Tag: news

Now that President Trump has boxed Jerome Powell into a corner by declaring his intention to slap tariffs on the other ~$300 billion in Chinese goods that haven’t already been impacted, it’s worth considering: How will Beijing respond to all of this?

So far, Chinese media has been quiet on the subject, even as domestic markets tumble and the yuan slides. That’s possibly because China’s senior lawmakers have departed to the seaside resort of Beidaihe for their annual two-week policy conclave. Typically, officials from President Xi on down disappear from public view as they debate policy. But Beijing’s minister of foreign trade has already made clear that Beijing is less than pleased with President Trump’s latest announcement which, like the last one, took them completely by surprise (though it’s not all that surprising considering that the latest round of trade talks barely lasted half a day.

And although Beijing doesn’t have nearly as many options for retaliatory tariffs since the US imports far more goods from China than China imports from the US – and even less now that Beijing has ended purchases of agricultural products – Bloomberg has put together a list of possible options for retaliation that Beijing could invoke.

Beijing has already levied retaliatory tariffs on about $110 billion in imports from the US. Based on 2018 data, that leaves another $45 billion of products that could be hit with tariffs.

Here’s what Bloomberg‘s economists had to say:

“Assuming Trump’s tweet becomes policy, we’d expect a proportionate reaction from China. That would mean more tariffs on imports from the US. We don’t think China would shoot itself in the foot with harassment of US. firms or sales of US. Treasuries.”

But with China halting or dialing back purchases of American pork and soybeans, imports are down 30% in the first six months of this year compared to 2018. So the goods that could actually be hit is much lower.

As an opening salvo, Beijing could reinstate the tariffs on US cars that it lifted as part of a goodwill gesture, Bloomberg reports.

Mouthpieces for the Communist Party like Hu Xijin have also suggested that Beijing will likely walk away from the talks altogether should the US move ahead with its tariffs, as Beijing shifts its focus to how it should function during a prolonged trade war.

New tariffs will by no means bring closer a deal that the US wants, it will only make it further away. I think the Chinese will no longer give priority to controlling trade war scale, they will focus on the national strategy under a prolonged trade war.

— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) August 1, 2019

As far as I know, China has recently sped up buying US farm products, public opinion is helping make the adjustment. But Pre Trump is in a rush to reach a deal & is too arrogant. Influenced by wrong intelligence,he misjudges China in many fields. He may make big mistake on China.

— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) August 2, 2019

Just as they threatened to do a few months back, Beijing could look to its stranglehold on the supply of rare earth metals as one avenue for retaliation. Investors are already betting that Beijing could choose this option, sending shares of rare-earth miners higher in Friday’s trade.

Beijing might even walk back its promise to buy US oilseeds as a goodwill gesture, something it promised to do before the latest round of talks began. With the harvest just around the corner, now is a critical time for farmers, as buyers typically start booking orders for the new American harvest.

Beijing needs low-sulfer US crude – which is one reason why it hasn’t been hit with tariffs yet. But it could increase the already 25% tariff on LNG. Since there’s a market glut, Beijing doesn’t need it.

Another option is to follow through with threats to include FedEx and any other US companies that have offended Beijing to its promised “unreliable entities” list. Few details have been released, but many expect the unreliable entities list to be similar to the Commerce Department’s entities list, the “blacklist” that Huawei was placed on.

Boeing’s shares tanked following Trump’s tariff announcement, and with good reason: the aerospace giant is in the middle of negotiations with Chinese airlines to complete a massive order.

Economists, though, are sharing their views, and most are pretty downbeat.

And there’s always Huawei. If Trump goes back on the promises he made to President Xi in Osaka, it could open up a whole can of worms as Beijing might walk away from all future talks.

At any rate, it’s becoming increasingly clear to economists that Beijing is seeking to slow down the pace of trade talks and retaliation as it hopes to wait out Trump’s term, in the hopes that a Democratic successor might be easier to deal with.

“China’s strategy in this trade war escalation will be to slow down the pace of negotiation and tit-for-tat retaliation,” according to a note from Iris Pang, an economist at ING bank NV in Hong Kong. “This could lengthen the process of retaliation until the upcoming U.S. presidential election. It won’t have escaped the authorities in China’s attention that a full-blown trade war is unlikely to help President Trump’s chances in the election.”

