Month: February 2016

After Returning the Money They Stole, Feds Will Pay Interest and Legal Expenses Too

First the feds stole $107,000 from Lyndon McLellan, saying his bank deposits of money from his North Carolina convenience store were suspiciously small, as if he were trying to avoid the reporting requirement for transactions involving $10,000 or more. Then the feds refused to return the money, even after the IRS and the Justice Department announced that they would no longer pursue such “structuring” cases unless they involved proceeds of illegal activity. Offering to return half the money last March, a federal prosecutor warned McLellan’s lawyer that calling public attention to the case would only make the government less inclined to reach a settlement. Two months later, the feds finally agreed to give McLellan his money back but without interest and without compensating him for the $22,000 he had paid his lawyer and a forensic accountant before the Institute for Justice took the case pro bono. This week a federal judge completed McLellan’s vindication by dismissing the forfeiture case with prejudice, making him eligible to recover his costs and the interest on his purloined savings under the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (CAFRA).

“The damage inflicted upon an innocent person or business is immense when, although it has done nothing wrong, its money and property are seized,” wrote U.S. District Judge James Fox. “Congress, acknowledging the harsh realities of civil forfeiture practice, sought to lessen the blow to innocent citizens who have had their property stripped from them by the Government. Through CAFRA , Congress provided for relief in such cases. This court will not discard lightly the right of a citizen to seek the relief Congress has afforded.”

Under CAFRA, the owner of a seized asset is entitled to attorney fees, litigation costs, and interest if he “substantially prevails” in challenging a forfeiture. Dismissal with prejudice, which means the government is barred from bringing the case again, makes it much easier to satisfy that standard. The Justice Department argued that Fox should ignore that issue in deciding how to dismiss the case. Fox disagreed.

Fox’s ruling, which was issued on Tuesday, “recognizes that Lyndon should not have to pay for the government’s outrageous use of civil forfeiture laws against a totally innocent property owner,” says Institute for Justice attorney Robert Everett Johnson. “The government took Lyndon’s property even though he did nothing wrong, forcing him into a prolonged and expensive legal nightmare. Now the government will have to comply with its obligation to make Lyndon at least partly whole.”

The Institute Justice is seeking CAFRA compensation in a similar structuring case involving Carole Hinders, an Iowa restaurant owner who got her money back after I.J. took up her cause. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit will hear oral argument in that case next Tuesday. “The government cannot turn a citizen’s life upside down and then walk away as if nothing happened,” says Wesley Hottot, an I.J. attorney who is representing Hinders. “Now that Lyndon has been vindicated, we look forward to holding the government to account in Carole’s case as well.”

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Brickbat: You’re in Dutch Now

Shortly after Mark Jongeneel tweeted that a proposal to send 250 migrants to the town of Sliedrecht was a “bad plan,” he got a visit from cops who told him to watch what he tweeted, and if there were riots he was responsible. In fact, people across the Netherlands report they have gotten police visits over even very mild criticism of migrants. Cops say they just want to let them know that if there is violence they may face incitement charges.

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World Health Organization: No Kids Should See Films That Show Smoking

The World Health Organization (WHO), granted great power and great responsibility to “promote and protect the health of all peoples,” wants to make sure that children are not permitted to see a character in a movie smoking without a parent or guardian present,The Guardian reports.

This would mean an end to unaccompanied youth access to such modern films as The Lord of the Rings and X-Men, as well as such children’s classics as Pinocchio, Peter Pan, 101 Dalmatians, and Little Mermaid.

They’ve spend their precious time in a world where Zika is on the spread to research and publish an entire monograph on the topic of characters in movies smoking.

This isn’t unusual for the international bureaucracy, alas. In 2002, I reported in great detail on the WHO’s strange status as world bureaucrats obsessed with curbing and controlling choices and behavior and at best, when it comes to infectious diseases, a coordinator of meeting and talking and planning and very little acting. As I wrote:

WHO’s goal seems not so much to bring the world “health” as a physical condition as it is to bring the world under the control of the international mavens of “public health,” the sociopolitical discipline….

One WHO propaganda book lists five things we’d be missing in “A World Without WHO” — presumably what it considers its most important achievements. None of them had to do with curing a single disease in a single person. Instead, they aver that in “a world without WHO — national health officials would not be able to count on global moral support in their battle against tobacco addiction,” and “there would be no unifying moral and technical force to galvanize, guide and support countries in achieving health for all by the year 2000.”….

When reading WHO’s reports, press releases, and other documents, one struggles to find non-abstract nouns and verbs representing actions a human being might need a body to perform. While infectious diseases are thankfully becoming a less significant cause of death globally, they do still kill at least 3 million children every year, so one might expect WHO’s rhetoric to be dominated by talk of inoculation and cure. Instead, one overwhelmingly finds talk of forming coalitions to manage and monitor systems that lay the groundwork for plans to coordinate actions to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to begin the process of forming coalitions, repeat as necessary.

