Tag: news

Doug Casey On Why It’s OK To Discriminate

Via CaseyResearch.com,

It was the worst article I’ve ever read. The piece was titled “Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?” In it, the author argued why white men should no longer be allowed to vote.

(The Huffington Post has since pulled the original article down claiming that the author “cannot be traced and appears not to exist.” Luckily, we were able to track down the original article. You can read it here.)

As soon as I finished reading the article, I sent it to Casey Research founder Doug Casey. He replied:

“Fascinating. At first, it seemed like a comedy piece. But it's clear she's serious.”

A few days later, Doug and I chatted about the article.

Below is a transcript of our conversation. We hope you enjoy it.

*  *  *

Justin: Doug what did you think of that Huffington Post article I sent you?

Doug: I read the article when it was still up, and it was absolutely incredible. That’s not just a figure of speech. I mean it beggared belief. I urge everyone reading this to hit the link. These people don’t seem to realize that they’re actually parodies of themselves. I mean, they’re always talking about racism and xenophobia and sexism and ageism and the like. They don’t look at people as individuals, they look at people as members of classes. That’s why it’s called “identity politics”—you don’t identify as an individual, but as a member of a group or a class. And, of course, their philosophical background is cultural Marxism. Because, you know, one of the central points of Marxism is that people are all members of classes.

But it’s actually gone beyond that. It’s become fashionable now to hate white males in particular. They say that women, blacks, Muslims—pick a group, any group except for white males—are all discriminated against.

I would say, in the first place, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with discrimination in itself. Discrimination can be rational. Discrimination can be intelligent. It’s often necessary. It’s a matter of what you’re basing your discrimination on.

You have to discriminate between things that will help you and things that will hurt you. And that can include other groups or even other people. It’s a genetic trait to be more favorably inclined towards people like yourself. Tribes usually identify themselves as “the people”, and everybody else is “other”, a potential enemy. It makes sense to recognize facts of reality. Different ethnic and religious groups have different beliefs, customs, and ethics. Until you can get to know them as individuals it makes sense to generalize.

But it goes deeper than that with this insane article. What these people really hate is Western Civilization and everything it represents. The question is: Why do these people think it’s virtuous to discriminate against white males? White males are largely responsible for Western Civilization. Which is shorthand for things like individualism, free markets, free thought, science, literature, industry, and about everything that’s allowed mankind to rise out of the muck and look to conquer the planets.

That’s what this article really hates.

So, it’s fascinating not so much that somebody wrote an article as stupid as that. But that a large outlet like Huffington would actually publish it. It’s a sign of how degraded things are. I’d say the author suffers from a serious psychological aberration. The editor who posted it is clearly a graduate of some PC US university, probably a major in Gender Studies.

It’s too bad that they took it down because it should be put on display, as a warning. Unless they repost it in The Onion.

Justin: I totally agree, Doug. I’ve also noticed that these people don’t really want equality for all. They want equality for some. It’s incredibly hypocritical.

Doug: It’s actually all about envy. Envy is a vice—it’s different from jealousy, another vice. Jealousy is a vice that says, “You have something, I want it, I’ll take it away from you.” Envy is even worse. It says, “You have something that I want, I can’t get it, so I’ll destroy it, so you can’t have it either.” These people aren’t just misguided. They’re mentally ill. They’re actually evil. But they’re not just taken seriously, they’re treated with respect. And they’re endemic to society at this point. This is cause for great pessimism.

Justin: It’s certainly not the only reason to be pessimistic, either. But that’s it for today. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.

Doug: You’re welcome.

*  *  *

Doug and his team just released a new video presentation that explains a unique way to get paid every month on autopilot. Thanks to a brand-new initiative started by the US government, you can potentially earn an extra $10,000 to $40,000 over the next three years. If you're interested, you can watch it right here.

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The New America: Rich Get Richer, Poor Get Replaced By Robots

Trump has spent a lot of time during his first couple of months in the White House ramping up the rhetoric over all the jobs that are flowing out of the country into lower-cost labor markets like Mexico, China and elsewhere.  And while that may be true, as we’ve pointed out multiple times in the past, part of the issue is also related to good old-fashioned capital allocation decisions whereby the combination of rising labor costs in the U.S. and declining technology costs makes capital investments in automation much more attractive.

The problem, of course, is that low-skilled labor (e.g. making a Big Mac or taking an order at McDonald’s) is much more susceptible to automation than higher-skilled positions which results in expanding income disparity. 