Meanwhile. President Trump is set to make an “announcement” on EU trade on Friday. Which means he might be about to open another front in the trade war, at a time when global trade tensions are already peaking.

Trump to Make Announcement on EU Trade Friday 1:45pm DC Time

Here come auto tariffs

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 2, 2019

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KirDl8 Tyler Durden

Lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein have asked a judge for “at least a year” to review a “blizzard” of documents that prosecutors have gathered against him in their case alleging sex trafficking in minors and conspiracy. Bloomberg reports that prosecutors have asked the judge for a trial in June of next year, but Epstein’s defense team, led by attorney Martin Weinberg, responded that his team wanted to wait until September 2020 because they haven’t yet begun to receive documents from the government. 

In a hearing on Wednesday in Manhattan, Weinberg said: 

“We need time to receive a million pages of discovery and prepare to defend a four- to six-week trial. We need time to assess events that occurred 14 to 17 years ago.”

The judge set a tentative trial date of June 8 and asked both parties to keep him abreast of their progress. There was also no talk about last week’s incident where Epstein was reportedly found “nearly unconscious” in his prison cell. As we reported last week, Epstein was found semi-conscious with “marks on his neck.”

Epstein was arrested on July 6 after stepping off his private plane in New Jersey. He has pleaded not guilty and said that he has “fully complied with the law for more than 14 years”. He is accused of molesting teenage girls between 2002 and 2005 and plead guilty in 2008 to Florida state charges of soliciting prostitution after entering into a settlement.

Prosecutors in New York say they are not bound by the settlement and are now pursuing their own charges.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LTql3b Tyler Durden

While hysteria raged about possible Russian “interference” in the 2016 US election, British intelligence officials were secretly playing a “key role” in helping instigate investigations into Donald Trump, secret texts have shown.

“Turns out it was Britain that was the foreign country interfering in American affairs,” former MP George Galloway told RT, speaking about the new revelations published by the Guardian about early British involvement in the ‘Russiagate’ investigation.

The Guardian reported on texts between former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and Jeremy Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, who now heads GCHQ. The two men met in 2016 to discuss “our strange situation” – an apparent reference to Russia’s alleged interference in US domestic politics.

British intelligence “appears to have played a key role in the early stages,” the report said.

Galloway told RT that the revelation was not surprising because people “already knew” that British intelligence had played a part in the Russia-related investigations in the US. He recalled that it was former British spy Christopher Steele who drew up the now-infamous Steele dossier, which made multiple unverifiable and salacious claims about Trump and has since been largely discredited.

Britain is “up to its neck in the whole Russiagate affair,” he said.

The texts also reveal that the Brexit vote was viewed by some in the FBI as something that had been influenced by Russia.

Asked what the UK stood to gain by trying to implicate Russia in a US election scandal at a time when then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson was dismissing baseless claims of Russian interference in the Brexit campaign, Galloway noted that Johnson’s comments on Russia have appeared to strangely sway between friendly and antagonistic.

Johnson is like “a sofa that bears the impression of the last person to sit upon him,” the former MP quipped. What happens next will depend on who is leading the tango, “the orange man in Washington or the blonde mop-head in London.”

In June 2016, the FBI opened a covert investigation codenamed ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ into Trump’s now disproven collusion with Moscow, which was later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Ultimately, the two-year-long probe that followed came up short, producing no evidence to prove a conspiracy or collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russia.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/336xfHS Tyler Durden

In an interview with CNBC, Goldman Sachs’ CTO of electronic trading revealed that the investment bank has committed to investing $100 million to overhaul its stock trading platform to make it more appealing to the biggest quant funds like Renaissance Technologies and Two Sigma, who are among the bank’s “most demanding clients from a technology perspective.”

While Mike Blum, the Goldman quant CTO, didn’t offer any specifics about what he bank’s “Project Atlas” will entail, at a time when banks’ trading revenue is shrinking, eliciting layoffs for hundreds of human traders, the biggest banks will be battling one another for a bigger piece of a shrinking pie, as more equity trading – and even some credit trading – shifts to high-frequency players who rely on algorithms to place orders at speeds that human traders couldn’t possibly detect.

