Federal agents raided the offices of three suburban villages, including one governed by a mayor who doubles as a Cook County commissioner. All three are in the district of state Sen. Martin Sandoval, also the subject of a federal raid.
A trio of west suburban villages in Cook County were the latest subjects of an escalating federal corruption probe in Illinois, with all three in the district of a state senator who also was the target of federal raids two days earlier.
On Sept. 26, FBI agents raided government offices in the villages of McCook, Lyons and Summit, accompanied by officers from the IRS’ Criminal Investigation Division, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Federal agents searched the village halls of each of the three suburbs, in addition to Getty Insurance, where Lyons Mayor Christopher Getty is president. Getty’s family owns the firm, according to the village’s website.
An FBI spokesperson in a statement described the McCook and Lyons raids as “authorized law enforcement activity,” according to the Tribune, which the agency distinguished from the “investigative activity” conducted in Summit.
McCook village attorney Gary Perlman told the Chicago Sun-Times the search warrant sought information concerning “various contractors that have done work with the village.” McCook Mayor Jeff Tobolski, who has held the village’s top public office since 2007, has simultaneously served as a Cook County Board commissioner since 2010.
Tobolski has a history of using his mayoral role to dole out patronage hires, having “hired numerous family members for village jobs,” according to the Sun-Times. His brother currently serves as McCook’s village treasurer.
Lyons’ village history is also rich with corruption, as retold in a May report from the Better Government Association. Getty’s father was mayor and went to prison for stealing from the village.
The trio of raids were the latest in Illinois to involve authorities from both the FBI and IRS, conducted on Sept. 24 just two days after raids on the home and offices of state Sen. Martin Sandoval, D-Chicago. McCook, Lyons and Summit are all within Sandoval’s senate district.
Federal authorities confirmed they’re investigating allegations that Sandoval had used his political office to award government contracts to at least one company in exchange for kickbacks. Sandoval played a leading role in passing Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s massive capital plan that was supported in part by doubling the state gas tax. Infrastructure bills are notorious hotbeds of political favoritism, and many of Sandoval’s political donors are “engineering, planning, construction and related companies,” Crain’s Chicago Business noted.
The Chicago Tribune reported in April that state Rep. Jay Hoffman, D-Swansea, had acknowledged this form of horse trading explicitly, saying, “A capital bill is helpful for people being able to take votes so they can show that these (other) votes were worth it for their district.” Hoffman is assistant House leader under House Speaker Michael Madigan and a former House Transportation Committee chairman.
These latest raids appear to be part of an ongoing federal investigation into Illinois and Chicago political power brokers. The investigation appeared to peak in May when federal prosecutors brought a 14-count indictment against powerful Ald. Ed Burke, 14th Ward, Chicago’s longest-serving alderman.
The investigation into Burke revealed former Chicago Ald. Danny Solis had worn a wire to record Burke, in cooperation with the FBI. Weeks following the Burke indictment, FBI agents raided the ward office of Ald. Carrie Austin, 34th Ward; and a federal court sentenced former Ald. Willie Cochran to one year in prison on corruption charges – the 30th Chicago alderman since 1972 convicted of a felony related to his official duties.
Moreover, a series of federal raids on the homes of high-ranking political insiders appears to be circling in on Madigan, the nation’s longest-serving Statehouse speaker. Madigan confidants have all been the subject of high-profile federal raids including former state lawmaker and lobbyist Mike McClain, former Chicago Ald. Michael Zalewski and former Madigan political lieutenant Kevin Quinn.
In August, a federal indictment against state Sen. Tom Cullerton, D-Villa Park, on embezzlement charges became the latest political corruption bombshell to drop. Cullerton has pleaded not guilty to those charges.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot both campaigned on promises to fight corruption and clean up state and local government, respectively. Lightfoot has moved the city closer to those goals by empowering the city watchdog and limiting conflicts of interest, as well as introducing reforms to the city’s controversial workers’ comp program and ticketing-and-towing scheme.
Pritzker is the subject of a federal investigation into a scheme to save $331,000 on property taxes by removing the toilets from a neighboring mansion he owns on Chicago’s Gold Coast so it could be deemed uninhabitable and the value drop from about $6.25 million to about $1.1 million. He paid the taxes after the story became public.
His promises to fight corruption have so far gone unfulfilled.
Judge Orders Ocasio-Cortez To Testify In Person Over Twitter Bans
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has been ordered by a Brooklyn Federal Judge to appear in person to explain why she has blocked several people over twitter, according to the NY Daily News.
“I think she has to testify here,” said Judge Frederic Block during a Thursday hearing to discuss a case brought by former politician Dov Hikind, who AOC banned from her Twitter feed.
Block, after seeing hundreds of pages of tweets entered into evidence, said he believed hearing from the freshman member of Congress was necessary to decide whether to toss the suit or let the case proceed. Ocasio-Cortez boasts a staggering 5.4 million Twitter followers — even without Hikind.
The former state Assemblyman took on the media-savvy Ocasio-Cortez when she gave him the Twitter boot in a spat over her description of federal immigration detention centers as “concentration camps.” He griped that AOC was violating his First Amendment rights, citing a recent decision declaring President Trump’s blocking of Twitter trolls was unconstitutional. –NY Daily News
On Thursday, Hikind testified that he doesn’t personally send the tweets in his account, rather, a staffer does the “clicking” once he’s formulated “the wording.”
Also discussed was the fact that AOC has two Twitter accounts; a personal / campaign account, and a government-issued account.
AOC’s lawyers noted that Hikind doesn’t live in her district – rather, he live in Rep. Jerry Nadler’s Manhattan-Brooklyn district.
“So you’re not a constituent of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez?” asked AOC attorney Joseph Sandler.
“I’m a citizen of the United States,” replied Hikind.
“So you’re not directly …” Sandler continued.
“Not technically, yes,” Hikind replied.
Judge Block, meanwhile, said he doesn’t use Twitter and doesn’t plan to – telling the court “I’m afraid to use it. I haven’t posted anything on it. It scares me.”
Currencies that are prominent in international financial markets play several related but distinct roles—as mediums of exchange, units of account, and stores of value. Oil and other commodity contracts are mostly denominated in U.S. dollars, making it an important unit of account. The dollar is the dominant invoicing currency in international trade transactions, especially if one excludes trade within Europe and European countries’ trade with the rest of the world, a significant fraction of which is invoiced in euros. The dollar and euro together account for about three-quarters of international payments made to settle cross-border trade and financial transactions, making them the leading mediums of exchange.
The store-of-value function is related to reserve currency status. Reserve currencies are typically hard currencies, which are easily available and can be traded freely in global currency markets, that are seen as safe stores of value. A key aspect of the configuration of global reserve currencies is the composition of global foreign exchange (FX) reserves, which are the foreign currency asset holdings of national central banks. The dollar has been the main global reserve currency since it usurped the British pound sterling’s place after World War II.
Prasad digs into the data about the share of US dollar holdings in foreign exchange reserves of central banks. The IMF collects this data. In the last few years, the US dollar share of “allocated” foreign reserves has fallen from 66% to 62%, which seems like a relatively big drop in a short time–depending on what that word “allocated” means.