In fact, as Bloomberg points out in a series of charts today, the growing income divide, just since 2010, is fairly staggering.  The rich-poor gap – the difference in annual income between households in the top 20% and those in the bottom 20% – ballooned by just over $29,000 between 2010 and 2015. 

High-tech hubs were among the five metropolitan statistical areas where the gap between the highest- and lowest-income households expanded the most: two in California, San Francisco and San Jose, as well as Austin and Seattle.

 

The gap between the super rich (top 5%) and the middle class (the middle 20%) is also surging.

 

Meanwhile, as a new study from PWC points out, this trend is unlikely to reverse anytime in the near future as they estimate that 38% of U.S. jobs could be at risk of automation just over the next 15 years.

“Technological developments have increasingly replaced low- and mid-skilled jobs while complementing higher-skilled jobs,” said Chad Sparber, an associate professor and chair of the economic department at Colgate University.

 

This shift is predicted to continue. About 38 percent of U.S. jobs could be at high risk of automation by the early 2030s, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. The “most-exposed” industries include retail and wholesale trade, transportation and storage, and manufacturing, with less-educated workers facing the biggest challenges.

 

“Companies are doubling down on costs cuts and streamlining their operations,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank in New York. Workers “at the bottom have not seen as much improvement as those at the very top of society.”

Of course, when demand for a product, low-skilled labor in this case, is declining, the worst thing you can do is raise the price for that product.  Unfortunately, as we pointed out a couple of days ago, that is exactly what Bernie Sanders and other liberals are doing with their recently released legislation calling for a $15 federal minimum wage.

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Forget Reagan: Trump’s Tax Plan Is More Like George W. Bush

Still at it. ||| ReasonIn the run-up to today’s big White House tax-reform announcement, the question among many analysts was: Would President Donald Trump’s ideas look more like Ronald Reagan in 1981 (when he and a bipartisan congressional majority cut rates) or 1986, when they simplified the code? While Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, flanked by National Economic Director Gary Cohn, bragged that the administration’s plan was both “the biggest tax cut” and the “largest tax reform” in U.S. history—1981 and 1986 at the same time, only more!—the more apt and less comforting historical precedent might be the guy who Trump never tires of bashing: George W. Bush.

The second President Bush pushed through tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, each of which passed with fewer than the 60 Senate votes required by an amendment to the 1974 Congressional Budget Act that demanding a supermajority for any piece of legislation seen as worsening the federal deficit 10-plus years down the road. How did the Bush cuts pass with only 58 and 51 votes, respectively? By including sunset provisions right at that 10-year mark. You can’t be accused of affecting the year-11 deficit if you die at age 10!

In word and deed, President Trump appears poised to follow down Bush’s path of temporary tax reform through budget reconciliation; i.e., passing it on a party-line, simple-majority vote. “I hope [Democrats] don’t stand in the way,” Mnuchin said at the press conference. “And I hope we see many Democrats who cross the aisle and support this. Having said that, if they don’t, we are prepared to look at the reconciliation process.” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) echoed the sentiment: “We want to look at every avenue, but we think reconciliation is the preferred process, we think that’s the most logical process to bring tax reform through,” Ryan told reporters Wednesday.

There are exactly two ways you can sidestep the 60-vote rule. The first is to make sure the tax changes project to being deficit-neutral a decade from now. Given that Trump’s campaign tax-reform framework, upon which today’s announcement was largely based, had previously produced revenue estimates from conservative outfits showing a decrease of around $3.5 trillion over 10 years, it’s damn near impossible to imagine the Congressional Budget Office or the Joint Committee on Taxation (Congress’s go-to economic projection shops) torturing those 13-figure numbers out of existence, no matter how “dynamic” their scoring.

Worsening those prospects—though arguably making the policy world a better place—the Mnuchin/Cohn duo swatted away one of the main proposed revenue-generators of 2017 tax reform: Paul Ryan’s treasured and troublesome “border adjustment tax,” a tariff by any other name that the speaker was counting on to offset the revenue hits by $1 trillion.

Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, no fan of either taxes or tariffs, told me last week that he was in favor of the Border Adjustment Tax as the price for getting a $2.5 trillion tax cut. Without it? “There are two options to that,” Norquist said. “You could have a smaller tax cut, not get rid of the death tax, not take the individual rates down or the corporate rates down as much. But you have to find a trillion dollars in less tax-cutting. Or you could have a tax that replaced it, some tax somewhere else. I’m not sure there’s one that’s an improvement.”