Mike Blum

The big quant funds are among Goldman’s “most demanding” clients, Blum said. And the bank is revising its equity trading platform with their needs at the forefront. The bank is competing with JPM and Morgan Stanley.

“With this investment we’re trying to tackle the quantitative hedge fund space and do so front-to-back to create a seamless experience for our clients, and just try to get as efficient as they are at doing their jobs,” said Blum, a 25-year electronic trading veteran who joined Goldman in 2017.

As CNBC points out, the three banks mentioned above have made $11.4 billion in stock trading revenue so far this year, which is 14% lower than in 2018.

With “Atlas”, Goldman is targeting a group of more than a dozen of the most sophisticated quant funds by focusing on a range of different trading styles. The bank believes that, if it can satisfy this group of clients, it can satisfy any type of hedge fund or asset manager. The upgrades will allow these funds to trade at speeds measured in microseconds in more than 32 markets around the world, while also extending this speed to other functions like clearing and settling trades, allocating stock, lending shares, and trade reporting.

“As we learned the quantitative client base and what their demands and needs were, we decided to take the technology and basically turned it into a framework that can be used to solve lots of different problems,” Blum said.

One of the project’s goals was to improve the firm’s performance on trade orders that can last for a microsecond – a millionth of a second – to about 30 seconds. Trades that once took hundreds of milliseconds (thousands of a second) will soon be executed in less than 100 microseconds. The platform will also improve the time it takes for the bank to digest floods of orders that sometimes emanate from certain quant firms.

The bank has also brought in more quants to rewrite its algorithms and improve “quality of execution.”

“As we roll it out globally, they should absolutely see a massive speed improvement,” Blum said. “They should see quality of execution go up, not just because of speed, but we’re completely rewriting our algorithms, we’ve brought in more researchers, more quants to improve our algos.”

In other words, Goldman will soon be able to offer these quant clients an edge over the competition: Faster execution means clients will effectively be able to more easily front run their rivals orders (in a way that’s totally legal) – and it’s difficult to put a price on that.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LVD3ys Tyler Durden

Authored by Hans-Werner Sinn, op-ed via The Guardian,

The outgoing ECB chief is locking his successor into a new phase of expansionary monetary policy…

Expectations – and, for many economists, rather bad ones – have been confirmed: the European Central Bank has decided to inflate the eurozone. Following the ECB’s latest policy meeting on 25 July, the outgoing president Mario Draghi made it clear that the bank’s seemingly harmless inflation target of 1.9% will in fact be the basis for a new phase of expansionary monetary policy over the next few years. This will go well beyond the ECB’s stimulus measures to date and is likely to pose further risks to the European economy.

We should remember that the Maastricht treaty assigned the ECB the single, non-negotiable goal of maintaining stable prices, which, if taken literally, would mean an inflation rate of zero. This is very different from the mandate given to other central banks. The introduction of the euro, however, caused interest rates in southern Europe to fall, leading to an inflationary bubble that raised annual price growth to well over 2% in some countries. The ECB’s governing council then argued that the goal of price stability could not be achieved exactly and also pointed to several measurement errors that complicate policymaking. So, the authorities said, they would tolerate average inflation of up to 2% for the eurozone as a whole.

The governing council did not fancy a restrictive monetary policy aimed at reducing inflation, as it gave only little weight to the risk of reducing competitiveness in some countries and did not want to slow down countries in stagnation such as Germany.

Then came the euro crisis. With inflation plummeting, the ECB turned the still-tolerable upper limit for the inflation rate into its target. Suddenly, it was argued, the bank would seek to achieve inflation of “close to, but below 2%”. Draghi even went before the television cameras to claim in all seriousness that this was the ECB’s mandate.

And now, at the end of his term of office, Draghi is seeking to bind his successor, Christine Lagarde, to a council decision that will force her to aim for 1.9% inflation with a symmetrical concern about potential deviations. In plain language, this means the ECB will try to achieve this figure on average over time, netting out future above-average inflation rates with below-average inflation in recent years.

In seeking to justify the ECB’s new phase of expansionary monetary policy, Draghi referred several times to the rapidly deteriorating situation in Europe’s manufacturing sector. He wants monetary policy to come to the aid of a more expansive fiscal policy needed to revitalise the European economy.

