Category: zerohedge

Authored by Eric Zuesse via Strategic-Culture.org,

On Friday July15^th, as the national news media were either on vacation or preparing for the opening of the Trump National Convention on Monday the 18^th, the long-awaited release of the ‘missing’ 28 pages from the US Senate’s 9/11 report occurred («DECEMBER 2002: JOINT INQUIRY INTO INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES BEFORE AND AFTER THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001»). The official title of this document is «PART FOUR – FINDING, DISCUSSION AND NARRATIVE REGARDING CERTAIN SENSITIVE NATIONAL SECURITY MATTERS», and it constitutes pages 6-34 of a pdf. (Some writers mistakenly call it «29 pages».)

It «was kept secret from the public on the orders of former President George W. Bush», and remained secret under Bush’s successor Barack Obama, until that Friday night late in Obama’s Second Administration, right before a week of Republican National Convention news would be dominating the news (along with any racial incidents, which would be sure to distract the public even more from any indication of Bush’s guilt). The pdf was of a picture-file so as to be non-searchable by journalists and thus slow to interpret, and thus would impede press-coverage of it. The file was also of a very degraded picture of the pages, so as to make the reading of it even more uninviting and difficult. Well, that was a skillful news-release-and-coverup operation! The Federal Government had plenty of time to do this right, but they evidently had plenty of incentive to do it wrong. They’re not incompetent; the reasonable explanation is something worse than that. (After all, this information has been hidden from the public for all of the 13+ years since that report was published without the 28 pages at the end of 2002.)

What these 28 long-suppressed pages revealed was well summarized by one succinct reader who wrote:

"The Inquiry discloses that there is a very direct chain of evidence about financing and logistics… [that] goes from the Saudi Royal family (Amb. Bandar's wife and Bandar's checking account) and Saudi consulate employees (al Thumiari) to the agent handlers (Basnan and al Bayoumi) to some of the 9/11 hijackers (Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi)."

In other words, Prince Bandar bin-Sultan al-Saud, known in Washington as «Bandar Bush» (for his closeness to the Bush family), and who served at that time as Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the United States, paid tens of thousands of dollars to Saudi Arabia’s «handlers» who were directing two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Also, one of Bandar’s subordinates at the Embassy, named al-Thumiari, was likewise paying the person who was paying and managing those two jihadists.

The report said:

"FBI files suggest that al-Bayoumi provided substantial assistance to hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi after they arrived in San Diego in February 2000… According to an October 14, 2002 FBI document, al-Bayoumi has ‘extensive ties to the Saudi Government’… According to the FBI, al-Bayoumi was in frequent contact with the Emir at the Ministry of Defense, responsible for air traffic control… Al-Bayoumi was receiving money from the Saudi Ministry of Defense… Al-Bayoumi was known to have access to large amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that he did not appear to hold a job… Al-Bayoumi’s pay increased during the time that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were in the United States."

Also, an FBI agent testified on 9 October 2002 regarding al-Bayoumi, and said Bayoumi: 

"acted like a Saudi intelligence officer, in my opinion. And if he was involved with the hijackers, which it looks like he was, if he signed leases, if he provided some sort of financing… then I would say that there’s a clear possibility that there might be a connection between Saudi intelligence and UBL [Usama bin Laden]."

Moreover: «The FBI has now confirmed that only Osama Bassnan’s wife received money directly from Prince Bandar’s wife, but that al-Bayoumi’s wife attempted to deposit three of the checks from Prince Bandar’s wife, which were payable to Bassnan’s wife, into her own accounts… Bassnan was a very close associate of Omar al-Bayoumi’s and was in telephone contact with al-Bayoumi several times a day».

Furthermore: «Bassnan’s wife received a monthly stipend from Princess Haifa».

And: «On at least one occasion, Bassnan received a check directly from Prince Bandar’s account. According to the FBI, on May 14, 1998, Bassnan cashed a check from Bandar in the amount of $15,000. Bassnan’s wife also received at least one check directly from Bandar… for $10,000… FBI Executive Assistant Director D’Amuro commented on this financing: «I believe that we do have money going from Bandar’s wife, $2,000 a month up to about $64,000».

Also:

"On March 28, 2002, US and coalition forces retrieved the telephone book of Abu Zubayda, whom the US Government has identified as a senior al-Qa’ida operational coordinator. According to an FBI document, ‘a review of toll records has linked [to] ASPCOL Corporation in Aspen, Colorado… ASPCOL is the umbrella corporation that manages the affairs of the Colorado residence of Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador… The US Government also located another Virginia number at an Usama bin Laden safehouse in Pakistan… [where a person was] interviewed by the FBI in June 2002. He could not explain why his number ended up at a safehouse in Pakistan, but stated that he regularly provides services to a couple who are personal assistants to Prince Bandar."

This has to be seen in the context of George W Bush’s very close and longstanding personal friendship with Prince Bandar, and also in the context of Bandar’s career.

Bandar has long been involved, both officially and unofficially, in the intelligence operations of the Saud family (which own Saudi Arabia). During October 2005 through January 2015, he served as secretary general of Saudi Arabia’s National Security Council, and he also was director general of the Saudi Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014. Furthermore, the just-released report asserts:

«The FBI also received reports from individuals in the Muslim community alleging that Bassnan might be a Saudi intelligence agent. According to a CIA memo, Basnan reportedly received funding and possibly a fake passport from Saudi Government officials. He and his wife have received financial support from the Saudi Ambassador to the United States and his wife… A CIA report also indicates that Bassnan traveled to Houston in 2002 and… that during that trip a member of the Saudi royal family provided Bassnan with a significant amount of cash… FBI information indicates that Bassnan is an extremist and a supporter of Usama bin Laden».

Regarding Shaykh al-Thumairy, he was «an accredited diplomat at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles and one of the ‘imams’ at the King Fahd Mosque… built in 1998 from funding provided by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdulaziz. The mosque… is widely recognized for its anti-Western views».

The 28 pages also include lots more, but those facts give at least some solid indications of the links that Prince Bandar had to 9/11.

And other FBI offices than in San Diego were basically not even covered in the 28 pages; this was a rush-job by a Senate Committee, and with enormous resistance from the White House, which did everything they could to block the investigators.

Furthermore: none of this information is as solid as the sworn court-testimony of the captured former bagman for al-Qaeda, their bookkeeper who personally collected each one of the million-dollar cash donations to the organization and named many donors, including Prince Bandar, as having been among the people from whom he picked up those suitcases full of cash. He said of their donations: «It was crucial. I mean, without the money of the – of the Saudi you will have nothing». The authors of the Senate investigation report, never got any wind of this, because that man was in a US prison and held incommunicado until that court-case in October 2014. But it was virtually the entire Saud family – not merely Bandar – who funded 9/11.

So, we know that Bandar «Bush» was practically like a brother to George W Bush, but what other indications do we have of GWB’s guilt in the planning of the 9/11 attacks?

First of all, if he wasn’t involved in the attack’s planning, then he was grossly incompetent and uncaring, to the point of criminal negligence for the numerous attempts that the CIA had made to warn GWB that such an attack was being planned and would occur soon – that he simply ignored those warnings. Criminal negligence, however, isn’t the same as being a traitor. That’s far more serious, and it would entail Bush’s conscious desire for such an attack to occur. Such evidence does exist. Here it is:

Researcher Chris Whipple headlined at Politico, on 12 November 2015, «‘The Attacks Will Be Spectacular’», and he reported:

«Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US» The CIA’s famous Presidential Daily Brief, presented to George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, has always been Exhibit A in the case that his administration shrugged off warnings of an Al Qaeda attack. But months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.