Well, Mnuchin and Cohn did include a big revenue generator in today’s press conference, in the form of eliminating the federal tax deductions that Americans can take on their state and local taxes, a change that the Washington Post says “could save more than $1 trillion over 10 years.” This idea, which makes intuitive sense, would nonetheless be heavily disruptive to those of us who live in high-tax states. And not just in thos Democratic-bubble strongholds like New York, California, and Illinois—according to this WalletHub analysis, vying for worst American state/local tax burden are the deep red states of Nebraska and Iowa (ranked 50th and 43rd out of 51, respectively), plus the Trump swing states of Michigan (44th) and Ohio (45th). That’s five Republican senators right there, at a time when the GOP advantage in the Senate is just 52-48. If this provision passes, I’ll eat my baseball glove. (And then move to Nevada.)

Steve Mnuchin can say that the tax cut “will pay for itself,” but it is extraordinarily unlikely that any reputable governmental economic-projection outfit will agree. So what was that Option #2, Mr. Norquist?

“I’d have to give up on permanence, and make it temporary,” he said. The problem with that: “Going to temporary means that people can’t plan. And you won’t get the economic benefit of reforms if people think they disappear in a few years.”

It is true that some of Bush’s tax cuts were eventually made permanent, and that Trump’s people are clearly hoping to press whatever advantage they have now to maybe achieve that or other tax-code goals later. But it’s also true that, coupled with his other commitments, Trump is setting himself up to mimic one of the signature aspects of a presidency he disdains. Taxcut-and-spend is back, baby, and with it any last claim that the Republican Party is serious about confronting the national debt.

There is plenty to like about the tax-reform bullet points distributed by the White House. A 15 percent corporate tax rate is one helluva lot better than 35, and could conceivably spur the kind of growth America has not seen this whole grim century. The Alternative Minimum Tax, among other intended hatchet victims, does not deserve our sympathy. And though it’s getting much less play, the switch to a “territorial” tax system—meaning, you pay taxes on what you earn here, not what you earn abroad—is a welcome and long-overdue change in a global outlier of a tax policy. (“We want any American company that makes money in Germany to be able to bring it back easily and not be punished for bringing it back,” Norquist said. “That’s the way the rest of the world operates, it’s not how we operate.”)

I predict...pain. ||| AEI/ReasonBut even if the economy responds to temporary tax cuts and aggressive regulatory rollbacks with a historic growth spurt (looming trade war be damned), that will not make up for the fact that President Trump has no demonstrated interest in cutting back the biggest drivers of federal spending: Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest on the debt. His first proposed budget, a political nonstarter, only manages to keep spending flat by proposing agency cuts that Congress will never agree to. His infrastructure plan, as an opening bid, promised Democrats they could spend around $200 million of federal money (still not nearly enough for the Chuck Schumers of the world). He is so far operating a more interventionist foreign policy than he campaigned on. At a time of unprecedentedly worrisome debt overhangs and entitlement bubbles, Trump has steered an all-too-willing GOP into fiscal fantasyland.

Few politicians win elections by bumming out voters with the realities of trade-offs. As the late, great economist James Buchanan wrote midway through the Reagan presidency:

“The attractiveness of financing spending by debt issue to the elected politicians should be obvious. Borrowing allows spending to be made that will yield immediate political payoffs without the incurring of any immediate political cost.”

What’s more, Buchanan warned, “the replacement of current tax financing by government borrowing has the effect of reducing the ‘perceived price’ of government goods and services,” with the result that taxpayers “increase their demands for such goods and services.”

It was for this reason that Buchanan favored balanced budget amendments rather than an endless series of tax cuts. If voters knew how much their government actually cost, he reasoned, they might finally get serious about restraining it. As his former colleague Tyler Cowen put it in The New York Times in March 2011, Buchanan “argued that deficit spending would evolve into a permanent disconnect between spending and revenue, precisely because it brings short-term gains. We end up institutionalizing irresponsibility in the federal government.”

There are a handful of politicians on Capitol Hill, many from the Tea Party wave beginning in 2010, who are aware of Buchanan’s work, and even campaigned on openly confronting fiscal illusions and realistic tradeoffs. Some of those politicians, such as Rand Paul and Mike Lee, are among the razor-thin GOP majority in the Senate. It will be interesting to see how they react to the near-term scrums over government shutdowns, border-wall financing, emergency supplemental requests, and massive tax cuts.

