With legislation to regulate the mining and trading of cryptocurrencies still awaiting consideration by the Russian Parliament, one lawmaker has introduced a draft bill to create a national cryptocurrency called “the CryptoRuble.”
“The amendments proposed by the draft law … codify the digital financial asset as a legal means of payment on the territory of Russia,” the document’s explanatory note reads.
Interestingly, the draft law was submitted by a Communist Party MP named Rizvan Kurbanov. The law proposes several amendments to the Russian Civil Code that will make the CryptoRuble a legal means of payment circulated nationwide.
In October, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the issuance of a national cryptocurrency – which many interpreted as a sign that Russia is warming to the new technology after initially seeking to ban it.
The document proposes several amendments to the Russian Civil Code, which would make the CryptoRuble a legal means of payment circulated nationwide. The bill was submitted to parliament at the same time as another draft law aimed at regulating the mining and circulation of digital financial assets in Russia.
There’s some confusion about the future of cryptocurrency policy should the CryptoRuble become a reality.
Communications Minister Nikolay Nikiforov said last year that the introduction of a state currency should preclude the mining of all other cryptocurrencies, according to RT.
According to the bill, financial transactions involving the cryptocurrency are to be taxed at the rate of 13%, applied to any appreciation in value, or 13% of the total if the owner can’t explain the source of the digital coins.
The CryptoRuble will also be promoted for circulation on international markets, according to Russia’s Deputy Minister of Economic Development Oleg Fomichev, who stressed the CryptoRuble is designed to become Russian “digital money in light of the digital economy.”
Under President Obama’s watch, the Islamic State conquered a so-called caliphate the size of Ohio in Syria and Iraq. Luckily a new, “tough” president – Donald Trump – stepped in, loosed restrictions on his military, and, defeated the bad guys. At least that’s the popular story and the party line.
Of course, the ground-level truth is much messier.
If ISIS is so decisively and irreversibly defeated, how then to explain last week’s gruesome double-suicide bombing in Baghdad and expert warnings that up to 10,000 ISIS loyalists remain in Iraq and Syria?
The problem is that, even after 17 years of hard lessons to the contrary, most Americans – and administration spokespeople – insist on viewing ISIS as a linear, conventional threat. A quick look at color-coded Syria maps gives the obvious impression that ISIS as a conventional military force indeed has receded. Plentiful U.S. airstrikes, ample American advisory teams, and local Kurdish ground troops combined to devastate Islamic State’s fighters – which is a positive development.
Unfortunately, that may have been the easy part. Conventional destruction does not equate to total, ideological defeat. ISIS is as much idea as army, and such groups have proved remarkably resilient and capable of morphing into new, menacing manifestations.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis hinted at this, fearing the growth of “ISIS 2.0.” The thing is, we’re already fighting the second manifestation of Islamic State, which used to be called al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and reconstituted itself in U.S. prisons in that country. The next threat is actually ISIS 3.0.
Odds are ISIS leaders, fighters and sympathizers will go underground for a while — in both Iraq and Syria. They’ll keep up their slick media campaign, slowly reconstitute and continue to inspire terror attacks. But there’s something else: America’s regional military presence itself undoubtedly will fuel the Phoenix-like rise of ISIS 3.0.
The Islamic State’s worldview and ideological playbook consist of more than just Sunni chauvinism and jihadi interpretations of the Koran. A third key ingredient has always been virulent opposition to any Western military presence. What Americans view as advising and assisting, jihadis — and an uncomfortable number of like-minded sympathizers — see as occupation.
Trump supporters, most political conservatives and many military officers point to Obama’s supposedly hasty withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 as the impetus for the rise of ISIS. That explanation was simplistic — and, in the case of candidate Trump claiming that Obama literally “founded ISIS,” bordered on the absurd.
Nevertheless, in the court of public opinion (especially among Republicans), the charges stuck. Premature withdrawal indeed can be a serious mistake, but there’s a flip side: Stay too long, and military assistance can resemble invasion or occupation. Notice how that’s rarely discussed.
It’s a tough balance to strike: applying sufficient U.S. military aid when necessary whilst not overstaying a (very brief) welcome. Sixteen full years of U.S. military occupations in the Greater Middle East and a 2003 Iraq regime change have simply tarnished the American brand regionally, perhaps beyond repair. So much so, in fact, that one could argue that any overt U.S. military action tends to be counterproductive. Maybe that’s hard to swallow in hyper-interventionist Washington, but it’s something sober strategists must seriously consider.
Each side of the border, in Iraq and Syria, presents its own challenges.
In Iraq, look for ISIS to dial up its bombing campaign in Baghdad, puncturing any hope for post-war normalcy in the capital. Then, unless Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s Shia-dominated regime shows restraint and embraces minorities, expect ISIS once again to exploit Sunni grievances. This would mean demobilizing Shia Popular Mobilization Forces, some Iranian-sponsored. That’s a big if.
In Syria, the risks resemble those of Iraq, only on steroids. Here ISIS remnants will seek to inspire an anti-Kurdish and, by extension, anti-U.S. insurgency in the Euphrates River valley and the country’s northeast. That likelihood increases the longer that thousands of U.S. soldiers and marines remain in Syria. And recent pronouncements from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary Mattis seem to indicate the United States will stay in Syria indefinitely.