By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, ‘it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.’ ‘There were real plots being manifested,’ Cofer’s former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years…

The crisis came to a head on July 10. The critical meeting that took place that day was first reported by Bob Woodward in 2006. Tenet also wrote about it in general terms in his 2007 memoir At the Center of the Storm.

But neither he nor Black has spoken about it publicly in such detail until now — or been so emphatic about how specific and pressing their warnings really were. Over the past eight months, in more than a hundred hours of interviews, my partners Jules and Gedeon Naudet and I talked with Tenet and the 11 other living former CIA directors for The Spymasters, a documentary set to air this month on Showtime.

The drama of failed warnings began when Tenet and Black pitched a plan, in the spring of 2001, called «the Blue Sky paper» to Bush’s new national security team. It called for a covert CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threat — ‘getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.’ ‘And the word back,’ says Tenet, ‘was «we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking». (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.)»

Five days later, I wrote an article interpreting that, titled «Politico Reports Bush Knew 2001 Terror-Attack Was Imminent and Wanted It». Readers here are referred to that, for the continuation of the case here.

For additional information on the bonding between the Saudi aristocracy and the US aristocracy, see this and this. It’s important to understand in order to be able to understand why Obama helped to set up the 21 August 2013 Syrian sarin attack to be blamed on Bashar al-Assad, who is allied with Russia. The US is allied with the Saud family, against Russia; and Syria is allied with Russia and refuses to allow pipelines for gas from Qatar and oil from Saudi Arabia through Syria to replace gas and oil that Russia has been selling to the EU. (Like RFK Jr. properly headlined on 25 February 2016, «Syria: Another Pipeline War». That’s why the Sauds want Assad dead.)

via http://ift.tt/2a4qdu7 Tyler Durden

A WSJ reporter who covers the Middle East had a very “troubling” close-encounter with the US police superstate.

Maria Abi-Habib was detained by federal agents at Los Angeles International Airport, who demanded to confiscate her two cell phones, and was shocked to learn that border agents have the authority to do that. The reporter has both U.S. and Lebanese citizenship and was traveling on an American passport. She was flying into Los Angeles from Beirut last Thursday when she taken out of line at immigration.

“They grilled me for an hour,” she wrote. “I answered jovially, because I’ve had enough high-level security experiences to know that being annoyed or hostile will work against you.” Abi-Habib said that the agents then asked for her cellphones in order to “collect information.”

“That is where I drew the line,” Abi-Habib wrote. “I told her I had First Amendment rights as a journalist she couldn’t violate and I was protected under.”

According to Abi-Habib, the agent then presented a DHS document which explained that the government has the right to confiscate phones within 100 miles from U.S. borders: the document “basically says the US government has the right to seize my phones and my rights as a US citizen (or citizen of the world) go out the window.” 

She posted a photo of this tearsheet on the Facebook post.  The same document is also available on the website of the US Customs and Border Patrol and can be found at the following link. The key section is the following:

You’re receiving this sheet because your electronic device(s) has been detained for further examination, which may include copying. You will receive a written receipt (Form 6051-D) that details what item(s) are being detained, who at CBP will be your point of contact, and the contact information (including telephone number) you provide to facilitate the return of your property within a reasonable time upon completion of the examination.

 

The CBP officer who approved the detention will speak with you and explain the process, and provide his or her name and contact telephone number if you have any concerns. Some airport locations have dedicated Passenger Service Managers who are available in addition to the onsite supervisor to address any concerns.

More importantly, one can not refuse to hand over any demanded electronic device to the customs agent, as “collection of this information is mandatory at the time that CBP or ICE seeks to copy information from the electronic device. Failure to provide information to assist CBP or ICE in the copying of information from the electronic device may result in its detention and/or seizure.”

 

Here, Abi-Habib did something the DHS did not expect: “I called their bluff” she says, as she refused to hand over her two cell phones.   

“You’ll have to call The Wall Street Journal’s lawyers, as those phones are the property of WSJ,” she said.

This led to the agent accusing her of “hindering the investigation.” The agent left to speak with her supervisor, returning 30 minutes later to tell Abi-Habib that she was free to go. “I have no idea why they wanted my phones,” she wrote. “It could have been a way for them to download my contacts. Or maybe they expect me of terrorism or sympathizing with terrorists.”

“Why I was eventually spared, we do not know and we are writing a letter contesting DHS’ treatment of me,” Abi-Habib wrote. “I assume they avoided seizing my phones forcefully because they knew we would make a stink about it and have a big name behind us — WSJ.”

According to CNN, DHS later acknowledged the incident occurred, confirming the story, and explaining Abi-Habib’s shock at the realization of being singled-out by the police state.

Except…

None of this is actually new. 

The policy was set in 2013 when DHS reviewed its own powers and concluded that its agents were clear to search at will.  “Imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” it wrote.

In fact we wrote about precisely this over three years ago, in February 2013, in “Goodbye Fourth Amendment: Homeland Security Affirms “Suspicionless” Confiscation Of Devices Along Border.” As a reminder, this is what we said:

Slowly but surely the administration is making sure that both the US constitution, and its various amendments, become a thing of the past. In the name of national security, of course. And while until now it was the First and Second amendments that were the target of the administration’s ongoing efforts to eavesdrop on anyone, all the time, in order to decide who may be a domestic terrorist and thus fit for ‘droning’, coupled with an aggressive push to disarm and curtail the propagation of weapons in what some perceive is nothing more than an attempt to take away a population’s one recourse to defend itself against a tyrannical government, the time may be coming to say goodbye to the Fourth amendment – the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures – next. But only in close proximity to the border at first. As it turns out the Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights watchdog has concluded that travelers along the nation’s borders may have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security.

Who was at fault for this?  As it turns out, first Bush and then Obama.

The President George W. Bush administration first announced the suspicionless, electronics search rules in 2008. The President Barack Obama administration followed up with virtually the same rules a year later. Between 2008 and 2010, 6,500 persons had their electronic devices searched along the U.S. border, according to DHS data.

 

What does this decision mean in principle: According to legal precedent, the Fourth Amendment — the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures — does not apply along the border. By the way, the government contends the Fourth-Amendment-Free Zone stretches 100 miles inland from the nation’s actual border.

Finally, why 100 miles?

Because as the attached map shows, the “borders” in question include maritime zones as well, and with the bulk of the US population concentrated along the coasts, the “constitution free” zone of the US includes virtually everyone living on the two seaboards: some 66% of the US population.

 

We even laid out a case study of what happened to a perfectly innocent man:

A lawsuit the ACLU brought on the issue concerns a New York man whose laptop was seized along the Canadian border in 2010 and returned 11 days later after his attorney complained. At an Amtrak inspection point, Pascal Abidor showed his U.S. passport to a federal agent. He was ordered to move to the cafe car, where they removed his laptop from his luggage and “ordered Mr. Abidor to enter his password,” according to the lawsuit.

 

Agents asked him about pictures they found on his laptop, which included Hamas and Hezbollah rallies. He explained that he was earning a doctoral degree at a Canadian university on the topic of the modern history of Shiites in Lebanon. He was handcuffed and then jailed for three hours while the authorities looked through his computer while numerous agents questioned him, according to the suit, which is pending in New York federal court.

As we concluded then: “First they came for your iPad, and nobody said anything…”

Over three year later, they came for a very stunned Maria Abi-Habib’s cell phones and she said something, because it is one thing to read about it one some website, it is something totally different to go through it in person.

* * *

Amusingly, the confusion stretched to the very top.

The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, Gerard Baker, told CNN that the paper is “disturbed by the serious incident involving Abi-Habib.”

“We have been working to learn more about these events, but the notion that Customs and Border Protection agents would stop and question one of our journalists in connection with her reporting and seek to search her cell phones is unacceptable,” Baker said in a statement to CNNMoney. 

