH OR MAINTAIN YOUR POSITION. IF THE

MARKET MOVES AGAINST YOUR POSITION, YOU MAY BE CALLED UPON BY YOUR BROKER TO

DEPOSIT A SUBSTANTIAL AMOUNT OF ADDITIONAL MARGIN FUNDS, ON SHORT NOTICE, IN

ORDER TO MAINTAIN YOUR POSITION. IF YOU DO NOT PROVIDE THE REQUESTED FUNDS

WITHIN THE PRESCRIBED TIME, YOUR POSITION MAY BE LIQUIDATED AT A LOSS, AND YOU WILL

BE LIABLE FOR ANY RESULTING DEFICIT IN YOUR ACCOUNT.

UNDER CERTAIN MARKET CONDITIONS, YOU MAY FIND IT DIFFICULT OR IMPOSSIBLE TO

LIQUIDATE A POSITION. THIS CAN OCCUR, FOR EXAMPLE, WHEN THE MARKET MAKES A “LIMIT

MOVE.”

THE PLACEMENT OF CONTINGENT ORDERS BY YOU OR YOUR TRADING ADVISOR, SUCH AS A

“STOP-LOSS” OR “STOP-LIMIT” ORDER, WILL NOT NECESSARILY LIMIT YOUR LOSSES TO THE

INTENDED AMOUNTS, SINCE MARKET CONDITIONS MAY MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO EXECUTE

SUCH ORDERS.

A “SPREAD” POSITION MAY NOT BE LESS RISKY THAN A SIMPLE “LONG” OR “SHORT” POSITION.

THE HIGH DEGREE OF LEVERAGE THAT IS OFTEN OBTAINABLE IN COMMODITY INTEREST

TRADING CAN WORK AGAINST YOU AS WELL AS FOR YOU. THE USE OF LEVERAGE CAN LEAD TO

LARGE LOSSES AS WELL AS GAINS.

IN SOME CASES, MANAGED COMMODITY ACCOUNTS ARE SUBJECT TO SUBSTANTIAL CHARGES

FOR MANAGEMENT AND ADVISORY FEES. IT MAY BE NECESSARY FOR THOSE ACCOUNTS THAT

ARE SUBJECT TO THESE CHARGES TO MAKE SUBSTANTIAL TRADING PROFITS TO AVOID

DEPLETION OR EXHAUSTION OF THEIR ASSETS. THIS DISCLOSURE DOCUMENT CONTAINS A

COMPLETE DESCRIPTION OF EACH FEE TO BE CHARGED TO YOUR ACCOUNT BY THE

COMMODITY TRADING ADVISOR.

THIS BRIEF STATEMENT CANNOT DISCLOSE ALL THE RISKS AND OTHER SIGNIFICANT ASPECTS

OF THE COMMODITY INTEREST MARKETS. YOU SHOULD THEREFORE CAREFULLY STUDY THIS

DISCLOSURE DOCUMENT AND COMMODITY INTEREST TRADING BEFORE YOU TRADE,

INCLUDING THE DESCRIPTION OF THE PRINCIPAL RISK FACTORS OF THIS INVESTMENT.

THIS COMMODITY TRADING ADVISOR IS PROHIBITED BY LAW FROM ACCEPTING FUNDS IN THE

TRADING ADVISOR’S NAME FROM A CLIENT FOR TRADING COMMODITY INTERESTS. YOU MUST

PLACE ALL FUNDS FOR TRADING IN THIS TRADING PROGRAM DIRECTLY WITH A FUTURES

COMMISSION MERCHANT OR RETAIL FOREIGN EXCHANGE DEALER, AS APPLICABLE.

Whoa- where do I sign?  This is an example of how regulators manipulate the presentation of options in order to mislead investors away from something which can protect them from disaster.

Financial tools like options are like any tools, they can be used like insurance, or they can be used as weapons.  Take simple construction tools.  A hammer can be used to build furniture, or destroy furniture.  A hammer can break a window, kill someone – but also it can be used for decades to build fine woodwork (if you are a craftsman).  

Building a financial defense line

This is the personal finance equivalent of hedging.  Hedging with options for example – should be used like an insurance policy.  It’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.  

Your financial defense line can be a property that’s paid for cash that you can live on for the rest of your life, it could be if you are in the car business an inventory of valuable used cars, it could be a pile of gold bars.  Preppers are one group that understands this concept well – it’s the underlying ethos of prepping.  

But the majority of Americans are one paycheck away from disaster.  They ‘spend money on things they don’t need, with money they don’t have – to impress people they don’t know’

And of course, the problem with writing such an article is the paradox of education.  Those who understand this concept, are already doing it, and those who don’t understand – they don’t believe that they need to know it – they have another opinion!  Such thinking is never without punishment in the markets.  

Hedging is all about paying for something you do not need, but may need one day, should an unexpected event happen.  It’s a form of insurance.  

There’s one kind of insurance that takes this concept too far – life insurance.  But that’s a topic for another article.  Common insurance like homeowners insurance, professional insurances like directors’ liability insurance, and others; are a type of financial defense line.  For example, did you know in large class action cases where big corporations are involved in fraud – shareholders are settled financially primarily through insurance claims made by plaintiffs attorneys?  Commonly it’s thought that companies pay out these big settlements but actually, it’s mostly insurance companies.  Wall St. is a huge user of insurance, and hedging – which is why at companies like AIG, the lines between derivatives trading, opaque contracts, and insurance – was widely blurred.

But you don’t need a Wall St. bank in order to create a financial defense line, it can be as simple as investing in something for cash that you may need one day ‘just in case’ but don’t need right now, like a property, a container full of canned food – whatever it is to you.

When you HAVE the financial defense line IN PLACE – THEN and ONLY THEN can you go out into the risky market and take risks.  There’s a phenomenon that’s difficult to quantify, but the fact that you have the defense line, it seems that those investors usually don’t lose on the risks they take in the market.  The only analogy that can explain this is a Sierra Club study about bears and men carrying guns; it seems that men who hike in the mountains who carry loaded guns are almost never attacked by bears – but also they never shot any bears, which means the men must emit a pheromone that the bears can sniff.  