Here, Draghi was probably mainly focusing on Germany, whose manufacturing sector has been in recession since the summer of 2018. And the ifo Business Climate Index, published on the same day that Draghi announced the ECB’s new policy, added to the pile of bad economic news. It appears that the years of plenty for German industry are probably over for now. Looming Brexit, the US president Donald Trump’s imminent impositionof tariffs on more European goods and the European Union’s new CO2directive (which will require electric cars to account for one-half or more of some carmakers’ output by 2030), are significantly increasing costs for German (and European) industry.

But monetary and fiscal expansion in the eurozone cannot help the many manufacturing firms that do most of their business globally these days. Moreover, domestic demand in the eurozone is strong. Construction is booming in most countries, demand for services is strong, and wages are increasing rapidly, as Draghi noted with approval. Introducing further stimulus measures on top of that would create additional cost pressures that will make life even harder for firms facing both tough international competition in goods markets and domestic competition in labour markets. Stimulating the non-traded goods sectors through cheap credit typically incurs negative factor market effects for the traded goods sectors that are similar to those fuelling the so-called Dutch disease – a term referring to the problems of Dutch manufacturers in the 1970s after gas revenues rapidly elevated the wage level.

Draghi complained in his speech that the passthrough of rising wages to prices was insufficient. But more wage pressure and increased passthrough would be poison for the global competitiveness of the manufacturing sector. It is not convincing to use the weakness of German manufacturing as an argument for looser monetary policy, for such policy will primarily stimulate those sectors that are in competition with manufacturing, such as construction and government.

True, industry must innovate to maintain its competitiveness, especially in turbulent economic times. But this will require measures that go far beyond the policy toolbox so revered by the New Keynesians who now populate central banks and international institutions. Europe needs structural policies that liberate market forces rather than continuing a policy of sustaining zombies and financing a new housing bubble and over-indebted government sectors with ever-cheaper credit. These sectors will not enable sustained economic growth for the continent.

Nor is it clear where the ECB will find the ammunition for the new battle it wants to fight. In the past four years, the bank has increased its money stock from €1.2tn (£1.1tn) to €3.2tn. It has bought securities worth another €2.6tn, including €2.1tn of public sector bonds – a policy that is in conflict with article 123 of the treaty on the functioning of the European Union. And interest rates are currently zero and negative.

All this is adventurous enough. If the ECB now wants to go even further, Europe’s economic system could become weaker and less sustainable.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2GIdZH7 Tyler Durden

Last weekend, Moscow police arrested around 1,400 protestors, the largest gathering in a decade, after people met to contest the dubious circumstances surrounding city-wide elections. Nearly 150 people remain in custody, according to OVD-Info. Alexi Navalny, a prominent critic of the Kremlin, was arrested Wednesday for inciting anti-government protests. The opposition candidate was hospitalized Sunday after being exposed to an undefined chemical substance and released later in the week.

Local election officials alleged that nominating petitions for opposition candidates had insufficient signatures for the September 8th Duma election, which sparked the most recent and violent demonstrations. Police arrested many of the opposition candidates, and most remain behind bars.

The specific numbers surrounding the event remain unclear, but as Statista’s Sarah Feldman details, official police reports cite 1,074 arrests, while independent monitoring organizations reported 1,373 detentions. The peaceful protestors were broken up violently in what Amnesty International referred to as “indiscriminate use of force by police.” Police report 3,500 people gathered on Saturday, though independent reports and aerial footage put that figure anywhere between 8,000 to 20,000 protestors.

Last month, Russian police arrested about 500 people at a protest over the jailing of an investigative Moscow journalist. The journalist, Ivan Golunov, was arrested for allegedly dealing drugs, a charge he denies. In an unusual turn of events, the police released him and promised to punish those who allegedly framed him. Not only did hundreds take to the streets to protest the arrest, but the three main newspapers printed front-page headlines criticizing the arrest, an uncommon show of solidarity.

These widespread protests are unusual for the country but may grow more common.

You will find more infographics at Statista

According to Levada, an independent public opinion research organization, Russians are nearly twice more likely to protest now than they were two years ago. In February 2017, only about 12 percent of Russian respondents said they would probably participate in a public mass protest. By May 2019, about a quarter of respondents said they would likely participate in a public mass protest.