Actually, Gerard, it’s the law and has been for years. Even this little “fringe tinfoil blog” reported on it while you were focusing on far greater matters. Maybe now that you are familiar with just what the US police state is capable of doing, you will write an article decrying it?

We doubt it.

* * *

But the absolute in irony came, when CNN quoted Gregory T. Nojeim, a lawyer at the Center for Democracy & Technology, who “is concerned” about these extraordinary powers.  “They should have to have reasonable suspicion when they do this,” he said.

They should yes, but they don’t. And if you “lawyers” were actually doing your job and protecting civil liberties, this would not have happened. Of course, we realize that is asking far too much.

* * *

Her full Facebook post is reposted below in its entirety. Highlights ours.

Dear friends,

I wanted to share a troubling experience I had with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in the hopes it may help you protect your private information. I was born a US citizen and was traveling on my American passport.

I landed at LA airport last Thursday to attend a wedding. I was standing in line for immigration when a DHS officer said “oh, there you are.” I was puzzled. “I was trying to recognize you from your picture. I’m here to help you get through the line.”

I asked a few questions, and she said that DHS had decided to pick me up when my name came in on the flight manifest (this is not uncommon, for countries to share passenger names). She didn’t say whether the flight manifest was sent from Beirut, where I started my trip, or Frankfurt, where I hopped onto my connecting flight to LAX. The DHS agent went on to say she was there to help me navigate immigration because I am a journalist with The Wall Street Journal and have traveled to many dangerous places that are on the US’ radar for terrorism. She independently knew who I worked for and my Twitter account, countries I’d reported from (like Iraq) and even recent articles I’d written — I told her nothing about myself.

This didn’t seem out of the ordinary at first — I’ve had US Immigration officials tell me my name is on a special list that allows me to circumvent the questioning most would receive if they had a similar travel profile or internet print (talking to members of known terrorist groups). I travel to the US about twice a year and have always remarked on how smooth my experiences at Customs/Immigration are.

But after pushing me to the front of a very long line at immigration, she then escorted me to the luggage belt, where I collected my suitcase, and then she took me to a special section of LAX airport. Another customs agent joined her at that point and they grilled me for an hour – asking me about the years I lived in the US, when I moved to Beirut and why, who lives at my in-laws’ house in LA and numbers for the groom and bride whose wedding I was attending. I answered jovially, because I’ve had enough high-level security experiences to know that being annoyed or hostile will work against you.

But then she asked me for my two cellphones. I asked her what she wanted from them.

“We want to collect information” she said, refusing to specify what kind.

And that is where I drew the line — I told her I had First Amendment rights as a journalist she couldn’t violate and I was protected under. I explained I had to protect my sources of information.

“Did you just admit you collect information for foreign governments?” she asked, her tone turning hostile.

“No, that’s exactly not what I just said,” I replied, explaining again why I would not hand over my phones.

She handed me a DHS document, a photo of which I’ve attached. It basically says the US government has the right to seize my phones and my rights as a US citizen (or citizen of the world) go out the window. This law applies at any point of entry into the US, whether naval, air or land and extends for 100 miles into the US from the border or formal points of entry. So, all of NY city for instance. If they forgot to ask you at JFK airport for your phones, but you’re having a drink in Manhattan the next day, you technically fall under this authority. And because they are acting under the pretense to protect the US from terrorism, you have to give it up.

So I called their bluff.

“You’ll have to call The Wall Street Journal’s lawyers, as those phones are the property of WSJ,” I told her, calmly.

She accused me of hindering the investigation – a dangerous accusation as at that point, they can use force. I put my hands up and said I’d done nothing but be cooperative, but when it comes to my phones, she would have to call WSJ’s lawyers.

She said she had to speak to her supervisor about my lack of cooperation and would return. I was left with the second DHS officer who’d been there since we left the baggage claim area.

The female officer returned 30 minutes later and said I was free to go. I have no idea why they wanted my phones — it could have been a way for them to download my contacts. Or maybe they expect me of terrorism or sympathizing with terrorists — although my profile wouldn’t fit, considering I am named Maria Teresa, and for a variety of other reasons including my small child.

I’ve since done some research and spoken to an encryption expert. This is the information I’ve gleaned which I hope may help those reading:

1) My rights as a journalist or US citizen do not apply at the border, as explained above, since legislation was quietly passed in 2013 giving DHS very broad powers (I researched this since the incident). This legislation also circumvents the Fourth Amendment that protects Americans’ privacy and prevents searches and seizures without a proper warrant.

2) Always use encryption, but even this cannot keep you 100% safe. If you are contacting someone about a sensitive matter, use an application like Signal. But if DHS seizes your phone, they can see you’ve been speaking to that person, although if you erase your chats, they won’t see what you spoke about.

3) Never download anything or even open a link from a friend or source that looks suspicious. This may be malware, meaning that they have downloaded software on your phone that will be able to circumvent the powers of encryption. Don’t leave your phone unattended for the same reasons – they can just open it up and download malware.

4) Travel “naked” as one encryption expert told me. If any government wants your information, they will get it no matter what. Remember the San Bernardino shooter? Apple refused to comply, so the US got the information by paying an Israeli company $1 million to unlock the shooter’s phone. So if you have something extra sensitive on your device – phone or laptop – do not travel with it and instead use your sim card in a clean phone. And for sensitive numbers, write them on a piece of paper you can somehow secure and then restore the factory settings on your phone – which seems to be the only way of wiping it clean 100%.

Sorry for the long post. I hope this helps.

via http://ift.tt/2agL4sX Tyler Durden

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Earlier this week, I published a lengthy thought piece titled, America is Being Divided and Conquered Into Oblivion. I ended it with the following paragraphs:

All that said, I don’t want to end this post on a negative note. I think the real thing that’s missing from the equation is too many good, talented people are doing nothing. I’m not trying to be judgmental here. I personally had the ability and resources to quit my job and do what I do. I didn’t have a family at the time and didn’t have to provide for anyone else. That’s not the point. You don’t have to do what I did to make a difference and influence people. You don’t have to quit your job and fight the status quo with every breath you take. Life doesn’t need to be seen as an all or nothing endeavor in everything you do. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to consider the following (as an aside, I try to ask myself these questions all the time).

 

Think about your everyday life. What are you doing to push forward the decentralization of power and unite people? How are you being potentially divisive in life, and how can you bring people together as opposed to tearing others down? If you were brought up privileged and financially well off, you arguably have a greater responsibility to society. What are you doing to give back? Is it sufficient? Is what you do for a living accretive or extractive to society? What are you doing to make the world a better place than you found it? If nothing, why not?

 

While there are plenty of fortunate people out there doing jobs merely to chase cash and stroke their ego, the vast majority of people genuinely have major financial commitments and therefore have no choice but to stay in spiritless, soul-sucking jobs. I get that. For people in the former group, I ask you to consider the fact that you have one life to live and this battle is an existential one.

 

If you can dedicate your talents and creativity to something positive, consider doing so. If you are in the latter group, I understand that providing for your family is of the utmost importance, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make meaningful contributions in smaller ways, even if it’s as simple as trying to be less divisive and more self-reflective. As Gandhi noted:

 

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.”

 

But even this is not enough. We need to heed the words of Huxley in 1958:

 

“If you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society’s merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.”

 

We can’t rely on politicians and we can’t rely on hope. We need to rely on the power of our own actions coming together to ultimately make the world a better place. The window of opportunity is now and the world needs you. All of you.

I was thrilled that the above post touched a lot of people, but I didn’t really provide any specific suggestions for personal growth. Fortunately, I just read an excellent article by the Daily Zen’s Charlie Ambler, which does just that.

Here it is, republished in full: How to Actually Make America Great Again.

