Tag: finance

Updating our earlier note, it appears The State Department's stalling has been disallowed… (as Bloomberg reports)

A judge ordered the State Department to expedite its review of almost 15,000 previously undisclosed documents recovered by the FBI from Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail servers.

 

U.S. District James Boasberg on Monday ordered the State Department to process those recovered records by Sept. 22 and report back to him that day. He didn’t set a schedule for public release. The department raised the possibility of a phased release starting Oct. 14, which left open how many would be disclosed before the Nov. 8 presidential election.

As we detailed earlier, in yet another incident pointing to Hillary's 'above the law' persistent lies, WaPo reports The FBI’s year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server uncovered tens of thousands more documents from her time as secretary of state that were not previously disclosed by her attorneys. Worse still, as Judicial Watch details, “it looks like the State Department is trying to slow roll the release of the records."

Having suffered blowback from throwing Colin Powell under the bus over the weekend, The Clinton campaign is likely back in panic mode as The Washington Post reports the number of emails to be released is nearly 50 percent more than the 30,000-plus that Clinton’s lawyers deemed work-related and returned to the department in December 2014…

The State Department is expected to discuss when and how it will release the emails Monday morning in federal court.

 

Monday’s hearing comes seven weeks after the Justice Department on July 7 closed a criminal investigation without charges into the handling of classified material in Clinton’s email set-up, which FBI Director James B. Comey Jr. called “extremely careless.”

 

The FBI on Aug. 5 completed transferring all of what Comey said were several thousand previously undisclosed work-related Clinton emails that the FBI found in its investigation for the State Department to review and make public. Government lawyers until now have given no details about how many emails the FBI found or when the full set would be released. It’s unclear how many of the 15,000 or so documents might be attachments, duplicates or exempt from release for various legal reasons.

 

Government lawyers disclosed last week that the FBI turned over six computer discs of information: one including e-mails and attachments that were sent directly to or from Clinton, or to or from her at some point in an e-mail chain, and not previously turned over by her lawyers; a second with classified documents; another with emails returned by Clinton; and three others containing materials from other individuals retrieved by the FBI.

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton tweeted Monday morning that…

FBI found almost 15,000 new Clinton documents. When will State release them? Court hearing today.

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) August 22, 2016

Adding in an interview that “it looks like the State Department is trying to slow roll the release of the records. They’ve had them for at least a month, and we still don’t know when we’re going to get them.”

The roughly 15,000 documents at issue now come from the first disc, Fitton said.

Lawyers for the State Department and Judicial Watch, the legal group, said in an Aug. 12 court filing that they intended to negotiate a plan for the release, part of a civil public records lawsuit before U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg of Washington.

The pre-emptive excuse already being pitched by FBI Director Comey is just as disgusting as his previous statement that  investigators found no evidence that the emails it found “were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.”

Clinton's lawyers also may have deleted some of the emails as "personal," Comey said, noting their review relied on header information and search terms, not a line-by-line reading as the FBI conducted.

We are sure this is "probably nothing" – just another factual falsehood from the Clintons and their establishment cronies.

Of course, as Bill Clinton has stated, this will all change…

If [Hillary] is elected, we will immediately implement the following changes: 

 

The Foundation will accept contributions only from U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and U.S.-based independent foundations, whose names we will continue to make public on a quarterly basis. 

 

And we will change the official name from the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation to the Clinton Foundation.

 

While I will continue to support the work of the Foundation, I will step down from the Board and will no longer raise funds for it.

But – we presume – if she is not elected then the foreign bribes will continue?

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Last week Obama took a lot of heat for playing golf with Larry David and attending lavish Hillary fundraisers instead of taking the time to visit Louisiana (see our post "Does Obama Care About Black People? Louisiana Asks The President To Cut Vacation Short"). 

But, it turns out Obama did do something, his DOJ sent Louisiana a 16-page "guidance" letter warning officials not to be racist in their recovery efforts.  According to Breitbart, the "guidance" has struck a nerve with Louisiana residents including Retired Air Force Colonel Rob Maness who is currently running for U.S. Senate:

“The U.S. Department of Justice under President Barack Obama issued letters to the survivors [in] Louisiana of this great flood of 2016 and said ‘you better not be racist down there’… They sent letters that hit the streets a few days ago, maybe yesterday, that basically warned the citizens of Louisiana that you better not be racist when you’re hiring people to fix your homes,” Maness said.