Now when it comes to the Zika virus, WHO sounds largely the same, declaring and coordinating but perhaps not performing actions in the world that need to occur anywhere other than in a lecture hall or boardroom. 

Some are not impressed by WHO’s all-“coordination,” little-action in the real world approach, as The New York Times reports:

The World Health Organization declared the Zika virus and its suspected link to birth defects an international public health emergency on Monday, a rare move that signals the seriousness of the outbreak and gives countries new tools to fight it…..

At a news conference in Geneva, Dr. Margaret Chan, the director general of the W.H.O, acknowledged that the understanding of the connection between the Zika virus and microcephaly was hazy….

An emergency designation from the W.H.O. can prompt action and funding from governments and nonprofits around the world. It elevates the agency to the position of global coordinator and gives its decisions the force of international law…

But many health experts said Monday’s announcement lacked details, and they expressed concern that it would not jolt the agency into action. Among the most urgent needs, experts said, were aggressive efforts to control the populations of mosquitoes that spread Zika…

“They should have presented a specific list of interventions and the most obvious one is mosquito control,” said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. “This is their window of opportunity.”

Our own domestic Centers for Disease Control healthism busybodies use our tax dollars meant to further the fight against disease to keep scrupulous track of “tobacco incidences” in American (non-R rated) film. (Jacob Sullum reported back in 2007 on the Motion Picture Association of America’s folding smoking into the things it would inform parents about in film.)

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Paul Craig Roberts: There Is No Freedom Without Truth

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

 

– President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Dwight D. Eisenhower was a five-star general in charge of the Normandy Invasion and a popular two-term President of the United States. Today he would be called a “conspiracy theorist.”

Were Ike to be issuing his warning from the White House today, conservative Republicans like Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) would be screaming at Ike for impugning the motives of “the patriotic industry that protects our freedom.”

Neoconservatives such as William Kristol would be demanding to know why President Eisenhower was issuing warnings about our own military-industrial complex instead of warning about the threat presented by the Soviet military.

The presstitute media would be implying that Ike was going a bit senile in his old age, a tactic the presstitutes used against President Reagan as he struggled to end stagflation and the Cold War.

By January 17, 1961, when Eisenhower issued his warning in his farewell address to the American People, it was already too late. Cold Warriors had had their hooks into the American taxpayer for 15 years after the end of WW II, and the military-industrial complex had replaced “mom and apple pie” as the most venerated and entrenched US interest. The Dulles brothers ran the State Department and CIA and overthrew governments at will. (Read The Brothers)

The military-industrial complex had learned that regardless of the protestations of high-ranking military officers, no cost-overrun, no matter how egregious, went unpaid. Armaments industries and military bases were spread all over the country and were important considerations for every senator and many congressional districts. The chairmen of House and Senate military appropriations subcommittees and armed services committees were already dependent on campaign contributions from the military-industrial complex and for cushy jobs should they lose an election.

The Cold War was a profitable business that served many, and that is why it lasted so long.

There was never any threat of the Red Army invading Europe. Stalin declared “socialism in one country” and purged the Communist Party of the Trotskyist element that preached world revolution. An accommodation could have been reached, except that for the first time ever the military-industrial complex saw that it could keep the war business going for decades and perhaps forever.

George F. Kennan predicted that should the Soviet Union “sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean,” another adversary would have to be invented. “Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the “Soviet threat” was replaced with the “Muslim threat” and the “War on Terror” took over from the Cold War. Despite a succession of false flag attacks and warnings of a “thirty years war,” a few thousand lightly armed jihadists were an insufficient replacement for the Soviet Union and its thousands of nuclear ICBMs. It was an uncomfortable notion that the “world’s only superpower” could not dispose of a few terrorists.

So we are back to the Cold War with Russia. The propaganda is fast and furious. “Putin is the new Hitler.” “Russia invaded Ukraine.” Russia is about to invade the Baltics and Poland.” “Putin is a corrupt multi-billionaire.” “Putin is scheming to recreate the Soviet Union.” These accusations become headlines despite US military spending being a dozen or more times higher than Russian military spending and the Russian government expressing no hegemonic aspirations.

Eisenhower’s sucessor, John F. Kennedy, realized that the military-security complex was a threat, but he underestimated the threat and paid for it with his life when he stood up to the military-security complex. In stating this fact I have joined Eisenhower as a conspiracy theorist. (For a hair-raising account of the threat posed to President Kennedy by General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, read chapter three in Richard Cottrell’s book, Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe.)

Conspiracies are real. There are many more of them than people are aware. Many government conspiracies are heavily documented by governments themselves with the official records demonstrating the conspiracies openly available to the public. Just google, for example, Operation Gladio or the Northwoods Project. These conspiracies alone are sufficient to chastise those uninformed Western peoples who go around saying, “our government would never kill its own people.”