Staying in north and east Syria means the U.S. military will own all that does or does not happen in the area — the good and the bad. An inadequate power grid: that’s on us.Drought and disease: that’s our problem too. I’ve played this game before in Baghdad back in 2007. It rarely ends well. No matter how benevolent Americans view their motivations, the longer its military acts as a de facto occupation force, the more likely it is to fuel an insurgency — especially among Syria’s Sunni majority. ISIS will do all it can to exploit this vulnerability.
There’s one more huge risk in Syria, highlighted by Turkey’s recent ground invasion of Northern Syria. The Turks’ — a NATO ally! — attack on U.S.-allied Kurdish militias might lead to a genuine ethno-sectarian regional war. In that case, the United States would really be caught in the middle — and remember: ISIS, and similar Islamist groups, thrive amid such chaos. No matter how far the Turkish incursion escalates, ISIS most certainly will attempt to revamp and reconstitute under cover of a regional conflagration, just as al-Qaeda has in Yemen.
There are no easy answers in either Mesopotamia or Greater Syria. Which is why one hopes that the administration’s “adults in the room” are piloting the ship and asking the tough questions.
All signs point to what would be the worst possible outcome for U.S. troops and regional stability alike: hastily declaring victory but indefinitely maintaining U.S. troops on the ground. In that case, no amount of tough talk, courageous soldiering or skillful generalship will dodge the next regional insurgency. When Trump’s first term comes to a close, then the U.S. military would find itself traveling back to the future and entering its third decade of war — right back where it started.
Despite a flurry of warnings from cable-news doctors and furious parent’s groups, more teens are attempting the “Tide Pod Challenge” – to disastrous consequences (and the abject horror of Proctor & Gamble executives).
As Mashable reports, despite the “HIGH ALERT” warning issued by the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC), Tide Pod consumption has continued unabated.
“Last week, AAPCC reported that during the first two weeks of 2018, the country’s poison control centers handled thirty-nine intentional exposures cases among thirteen to nineteen year olds,” the report read.
That number didn’t last long, however. “That number has increased to eighty-six such intentional cases among the same age demographic during the first three weeks of 2018.”
Tide pods have become an unexpected cultural phenomenon in the early weeks of 2018. People are baking “Tide Pod-inspired” donuts – a tastier, and less corrosive, alternative to eating laundry detergent.
This increase comes as P&G, the producer of Tide Pods, to contain the horrible trend. They’ve partnered with YouTube to remove videos of kids eating Tide Pods, and Amazon has removed those commenting online about how delicious the forbidden fruit is. Additionally, P&G released a statement to warn consumers and even hired New England Patriots’ Rob Gronkowski to spread the word.
So kids, next time you’re thinking about chomping down on a plastic pod filled with colorful – but extremely toxic – chemicals, remember what Gronk said..
We have frequently written about the unsustainable trends in new car sales in the United States created by the combination of lower rates, easing underwriting standards and voracious demand for new securitizations by wall street and pension funds that will do just about anything for an extra 20bps of yield.
This week we find that according to the latest Edmunds’ data, many of the same problems also afflict the used auto market. The most startling takeaway from the report is that the percentage of used cars being traded in with negative equity values – which means that dealers lenders are willing to accept an immediate loss for new transactions – continues to rise and currently stands at an all-time high 32.4%, up from under 20% in 2009. Moreover, the average balance of the negative equity also continues to rise and stood at a record $5,130 last year, up over a quarter from $4,075 a decade earlier.
This confirms that banks and finance companies are making riskier loans to keep up revenue as vehicle sales slow. and here’s why.
The record percentage of underwater loans on trade-ins suggests that car owners are trading in their vehicles sooner than they had previously. According to Bloomberg, “a consumer is often the most underwater on his or her auto loan in the first few years of ownership, because the value of the vehicle drops fastest over that time. By the fourth year, for example, the borrower has paid down a big chunk of the loan, catching up to the depreciation they took in the first few years.”
So for borrowers who do trade in their underwater cars, lenders are essentially giving them the money to pay down their loan. The dealer sells the used car, and whatever balance remains on the old loan is folded into the new loan. The borrower might get a longer-term loan than he or she had before to help keep monthly payments manageable. That means that loan balances are getting bigger relative to the value of the new car, and the debt will be paid off slower.
Moody’s analyst Jason Grohotolski notes that the growing proportion of underwater trade-ins means that at least some borrowers are getting deeper and deeper in debt with every car they buy. This will – eventually – translate to bigger and bigger losses on loans for finance companies whenever the economy heads south, the same way lower down payments slammed mortgage lenders after the credit and housing bubbles burst.
“It’s this cycle that just continually gets worse and worse,” Grohotolski said. “It has to stop, and it doesn’t have a favorable outcome.”
Meanwhile, the average used car price continues to rise and stood at $19,400 as of Q3 2017. This suggests that, since most people simply roll their negative equity into their new loans, many used car buyers are likely sitting on loans where ~15-20% of their outstanding balance simply reflects their negative equity from their previous car.
But wait, there’s more.
Despite rising average used car prices and rising negative equity, average monthly payments for used cars have managed to stay pretty much flat since Q3 2011. Obviously, monthly payments are determined by 3 variables: beginning loan balance, interest rate and term. While interest rates have (at least until recently) come down since 2011, they haven’t declined nearly enough to offset a $2,800 increase in starting principal balance which indicates that, like new car loans, used car loan terms are getting stretched out further and further to manage monthly payments.