As Prasad explains, countries don’t always report the currencies in which they are holding foreign exchange reserves, because they don’t have to do so and the information might feel sensitive. The IMF promises that it will keep the country-level information confidential, and only report, the aggregate numbers–as in the figure. If a central bank does reveal what currency that it is holding for foreign exchange reserves, this amount is “allocated.” Thus, the blue line in the figure shows that central banks have become much more willing to tell the IMF, confidentially, what currencies they are holding.
Prasad argues:
“The recent seemingly precipitous four-percentage-point decline in the dollar’s share of global FX reserves, from 66 percent in 2015 to 62 percent in 2018, is probably a statistical artifact related to changes in the reporting of reserves. This shift in the dollar’s share was likely affected by how China and other previous non-reporters chose to report the currency composition of their reserves, which they did gradually over the 2014-2018 period.”
Another measure of the use of the US dollar in international markets comes from how it is used in global foreign exchange markets. The gold standard for this date is the triennial survey of over-the-counter foreign exchange markets done by the Bank of International Settlements, and data for the 2019 survey is just becoming available from BIS. Their results show:
Trading in FX markets reached $6.6 trillion per day in April 2019, up from $5.1 trillion three years earlier. Growth of FX derivatives trading, especially in FX swaps, outpaced that of spot trading.
The US dollar retained its dominant currency status, being on one side of 88% of all trades. The share of trades with the euro on one side expanded somewhat, to 32%. By contrast, the share of trades involving the Japanese yen fell some 5 percentage points, although the yen remained the third most actively traded currency (on one side of 17% of all trades).
As in previous surveys, currencies of emerging market economies (EMEs) again gained market share, reaching 25% of overall global turnover. Turnover in the renminbi, however, grew only slightly faster than the aggregate market, and the renminbi did not climb further in the global rankings. It remained the eighth most traded currency, with a share of 4.3%, ranking just after the Swiss franc.
Yet another measure of the US dollar as a global currency is its use in international payments made through the SWIFT system (which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication). Prasad offers some evidence here:
“For instance, from 2012 to 2019, the dollar’s share of cross-border payments intermediated through the SWIFT messaging network has risen by 10 percentage points to 40 percent, while the euro’s share has declined by 10 percentage points to 34 percent. The renminbi’s share of global payments has fallen back to under 2 percent.”
In short, the US dollar has been maintaining its dominance as the world’s dominant currency in recent years. There is some movement back and forth between the rest of the currencies in the world–the EU euro, China’s renminbi yuan, Japanese yen, British pound, Swiss franc, and others–but the international leadership of the US dollar has not been significantly challenged. As Prasad writes:
[G]iven the ongoing economic difficulties and political tensions in the eurozone, it is difficult to envision the euro posing much of a challenge to the dollar’s dominance as a reserve currency or even as an international payment currency.
Does the renminbi pose a realistic challenge to the dollar in the long run? China’s large and rising weight in global GDP and trade will no doubt stimulate greater use of the renminbi in the denomination and settlement of cross-border trade and financial transactions. The renminbi’s role as an international payment currency will, however, be constrained by the Chinese government’s unwillingness to free up the capital account and to allow the currency’s value to be determined by market forces…
…While change might eventually come, the recent strengthening of certain aspects of the dollar’s dominance in global finance suggests that such change could be far off into the future. It would require substantial changes in the economic and, in some cases, financial and institutional structures of major economies accompanied by significant modifications to the system of global governance. For now and into the foreseeable future—and given the lack of viable alternatives—the dollar reigns supreme.
Chaos Continues In Hong Kong; Undercover Cops Pull Guns Amid ‘Aggressive Clearance Operation’
Violence continued in Hong Kong as anti-government demonstrations entered their 17th week. The police response was described by the Washington Post as “among the most aggressive” since the movement began over a now-withdrawn extradition bill which would have allowed China to forcibly move suspects to the mainland for face trial in communist courts.
Protesters destroyed signs and flags raised in advance of the 70th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, some of which were burned. According to WaPo, “At times, riot police appeared outnumbered. Shoppers at a luxury mall in central Hong Kong looked on as police and protesters engaged in a pitched battle. Protesters crouched, created a phalanx of umbrellas and tossed bricks and bottles toward the officers. Police fired round after round of tear gas.”
The protesters inched forward as rubber bullets shredded their umbrellas. When it appeared the police might be outflanked, officers made a hasty retreat. Protesters seized the moment, rushing toward officers piling into police vans.
Demonstrators, cheered by onlookers and fellow marchers, hit the vans with poles and bottles as the vehicles sped away. The road was littered with glass and spent tear-gas canisters clinked across the asphalt as the protesters continued their march.
At nightfall in the nearby neighborhood of Wan Chai, residents left their homes and workplaces to jeer at police and pelt their vehicles with bricks and bottles. –Washington Post
At one point, an undercover cop who was exposed pulled a gun on protesters.
When riot police started amassing inside Wan Chai station, frontline protesters worked to cut them off by barricading its entrances and hurling bricks, pulled from the sidewalk, down the escalators. pic.twitter.com/oQ7BdTI5f1
Street battles broke between protesters and police who struggled to keep the demonstrators at bay with rubber bullets and tear gas.
Residents and tourists were caught in the crossfire, clutching their faces and running in fear in several areas, including the neon-lit luxury shopping district of Causeway Bay. –Washington Post
At approximately 5pm, riot police launched an aggressive clearance operation against protesters along Harcourt Road – a frequent location for clashes.
Police pushed young demonstrators to the asphalt road and dragged them away, leaving pools of blood. Hong Kong’s hospital authority said 13 people were admitted to hospitals by 7:30 p.m., including one in serious condition. –Washington Post
Riot police officers fire tear gas to disperse anti-government protesters after a march in Hong Kong. (Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters)
Arrested protesters were lined up against a wall outside a government building before being frisked and taken away.
After one clash, police regrouped and then charged protesters. “Go, go, go,” a commanding officer shouted as dozens of tactical and riot officers sprinted down the street. Officers tackled demonstrators, pinning them to the ground and blocking journalists’ cameras as they made arrests. –Washington Post
“Go, Go, Go!” Raptor and riot police charge toward Pacific Place in Hong Kong this afternoon appeared to be lead by Rupert Dover. pic.twitter.com/3WHLCfGLdZ
An anti-government protester throws a molotov cocktail towards riot police officers inside the Wan Chai station during a demonstration in Hong Kong. (Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters)
According to Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, the United States is the main instigator of terrorism in the Middle East.
Wherever the U.S. goes, Rouhani explained to Fox News, “terrorism has expanded in its wake.”
Publicly available evidence seems to indicate there is some truth to the Iranian’s president’s words. Take, for example, a recent article in the journal Environmental Pollution, which discusses the results of a study undertaken in Nasiriyah near Tallil Air Base.