 

“You know what? We’re tired of being called racists. And I think that that’s the number one issue in the United States of America. Those people [at the DOJ] can just go to hell. They’re not my Department of Justice,” the retired Air Force colonel added.

 

“The good folks down here where I live in Southern Louisiana are just absolutely more than appalled. We’re just  livid about it. The man ought to apologize to the people of this great state,” Maness said of the president.

The guidance letter (included in it entirety below) was originated by the Department of Justice and a litany other federal agencies "to ensure that individuals and communities affected by disasters do not face unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin (including limited English proficiency) in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI)."  The letter points out how the recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina were found to be discriminatory:

In the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we have learned many critical lessons about how recipients of federal financial assistance engaged in emergency management activities can more effectively ensure that all members of the community receive services, regardless of race, color, or national origin.

 

The Recovery Framework notes that “care must be taken to assure that actions, both intentional and unintentional, do not exclude groups of people based on race, color, national origin (including limited English proficiency), religion, sex or disability.”

 

While emergencies and disasters affect all people, the ability of communities of color to access critical recovery programs, activities, and services often has been hampered.

The letter goes on to highlight specific instances of "discrimination" in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  As evidence, the letter points to a single, online rental post which said the renter "prefers two white females."  The letter also points out that St. Bernard Parish acted in a discriminatory fashion by passing a law that allowed blood relatives to skip the permitting process in erecting single-family housing units on the property of relatives.

Nondiscriminatory access to housing and shelters in the aftermath of Katrina also posed a major challenge for diverse racial and ethnic communities. Many seeking temporary housing immediately encountered discriminatory rental advertisements that explicitly refused to rent to African Americans.  For example, an advertisement on a website designed to reach Katrina evacuees read: “Provider will provide room and board for $400 but prefers two white females.” Evidence collected by fair housing testers found that in 66% of all tests, White persons were favored over African American persons seeking housing using contacts available to Katrina evacuees. A federal court found evidence of intentional discrimination in actions by St. Bernard Parish, which neighbors New Orleans, when the parish sought to restrict rental housing opportunities, including actions to halt the development of rental housing and enacting a permit requirement for single-family rentals that exempted renters who were “related by blood” to the homeowners.

We suspect that Air Force Colonel Rob Maness isn't the only person in Louisiana who is going to find this "guidance" somewhat offensive.  Should make for an awkward day for Obama as he tours the state tomorrow to survey damage. 

 

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Submitted by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

What the world is witnessing, without actually paying much attention, is the death of our debt-based economy — that is, borrowing the means to thrive in the now from a future that can’t really furnish it anymore. The illusion that the future would always provide was a legacy of the cheap energy era. That era ended in 2005. The basic promise is broken and with it the premise for living as we had been. The energy available today, especially oil, is no longer cheap enough to run the industrial economies designed to run on it. Any way that you look at the dynamic, Modernity loses.

With oil under $50 a barrel, and gasoline under $3 a gallon (back east), the public apparently thinks that the Peak Oil story is dead and gone. But when it costs $75 a barrel to pull the stuff out of the ground, and the stuff only sells for $47 a barrel, the oil companies’ business model doesn’t really work. The shale oil companies especially have been gaming the system by issuing bonds that pay relatively high interest rates in an investment climate where almost nothing else offers enough yield to live on, especially for pension funds and insurance companies. Two little upward bumps this year in the price of oil toward the $50 range prompted a wish that the good old days of high-priced oil were coming back, that the oil business would be profitable again.

The trouble is that high oil prices — say, over $100 a barrel, as it was in 2014 — crush advanced economies, so that demand for oil crashes, and with it productive activity. Without productivity, the debts issued by companies (and even governments) don’t get repaid. There really is no “sweet spot” in this energy cost equation.