Perhaps Russian studies provided my introduction to government conspiracies against their own people. I learned that the Tsar’s secret police set off bombs and killed people in order to blame and arrest labor agitators. I was skeptical of this account and wondered if it was a reflection of left-wing bias against Tsarist Russia. Some years later I asked my colleague, Robert Conquest, at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University if the account was true. He replied that the story is true as is known from the released secret police files that are part of the Hoover Institution’s archives.

False flag attacks are used by governments in order to pursue secret agendas that they cannot publicly acknowledge. If President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had said: “We are going to attack Iraq and a half dozen other countries in order to exercise hegemony over the Middle East, steal their oil, and clear the path for Israel to steal the entirety of the West Bank of Palestine, diverting taxpayers’ resources from serving the American people into the pockets of the armaments industries and spilling the blood of your parents, spouses, children, and siblings," even the American sheeple would have resisted.

Instead, following the famous advice of Hitler’s chief propagandist, they said: “Our country has been attacked!”

Generally speaking, an observant person with a bit of education can recognize a false flag attack. However, few people pay attention beyond what the official media says, and the media no longer investigates and questions but simply repeats the official story. Therefore, only a few realize what has really happened, and when these few open their mouths they are discredited as “conspiracy theorists.”

This method of control might be wearing thin. There have been so many false flag “terrorist attacks” in the 21st century that there are now thousands of experts labeled as “conspiracy theorist.” For example, the 9/11 Truth Movement consists of thousands of high rise architects, structural engineers, demolition experts, nano-chemists, physicists, firefighters and first responders, civilian and military pilots, and former high government officials. Collectively these experts represent far more knowledge and experience than the 9/11 Commission, which did nothing but write down whatever the government told the commission, NIST, a collection of people whose incomes and careers depend on the government, and the presstitutes who can barely manage arithemetic, much less the mathematics of controlled demolition.

The neoconservatives, who controlled the George W. Bush regime, called for a “New Pearl Harbor” so that they could begin their wars of conquest in the Middle East. A “New Pearl Harbor” is what 9/11 gave them. Was this a coincidence or a Gulf of Tonkin or a Reichstag fire or a Tzarist secret police or Operation Gladio bomb?

The charge, “conspiracy theory,” is used to prevent investigation.

9/11 was not investigated. Indeed, as many experts have pointed out, there was a conscious effort to remove and destroy the evidence before it could be investigated. The 9/11 families had to lobby and protest for a solid year before the Bush regime consented to the totally controlled 9/11 Commission.

The Boston Marathon Bombing was not investigated. A scripted story was issued and repeated by the media. The San Bernardino shootings were not investigated. Again, a pre-scripted story took the place of investigation.

The success of false flag attacks in the US led to their use in the UK and France. The Charlie Hebdo affair was not investigated and the official explanation makes no sense. The story has been closed with all the loose ends dangling. For example, why did a French police official investigating the crime allegedly commit suicide in his police office in the early hours of the morning, and why was his family denied the autopsy report? What happened to this disappeared story? Why did the police finger a third participant in the attack as the “getaway driver” who had an iron clad alibi? If the police were so totally wrong about this member of the gang, how do we know they are right about the two men they shot to death. How come alleged perpetrators of “terrorist attacks” are always killed before they can talk? How come the only story we ever get is what the government says? How can people be so gullible after the Gulf of Tonkin, Operation Gladio, etc.?

Apparently the Charlie Hebdo attack was insufficient for the purpose, and now France has had what is called “the Paris attack,” an even more unbelievable event, evidence for which is missing. This false flag attack was too much for Kevin Barrett who assembled a collection of skeptical essays from 26 people into a book, Another French False Flag: Bloody Tracks From Paris To San Bernardino. 

Twenty-four of these contributors do not believe the official story. Does this make them “conspiracy theorists,” or does this make them brave souls who are concerned that Reichstag fire type events are replacing Western civil liberty with fascist police states?

Ask yourself, why are those trying to preserve liberty denounced?

What incentive does contributor A.K. Dewdney, Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario, author of ten books about science and mathematics, have to be a conspiracy theorist?

What incentive does Philip Giraldi, former CIA case officer and Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, have to be a conspiracy theorist?

What incentive does Anthony Hall, Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, whose latest book has been endorsed by the American Library Association as “a scholarly tour de force,” have to be a conspiracy theorist?

What incentive does Mujahid Kamran, Vice Chancellor of Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan, a Fulbright Scholar and recipient of numerous awards, have to be a conspiracy theorist?

What incentive does Stephen Lendman, syndicated columnist and host on the Progressive Radio News Hour, have to be a conspiracy theorist?

What incentive does James Petras, Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, have to be a conspiracy theorist?

What incentive does Alain Soral, one of France’s public intellectuals, have to be a conspiracy theorist?

What incentive does Robert David Steele, former CIA Clandestine Services Officer, have to be a conspiracy theorist?