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

Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

British Ambassador Kim Darroch’s return to London from his failed mission in America is being hailed by many naïve commentators as yet another proof that President Trump is a crazed ego-maniac who cannot take criticism from a seasoned professional diplomat.

During the weeks since the “Darroch memo” scandal erupted, mainstream media has totally mis-diagnosed the nature of the breakdown in US-British relations, and has brushed over the most relevant evidence that has been brought to light by Darroch’s cables. This spinning of the narrative has made it falsely appear that the Ambassador merely criticized the President as “clumsy, diplomatically inept, unpredictable and dysfunctional” and was thus unjustly attacked by the President causing the poor diplomat to resign saying “the current situation is making it impossible for me to carry out my role as I would like.” Former British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt went so far as to say that Darroch was “the best of Britain” and encouraged all diplomats to continue to “speak truth to power.” International press on both sides of the ocean followed suit portraying Darroch as a hero among men.

Hog wash.

The reality is that Darroch’s messages to the British Foreign Office go much deeper and reveal something very ugly that challenges the deepest assumptions about recent history and modern geopolitics.

Sir Darroch and Britain’s Invisible Hand Exposed

Sir Darroch, (Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George) is not your typical British diplomat. The Knight made a name for himself as a leading agent of Tony Blair while acting as Ambassador to the European Union from 2007-2011 in an effort to win international support for a regime change operation against Iran, Syria and Libya.

Blair and the highest levels of the British oligarchy had managed America as its “dumb giant” throughout the entire post-9/11 regime change program on the Middle East. While many have labelled this policy as “American”, we shall come to see that it was merely the carrying out of the “Blair Doctrine” announced in the 1999 speech in Chicagocalling for a post-nation state (post-Westphalian) world order.

It is important to remind ourselves that the dodgy WMD dossier  had been crafted by the British Foreign Office before being used by neo con hawks such as John Bolton and Cheney as justification to blow up Iraq in 2003. It was also the earlier Anglo-Saudi sponsored BAE black operation run by Prince Bandar bin Sultan which funded and directed 9/11 earlier. As US Ambassador beginning in January 2016, Sir Darroch was instrumental in vetting Christopher Steele as “absolutely legit”. Steele’s “dodgy dossier” on Trump was used to justify the greatest witch hunt of a sitting President in history.

When viewed in the same light as the British-directed Russia-gating of the President, these memos shed valuable light upon the Byzantine methods which British intelligence has used to conduct its subtle manipulation of America for a very long time.

Trump Whisperers and Britain’s Other Tools

In his memos, Sir Darroch called for “flooding the zone” with Trump whisperers who can influence the President’s perceptions of the world and push him towards the British agenda on issues such as de-carbonization, Free Trade, and war with Iran.

Sir Darroch said to his superiors that “we have spent years building the relationships; they are the gatekeepers… the individuals we rely upon to ensure the U.K. voice is heard in the West Wing.” Who are these voices who been built up over years? National Security Advisor John Bolton is a long-standing visitor to the British embassy and former Chief of Staff John Kelly has had regular early morning breakfast dates. A Washington Post assessment of July 8th described Darroch’s “coterie- including Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller, Mick Mulvaney, Sarah Sanders and Trump ally Chris Ruddy” who have met at the embassy and “share about the President and his decision-making.”

Darroch also revealed that Trump’s resistance to the British position on war with Iran was not acceptable when the President chose to cancel an attack on Iran on June 21st after an America drone was shot down. Moments after Trump’s cancellation of the attack, a Darroch memo complained that Trump was “incoherent and chaotic” and that Trump could fall into line once he was “surrounded by a more hawkish group of advisers… Just one more Iranian attack somewhere in the region could trigger yet another Trump U-turn.”

Only two weeks after sending this cable, Britain orchestrated a crisis by seizing an Iranian ship on July 5th which snowballed into an Iranian seizure of a British tanker and greater danger of confrontation amongst the NATO axis and Iran.

The biggest confusion spread by the controllers of “officially accepted narratives” when assessing such things as 9-11, regime change wars, or the current debacle in Iran is located in a sleight of hand that asserts that America leads the British in the Special relationship. This belief in an “American empire” betrays a profound misunderstanding of history.