Over the years, Dr Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Michigan has conducted several investigations in Iraq to better understand the affects of pollutants and toxic chemicals on the Iraqi people from the US-led war in Iraq.
According to Savabieasfahani, the levels of thorium in children born with congenital disabilities near the Talil Base were up to 28 times higher than compared to children who were born without congenital disabilities and whom lived further away from the military base.
The culprit behind these defects is depleted uranium (DU). For a significant period of time, DU was so attractive to U.S. and NATO militaries due to its dense nature, which allows it to pierce even armored trucks. It was used on a large scale during the first Gulf War, and has been used quite extensively by the U.S. ever since.
The American military used some 944,000 rounds of DU bullets in Iraq and Kuwait during the first Gulf war, and was estimated to use 4,000,000 pounds in the 2003 invasion.
Since the Iraq war, incidences of cancer and congenital defects have increased significantly. By detecting thorium in the teeth and hair of Iraqi children born with congenital disabilities near the base in question, the causative link between DU and these defects seems to be ever more apparent. Thorium is a decay-product of depleted uranium and is otherwise radioactive.
“For years following the 2003 U.S-led invasion, Iraqi doctors raised alarms about increasing numbers of babies being born with congenital disabilities in areas of heavy fighting. Other peer-reviewed studies found dramatic increases in child cancer, leukemia, miscarriages and infant mortality in cities such as Fallujah, which saw the largest battles of the war. Scientists, Iraqi physicians and international observers have long suspected depleted uranium to be the culprit. In 2014, one Iraqi doctor toldTruthout reporter Dahr Jamail that depleted uranium pollution amounted to ‘genocide.’”
The U.S. military has doomed the futures of countless innocent children who probably wouldn’t have even been born during Saddam Hussein’s rule. For what? And what does it take to wake up the American public to the fact that just because the U.S. is not actively bombing Iraq into oblivion at this point in time, it does not mean that we turn our minds off from the fact a grave crime has been committed? Victims of that crime will continue feeling the effects of this collective punishment for decades to come. Will these victims receive justice?
A war of aggression, the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg explains, is not only an international crime, but the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
The evil unleashed by United States on Iraq is encapsulated to a great extent by this latest study, but as the Nuremberg principles affirm, this is just but one of the many evils of an accumulative whole which the U.S. military has brought, and continues to bring, to the Middle East.
Is This The Real Driver Of Gold’s Recent Weakness?
Despite uber-dovish Fed jawboning (and a re-expansion of their balance sheet), a liquidity crisis prompting repo action by NYFed, re-escalated trade tensions, a breakdown in talks with North Korea, and of course, the Trump impeachment process; safe-haven precious metals were pummeled lower the last few days, breaking back down below $1500…
Source: Bloomberg
The question on many investors minds is…why?
The answer is surprisingly simple… China’s Golden Week Holiday.
As SHTFplan.com’s Mac Slavo wrote previously, and appears to be proved correct once again… Ask the expert pundits on financial media and you’ll get a swath of explanations for how the strength of the dollar or the improving health of the global economy are to blame.
One could reasonably argue that dollar strength this week could certainly put downward pressure on the gold price. So, too, could one make the point that mainstream perspective is such that the economy is improving (which we have just explained is simply an anomaly due to use-it-or-lose-it spending patterns), which means investors aren’t in panic mode and have no reason to hold a safe haven asset. But neither of these arguments could realistically lead to the smack down we witnessed this week.
There’s no reason… there’s not even a propaganda meme of why [gold has been dumped]… there isn’t even a such thing as negative news for precious metals anymore…
The fact is, [like the last few years, when prices collapsed], China is closed for the week.
One glance at the last few years gold price action suggests he may well be correct…
Source: Bloomberg
As of Tuesday, China will be on vacation for its Golden Week National Holiday and this weakness appears to be traders front-running the traditional chaos that the rest of the world plays when China leaves the playing field.
China will be back in business on October 9th, and that means the Shanghai Gold Exchange, which opened in 2015 to counter Western manipulation of precious metals, will likely help re-balance prices to where they were before this recent takedown.
We could be wrong, but something tells us gold and silver prices won’t stay this low for much longer and that they could well see a complete turnaround when China reopens on October 9th.
It’s haunting how accurately our first president predicted our “foreign entanglements” with Riyadh.
President Donald Trump wants to outsource U.S. policy to Riyadh. After the recent attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil fields, he tweeted that his administration was “locked and loaded,” but was “waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!” He later ordered American forces to Saudi Arabia to garrison the Middle East’s most brutally repressive and dangerously aggressive state.
Since he himself ventured to Riyadh in 2017—his first foreign trip—Trump has consistently sacrificed America’s national interests in catering to the preferences of the Saudi royal family. His administration backed the regime’s brutal attack on Yemen, ignored Riyadh’s continuing support for Islamic radicalism, and said little about their mounting human rights violations. Now he is acting as if American armed forces constitute the royals’ personal bodyguards, at the crown prince’s beck and call.
It was fear of precisely this kind of obsequious subservience to foreign nations and interests that prompted President George Washington to issue his famous 1796 Farewell Address. Obviously America’s position in the world was very different then. The former colonies were still forging their disparate communities into a nation. The United States was a weak, marginal player in a world dominated by empires. Great Britain and Spain retained interests in and forces on the North American continent, while France maintained Caribbean colonies.
Centuries later, however, Washington’s words still resonate. His message was clear:
“nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated.
The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”
Tragically the Trump administration’s Middle East policy illustrates both sides of the equation. The president exhibits just such “permanent, inveterate antipathies” against Iran and Syria and “passionate attachments” to Saudi Arabia and Israel. The result has been to badly distort U.S. policy and harm American interests.
As Washington presciently explained more than two centuries ago:
“Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy.”
“Haughty and intractable” surely describes American policy toward Iran. As does the first president’s warning of when the national government “adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations has been the victim.”
Iran is a bad actor, along with Syria. So are many other nations, including China, Cuba, North Korea, and Russia. But adopting “through passion what reason would reject” as policy has harmed the U.S. as much as it has those other nations.
Constant confrontation and conflict have sacrificed American lives, wealth, and interests for no compelling reason.
The other side of the equation has had an equally distorting impact on U.S. policy. Indeed, America’s “passionate attachments” have helped determine the foregoing enemies’ list. After all, Washington observed, “likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”
Perhaps the most immediate and obvious consequence of this are “concessions to the favorite nation” – such as arming the Saudis, aiding their murderous campaign against Yemeni civilians, and whitewashing their odious oppressions.
However, the dangers go beyond simple policy. This sort of “passionate attachment” also threatens American democracy. Said Washington:
“it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; guiding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.”
Riyadh appears to buy its friends directly and openly, as does its ally the United Arab Emirates. A different and more enduring foreign loyalty often emerges among those who retain ties to their ancestors’ homelands, such as Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Greece and Turkey. Israel is sui generis, with its most zealous backers Christian believers who hold a unique (and uniquely dubious) eschatology.