Practically, it’s better not to enter the market and take risks if you don’t have a defense line.  Another example is ‘investing money you can afford to lose’ – many advisors recommend investing only a percentage of a portfolio (like 5% or 10%) that if the investment is wiped out, the portfolio will remain intact.  There’s a few demographics that understand this other than preppers – Texas Oil Investors and Silicon Valley VCs.

In Oil Investing, 9 out of 10 wells may be dry, or just barely break even.  But 1 out of 10 can be a gusher – 1,000% returns, which make up for the dry and average wells.  

Average investors, even if you don’t have any retirement or pension, can build a financial defense line – it can mean getting an extra job, doing something for extra income (like selling stuff online) or applying for a research grant you always dreamt of.  It’s a myth that you need money to invest.  In fact, most startups are started with 99% persperation and 1% inspiration.  Without money though, you’ll have to put MAJOR WORK into your project to really build equity.  In a simple example of a housing project, that means doing the labor yourself which can be 60% – 70% of the costs.  In a business, it means you’ll have to do 10 jobs, instead of hiring an accountant, a webmaster, and other things.

Fortress Capital provides hedging, alternative investments, and portfolio consulting – visit http://ift.tt/1UyrYMp to learn more.

Hey – it’s better than sticking a crayon up your nose.  Extended warranty?  How can I lose?

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Regular readers remember how, when we first reported around the time of our launch eight years ago that central banks buy stocks, intervene and prop up markets, and generally manipulate equities in order to maintain confidence in a collapsing system, and avoid a liquidation panic and bank runs, it was branded “fake news” by the established financial “kommentariat.” What a difference eight years makes, because today none other than the WSJ writes that “by keeping interest rates low and in some cases negative, central banks have prompted some of the most conservative investors to join the hunt for higher returns: Other central banks.”

To be sure, nothing that the WSJ reports is news to our readers, who have known for years how central banks overtly, in the case of the BOJ, PBOC and SNB most prominently, and covertly, as the infamous “leave no trace behind” symbiosis between the NY Fed and Citadel, however we find it particularly enjoyable every time the financial paper of record reports what until only a few years ago was considered “conspiracy theory”, and wonder what other current “fake news” will be gospel in 2020.

Meanwhile, for those few who are still unfamiliar, this is how central banks who create fiat money out of thin air and for whom “acquisition cost” is a meaningless term, are increasingly nationalizing the equity capital markets. As the WSJ puts it “these central banks care relatively little about whether such investments make profits or losses—though they can matter politically—because they can always print more of their currency. So risk is less important, analysts say.” And since risk was no longer part of the equation, leaving only return, central banks started buying stocks.

“When yields started to get really low and closer to zero in 2014, we decided to start equity investments,” said Jarno Ilves, head of investments at the Bank of Finland, who said he plans to increase his allocation to stocks.

But if you think the farce is bad now, wait until next year. According to a recent study by Invesco on central- bank investment which polled 18 reserve managers, some 80% and 43% of respondents to questions on asset allocation said they planned to invest more in stocks and corporate debt, respectively. Low government-bond returns were behind the moves to diversify, said 12 out of 15 respondents, while three declined to answer.

 

So between central banks outbidding each other to buy “risky” assets with “money” that is constantly created at no cost, very soon all other private investors will be crowded out but not before every stock is trading at valuations that even CNBC guests won’t be able to justify.

The good news is that instead of focusing on Ultra High Net Worth clients, a desperate for revenue Wall Street can just advise central banks on which stocks to buy.

The shift has significant implications for markets and the global economy, analysts say. Many central banks are hiring outside managers to handle the nontraditional assets in their portfolios, presenting an opportunity to a financial industry struggling with stagnant revenue growth.

 

“We see more and more appetite by central banks for riskier strategies,” said Jean-Jacques Barberis, ‎who manages central-bank money for Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager.

The bad news, is that as more people realize that a free “market” now only exists in textbooks, and that Soviet-style central planning is the only game in town, confident in price formation will evaporate, in turn pushing even more market participants out of the quote-unquote market, until only central banks are left bidding on each other’s otherwise worthless stock certificates.

At the same time, efforts to invest reserve funds more broadly mean that more markets will be subject to what some critics describe as central-bank distortion, as large and often price-insensitive buyers run the risk of driving up prices and reducing prospective returns for other market participants.

For virtually all central banks, however, the grotesque central planning shift of the past decade means that instead of engaging in monetary policy, the world’s central banks are now activist hedge funds, who are focused first and foremost on “investment management”:

The South African Reserve Bank’s growing piggy bank drove it to switch “from being a liquidity manager to focusing on investment management,” said Daniel Mminele, its deputy governor.

 

In the third quarter of 2016, global foreign-exchange reserves totaled $11 trillion, according to the International Monetary Fund, up from $1.4 trillion at the end of 1995.

But in the world of central bank hedge funds, no other bank comes even remotely close to the (publically-traded) Swiss National Bank, which has taken risky investing to a whole new level.

In 2013, the SNB opened a branch in Singapore to manage its Asia-Pacific assets, which as of 2015 include emerging-market equities and Chinese government bonds. It was a necessity, since the SNB now manages a mammoth 645 billion franc ($643 billion) in foreign reserves, a pile that grew as the bank tried to push down the value of its currency in a bid to fight deflation and help exporters.

 

In 2009, equities only made up 7% of the SNB’s reserves, four years after it started buying them. Now they are 20%, including investments of $1.7 billion in Apple Inc., $1.08 billion in Exxon Mobil Corp., and $1.2 billion in Microsoft Corp., according to third-quarter Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Having bought hundreds of billions in equities carries risks even for central banks, if only on paper: in 2015, the SNB booked a loss of 23.3 billion francs, when officials stopped maintaining a ceiling on the value of their currency. As the currency jumped by as much as 22% against the euro, the value of their foreign assets fell. Last year, it offset those losses with a 24 billion-franc profit, as its equity investments paid off.

