Month: July 2018

Authored by Craig Murray via CraigMurray.co.uk,

A NATO summit approaches that brings Donald Trump to Europe and then on to these [British] shores, and brings the usual clamour for more of the taxpayers’ money to be given to arms manufacturers.

Yet NATO is a demonstrably useless institution.

It’s largest ever active military deployment, for 12 years in Afghanistan, resulted in military defeat throughout 80% of the country, the installation of a pocket regime whose scrip does not run further than you can throw the scrip, and a vast outflow of heroin to finance the criminal underworld throughout NATO countries.

Look at this chart closely, and marvel at the fact that the NATO occupation began in early 2002.

In invading Afghanistan and boosting the heroin warlords, NATO countries destabilised themselves.

NATO’s second biggest military operation ever was the attack on Libya, where NATO carried out an incredible 14,200 bombing sorties using high explosive munitions and devastated Libya’s infrastructure and entire cities. Here is Sirte after NATO “liberation”.

The direct result of the devastation of Libya and destruction of its government infrastructure has been the massive untrammelled exodus of migrants, especially from West Africa, through Libya and across the Mediterranean on boats. This has not only led to the appalling exploitation and tragic death of many migrants, it has fundamentally weakened the governments and indeed governing public ethos of European NATO member states and led to a right wing populist surge throughout much of the EU.

In short, in destroying Libya, NATO members destabilised themselves.

The direct result of NATO’s destruction of Libya.

Now NATO is focusing once more on the original “threat” it was supposed to combat, a Russian invasion of Western Europe.

Russia has absolutely no intention of invading Western Europe. The very notion is ludicrous. It does not require NATO to deter a threat that does not exist.

Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia alone have a combined GNP as big as Russia. On a purchasing power parity basis, if you add in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania those Eastern states still match Russia economically. On a PPP basis, the combined GDP of all NATO states is 12 times that of Russia.

Russia does have disproportionate military power for its size – but not that much. Russia’s defence spending is one sixth that of NATO defence spending, though it is slightly more efficient because, despite corruption, less of Russia’s defence spending goes into the pockets of arms company shareholders, lobbyists, politicians and other fatcats than happens in the West. But that cannot outweigh Russia’s massive economic disadvantage. Nothing can. Russia is very well placed to defend itself, but in no position to attack major powers.

Russia’s foreign policy successes – in Crimea, Syria and Georgia – have been based not on massive military strength – the NATO powers far outweigh Russia there – but simply on much better statecraft. And NATO, for all the trillions western taxpayers spend on it, has been unable to do anything about it, despite the fact that Russian actions in Crimea and Georgia have been illegal in international law.

In fact if anybody has not worked out by now that our famed nuclear arsenal is a chocolate teapot, then they have not been paying attention. In none of the recent foreign policy crises – including the North Korean nuclearisation issue – nobody, anywhere, ever has mentioned Trident missiles as part of the solution. They are utterly worthless.

The threat of a Russian attack on NATO itself is non-existent. The EU is not officially a military alliance but the idea that any part of EU territory could be subject to invasion without the rest of the EU reacting is a political impossibility. It is very plain that Vladimir Putin’s policy is to reincorporate into Russia those bordering pockets of ethnic Russians in former Soviet states. But this has been approached piecemeal and avoiding major confrontation. There is no practical threat to the Baltic states whose security is already de facto guaranteed by EU membership.

So NATO’s role of defence against Russia is otiose, and its wider military adventures have been a total disaster.

Finally, a thought about China. I cannot think of a parallel to China these last two decades, where any country in history has obtained so much economic pre-eminence in the World and shown so very little interest in military expansion. The invasion of Tibet occurred before China’s economic flowering, and the South China Sea dispute is hardly the invasion of Iraq. I do not claim any expertise in Chinese culture or thought, but they appear to realise that dominance can be achieved by more subtle means than the sword. It is going to be a fascinating few decades as China rapidly overtakes the USA in the superpower stakes.

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According to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), trade disputes are common and they can arise when a government believes that another government has violated an agreement or commitment made in the WTO.

As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, the WTO has endeavored to end such disputes and out of 500 brought since 1995, 350 rulings have been issued.

As of April 2018, China was involved in 55 cases, both as complainant and as respondent:

You will find more infographics at Statista

It has the most of them with the United States where 55 were brought against it while it was the complainant in 10 cases. It had the second-highest number of disputes with the EU (13) while it had 4 with Mexico, all of which were brought against it.

As of April of this year, the WTO says that the United States was involved in 253 cases, both as complainant and as respondent:

You will find more infographics at Statista

52 of the trade disputes with the European Union – it brought 33 of those while 19 were brought against it. There were 32 disputes in total involving trade with China while with Canada, there were 26, most of which were brought by the U.S

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While Chinese markets are still closed for lunch, the announcement of US tariffs on China being officially unleashed – followed swiftly by China commenting that “it’s forced to retaliate” has, of course, been met with a sudden wave of panic-buying in US equity futures…

Shots Fired

0001ET *U.S. TARIFFS ON CHINA TAKE EFFECT AS TRUMP TRADE WAR ESCALATES

0004ET *CHINA SAYS IT HAS TO FIGHT BACK

0006ET *CHINA SAYS IT’S FORCED TO RETALIATE ON U.S. TARIFFS

And Dow Futures spike 100 points…

What a farce – if this holds then Trump will be more than pleased to follow through with more hundreds of billions in tariffs – and new record highs for The Dow?