* * *
Record “underwater” trade-ins are just one of the many facets of the deteriorating US auto market, which has been slowing down in the past year, and in 2017 new vehicle sales fell 1.8% to 17.2 million in 2017, the first decline since 2009…
… even as loan volumes for new and used car purchases was on track to be higher than ever. Suggesting more trouble lies ahead, Moody’s said that the growth in the average amount financed for a new car outpaced median income growth between 2013 and 2016, suggesting borrowers are getting more strained.
This can be quantified directly by observing surging delinquency and default rates for subprime auto loans. With few ways to keep the business flowing as demand slows, one staple remains which, of course, is to reach out to less creditworthy borrowers. As a result, delinquencies are soaring for subprime auto loans and in the third quarter reached the highest rate in more than seven years, according to New York Fed data from November.
While few deny that the US auto segment, and especially its financing subset is in a bubble, there is broad consensus that unlike subprime mortgages, the bursting of the auto loan bubble will not have dire consequences. In fact, according to a surprisingly rosy take by Bloomberg, “any pain from car-loan trouble will likely be just a shadow of the housing bubble collapse, because the auto debt market is much smaller.” There were around $9 trillion of mortgages outstanding at the end of the third quarter, compared with $1.2 trillion of auto debt, the New York Fed said.
And so far, many of the bonds backed by subprime auto loans are performing well thanks to built-in protections for investors. Wells Fargo analysts said in a note Wednesday that bonds issued by two of the biggest subprime auto lenders — Santander Consumer USA Holdings Inc. and General Motors Co.’s finance arm — have room to reach prices not seen since before the financial crisis.
Of course, where this analysis falls short is assuming a linear deterioration once the bubble pops; as the last financial crisis demonstrated, once the waterfall effect of bursting asset bubbles is in play, the fallout quickly turns exponential, and no rational assessment will do the ensuing collapse justice. As such, the real question is whether auto loans will be the trigger, or catalyst for the bursting of the next consumer debt bubble.
Meanwhile, Wall Street is back to its usual antics. Since auto loans performed relatively well during the financial crisis, it encouraged new lenders to step into the space, according to Dan Zwirn, chief investment officer of Arena Investors. Rrisky car loans can be bundled into bonds and sold to yield-starved investors, who are eager to buy them, and as the chart below shows, that’s precisely what is going on.
And, according to Zwirn, that also gives cheap funding to finance companies to reach out to riskier borrowers.
“The same sorts of excesses are happening in car loans that happened in residential mortgages,” Zwirn said. “Ultimately, when the overall fixed-income market has an issue, even if this is not the cause, car loan debt will likely suffer greatly.”
And since Zwirn’s hedge fund had to shutter a decade ago precisely because it did not envision this particular scenario, Zwirn’s caution deserves particular attention..
For now, the stable economy and low interest rates are helping keep borrowers afloat for now said Moody’s Grohotolski. But once there is a slowdown, and rates start rising aggressively, lenders will face a reckoning.
“We could be in a continued state of risk-building on lenders’ balance sheets,” Grohotolski said. “You may not necessarily recognize all of that risk until an unexpected downturn. There could be a meaningful increase in losses.”
* * *
For now, besides the modest decline in total sales and surging delinquencies among subprime borrowers, there are few signs of an imminent storm in the new or used auto markets. However, chaos in the used-car market – once it accelerates – will hurt OEMs.
As we pointed out in June, Morgan Stanley recently predicted that the surge in used-car inventory – driven by a flood of off-lease vehicles – would saturate the market, resulting in as much as a 50% crash in used car prices over the next couple of years which would, in turn, put further pressure on the new car market, which has already resorted to record incentive spending to maintain volumes.
What can borrowers do when prices inevitably crash? Last year, the New York Times reported that lenders are increasingly taking delinquent borrowers to court, and winning – garnishing their wages for years for cars that were, in many cases, worth far less than the amount they’re paying.
For working-class borrowers who are struggling in an economy with stagnant wages, this burden could create serious problems for the household budget, and beyond. It also means that once the current low-rate, credit funded sugar high ends, it will be the middle class that pays for it, as usual.
The largest number of homeless people was recorded in New York City (76,501), with Los Angeles in second place (55,188).
* * *
And this is what we get for record high stock prices, record high debt, record high central bank balance sheets, and record high complacency?
It is perhaps no coincidence that the density of homeless Americans tends to focus on left-leaning states run by politicians who might lead one to believe that the poor in America are held down solely by the machinations of the rich and connected.
As xRugger writes at Jim Quinn’s Burning Platform blog, there seems to be a sentiment out there that the poor are simply not responsible for the state in which they find themselves and that one day they will rise up and throw off the shackles that bind them in poverty and want. Everything has been done to them; therefore, we are obligated to do everything for them.
Do not put your hope for change in the poor and downtrodden of this country. Your faith in the supposed virtuous poor is badly misplaced. The majority of the American underclass are neither virtuous nor (by any rational standard of true poverty) are they poor. This is not a statement meant to absolve the wealthy and powerful of their sins in that they have done much to degrade and destroy the “disadvantaged” of this nation. They will have their own millstone to deal with. Having said that, let’s chat a little bit about the true state of the American underclass.
First, let’s dispel the notion that the American poor are truly poor. Oh sure, by the standards of the poor in other western industrial nations, the American version may indeed be worse in some ways than, say, the German poor, or the British poor, or the Australian poor. However, when you bring the grinding poverty of Africa, India, or rural China into the calculation, then what it means to be poor in America becomes discernable in its proper context.