A lot of wishful thinkers would like to believe that you can run contemporary life on something beside oil. But the usual “solutions,” solar and wind energy, don’t pencil out, especially when you consider that the hardware for running them — the photovoltaics, charge controllers, batteries, turbines, and blades, can’t be mass-produced and distributed without the very fossil fuels they are supposed to replace.

These matters add up to the essential quandary of our time. It has expressed itself in falling standards of living for what used to be the middle class, most particularly in the USA. European countries have tried to work around this problem with their rigid bureaucracies for keeping those already employed from losing their jobs. In France, Spain, and Italy, this has only made it much harder for people under 30 to get a job. The jobs picture for millennials in the USA is not much better, though there’s no structural job-protection for their elders who are still working here. They live in abject fear of termination by the HR ghouls of the big corporations.

Sooner or later the younger generation will explode in rage at the system and there is no telling what the result will be. We’re already seeing it in the black ghettos, where decades of accrued social dysfunction make the anomie and purposelessness — of young men especially — much worse. The newer loser class of people who once had good jobs and now have poor prospects of ever getting them back gets swept up in the mania for their incoherent champion, Trump, who shows no sign of understanding the essential quandary of our time. The tragedy of Trumpism is that the man so poorly represents a large group of Americans with genuine woes and grievances. And the larger tragedy of our country these days is that events did not prompt better leaders to step forward.

The explanation may be that people who actually understand the dark dynamics spinning out are rather pessimistic about the our ability to carry on under the familiar disposition of things. Hillary represents the forces in our national life that want to pretend that nothing is wrong, that all the splendid rackets of the day — Federal Reserve interventions, corporate debt-fueled stock buybacks, military log-rolling, medical racketeering, the college loan Ponzi, pension fund levitation, primary dealer bank interest rate arbitrage, agribiz Frankenfood proliferation — can just grind along like some old riverboat banger engine keeping the garbage barge of American life afloat. Thus, Hillary is shaping up to be the patsy of the century, likely to preside, if elected, over the biggest blowup of established arrangements that world has ever seen.

The debt problem alone is absolutely certain to express itself in at least three major ways: the crash of equity markets, the collapse of the bond markets, and the loss of faith in the value and meaning of whatever money you’re using. Any of those events would turn the economic life of the linked advanced economies upside down. Any of them could occur during the 2016 US election season.

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Every dip this morning has been met with a panic bid for stocks back to unchanged with Dow futures now having swung around 500 points intraday for no gain… as VIX is monkey-hammered lower…

Note the 5amET slump in stocks and spike in crude as oil tumbled in early European trading…

With Oil and bond yields consistently trending to the lows of the day…

One trader described the swings in stocks as “complete chaos” saying that machines were clearly in charge… “there’s no humans playing anymore.”

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There is an odd infatuation among Japan’s ruling elite with fantasy characters: last June, BOJ governor Haruhiko Kuroda, who is running the greatest monetary experiment in history, essentially compared himself to Peter Pan in a formal speech at the BOJ-IMES conference, saying no matter what, one has to believe one can fly just like Peter Pan:

The issues I have raised so far are all complex, and there are no quick, definitive solutions for them. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that, at this one-and-a-half day conference, we will address the issues we currently face and find our way forward through lively discussions. I trust that many of you are familiar with the story of Peter Pan, in which it says, “the moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.” Yes, what we need is a positive attitude and conviction. Indeed, each time central banks have been confronted with a wide range of problems, they have overcome the problems by conceiving new solutions.

Overnight, Japan’s other distinguished ruler, premier Shinzo Abe did it again, when he took time away from his busy schedule of instructing the BOJ to monetize any ETF it can find, while buying now more than a third of all Japanese government bonds, and appeared in a brief but showstopping gig at the Olympics closing ceremony as the Nintendo game character Super Mario, in what AP said “offered a tantalizing glimpse at Tokyo’s plans for the 2020 games.”