After early weakness, onshore- and offshore-Yuan are now spiking too…

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Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

Trump and Putin are likely to discuss the tricky situation in southern Syria when they meet; while the US president says he wants US forces back home, the CIA, Pentagon and Israel may be happier to see them stay so the war-torn state remains unstable…

Syrian government tanks and soldiers take positions in the town of Western Ghariyah, about 15km east of the southern embattled city of Daraa. Photo: AFP/ SANA handout released on June 30, 2018.

Ahead of the Eagle-meets-Bear Trump-Putin summit on July 16 in Helsinki, Syria-centered spin has gone into overdrive. Unknown sources have leaked what is billed as President Trump’s alleged Syria deal discussed with Jordan’s King Abdullah.

Trump would “allow” Damascus, supported by Russian air power, to regain its territory along the borders of Jordan, Israel and Iraq. In return, President Putin and Bashar al-Assad would agree to establish an extended demilitarized zone (DMZ) along these same borders, off-limits to any Iranian forces.

That would set the scene for Trump’s already announced desire to extract US forces out of Syria before October and the US mid-term elections. The president would be able to declare the proverbial “Mission Accomplished” in defeating Daesh or Islamic State.

The CIA and the Pentagon are not exactly enthusiastic with Trump’s alleged Syria gambit, to say the least. For assorted neocons and powerful factions of the industrial-military-surveillance complex, “Assad must go” Syria simply cannot be traded off.

And yet there’s nothing to trade. Syria cannot be “offered” to Russia because Russia is already the major player in deciding what happens in Syria, not only militarily but via the ongoing Astana format alongside Iran and Turkey. No wonder the alleged Trump “deal” was duly dismissed by the Kremlin. 

What will be negotiated in the Trump-Putin summit, as Asia Times has learned, is something completely different. This negotiation, incidentally, will happen after the NATO summit in Brussels and before the next Astana format meeting in Sochi on July 30, as confirmed by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Vershinin.

The heart of the matter remains Syria’s territorial integrity and the legitimacy of the government in Damascus. Russia, Iran and, after countless circumvolutions, even Turkey are for it. The NATO-Gulf Cooperation Council alliance is ferociously against it – especially after having, over the past few years, funded and weaponized those notorious “moderate rebels,” the overwhelming majority of which are nothing but takfiri jihadis.

Back to Daraa

And so, as a gloomy serpent biting its own tail, the tragic war in Syria is back to where it first started, seven and a half years ago, to a dusty, dirt-poor, religiously intolerant, back of beyond Daraa. Just across the border with Jordan, it is splendidly convenient crossroads for weapons smuggling destined to the takfiri hordes.

As it stands, the main narrative in Western media is that “regime forces” have unleashed air strikes and barrel bombs over “rebel-held” sections of southern Syria. 

Mohammad Hawari, the UNHCR spokesman in Amman, may be correct when he says: “We’re facing a real humanitarian crisis in southern Syria.” What he does not say is that quite a few “opposition bodies” – code for takfiri jihadis – have rejected Damascus-proposed deals to be back under government control, thus inflating the humanitarian crisis.

Analyst Elijah Magnier has correctly identified the state of things in the battlefield, and some key sticking points have already been agreed on by Moscow and Washington.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) is proceeding flat out in an offensive to reopen the nation’s borders. What has not been negotiated is what happens to a tricky patch partially bordering Jordan and partially in Quneitra province, near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Damascus wants to reopen full trade connectivity between Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, a route that goes all the way to the Gulf via Masna, between Lebanon and Syria, and Naseeb between Syria and Jordan, that is essential to business for all concerned.   

Once again, the holy of the holies concerns al-Qaeda. Actually, Jabhat al-Nusra, as in al-Qaeda in Syria, is now rebranded as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and their allied collection of 54 takfiri militias, trained and weaponized in a base in Jordan, for years, by the CIA and British Special Forces.

It’s no secret in Syria, and Lebanon, how this rebranded al-Qaeda has been intertwined with the militia mishmash that is known as the Southern Front. Their intel HQ is a US-led war-room based in Amman called the Military Operations Center (MOC), as Asia Times confirmed over two years ago. The MOC, staffed by US, UK, France, Jordan, Israel and a few GCC operatives, is responsible for funding, weaponizing, salaries and intelligence for the takfiri galaxy.

The above map, even without getting into detail, at least shows how the rebranded al-Qaeda in Syria is firmly embedded in areas under control by “US-backed rebels.”

Major border trouble

The current Damascus offensive in Daraa will be compounded with an inevitable, further offensive towards the US base at Al Tanf, on the Syria-Iraq border.

Al Tanf is absolutely key to the whole plot, because that’s where US advisers have been for all practical purposes rebranding takfiris into something called Maghawhir al Thawra (Commandos of the Revolution). These takfiri commandos are backed by US air power and have been attacking the SAA outside a “deconfliction zone” that the US has – unilaterally – set up within a 50-kilometer radius of Al Tanf.