There’s a lot of platitudinal talk about making things “great” again, which is a good way to engage any regular idiot without providing any sort of prescription for what should actually happen. I find this particular election cycle to be revolting and don’t feel personally connected to it in any way. As I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals, about Lincoln and other American political figures during the Civil War era, I can’t help but think that these events of 2016 are just further signals of the decline of both American society and the West at large.

 

Sorry, folks, but we got our freedom and we squandered it fewer than a handful of centuries. We stopped reading books. We gave up on the nuclear family. We skewed the meaning of words and let other people and institutions do for us what we could have done ourselves. We lost any semblance of identity other than that reliant on the hedonistic narcissistic whims of the individual. Identity politics have emerged alongside a complete loss of cultural identity— what a supreme irony! It really feels great to get this off my chest.

 

In this sense, there are obvious ways to “make America great again” that don’t involve trusting a wealthy NYC landlord. After a few years of dealing with those guys I can assure you they’re bad news. How do we make America Great Again? A few ideas for individuals, since the whole purpose of this place to begin with was that individuals had the opportunity to live virtuous lives without needing to rely too heavily on their institutions to provide for them or stifle them. Let’s review a few individual tactics that can help bring some sanity back to the Western cultural-political landscape:

 

Return to the family.

 

There’s no great human society that didn’t place a high value on the nuclear family. The modern West has experienced a fracturing of the family due to various technologies and cultural excitements that made it seem unimportant. Many people went their own way; love became about promiscuity, drama and money, rather than sacrifice, honor, humility, modesty or child-rearing. Success became about money and the career ladder rather than passing wisdom and virtue onto one’s kin.

In New York City, the apotheosis of the peculiar type of modernity we see in 2016, I see mothers who dress their babies like tiny hip college students and then go off to work, leaving the babies with a random babysitter who spends the day walking them in circles around the park. If you want to rescue the modern world, return to the family. Focus less on culture and careerism and more on teaching children how to live a meaningful life. If the example we set is that work is more important than family, the next generation of children probably won’t even bother with raising families. These priorities should be reversed.

 

Read more.

 

Many of the men who founded America and sent it forward in the beginning were voracious readers. Before you could spend your leisure time by just going on your phone and playing Angry Birds or getting laid on Tinder, smart people would spend hours each day reading for leisure. They would digest the timeless works of the past not for any real practical purpose but to cultivate a fuller understanding of the world, history, and human life. If they wanted correspondence with someone, they would sit down and draft a thoughtful letter by hand.

Information was scarce and ambitious people sought it out. Today, the great books are open to literally everyone. What do young people do? They complain that the authors weren’t multicultural enough. I really have no choice but to shake my head at the sheer arrogance and spiritual void that exists in my generation. I’m often embarrassed by it. Liberal arts college students should start actually reading books again; they’ve clearly taken a break.\

 

This is not to say, “Aw man, the good ol’ days, right!?” Most people in Lincoln’s era and before, war notwithstanding, only lived until their mid-40’s on average. But we should understand from the past just how insane our current notions of leisure are. We have lost so much discipline, so much capacity for patience and knowledge that people not that long ago were willing to cultivate. Read more. Read every day. Honestly, read as much as you possibly can. It will transform your life in a way that you won’t recognize until you see.

 

Don’t be scared

 

When America started, most people didn’t even think about retirement. Retirement wasn’t an option. This was because it was unlikely for anyone to live to middle-age, let alone past it, thanks to poor medical science and general uncleanliness. It’s not unusual today for someone to live to 80, 90, or 100, the irony being that they’re usually stuck in some sort of boring post-industrial retirement home or a hospital bed. And up until retirement they likely spent their entire life working to save money for retirement. The logic in these scenarios really just reflects a population that does not reflect!

 

That would you do today if you knew you were going to die at 40? Would you worry so much about petty things? We can learn from the past how to keep the present in perspective. Modern society’s current degradation is the best argument against “situational progress” that one can muster. People emotionally shift and become just as uncomfortable in a state of supreme comfort as they are in a state of supreme discomfort, the same way many people who get rich aren’t any happier for it. We adapt. It’s in our nature. If we can spiritually train ourselves to be less uncomfortable, less fearful, and more grateful of life, we will stop being so collectively petty and greedy.

 

I don’t write very many political articles, but when you get to the root of politics you realize that it’s everywhere. Everything you do is a reflection of your beliefs. The way to make America great again isn’t to kick out all the brown people or give everyone free money or fight strange conflicts abroad, but instead to have a complete spiritual overhaul! Politics is a reflection of our collective spirit; clearly today that spirit is nearly-bankrupt. Our priorities are insanely out of order.

 

If we want to reclaim a sense of greatness and virtue, it takes individuals to reconfigure themselves and cultivate greatness on a spiritual level. It takes people who have an appetite not for mindless destruction and distraction but for knowledge, reality, humility and gratitude. Meditate, folks. Read more. Love your family. Stifle your ego. This might be our only hope.

 

If you liked this piece, please consider supporting Daily Zen.

Thank you for writing this, Charlie.

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It's not just Invesco that is confused by the market's complacency, Bloomberg notes that global markets are showing a surprising calm as investors struggle to quantify macro risks, taking divergent approaches to portfolio allocations.

While investors cite geopolitical risks as a chief concern and events like Turkey’s failed coup highlight the dangers, Bloomberg notes there is little evidence that people are bailing on risky investments.

BlackRock says it’s very bullish on EM and Ashmore saying it buys into dips from such shocks, while G-10 currencies in tight ranges and volatility low across EM even as a BofAML fund-manager survey sees the highest cash levels since 2001.

 

“We are living in unprecedented times of geopolitical and social uncertainties. For investors, it is really hard to quantify those risks,” says Pimco’s currency portfolio manager Thomas Kressin.

 

Developments including the U.K. vote to leave the EU; terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels and Nice; Italy’s upcoming referendum over a constitutional reform; and U.S. presidential elections point to a marked increase in political risks in systemically significant countries.

 

The failed Turkish coup caused an initial market reaction, though by Monday the lira was rebounding and TD saw it as a “buy”; subsequent actions by Erdogan to purge the ranks of state institutions have seen TRY trade to around record lows. S&P cut Turkey’s rating to BB from BB+, outlook to negative.

HOW MARKETS ARE IGNORING GEOPOLITICAL RISKS

• VIX is trading at 2016 lows around 12, decreasing from the highest since February hit in aftermath of Brexit referendum and well below its lifetime average ~20
• S&P 500 Index reached a record yesterday and its forward P/E ratio is the highest since early 2002; the MSCI emerging-markets index is at its highest level since mid-August 2015 and the MSCI EM FX index has gained 4.7% YTD
• 10yr UST yields reached record low earlier this month ~1.32%, though have since moved back into the 1.5%-1.6% range

MARKETS’ SHORT MEMORY

• “Markets ignore geopolitics. I don’t see any obvious cases to trade this week, as Fed is silent and there are no important data releases,” said Nordea analyst Aurelija Augulyte Monday, after markets re-opened after the weekend events
• Short term recent developments will likely prompt FX shocks and a return to risk-off sentiment until the dust settles, said Citigroup in a note sent to clients Monday, though “markets typically have short memories”
• “In this age of monetary policy uber alles, every setback somehow gets sold as a buying opportunity. There are no long-term ramifications ascribed to anything,” Bloomberg strategist Richard Breslow wrote Tuesday

WHAT INVESTORS ARE DOING

Pimco

Firm keeping its cash levels above average to be ready to buy into market swings likely to follow new risk events, says Pimco’s Kressin

 

Running low FX conviction strategy based on the view that G-10 currencies will continue to trade in ranges as global central banks consider a strong dollar undesirable

 