The organizers for the Tokyo Olympics crammed the works into a brief two-minute film montage before Abe’s appearance: athletes participating in more than a dozen sports, as iconic Japanese images like Tokyo Tower, cherry blossoms, a bullet train, Tokyo Bay Bridge and the famous “scramble” intersection in Shibuya whiz by. Anime and video game characters including Pac Man and Hello Kitty were featured, along with the blue Doraemon cat, who pulls from his pocket of magic gadgets a green warp pipe to whisk Abe, transformed briefly into Super Mario, from his limousine in Tokyo straight to Rio.

Abe emerges atop the “pipe” in a big red Super Mario cap and costume, holding a glowing red ball kicked to him by famed manga soccer star Captain Tsubasa.

Loved watching the Olympic closing ceremony just because of Mario Abe lol. Can’t wait for Tokyo 2020 Olympic games!! http://pic.twitter.com/56F0RCDBM1

— OPPAI_Lover69 (@OPPAI_Lover69) August 22, 2016

How did Japan’s prime minister become an Italian character with a fetish for eating magic mushrooms? The Tokyo 2020 organizers said in a statement that the Super Mario idea came up during a brainstorming session.

Staff at Nintendo would say only that the government asked to borrow the character for the show. At least on Twitter, Abe pretty much upstaged other highlights of the Olympics finale. Alternatively, perhaps Abe was merely giving Kuroda a hint to be more like his ECB peer, Super Mario Draghi, best known for his unprecedented ability to soak up debt securities over the past two years.

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The farce continues as detailed reckoning of Hillary Clinton's State Department emails reveal former Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin provided influential Clinton Foundation donors special, expedited access to the secretary of state. In many instances, as Judicial Watch exposes, the preferential treatment provided to donors (from a British soccer player to the crown prince of Bahrain) was at the specific request of Clinton Foundation executive Douglas Band.

As JudicialWatch.com details, the new documents included 20 Hillary Clinton email exchanges not previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date to 191 of new Clinton emails (not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department).  These records further appear to contradict statements by Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department.

The Abedin emails reveal that the longtime Clinton aide apparently served as a conduit between Clinton Foundation donors and Hillary Clinton while Clinton served as secretary of state. In more than a dozen email exchanges, Abedin provided expedited, direct access to Clinton for donors who had contributed from $25,000 to $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In many instances, Clinton Foundation top executive Doug Band, who worked with the Foundation throughout Hillary Clinton’s tenure at State, coordinated closely with Abedin. In Abedin’s June deposition to Judicial Watch, she conceded that part of her job at the State Department was taking care of “Clinton family matters.”

Included among the Abedin-Band emails is an exchange revealing that when Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain requested a meeting with Secretary of State Clinton, he was forced to go through the Clinton Foundation for an appointment. Abedin advised Band that when she went through “normal channels” at State, Clinton declined to meet. After Band intervened, however, the meeting was set up within forty-eight hours. According to the Clinton Foundation website, in 2005, Salman committed to establishing the Crown Prince’s International Scholarship Program (CPISP) for the Clinton Global Initiative. And by 2010, it had contributed $32 million to CGI. The Kingdom of Bahrain reportedly gave between $50,000 and $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. And Bahrain Petroleum also gave an additional $25,000 to $50,000.

From: Doug Band

To: Huma Abedin

Sent: Tue Jun 23 1:29:42 2009

Subject:

Cp of Bahrain in tomorrow to Friday

Asking to see her

Good friend of ours

From: Huma Abedin

To: Doug Band

Sent: Tue Jun 23 4:12:46 2009

Subject: Re:

He asked to see hrc thurs and fri thru normal channels. I asked and she said she doesn’t want to commit to anything for thurs or fri until she knows how she will feel. Also she says that she may want to go to ny and doesn’t want to be committed to stuff in ny…

From: Huma Abedin [Huma@clintonemail.com]

Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2009 10:35:15 AM

To: Doug Band

Subject:

Offering Bahrain cp 10 tomorrow for meeting woith [sic] hrc

If u see him, let him know

We have reached out thru official channels

Also included among the Abedin-Band emails is an exchange in which Band urged Abedin to get the Clinton State Department to intervene in order to obtain a visa for members of the Wolverhampton (UK) Football Club, one of whose members was apparently having difficulty because of a “criminal charge.” Band was acting at the behest of millionaire Hollywood sports entertainment executive and President of the Wasserman Foundation Casey Wasserman. Wasserman has donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation through the Wasserman Foundation.