The Pentagon narrative is that the US must remain in Syria to fight Daesh. That does not add up considering the Commandos of the Revolution takfiri rebranding coupled with the fact it was the SAA, Iranian advisers, Hezbollah and Russia air power who did the heavy lifting against all takfiri outfits, including Daesh.    

A few Hezbollah advisers are involved in the Daraa offensive. There are no Iranian advisers. Hezbollah special forces are present in areas near the Lebanese border. But the most important point is that after the jihadi outfits are destroyed, they won’t need to remain in Quneitra or near the occupied Golan Heights.

Across the chessboard, what’s really significant, as Magnier notes, is how “the presence of Takfiri Wahhabi jihadists on the Israeli-Syrian borders represents – in Tel Aviv’s view – a security factor to the Israeli Army. And Israel would rather not see the Syrian state recovering and eliminating all terrorists and jihadists.”

The Israeli military is, in fact, claiming that it “accepts” the SAA operations in Daraa and Quneitra. It’s as if Israel agrees to allow Syria to be operating inside … Syria.

Analyst Sharmine Narwani, recently returned from Daraa, is adamant “the US, Israel and their allies cannot win this southern fight. They can only prolong the insecurity for a while before the SAA decides to launch a military campaign against the 54-plus-militias-Nusra occupying the south of Syria.”

So there’s got to be a deal. And this is what Putin and Trump may be able to negotiate in Helsinki.

No Takfiri left behind

The key problem remains how to make Trump understand what’s at stake in terms of US forces leaving Al-Tanf. The Pentagon and the CIA absolutely love the idea of having the Maghawhir takfiris constantly attacking the SAA on the only available crossing between Syria and Iraq on al-Qaim-Albu-Kamal.

The reality, though, will soon set in. Russia is sending extra Special Forces. The SAA is already preparing for the offensive. And the Iraqi People Mobilization Units (PMUs) will also join, everything coordinated by an operations command in Baghdad.

All that is evidence the US does not “have” southern Syria. What the US does have is roughly 2,000 Special Forces embedded with the Kurdish YPG in the landlocked northeast and eastern Syria near the Turkish and Iraqi borders. Absolutely no one wants them there, except the YPG.

It’s no secret the usual War Party suspects want Syria balkanized and unable to concentrate on economic recovery, with help from Russia, China and Iran, to become a key node in Eurasia integration.

As for Putin’s priorities, they are crystal clear: Syria’s territorial integrity, the stability of the government in Damascus and The Gates of Hell for all takfiri jihadis, whatever their denomination, so there won’t be any further blowback in the Caucasus.

It’s up to Trump, or the CIA, or the Pentagon if they insist on considering “No Takfiri Left Behind” a sound geopolitical strategy.

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The era of commercial supersonic flight could be just around the corner (again).

This November, residents will get to hear “quiet” sonic booms as military jets race above the skies of Galveston, Texas, said NASA.

Part of the Low-Boom Flight Demonstration program (LBFD), the space agency recently awarded Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works a $247.5-million contract to design, build and flight test a low-boom X-plane that could produce a quiet supersonic aircraft in the next three to five years.

The experimental aircraft dubbed X-59 “QueSST,” is scheduled to take to the skies in 2021 with a top velocity of 1.5 times the speed of sound, or about 990 miles per hour at an altitude of 55,000 feet. The jet will only have room for a pilot, as it tests design principles that soften the sonic boom.

“It is super exciting to be back designing and flying X-planes at this scale,” said Jaiwon Shin, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics. “Our long tradition of solving the technical barriers of supersonic flight to benefit everyone continues.”

The news comes about four months after President Trump signed the federal budget deal, which funds the Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator (LBFD) program. In the budget proposal, the Trump administration noted that the X-plane “would open a new market for U.S. companies to build faster commercial airliners, creating jobs and cutting cross-country flight times in half.”

While the X-59 is more of a concept than reality, NASA will use McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornets over Galveston to imitate the sonic profile of the X-plane while residents and sound recording sensors document the sonic booms overhead — if there are any.

During the tests this fall, F/A-18 Hornets will perform dives at supersonic speeds, making powerful sonic booms over the Gulf of Mexico and quieter booms over the coastal city. Simultaneously, a network of “audio sensors strategically placed around the city” will provide scientists with a decibel reading of how loud the sonic booms were, said NASA. About 500 local volunteers will be dispersed around the region to document their experience. The combination of audio sensors and the “human factor” will give scientists a better understanding if the LBFD program can produce “quiet” sonic booms.

According to NASA, the Gulf Coast city was selected because of its location near the Gulf of Mexico, allowing the F/A-18s to keep its louder sonic booms (near the dive point) out to sea, while sending muffled sonic thumps [X-59 supersonic profile] towards the city.

“We’ll never know exactly what everyone heard. We won’t have a noise monitor on their shoulder inside their home,” Alexandra Loubeau, NASA’s team lead for sonic boom community response research at Langley, Virginia, said in a statement. “But we’d like to at least have an estimate of the range of noise levels that they actually heard.”

The technology behind the X-59’s noise-reducing ability is its uniquely shaped structure, designed so that supersonic shockwaves do not build up into strong sonic booms.