As for Trump, he was already going into his presidency with a chance of topping even the flagrantly irresponsible Barack Obama in creating new debt. The economy, and American pocketbooks (outside of New York and California, anyway), might get a temporary sugar high, and here’s hoping they do. But the long-term fiscal picture is arguably bleaker today than it was yesterday. Trump, whatever his many flaws, was supposed to at least provide a sharp break from politics as usual. With his Bush-style tax cuts and Obama-like spending, however, he is instead giving us more of what has made the 21st century so disappointing in the first place.

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Obama Explains Why He Accepted $400,000 For A Paid Speech On Wall Street

There was some snickering two days ago when it emerged that as his first paid speech appearance, former president Barack Obama who – at least on paper was a determined crusader against the big banks – will receive $400,000 for roughly an hour of his time from, well, a bank or rather Cantor Fitzgerald.

Moments ago, Obama seemingly concerned by the public response the news has generated, decided to respond via his spokesman Eric Schultz, and explain why it is perfectly ok for the former president to collect a $400,000 from a bank. We won’t comment suffice to note that in trying to explain why it is now ok for him to collect nearly half a million dollars from the hate banks, it is probably not a good idea to say the following: “I’d just point out that in 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history.“

Full statement from Obama spokesman Greg Sargent

As we announced months ago, President Obama will deliver speeches from time to time. Some of those speeches will be paid, some will be unpaid, and regardless of venue or sponsor, President Obama will be true to his values, his vision, and his record.

 

He recently accepted an invitation to speak at a health care conference in September, because, as a President who successfully passed health insurance reform, it’s an issue of great importance to him. With regard to this or any speech great importance to him. With regard to this or any speech involving Wall Street sponsors, I’d just point out that in 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history – and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since FDR.

 

And while he’ll continue to give speeches from time to time, he’ll spend most of his time writing his book and, as he said in Chicago this week, focusing his post-presidency work on training and elevating a new generation of political leaders in America.

Source: Greg Sargent

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Paul Brodsky: “Only The Court Jester Gets To Speak Truth To Power And Laugh About It”

By Paul Brodsky of Macro Allocation Inc.

“A stock is like a living organism. A sparrow, say. And we are able to create an emergent-based abstraction of that sparrow, which closely approximates the sparrow itself, accounting for migration patterns, wind, weather, and other variables. We can create a similar abstraction of a stock combining the information from the specific ETFs, which represent its underlying dependencies. And if we apply this to the stock we can predict its delta, following the path of its extracted self, because nature follows abstraction.”

      – Taylor from Billions

Surely, You Jest

The writers of Showtime’s Billions are nothing if not funny. The gibberish above captures perfectly the philosophical yearning of hedge fund men and women in their tortured quest for higher meaning. (As it turns out, the show does not limit its characters to men and women. Taylor is played by an actor that self-identifies sexually in real life as “non-binary” and in the show demands the pronouns “its” and “their” instead of he, she, his or her.)

To be sure, “its” description of stocks as create-able and manipulate-able abstractions rings true, especially today when factors exogenous to earnings and commercial prospects seem to influence market prices more than rational demand for equities. Don’t tell anyone but market manipulation is legal when parallel abstractions are created and executed by self-serving political and economic policy makers; not so when they are perpetrated by self-serving financiers. We suspect the show’s US Attorney for the Southern District of New York will eventually inform Taylor that hedge funds don’t get to create and manipulate their own abstractions (and if it wants to do so, then it should work at the Fed).

Another fun second-hand account of the markets was on offer this weekend in an established financial column that criticized how “financial philosopher kings” like to opine on “the meaning of life” and “the nature of happiness” instead of…providing graphs! We were to urged to believe, we suppose, that graphs are more scientific and allow anyone to more accurately extrapolate the future from the past.

The column’s current steward (it has been around for decades) then endorsed an analyst who noticed “booming” trends in US interior cities and millennial labor participation (for which he presumably had many graphs). Awkwardly, the analyst concluded there will be only modest moves in stocks and bonds, and so the column successfully expended a thousand words to inform readers that financial markets still exist. Some of those words were ironically spent informing readers that a picture is worth a thousand words, and so it may have been more efficient (and less ironic) to instead paste a pinup of Warren Buffett, the biggest supporter of buy-and-hold-no matter-what investing, on a graph of the S&P 500:

Buffet is still a forward-looking philosopher king but stays mute when valuations are high. We are more drawn when values are high to those like Paul Tudor Jones, who allegedly told a private meeting at Goldman Sachs that the Fed should be terrified to look at a chart, ironically cited often by Warren Buffet, that shows the stock market woefully out of balance with the broader economy.