The Fallacious History of US-British “Friendship”

For much of the 19th century, Americans generally had a better understanding of their anti-colonial origins than many do today. Even though the last official war fought between Britain and America was in 1812-15, the British failure to destroy America militarily caused British foreign policy to re-focus its efforts on undermining America from within… generally through the dual infestation of British-sponsored ideologies contaminating the American school system on the one hand and British banking practices of Wall Street’s ruling class on the other. This attack from within required more patience, but was more successful and led to the near collapse of America in 1860 when Lord Palmerston quickly recognized the Southern slave power’s call for independence from the Union. Britain’s covert military support for the Confederate cause was exposed by the end of that war and led to Britain’s payment of $15 million settlement to America as part of the Alabama Claims in 1872.

As the informative 2010 Lpac documentary “The Special Relationship is for Traitors” showcased, during the early 20th century leading American military figures like Brig. General Billy Mitchell understood Britain’s role in supporting the Confederacy and Britain’s manipulation of global wars. General Mitchell fought against the “special relationship” tooth and nail and led the military to create “War Plan Red and War Plan Orange” to defeat Britain under the context of an eventual war between the English-speaking powers. These plans were made US military doctrine in 1930 and were only taken off the books when America decided it was more important to put down London’s Fascist Frankenstein threat than fight Britain head on in WWII.

The Rhodes Scholars Take Over

Before the “Churchill gang” (that Stalin accused of poisoning FDR) could take control of America, Franklin Roosevelt described his understanding of the British influence over the US State Department when he told his son: 

“You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats over there aren’t in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston. As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of ’em: any number of ’em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!” I was told… six years ago, to clean out that State Department. It’s like the British Foreign Office….”

With FDR’s death, these British operatives took over American foreign policy and wiped out the remaining pro-American forces in the State Department, disbanding the OSS and reconstituting America’s intelligence services as the MI6-modelled CIA in 1948.

In 1951, the Chicago Tribune published a incredible series of exposes by journalist William Fulton documenting the cancerous penetration of hundreds of Oxford Trained Rhodes Scholars who had taken over American foreign policy and were directing America into a third world war. On July 14, 1951 Fulton wrote:

 “Key positions in the United States department of state are held by a network of American Rhodes scholars. Rhodes scholars are men who obtained supplemental education and indoctrination at Oxford University in England with the bills paid by the estate of Cecil John Rhodes, British empire builder. Rhodes wrote about his ambition to cause “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British empire.” The late diamond and gold mining tycoon aimed at a world federation dominated by Anglo-Saxons.”

Sir Kissinger Opens the Floodgates

A star pupil of William Yandall Elliot (a leading Rhodes Scholar based out of Harvard) was a young misanthropic German named Henry Kissinger.

A decade before becoming a Knight of the British Empire, Kissinger gave a remarkable speech at a May 1981 event on British-American relations at London’s Royal Institute for International Affairs. At this event Kissinger described the opposing world views of Churchill vs. Roosevelt, gushing that he much preferred the post-war view of Churchill. He then described his time working for the British Foreign Office as Secretary of State saying:

 “The British were so matter-of-factly helpful that they became a participant in internal American deliberations, to a degree probably never practiced between sovereign nations… In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department… It was symptomatic”.

As Kissinger spoke these words, another anglophile traitor was being installed as Vice-President of America. George Bush Sr. was not only the son of a Nazi-funding Wall Street tool and former director of the CIA, but was also made a Knight of the Grand Cross and Order of Bath by Queen Elizabeth in 1993. The most disastrous foreign policies enacted under Reagan’s leadership during the 1980s can be traced directly back to these two figures.

The Potential Revival of the ‘Real’ America

Think what you may of Donald Trump. The fact is, that he has not started any wars which a Jeb or Hillary were happy to launch. He has reversed a regime change program active since 9/11. He has fought to put America into a cooperative position with Russia. He has undone decades of WTO/City of London free trade. He has called for rebuilding productive industries following through by reviving the protective tariff. To top it off, he has been at war with the British-directed deep state for over three years and survived. Now that Bolton has been outed as an ally of Sir Darroch, there is an open acknowledgement that Trump is gearing up to replace the neocon traitor as we speak. Trump has many problems but being a British asset is not one of them.