While people can, and some do, advocate support for foreign regimes as necessary for American prosperity and/or security, others appear to assume that their favored nation’s interests are automatically America’s interests. Particularly shocking were Republican Party presidential candidates in 2016 who demanded reflexive support for the Saudis and other “allies” and insisted there should not be the slightest margin of difference between American and Israeli policy despite our many manifest divergences in interests. Which, in practice, would mean conforming to foreign positions irrespective of what our own imperatives are.
Washington also warned of the potential danger such entanglements could pose to domestic institutions:
“As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public council. Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.”
Could there be a better description of America’s current policy toward the Middle East? Our supposed friends have entangled us and turned us into their catspaw. Perhaps most shocking is how Saudi Arabia, which shares neither our values nor our interests, has gained effective control over our foreign policy.
Riyadh’s influence in Washington, D.C. may be nonpareil—the only other nation that comes close is Israel. But there are other countries that seek to gain favor through lobbying. Advocates for Greece and Turkey routinely battle each other, often with inconclusive results, though the latter has won particularly important victories, such as American acquiescence to and sometimes approval of often ruthless policies against internal opponents and other nations, including Cyprus and Syria.
Activists with ties to Central and Eastern Europe have backed the liberation of their “captive nations” during the Cold War and pushed for the rapid expansion of NATO afterwards, despite America’s and Europe’s contrary assurances to Russia. Today’s confrontation between the West and Moscow in part grows out of what Russians see as a calculated betrayal. South Korea, meanwhile, looks to Korean Americans for support, though they lack the organization and clout of other groups.
In different ways, all of these cases illustrate the problem caused by “passionate attachments”—the almost routine and sometimes substantial sacrifice of U.S. economic and security interests to benefit other governments. In most instances, cultural, ethnic, and historical ties provide the foundation for foreign political influence. Saudi Arabia is the rare case where the means is mostly cash and lobbyists.
What to do? George Washington was no isolationist. Like his contemporaries, he expected America to prosper as a commercial republic. Rather, he advocated that the new government “steer clear of permanent alliances,” have with other states “as little political connection as possible,” and not “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils” of other nations’ “ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice.” That is, cooperation in any form should be based on circumstance and focused on advancing the interests of the American people. He wouldn’t necessarily oppose defending Saudi Arabia, but he would expect the determination to be made by Washington, D.C. and not Riyadh.
Some Americans have lost interest in the Founders, who seem exiled by the mists of time. Yet George Washington and his contemporaries confronted the eternal challenges of power and principle. In his Farewell Address, Washington melded theory with practice and offered lessons which U.S. presidents and other policymakers should learn for today, including to “observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all.”
Today’s presidents would be wise to learn the lessons he teaches—especially those who think we need to subordinate ourselves to a remote desert kingdom.
BofA: We Are “Irrationally” Bullish On 2019, But A Liquidity Crisis Is Coming In 2020
When it comes to the equity market, between the Trump and Powell puts, there appears to be nothing in this world – literally – that can put a dent in stock price. In what Bank of America’s CIO Michael Hartnett calls a “Miracle on Wall Street” in his latest Flow Show weekly, he lists a barrage of negative catalysts including: i) yield curve inversion, ii) US-China trade war, iii) recession in Germany, iv) collapse in Chinese industrial production, v) contraction in global profits, vi) oil price spike, vii) BREXIT, viii) Trump impeachment inquiry, ix) Argentine default/Ford downgrade, x) Thomas Cook bankruptcy…and yet risk assets close to all-time highs and US stocks on course for 30% annualized returns, global stocks 24%, commodities 17%, global IG & HY bonds 14%, US Treasuries 10%… or as he concludes laconically, this is “breathtaking stuff.”
Betting on a continuation of this “breathtaking” exuberance, Hartnett writes that he remains 2019 irrationally bullish as a result of bearish investor sentiment + desperate central banks/policy-makers + bond ‘bubble’, culminating in an “overshoot” in credit & equity prices this autumn; even so, Hartnett expects rising bond yields to trigger more frequent episodic violent rotations from deflation assets (e.g. bonds, growth stocks, defensives) to inflation assets (e.g. commodities, value stocks, cyclicals).
However, the party ends next year (as the presidential election looms) and BofA remains 2020 rationally bearish, when the bank’s chief market strategist expects the bond bubble to pop and induce “big top” in credit (spreads trough) & equities (multiples peak), causing a Wall St deleveraging & Main Street recession. Of course, a broad economic recession just months before the presidential election would also have a dramatic impact on the election of the next US president, and may usher in MMT (i.e. helicopter money) far sooner than most had anticipated.
For now, the market isn’t buying BofA’s thesis, and instead it remains dominated by risk-off weekly flows: $9.2bn into bonds, $2.8bn into gold, $22.0bn out of equities; resulting in risk-off YTD flows…$358bn into bonds, $15bn into gold, $201bn out of stocks (for those asking why stocks remain just 2% below all time highs, we have a one-word answer: stock buybacks).
Here Hartnett makes the following notable flow observations:
Inflows to government bonds ($1.8bn inflows after $10bn outflows past 2 weeks) & 2nd biggest gold inflows ever ($2.8bn); inflows continue across credit markets (IG $5.0bn, HY $0.2bn, EM debt $0.8bn); big redemptions from equities ($22.0bn – reversal of $34bn inflows past 2 weeks); biggest redemptions from tech ($0.3bn) in 6 weeks & US growth funds ($6.1bn) in 3 months.
In response to this wholesale risk-off capitulation by traditional investors, central banks have once again gone “all-in”, with 43 global rate cuts YTD, 751 rate cuts since Lehman. More importantly, the new ECB QE program, together with the upcoming Fed QE4 to “normalize the money markets”, means a new all-time high of $16.6tn central bank balance sheets high by Apr’ 20…
… while the stock of negative-yielding bonds will soon resume rising and surpass its prior record of $17 trillion, all of which BofA finds to be maximum bullish for Wall Street… at least until the moment if impotence arrives, at which point it’s more or less game over.
Meanwhile, as we near the point of “maximum liquidity”, we also hurtle toward the point of “minimum growth”, with Hartnett reminding us that the BofA Global EPS Model forecasts -6.8% EPS growth next 12-months vs. consensus -2.8%, with the inflection point higher in global profits the “missing “ingredient to more sustained multi-quarter rotation from deflation to inflation assets.
In short, we are back to square one, as the playbook from the early 2010s – minimum growth & maximum liquidity – is applied all over again:
own “yield” plays
own “growth” plays (high beta when PMIs>50, low beta when PMIs<50)
rent “value” plays.
It’s not just the market that is experiencing a 2010s deja vu: the next chart shows key macro drivers of 2010s – steady GDP in US, accelerating EPS in US, weaker GDP in China, stagnation in Japan & Eurozone, lower CPI, collapsing rates & yields.
That said, three catalysts can change this in the 2020s, and break the cycle:
Catalyst 1 = higher growth & higher yields: This would require PE (Populist Easing), a shift to MMT, fiscal stimulus as cheap financing incites large government spending addressing wealth inequality, student debt, housing affordability and climate change boosting global animal spirits; but fiscal policy-makers remain timid, e.g. Eurozone most “behind-the-curve”…Germany in recession yet Eurozone governments remain net savers not borrowers in 2019 (much to Mario Draghi’s disgust).