Luke Spajic, head of portfolio management for emerging Asia, says Pimco is seeking to “tilt our alignment to cheaper credit where we can find it,” as yields on 10Y USTs dropped further than anticipated

Janus

Geopolitical risks across Europe not fully priced into EU assets and euro outlook has plenty of downside risks ahead, portfolio manager Ryan Myerberg says in interview

 

European project could be at stake as tensions in Turkey will worsen relations with EU over immigration

 

Attacks in Nice may increase support for France’s Front National, a party that has backed the idea to hold a referendum over European membership

 

Remains constructive on bonds in euro-area countries including Spain and France, as ECB is expected to tweak the QE program in September

 

Keeps limited exposure to emerging markets; negative on currencies such as TRY, ZAR

BlackRock

Emerging markets are on an improving path and EM debt is set to benefit from inflows of money fleeing from low or negative rate environments, EM portfolio managers including Pablo Goldberg say in a note

 

Sticks to positive outlook for EMD despite shock waves sent from the Brexit vote and sees local currency debt providing greater potential given EM FX sensitivity to risk-aversion shocks

Ashmore

Firm typically buys into any temporary weakness caused by global geopolitical events and sees the political shocks in EM to be more country specific risks than geopolitical per se, head of research Jan Dehn, says in interview

 

While the fund remains underweight on Turkey, it would look to buy the country’s assets once they reach a more attractive entry levels

 

Expects EM resilience as fundamentals are getting better and bonds are attractively priced

Aberdeen Asset Management

Market is desensitized; for EM investors “this is nothing new” says Edwin Gutierrez, head of EM sovereign debt at Aberdeen Asset Management

 

In Turkey, for instance, the country has had a number of bomb attacks and “markets get used to it”

 

When asked about next big geopolitical concerns, says if it were something we knew was going to move the market, it probably wouldn’t

Invesco

Investors are focused on the U.S. and China, and their relative stability probably allows market to view shocks like Turkey as more of a local phenomenon, Invesco portfolio manager and head of macro research Ray Uy says in phone interview

 

General theme of political risks increasing or political risk premium has been prevailing for the last few years; now seeing tension between established political regimes and populist movements

 

Unclear why this hasn’t been a significant driver of markets across the board; “maybe we just haven’t hit the threshold”

 

Investors are still dealing with aftermath of negative rates, super-accommodative monetary policy globally and structural need for income, which is mobilizing capital flows in unprecedented ways; “maybe that’s what we’re seeing overcome some of the concerns”

Old Mutual

Firm may consider reweighting toward havens as rising geopolitical risk could play a bigger part in the portfolio construction process, according to PM Nicholas Wall

 

Sold a small amount of Turkish bonds as the government’s post-coup purge extended to university deans and others not directly involved in the event, according to John Peta

Wadhwani Asset Management

Sees short term opportunity to buy EM FX as risk appetite comes back after Brexit vote

Standish Mellon

Central bank activity has supported asset prices and made periods of volatility incredibly short-lived, more so than would’ve been anticipated, Standish Mellon portfolio manager and director of global fixed income Brendan Murphy says in phone interview.

So what will it take for risk appetite to shift?

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Submitted by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

A few days ago I examined the relationship between the stock market PE and CPI inflation. The reason was the sudden renewed emphasis on low inflation in the context of trying to justify increasingly outlying earnings multiples in stocks. Earnings fell sharply in 2015, but prices really didn’t; there was, at most, only more volatility spread across sideways trading (even including recent record highs). EPS haven’t as yet recovered and there are growing signs that risks to the earnings recovery have only increased, not decreased. By simple math, then, stocks are trading on very shaky ground at already high multiples and greater uncertainty that it will all be corrected naturally by the any-day-now thriving economy; leaving prices as the more likely motivated method for convergence.

Inflation is but one of the inappropriate attempts to justify high PE’s; as one reader pointed out (thanks to RUI), there is also the interest rate comparison to the stock earnings yield. The inverse of the PE is the EP ratio, which is supposed to be a relative comparison of stocks to bonds. The current PE ratio, according to Robert Shiller’s data, is an alarming 23.7 as of the latest earnings, which are for December 2015. Since earnings haven’t improved much at all since then, while prices are somewhat higher, the valuation imbalance has likely grown worse over the interim.

But if you flip the ratio around, the so-called earnings yield is a “healthy” 4.21%. Compared to a 10-year UST yield around 2% at the time, and now much less, the EP theory would imply that stocks are not at all overvalued in comparison to UST’s. You might even go so far as to suggest stocks have a lot of room for even more multiple expansion.

This theory was popular during the dot-com bubble, and much less so after it. It had been around for some time, but Alan Greenspan testified to Congress in February 1997 that:

Analytically, current stock-price valuations at prevailing long-term interest rates could be justified by very strong earnings growth expectations. In fact, the long-term earnings projections of financial analysts have been marked up noticeably over the last year and seem to imply very high earnings growth and continued rising profit margins, at a time when such margins are already up appreciably from their depressed levels of five years ago.

Because he was then still the “maestro”, thus was born the “Fed model” as merely this earnings yield concept repackaged as if given official imprimatur from the one man Wall Street admired the most. It was used quite often to justify the dot-com bubble as anything but a bubble, forgetting that the basic relationship between UST rates and forward earnings expectations isn’t so clear – and especially so in history outside the 1990’s.

Unfortunately, I don’t have historical data for forward earnings at each interval in time, so past earnings will have to be a sufficient substitute (and I am going to regress the 10-year monthly UST CMT yield against the market PE, which is mathematically no different than the EP). What we find is remarkably similar to the (lack of) relationship between PE and the CPI. There just isn’t any evidence to suggest stock valuations relate much to interest rates, and therefore that the latter can or ever does imply anything about the former.

Notice that the regression model doesn’t predict any PE less than 11 nor any greater than 16; there is just no correlation to be found.

There are a couple points in history that illustrate as consistent examples this lack of definable relationship very well. With the onset of WWII, following the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve was tasked with broadly pegging UST rates as part of the war effort. From April 1942 forward, the Fed imposed a 2.50% cap on long-term Treasury bond rates. Until 1947, however, bond rates remained steady on their own, requiring very little of central bank purchases to enforce the rate ceiling. The reason was the separate commitment to purchase T-bills at 3/8 %. Because of “overvaluing” bills relative to bonds, the public accumulated treasury bonds while the Fed accumulated T-bills, providing a seemingly very stable financial platform for the war and beyond.

In July 1947, bills were no longer pegged and the Fed (though for only a short while) was forced to buy significant quantities of bonds to keep the rate ceiling intact. It was only with the “independent” Fed battle over the Korean War in 1951 when rates were finally allowed to be determined, relatively speaking, more by market forces (“even keel” remained in effect right on into the Great Inflation a decade later).

In relation to stocks, it implies “loose” and again stable monetary policy that would seem, like the 1990’s, to suggest a greater possibility for increasing valuations especially relative to steady bond yields. Rather than finding even a hint of correlation, however, what we see instead is no relationship at all. As the 10-year bond rate held steady, the market PE rate was all over the place; rising to above 20 by 1946 before falling all the way back to 5.8 by 1949 (and the recession that year) before rising yet again into the 1950’s.

The most charitable time period for the possibility of the earnings yield comparison for stocks is, as the CPI and inflation, the post-1965 environment. But the same interpretation also applies here; meaning that the most that can be said about it is that during the Great Inflation interest rates tended to be higher while stock valuations tended to be lower and nothing more.