“With the X-59 you’re still going to have multiple shockwaves because of the wings on the aircraft that create lift and the volume of the plane. But the airplane’s shape is carefully tailored such that those shockwaves do not combine,” said Ed Haering, a NASA aerospace engineer at Armstrong.

“Instead of getting a loud boom-boom, you’re going to get at least two quiet thump-thump sounds, if you even hear them at all,” he said.

“This is why the F/A-18 is so important to us as a tool. While construction continues on the X-59, we can use that diving maneuver to generate quiet sonic thumps over a specific area,” Haering added.

The X-59 is expected for delivery by the second half of 2021. Once the prototype is built and its “quiet” sonic booms confirmed, NASA stated it would conduct test flights across the United States.

Sonic booms have been a problem for aeronautical engineers for decades. In 1973, the U.S. banned commercial supersonic flights over the mainland for concern that sonic booms posed an extreme public nuisance. This was a significant challenge for the Anglo-French Concorde project to expand, which ultimately led to its retirement in 2003.

While commercial supersonic airliners have been around for decades, commercial flights were halted following the Year 2000 crash of Air France Flight 4590. However, the Trump administration is making a move to reintroduce these planes by the mid-2020 period. That is, assuming “quiet” sonic booms can be confirmed via NASA.

Meanwhile, the real test is about a decade later, because it is around early 2030 or mid-2030s when hypersonic airliners are expected to be introduced to the public domain. When that happens, and assuming commercial flight is cost-effective, it would spark the next “travel” revolution around the world.

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Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

When a baby is born, its parents teach it how to eat solid foods and walk and talk, which generally works out fine. Then they start teaching the baby all the lies their parents taught them, and things start to get messy.

When the baby is old enough, they send it to school, where it spends twelve years being taught lies about how the world works so that one day it will be able to watch CNN and say “Yes, this makes perfect sense” instead of “This is ridiculous” or “Why does this whole entire thing seem completely fake?” or “I want to punch Chris Cuomo in the throat.”

The baby is taught history, which is the study of the ancient, leftover propaganda from whichever civilization happened to win the wars in a given place at a given time.

The baby is taught geography, so that later on when its country begins bombing another country, the baby’s country won’t be embarrassed if its citizens cannot find that country on a globe.

The baby is taught obedience, and the importance of performing meaningless tasks in a timely manner. This prepares the baby for the half century of pointless gear-turning it will be expected to undertake after graduation.

The baby is taught that it lives in a free country, with a legitimate electoral system which facilitates meaningful elections of actual representatives in a real government. It is never taught that those elections, representatives and government are all owned and operated by the very rich, who use them to ensure policies which make them even richer while keeping everyone else as poor as possible so that they won’t have to share political power. It is never taught that highly secretive intelligence and defense agencies form alliances with those rich people to advance murderous and exploitative agendas for profit and power. It is never taught that the things it sees on television are mostly lies.

The baby is smoothly, seamlessly funneled from uterus to full-time employment through this system, often with a little religion mixed in to really drive home the importance of obedience and meekness and the nobility of poverty. From there the various screens in the baby’s life take over its continuing education, tightening the bolts of the propaganda cage and making sure that baby keeps turning those gears without asking too many questions. This continuing education continues until the baby dies in a mass shooting or nuclear holocaust, or of cancer from trying to numb the pain of living with cigarettes, or of liver failure from trying to numb the pain of living with alcohol, or of suicide because it just couldn’t take it anymore, or from its body and brain simply falling apart after a long, pointless, immensely unsatisfying life.

So now you’ve got all these babies wandering around, just as confused and clueless as the day they were born, thinking thoughts they were told to think and believing beliefs they were told to believe. Some are better at feigning confidence than others, but one baby’s guess about what’s going on is really as good as the next baby’s. The only thing any of them have ever known is the stories that they have been told.

So those stories get treated as something very important. All they’ve been taught to believe from womb to present moment tells them that it’s very important to keep turning those gears and walking in the same direction as all the other babies, so if all of a sudden one baby steps out of line and starts saying things like “Uhh, guys? We’re marching off a cliff of ecocide and omnicide. Maybe we should turn around?” or “It’s all a lie! We’re being exploited and deceived by an Orwellian oligarchy!”, that baby will usually sound crazy to all the other babies.

“Shut up you crazy conspiracy theorist baby,” they might say.

“We all agree on our story about what’s going on. Our parents told us the same story, our teachers told us the same story, the news man on TV told us the same story, and the politicians told us the same story. We can’t all be wrong!”

But of course they can, and they are.

All it takes is a dominant power structure wielding sufficient control of the stories that all the babies are told.

Imagine, though, if one of the other babies stepped forward and said,

“You know what? Maybe that baby is right. None of the stories we’re told have ever added up.

How come voting never seems to make much difference no matter who we elect and our lives stay shitty even though we always vote for the politician who promises to make them better?

How come the news man on TV is always telling us about a New Official Bad Guy we need to go bomb, and how come it always happens the same way each time?

And how come they can always afford all those big fancy bombs while we’re getting poorer and poorer?”

Then the story of total agreement would be disrupted. If another baby steps forward and does the same thing the story loses even more weight. If those babies get better at communicating with other babies, say with the invention of the internet, more and more babies start questioning the official stories they’ve been told since birth, and before long there’s no more herd mentality keeping all the babies moving in the same direction.