Others did not fare quite as well: “the Czech National Bank started buying stocks in June 2008 just before the financial crisis. The subsequent stock market crash wiped out a third of its equity investment that year, then roughly 2.5% of its total reserves.”

* * *

By now it is common knowledge that central banks openly intervene in markets, the most vivid and recent example of which is the BOJ, which as of this moment owns two-thirds of all Japanes ETFs…

… and at the current rate of expansion, within a few years the world’s monetary authorities who are tasked with “financial stability”, will have acquired a majority of the world’s equity tranche, effectively nationalizing it. We bring it up in light of recent ridiculous allegations that “Russia hacked the US elections” – we wonder, will the liberal press blame the USSR after it dawns upon the world’s intrepid press that while it was busy comparing the Obama and Trump crowds, the world’s greatest wealth transfer was taking place right below everyone’s nose.

via http://ift.tt/2jk9Yxi Tyler Durden

In recent months, we’ve spent a lot of time writing about the various housing bubbles all over the world with an emphasis on Vancouver, Sydney and Melbourne (see here, here and here).  Now, courtesy of the “13th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey“, we have a comprehensive comparison of just how bubbly some of the world’s least affordable housing markets have become. 

The study, which analyzed 406 metropolitan housing markets around the world, compared affordability on the basis of a ratio of median homes prices to median gross incomes with anything over 5x considered “Severely Unaffordable.”  And while there are obvious flaws in the methodology, including the fact that income isn’t adjusted for local taxing policies and building quality, the study at least provides a basis for comparison.

 

Not surprisingly, Hong Kong and Sydney maintained their “lead” as the least affordable housing markets in 2016 with Vancouver moving into the number 3 spot with home prices there increasing by the equivalent of a full year’s median income in just a single year.

 

Meanwhile, of the 94 “severely unaffordable markets” in the world, nearly 40% of them were located in the U.S. and another one-third were in Australia.

There are 26 severely unaffordable major housing markets in 2016. Again, Hong Kong is the least affordable, with a Median Multiple of 18.1, down from 19.0 last year. Sydney is again second, at 12.2 (the same Median Multiple as last year). Vancouver is third least affordable, at 11.8, where house prices rose the equivalent of a full year’s household income in only a year. Auckland is fourth least affordable, at 10.0 and San Jose has a Median Multiple of 9.6.

 

The least affordable 10 also includes Melbourne (9.5), Honolulu (9.4), Los Angeles (9.3), where house prices rose the equivalent of 14 months in household income in only 12 months. San Francisco has a Median Multiple of 9.2 and Bournemouth & Dorsett is 8.9.

 

There are 94 severely unaffordable markets, with 36 (of 262) in the United States, 33 (of 54) in Australia, 11 (of 33) in the United Kingdom, 7 (of 40) in Canada, 6 (of 8) in New Zealand and the one market in China. Singapore, Japan and Ireland have no severely unaffordable housing markets.

 

The least affordable among the smaller markets is Santa Cruz (CA) in the United States, with a Median Multiple of 11.6.

 

Of course, for anyone who still doubts the source of the 2006/2007 U.S. housing bubble, the relationship between median incomes and housing prices remained fairly constant in the U.S. right up until the Fed decided to utilize near-zero interest rates to manage stock prices shortly after the 2000 tech bubble burst… 

 

…a mistake that Yellen & Co. seems to be on a path to repeating.

via http://ift.tt/2jqZWbf Tyler Durden

Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

In Part One of this article I explored Thomas Paine’s critical role in the creation of our nation. His Common Sense pamphlets inspired the common people to uncommon acts of courage and heroic feats of valor; leading to the great experiment we call the United States of America. Paine, Franklin and the other Founding Fathers produced a republic, if we could keep it.

John Adams championed the new Constitution precisely because it would not create a democracy, as he knew a democracy “soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.” Their herculean efforts, sacrifices, and bloodshed have been for naught as we allowed our republic to devolve into a democracy and ultimately into our current corporate fascist warfare/welfare surveillance state. Sadly, we were unable to keep the republic Franklin and his fellow revolutionaries gave us.

“From the errors of other nations, let us learn wisdom.” – Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Some might contend Paine’s Common Sense arguments against a despotic monarchy two and a half centuries ago, with an audience of two and a half million colonists, couldn’t be pertinent today in a divided nation of 325 million people. But when you examine the events, actions and catalysts inspiring Paine to pen Common Sense, you see the parallels with the events, decisions and facilitators of our current Crisis.

For more than a decade before the eruption of open hostilities, tensions had been building between colonists and the British authorities. An overbearing far flung British Empire began to pillage the colonies to pay for their corrupt kingdom by shaking them down through the Stamp Act of 1765, the Quartering Act of 1765, the Townshend Tariffs of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773.

This taxation without representation was met with passionate protest among many colonists, who resented their lack of representation in Parliament and demanded the same rights as other British subjects. These demands were met with arrogant indifference by the monarchy and a haughty parliament. Forcing colonists to feed and house the very soldiers who were being paid with their taxes to repress them was the ultimate insult.

Initially, the colonists just fumed at the domineering disrespect shown them by the British ruling establishment. The pillaging of their hard earned wealth by distant oppressors prompted the colonists to initially organize nonviolent resistance and embargoing British luxury goods. As anger against their authoritarian overseers boiled over, the British cracked down harder in their version of a colonial surveillance state. Colonial resistance eventually led to bloodshed in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists, killing five men in what became known as the Boston Massacre.

Parliament eventually backed down and repealed all of the duties except for one symbolic duty on tea. In December 1773 the Samuel Adams inspired Sons of Liberty, dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. An outraged Parliament passed a series of measures known as the Intolerable or Coercive Acts, designed to reassert imperial authority in Massachusetts. In response, a group of colonial delegates (including George Washington of Virginia, John and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, Patrick Henry of Virginia and John Jay of New York) met in Philadelphia in September 1774 to give voice to their grievances against the British crown.