Catalyst 2 = higher rates & lower growth: BofA’s bearish narrative for 2020 is via policy impotence & pop in bond ‘bubble’; for the moment credit spreads remain very low but IPO underperformance (chart below), spike in repo rates, credit tremors (Argentina, Ford, Thomas Cook) and growing risk of disorderly rise in US dollar given US policy divergence, all hint at “potential liquidity crisis in 2020″ according to BofA, an outcome that would be music to the ears of Donald Trump’s opponents in the 2020 elections.
Catalyst 3 = lower EPS & lower yields: note Fed response to ’98 Asia crisis overwhelmed Clinton impeachment (Chart 7); a potential Trump impeachment in 2020…
… could herald shift to left towards redistributive policies of higher regulation & higher taxation harming US EPS.
That means that if the Clinton impeachment a harbinger of what comes next, expect an even more pressing and dramatic financial or geopolitical crisis to be unleashed somewhere in the world, which will force even more easing by the Fed, and in turn send stocks to even recorder highs, before the next and perhaps final bubble bursts, send stocks crashing to new generational lows. The only question is whether Trump will successfully delay this day of reckoning to beyond November 2020. And once we cross that point, the collapse will be just a matter of time, as will be the launch of MMT under president AOC/Warren in 2024 and the end of the US Dollar as a reserve currency.
In order to understand why Ukraine’s President Voldomyr Zelensky doesn’t want the dirt about Joe Biden to become public, one needs to know that Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at Burisma Holdings was, at least partly, Zelensky’s boss and benefactor until Zelensky became Ukraine’s President, and that revealing this would open up a can of worms which could place that former boss and benefactor of both men into prison at lots of places.
First, the falsehoods in the press have to be documented here, since this article will go up against virtually all U.S.-and-allied reporting on these events. And, in order to do such a thing, the bona fides of my main sources need to be presented:
Naked Capitalism is, as the article about it at Wikipedia, says, the blog of Susan Webber, pen-named “Yves Smith,” who “graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Business School. She had 20 years of experience in the financial services industry with Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Co., and Sumitomo Bank.[3] She has written articles for the New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Roosevelt Institute.[4][5]” “The site has had over 60 million visitors since 2007, and was cited as among CNBC’s 2012 top 25 ‘Best Alternative Financial Blogs’, calling Smith ‘a harsh critic of Wall Street who believes that fraud was at the center of the financial crisis’.[2]” “The New York Times financial reporter Gretchen Morgenson cited Naked Capitalism as one of the ‘must-read financial blogs’ she reads regularly.[9]”
Her blog is widely respected amongst both scholars and experts in the field of finance, and is among the top go-to sites for trustworthy investigative news reporting in their highly complex field. So as to be able to achieve this high degree of respect, day in and day out, for decades, she carefully selects and relies upon the expertise of a small team of investigators, one of whom is Richard Smith, who has done around 200 articles for her site. One of these was dated 21 May 2014 and headlined “R. Hunter Biden Should Declare Who Really Owns His New Ukrainian Employer, Burisma Holdings”, and it reported that the U.S. Vice President’s son had become “a new member of the board” and that this “Ukrainian energy company has retained the counsel of the vice president’s son and the Secretary of State’s close family friend and top campaign bundler.” Since these men were being paid by the corporation’s owner, Mr. Smith researched extensively to find out who that was, or they were. He reported “what one careful Ukrainian journalist dug up in 2012”:
“Burisma changed owners last year [in 2011]: instead of Zlochevsky and Lisin, the company was taken over by a Cypriot off-shore enterprise called Brociti Investments Ltd. Pari and Esko-Pivnich” and a “third company was already waiting for them in the same building – the above-mentioned Ukrnaftoburinnya,” and “The Privat Group is the immediate owner. This company was founded by Mykola Zlochevsky some time ago, but he later sold his shares to the Privat Group,” which “is a conglomerate controlled by the ferocious Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky,” who “is one of the oligarchs charged with holding down the Eastern provinces of Ukraine,” and who “is far too ebulliently Jewish to look like a neo-Nazi.
A US connection with Kolomoisky might play well in circles keen to counter Russian complaints that the interim Kiev regime is dominated by ‘fascists’.” Those quotations are from Mr. Smith’s article, but the following is not. Examining the documents myself, I note especially that at their end is the conclusion:
“Thus, Ihor Kolomoisky managed to seize the largest reserves of natural gas in Ukraine.”
This was the conclusion of the “careful Ukrainian journalist,” which was actually not one but a team of three, who were employed at a Ukrainian non-profit, the Anticorruption Action Centre, which specialized in tracking down the actual persons who controlled corporations and which had a particular focus on finding “Offshore fronts for Yanukovych.” Yanukovych was the democratically elected Ukrainian President, who took office on 25 February 2010. So: this non-profit was an anti-Yanukovych organization, writing more than two years into his Presidency, on 28 August 2012.
A certain historical background is essential here; and this, too, goes up against American ‘news’-reporting and will therefore be linked to articles that, in turn, link to ultimate sources that are of unquestioned reliability on each of the particulars that are in question: There was a coup in Ukraine in February 2014, which is portrayed in the West as being a democratic revolution (but was actually a coup hidden behind anticorruption demonstrations, and that was entirely illegal), and it replaced the democratically elected President by a ruler who was selected by Victoria Nuland, whose boss was Secretary of State John Kerry, whose boss was Barack Obama. Nuland had been originally a protégé of Vice President Dick Cheney, and then of Kerry’s immediate predecessor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Obama assigned Nuland to carry out his plan for Ukraine, which plan was to turn its government away from being friendly toward its next-door neighbor Russia to becoming instead a satellite of the United States against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor. Consequently, fascists, and even outright racist-fascists (nazis), people who came from the groups that had supported Hitler against Stalin during World War II, were installed into this new government, such as the co-founder of the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, Andriy Parubiy. (The CIA instructed that Party, which was Ukraine’s main nazi party, to change its name to “Freedom Party” — Svoboda — so as to become acceptable to Americans; and Paribuy and his colleagues did it, in order to help the U.S. Government to fool the American people about what the U.S. was doing in Ukraine.)
At least until Zelensky was elected, Ukraine’s Government remained fascist. And so is Kolomoysky himself, as I had reported about him on 18 May 2014. As I reported there,
On 12 May 2014, Burisma Holdings announced, “Hunter Biden Joins the Team of Burisma Holdings,”and reported that, “Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, has expanded its Board of Directors by bringing on Mr. R Hunter Biden as a new director. R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations.”
At the time, Hunter Biden, now 49, and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of then-Secretary of State John Kerry, co-owned Rosemont Seneca Partners, a $2.4 billion private equity firm. Heinz’s college roommate, Devon Archer, was managing partner in the firm. In the spring of 2014, Biden and Archer joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company that was at the center of a U.K. money laundering probe. Over the next year, Burisma reportedly paid Biden and Archer’s companies over $3 million.