But those gears still need turning if the rich are going to remain rich and powerful. So they come up with even more stories to restore authority to their old stories about what’s going on. Stories about Russian propaganda, stories about fake news, stories about “useful idiots”, a term applied to babies who believe different stories from the ones they were taught by their parents and teachers and the news man. They do this because they know if they no longer have widespread consensus giving the illusion of credibility to their stories, they’re going to have to start relying on facts and evidence. And that won’t go well for them at all.

And now the babies are growing restless. The babies are growing cranky. The old lullabies aren’t keeping them asleep anymore.

The babies are waking up. The babies are growing up. Soon the babies won’t be babies anymore. Soon the babies will be able to tell their own stories. True stories.

What will happen to those gears then? What will happen to the machines they power? The answer to that question is why the rich have been fighting so hard for so long to sing the old lullabies, and keep the babies asleep.

*  *  *

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In his summary of today’s (disappointing) ADP report, Mark Zandi said that “Business’ number one problem is finding qualified workers. At the current pace of job growth, if sustained, this problem is set to get much worse. These labor shortages will only intensify across all industries and company sizes.” As it turns out, this is just one more way in which the US is gradually becoming like Japan.

In his latest note, SocGen’s Albert Edwards cites a recent story in the Nikkei which reveals just how much worse America’s labor shortage problem could get as US demographics start to approximate those of Japan:

“A record-high 98.0% of newly minted university graduates in Japan have landed jobs at the beginning of this fiscal year in April. The employment rate of job-seeking graduates rose 0.4 percentage point from a year earlier, up for the seventh consecutive year, in an annual survey conducted since 1997 by the labour and education ministries. The employment rate among new high school graduates who sought jobs as of the end of March gained 0.1 percentage point to 98.1%, up for the eighth straight year.”

Now that’s what full employment looks like, and as Edwards further notes, “all this is happening without the help of large tax cuts and repatriated foreign earnings. Japan is enjoying what ostensibly appears to be a healthy, balanced recovery – albeit with the very large caveat that it is dependent on the most ludicrous QE ever seen in a modern economy.”

But why if Japanese labor shortages are so extensive, and with a near record low unemployment rate, does Japan’s wage inflation remain so muted. Well, it actually isn’t: as Edwards also points out, “extreme labor shortages have seen a jump in wage inflation and household incomes are now growing some 3% yoy, dragging consumer spending growth kicking and screaming in its wake.”

Then, on Friday morning Japan reported an absolutely barnburner of a number, confirming that wage inflation in Japan is indeed suddenly rampaging: nominal cash wages soared by 2.1% y/y in May, up from 0.6% in April and more than double the median estimate of 0.9%, matching the fastest increase since 1994. Basic wage growth accelerated to +1.5% yoy (April: +0.9%), and special wages rose 14.6%, lifting the overall wage reading by +0.6 points

As a result, real wage growth increased sharply to +1.3% yoy, from -0.2% in April, after adjusting for a 0.8% yoy rise in May in the CPI excluding imputed rent.

As a Bloomberg commentator said, “all that’s needed now is for Japanese households to start spending and the elusive inflation rise toward 2.0% may actually begin.”

Alas, that’s isn’t happening because in a separate report, Japanese household spending tumbled -3.9%, more than double the -1.5% decline expected, and the biggest drop since August 2016.

As Bloomberg’s Garfield Reynolds writes, “Japanese household thrift looks to be so ingrained as to dash any hopes that consumer demand will be able to spur economic growth and inflation.”

Or, perhaps, none of this is real, and Japan is merely the latest nation to “Chinafy” its data reporting: as Goldman Sachs writes in a note on today’s report, based on the old sample groups, wage growth actually stagnated in May:

As we have noted previously, roughly half of the sample group for the monthly labor statistics was replaced in January 2018, but the official statistics directly compare average wages for old and new sample groups on a yoy basis, possibly creating data distortion.

The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) discloses wage growth data for old sample groups (companies still included in the survey) for reference purposes. According to these data, basic wages rose sharply to +0.7% yoy in May, from +0.1% in April. However, this merely represents a return to the trend from October 2017 through March 2018 (basic wages briefly declined sharply in April). Nominal cash wages in May came in at +0.2% yoy on an old sample basis, a slight decline from April (+0.4%).

So which is it: is Japan simply statistically skewing the sample to fabricate and goal seek data it wants, “confirming” Abenomics is working when it isn’t, meanwhile Japan’s population refuses to spend (money which it may not have beyond some computer’s statistical model), or is the alternative more likely: that nothing at all has changed and that after 6 years of Abenomics, all Japan has to show for the biggest monetary experiment in history is a higher stock market, and a central bank which now owns 42% of the country’s bonds, and amount roughly equivalent to Japan’s GDP…

… and will soon run out of bonds to buy…

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Authored by Dan Kurz via DKAnalytics.com,

The good:

“Red state” Americans, yours truly included, are grateful that President Trump is calling out the fake news for what it is: fake — and out to get any powerbrokers that threaten its pervasive media dominance.  Clearly, a media with a revolving-door to bureaucrats has facilitated unprecedented industry consolidation since President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996.  The increasingly incestuous, oligopolistic relationship between big government and big business has resulted in a crony press that rivals the Pravda (“truth”) press in the former USSR.  Thus, instead of news and a check on increasingly abusive government power as the Framers intended, the misnamed “Main Stream Media” (MSM) has been generating propaganda supportive of an increasingly fascist regime, i.e., the US government.