If you have central heat and air conditioning in your subsidized housing, or even in the homeless shelter for that matter, then you are far better off than sub-Saharan Africans who burn buffalo dung for heat. If you cook your subsidized meals on an electric or gas stove under an electric light, then you and yours exist at a level of comfort unknown to huge numbers of the truly destitute. If you have the luxury of indoor plumbing, then you have far exceeded the standards of the rural poor in India where the majority of the population still defecate in the open.
If you claim to be poor, yet you own a car, a cell phone, have a TV, a CD player, and a microwave, then to be poor in America is to have won the poverty lottery. The fact is that the vast majority of America’s poor have some, or all, of these things in addition to widely available public safety nets for nutrition, health, job training, etc. Being poor in America is an extremely advantageous position to be in vis a vis the poverty stricken who live and die in the more benighted regions of the globe. To arrive at any other conclusion is intellectually dishonest and is a denial of reality.
So, having established that most of the poor in this country are not actually poor, let’s have a look at whether or not the American underclass are the virtuous, honest, just-need-a-hand-up people that the media would have us believe. After all, touting the supposed good qualities of the poor who just need a bit of help is the constant justification for throwing more money at them. They are really good people at heart, it’s just that poverty and want cause them to behave badly. Allow me to suggest that, in fact, the opposite is true. People do not behave badly because they are poor. They are poor because they behave badly. If the poor are entitled to our help by virtue of their destitution, is it not then incumbent upon the poor to behave responsibly as the price of that assistance?
Lest anyone accuse me of being some uninvolved academic, or an ignorant bigot who has never experienced want and has no right to pass judgement, let me offer this. I have been homeless twice in my life: Once when I lived in a large Canadian city and once when I initially moved here to Montana. I reached that condition both times due to the choices I made and the behavior I engaged in. That’s it. That’s all. I was the reason I was poor. This essay is no academic exercise. These words relate the experience of someone has faced his own demons and recognizes those demons in the minds and hearts of others. I know the truth of what I say because I have seen, and heard, and lived that truth.
When I had descended into that world, I quickly realized how dangerous and soul-destroying it really is. The level of chaos in day-to-day living is barely imaginable to one who has not directly experienced it. There is no honor among thieves. Lying, backstabbing, cheating, and stealing are the order of the day. In my personal experience, whatever virtue survives among the American poor has been eroded to such a degree by dependency as to be almost nonexistent. If the entitled poor of this nation redirected the significant creative effort, labor, and time they devote to gaming the system for freebies and put it into productive pursuits, they would vastly increase their chances of finding a way out of the social station to which they have consigned themselves. Pursuit of a better life with honesty, decency, and self-respect as guideposts would also engender the goodwill of many who now withdraw their hand.
The honest poor do exist.
Cream and scum both rise to the top, and this screed is not meant as a universal indictment of the poor in America, nor is it meant to denigrate those who truly cannot help themselves.It is however, meant as a universal indictment of those who will not help themselves. It is meant as an indictment of the apparatus that profits from and perpetuates itself on the backs of the both the honest and dishonest alike. It is most certainly meant as a universal indictment of a system that fosters dependency, helplessness, and self-pitying indolence. Distinguishing between those who want something better and those who don’t is the trick. The honest poor must struggle every day as they try to extricate themselves and their families from the chaos in which they live. The scum disguise themselves as cream in order to game the system. The cream must constantly prove themselves in order to have any chance of escaping the system. It is a sad reality, but it is reality nonetheless.
The American underclass will indeed rise up one day, but the result will not be what you think. Over the decades, the poor in this nation have willingly accepted a level of dependence and subservience to the god of self-pity that has destroyed much of their humanity. They are vicious, deviant, deceitful, and dangerous. The bread and circuses of the modern American welfare state have done what bread and circuses have always done, created a lazy, violent, and restless mob no different from any other of the past. The rising will not reform the system. It will thoroughly smash the system, but the people who have destroyed it will have neither the intelligence nor the ambition to replace it with anything better. They know no other path. When they have eaten the rich, they will come for the rest. They will boil out of their filthy hovels and advance upon what bastions of decency remain and if they triumph, they will squat amidst the rubble and wonder why no one is coming to save them.
(The following is the speech that I delivered this Sunday at the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention in Myrtle Beach. My appreciation to Joe Dugan and everyone involved in organizing it and making it a reality once again. And to Don Neuen and Donna Fiducia of Cowboy Logic Radio for the introduction. And to anyone and everyone still fighting the good fight.)
Full Transcript below:
This is a civil war.
There aren’t any soldiers marching on Charleston… or Myrtle Beach. Nobody’s getting shot in the streets. Except in Chicago… and Baltimore, Detroit and Washington D.C.
But that’s not a civil war. It’s just what happens when Democrats run a city into the ground. And then they dig a hole in the ground so they can bury it even deeper.
If you look deep enough into that great big Democrat hole, you might even see where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.
But it’s not guns that make a civil war. It’s politics.
Guns are how a civil war ends. Politics is how it begins.
How do civil wars happen?
Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge.
That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.
I know you’re all thinking about President Trump.
He won and the establishment, the media, the democrats, rejected the results. They came up with a whole bunch of conspiracy theories to explain why he didn’t really win. It was the Russians. And the FBI. And sexism, Obama, Bernie Sanders and white people.
It’s easier to make a list of the things that Hillary Clinton doesn’t blame for losing the election. It’s going to be a short list.
A really short list. Herself.
The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. But it’s not the first time they’ve done this.