This First Continental Congress did not mandate liberation from Britain, but it denounced taxation without representation, maintenance of the British army in the colonies without their consent, and issued a declaration of the rights due every citizen, including life, liberty, property, assembly and trial by jury. The Continental Congress voted to meet again in May 1775 to consider further action, but before it convened again Paul Revere made his fateful ride and local militiamen fired the first shots of the Revolutionary War at Lexington & Concord. These events set in motion Paine’s call to arms and the Declaration of Independence shortly thereafter.

The First American Revolution was the result of at least a decade of government overreach, excessive taxation, disregard for the rights of citizens, elitist arrogance of empire builders, and thuggish intimidation of colonists by the British military. The Americans, most of whom had been born on American soil, felt only vague allegiance to a monarchy across the seas imposing their iron fist of taxation and intimidation upon citizens and their means of livelihood.

There had been growing discontent for decades and the Boston Tea Party catalyst triggered a dramatic change in the colonial mood. The chain reactions happened rapidly thereafter and there was no turning back. Paine realized independence was the only true option and proceeded to inspire that result with his Common Sense pamphlets.

“Until an independence is declared the continent will feel itself like a man who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day, yet knows it must be done, hates to set about it, wishes it over, and is continually haunted with the thoughts of its necessity.” – Thomas Paine, Common Sense

With this potent image, Paine concluded Common Sense. This illustration captured Paine’s central point throughout the pamphlets that America must break away from Britain. The only question that remained was when the colonies were to become free. Paine believed the time for action was now rather than later, and exhorted his fellow Americans to rise to arms and vanquish their British oppressors.

The moment for transformation had come. It was time for the American people to take back their country from an overbearing, corrupt, evil establishment. The Crisis had reached its regeneracy with Paine’s Common Sense and Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, two of the most important documents in America history.

Society is a Blessing/Government a Necessary Evil

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer…” – Thomas Paine, Common Sense

If you are blind to the parallels with our current position in this Fourth Turning, you are either wallowing in willful ignorance or you are a functionary within the debased establishment. One of Paine’s main themes was society was a blessing while government was, at best, a necessary evil.

Paine believed in the power of the people. Society constitutes everything constructive people create through working together. The creation of businesses, inventions, scientific discoveries, art, and literature has never required government. Collaboration among individuals brings about positive outcomes and the advancement of society. People transact business, cooperate, follow societal norms, and live their lives on a daily basis with absolutely no intervention or oversight from an oppressive threatening government entity.

Human beings are fallible creatures with a weakness for the vices of greed, envy, lust, pride and a few others. The only true purpose of government is the protection of life, liberty and property. Paine presented government as an organization whose lone function was to inhibit the wickedness in man.

Government’s fundamental purpose is to provide security from foreign invaders and insure property rights are protected. The success of a government should be judged by the extent to which it fulfills these roles. Society is a force which promotes our happiness positively, while government is a coercive force, which at best has a neutral impact on our lives and at its worse, hampers our lives through coercion.

Paine believed the British monarchy had too much power over the lives of the colonists. The hereditary succession of the monarchy led to the elevation of asses to the throne while pretending he was a lion. King George III was just such an ass.

The purposeful complexity of the British system of government was designed to centralize power in the hands of the few, unlawfully and unjustifiably seizing control from the people. A government should be judged on whether it improves society or makes it worse. If the government does not represent the will of the people then it needs to be discarded or overthrown. The larger the government bureaucracy, the more disordered its decision making, and more likely corruption, tyranny, and taxation will burden the citizens.

Paine scoffed at the absurdity of branches of government checking each other. Once entrenched in power the aristocratic civil servants only served themselves and their financial benefactors. The happiness and well-being of the people was not their concern. Every government, even if its initial design had a noble purpose, devolves into a fetid swamp of control freaks, the tyrannical power hungry, egomaniacal sociopaths, and feckless apparatchiks. It becomes a bane and punisher of the people.

“Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.” – Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Government of the People, By the People, For the People

“I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense.” – Thomas Paine

“We still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry and grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute.” – Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Three generations have passed since Paine’s words inspired a revolution, but they ring as true today as they did during that fateful year of 1776. We have been ruled by an oppressive tyrannical establishment, bent on controlling and regulating every aspect of our lives, over-taxing hard working Americans to pay for its welfare/warfare surveillance state, indebting unborn generations with over $200 trillion of unfunded promises, enriching themselves and their Deep State benefactors, impoverishing the people through systematic inflation, globalizing their jobs to Asia, and treating hard working Americans with utter contempt.

The 2008 Federal Reserve/Wall Street created global financial collapse and subsequent banker bailout, while throwing senior citizens and the common man under the bus catalyzed this Fourth Turning. Main Street and flyover America did not participate in the faux economic recovery flogged by Obama, his minions, and their media mouthpieces.

Propaganda, fake economic data, and a vacuous divisive empty suit Deep State pawn president, running up the national debt by $9.3 trillion while enriching Wall Street, the military industrial complex, and the sickcare complex, did nothing to benefit average Americans. The result of this blatant disregard for the well-being of millions has backfired on the establishment.

The elevation of Donald Trump to the presidency has marked the regeneracy moment of this Fourth Turning. The mood of the country has taken a dramatic turn, with the normal people attempting to take back control of the government from malevolent Deep State financial, military, media, and corporate interests. This invisible government establishment is far more entrenched and malignant than the British monarchy confronted by Thomas Paine.

Just as the Loyalists supported the armed clampdown upon the liberty seeking revolutionaries by the redcoats, the deranged leftist useful idiots rioting in DC and in the liberal urban bastions around the country this past week are at war against normalcy, self-reliance, fiscal responsibility, the family values that built this nation, and the geographic will of 85% of the country.

Despite the wailing, gnashing of teeth, breaking of windows, setting limousines on fire, dressing as vaginas, calling for the assassination of Donald Trump, and overall infantile behavior of the losers in this recent election, the fact remains Trump won the popular vote in 30 states, accumulated an electoral landslide victory, and struck a chord with normal average family people who have been left behind by a government designed to benefit an autocratic few and buy off special interests for their votes.

These supposedly grass roots rallies representing all women were nothing more than another George Soros/Democrat Party funded propaganda effort to discredit Trump’s overwhelming victory. The dying left wing media mouthpieces for the establishment felt a tingle up their legs as they breathlessly reported on the prodigious hatred for a man who has been in office for one day.