Subsequently, both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were removed from Burisma’s board and replaced by a four-person board, which mysteriously had included ever since May 2013 (which still was after Zlochevsky no longer controlled the company) Alan Apter, of Sullivan & Cromwell, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Renaissance Capital. Apter now became the “Chairman of the Board of Directors”. Here are the other three Directors: Aleksander Kwaśniewski was the President of the Republic of Poland from 1995 to 2005 when it was being taken over by America, and when Kwaśniewski was also a member of the Atlantic Council (NATO’s PR arm), and of the Bilderberg Group. Joseph Cofer Black was the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (1999-2002) and Ambassador at Large for counter-terrorism (2002-2004), while President George W. Bush was lying America into invading Iraq, and Black subsequently became the Vice Chairman at Blackwater Worldwide (now Academi), which the Bush Government hired to train and arm mercenaries to help conquer Iraq. (Blackwater/Academi is owned by Erik Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVos of the Amway fortune, who is the Trump Secretary of Education, and Prince also is a personal friend of Trump. Obama’s Government also hired Blackwater/Academi to kill independence fighters in the Dnieper Donets Basin, where Burisma owns the drilling rights for gas.) And the fourth Director is Karina Zlochevska, whom the site identifies hardly at all, but is actually the daughter of Mykola Zlochevsky. In other words: Zlochevsky probably does remain as a minority owner of the company, and she represents his interests there.
Virtually all of the Western press simply alleges that Mykola Zlochevsky owns Burisma Holdings and brought Biden on board and was his boss; however, I have never seen from any of those ‘news’-reports any evidence or documentation that it’s true — nothing like the sources that Richard Smith relied upon and linked to documenting that this was Kolomoysky’s company. Nothing, at all.
Joseph Biden, as is well reported in the press, instructed the new Ukrainian Government to fire and replace the General Prosecutor of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, who had failed to prosecute Zlochevsky, and this action by Joe is reported as indicating that the senior Biden granted his son’s employer no favor but instead the opposite — that Joe insisted upon Hunter’s boss’s prosecution.
The then-vice president issued his demands for greater anti-corruption measures by the Ukrainian government despite the possibility that those demands would actually increase – not lessen — the chances that Hunter Biden and Burisma would face legal trouble in Ukraine.
Risen reported there that V.P. Biden’s “anti-corruption message might be undermined by the association of his son Hunter with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky.”
However, none of that press says Kolomoysky owned the company and was its boss. The presumption there is always that Zlochevsky needed to be prosecuted — not that Kolomoysky did. Kolomoysky is simply being written out of the picture altogether — whited-out from it
Also as is typical, the New York Times reported, on 1 May 2019, that Mykola Zlochevsky is the “owner of Burisma Holdings” and that “Mr. Lutsenko initially continued investigating Mr. Zlochevsky and Burisma, but cleared him of all charges within 10 months of taking office. The prosecutor general reversed himself and reopened an investigation into Burisma this year. Some see his decision as an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration.” For some mysterious reason, that article not only says that the replacement Prosecutor tried and failed and now tried again to prosecute Zlochevsky but that “Some see his decision as an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration,” though, actually, it was the Obama Administration that had been pressing Ukraine’s Government to prosecute Zlochevsky, who wasn’t Hunter Biden’s boss and didn’t control Burisma and was associated not with the 2014 Obama-installed Government of Ukraine but instead with the Government that had preceded it and was the last of all Ukraine’s democratic Governments, having been democratically elected by all of Ukraine including the two regions (Crimea and Donbass) that broke away from Ukraine when Obama in February 2014 overthrew the Government that those two now-breakaway regions had voted for, by over 75% in that 2010 election.
And here is from Wikipedia’s article on “Viktor Shokin”:
Since 2012, the Ukrainian prosecutor general had been investigating oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of the oil and natural gas company Burisma Holdings, over allegations of money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption.[15]In 2014, then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden‘s son, Hunter Biden, joined the board of directors of Burisma Holdings.[16]In 2015, Shokin became the prosecutor general, inheriting the investigation. The Obama administration and other governments and non-governmental organizationssoon became concerned that Shokin was not adequately pursuing corruption in Ukraine, was protecting the political elite, and was regarded as “an obstacle to anti-corruption efforts”.[17]Among other issues, he was slow-walking the investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma – to the extent that Obama officials were considering launching their own criminal investigation into the company for possible money laundering.[15]
In March 2016, Joe Biden threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenkothat if he did not fire Shokin, that the US would hold back its $1 billion in loan guarantees. “I looked at them and said, “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.” Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”[18]Shokin was dismissed by Parliament later that month.
Shokin claimed in May 2019 that he had been investigating Burisma Holdings.[19][20][21][22]However, Vitaliy Kasko, who had been Shokin’s deputy overseeing international cooperation before resigning in February 2016 citing corruption in the office, provided documents to Bloomberg News indicating that under Shokin, the investigation into Burisma had been dormant.[23]Hunter Biden’s ties to Burisma Holdings was criticized as a conflict of interest in a New York Times editorial, though Amos Hochsteinhas claimed to have never seen coordination between Joe Biden and his son on the matter.[24][25]
And here is from Wikipedia’s Article on “Burisma Holdings”:
Burisma Group was founded in 2002 by Ukrainian businessman Mykola Zlochevskyand Nikolay Lysin[uk]. Now it is owned by Mykola Zlochevskyi[uk], who was minister of natural resources under Viktor Yanukovych.[2]Zlochevsky returned to Ukraine in February 2018 after the corruption investigations into his Burisma Holdings had been completed in December 2017 with no charges filed against him.[3]
So, the myth that Zlochevsky was Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at Burisma isn’t only in the ‘news’-media that are controlled by U.S. Deep State that controls the CIA, which controls America’s major ‘news’-media, but it is also in the Web’s main encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which is not only edited by the CIA, but also, to some extent, written by the CIA.
Furthermore, the CIA was the ‘whistleblower’ that made the impeachment-charge to the Democratic Party head of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Adam Schiff, who is the lead proponent of impeaching Donald Trump so that Trump can then become tried in the U.S. Senate, which then would possess the power to replace Trump and make President the current Vice President, Mike Pence, which Democrats, for some unexplained reason, seem to hope will happen. As Reuters reported on September 26th, “The whistleblower is a CIA officer and was assigned at one point to work at the White House, two sources familiar with the probe into his complaint said. The New York Times first identified the whistleblower as a CIA officer, which Reuters confirmed.” That report also asserted:
The call occurred after Trump had ordered a freeze of nearly $400 million in American aid to Ukraine, which was only later released. Before the call, Ukraine’s government was told that interaction between Zelenskiy and Trump depended on whether the Ukrainian leader would “play ball,” the whistleblower said.
The report said Trump acted to advance his personal political interests, risking national security.
“I am deeply concerned that the actions described below constitute ‘a serious or flagrant problem, abuse, or violation of law or executive order,’” the whistleblower complaint, dated Aug. 12, said.