Graphs themselves are funny things. Trying to gain insight by identifying trends without ratios, which provided context, is like trying to clap with one hand. Booming cities based on health care revenues is a signal to us how tenuous economic growth is, not how strong or sustainable it may be.

Alas, our personal fate is not to have billions, or to play an asexual financial automaton on the show of the same name, or to be a financial philosopher king. We will have to be satisfied with being invited to Court every now and then, even if it is as a jester. Who else can speak truth to power and laugh about it?

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ESPN Will Get Better, or Fail Trying

ESPN, which has lost millions of subscribers in recent years, announced it would be laying off 100 employees, mostly on-air talent, as The Hollywood Reporter reports—they are not the first big layoffs at the sports network, but represent ESPN’s continuing efforts to respond to increased competitive pressure as fortress cable’s hold on Americans’ viewing habits continues to weaken.

ESPN makes the majority of its money—two thirds of its revenue in 2013—on carriage fees. If you have a cable or satellite package with ESPN on it, the network gets a cut of your monthly bill whether you watch or not. The rest comes from advertising.

In 2015, cable companies lost 1.1 million subscribers, four times the number they lost in 2014. Last year, 1.8 million people cut the cord. According to Disney, which owns ESPN, the network lost 3 million subscribers in 2015, and is down to 92 million from 99 million at the end of 2013. Competing cable networks don’t always benefit—in February Fox Sports 1 lost even more subscribers than ESPN, and from a smaller base.

Nevertheless, ESPN has the kind of long-term contracts for broadcasting rights other cable sports networks aren’t saddled with. It spends more on content a year, $7.3 billion, than Netflix, which spends $5 billion. It’s spending $166 million a year through 2036 on the ACC alone. According to Motley Fool, ESPN last year had $33.27 billion in long-term broadcast rights contract obligations for MLB, the NBA, the NFL, and the college football playoffs.

ESPN has been successful for a long time, and according to Disney revenue and operating income for its cable networks still rose three percent in the first three quarters of 2016, as Motley Fool reported, a slowdown from previous years. ESPN enjoyed the benefits of being the first network to do what it did—dedicate its broadcasts entirely* to sports—and the benefits of the cable monopolies.

Almost since its inception, the cable industry has been regulated at the local, state, and federal level. As a 1984 Cato report explained, federal regulations brought the cable industry to a near halt between 1966 and 1975. After courts and bureaucrats started rolling back these regulations, local governments stepped in with new regulations and controls. Clint Bolick noted in the 1984 report the danger posed by local regulation and franchising prompted by the fallacious idea that cable was a natural monopoly. Such predictions of natural monopoly formation, Bolick explained, tended to be self-fulfilling prophecies because of the government intervention they yield.

By 2005, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) was concerned in the other direction, spending several years trying to combat the rising cable prices enabled by local government franchise regulations and the expansive bundles that came with them—George W. Bush’s FCC wanted to force cable companies to offer more a la carte choices, but in the end, as Peter Suderman noted in 2015, it was market forces, and the internet in particular, that yielded the “great cable unbundling.”

ESPN’s broadcasting rights binge may have been a response to those trends. Actual games are the currency of sports broadcasting. But ratings are down in many sports too. NFL ratings fell 9 percent last year (ESPN is paying $1.9 billion a year for the broadcasting rights to Monday Night Football through 2021). Major league has seen some ratings improvements after years of decline.

At the same time as going all-in on being the home of broadcast sports, ESPN has moved away from the idea of all-sports coverage. Its own public editor reported of regular complaints about the network’s foray into politics (generally of a specific left-wing variety). “Like it or not, ESPN isn’t sticking to sports,” Jim Brady wrote earlier this month. He repeated his assertion that disentangling sports and politics was a “fool’s errand” while acknowledging that looking back at the last twenty years of ESPN’s flagship news show Sports Center it was “noticeable how little politics and culture intruded into the tsunami of highlights and witty banter that once marked that show.”

Brady continued: “That was reflective of the overall newsier focus ESPN had in those days.” Perhaps there’s a connection between ESPN moving away from content that made it unique—high-energy sports news—in favor of political rehashed rehash available at all kinds of other outlets on the internet and other platforms and the problem of viewership loss. Nevertheless, such effects are on the margins compared to the broader structural problems.