The first time a Republican president was elected this century, they said he didn’t really win. The Supreme Court gave him the election. There’s a pattern here.
Trump didn’t really win the election. Bush didn’t really win the election. Every time a Republican president won an election this century, the Democrats insist he didn’t really win.
Now say a third Republican president wins an election in say, 2024.
What are the odds that they’ll say that he didn’t really win? Right now, it looks like 100 percent.
What do sure odds of the Dems rejecting the next Republican president really mean? It means they don’t accept the results of any election that they don’t win.
It means they don’t believe that transfers of power in this country are determined by elections.
That’s a civil war.
There’s no shooting. At least not unless you count the attempt to kill a bunch of Republicans at a charity baseball game practice. But the Democrats have rejected our system of government.
This isn’t dissent. It’s not disagreement.
You can hate the other party. You can think they’re the worst thing that ever happened to the country. But then you work harder to win the next election. When you consistently reject the results of elections that you don’t win, what you want is a dictatorship.
Your very own dictatorship.
The only legitimate exercise of power in this country, according to the left, is its own. Whenever Republicans exercise power, it’s inherently illegitimate.
The attacks on Trump show that elections don’t matter to the left.
Republicans can win an election, but they have a major flaw. They’re not leftists.
That’s what the leftist dictatorship looks like.
The left lost Congress. They lost the White House. So what did they do? They began trying to run the country through Federal judges and bureaucrats.
Every time that a Federal judge issues an order saying that the President of the United States can’t scratch his own back without his say so, that’s the civil war.
Our system of government is based on the constitution, but that’s not the system that runs this country.
The left’s system is that any part of government that it runs gets total and unlimited power over the country.
If it’s in the White House, then the president can do anything. And I mean anything. He can have his own amnesty for illegal aliens. He can fine you for not having health insurance. His power is unlimited.
He’s a dictator.
But when Republicans get into the White House, suddenly the President can’t do anything. He isn’t even allowed to undo the illegal alien amnesty that his predecessor illegally invented.
A Democrat in the White House has “discretion” to completely decide every aspect of immigration policy. A Republican doesn’t even have the “discretion” to reverse him.
That’s how the game is played. That’s how our country is run.
When Democrats control the Senate, then Harry Reid and his boys and girls are the sane, wise heads that keep the crazy guys in the House in check.
But when Republicans control the Senate, then it’s an outmoded body inspired by racism.
When Democrats run the Supreme Court, then it has the power to decide everything in the country. But when Republicans control the Supreme Court, it’s a dangerous body that no one should pay attention to.
When a Democrat is in the White House, states aren’t even allowed to enforce immigration law. But when a Republican is in the White House, states can create their own immigration laws.
Under Obama, a state wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom without asking permission. But under Trump, Jerry Brown can go around saying that California is an independent republic and sign treaties with other countries.
The Constitution has something to say about that.
Whether it’s Federal or State, Executive, Legislative or Judiciary, the left moves power around to run the country. If it controls an institution, then that institution is suddenly the supreme power in the land.
This is what I call a moving dictatorship.
There isn’t one guy in a room somewhere issuing the orders. Instead there’s a network of them. And the network moves around.
If the guys and girls in the network win elections, they can do it from the White House. If they lose the White House, they’ll do it from Congress. If they don’t have either one, they’ll use the Supreme Court.
If they don’t have either the White House, Congress or the Supreme Court, they’re screwed. Right?
Nope.
They just go on issuing them through circuit courts and the bureaucracy. State governments announce that they’re independent republics. Corporations begin threatening and suing the government.
There’s no consistent legal standard. Only a political one.
Under Obama, states weren’t allowed to enforce immigration laws. That was the job of the Federal government. And the states weren’t allowed to interfere with the job that the Feds weren’t doing.
Okay.
Now Trump comes into office and starts enforcing immigration laws again. And California announces it’s a sanctuary state and passes a law punishing businesses that cooperate with Federal immigration enforcement.
So what do we have here?
It’s illegal for states to enforce immigration law because that’s the province of the Federal government. But it’s legal for states to ban the Federal government from enforcing immigration law.
The only consistent pattern here is that the left decided to make it illegal to enforce immigration law.
It may do that sometimes under the guise of Federal power or states rights. But those are just fronts. The only consistent thing is that leftist policies are mandatory and opposing them is illegal.
Everything else is just a song and dance routine.
That’s how it works. It’s the moving dictatorship. It’s the tyranny of the network.
You can’t pin it down. There’s no one office or one guy. It’s a network of them. It’s an ideological dictatorship. Some people call it the deep state. But that doesn’t even begin to capture what it is.
To understand it, you have to think about things like the Cold War and Communist infiltration.
A better term than Deep State is Shadow Government.
Parts of the Shadow Government aren’t even in the government. They are wherever the left holds power. It can be in the non-profit sector and among major corporations. Power gets moved around like a New York City shell game. Where’s the quarter? Nope, it’s not there anymore.
The shadow government is an ideological network. These days it calls itself by a hashtag #Resistance. Under any name, it runs the country. Most of the time we don’t realize that. When things are normal, when there’s a Democrat in the White House or a bunch of Democrats in Congress, it’s business as usual.
Even with most Republican presidents, you didn’t notice anything too out of the ordinary. Sure, the Democrats got their way most of the time. But that’s how the game is usually played.
It’s only when someone came on the scene who didn’t play the game by the same rules, that the network exposed itself. The shadow government emerged out of hiding and came for Trump.