The neocons’ whores in the Western media who call these people “conspiracy theorists” are so stupid and unintelligent as to be unqualified to express any opinion.

Dear Western Peoples, if you wish to be able to walk down the streets of your cities without being accosted by police, demanded to present identity papers, searched, detained indefinitely or assassinated without due process of law, if you wish to be able to express your opinion about “your” government and its use of your tax payments, if you wish to be able to discuss current affairs or your personal affairs without being recorded by the NSA or the equivalent in your own country or by both, if you wish to be able to act on your moral conscience and to protest the violence the West applies to Muslims and others unfavored by powerful Western interests, such as Palestinians, if you wish to live in the freedom that was achieved in the West after centuries of struggle, wake up, find time from less meaningful pursuits to become aware of what is being stolen from you. It is late in the game. If you do not stand up for truth, you will have no freedom as there is no freedom without truth.


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The Spread Of ISIS (In 1 Disturbing “The West Is Losing” Animation)

Via Foxtrot Alpha's Tyler Rogoway,

The video below depicting the expansion of ISIS controlled territory over time is especially interesting. After explosive expansion in 2013-2014, now it seems that when any territory is taken back from the Islamic State they just expand elsewhere.

Also of interest is just how little ground has been taken back from ISIS even after almost a year and a half of coalition combat operations against it. On the other hand, it must be noted that some of the wide areas shown on the map that ISIS supposedly controls is just empty desert, and the same can be said for much of the non-ISIS controlled areas highlighted in purple.

ISIS’s great recruitment tool is the vast territory they still control even after a year and a half of constant coalition airstrikes. By just holding on against what they deem as an imperial force of infidels they retain high-credibility within their twisted world. Unless the coalition gets serious about totally overhauling its strategy and aggressively reducing ISIS footprint via ground operations, and holding that ground after, don’t expect the Islamic State to be greatly weakened anytime soon.


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Guest Post: How The Blockchain And Gold Can Work Together

Submitted by Thorsten Polleit via The Mises Institute,

A look into monetary history shows that people, when given freedom of choice, opted for precious metals as money. This doesn’t come as a surprise. Precious metals have the physical properties a medium must have to serve as legal tender: They are scarce, homogenous, durable, divisible, mintable, and transportable. They are held in high esteem and represent considerable value per unit of weight. Gold fulfills these requirements par excellence, and this is why it has always been peoples’ first choice in terms of money. Gold has proven its merits as money for millennia; it is the ultimate means of payment.

More recently, gold has been replaced by the state’s unredeemable fiat money — for reasons rather more political than economic. The state prefers money whose value can be altered at will — say, to influence overall demand, redistribute income, and to benefit some at the expense of the many. Gold money stands in the way of such machinations. Fiat money doesn’t. On the contrary, fiat money can simply be printed up; can be created out of thin air.

Fiat money has serious economic and ethical drawbacks, though. It is chronically inflationary, widens the gap between poor and rich, triggers boom-and-bust cycles, and compounds the economy’s debt burden. Most important, a fiat money regime allows the state to expand actually without limit, over time potentially transforming even a minimum state into a maximum state at the expense of individual liberty and freedom.

In the wake of the most recent financial and economic crisis of 2007–2008, many people have become concerned that their savings, mostly invested in fiat-denominated bank accounts and bonds, could be devaluated. This has prompted a search for “good” money.

Somewhat new to the mix are the digital currencies, most famous of which is the virtual unit “bitcoin.” It is a digital currency generated by decentralized, internet-based computers rather than a central authority.

Transactions through digital currencies such as bitcoin are confirmed, or validated, by a decentralized consensus system that uses a “blockchain.” The latter is essentially a public digital ledger, an account statement for transactions among computers. The blockchain is saved on many computers so that it is practically impossible to manipulate. In the case of bitcoin specifically, the blockchain ensures that only the bitcoin’s owner can make a transaction with his bitcoin, that the same bitcoin cannot be created manifold.

In this article, I’ll use bitcoin as my main example, although this technology can be applied to any number of similar digital currencies.

However, this technology has now been used to provide a new means of transferring assets among people: the “colored bitcoin.” A colored bitcoin — or something comparable using blockchain technology — represents a certain asset. For instance, physical gold can be made available for day-to-day transactions — for purchases and sales in supermarkets and on the internet — simply by transferring a gold-backed colored bitcoin from the bitcoin wallet of the buyer to the bitcoin wallet of the seller.

How could one obtain such a gold-backed bitcoin? You would buy, say, physical gold at a gold shop. The latter then issues a colored bitcoin, which represents the ownership of physical gold. The colored bitcoin is, economically speaking, a gold substitute (a money substitute, fully backed by physical gold). It can be used for making purchases and, upon the wish of its owner, it can be redeemed into physical gold at the gold shop at any time.