Even then the weak correlation is less convincing than it appears because the relationship particularly after the dot-com bubble turned to bust completely broke down. There is actually so little correlation 1995 and forward that the regression flips! In other words, the exponential regression model shows a positive slope, meaning that from 1995 to the end of 2015 there is a very, very weak positive correlation that would suggest higher PE’s with higher interest rates. That actually makes relatively more logical sense given that ultra-low rates indicate nothing good about the intermediate term economy and corporate environment (or even longer-term already, since, contra Keynes, it seems we have reached the long run and we aren’t dead – but the economy still is). Thus, it would seem more positive for stock valuations if interest rates actually normalize, moving higher, not lower.

That is, of course, imposing a qualitative bias on the data where, again, no significant relationship can be found statistically. There is just nothing to suggest interest rates are related to PE’s or EP’s, and thus the “Fed model” was but another 1990’s gimmick to justify the unjustifiable.

The fact is that stock multiples move all over the place predicated on factors not always (ever?) related to fundamentals; as if that were an insightful statement. If the economy of the dot-com bubble, the one the Fed confused in the 2000’s with a permanent uptick in productivity, had actually continued without interruption Alan Greenspan would (might) have been right in 1997. It didn’t because that economy was an illusion, as were the stock prices that fed into it (and in many ways fed it). These supposed valuation comparisons were then nothing more than trying to work backward to a predetermined conclusion; as they would be now.

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Following Cruz' "career-ending speech" last night, the moment everyone has been waiting for has arrived. A year after after announcing his run for president, billionaire Donald Trump takes the stage Thursday night to deliver what few pundits thought would ever happen: His acceptance speech for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party. While many will be interested in Peter Thiel and Tom Barrack, Ivanka Trump will introduce her dad whose theme – “Make America One Again” – centers on unity.

Live Feed (Trump is expected to speak at around 10pmET):

*  *  *

Here’s what The Hill believes are the most important things to watch for during the final Republican National Convention session, which starts at 7 p.m. Eastern Time, as the real estate mogul takes hold of the party’s banner for the general election.

Will the Donald deliver?

All eyes will be on Trump’s keynote address, the climax of the weeklong event. Even for a man who has dominated media coverage for the greater part of a year, Trump’s Thursday speech will almost certainly be his most watched. He has sworn off his preferred free-wheeling style for a safer scripted address, a decision that will please the party’s wary establishment but could limit the opportunity for both viral moments and potentially damaging ones. Expect Trump to speak to both wings of the party—enthusiastic members of the Trump train as well as those who refuse to leave the station. He’ll need both if he wants to overtake Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls and win the Oval Office.  

Ivanka testifies for her father 

Thursday also marks a major moment for Ivanka Trump, the eldest Trump daughter who is poised to emerge from this presidential cycle as a potent force. Ivanka has already served a key role in the campaign—she’s often deployed to soften her controversial father’s rough edges and has been called upon as his close adviser. Trump has already previewed the theme of his daughter’s speech—gender equality. As it stands in the polls, he could use a lifeline with female voters who have fled him in droves. It’s a tough mountain to climb, but Ivanka will be tasked with flipping the common perception of her father on its head and selling him as a compassionate father and, in her words earlier this month, a “feminist.” Even if she fails to stop a mass exodus of female support, a strong speech will reinforce her strong performance as a surrogate and potentially stoke the rumors of her potential political future.  

Make America One Again

The final spin on Trump’s theme, “Make America One Again” centers on unity. That’s no surprise considering the handful of notable Republicans reluctant to support Trump’s candidacy. While many of the party’s standard-bearers won’t be in attendance, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus will take to the stage in the hopes of convincing delegates and Republicans across the country to fall in line, no matter their view on Trump. It’s a role Priebus has played for months—declaring Trump the party’s presumptive nominee back in May and working both in public and private to get Republicans on board. And it's a role that becomes even more important after Ted Cruz stunned the convention crowd on Wednesday by not endorsing Trump, a decision that dominated the night. Look for a healthy reliance on one thing bound to resonate with every delegate and attendee—an aggressive critique of Hillary Clinton. This week’s best-received speeches hammered home the case against Clinton—notably Chris Christie’s “indictment” of the presumptive Democratic nominee. So as he looks to motivate the party’s loyalists around the country, he’ll likely find no greater force than distaste for Clinton. 

GOP looks to expand its appeal

Trump’s precarious favorability numbers with women and minorities has prompted worries that he needs to expand his appeal or else he may lose the White House and take down-ticket Republicans with him. Thursday’s schedule of speakers is engineered to fight back and includes a handful speakers meant to shore up support among different constituencies. Along with Ivanka Trump, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Gov. Fallin (Okla.) will likely speak to discontented female voters and look to draw them back into the arms of the Grand Old Party. Jerry Falwell Jr. aims to rally Christian conservatives who may feel lukewarm about their nominee’s commitment to issues like abortion and gay rights. And Lisa Shin, a New Mexico small business owner and member of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, will try to tell minority voters who have largely steered clear of Trump why he can “Make America Great Again” for them too.  

Billionaires for Trump

The speaking roster will also include two of Trump’s supporters from the business world—venture capitalist Peter Thiel and investor Tom Barrack. Thiel is best known as one of Facebook’s earliest outside investors and the head of security software firm Palantir Technologies. An openly gay man, he’s received some criticism from the liberal tech bubble for his support of Trump and the GOP despite the party’s stance against gay marriage. But Trump has been much more accepting of the LGBT community in his rhetoric, despite calling for the court to overturn the Supreme Court decision supporting gay marriage, so Thiel’s speech could shine an interesting light on how the party plans to reconcile the differences.

Barrack’s relationship with Trump apparently dates back to before his political bid and to his real estate career. He also served as Deputy Undersecretary in President Ronald Reagan’s Department of Interior, giving him additional credibility at an event where Reagan is revered. He hosted Trump’s first major fundraiser in May, and recently released his own economic treatise… "Opaque global monetary policies combined with unfocused, poorly negotiated international trade agreements are undermining the entire project of globalization as proponents of these policies face a growing backlash among voters," he writes.

Citizens everywhere are unhappy with their governments and angry with their leaders. They are no longer interested in a political rhetoric that they do not understand and that has no value in their lives. Monetary policy, trade policy technological disruption and the array of issues that make up globalization are simply a parade of unintelligible horribles to the average working class citizen.

 

…

 

Until recent times, central bank activities were mostly technical, marginal, and unreported. Today central bankers utilize exotic new tools such as Quantitative Easing (“QE”) and massive asset purchases to manipulate markets to conform to macroeconomic mandates and political leaders' preferences. The driving force behind US economic policy is no longer the Secretary of the Treasury or Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors; it is the new breed of central banker on steroids. Foreign exchange, QE, asset purchases and the printing of money unanchored to any external standard, and other technical monetary tools are today’s “super trade weapons.”

 

In the early stages of the financial crisis, central banks acted quickly, decisively and effectively to provide liquidity and help avert another Great Depression. These actions reinvigorated the payments and settlements system, established a floor on value and forced banks to restructure. Yet instead of curtailing emergency policies as economies recovered, central banks have all but monopolized the economy policies of many nations. As a result, investment has stalled and savings rates are pressing historic lows. Middle- and lower-income workers see no benefits from these policies, while the holders of capital, just as with globalization, enjoy burgeoning investment portfolios and bank accounts. At this point, central bank actions seem mainly to impact asset prices while only marginally influencing the true drivers of the economy, such as real investment, productivity expansion and job growth. We have reached the point where central banks – which are a lot better at emergency responses than steering long-term policy – have become the problem, not the solution.

 

…

 

The dramatic swelling of Wall Street asset prices has not been accompanied by a revival of the real economy or rising middle class incomes. Unconventional monetary policy is not a reliable force for robust growth in a time of economic stagnation. Instead, it encourages riskier investment, compounding the rising wealth effects from expanding equity markets and real estate prices, which primarily benefit the affluent.