In the end, ESPN is subject to competitive pressures, and as the internet breaks down various government-constructed barriers to entry, those pressures will increase. ESPN came on the air nearly 38 years ago. If it can continue to adapt, it can continue. If it refuses to, it won’t. A little bit of creative destruction could go a long way, an exciting prospect for an arguably stale network.

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Iraq War Architect, Paul Wolfowitz, Is Becoming Optimistic On Trump

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

So we tried that thing called regime change in Iraq, and failed miserably. We tried it in Libya, and now there are now active slave markets in the place. But we satisfied the objective of “removing a dictator”. By the exact same reasoning, a doctor would inject a patient with “moderate” cancer cells “to improve his cholesterol numbers”, and claim victory after the patient is dead, particularly if the post-mortem shows remarkable cholesterol readings. But we know that doctors don’t do that, or, don’t do it in such a crude format, and that there is a clear reason for it. Doctors usually have some skin in the game.

 

And when a blow up happens, they invoke uncertainty, something called a Black Swan, after some book by a (very) stubborn fellow, not realizing that one should not mess with a system if the results are fraught with uncertainty, or, more generally, avoid engaging in an action if you have no idea of the outcomes. Imagine people with similar mental handicaps, who don’t understand asymmetry, piloting planes. Incompetent pilots, those who cannot learn from experience, or don’t mind taking risks they don’t understand, may kill many, but they will themselves end up at the bottom of, say, the Atlantic, and cease to represent a threat to others and mankind.

 

So we end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating modernist slogans stripped of all depth. In general, when you hear someone invoking abstract modernistic notions, you can assume that they got some education (but not enough, or in the wrong discipline) and too little accountability.

From Nassim Taleb’s recent post: On Interventionistas and their Mental Defects

I spent the last 50 minutes listening to an interview of neocon Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz, a truly unfortunate experience which felt like a tomahawk missile attack against my cerebrum. Regrettably, we still live in a world where you have to listen to the musings of such war criminals, as they continue to have considerable influence in certain circles of American power, and quite possibly within the Trump administration itself.

There were four main takeaways from the man’s monstrous, deluded ramblings. First, he hates being called a neocon, so make sure you continue to do so — publicly and with as much vigor as possible. Second, he’s learned absolutely zero lessons from the spectacular, historic failures that resulted from his neocon policies. This makes perfect sense, because as Taleb so eloquently noted on his piece referenced at the top, mentally deranged people in leadership positions who blow up the world suffer no consequences for their actions. Indeed, they are often rewarded handsomely for their failures (a similar thing happens in corporate America, see Wall Street). When failure is rewarded, you get a lot more of it, which pretty much summarizes the U.S. experience in the 21st century. Third, he didn’t vote for Hillary or Trump in the 2016 election. He considered voting for Hillary, but what gave him pause was the fact she wasn’t hawkish enough on Russia.

Given the above, you’d think such a man would have little to no influence within the Trump administration. Unfortunately, this is not the case, which brings us to the final takeaway. Not only has Wolfowitz become more optimistic about Trump (we all know how much bombing and destruction turns him on), but he may have his neocon tentacles deep within the Trump camp via his relationship with both General McMaster and General Mattis.

Here are a few highlights from the interview via Politico (click the link to hear the whole thing):

Iraq might descend into “chaotic violence” – or worse. The broader Middle East could “go to hell” all over again.

 

If the United States doesn’t step up under President Donald Trump, Paul Wolfowitz warns in a new interview for The Global POLITICO, our weekly podcast on world affairs in the Trump era, it would represent an “opportunity” blown, a missed chance that would result in “lost American influence” and a win for “hostile actors.”

Oh so things are going swimmingly in the Middle East. Who knew.

Yet Wolfowitz has not entirely given up on the idea that the United States is essential to stability in a region that has seen very little of it. Without American involvement, for instance, he fears Iraq could splinter apart entirely. “The alternative is to let a very important, critical part of the world go to hell literally and lose American influence,” he says. “We may not like to talk about oil, but this is the engine of the world economy and if it’s dominated by the wrong people, the consequences here in the United States are very serious.”

The guy has some nerve, but at least he doesn’t pretend U.S. interventions are driven by “human rights” concerns.