Billionaire real estate and successful entertainment tycoon Donald Trump refused to become part of today’s MSM quid pro quo.  He didn’t have to, nor did he want to.  Instead, he took his “America First” (including bringing jobs back home) message to “flyover country” via the Internet/his Twitter account and as supplemented by his frequent, rousing, and well-attended speeches.  Critically, he was also backed by the one largely anti-leftist entity in the MSM, ratings dominating Fox News, which has long resonated with “red state” Americans.  Thus, the battle lines were drawn.  An all-out MSM backlash against this nonconformist ensued, and “news” morphed even more completely into statist, anti-Trumppropaganda, a.k,a., fake news.  It wasn’t only fabricated stories, one-sided allegations or quotes taken out of context, but utter and complete suppression by the vast majority of the MSM of lawless behaviorby those positioned at the top echelons of federal power during the prior administration as well as unconstitutional behavior being carried forward into the current administration and into the 115th US Congress.

The Trump administration, however compromised, appears to be making a largely clandestine effort(via sealed indictments) to smoke out the “deep state” (the unelected bureaucracy and its hangers-on both inside and outside the government) lawlessness it has been a victim of.  Any success here, no matter how unlikely given the de facto “broad daylight conspiracy” — criminal decision makers keeping quiet buttressed by their staffs wanting to maintain the huge bureaucracy’s unconstitutional power, their outsized compensation and their privileged benefits status quo — would be monumental.  Such an achievement could spark a rule of law revival, arresting our B.R. trajectory. Meanwhile, a strategic return to greater constitutional fidelity is getting a sorely needed lift by Trump’s fine judge/justice selections!

The bad:

Trump’s integrity.  Is it there, when it counts, beyond his stellar judge selections and beyond the fact that he isn’t an “unindicted felon,” i.e., Hillary Clinton?  This isn’t an idle concern, for integrity begets and nourishes credibility, which is critical to a president’s “bully pulpit” efficacy in “troubled times.” 

Some worrisome signs include:

• His real estate developer exploitation of the property rights-curdling Kelo New London decisionsuggests neither fidelity to a constitutional anchor (property rights tied at hip to liberty) nor to the lot of everyday Americans.

• His tabloidesque remarks about Ted Cruz’s dad being involved in the JFK assassination give further pause.

• His debate claim of putting Hillary in jail if he’s elected only to pathetically comment, once president-elect, that “Hillary Clinton had suffered enough” is disingenuous at best.

• His apt campaign claims that the low unemployment rate was fake, the recovery was the weakest ever, and the stock market was a bubble susceptible to an interest rate spike morphed into the lowest unemployment rate since the turn of the century, the best economy ever, and the best stock marketever once he sat in the oval office.

• From vowing to crack down on illegal immigration and erecting a wall on the southern border, Trump’s 1.8m “pre-wall” amnesty proposal threatens to effectively “green-light” the very illegal, third world immigration that has led to a massive transfer of property from citizens to aliens while thwarting wages and Balkanizing America.

• From railing against Goldman Sachs cronyism and globalism on the campaign trail to a GS-laced Trump cabinet!

• From vowing to shrink the federal government once elected, Trump signed legislation which further bloats it.

Instead of being honest about the long, tough road ahead to bring America back to manufacturing strength (reindustrialization takes time!), Trump has preferred exerting unconstitutional pressure on select manufacturers to highlight US job preservation thanks to his intervention, even as a closer look at such “agreements” disclosed heightened taxpayer expense and producers’ expanded outsourcing options. How does one spell demagoguery?

The ugly:

A potential Trump trade war is a huge risk to both the US and the global economy, but the US is especially vulnerable.  This is due to America’s largely self-inflicted manufacturing enfeeblement, its huge net dependency on foreign goods (just go to WalMart’s non-grocery aisles) and foreign financing, and its dependency on continued widespread overseas acceptance of dollar-based trade, … despite America’s $7.9trn net debtor status vis-à-vis the rest of the world, over $21trn in US debt, and the US’s decade-long $1trn plus average yearly expansion in federal debt. 

Some reflections:

• Is Trump going the Hoover route (dangerous “interventionism” and an escalating trade war)? Hoover was a leading industrialist before he became president.  Are we about to revisit this dark chapter in history?

• A nation that has an $800bn plus annual deficit in goods trade and has lost a vital portion of its manufacturing base can ill afford to start a trade war, from consumers’ or producers’ perspectives. It needs component parts that are often made only overseas nowadays (think the “787” or US-assembled cars) to produce high-value added finished products for domestic consumption and for exports, much less give it the ability to restore a domestic supplier base and address destructive corporate governance and compensation (more below).

• Tariffs are taxes on Americans that the feds collect – we thought Trump was about shrinking government?