A colored bitcoin represents a physical thing or asset that exists outside the bitcoin network. It therefore carries with it a risk that the issuer will not live up to his promise. However, there are market solutions to this problem. For instance, the gold can be stored with a particularly trustworthy third party. Or, people hold colored bitcoins issued by various issuers. If the latter are seen to be of the same riskiness, they would trade at par to each other (after making allowance for possible storage and handling costs).

That said, the gold-on-the-blockchain technology appears to hold great potential when it comes to making possible a world of digital gold money transactions. So far, governments use regulation and taxation to inhibit and even prevent unencumbered competition among monies. However, the evolution of the blockchain largely circumvents many of the obstacles governments put in the way of a free market in money. Where it will lead is, of course, is impossible to predict with certainty.

In any case, when we’re comparing to government fiat money, digital currencies can offer attractive alternatives. The same goes for gold lovers, who may see blockchain technology as the means of conveying physical gold; and in the end digitized gold money could become a practical option.


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Hedge Funds Fight The PBOC: There Can Be Only Yuan

With every Tom, Dick, and Harry hedge fund manager now taking on The People’s Bank of China (in various ways), it is no surprise that the spread between offshore Yuan and onshore Yuan blew out to its widest in 3 weeks this morning.

They are not getting it all their way for now though.

Just as the last time the spread was this wide, The PBOC stepped in, so as we noted this morning, there was a clear and present short-squeezing danger in Yuan as The PBOC clearly intervened to snap the spread 450 pips tighter. As China opens tonight, selling pressure however is back on the Yuan…

The intervention is pretty clear…

 

But the battle continues, as Yuan is selling back off…

 

Bill Gross is right…


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How Corruption Cripples America’s Military

Authored by Eric Zuesse,

America’s military budget is roughly 7.2 times that of Russia ($610 billion compared to $84.5 billion), but even Western news-accounts are saying that the weaponry produced in Russia is superior overall to the weaponry produced in the United States.

Compare the top-of-the-line fighter jets of the two countries: that's the F-35 fighter-jet produced by the U.S. corporation Lockheed Martin, versus the Su-35 fighter jet produced by the Russian government (its wholly owned Sukhoi Company). The F-35 costs around $100 million per plane. The Su-35 costs around $65 million per plane.

The weaponry-expert David Majumdar headlined on 15 September 2015, “America's F-35 Stealth Fighter vs. Russia's Su-35: Who Wins?” He concluded: "Basically, an F-35 pilot should avoid a close in fight at all costs. It is highly unlikely that a U.S. Joint Force Air Component Commander (JFACC) would assign an air superiority mission to an F-35 unit if alternatives were available. But given the tiny fleet of [F-22] Raptors and dwindling F-15C fleet, it is possible that the JFACC could be forced to use the F-35 as an air superiority asset.”

In other words: the U.S. had stopped production of the better planes, the F-22 and the F-15C, which might stand a chance against the Su-35. The U.S. stopped production of those planes in order to replace them with the inferior and far costlier (and more profitable) F-35.

Earlier, on 6 December 2014, Majumdar had bannered, “Killer in the Sky: Russia's Deadly Su-35 Fighter.” He wrote:

One U.S. Navy Super Hornet pilot — a graduate of that service’s elite TOPGUN school — offered a sobering assessment. “When taken as a singular platform, I like the Su-35’s chances against most of our platforms, with perhaps the exception of the F-22 and F-15C,” the naval aviator said. “I suspect the F/A-18E/F can hold it’s own and F-35 has presumed stealth and sensor management on its side.”

 

But one Air Force official with experience on the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter said that the Su-35 could pose a serious challenge for the stealthy new American jet. The F-35 was built primarily as a strike fighter and does not have the sheer speed or altitude capability of the Su-35 or F-22. “The Su's ability to go high and fast is a big concern, including for F-35,” the Air Force official said.

 

As an air-superiority fighter, its major advantages are its combination of high altitude capability and blistering speed — which allow the fighter to impart the maximum possible amount of launch energy to its arsenal of long-range air-to-air missiles. …

 

Another highly experienced veteran fighter pilot added that much about the Su-35 and the capabilities of the Russian military remain unknown.

Among these unknowns were the effectiveness of the Russian plane’s “electronic attack” capabilities. Here’s how that was described:

The addition of the electronic attack (EA) capability complicates matters for Western fighters because the Su-35’s advanced digital radio frequency memory jammers can seriously degrade the performance of friendly radars. It also effectively blinds the onboard radars found onboard American-made air-to-air missiles like the AIM-120 AMRAAM. …

 

Said another senior Air Force official with experience on the F-22 Raptor, “So, while we are stealthy, we will have a hard time working our way through the EA to target the Su-35s and our missiles will have a hard time killing them.”

 

The Su-35 also carries a potent infrared search and track capability that could pose a problem for Western fighters. “It also has non-EM [electro-magnetic]sensors to help it detect other aircraft, which could be useful in long-range detection,” the Super Hornet pilot said.