The same CIA whose lies had ‘justified’ America’s invading Iraq in 2003, and invading Libya in 2011, and invading Syria starting in 2012 (and extending there up till at least 2018), is now ‘justifying’ congressional Democrats to replace Trump by Pence if they possibly can.
And Kolomoysky might be one of the world’s biggest thieves. On 19 April 2019, Graham Stack reported for OCCRP, a U.S.-and-allied-funded nonprofit anti-corruption investigatory organization that
“‘Large-scale coordinated fraudulent actions of the bank [PrivatBank] shareholders and management caused a loss to the state of at least $5.5 billion,’ [Valeria] Hontareva [former chair of Ukranie’s central bank] said in March 2018. ‘This is 33 percent of the population’s deposits … [and] 40 percent of our country’s monetary base.’ … By the time regulators took over PrivatBank, the $5.5 billion had already been transferred to banks in Austria, Luxembourg, and Latvia. From there, the trail goes cold. … This account is based on a forensic audit by Kroll, the U.S.-based corporate investigation and risk consulting firm. The report … is based on PrivatBank’s own records and was obtained exclusively by OCCRP. … Ukraine nationalized PrivatBank in December 2016, saddling taxpayers with a $5.9 billion bailout.”
Furthermore, the estimable and reliably accurate Moscow investigative journalist John Helmer reported on 19 February 2015 that “In March 2014, days after the ouster of Yanukovich in Kiev and the installation of a new regime, the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) started investigating Zlochevsky. According to the evidence it presented to the Central Criminal Court between March and December of 2014, and according to Justice Blake, who assessed the evidence, there is no mention of Lisin, Deripon, Burrard or Kolomoisky.” Obama’s people (there via the U.S. regime’s lap-dog UK) were targeting Zlochevsky, certainly not Kolomoysky, who was instead on their team.
Zelensky, prior to becoming Ukraine’s President, had been the star of a popular comedy series on Ukrainian television that was telecast by Ihor Kolomoysky’s 1+1 Media group. On 19 May 2014, Forbes published a shockingly honest article, by Vladimir Golstein, “Why Everything You’ve Read About Ukraine Is Wrong”, which mentioned, about Kolomoysky, that,
His business holdings include the largest Ukrainian media group, “1+1 Media,” the news agency “Unian,” as well as various internet sites, which enable him to whip public opinion into an anti-Putin frenzy. Andrew Higgins of The New York Times published a story with the headline, “Among Ukraine’s Jews, the Bigger Worry is Putin, Not Pogroms,” which praises Kolomoisky for adorning Dnepropetrovsk with “the world’s biggest Jewish community center” along with “a high tech Holocaust museum.” Higgins notes, however, that the museum “skirts the delicate issue of how some Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with Nazis.
Kolomoysky himself had become installed by the Obama Administration’s Ukrainian agents as the Governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine where his approximately $5 billion financial empire was based, and which in its north extends into the Dnieper Donets Basin where Burisma owns the drilling rights for gas. As this last link indicates, that Basin “is the major oil and gas producing region of Ukraine accounting for approximately 90 per cent of Ukrainian production and according to EIA may have 42 tcf of shale gas resources technically recoverable from 197 tcf of risked shale gas in place.” That article, from the investment-oriented website Zero Hedge, sums up:
In a nutshell, Ukraine (or rather its puppetmasters) has decided to let no crisis (staged or otherwise) or rather civil war, go to waste, and while the fighting rages all around, Ukrainian troopers are helping to install shale gas production equipment near the east Ukrainian town of Slavyansk, which was bombed and shelled [by the Obama-installed Government] for the three preceding months, according to local residents cited by Itar Tass. The reason for the scramble? Under peacetime, the process was expected to take many years, during which Europe would be under the energy dictatorship of Putin. But throw in some civil war and few will notice let alone care that a process which was expected to take nearly a decade if not longer while dealing with broad popular objections to fracking, may instead be completed in months!
Ukraine’s bombing of that region (for examples, this and this and this) was in order to clear the land for a massive fracking operation. However, it turned out that not only Kolomoysky’s operation with Shell in the Dnieper Donets Basin in Ukraine’s far east, but also the Ukrainian Government’s own gas-exploration operation with Chevron in western Ukraine’s Olesska field, were uneconomic; or, as I headlined about them on 16 December 2014, “Ukraine’s Two Big Gas Deals Are Now Both Dry”. It seems that if Hunter Biden is to become a billionaire, it won’t come from Ukrainian gas. (Nor, of course will it have come from Zlochevsky, which the news-media would have it to be.)
As was reported on 20 May 2014 by Israel Shamir at the website of Paul Craig Roberts, under the headline “The Ukraine in Turmoil” (and his article there was the first comprehensive and accurate summary of what had recently happened to Ukraine):
These people had brought Ukraine to its present abject state. In 1991, the Ukraine was richer than Russia, today it is three times poorer because of these people’s mismanagement and theft. Now they plan an old trick: to take loans in Ukraine’s name, pocket the cash and leave the country indebted. They sell state assets to Western companies and ask for NATO to come in and protect the investment.
They play a hard game, brass knuckles and all. The Black Guard, a new SS-like armed force of the neo-nazi Right Sector, prowls the land. They arrest or kill dissidents, activists, journalists. Hundreds of American soldiers, belonging to the “private” company Academi (formerly Blackwater) are spread out in Novorossia [Donbass, the far-eastern region that became independent after Obama’s coup], the pro-Russian provinces in the East and South-East. IMF–dictated reforms slashed pensions by half and doubled the housing rents. In the market, US Army rations took the place of local food.
The new Kiev regime had dropped the last pretence of democracy by expelling the Communists from the parliament. This should endear them to the US even more. Expel Communists, apply for NATO, condemn Russia, arrange a gay parade and you may do anything at all, even fry dozens of citizens alive. And so they did.
The harshest repressions were unleashed on industrial Novorossia, as its working class loathes the whole lot of oligarchs and ultra-nationalists. After the blazing inferno of Odessa and a wanton shooting on the streets of Melitopol the two rebellious provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk took up arms and declared their independence from the Kiev regime.
And then, to top it off, there is the brilliant pewreport blogger, who, on 27 July 2014, headlined “USAID to Help Young Biden: The Burisma File”, and that anonymous person succinctly laid out the use of the U.S. Government to enable the families of some of its top officials to join America’s aristocracy, the billionaire class. It’s something that Trump himself is intimately involved with and exploits, but if America’s national and international police-agencies such as the FBI and CIA are trying (first with Russiagate, and now with Ukrainegate) to replace him by Pence in order to enable another friend of Obama to become installed (like Hillary was supposed to have been) as President and Commander-in-Chief, then this struggle between the agents of America’s Democratic Party billionaires versus those of its Republican Party billionaires could end up having consequences that no one is predicting.