 

Policies like QE also favor net borrowers over net savers, again benefitting debt-burdened governments and corporations that have the ability to borrow, while middle-class workers with limited borrowing capacity stagnate. This is the primary reason why corporate profit margins and equity markets are at historic highs, while real wage growth remains historically low. Employment data show a resentful workforce feeling despair and doomed to irrelevance in a technologically advanced global marketplace, even as investors enjoy the bull run of the century.

 

In today’s globalized economy, elected leaders who decide fiscal policy, on which long-term economic growth is predicated, make little sustained effort to reform outdated personal or business tax policies or exercise spending restraints needed to reduce government debt. Monetary policy, for which elected leaders disclaim responsibility, leaving it to unelected central bankers, is king. Central banks are frantically seeking market share through currency devaluations, desperately hoping that lower nominal exchange rates will boost exports and reduce imports – part of a zero-sum rush-to-the-bottom.

 

…

 

As the central bankers continue down their road without a GPS, no one knows what the effects will be: financial bubbles, a debt bust, an equity bust, a disorderly exit from the sale of trillions of dollars sitting on central bank balance sheets, emerging market capital outflows or increased inequality and disenchantment. Financial engineering by itself cannot achieve the kind of sustainable, inclusive growth that will extend economic benefits to America’s hard-pressed middle class. Opaque global monetary policies combined with unfocused, poorly negotiated international trade agreements are undermining the entire project of globalization as proponents of these policies face a growing backlash among voters.

 

…

 

The world is moving at warp speed, as are all the things within it. In order to keep up, we too need to move and adapt or be lost in the black hole of entrenchment and entitlement. Many decades ago, Winston Churchill wrote a series of essays predicting the ever more dizzying pace of change in the modern world. It could not and must not be stopped, but he worried that mankind might have so much more, yet be unhappier than before. "Their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things," he wrote. We need to be reminded about the "simple questions which man has asked since the earliest dawn of reason," about the meaning, purpose, and ends of mankind – in other words, the same kind of questions that led America's Founders to declare the self-evident truth that all human beings are created equal. As we question the status quo and chip away at the corrosion that attends old thoughts, ideas, and institutions, we must not fail to keep in mind the difference between material things that are always changing and the abiding truths that have made America great.

Full Economic Treatise here…

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Whether you know it or not, everyone is a Forex investor.  As we explain in Splitting Pennies – Understanding Forex – just by going grocery shopping, you’re trading Forex.  If you use US Dollars, you are trading Forex.  If you have a savings account based in US Dollars, you are investing in Forex.

Brexit was a great example of FX being in focus, but there are many.  Every week there’s an FX event, whether it be a coup or failed coup in Turkey, an NFP surprise, or cheif traders being arrested at JFK airport.

ANY global event is an FX event, ANY market event is an FX event, but NOT ALL market events are FX events.  FX is the superset of markets.  Remember, stocks are settled in US Dollars.  That’s changing, with all the Bitcoin and blockchain proposals, but we’re still years if not decades away from signficiant paradigm shift in that regard.

Investors are starting to take note of FX.  Forex is becoming part of a mainstream discussion on Wall St., although behind the scenes.  This is happening in parallel with a restructuring of the market dyamics on a technical level.

Solid reasons that any portfolio should include FX strategies:

• Mainstream investments show a diminishing return
• The stock market can’t go up forever
• FX provides opportunities not seen in other markets
• Although there are risks, the risks have a different nature, and there are also more opportunities 

Although everyone is a Forex investor, the majority are always losing.  They are losing slowly through the rapid deterioration of the currency.  Many investors make up for this with high yield investments – but they are rare in a ZIRP and coming NIRP.

Forex provides a means to diversify this risk, for investment professionals, investors, quants, corporations, pension funds, and basically anyone – even for the retail investor who only has $1.  Yes, you can open an account with Oanda for only $1.  This is where we derived the name for our recent book “Splitting Pennies” – Currencies in normal markets don’t change too much.  Brexit was an exception.  So in order to profit from Currency trading, leverage is used, thus multiplying risks and profits too.

If you’re not already starting the move into Forex – don’t worry, it will happen with or without you.   If you want to give yourself a heads up, checkout Splitting Pennies – the pocket guide designed to instantly make you a Forex genius!

If you want to get started looking at investing, checkout Fortress Capital Forex

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Here is the full text of Donald Trump's prepared speech as prepared for delivery according to a draft obtained by Politico on Thursday afternoon. The end product may very well end up being something totally different. 

* * *

Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

Together, we will lead our party back to the White House, and we will lead our country back to safety, prosperity, and peace. We will be a country of generosity and warmth. But we will also be a country of law and order.

Our Convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.

Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims.

I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.

The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.

It is finally time for a straightforward assessment of the state of our nation.

I will present the facts plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.

So if you want to hear the corporate spin, the carefully-crafted lies, and the media myths the Democrats are holding their convention next week.

But here, at our convention, there will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else.

 

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Submitted by Llewellyn Rockwell via The Mises Institute,

Is it too much to say that since the French Revolution, the left has been the source of virtually all political evils, and continues to be so in our day?

There can be no doubt that great cruelty and violence can be and have been inflicted in the name of preserving the existing order.

But when we compare even the worst enormities of the more distant past with the leftist totalitarian revolutions and total wars of the twentieth centuries, they are in general a mere blip. The entire history of the Inquisition, said Joe Sobran, barely rises to the level of what the communists accomplished on a good afternoon.

The French Revolution, and particularly its radical phase, was the classic manifestation of modern leftism and served as the model for still more radical revolutions around the world more than a century later.

As that revolution proceeded its aims grew more ambitious, with its most fervent partisans demanding nothing less than the total transformation of society.

In place of the various customs and settled ways of a France with well over a millennium of history behind it, the radical revolutionaries introduced a “rational” alternative cooked up in their heads, and with all the warmth of an insane asylum.

Streets named after saints were given new names, and statues of saints were actually guillotined. (These people guillotining statues were the rational ones, you understand.) The calendar itself, rich with religious feasts, was replaced by a more “rational” calendar with 30 days per month, divided into three ten-day weeks, thereby doing away with Sunday. The remaining five days of the year were devoted to secular observances: celebrations of labor, opinion, genius, virtue, and rewards.

Punishments for deviations from the new dispensation were as severe as we have come to expect from leftism. People were sentenced to death for owning a Rosary, giving shelter to a priest, or indeed refusing to abjure the priesthood.

We are plenty familiar with the guillotine, but the revolutionaries concocted still other forms of execution as well, like the Drownings at Nantes, designed to humiliate and terrorize their victims.

Given that the left has sought the complete transformation of society, and given that such wholesale change is bound to come up against the resistance of ordinary people who don’t care for having their routines and patterns of life overturned, we should not be surprised that the instrument of mass terror has been the weapon of choice. The people must be terrified into submission, and so broken and demoralized that resistance comes to seem impossible.

Likewise, it’s no wonder the left needs the total state. In place of naturally occurring groupings and allegiances, it demands the substitution of artificial constructs. In place of the concrete and specific, the Burkean “little platoons” that emerge organically, it imposes remote and artificial substitutes that emerge from the heads of intellectuals. It prefers the distant central government to the local neighborhood, the school board president over the head of household.

Thus the creation of the departments, totally subordinate to Paris, during the French Revolution was a classic leftist move. But so were the totalitarian megastates of the twentieth century, which demanded that people’s allegiances be transferred from the smaller associations that had once defined their lives to a brand new central authority that had grown out of nowhere.

The right (properly understood), meanwhile, according to the great classical liberal Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “stands for free, organically grown forms of life.”