If you’ve made it this far, you shouldn’t be surprised that the collapse of the special relationship is a very good thing, since America now has a real opportunity to rediscover its true anti-imperial nature by working with Russia, China, India and other nations under the new cooperative framework of space exploration and the Belt and Road Initiative.

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

A new bombshell report making headlines in Israeli media alleges Tel Aviv went to great lengths to exert pressure on Washington to block the sale of US F-35 stealth fighter jets to Turkey.

“Israel worked behind the scenes to ensure the United States blocked the sale of its F-35 stealth fighter jets to Turkey as part of its efforts to preserve its military qualitative edge in the region,” The Times of Israel revealed Thursday, citing a prior Israeli Channel 12 report.

“Israel in recent months lobbied Washington to drop Ankara from the F-35 program after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan went ahead with a purchase of a Russian-made missile defense system that would give Turkey advanced air capabilities,” the report continued.

Though neither US nor Israeli officials have commented on the alleged lobbying campaign, it’s consistent with the fact that Israel has seen growing Russian-Turkish defense ties as a significant threat to both its anti-Iran policy and actions in Syria. And further, Ankara and Tel Aviv have a long history of clashing over Palestinian related issues. 

Last month the White House announced Turkey has been effectively booted from the F-35 program for procuring Russia’s S-400 anti-air defense system, further entrenching Moscow’s growing influence and security arc in the Middle East. 

Crucially, both Israel and Turkey were set to be the only countries outside the United States which possessed the advanced Lockheed-made fighter. But it appears Israel did its best to ensure it’d be the only one, as The Times of Israel noted:

Israel has agreed to purchase at least 50 F-35 fighter jets from the US defense contractor Lockheed Martin. So far, 16 aircraft have been delivered, and the remaining planes are slated to arrive batches of twos and threes until 2024.

Israel is the second country after the US to receive the F-35 from Lockheed Martin and one of the few allowed to modify the state-of-the-art aircraft, known in Israel as the Adir.

Compare this to the more than 100 Turkey was slated to receive at around $1.4 billion before the program was halted. 

The White House has long been on record as saying the American fighter jet program “cannot coexist with a Russian intelligence collection platform that will be used to learn about its advanced capabilities.”

Aside from the more pressing issues of both Russian and Iranian entrenchment in Syria, and growing Russia-Turkey defense ties, Israel and Turkey also stand on opposite sides of the Kurdish question.

While President Erdogan has lately reiterated plans to crush “outlawed” armed Kurdish groups in Syria and Iraq, Israeli military and intelligence has over the past couple of years been rumored to be active in training and supporting these very groups alongside its US ally. 

All of this and more translates to Tel Aviv viewing Turkey’s large-scale integration into the F-35 stealth program as a serious long term threat to its security interests in the region. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2OA56Wm Tyler Durden

Authored by Daniel Greenfield via Sultan Knish blog,

India’s 2,582 mile border with Bangladesh is even longer than America’s 1,954 mile border with Mexico.

The two countries are divided not only by that border, but by religion. India has an 80% Hindu majority and a rising 13% Muslim minority. Bangladesh has a 90% Muslim majority. And the tide of Muslim migration from Bangladesh to India began to shift the population balance in some Indian states.

India has spent decades building fences, topping them with barbed wire, and installing lights. The lights are there so that the guards can see. Unlike America, there are guards, they have guns, and they shoot.

 

What makes America’s border different from those of so many other countries isn’t the lack of fencing. Smugglers, traffickers, and assorted criminals can often find weak points in any security setup. In most countries, the defense of the border is seen as a national security issue backed by real firepower.

America’s Border Patrol has less than 20,000 people. India’s Border Security Force (BSF) has 186 battalions and 257,363 people. It’s a paramilitary organization with an intelligence network, ten artillery units, air and marine wings, and canine and even camel units. And the weapons aren’t just there for show.

Over 1,000 illegal infiltrators have been killed trying to enter India from Bangladesh in over a decade.

BSF personnel are allowed to shoot on sight. Boats are used to monitor river areas that can’t be fenced in. Air units watch from the sky. And intelligence units gather information on smuggling gangs. The first and final line of defense though comes from men with rifles watching the fences and the shadows.