Where were these patriots for the last eight years as their savior president droned wedding parties, blew up hospitals in the Middle East, and oversaw the unlawful collection of personal data by his rogue NSA spies? You didn’t hear any of the fake news pundits on CNN or MSNBC mention that 30 million deplorable women had voted for Trump and he crushed Hillary among white women with 53% of the vote.

The vitriolic, unhinged reaction to Trump’s victory by a fearful establishment, their fake news corporate media hacks, and the parasitical special interests dependent upon free shit, should be a wake-up call for the normal, hard-working, tax paying, self-reliant, liberty minded people in this country. The deeply rooted evil establishment and their feckless, toady, easily manipulated, useful idiot minions have declared war on Trump and the normals (aka deplorables) who voted for him.

After the battles of Lexington & Concord the British Empire declared war on the colonies. Many colonists still longed for reconciliation, but Thomas Paine and his fellow patriots knew that was impossible. This was going to be a fight to the death. If they lost, Paine and his brethren would be hanged.

Paine’s simple facts, plain words and common sense bolstered the morale of the American colonists, provided backbone to those on the fence, appealed to the English people’s consideration of the war with America, clarified the issues at stake in the war, and denounced the advocates of a negotiated peace. There was no time to be a summer soldier or sunshine patriot in 1776. We now stand on the precipice of another era of revolution. These are new times, but they will also try our souls. Words do matter. This really is a war and must be fought on all fronts.

The dumbing down of the American populace through the government run public education system results in tens of millions being intellectually incapable of resisting the never ending onslaught of Deep State propaganda through critical thought. Restoring the public’s ability to use common sense, sound reasoning, and good judgement is a virtual impossibility today, as a vast swath of the populace couldn’t name a Founding Father, why we celebrate July 4, or even voted in this past election. There were approximately 231 million eligible voters on November 8 and only 136 million voted. The apathy of the 95 million non-voters is a reflection of our iGadget addicted, debauched, feeble minded, bread and circuses distracted, confederacy of fools culture.

With a population of 325 million, versus the 2.5 million in Paine’s day, the question is how many patriots will be required to vanquish the Deep State sycophants and their useful idiot followers. It has been noted only 3% of colonists truly fought for independence during the American Revolution. One third remained loyal to the crown, one third passively supported independence and another third didn’t support either side. We have a similar dynamic today with about 30% supporting Trump’s revolution, 30% supporting the corrupt establishment, and 40% choosing to not participate. If the 3% still applies, it will only take 7 million out of Trump’s 63 million voters to successfully see the revolution through to its conclusion.

The venomous reaction from the fake news corporate media to Trump’s plain spoken, direct, and truthful, common sense inaugural address reveals his opponents true nature. They called the speech dark, gloomy, scary, and Hitler like. Trump derangement syndrome has clearly infected this insane clown posse of brainless talking heads and vacuous spokesmodels as they mouth the lines written by their establishment employers.

He directly confronted his establishment enemies as they sat in front of him by declaring war on their petty world of corruption, malfeasance, idolatry of power, world domination, globalization, and disregard for the lives of the common people. Just as Paine had declared in 1776, Trump declared this week – there will be no reconciliation, no negotiated peace, and no truce. His war on the establishment will be fought to the finish, with a clear winner and a clear loser. His address is the new Common Sense for common people looking to take back control of their government.

Trump immediately struck at the heart of the Washington DC beltway beast. The people out in the hinterlands, beyond the DC, NYC, LA, SF elitist enclaves, have been left behind and discarded while the connected few reaped unwarranted riches.

“For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.”

Just as Paine delineated between the liberty seeking patriots and the despotic monarchical regime of King George III, Trump doesn’t play the standard political party games. This is a revolutionary movement. It’s the forgotten men and women versus the non-responsive imperious government.

“What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction that a nation exists to serve its citizens.”

Trump demolished the fake news storylines of economic advancement, low unemployment, reduced crime rates, and a thriving middle class. The media pundits were aghast when he told the truth about a nation in decay. After 50 years and $10 trillion of Great Society welfare programs, the poverty rate is near all-time highs; 43 million (up by 12 million since recession officially ended in 2009) people depend on food stamps to survive; over 100 million working age Americans aren’t working; real wages are lower than they were thirty years ago; and millions of family sustaining blue collar jobs have been off-shored to Asia in the name of globalization.

Our government run public schools are nothing more than social engineering indoctrination centers wasting $12,000 per student by having mediocre overpaid union teachers flog common core pabulum to disinterested students. They graduate functionally illiterate morons into society, further degrading the civic character of our nation, while in liberal run cities, like Chicago, murder rates skyrocket as black communities implode due to the breakdown of the family unit, welfare mentality, drugs, and placing no value on education. Trump’s assessment of this carnage is dead on.

“But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Trump scorched the globalization acolytes and neo-cons with his common sense appraisal of how we’ve wasted our wealth benefiting other countries and global corporations, while disregarding our own decaying infrastructure and families’ dependent upon decent paying jobs to make an honest living. The priorities of the establishment have enriched their corporate masters while destroying a once thriving middle class.

“We spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay. We’ve made other countries rich, while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon. One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world.”

It is telling how low we’ve sunk as a nation when the intellectual elitists reference Hitler when pandering to their disturbed demagogues of despair while describing Trump’s speech. I guess the author of the Declaration of Independence would be classified as a Nazi by today’s standards, as his words were directly echoed by Trump:

“Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations…entangling alliances with none” – Thomas Jefferson

“We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first. We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example. We will shine for everyone to follow.” – Donald Trump

If CNN, MSNBC, or the Washington Post had existed in 1776, they would have classified Thomas Paine as a terrorist, exposing his failed business ventures, failed marriages, and revealing him to be too pugnacious and nasty to be taken seriously. They couldn’t demand that he release his tax returns, since the individual income tax didn’t get enacted until 137 years later in the dreadful year of 1913. They would have glorified King George III as a benevolent father figure and boldly predicted a landslide victory for the British Army against Washington’s ragtag army of farmers.