To liberals and other critics, Wolfowitz would be the last person they want Trump to listen to. Long a lightning rod because of the havoc unleashed by the Iraq invasion, Wolfowitz has never apologized for advocating the war, although he has said—and repeated in our conversation—that it was not carried out as he would have wanted it to be. In recent days he‘s jumped right back into the public debate, nudging President Trump from the pages of the Wall Street Journal to follow up his bombing strike in neighboring Syria with more aggressive action—and, he tells me, privately emailing with Trump Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security advisor H.R. McMaster, both longtime contacts since his Bush days, in hopes they will pursue a U.S. strategy of stepped-up engagement in the Middle East.

There’s that relationship I alluded to earlier, but there’s more. Specifically, Mattis was Wolfowitz’s senior military assistant when he first came to the Pentagon in 2001.

Moving along…

Like many other hawkish Republicans—“do me a favor,” he says, and don’t call him a “neocon,” which he believes is a charged word wielded by critics—Wolfowitz adamantly opposed candidate Trump in 2016, put off by his “America First” rhetoric, his rejection of the Iraq war as a disastrous mistake and his praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin and other autocratic leaders.

 

Indeed, Wolfowitz tells me that he did not vote for Trump because he feared he would be “Obama on steroids” given Trump’s campaign-trail reluctance to project American power and leadership in the Middle East and elsewhere—and that he decided not to vote for Hillary Clinton either because he was not sure she would pursue tougher policies and thought she had joined Obama in misjudging Putin with their failed Russia “reset” policy.

 

When I ask about Trump, Wolfowitz waxes surprisingly optimistic about his chances in a region that has humbled many an American president before him. “Look, he’s said a lot of things. He’s changed a lot of things,” he says. “I don’t think anyone would deny that he’s opportunistic, and I don’t think anyone would deny that he would like to be ‘the greatest president in modern times’ or ‘huge’ or you pick your adjective. And I think to achieve a Dayton-like peace settlement in Syria would not only be something that would be widely acclaimed, it would be hugely in the interest of the United States.”

 

It’s a reminder of what a head-spinning few weeks it’s been for anyone paying attention to American foreign policy, with Wolfowitz and others who openly proclaimed Trump unfit for the presidency now contemplating the opportunity his presidency presents to advance their policy agenda, and even those who were Trump’s harshest critics within the Republican Party only a few weeks ago now praising him.

 

“I am like the happiest dude in America right now,” Senator Lindsey Graham said the other day, citing Trump’s Syria strike as well as his tough rhetoric against Iran and nuclear-armed North Korea; this winter, Graham and his close ally Senator John McCain were issuing near-daily warnings about Trump’s foreign policy. Now, he says, “we have got a president and a national security team that I’ve been dreaming of for eight years.”

 

Now 73, good-humored and gray, Wolfowitz has returned to the conservative American Enterprise Institute as a scholar since his time in Bush’s Pentagon and a short, rocky tenure as president of the World Bank. When we meet in a studio at AEI’s grandly renovated new headquarters on Massachusetts Avenue, he picks up on the phrase making the rounds in Washington that Trump’s critics take him literally but not seriously, whereas his supporters take him seriously but not literally.

Comforting to see that a notorious war criminal is not only “good humored,” but also a “scholar” at an American think tank after destroying Iraq and creating ISIS.

But hey, that’s how the American Empire rolls.

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Ethereum Surges To All Time High As SEC Considers Ether-based ETF

Yesterday holders of bitcoin got an unexpected, if pleasant surprise courtesy of the SEC which announced that two months after deciding against a bitcoin ETF, it would review its decision, suggesting that after several failed attempts, Bitcoin may surge even more soon should the long-awaited Bitcoin-based ETF be ultimately approved. Whether or not it is a good thing for the cryptocurrency in the long-run to get such approval, which would expose bitcoin to the vagaries of volatile retail money flows and even greater volatility, is yet to be determined, but the price of bitcoin liked it, and earlier today it rose to near record highs, rising above $1,300 just shy of all time highs.

 

Then today, in similarly favorable news for holders of Bitcoin’s smaller peer, Ethereum, it was revealed that the SEC had quietly begun the process of considering whether to approve an exchange-traded fund for the cryptocurrency ethereum. Recall that ethereum exploded higher at the end of February when it was revealed that a consortium of venerable corporations including JPM, Intel, Microsoft and many others, had created a blockchain alliance based on the ether technology.

In same ways, whereas bitcoin has been seen as the more venerable, if “renegade” cryptocurrency, ether has developed the reputation of the smaller, better-behaved relative, one which is backed by major banks and corporations, which in the past has distanced itself from bitcoin due to limitations associated with its specific blockchain technology.