From: Tim Hoy [VP Wasserman Media Group]

Date: Tue. 5 May 2009 10:45:55 – 0700

To: Casey Wasserman

Subject: [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter

Casey: Paul Martin’s [popular English footballer] client [Redacted] needs to get an expedited appointment at the US Embassy in London this week and we have hit some road blocks. I am writing to ask for your help.

 

The Wolverhampton FC is coming to Las Vegas this Thursday for a “celebration break.” [Redacted] so he cannot get a visa to the US without first being “interviewed” in the visa section of the US Embassy in London …

I contacted Senator Boxer’s office in SF for help … They balked at the criminal charge and said they “couldn’t help.”

I’m now trying to get help from Sherrod Brown’s office but that’s not going well either. So do you have any ideas/contacts that could contact the US Embassy in London and ask that they see [Redacted] tomorrow?

From: Casey Wasserman

To: Doug Band; Trista Schroeder [Wasserman Media Group executive]

Sent: Tue May 05 2:23:50 2009 [PT]

Subject: FW [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter

Can you help with the below [Hoy email], or maybe Huma??? I am copying trista as I am on the plane in case I lose connection … thx.

From: Doug Band

Sent: Tue May 05 7:08:21 2009 [ET]

To: Casey Wasserman; Trista Schroeder

Subject: Re: [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter

Will email her.

From: Doug Band

To: Huma Abedin

Sent: Tue May 5 7:26:49 2009

Subject: Fw: [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter

[As per subject line, Band apparently forwarded Abedin material sent to him by Casey.]

From: Huma Abedin [Huma@clintonemail.com]

Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 7:39:38 PM

To: Doug Band

Subject: Re: [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter

I doubt we can do anything but maybe we can help with an interview. I’ll ask.

From: Huma Abedin

To: Doug Band

Sent: Tue May 05 5:50:09 2009

Subject: Re: [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter

I got this now, makes me nervous to get involved but I’ll ask.

From: Doug Band

To: Huma Abedin

Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 7:43:30 PM

Subject:  Re: [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter

Then don’t

The Abedin emails also reveal that Slimfast tycoon S. Daniel Abraham was granted almost immediate access to then-Secretary of State Clinton, with Abedin serving as the facilitator. According to the Clinton Foundation website, Abraham, like the Wasserman Foundation, has given between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. The emails indicate that Abraham was granted almost immediate access to Clinton upon request:

From: Huma Abedin

To: H

Sent: Mon May 04 4:40:34 2009

Subject: Danny

Danny abraham called this morning. He is in dc today and tomorrow and asked for 15 min with you. Do u want me to try and fit him in tomorrow?

From: H

To Huma Abedin

Sent: Mon May 04 5:14:00 2009

Subject: Re: Danny

Will the plane wait if I can’t get there before 7-8?

From: Huma Abedin

Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 5:15:30 PM

Subject: Re: Danny

Yes of course

Additional Abedin emails in which the top Clinton aide intervenes with the State Department on behalf of Clinton Foundation donors include the following:

• On Friday, June 26, 2009, Clinton confidant Kevin O’Keefe wrote to Clinton saying that “Kevin Conlon is trying to set up a meeting with you and a major client.” Clinton wrote to Abedin, “Can you help deliver these for Kevin?” Abedin responded, “I’ll look into it asap” Kevin O’Keefe donated between $10,000 and $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Kevin Conlon is a Clinton presidential campaign “Hillblazer” who has raised more than $100,000 for the candidate.