The dying legacy media are the propaganda arm of the establishment and will need to be crushed without impunity by the Trump administration and the hundreds of alternative truth telling media websites representing the Thomas Paines of today. One Thomas Paine cannot influence 200 million people the way he influenced 2.5 million in 1776, but an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men, can make an impact during the most crucial period of this Fourth Turning Crisis.

Trump has pointed out what is wrong with our government. The outcry from those comfortable with the status quo has been spiteful, lashing out irrationally in a crazed manner, which will surely bring more normal people over to Trump’s side. Time and results will convert more to the right side of history.

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.” – Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Just as the British levied taxes on the colonies to pay the debts of their French & Indian War adventures and their sprawling empire, our malevolent surveillance state wages undeclared wars across the globe, having wasted over $6 trillion in the Middle East since 2003, and extracts taxes from our paychecks at the point of a gun to pay for these neo-con wet dreams. The $20 trillion of accumulated debts and the $200 trillion of unfunded future obligations are nothing but tax obligations of our children and unborn generations.

Just as the British military invaded the homes of American colonists, police state thugs roam our streets with impunity, intimidating, shaking down and acting as the truncheon for the establishment. The Fourth Amendment has been gutted by the powers that be, with the First and Second under constant attack.

Paine believed in the common sense golden rule.

“When I was teaching children I began every day writing this on the blackboard: “Do to others what you would like them to do to you”, telling them how much better the world would be if everybody lived by this rule.” – Thomas Paine, Common Sense

But he realized everyone does not live by that rule. In fact, very few people live by that rule. They believe they are owed something for being born. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness isn’t good enough. The leftists fighting Trump tooth and nail believe they are entitled to special rights, privileges, and benefits. These special snowflakes have been triggered by the big bad mean talking Trump and after getting their paychecks from Soros will angrily protest within their liberal urban blue safe zones. If they ever violently venture into the 85% of the country colored red, the carnage will be instantaneous.

The contemptible fake news media continues to flog the popular vote drivel of a country divided. This map shows a much unified country, unified against the liberal elite and their enslaved welfare state dregs occupying the miniscule blue areas on the map. Those in the blue believe it is their right to subdue the will of those in the red. We disagree. Let the hostilities commence. Over 90% of the legally owned firearms reside in the red areas.

“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavored to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.” – Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Donald Trump had much more to lose than to gain by putting himself through the gauntlet of a presidential campaign. He was ridiculed, scorned, attacked, and dismissed by the ruling oligarchy and their prodigious array of propaganda mechanisms. The surveillance state used all their unlawful powers to discredit him.

He has taken on the thankless task of trying to rectify decades of bad decisions, bad policy, bad finance, bad people, and an entrenched bureaucracy of DC swamp creatures. Trump is a billionaire and could have spent his waning years golfing, mentoring his sons, and enjoying the fruits of his labor. But, like the wealthy colonial landowners Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, Trump has taken a huge risk in fighting the Washington Deep State establishment to make government work for the people again.

His inauguration speech was the first salvo in what will be a long and bloody fight. Common Sense was written in 1776 and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution was still thirteen bloody years in the future. Fourth Turnings never end in compromise. They end with a clear victor and a clear loser. The next eight years will surely try men’s souls.

Trump is fighting against a half a century of establishment rule. As we have seen already, they will not go down without a fight. Are we ready to stand and fight, or will we be summer soldiers and sunshine patriots during this crisis, shrinking from the service of our country? The future of our country depends upon our answer.

Aldous Huxley foretold the willful loss of our freedoms back in 1959. Our chance to vanquish the oligarchs has arrived.

“Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”

– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

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Just this morning a “progressive” watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York alleging that President Trump is violating the constitution by owning business interests around the globe that are receiving payments from foreign governments (we covered it here:  “Ethics Group Will Sue Trump On Monday Over Foreign Government Payments“). 

Of course, as liberals continue their witch hunt for unconstitutional foreign payments to Trump businesses, something they completely overlooked when it came to the Clinton Foundation’s myriad of foreign entanglements, they don’t seem to be concerned at all with the increased security and insurance costs that the Trump Organization will undoubtedly have to bear as a result of his new title.  Per the Associated Press:

As Trump remains a brand overseas, criminal gangs or militants could target buildings bearing his name in gold, abduct workers associated with his enterprises for ransom or worse, they say.

 

“They may kidnap a Trump worker and not even want to negotiate,” aiming for publicity instead, said Colin P. Clarke, a political scientist with the RAND Corporation who studies terrorism and international criminal networks.

 

U.S. brands have been targeted in overseas violence before, but they never belonged to a president. That’s the difference. Trump becoming America’s 45th president presents a unique challenge given the range of his international business interests.

 

Unfortunately, the Trump Organization owns and/or has licensed the “Trump” name to several luxury properties around the globe in cities that have been frequent targets of terrorist organizations.

But other properties are in areas that have seen violence, like Trump Towers Istanbul, the Turkish city hit hard by a string of bomb and gun attacks carried out by the Islamic State group. Flags and banners around the site bear the president’s name, while private security guards man X-ray machines and metal detectors at its entrances, a standard practice in the city.

 

In Bali, where bombs planted by the Islamic extremist group Jemaah Islamiyah targeting bar-goers killed 202 people in 2002, Trump’s organization has licensed the president’s name to a planned luxury resort. Bali police spokesman Hengky Widjaja said no one had requested extra security for the property and authorities had no plans to increase their presence there.

 

A Trump-named residential tower is under construction in the Indian city of Mumbai, which was hit by a 2008 terror attack blamed on the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba that killed 166 people. Mumbai police spokesman Ashok Dudhe said he had no knowledge of any additional security around the tower.

 

Another tower is being built in Manila in the Philippines, a nation where Abu Sayyaf militants conduct frequent kidnappings for ransom and where President Rodrigo Duterte wages a brutal crackdown on drug dealers that has killed thousands. Philippine police say they haven’t monitored any specific threat toward Trump properties, though a tower rising in Manila sits in an area under an intensified security watch after Duterte declared a “state of lawlessness” following a September bombing.