And that’s the civil war.
This is a war over who runs the country. Do the people who vote run the country or does this network that can lose an election, but still get its agenda through, run the country?
We’ve been having this fight for a while. But this century things have escalated.
They escalated a whole lot after Trump’s win because the network isn’t pretending anymore. It sees the opportunity to delegitimize the whole idea of elections.
Now the network isn’t running the country from cover. It’s actually out here trying to overturn the results of an election and remove the president from office.
It’s rejected the victories of two Republican presidents this century.
And if we don’t stand up and confront it, and expose it for what it is, it’s going to go on doing it in every election. And eventually Federal judges are going to gain enough power that they really will overturn elections.
It happens in other countries. If you think it can’t happen here, you haven’t been paying attention to the left.
Right now, Federal judges are declaring that President Trump isn’t allowed to govern because his Tweets show he’s a racist. How long until they say that a president isn’t even allowed to take office because they don’t like his views?
That’s where we’re headed.
Civil wars swing around a very basic question. The most basic question of them all. Who runs the country?
Is it me? Is it you? Is it Grandma? Or is it bunch of people who made running the government into their career?
America was founded on getting away from professional government. The British monarchy was a professional government. Like all professional governments, it was hereditary. Professional classes eventually decide to pass down their privileges to their kids.
America was different. We had a volunteer government. That’s what the Founding Fathers built.
This is a civil war between volunteer governments elected by the people and professional governments elected by… well… uh… themselves.
Of the establishment, by the establishment and for the establishment.
You know, the people who always say they know better, no matter how many times they screw up, because they’re the professionals. They’ve been in Washington D.C. politics since they were in diapers.
Freedom can only exist under a volunteer government. Because everyone is in charge. Power belongs to the people.
A professional government is going to have to stamp out freedom sooner or later. Freedom under a professional government can only be a fiction. Whenever the people disagree with the professionals, they’re going to have to get put down. That’s just how it is. No matter how it’s disguised, a professional government is tyranny.
Ours is really well disguised, but if it walks like a duck and locks you up like a duck, it’s a tyranny.
Now what’s the left.
Forget all the deep answers. The left is a professional government.
It’s whole idea is that everything needs to be controlled by a big central government to make society just. That means everything from your soda sizes to whether you can mow your lawn needs to be decided in Washington D.C.
Volunteer governments are unjust. Professional governments are fair. That’s the credo of the left.
Its network, the one we were just discussing, it takes over professional governments because it shares their basic ideas. Professional governments, no matter who runs them, are convinced that everything should run through the professionals. And the professionals are usually lefties. If they aren’t, they will be.
Just ask Mueller and establishment guys like him.
What infuriates professional government more than anything else? An amateur, someone like President Trump who didn’t spend his entire adult life practicing to be president, taking over the job.
President Trump is what volunteer government is all about.
When you’re a government professional, you’re invested in keeping the system going. But when you’re a volunteer, you can do all the things that the experts tell you can’t be done. You can look at the mess we’re in with fresh eyes and do the common sense things that President Trump is doing.
And common sense is the enemy of government professionals. It’s why Trump is such a threat.
A Republican government professional would be bad enough. But a Republican government volunteer does that thing you’re not supposed to do in government… think differently.
Professional government is a guild. Like medieval guilds. You can’t serve in if you’re not a member. If you haven’t been indoctrinated into its arcane rituals. If you aren’t in the club.
And Trump isn’t in the club. He brought in a bunch of people who aren’t in the club with him.
Now we’re seeing what the pros do when amateurs try to walk in on them. They spy on them, they investigate them and they send them to jail. They use the tools of power to bring them down.
That’s not a free country.
It’s not a free country when FBI agents who support Hillary take out an “insurance policy” against Trump winning the election. It’s not a free country when Obama officials engage in massive unmasking of the opposition. It’s not a free country when the media responds to the other guy winning by trying to ban the conservative media that supported him from social media. It’s not a free country when all of the above collude together to overturn an election because the guy who wasn’t supposed to win, won.
We’re in a civil war between conservative volunteer government and leftist professional government.
The pros have made it clear that they’re not going to accept election results anymore. They’re just going to make us do whatever they want. They’re in charge and we better do what they say.
That’s the war we’re in. And it’s important that we understand that.
Because this isn’t a shooting war yet. And I don’t want to see it become one.
And before the shooting starts, civil wars are fought with arguments. To win, you have to understand what the big picture argument is. It’s easy to get bogged down in arguments that don’t matter or won’t really change anything.
This is the argument that changes everything.
Do we have a government of the people and by the people? Or do we have a tyranny of the professionals?
The Democrats try to dress up this argument in leftist social justice babble. Those fights are worth having. But sometimes we need to pull back the curtain on what this is really about.
They’ve tried to rig the system. They’ve done it by gerrymandering, by changing the demographics of entire states through immigration, by abusing the judiciary and by a thousand different tricks.
But civil wars come down to an easy question. Who runs the country?
They’ve given us their answer and we need to give them our answer.
Both sides talk about taking back the country. But who are they taking it back for?
The left uses identity politics. It puts supposed representatives of entire identity groups up front. We’re taking the country back for women and for black people, and so on and so forth…
But nobody elected their representatives.
Identity groups don’t vote for leaders. All the black people in the country never voted to make Shaun King al Al Sharpton their representative. And women sure as hell didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton.