• On Tuesday, June 16, 2009, Ben Ringel wrote to Abedin, “I’m on shuttle w Avigdor Liberman. I called u back yesterday. I want to stop by to see hrc tonite for 10 mins.” Ringel donated between $10,000 and $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

• On Monday, July 6, 2009, Maureen White wrote to Abedin, “I am going to be in DC on Thursday. Would she have any time to spare?” Abedin responded, “Yes I’ll make it work.” White donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

• In June 2009, prominent St. Louis political power broker Joyce Aboussie exchanged a series of insistent emails with Abedin concerning Aboussie’s efforts to set up a meeting between Clinton and Peabody Energy VP Cartan Sumner. Aboussie wrote, “Huma, I need your help now to intervene please. We need this meeting with Secretary Clinton, who has been there now for nearly six months. This is, by the way, my first request. I really would appreciate your help on this. It should go without saying that the Peabody folks came to Dick [Gephardt] and I because of our relationship with the Clinton’s.” After further notes from Aboussie, Abedin responded, “We are working on it and I hope we can make something work… we have to work through the beauracracy [sic] here.” Aboussie donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

• On Saturday, May 16, 2009, mobile communications executive and political activist Jill Iscol wrote to Clinton, “Please advise to whom I should forward Jacqueline Novogratz’s request [for a meeting with the secretary of state]. I know you know her, but honestly, she is so far ahead of the curve and brilliant I believe she could be enormously helpful to your work.” Clinton subsequently sent an email to Abedin saying, “Pls print.” Jill and husband Ken Iscol donated between $500,000 and $1 million to the Clinton Foundation. Clinton subsequently appointed Novogratz to the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

The newly obtained Abedin emails also contain a memorandum sent to Cheryl Mills from State Department White House liaison Laura Pena revealing that Rajiv Fernando was proposed for his controversial appointment to the sensitive International Security Advisory Board as early as June 2009. Fernando was not actually appointed until 2011, and his appointment raised a firestorm because, according to an ABC News report, “he had no obvious experience in the field.” Fernando donated $1 million to the Clinton Foundation.

The Abedin emails reveal that even U2’s Bono got into the act when former Bill Clinton aide Ben Schwerin, who helped set up the Clinton Foundation, urged Abedin to help the aging rock star broadcast from the international space station. In a May 27, 2009, email with the subject line “Bono/NASA,” Schwerin wrote, “Bono wants to do linkup with the international space station on every show during the tour this year.… Any ideas? Thks.” Bono has been a donor to the Clinton Global Initiative. And in 2011, he gathered top entertainers for “A Decade of Difference: A Concert Celebrating 10 Years of the William J. Clinton Foundation.” According to USA Today, “Some tickets were sold to the public for $50 to $550, and premium seats went for $1,000 to $5,000 on the Foundation website.”

“These new emails confirm that Hillary Clinton abused her office by selling favors to Clinton Foundation donors,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “There needs to be a serious, independent investigation to determine whether Clinton and others broke the law.”

This is the tenth set of records produced for Judicial Watch by the State Department from the non-state.gov email accounts of Huma Abedin.  The documents were produced under a court order in a May 5, 2015, Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00684)) requiring the agency to produce “all emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013, using a ‘non-state’.gov email address.”

 

In June, Judicial Watch uncovered two batches (here and here) of new Clinton email records through court-ordered discovery.  Twice in May, Judicial Watch uncovered new Clinton emails, including emails that show Clinton knew about the security risk of her BlackBerry (see here and here).

 

Recently, Judicial Watch released other State Department emails (one batch of 103 pages, the second of 138 pages), with newly discovered Clinton emails also going back as far as January 2009.

 

In March, Judicial Watch released Clinton State Department emails dating from February 2009 that also call into question her statements about her emails. Those emails contained more evidence of the battle between security officials in the State Department, National Security Agency, Clinton and her staff over attempts to obtain secure BlackBerrys.

 

On August 9, Judicial Watch produced a 2009 email in which Band directed Abedin and Mills to put Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire and Clinton Foundation donor Gilbert Chagoury in touch with the State Department’s “substance person” on Lebanon. Band noted that Chagoury is “key guy there [Lebanon] and to us.” Chagoury has donated between $1 million to $5 million to the Foundation, according to foundation documents. He also pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative.

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly stated that she believes that the 55,000 pages of documents she turned over to the State Department in December 2014 included all of her work-related emails.  In response to a court order in other Judicial Watch litigation, she declared under penalty of perjury that she had “directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or are potentially federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done.” This new email find is also at odds with her official campaign statement suggesting all “work or potentially work-related emails” were provided to the State Department.