Asked about security issues, the Trump Organization said in a statement it has “extensive protocols in place at our Trump-owned and -managed properties” in the United States and abroad.  The statement continued: “Our team continues to work very closely with local law enforcement and we are also working in tandem with the local developers at Trump-branded properties worldwide to ensure that all residents, guests and associates remain safe and secure.”

As we’ve previously pointed out, even though Trump’s attorneys maintain that it is impossible for the President of the United States to have “conflicts of interest,” he has agreed to donate all profits derived from foreign governments to the United States Treasury.  That said, something tell us that fact was conveniently omitted from CREW’s lawsuit filed this morning.

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Submitted by Robert Gore via StraightLineLogic.com,

 

Billions of people around the globe would like Americans to put America first.

The largest infrastructure project in the world is China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative, often referred to as the New Economic Silk Road. This effort spearheads the economic integration of the physical center of the world: the contiguous nations from China across Southeast and Central Asia, Russia, Belarus, Iran, and Turkey. The area has large percentages of the world’s land mass, population, and resources. Under construction is a huge network of new linkages: ports, roads, highways, high-speed rail lines, electricity transmission facilities, and petroleum pipelines.

To date China has also invested more than $51 billion in the countries along the present OBOR route. The new land rail routes will greatly reduce transportation costs across Eurasia, enable formerly isolated regions to connect efficiently to sea and land markets and ignite tremendous new economic growth across Eurasia.

 

“The Eurasian Century Is NOW Unstoppable,” William Engdahl, 10/11/16

US companies and US-led multinational institutions have been excluded from both the construction and financing, and the world’s reserve currency is getting the boot. Transactions are denominated in yuan and rubles, including oil and gas deals. Bye-bye petrodollar, the anchor for the dollar’s reserve status since Nixon abandoned the last dollar-gold link in 1971.

The war lobby ceaselessly conjures threats to US interests and conspiracies to dominate the world. All which must be met with US intervention—overt, covert, or both. How do you conjure a threat when a big part of the world decides to ignore you, who at best sees the US as irrelevant, at worst, a dangerous nuisance? One of life’s joys, all too rare, is telling self-important, pompous people that nobody cares what they do or say, or even if they live or die. It’s been a long time coming, but the rest of the world is starting to tell the US to keep its opinions and interventions to itself, and that’s a good thing for all concerned.

Two men who have caught the new mood are those Best Friends Forever, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Putin watched the Soviet Union crumble, and Trump has been a vocal critic of the US’s Middle East follies. They both see the dark side of empire. Neither man has ever been accused of selfless concern for humanity. They are both unabashed proponents of national interests—putting America and Russia first—but they’ve redefined national interests in ways that vex the Western elite status quo.

Despite the best efforts of the US government and its mainstream media arm to portray Putin as bent on offensive expansion, to date his efforts outside of Russia have been directed towards securing what fair-minded observers would concede are vital interests. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine after a US-sponsored coup installed a hostile regime there. In a referendum, Crimean citizens voted overwhelmingly to leave Ukraine and join Russia. Sebastopol, on the western Black Sea coast of Crimea, is the Russian navy’s warm-water base.

Russia has provided aid to eastern Ukrainian separatists, who have Russian roots, speak Russian, and would prefer to be part of that country. Repeated references to a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine are a canard. If Russia had invaded Ukraine a Russian flag would fly above the capitol in Kiev. Putin regards a secure Ukraine as vital to Russian security, but he has no interest in assuming Ukraine’s ruinous debts or suppressing the pro-Europe and US western half of the country, and he has not annexed eastern Ukraine. Putin tolerates Ukraine’s current Western puppet government—it’s so incompetent and corrupt it poses little threat—but NATO incorporation, a goal of US neoconservatives, would be unacceptable.

Russia has maintained a naval base, Tartus, on Syria’s western Mediterranean coast since 1971. The Soviet Union and then Russia have been staunch allies of the successive autocratic regimes of father and son Hafez and Bashar al-Assad. Putin’s military moves have bolstered Bashar al-Assad against a rebel alliance seeking regime change, funded and supported by the US, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and until recently, Turkey. Russia’s regime preservation operation came at the request of Assad, Syria’s elected head of state. Whatever moral high ground there may be in this sad and bloody war, Russia has the better claim to it.

Syria has been disastrous for the US and its Europe allies, and they were excluded from the most recent cease-fire negotiations conducted between Syria, Turkey, Russia, and Iran, on the one side, and various rebel groups on the other. This drives US interventionists crazy. Being ignored is inconceivable and unacceptable, but what can you do other nations choose to do so and you cannot impose your will? Tellingly, the new Trump administration, presumably less interventionist, has been invited to the negotiations.

There are billions of people who wish they could ignore, and be ignored by, the US government. From South and Central America to the countries joining the OBOR initiative to the Middle East and Northern Africa, the US has inflicted misery, corruption, devastation and death. Americans often cast what they do in righteous, even messianic terms, rendering foreigners as “less than” who need to be saved and protected, and Americans as their “more than” saviors. Americans are among the world’s worst listeners; the desires of the saved are usually not acknowledged, much less acted upon. The saved soon see through the charade—America does what America wants, hang the rhetoric—and the US government would undoubtedly win a global poll as the world’s most hypocritical institution.

The hypocrisy leaves the government unable to acknowledge either what it has wrought or its consequences. It has made South and Central America its playpen for political meddling and the war on drugs, but will not admit that the misery it has helped create is in large part responsible for the influx of immigrants. US intervention has turned the Middle East and Northern Africa into a horror show, but policymakers refuse to publicly connect that to the obvious dots of burgeoning global terrorism and the European refugee crisis. US military “protection” comes with the usual protection racket price: you do as your protector says. Hence Europe, Japan, and a host of smaller countries are enervated US vassals. Per the reserve currency privilege, the US has papered the world with its fiat debt, setting up the global economy for the biggest financial and economic crash in history.