 

Another of the Su-35’s major advantages is that it carries an enormous payload of air-to-air missiles. “One thing I really like about the Su-35 is that it is a high-end truck: It can carry a ton of air-to-air ordnance into a fight,” the Navy pilot said.

 

On paper, that makes the Su-35 an extremely capable platform, but as one highly experienced F-22 pilot pointed out: “Whether they can translate that into valid tactics remain[s] to be seen.”

What, then, about that electronic-attack unknown?

On 13 September 2014, Voltairenet described on the basis of a 30 April Russian report, an incident on 12 April, in which the USS Donald Cook Aegis Class destroyer, loaded with missiles, entered the Black Sea, to threaten Russia, and a Russian Su-24 flew overhead, carrying a device that can turn off all electrical systems. Voltairnet said:

As the Russian jet approached the US vessel, the electronic device disabled all radars, control circuits, systems, information transmission, etc. on board the US destroyer. In other words, the all-powerful Aegis system, now hooked up — or about to be — with the defense systems installed on NATO’s most modern ships was shut down, as turning off the TV set with the remote control.

 

The Russian Su-24 then simulated a missile attack against the USS Donald Cook, which was left literally deaf and blind. As if carrying out a training exercise, the Russian aircraft — unarmed — repeated the same maneuver 12 times before flying away.

 

After that, the 4th generation destroyer [Donald Cook] immediately set sail towards a port in Romania.

 

Since that incident, which the Atlanticist media have carefully covered up despite the widespread reactions sparked among defense industry experts, no US ship has ever approached Russian territorial waters again.

 

According to some specialized media, 27 sailors from the USS Donald Cook requested to be relieved from active service.

Later, on 31 March 2015, Ben Hodges, the Commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, issued, to Defense News, an incoherent statement against Russia, that:

the volume of artillery and rocket ammunition that has been expended [by Russia] is eye-watering. The quality of the electronic warfare [EW] capability that Russians have employed in eastern Ukraine, this is not something that you can create in the basement of your home. So when President Putin says, well these are just coal miners and tractor drivers, it is an obvious lie.

Despite Hodges's attempt to bury in an insult to Putin, reference to electronic warfare capabilities on Russia’s part, that were “eye-watering” for Hodges,Defense News made clear what brought these tears to his eyes, when it reported on 4 August 2015:

Ukrainian forces have grappled with formidable Russian electronic warfare capabilities that analysts say would prove withering even to the US ground forces. The US Army has also jammed insurgent communications from the air and ground on a limited basis, and it is developing a powerful arsenal of jamming systems, but these are not expected until 2023. …

 

Hodges acknowledged that US troops are learning from Ukrainians about Russia's jamming capability, its ranges, types and the ways it has been employed. He has previously described the quality and sophistication of Russian electronic warfare as "eye-watering."

 

Russia maintains an ability to destroy command-and-control networks by jamming radio communications, radars and GPS signals, according to Laurie Buckhout, former chief of the US Army's electronic warfare division, now CEO of the Corvus Group. In contrast with the US, Russia has large units dedicated to electronic warfare, known as EW, which it dedicates to ground electronic attack, jamming communications, radar and command-and-control nets.

Of course, Hodges hadn’t said that about “Russian electronic warfare,” he had actually said it about "the volume of artillery and rocket ammunition that has been expended.” But he never publicly objected to the news-media’s tacit acceptance of what had really  brought tears to his eyes. Everyone knew it. And it wasn’t "the volume of artillery and rocket ammunition that has been expended.” So, Hodges had dealt with his tears by insulting Putin, instead of by thanking him for having given the U.S. this harmless warning shot across the bow. (Would Hodges have preferred that this capacity continue to be hidden by the Russian side?)

Everybody in the know knows that the U.S. wastes on corruption most of the money it pays, for military, just as it does for health care, and for education, and for other governmental functions. The higher the governmental level is (such as in the White House, and in the Pentagon), the bigger the percentage of waste is, because the skimming is monumental at those higher levels. And for recent U.S. Presidents, they and the foundations they set up suck in billions of dollars, as delayed ‘compensation’ for the favors that the former President had thrown to the ‘donating’ billionaire.

The BBC headlined on 25 January 2016, “Putin Is Corrupt, Says US Treasury,” and three days later, Reuters headlined, “White House Backs Treasury’s View that Putin Is Corrupt.” (Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury Secretary himself is deeply corrupt, even if not as much as recent U.S. Presidents have been.)

The next day, January 29th, Britain’s Independent  headlined, "Russia’s ‘Rustbucket' Military Delivers a Hi-tech Shock to West and Israel,” and reported:

It is this military might that is underpinning President Vladimir Putin’s strategic triumphs. His intervention in Syria has been a game changer and what happens there now lies, to a large extent, in his hands. The Ukraine conflict is semi-frozen, on his terms. The Russians are allying with the Kurds, unfazed by the Turkish anger this has provoked. And, crucially, they are now returning to Egypt to an extent not seen for 44 years, since they were kicked out by President Anwar Sadat.