• Protectionism (tariffs) is the worst form of cronyism: domestic steel and aluminum shareholders and their “Wilbur Ross cronies” will do fine, but domestic manufacturers of Maytag washers, Ford trucks, Harley Davidson motorcycles, GE locomotives, CAT dozers, Carrier chillers, etc. (and their workforces) will be negatively impacted or worse (bankruptcy). This is thanks to the resulting uncompetitive materials costs and/or retail prices that are out of consumers’ reach both domestically and in export markets, where outfits such as Harley will face a one-two punch of higher domestic steel and aluminum prices and tit-for-tat import tariffs for US made bikes.

• Trump should solely be talking up lowering tariffs globally — e.g., seeking Mexico’s zero tariffs to 44 nations.

• As is widely known, our top brass corporate compensation structure (CEO compensation was some 20x the average worker in 1965 and 271x in 2016), including $7m CEO signing bonuses and relatively rapid vesting of untold millions of underpriced options, coupled with litigation and regulatory insanity have come together to yield a “slash & burn” business model. In today’s world, the C-Suite a) no longer has parallel strategic organic growth interests (p. 5) with the American workers, taxpayers, and communities, b) is incentivized to cut/gut domestic cap ex instead of investing, and c) is motivated to outsource and fire domestically instead of hiring and training American workers.  Today’s senior management is rewarded for slashing costs while buying back stock with both cash flow and by issuing trillions in new debt to give EPS a “financial engineering lift.”  The C-Suite focus: drive up the stock price ASAP instead of focusing on building globally competitive products, which is an unending effort.  As such, “corporate anorexia“ has become the destructive norm.  Coupled with lacking trade schools, a failing educational system, and perpetually large government deficits, these are the true flies in the ointment!

Unfortunately, such truths don’t make for great soundbites, but they remain truths.  Plus, other high-wage workforces (with generally better paid workers than in the US) operating in generally strong currency nations — e.g., Switzerland, Germany, and, for a long time, Japan — have generated sustained and substantial trade surpluses of recent vintage that sometimes extended for decades, and typically included surpluses with China.

Commensurately, those that blame high US wages or a strong buck as “America’s chief culprits” are just not getting the big picture right, much less how to best address it: with “brick-by-brick” home-grown solutions (for largely home-made problems) instead of with misleading, silly, and patronizing claims of having (virtually) instantly “made America great again!”  Moreover, reputational integrity does matter when a president is attempting to make constructive deals for his country.  Yes, Virginia, both policy and integrity (character) matter.

Allocation conclusion:

If, against all odds, the rule of law is restored in the US and the lawless actors infesting the governing class/controlling the instrumentalities of power are brought to justice, the profound and breath-takingly stunning “gravity of it all” would rapidly turn greed into fear in terms of so-called “traditional asset” valuations.  In other words, sales would drive risk premiums much higher and net present values much lower, pricking today’s “bubble valuations.”

In the meantime, the US government’s reckless, deficitary fiscal policy would be even more exposed in a GDP-pummeling trade war — we are already way overdue for a recession amidst a historically weak, productivity-waning, debt-encumbered, artificial recovery.  Huge US commitments, political calculations, and a fiat currency — “The US can pay any debt …, it just can’t guarantee purchasing power” — could result in unprecedented amounts of dollar printing.  It appears to be more a question of “when” rather than “if.”  This suggests that the buck will be sacrificed in a tactical attempt to protect money center bank balance sheets (and the Fed itself) from “valuation meltdowns” and to meet “nominal dollar commitments” of a strategic nature.  Monetization of debt would become permanent and be expanded upon.  How does one spell doubling-down on currency debasement?  Against this backdrop, it is hard to imagine a secularly more bullish case for undervalued precious metals — and a more opportune time to reduce exposure to massively overvalued bonds and stocks.  (And please recall, markets are “reversion beyond the mean machines!”)

Finally, it is fitting indeed, on Independence Day, that we celebrate America’s historical blueprints — The Declaration of Independence, which led to the first-ever strict enumeration of governmental powers and codification of individual liberty and inalienable rights, otherwise known as the US Constitution, including the Bill of Rights.  How appropriate that Americans, and proponents of codified freedom around the globe, still have the unique opportunity to fortify their financial fortunes with the very “constitutional money” that could prove pivotal in the challenging times ahead in terms of supporting their families and in terms of helping to rebuild a return to free market capitalism and constitutionalism.  An increasing number of originalist/constitutional judges should be of strategic help.  Thank you, Mr. President.

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A senior Kremlin official tells Bloomberg that Vladimir Putin is preparing to offer significant concessions to President Trump at their July 16 summit in Helsinki, Finland in the hopes of beginning to repair strained relations between Russia and the United States. Chief among them, according to the official, is a discussion on Iran’s role in Syria – an issue that Moscow is simultaneously coordinating with Tehran.

Putin has agreed in principle to U.S. and Israeli demands that Iranian-backed forces in southern Syria be kept away from Israel’s border, replaced with troops loyal to the government in Damascus, two Kremlin advisers said.

After studying Trump’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, during which he announced a surprise halt to U.S. military exercises with South Korea, Putin decided he needs to negotiate with the billionaire personally, the senior official said, without elaborating. The two leaders may meet without aides, as Trump and Kim did in Singapore, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. –Bloomberg

In advance of the summit, U.S. ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman, briefed President Trump during a one-on-one conference call Thursday – saying that Trump will go into the meeting with “eyes wide open.” 