What we have in America is a representative government. A representative government makes freedom possible because it actually represents people, instead of representing ideas.
The left’s identity politics only represents ideas. Nobody gets to vote on them.
Instead the left puts out representatives from different identity politics groups, there’s your gay guy, there’s three women, there’s a black man, as fronts for their professional government system.
When they’re taking back the country, it’s always for professional government. It’s never for the people.
When conservatives fight to take back the country, it’s for the people. It’s for volunteer government the way that the Founding Fathers wanted it to be.
This is a civil war over whether the American people are going to govern themselves. Or are they going to be governed.
Are we going to have a government of the people, by the people and for the people… or are we going to have a government.
The kind of government that most countries have where a few special people decide what’s best for everyone.
We tried that kind of government under the British monarchy. And we had a revolution because we didn’t like it.
But that revolution was met with a counterrevolution by the left. The left wants a monarchy. It wants King Obama or Queen Oprah.
It wants to end government of the people, by the people and for the people. That’s what they’re fighting for. That’s what we’re fighting against. The stakes are as big as they’re ever going to get. Do elections matter anymore?
I live in the state of Ronald Reagan. I can go visit the Ronald Reagan Library any time I want to. But today California has one party elections. There are lots of elections and propositions. There’s all the theater of democracy, but none of the substance. Its political system is as free and open as the Soviet Union.
And that can be America.
The Trump years are going to decide if America survives. When his time in office is done, we’re either going to be California or a free nation once again.
The civil war is out in the open now and we need to fight the good fight. And we must fight to win.
While we have reported on previous incidents of looting, analysts are starting to fear that the current wave could linger amid the Venezuela’s economic freefall into a Mad-Max-like dystopia – very different from the promised-land of socialist utopian success promised by Bernie Sanders and his Latin American predecessors.
It is clear that amid desperate food shortages Venezuelans are picking up new survival skills.
“It makes you want to cry,” said Luis Felipe Anatael in a telephone interview with The Guardian.
“I think we are headed for chaos.”
A hungry mob took just 30 minutes to pick clean his grocery store in the eastern city of Puerto Ordaz, hauling away everything from cold cuts to ketchup to the cash registers.
“Whenever there are anti-government protests, they have more than enough teargas, tanks and troops to put them down,” he said.
“But for us business people, there is no security.”
During the first few days of January the Venezuelan Observatory for Social Conflict, a Caracas rights group, recorded 107 episodes of looting and several deaths in 19 of Venezuela’s 23 states.
As The Guardian notes, President Nicolás Maduro blames the country’s woes on an “economic war” against his government by rightwingers and foreign interests.
But rather than reforming the economy, the government has resorted to handouts and far-fetched schemes.
A newly formed ministry of urban farming encourages people to grow tomatoes and raise chickens on their patios and rooftops.
Another campaign encourages Venezuelans to breed rabbits for the table. At a recent news conference, Freddy Bernal, the urban farm minister, declared:
“We need people to understand that a rabbit is not a pet. It’s two and a half kilos of meat.”
A woman with a sign reading ‘There is no food’ protests against new emergency powers decreed by President Nicolás Maduro
But as they grow thinner some Venezuelans insist they have a right to take matters into their own hands. That was the case in the western city of Maracaibo, where residents recently swarmed into the streets, stopped two trucks filled with flour and candy, and emptied them.
“We either loot or we die of hunger,” one of the looters, Maryoli Corniele, told Diario la Verdad, the local newspaper.
Hugo Chavez had once touted the “marvelous community experience” of bartering. Now his collapsing narcostate is reduced to bartering its precious metals and jewels to survive.
Ordinary Venezuelans have long ago been battling imaginary inflation in the real life horror of socialism by trading in their worthless money for subsidized products and then reselling them on the black market. But increasingly they’re just bartering them to avoid the increasingly worthless currency.
Venezuela’s new supermarkets are the Facebook groups where the people trade sugar for beans. It’s a marvelous community experience that Hugo Chavez’s daughter, the richest woman in Venezuela, hasn’t been able to share with the rest of the populace. When Maduro, the former bus driver driving the country off a cliff as its insane leftist dictator, began chowing down on an empanada during a televised speech, the mouths of his starving people watered and a million memes were born.
But Maduro is promising Venezuelans that a replacement for money is coming soon. Venezuela’s dictator plans to create his own bitcoin, a cryptocurrency based on the only thing his failed state has, oil.
Forget the ‘monero’ and make way for the ‘petro’.
“The 21st century has arrived!” Maduro told a populace that is stuck in medieval times.
Venezuela’s past technological experiments haven’t exactly gone well. The joint Iranian-Venezuelan car company produced a vehicle more radioactive than Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The Chinese Vergatario socialist smartphone comes in handy when bartering for groceries on WhatsApp.
The ‘Petro’ will be backed by oil, gas, gold and diamonds. Except that Venezuela might be proposing to back its imaginary money with reserves that it already mortgaged to Russia. And that would make its imaginary money even more imaginary than it already is. But creating its own bitcoin would be a perfect solution by providing worthless money to everyone that wouldn’t even need to actually be printed.
But it still wouldn’t be worth anything.
And bitcoin is already in Venezuela. Tech savvy citizens who turned to imaginary money to escape worthless money aren’t about to switch to government money that’s both imaginary and worthless.
What happens when socialists run out of money? They start pawning the family jewels for more imaginary money while creating conspiracy theories about a capitalist war on socialism.
The left hates reality and math. Its theories turn money worthless. And you can’t eat theories.