The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking; a readiness to preserve traditional values (provided they are true values); a balanced view of the nature of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting on the uniqueness of human beings which cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers. The left is the advocate of the opposite principles; it is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, paradises in which everybody is the same, envy is dead, and the enemy is either dead, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated. Leftism loathes differences, deviations, stratifications. … The word “one” is its symbol: one language, one race, one class, one ideology, one ritual, one type of school, one law for everybody, one flag, one coat of arms, one centralized world state.

Is Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s description partly out of date? After all, who touts their allegiance to “diversity” more than the left? But the left’s version of diversity amounts to uniformity of an especially insidious kind. No one may hold a dissenting view about the desirability of “diversity” itself, of course, and “diverse” college faculties are chosen not for their diversity of viewpoints but precisely for their dreary sameness: left-liberals of all shapes and sizes. What’s more, by demanding “diversity” and proportional representation in as many institutions as possible, the left aims to make all of America exactly the same.

Leftists have long been engaged in a bait-and-switch operation. First, they said they wanted nothing but liberty for all. Liberalism was supposed to be neutral between competing worldviews, seeking only an open marketplace of ideas in which rational people could discuss important questions. It did not aim to impose any particular vision of the good.

That claim was exploded quickly enough when the centrality of government-run education to the left-liberal program became obvious. Progressive education in particular aimed to emancipate children from the superstitions of competing power centers (parents, church, or locality, among others) and transfer their allegiance to the central state.

Of course, the leftist yearning for equality and uniformity played a role as well. There is the story of the French Minister of Education who, looking at his watch, tells a guest, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools, they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.”

As Kuehnelt-Leddihn put it:

Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, personal tutors, none is in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons are manifold. Not only is delight in statism involved, but also the idea of uniformity and equality — the idea that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information, in the same fashion, and to the same degree. This should enable them to think in identical or at least in similar ways.

As time has passed, leftists have bothered less and less to pretend to be neutral between competing social visions. This is why conservatives who accuse the left of moral relativism have it so wrong. Far from relativistic, the left is absolutist in its demands of conformity to strict moral codes.

For example, when it declares “transgender” persons to be the new oppressed class, everyone is expected to stand up and salute. Left-liberals do not argue that support for transgender people may be a good idea for some people but bad for others. That’s what they’d say if they were moral relativists. But they’re not, so they don’t.

And it is not simply that dissent is not tolerated. Dissent cannot be acknowledged. What happens is not that the offender is debated until a satisfactory resolution is achieved. He is drummed out of polite society without further ado. There can be no opinion apart from what the left has decided.

Now it’s true: the left can’t remind us often enough of the tolerant, non-judgmental millennials from whom this world of ubiquitous bigotry can learn so much. So am I wrong to say that the left, and particularly the younger left, is intolerant?

In fact, we are witnessing the least tolerant generation in recent memory. April Kelly-Woessner, a political scientist at Elizabethtown College who has researched the opinions of the millennials, has come up with some revealing findings. If we base how tolerant a person is on how he treats those he disagrees with — an obviously reasonable standard — the millennials fare very poorly.

Yes, the millennials have great sympathy for the official victim groups whose causes are paraded before them in school and at the movies. That’s no accomplishment since millennials agree with these people. But how do they treat and think about those with whom they disagree? A casual glance at social media, or at leftist outbursts on college campuses, reveals the answer.

Incidentally, who was the last leftist speaker shouted down by libertarians on a college campus?

Answer: no one, because that never happens. If it did, you can bet we’d be hearing about it until the end of time.

On the other hand, leftists who terrorize their ideological opponents are simply being faithful to the mandate of Herbert Marcuse, the 1960s leftist who argued that freedom of speech had to be restricted in the case of anti-progressive movements:

Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for “the other side,” I maintain that there are issues where either there is no “other side” in any more than a formalistic sense, or where “the other side” is demonstrably “regressive” and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.

Even much of what passes as conservatism today is tainted by leftism. That’s certainly the case with the neoconservatives: can you imagine Edmund Burke, the fountainhead of modern conservatism, supporting the idea of military force to spread human rights around the world?

Talk to neoconservatives about decentralization, secession, nullification, and you’ll get exactly the same left-wing replies you’d hear on MSNBC.

Now I can imagine the following objection to what I’ve said: whatever we may say about the crimes and horrors of the left, we cannot overlook the totalitarianism of the right, manifested most spectacularly in Nazi Germany.

But in fact, the Nazis were a leftist party. The German Workers’ Party in Austria, the forerunner of the Nazis, declared in 1904: “We are a liberty-loving nationalistic party that fights energetically against reactionary tendencies as well as feudal, clerical, or capitalistic privileges and all alien influences.”

When the party became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or the Nazis, its program included the following:

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party is not a worker’s party in the narrow sense of the term: It represents the interests of all honestly creative labor. It is a liberty-loving and strictly nationalist party and therefore fights against all reactionary trends, against ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and capitalist privileges and every alien influence, but above all against the overpowering influence of the Jewish-commercial mentality in all domains of public life. …

 

It demands the amalgamation of all regions of Europe inhabited by Germans into a democratic, social-minded German Reich. …

 

It demands plebiscites for all key laws in the Reich, the states and provinces. …

 

It demands the elimination of the rule of Jewish bankers over business life and the creation of national people’s banks with a democratic administration.

This program, wrote Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “oozes the spirit of leveling leftism: it was democratic; it was anti-Habsburg (it demanded the destruction of the Danube monarchy in favor of the Pan-German program); it was against all unpopular minorities, an attitude that is the magnetism of all leftist ideologies.”

The leftist obsession with “equality” and leveling means the state must insinuate itself into employment, finance, education, private clubs — pretty much every nook and cranny of civil society. In the name of diversity, every institution is forced to look exactly like every other one.

The left can’t ever be satisfied because its creed is a permanent revolution in the service of unattainable ends like “equality.” People of different skills and endowments will reap different rewards, which means constant intervention into civil society. Moreover, equality vanishes the moment people begin freely exchanging money for the goods they desire, so again: the state must be involved in everything, at all times.

Moreover, each generation of liberals undermines and scoffs at what the previous one took for granted. The revolution marches on.

Leftism is, in short, a recipe for permanent revolution, and of a distinctly anti-libertarian kind. Not just anti-libertarian. Anti-human.

And yet all the hatred these days is directed at the right.

To be sure, libertarians are fully at home neither on the left nor the right as traditionally understood. But the idea that both sides are equally dreadful, or amount to comparable threats to liberty, is foolish and destructive nonsense.

via http://ift.tt/2ayVlQD Tyler Durden

Sometimes you have to know when to “stay down.” Having been barred from owning or operating a lab for at least two years, Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos founder and CEO, said that:

…the company would be “shutting down and subsequently rebuilding the lab from the ground up, rebuilding quality systems, adding highly experienced leadership, personnel and experts, and implementing enhanced quality and training procedures.”

And it appears, as Reuters reports, that is what they are doing as desperate investors maintain the dream despite its total crushing by regulatory authorities and any reality checks…

Theranos Inc hired two executives to oversee regulatory, quality and compliance standards, in a bid to turn around the struggling blood-testing company after it received sanctions from U.S. regulators.

 

Dave Wurtz, who previously worked at Thermo Fisher Scientific, was appointed vice president, regulatory and quality. He will work on getting FDA clearances and approvals, marketing new products, and look into medical-device quality systems.

 

Daniel Guggenheim, who formerly served as assistant general counsel at McKesson Corp (MCK.N), will be chief compliance officer. He will make sure that Theranos complies with all state and federal regulations.

Theranos also said its septegenarian establishment board had also created a compliance and quality committee.

Will a fawning media and drooling celebrity base (that included the Clintons) jump back on the bandwagon hoping this former unicorn becomes a phoenix?

If this former-unicorn was a race-horse they would have already put a bolt through its head.

via http://ift.tt/29ZmFZG Tyler Durden