Trump, meanwhile, has broken with Obama’s policy of demanding that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad be removed from power, a position reportedly formed before Russia and Iran turned the tide of the Syrian civil war in Assad’s favor against U.S. backed rebels. This sentiment was backed by U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton – who on Sunday told CBS News that Assad is no longer “the strategic issue” in Syria. Instead, Iran is now the focus. 

“We’ll see what happens when the two of them get together,” said Bolton, who never met a regime he didn’t want to change. “There are possibilities for doing a larger negotiation on helping to get Iranian forces out of Syria and back into Iran, which would be a significant step forward.”

Russia views the upcoming Trump-Putin summit as an opportunity to mend fences with the United States. Relations have soured dramatically since the days Bill Clinton was hanging out at Putin’s Moscow estate – within hours of collecting $500,000 for a speech to a Kremlin investment bank – in the same month Russia assumed control over 20% of U.S. uranium under Hillary Clinton’s State Department. But that was 2010. Since then, Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and allegedly hacked the 2016 U.S. election – which the Kremlin has been heavily sanctioned for. 

Still, major questions remain over Putin’s ability to actually enforce any agreement governing Iran’s actions in Syria, even if he offers to stabilize the border with Israel by sending troops into the area. This has in turn caused some in Washington and among Western allies in Europe that Trump may prematurely tout the Helsinki meeting without actually achieving real concessions. 

Russia may have supplanted America as the indispensable arbiter in various Mideast conflicts but there’s only so far Putin is willing to go to appease Trump when it comes to Iran, according to Andrei Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research group set up by the Kremlin. –Bloomberg

“Trump can’t force Putin to turn away from Iran,” Kortunov said. “Putin is not willing to push Iran too hard and he cannot rely on Trump.”

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Authored by Antonius Aquinas via AntoniusAquinas.com,

Two recent articles (here and here) have again demonstrated that the greatest “terrorist” entity on earth is not the boogeymen – Russia, China, Iran, North Korea – so often portrayed by Western presstitudes and the American government; but the United States itself!  Ever since World War II, the US has been the most militaristic, far surpassing all of the Communist and dictatorial regimes combined.

Some startling and rarely reported facts:

• Currently, the US drops on someone or something a deadly explosive once every12 minutes

• W. Bush’s military dropped 70,000 bombs on five different nations during his murderous regime

• Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Barrack Obomber, launched 100,000 bombs on seven countries

• Funding this mass murder is a reportedly $21 trillion (!) that is unaccounted for in the Pentagon’s coffers

Despite all of the “America First” bluster at the start of the Trump Administration, little has changed but, in fact, things have escalated.  While G.W. Bush in his wicked eight years dropped over 24 bombs per day and his successor upped that total to 34 bombs per day, the current Bomber-in-Chief has, in his first year in office, averaged 121 bombs per day!  For the initial year of his Presidency, 44,000 bombs were dropped on people and lands despite the fact that the US is not officially at war with a single country!

Despite these grisly statistics, which are hardly ever reported by the mainstream press, the military industrial complex and the controlled Western media outlets have propagated the lie of “precision bombing.”  Precision bombing has been trumpeted to minimize the effect of US aggression to the public that only true belligerents are targeted and not innocents.

When US bombing is reported by the press, the actual casualties and property damage are never accurately given.  The most notorious example of this mendacity was the coverage of Bush II’s Iraq war.  “The US and its allies ruthlessly carpet-bombed Iraq,” a UN report acknowledged, “reducing it from ‘a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society’ to a ‘pre-industrial age nation.’”

Later accounts of what actually happened showed that “only seven percent of the 88,500 tons of bombs and missiles devastating Iraq were ‘precision weapons.’”

Despite these facts, US policy makers have the gall to call certain regimes “rogue” and/or “terrorist.”  Do not look for any de-escalation, however, as “defense” spending for 2018 is set at $700 billion with an increase of $16 billion in the following year.  Yes, more taxes extorted from the public for the pulverization of peoples and their homes across the globe!

Even if these statistics were of common knowledge, do not look for things to change.  The majority of the American public loves its military and government and has been conditioned to overlook and accept nearly all of its military engagements and the propaganda that attempts to justify them.

What must change is ideology which, at one time, was strongly anti-interventionist, but gradually became pro-war.  Through education, the press, books, and the electronic media, the intelligentsia was able to manipulate public opinion.  Americans began to glorify war under the guise of spreading democracy and “freedom” to everyone, whether they wanted it or not.

Under current ideological conditions, a reversal of thinking to a non-interventionist foreign policy is not likely.  The only way that the nation’s rampaging foreign policy will be checked is through an economic collapse or a severe dollar crisis, the latter of which would end the greenback’s status as the world’s reserve currency.

If America no longer has the means to fund its military around the world, its imperialism will quickly come to an end.  It is extremely burdensome on a domestic economy to maintain a global empire and one that is actively engaged in costly military operations.  If the nation’s economy severely contracts or the dollar can no longer be printed with impunity, the bombing of other peoples and political involvement in overseas affairs would have to cease, or be drastically curtailed.  A historical example of this is Great Britain after WWII.

As it stands now, only financial calamity will bring down the world’s foremost terrorist state.  If such a scenario comes about, the US may become the recipient of the destruction, loss of life, and mayhem it has unleashed upon the world.

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