Venezuelan socialists took a booming economy, destroyed its currency and reduced it to a barter economy. That’s what happens when socialists finally run out of other people’s money.
If you want to imagine the future of socialism, picture trading sugar for beans on social media.
That’s the leftist economy of tomorrow brought to you by their welfare policies of today.
Not only is The S&P 500 at its most overbought in its history…
But as Dana Lyons’ exposes below, the stock market is scoring new highs at the fastest clip in history.
In our habitation within the investment-based social media realm, we have noticed a ongoing discussion between market observers related to the present stock rally.
On the one hand, there is a loud chorus from folks (likely many of whom are frustrated non-participants in the rally) pointing out the unusual, and perhaps inorganic, nature of the incessant rally.
On the other hand, you have the assured (condescending?) reminders from the other side (i.e., folks “killing it” at the moment) that an upward trajectory is the “normal” course of action for stocks, historically speaking. So which contingent is correct? They both are, to an extent.
Yes, it has been far more typical for stocks to rise than fall over the past 100-plus years. Thus, we should not be surprised by a rally, even in the face of elevated valuations, sentiment, etc. However, an unwillingness to acknowledge the noteworthy, even historic, nature of the current rally, would be an indication of either willful denial or potentially harmful ignorance.
This week, we take a look at some of the ways in which our current rally is truly unique from a broad historical basis. Today, we note the torrid pace at which the stock market is racking up new 52-week highs. Specifically, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is in the midst of a historic run of new highs. Over the past 100 days, the index has scored no fewer than 46 new 52-week highs. That is the most new highs the DJIA has ever accumulated over a 100-day stretch.
This new record surpasses the former mark of 45 set in 1954. And looking back over the last 100-plus years, there have now been just 14 unique occasions with even 35 new highs over a 100-year span.
So will the new highs continue from here – or is there nowhere to go but down at this point? Well, we’re not going to pretend that a new high is a bad thing. In fact, it’s about the most bullish thing a security or index can do – no resistance at all-time highs, you know. Furthermore, the momentum often generated by moves to new highs can be a powerful and (at least, temporarily) persisting phenomenon. That is, until the final high of the run. Obviously one high will eventually mark the top and the upward momentum will cease.
Are we at that point now? Are stocks going to come crashing back to earth – or can the market continue its levitation act a little longer?
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In a Premium Post at The Lyons Share, we take a quantitative look at previous prolific streaks of new highs to see what transpired afterward. If you are interested in the Premium version of our charts and research, check out “all-access” service, The Lyons Share. You can follow our investment process and posture every day — including insights into what we’re looking to buy and sell and when. Thanks for reading!
Funding real estate transactions with bitcoin has already become an accepted practice in the US, so it’s unsurprising that it’s begun to take root inJapan,the only developed country that has explicitly legalized cryptocurrenciesas legal tender.
CCNreports that a Tokyo-based real estate firm is sellinga commercial building for 547 bitcoin, or $6 million. It is said to be the first building in Japan to be sold using bitcoin.
The company’s CTO, Yokozawa Yuske, said a growing number of investors in the local cryptocurrency space have started to eye the country’s real estate market, primarily to spend profits they had amassed from their cryptocurrency investments over the past few years.
Yuske noted that there are also many investors in the local real estate market looking to sell multi-million dollar properties in exchange for bitcoin, chiefly because it’s easier to sell a large asset than to cash out a massive chunk of bitcoin: Most cryptocurency exchanges would make users undergo a vigorous verification process.
A Yitanzi spokesperson noted that a property in Tokyo will be sold for bitcoin in the upcoming weeks and that other properties listed by the startup will also be sold for bitcoin. For now, the company is only accepting bitcoin: Other cryptocurrencies may be added in the future.
Normally, purchasing properties through banks and third party service providers lead to significantly high fees, especially if several millions of dollars have to be transacted between two separate banks. As such, to circumvent the inefficient global banking system, many realtors in London and the United Arab Emirates have started accepting bitcoin for large payments.
In September 2017, British entrepreneurs Michelle Mone and Doug Barrowman disclosed that their $356 million real estate projectwill accept bitcoin from clients and buyers. Each apartment in the complex costs 30 bitcoins, around $330,000.
While the fees associated with small Bitcoin transactions can be disproportionately high, especially when network congestion causes them to spike, on a transactions worth more than $100,000, a $10 fee is substantially lower than bank wiring fees.
Barrowman said at the time:
“I’ve been invested in the crypto world for the last couple of years really, and it’s a sector I’ve watched grow and emerge. So I see it coming to that stage where the early adopters are giving way to a more mainstream application of cryptocurrency, and therefore it’s a logical extension to take land and buildings and effectively offer people the opportunity to pay in cryptocurrency or bitcoin rather than just fiat currency.”
Japanese businesses – including airlines, electronics manufacturers, budget hotel chains and retailers – have been accepting bitcoin for payment since immediately after the Japanese government legalized bitcoin and regulated its cryptocurrency exchange market early last year.
Bic Camera, the country’s biggest electronics retailer, and Peach, Japan’s most widely used budget airline, have been accepting bitcoin payments for more than six months. The acceptance of bitcoin by influential conglomerates has increased the awareness of the Japanese people regarding cryptocurrencies, leading to a surge in interest and demand for bitcoin.
This month, MUFG – Japan’s largest bank – announced its plans to launch a cryptocurrency exchange to address growing demand from institutional and retail traders.