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Moments ago, Belgian media reported that police had shot and wounded a woman in a Brussels suburb after she attempted to stab three people with a machete.

According to twitter accounts, there are initial reports of injuries.

 

#BREAKING: Initial reports of injuries after woman attacks bus passengers with a blade in Belgium http://pic.twitter.com/oPuhXnVyP5

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) August 22, 2016

#Breaking Reports suggest multiple people have been stabbed in #Uccle (Belgium) http://pic.twitter.com/Kp8fE736gI

— News This Second (@NewsThisSecond) August 22, 2016

#URGENT : Attaque à la machette à #Uccle selon des témoins. De nombreux policiers présents #Bruxelles (source :Seb) http://pic.twitter.com/WZWwnl52K8

— Geoffrey Hulsens (@GHulsens) August 22, 2016

The assailant has been arrested. There were no initial details on the motive or her background.

Developing story

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In his latest interview on RealVision conducted last Friday, Doubleline’s Jeff Gundlach recapped the major points of his relatively bearish worldview, which are increasingly prioritizing political risk, with the ‘T-word’ now a factor for stocks, as the election gets closer and the potential for a President Trump.

Gundlach has been calling a Trump victory since the start and he outlines the likely market impact, as well as an economic bounce from the fiscal stimulus and the bond market shenanigans that might follow. With a long term need for l governments to really tackle the global debt problem against the backdrop of entitlement, the only play for serious investors here is defensive and Gundlach is more focused on  where he can make money and for that he has the gold miners in his sights.

Here is a brief summary of his key points:

• Trump is elected, leading to more debt, and an even greater fiscal stimulus:

“I think Trump’s going to win largely because there are many, many– people have used the Brexit analogy and I think it’s apt. Where people were almost afraid to say that they were for Brexit and then they  ended up voting for it… Trump is the gateway to fiscal stimulus. He’s absolutely promising to build roads and airports and walls, and I have observed that one thing I think we all know is that Mr. Trump is pretty comfortable with debt.”

• Negative interest rates damage the real economy as they require higher savings, and are deflationary:

“You want to fight deflation with deflation. But they don’t seem to understand that you do not increase consumption with negative interest rates, at least for a significant fraction of the population. You increase savings, and you necessitate savings because the 60-year-old man that wants to retire at age 70– maybe an old school thought– I need to save a million dollars and maybe I can make 5%, $50,000 a year. Little social security if I get it. I can get by.”

• On the downside risk return skew in holding Treasuries, which may go from 1.25% to 1.00%, versus making 10% on gold miners:

“If you go 1% on Treasuries, you’ll make about three points on the 10-year. That happens over the course of a year, you make 4.3%. I just think there’s a lot of ways of higher probability of making 5% or 6% through rank speculations on volatile asset classes. Like at this point, I would even add gold miners. I actually said this in an interview with Barron’s on June 27, I think it was.”

• On his favorite recession indicator: the 12 month moving average in the unemployment rate.

“I’m not predicting a recession any time soon, in fact our early warning indicators are only now getting us a little bit of our antenna up. One of them is the unemployment rate versus 12 month moving average. For very understandable economic reasons, you never get a recession with the unemployment rate below it’s 12 month moving average. Well, it’s about to go above. There’s a 9 basis point difference between the unemployment rate and its 12 month moving average. It doesn’t guarantee anything, but unless that crosses over, you really can’t have a recession.”

• On America’s biggest generation: the broke Gen-Xers:

“I met with a major demographer this week who showed me something that I knew, but hadn’t focused on and didn’t know it was this extreme. And that is the net worth of the Gen Xers compared to the same time in their life of the baby boomers. I mean, the Gen Xers are the people who, demographically, should be fueling discretionary spending, like luxury minus houses. Not starters not senior facilities, but what people used to call the McMansions and things like that. They should be fueling luxury goods. They’re broke. They’re in really poor financial condition, in terms of where they are. I mean they bought houses in 2006, they’re way, way down. And they don’t have the wherewithal to drive these markets.”