 

One of the most senior analysts in Israeli military intelligence told The Independent in Tel Aviv last week: “Anyone who wants anything done in this region is beating a path to Moscow.”

If America elects yet another in the now-long succession, since 1980, of corrupt Presidents, it will be terrible not only for Russia, and for the countries such as Ukraine and Syria and Iraq that the U.S. is destroying, but also for the American people.

On 31 August 2015, The Daily Beast bannered, "Petraeus: Use Al Qaeda Fighters to Beat ISIS,” and reported:

Members of al Qaeda’s branch in Syria have a surprising advocate in the corridors of American power: retired Army general and former CIA Director David Petraeus.

 

The former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has been quietly urging U.S. officials to consider using so-called moderate members of al Qaeda’s Nusra Front to fight ISIS in Syria, four sources familiar with the conversations, including one person who spoke to Petraeus directly, told The Daily Beast.

Petraeus had organized the death squads in El Salvador and in Iraq, so he’s a natural for the global aristocracy to rely upon about such things. He’s even a regular attendee at the secret annual Bilderberg meetings.

On 16 November 2015, F. William Engdahl headlined, “Do We Really Want a New World War With Russia?” and he itemized the ways in which Russia’s military performance, in both Ukraine and Syria, has shocked the U.S. and its allies, especially. The main categories were: "Sukhoi SU-34 ‘Fullback’ fighter-bomber,” "New EW technologies,” "Killer Bumblebees,” and, "‘Status-6′,” which latter is "a new Russian nuclear submarine weapons system designed to bypass NATO radars and any existing missile defense systems, while causing heavy damage to 'important economic facilities' along the enemy’s coastal regions.”

Any U.S. President who would continue the effort started in 1990 by President George Herbert Walker Bush, to conquer and grab control of the resources of post-communist Russia, is insane, especially now, after the February 2014 U.S.-run coup in Ukraine crossed the line that Russia had repeatedly warned must not be crossed. If this effort ever stops, the ‘news’ media won’t report the U.S. gang’s retreat from this by-now 25-year-long war against Russia, which those same ‘news’ media have consistently refused to report. But even if they were to report it, no obligation by the West is so important as the obligation to stop  it — the obligation to call off the West’s Saudi-Qatari-Turkish-UAE-Kuwaiti-financed Sunni terrorists, and the rest of the West’s (via NATO, the IMF, etc.) war against Russia and against Russia's Shiite and BRICS allies.

On 28 May 2014, Barack Obama told future leaders of the U.S. military:

Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums.  …

 

It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world. The question we face, the question each of you will face, is not whether America will lead, but how we will lead — not just to secure our peace and prosperity, but also extend peace and prosperity around the globe.

If these sorts of lies are all that he can give us, then the Nobel Peace Prize Committee must demand he return his shameful 2009 Prize from them, right now. And why hasn’t the Committee already  demanded he return it?

American Presidents, and we, should leave Russia and its allies (including the BRICS and the non-BRICS such as Argentina) in peace, not pretend to support peace, when all that the U.S. actually spreads is invasions and wars — never-ending wars, and refugees from those wars, which are profitable only for the private investors in those private war-corporations or “contractors.”

Without that corruption, there would be a vastly smaller U.S. ‘Defense’ budget. The Pentagon isn’t even auditable. We have a good idea as to where lots of the real expenses are going. And it’s the opposite of ‘humanitarian’ or ‘pro-democracy.’ It’s arms to hire, or to invest in, by the world’s top kleptocrats — the people who control the lobbyists in Washington, who basically write America’s laws, and fund America’s politics.

Amongst all corrupt aristocracies (and that’s every  aristocracy), America’s takes the cake. But yet what has been a standard description which American leaders apply to the governments (such as Saddam Hussein’s, and Muammar Gaddafi’s, and Viktor Yanukovych’s) they’ve overthrown? It’s that they’re “corrupt.”

The International Criminal Court will begin to have credibility if and when it starts to prosecute American leaders such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama, but not a minute before that time. Western gangsters lead the world right now, and Western political leaders are their agents — merely fixers, for those elite gangsters.

*  *  *

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.


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PBOC Strengthens Yuan By Most In 2 Months As Golden Week Looms

With just one more day of trading before China’s lunar new year and Sping Festival Golden Week holiday, it appears The PBOC wants to flex its intervention muscles. By strengthening the Yuan fix by 0.16% (the most in 2 months) to 1-month highs, it seems China is trying to send a message before it practically closes for a week…

Of course today’s USD collapse is not going to help their ‘devaluation’ case…

 

China will be practically closed from Feb 7th until re-opening on Monday Feb 15th and so one wonders if this is a last ditch attempt to dissipate speculators before they are left somewhat to their own devices for a week?