While ether and bitcoin are similar, they are also very different. First of all, none of the big Chinese exchanges lists ether for trading (which means it is only a matter of time before they do) sending it into orbit as the traditional Chinese bubble stampede does. Second, the two biggest ether exchanges are Coinbase and Kraken, both regulated.

Ethereum is backed by almost all household brands who have formed an alliance in support of the platform. Microsoft is a big proponent, with ether’s protocol added to Hyperledger, the open-source cross-industry blockchain development effort headed by the Linux Foundation.

Whether that makes an ether-based ETF more likely remains to be seen. What we do know is that the backers of the EtherIndex Ether Trust first filed in July 2016, seeking to launch an ETF backed by a cache of ethers on the NYSE Arca exchange, according to Coindesk. NYSE Arca then filed for a proposed rule change clearing the way for the ETF listing in December, according to a notice published in January.

Then, in a new notice from the SEC, the agency announced that it has begun considering whether to approve the proposed ETF, opening up a comment period for outsiders. This is what the SEC said:

“Institution of such proceedings is appropriate at this time in view of the legal and policy issues raised by the proposed rule change. Institution of proceedings does not indicate that the Commission has reached any conclusions with respect to any of the issues involved. Rather, as described below, the Commission seeks and encourages interested persons to provide comments on the proposed rule change.”

As Cryptocoinnews adds, “Joseph Quintilian and Gregory DiPrisco have founded EtherIndex which is to act as a trust for an Ethereum ETF with Coinbase acting as a custodian and price based on GDAX while Kraken is to act as back-up, both regulated exchanges. Not much is known about the two, but Quintilian appears to be a Wall Street banker or trader, seemingly very well connected and apparently politically involved. He is a board member of Concord 51, a political action committee that targets young professionals, and, according to their LinkedIn, “not just the young Republican establishment, but also the unengaged.”

The two have also founded Axiom Markets, “a proprietary energy trading firm,” according to their website, and, interestingly, they say “Axiom Markets has melded technology and trading together. Our programmers and traders worked as a team during the development and implementation of our in-house proprietary platform.”

Like bitcoin, an ether-based ETF remains subject to final SEC approval. However, the mere likelihood, has sent the price of ethereum soaring from below $50 which had proven a solid resistance level in the past month, to well above $50 in the past 24 hours. It was last trading at $54.40.

As coindesk adds, the SEC is also seeking comments and feedback on which approach it should take, though notably, a previous comment solicitation went unanswered, according to the agency.

In the past 6 weeks the SEC turned down two bitcoin-based ETFs due to concerns over market surveillance and insufficient regulation. However, with a “credible” consortium backing ethereum, will the SEC be forced to finally concede, especially since ethereum appears to not have made headway into China… yet.

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Coulter Drops Out of Berkeley Speech, Citing Cowardice Amongst Conservative Groups; Based Stickman and Others Promise to Attend

The great civil war of 2017 was supposed to commence on April 27th, at Berkeley. The lightening rod was going to be Ann Coulter, vehemently hated conservative firebrand by the left, who would’ve induced sheer and utter panic amongst the ANTIFA thugs who are, seemingly, unable to deal with freedom of speech.

Unfortunately, Coulter canceled the speech, blaming conservative sponsors are the reason for her change of heart.

“There will be no speech,” she wrote in an email to Reuters on Wednesday, saying two conservative groups sponsoring her speech were no longer supporting her. “I looked over my shoulder and my allies had joined the other team,” she wrote.

The group accused of acquiescing to ANTIFA demands are the YAF (Young America’s Foundation), who said in a statement issued today that they were afraid of violence purported by the left.

“As of 4:00 p.m. today, Young America’s Foundation will not be moving forward with an event at Berkeley on April 27 due to the lack of assurances for protections from foreseeable violence from unrestrained leftist agitators,” they continued. “Berkeley should be ashamed for creating this hostile atmosphere.”

“Ms. Coulter may still choose to speak in some form on campus, but Young America’s Foundation will not jeopardize the safety of its staff or students,” they concluded. “For information on Ms. Coulter’s plans, please contact her directly.”

This prompted a series of tweets, designed to both shame YAF and Berkeley.

And here is the final kick in YAF’s small balls, Coulter thanking liberals for advocating for the first amendment.

Other conservatards have pledged to show up at Berkeley without Coulter, citing other firebrands who will be attending the rally in the hopes of striking death blows to ANTIFA.

The Based Stickman, aka An American Hero, will be in attendance, so maybe, just maybe, the civil war will commence, as previously scheduled.

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

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