Whether they realize it or not, countless billions of ordinary people should pray to whatever god they pray to that President Trump’s America First means America leaves them alone. Commendably, many Americans realize that would be not only best for world, but for America, too. The country faces a debt, demography, and entitlement tsunami. It can no longer afford empire and Pax Americana, if it ever could. Putting America’s own house in order, or even making a good start, would be a full-time, eight-year endeavor for the entire Trump team, and that’s if they never take vacations or sleep.

There is much wisdom in the phrase: “Mind your own business.” Making America great will entail making America dispensable and irrelevant, setting it free to address its own problems, and setting the rest of the world free to address theirs.

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It used to be that the term “doomsday prepper” evoked a certain visual of an ultra-conservative, bearded woodsman with slightly less than stellar hygiene practices living in the middle of no where with an arsenal of weaponry and a sufficient hoard of dried and canned food to live for years.  But recently that all seems to be changing.  And whether the election of Trump was the catalyst that drove the world’s rich to start prepping or simply allowed them to open up about being preppers all along, one thing is certain, “prepping” is growing in popularity among America’s billionaires.

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Evan Osnos takes a look at some of the super-rich that are taking extreme measures to prepare for the apocalypse.  One such wealthy prepper is Silicon Valley’s Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman, who admits that he went so far as to get corrective eye surgery, not for convenience or appearance, but bacause “If the world ends…getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass…without them, I’m fucked.”

Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently. “Without them, I’m fucked.”

 

Huffman, who lives in San Francisco, has large blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and an air of restless curiosity; at the University of Virginia, he was a competitive ballroom dancer, who hacked his roommate’s Web site as a prank. He is less focussed on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. “I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.”

 

Meanwhile, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook executive, decided to buy his own little section of a secluded island in the Pacific Northwest and load it up with generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

 

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

 

But the award for best wealthy prepper goes to Larry Hall, CEO of the Survival Condo Project, who turned a decommissioned, 15-story nuclear warhead silo into an underground fortress and sold off individual condos to America’s rich and famous. 

He ushered me through, and, in the darkness, I could see the outline of a vast concrete dome, with a metal blast door partly ajar. I was greeted by Larry Hall, the C.E.O. of the Survival Condo Project, a fifteen-story luxury apartment complex built in an underground Atlas missile silo. The facility housed a nuclear warhead from 1961 to 1965, when it was decommissioned. At a site conceived for the Soviet nuclear threat, Hall has erected a defense against the fears of a new era. “It’s true relaxation for the ultra-wealthy,” he said. “They can come out here, they know there are armed guards outside. The kids can run around.”

 

Hall got the idea for the project about a decade ago, when he read that the federal government was reinvesting in catastrophe planning, which had languished after the Cold War. During the September 11th attacks, the Bush Administration activated a “continuity of government” plan, transporting selected federal workers by helicopter and bus to fortified locations, but, after years of disuse, computers and other equipment in the bunkers were out of date. Bush ordered a renewed focus on continuity plans, and FEMA launched annual government-wide exercises. (The most recent, Eagle Horizon, in 2015, simulated hurricanes, improvised nuclear devices, earthquakes, and cyberattacks.)

 

“I started saying, ‘Well, wait a minute, what does the government know that we don’t know?’ ” Hall said. In 2008, he paid three hundred thousand dollars for the silo and finished construction in December, 2012, at a cost of nearly twenty million dollars. He created twelve private apartments: full-floor units were advertised at three million dollars; a half-floor was half the price. He has sold every unit, except one for himself, he said.

 

Allen told me that, in his view, taking precautions is unfairly stigmatized. “They don’t put tinfoil on your head if you’re the President and you go to Camp David,” he said. “But they do put tinfoil on your head if you have the means and you take steps to protect your family should a problem occur.”

 

That said, for some folks a decommissioned nuclear missile silo in the middle of Kansas isn’t nearly remote enough if the shit truly hits the fan.  As such, a record number of Americans, 13,401 in the 7 days after Trump’s election to be precise (17x the normal volume), have started the process necessary to take up residency in New Zealand.  

If a silo in Kansas is not remote or private enough, there is another option. In the first seven days after Donald Trump’s election, 13,401 Americans registered with New Zealand’s immigration authorities, the first official step toward seeking residency—more than seventeen times the usual rate. The New Zealand Herald reported the surge beneath the headline “Trump Apocalypse.”

 

In fact, the influx had begun well before Trump’s victory. In the first ten months of 2016, foreigners bought nearly fourteen hundred square miles of land in New Zealand, more than quadruple what they bought in the same period the previous year, according to the government. American buyers were second only to Australians. The U.S. government does not keep a tally of Americans who own second or third homes overseas. Much as Switzerland once drew Americans with the promise of secrecy, and Uruguay tempted them with private banks, New Zealand offers security and distance. In the past six years, nearly a thousand foreigners have acquired residency there under programs that mandate certain types of investment of at least a million dollars.

 

Jack Matthews, an American who is the chairman of MediaWorks, a large New Zealand broadcaster, told me, “I think, in the back of people’s minds, frankly, is that, if the world really goes to shit, New Zealand is a First World country, completely self-sufficient, if necessary—energy, water, food. Life would deteriorate, but it would not collapse.” As someone who views American politics from a distance, he said, “The difference between New Zealand and the U.S., to a large extent, is that people who disagree with each other can still talk to each other about it here. It’s a tiny little place, and there’s no anonymity. People have to actually have a degree of civility.”

 

The growing foreign appetite for New Zealand property has generated a backlash. The Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa—the Maori name for New Zealand—opposes sales to foreigners. In particular, the attention of American survivalists has generated resentment. In a discussion about New Zealand on the Modern Survivalist, a prepper Web site, a commentator wrote, “Yanks, get this in your heads. Aotearoa NZ is not your little last resort safe haven.”

Certainly, we wish all the new liberal, Silicon Valley preppers the best of luck in surviving Trump rule.  Alas, if everything turns out ok, and all your preparations were for nothing, we’re sure you’ll be to sell your underground fortresses to conservative billionaires when Bernie or Elizabeth Warren take the White House in 4-8 years.

via http://ift.tt/2j7DYc7 Tyler Durden