It’s also important to point out here that Zelensky’s predecessor, Poroshenko, was not Obama’s first choice to win the 25 May 2014 Ukrainian election that followed the February 2014 coup and installation of Yatsenyuk to run the country on an interim basis. Yatsenyuk was supposed to run it until that election (after which Yatsenyuk still continued long in office, and Obama pushed as hard as possible for President Poroshenko to continue Prime Minister Yatsenyuk’s policies). Obama’s first choice — and the planned winner — in the 25 May 2014 election, was an intense hater of Russia, Yulia Tymoshenko. Yatsenyuk had actually been her agent. Kolomoysky was perhaps her main financial backer. But she lost the election to Obama’s second choice, Poroshenko. Kolomoysky was enough of a supporter of Tymoshenko so that even after he returned to Ukraine on 16 May 2019 just prior to the latest Presidential election, he backed her even above Zelensky. But above all, he opposed Poroshenko, because Poroshenko had been forced by the main lenders to his Government to fire Kolomoysky as governor of Dnipropetrovsk and to nationalize his bankrupt PrivatBank due to Kolomoysky’s having been looting from Ukraine’s Government too much money via his bank and via his minority ownership of the Government’s gas company.
Obama had wanted that money to go toward the war against Donbass, not into Kolomoysky’s pockets.
(However, America’s Democratic-Party propaganda ‘non-profit’ Public Radio International gave a positive spin to Obama-team-member Kolomoysky even at the time of his firing by Poroshenko on 28 March 2015, saying of him, “He offered $10,000 bounties for captured pro-Russian insurgents. ‘People understand that this person came here to ensure stability,’ said Stanislav Zholudev, a local political analyst.” The euphemism “captured pro-Russian insurgents” was actually referring to their corpses — Kolomoysky was paying only for their corpses. Maybe for Obama-ites that’s “stability.” Kolomoysky was already paying the nazi Azov Battalion more than that per pro-Russian corpse, and now the Trump Administration wants Kolomoysky to be prosecuted for financial crimes instead of Zlochevsky to be prosecuted, and so Zelensky is being pushed one way by Democrats, and the opposite way by Republicans.)
Kolomoysky has many enemies. The main holders of Ukraine’s debt are unknown, but besides Russia which had lent to the pre-coup Government (and were thus trying to get their senior money that’s owing from Ukraine to be paid to Russia before the newer creditors get theirs), they were said to be the IMF, America’s Franklin Templeton Fund, and Blackstone Group, the World Bank, and a group of mainly American billionaires “and private Eurobond holders” who are represented by the law firm of Weil Gotshal & Manges. The U.S. Government and EU countries were also said to be indirectly such holders via their ownership shares in the IMF and World Bank, but also perhaps more directly. (If Trump were a decent President, he’d be publicly pressing for the exact numbers on all of this.) Kolomoysky’s siphonings from Ukraine’s Government were at the expense of all of them. The pressures upon Poroshenko to halt it were mounting. And, so, Kolomoysky was fired; and, now, to the extent that Zelensky has to satisfy Kolomoysky, Zelensky (who publicly said of Kolomoysky “He is my business partner”) needs to resist some of the demands of the U.S. regime and of many other billionaires. Without their continued support, Ukraine’s Government will collapse in the short term instead of only (which is inevitable) in the long term. It’s no longer just a question of the Ukrainian regime’s war against Donbass. The change that Obama wrought is permanent, and Trump dithers back and forth about how to deal with it. He apparently has no strategy on that.
Zelensky might fear that if he complies with Trump’s request, then his own major benefactor, Kolomoysky, could end up in prison somewhere; and Trump might fear that if he presses Zelensky on that (as he did not do but Democrats say he did), then the entire Deep State — not only Democratic Party billionaires, but also now Republican ones — will become Trump’s enemies, and his 2020 re-election chances will therefore go to zero. Consequently: Trump will probably abandon the matter, and the till-now-unsupported and maybe unsupportable mere assumption, that Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian benefactor was Zlochevsky instead of Kolomoysky, will continue to be asserted virtually everywhere throughout the U.S. empire, for as long a time as the matter continues to remain in the ‘news’. Of course, if that turns out to be the case, then Joe Biden will continue to be portrayed in this matter as having been a crusader against corruption in Ukraine, instead of as having been the aspiring founder of yet another billionaire American dynasty.
Basically, the new Russiagate charges to replace Trump by Pence, Ukrainegate (as those charges were presented by the CIA ‘whistleblower’ on August 12th and published on September 26th), represent all of the Democratic Party’s billionaires, and many of the Republican Party’s ones, as well. It’s the pinnacle of the Obama-versus-Trump feud, because it represents the Democratic Party’s position on what was Obama’s top international achievement — his conquest (via a coup) against Ukraine. Trump refuses to condemn Obama’s coup against Ukraine, but if he cared about the truth, he would, and the worst that could happen to him then would be that, for once in his life, he’d be fighting for truth, and not just for himself. Apparently, that’s too big a leap for him to take.
What’s especially pathetic in all of this is that whenever the U.S. Government overthrows and destroys a country, it’s trumpeted as reflecting America’s standing-up for rule-of-law and opposition to corruption, and for support of democracy and protection of human rights; but whenever Russia or a nation that’s friendly toward Russia resists control by the U.S. and its allies, it’s portrayed as being a dictatorship and an opponent of democracy and of human rights. So, go figure.
Massive Mystery Blaze Engulfs High-Speed Rail Station In Saudi Arabia
Another Yemeni Houthi missile or drone attack, or a local accident?
A massive fire broke out Sunday at the the Haramain high-speed rail station in Saudi Arabia’s coastal city of Jeddah, and upon early reports the cause is as yet unknown.
Social media videos showed giant plumes of black smoke rising high above the train station and city in what’s clearly a very significant incident.
Plumes of black smoke were still rising from the roof of the station at least four hours after the fire broke out at 12.35 p.m. (0935 GMT), Al-Ekhbariya state television footage showed.
It said civil defense were fighting the fire with air support and many sections of the blaze were under control.
At least five have been reported transported to a local hospital with injuries, with hundreds of emergency responders at the scene of the blaze.
Emergency fire suppression helicopters could be seen hovering over the train station’s expansive roof in a situation which doesn’t yet appear to be under control.
The high-speed rail has been described as“a centerpiece of a new multi-billion dollar high-speed rail project” related to the kingdom’s Vision 2030 project.
The terminal is acrucial link for Muslim pilgrims traveling to the country’s holiest Islamic sites, per Reuters:
The 450-km (280-mile) Haramain Railway linking the two holiest cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina, with the Red Sea city of Jeddah, was opened in 2018 and cost 6.7 billion euros ($7.3 billion).
Via Arab News
The high speed rail is also seen as central to crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s efforts at drastically modernizing Saudi infrastructure to boost tourism, in order to eventually wean the economy off oil revenue dependency, in preparation for a post-oil future.
The emergency incident comes following the Sept. 14 drone and missile attack on Saudi Aramco facilities, and amid soaring regional tensions with Iran, and as war rages on across the kingdom’s southern border in Yemen.
Civil aviation works on rescuing detainees at the Haramain high speed train station in #Jeddah.
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No injuries reported until this moment. pic.twitter.com/mk5WJXq2YG