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Shale Shock: Big Leg Lower In Oil Coming After Many Producers Found To Have Far Lower Breakevens

One of the great unknowns facing the US shale industry, and threatening the recurring rumors of its imminent demise, is how it is possible that despite the collapsing number of oil wells, and despite the plunge in crude prices which supposedly are well below all-in shale extraction costs, does production not only refuse to decline, but in fact has been largely increasing in the past 6 months, with just a modest decline in recent weeks.

 

The answer may come as a surprise not only to industry pundits, but certainly to Saudi Arabia, whose entire strategy has been to keep pressure the price of oil low enough for long enough to put as many “marginal producers” in the US shale space out of business as possible.

According to a report by the Bloomberg Intelligence analysts William Foiles and Andrew Cosgrove, Saudi Arabia may have its work cut out for it as it will be far harder to kill many U.S. E&Ps than analysts originally thought.

The reason: a break-even model for the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford shows that oil production across five plays in Texas and New Mexico may remain profitable even when WTI prices fall below $30 a barrel, according to a 55-variable Bloomberg Intelligence model for horizontal oil wells. 

The Eagle Ford’s DeWitt County has the lowest break-even, at $22.52, followed by Reeves County wells targeting the Wolfcamp Formation, at $23.40. The diversity of breakevens highlights the hazard posed by looking for a single number, even within a play.

These counties together produced about 551,000 barrels of liquids a day in October. Taking into account drilled but uncompleted wells boosts the number of potential survivors to 19. The wide range of break-evens undermines efforts to come up  with a single threshold for U.S. shale producers.

The full list of breakevens by county is shown below:

 

To corroborate its model of break-even levels for oil producers in the Permian and Eagle Ford, Bloomberg used a Baker Hughes’ horizontal rig counts in the Spraberry play Permian and Eagle Ford. Howard County, Texas, has the lowest average break-even, at a WTI price of $29.19 a barrel. Its rig counts have doubled since oil prices began collapsing in mid-2014. In Midland County, at $30, rig counts are up 56%. Counts in Irion and Reagan counties, with two of the highest break-evens targeting the play, have fallen more than 70%.

 

None of this would be feasible if average breakeven prices were anywhere close to the $50-60 assumed by the consensus.

But where Bloomberg’s analysis gets outright disturbing, if only for Riyadh, is that once wells are completed, breakeven costs tumble to Saudi-like sub-$20 prices in some countries.

From Bloomberg:

Tapping drilled but uncompleted (DUC) horizontal oil wells drops break-even WTI oil prices to less than $20 a barrel in eight county-play combinations in the Permian and Eagle Ford. The analysis assumes that drilled wells are sunk costs and that drilling constitutes 30% of a well’s total cost. The 55-variable model shows that the impact of removing drilling expenses varies significantly by county and play, with break-even reductions ranging from $7.24 to $21.51, or 28% to 42%.

 

Bloomberg proceeds to crown DeWitt County, Texas, as the King of Shale due to its lowest breakevens across the land:

DeWitt County, Texas, has on average the lowest break-even WTI price for its oil production among 29 county-play combinations in Texas and New Mexico, at $22.73 a barrel, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence model. Shifts in drilling in the Eagle Ford may reflect differing  cost levels. Dimmit County, with a break-even of $58.21, led the Eagle Ford in 1Q15 with 226 new horizontal oil wells, four times as many as DeWitt’s 56. Two quarters later, Dimmit’s new wells fell 71% to 65, while DeWitt’s surged 77%.

 

There is far more in the comprehensive analysis, but the punchline is simple: what many thought would be the “breaking” price point for virtually every shale play has just been lowered, and quite dramatically at that. It also means that algos and traders who had reflexively bought any dip below $30 on expectations this is close to the “sweet spot” and where the Saudis would relent, will have to drop their support levels by as much as a third! 

Finally, it means that if Saudi Arabia truly means to put the marginal non-OPEC producers (read efficient U.S. shale) out of business, it will have to pump far more not less as many speculate, and worse, it will have to ramp up production very fast because as is well known by now, the Saudi Kingdom is itself hurting profusely as a result of low oil prices which are leading to budget crunches and domestic austerity such as soaring prices of gas and water.

Finally, since Saudi Arabia had expected that its FX reserve outflow would last only temporarily using $40-50 breakevens, it will have to sell many more US reserves (either TSYs or stocks) to fund the cash shortfall which will persist for far longer until oil catches down to the lowest cost US producers, which as of today’s close are at least $10/barrel lower.

In short: the oil price war is about to enter its far more vicious, and far more lethal phase, and while it is unclear who ultimately wins, whether it is Shale or the Saudis, the loser is clear: anyone who bought into bets of an imminent oil bounce.


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