• Gundlach then cites Karl Marx on prevailing topics like class wars, tech upheaval, robots, property relations and social tension.

“Karl Marx actually wasn’t a communist by today’s standards, he was just a political philosopher. And he came up with this theory of revolution and change, which is that you start out with a copacetic society, at some point you find a level ground, and you have property relations, so the rules of who gets the spoils of the economy. And then you’ve got the means of production, and that’s the stuff being produced. And they’re very harmonious. And everything’s going along nicely. And society is going forward, people are relatively happy. But then something happens technologically and the means of production change. That’s obviously– we can identify the internet, social media, robots for sure. That changes– but the winners start to change places with the establishment. The establishment is trying to keep the reigns of power and economic benefit, but you’re starting to get guys that create an app, they can sell it for a billion dollars. They go from college student to billionaire in a year and that’s great for them. But for a lot of people that had traditional jobs– they’re replaced by robots and they don’t see any way that they’re going to be able to tap into this.

 

So rather than keep pace with the evolution of the means of production, they fight it. And so the tension gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it gets to the point where people start to realize that they’re not alone in feeling this way.

 

Thankfully we don’t live in a totalitarian regime, at least not yet. And if there’s a king you can understand why people are nervous about saying something against the King. The King’s probably going to chop your head off if you say something sufficiently negative about him.”

• The bond kind has a few less than kind words about driverless cars, noting it will take longer to get them cleared for safety reasons:

“I think driverless cars are further away than people think. I think they’re incredibly likely to happen ultimately. And again, massively problematic for jobs and for a lot of things, but I think it’s going to take a lot longer than people think.”

• On the fate of US GDP and the dollar, and why it could break to the downside

“There’s this great belief that the dollar’s going to strengthen because of the differences between our central bank policy, which is itching to raise rates– and trust me, the day of the Brexit I said to my training staff, I said, when do you think we’re going to talk about Fed tightening again? And the more junior guys were like 6 months minimum, and I said, within a month. Well it’s happened. It’s been less than a month and it’s happened. We’re already talking about the Fed raising rates. But it hasn’t strengthened the dollar.

 

Some people that do economic analysis in a different way than I do, I’m not very familiar with their methods, they seem to be arguing to me quite strongly– they expect quite a strong GDP report for the second half. Much stronger than GDP now, for whatever reason. I’m not predicting that’s going to happen, this isn’t my work. But it does fit together nicely in this puzzle. That if we got a strong GDP report for the second half – and a bounce back is sensible and frequent in the second half, even though they are seasonally adjusted, they seem to not get the adjustments right, maybe we’ll be talking about raising interest rates in September…. So that could make my dollar breaks on the downside.”

* * *

Finally, butting it all together, this is how Gundlach is currently positioned in his master fund:

“I’ve been net short all year. The US stock market bid my macro fund and I’m doing great. I’m not having trouble at all making money on the short side. In fact, my longs are probably bringing the performance down. Because I’m net short 100% , but I have some longs against some shorts, and the shorts have just been fantastic. And I’m basically looking at these things that are viewed to be safe and they’re not safe at all. I think the best way to play the short side is to buy stocks that are believed to be safe, but are very recession exposed.”

Much more in the full 50 minute interview which can be watched on RealVisionTV.

via http://ift.tt/2b9KDot Tyler Durden

Dozens of people gathered outside the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People headquarters in Third Ward Sunday for a White Lives Matter protest, according to Click2Houston.com.

White Lives Matter protesters, holding American and Confederate flags, were at the NAACP around noon. As time passed, the crowd started to grow, prompting the arrival of police on horseback and the placement barricades.

"We came here because the NAACP headquarters is here and that's one of the most racist groups in America," Scott Lacy said, adding "If they're going to be a civil rights organization and defend their people," he said, "they also need to hold their people accountable."

By the time police tried to disperse the White Lives Matter supporters, Third Ward residents were pushing back against the protest, citing recent officer-involved shootings that have left African Americans dead.

Once the others dispersed, a group of African-American and white locals gathered in the parking lot of a church nearby. They prayed.

 

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