When a Bangladeshi teenage girl illegally entering India was shot, leftist activists hoped to use her to stop the zero-tolerance border security policy. But India kept building fences and defending them.

And now it’s turning to the problem of the millions of illegal Bangladeshi Muslim ‘infiltrators’ in India.

Last year, around the same time that the media was fulminating over remarks by President Trump, Amit Shah, the head of India’s conservative ruling BJP, was being attacked for calling illegal aliens, “termites”.

“Millions of infiltrators have entered our country and are eating the country like termites. Should we not uproot them?” Shah asked voters in West Bengal, which is threatened by illegal Bangladeshis.

“A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government will pick up infiltrators one by one and throw them into the Bay of Bengal.”

Earlier that year, Assam, the part of India where the anti-illegal movement was born, began cracking down on the invading population with a “detect-delete-deport” program. Assam’s program spotted 4 million illegal infiltrators in the state of 33 million. Many of them had made themselves at home in India, but lacked birth certificates and other documents showing that they were citizens.

Just as when it comes to border security, India’s twin assets are determination and manpower.

The “detect-delete-deport” program began by digitizing old paper records and then checking them against the documents that were submitted by the population. Tens of thousands of government employees reviewed millions of documents and then began checking and cross-referencing them. The lies weren’t hard to spot as when dozens of people claimed to have been born from the same mother.

The work is far from finished but the number of Muslim illegal aliens could climb as high as 20 million, and so could the deportations, once “detect-delete-deport” is deployed across the entire country.

India’s National Register of Citizens is being used to clarify who belongs in the country and who doesn’t. Those who are unable to prove their citizenship potentially face the Foreigners’ Tribunals, courts that ask the accused to prove their citizenship. If the illegals fail to do so, they can be sent to prison and then deported. If they try to dodge the courts, the machinery of the system will move forward anyway.

Assam’s 1,000 Foreigners’ Tribunals have been busy, but every state in India has now been given the authority to create its own Tribunals. And detention camps are being built in Assam to hold illegals.

While much of the machinery is in place, the actual process of deporting millions of illegals may prove challenging. But India had previously been able to negotiate agreements with Bangladesh that made the thousands of miles of border fencing possible by using economic and political leverage. Convincing Bangladesh to accept millions of its own people, some who have been in India for a generation, may be harder, but BJP leaders clearly believe that it can be done. And financial arrangements may be a small price to pay for securing India’s future and preventing the rise of Islamic violence in affected areas.

India is also moving against the 40,000 strong Rohingya illegal Muslim population which have been a problem in that country, as well as in Myanmar. But India is also making it clear that it will respect legitimate refugees by providing sanctuary to Hindu and Buddhist refugees fleeing Islamic violence.

There are important lessons from this effort for the United States in our immigration challenges.

India’s Modi has been dubbed a natural counterpart to Trump. Under Modi, the BJP harnessed populist sentiments to begin executing an ambitious plan for tackling India’s longstanding immigration problems. The BJP understood that it had to run on migration issues to gain political sanction for a crackdown. Popular support from Indians allowed the government to ignore protests by leftist activist groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, the domestic opposition, and even the United Nations.

The BJP understood that border security alone would never be enough. Not unless the illegal infiltrators were made to understand that there was no future for them even if they did make it across the border.

Building a border wall is a partial answer. But the real answer lies in using military force to secure the border, ending the processing of asylum requests, and distinguishing Americans from illegal aliens.

India’s example shows that these things can be done. And if India can do them, America certainly can.

Despite the media’s frenzied shrieks, there is popular support for the Trump administration’s measures from deportation to border security to adding a citizenship question to the census. The obstacle is a radical judiciary determined to protect an illegal base of Democrat voters and voting districts.

The illegal migrant issue is not about human rights or racism. It’s about political power. Democrats opposed Vietnamese refugees for the same reason that they now support open borders with Mexico.

The BJP understood this and campaigned by targeting the left-wing opposition as a party of illegals. Its fundamental argument was that leftists had chosen foreign migrants over the country’s own poor.

That was a winning argument in India. It’s a winning argument in America.
 

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