Steve Bull's Blog, page 1376
April 20, 2017
U.S. Preparing Charges To Arrest Julian Assange
In a stunning new report, CNN has just revealed, according to anonymous sources at least, that US authorities have prepared charges and will seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for intelligence leaks dating all the way back to 2010.
US authorities have prepared charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, US officials familiar with the matter tell CNN.
The Justice Department investigation of Assange and WikiLeaks dates to at least 2010, when the site first gained wide attention for posting thousands of files stolen by the former US Army intelligence analyst now known as Chelsea Manning.
This latest revelation comes after CIA Director Mike Pompeo ramped up the Trump administration’s rhetoric against WikiLeaks describing it as a “non-state hostile intelligence service” earlier this week. Ironically, as we noted this morning, Pompeo’s comments can just days before the FBI and CIA admitted that they are searching for an “insider” at the CIA (not a Russian) who exposed thousands of top-secret documents that described CIA tools used to penetrate smartphones, smart televisions and computer systems.
Last week in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, CIA Director Mike Pompeo went further than any US government official in describing a role by WikiLeaks that went beyond First Amendment activity.
He said WikiLeaks “directed Chelsea Manning to intercept specific secret information, and it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States.”
“It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: A non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” Pompeo said.
Pompeo’s comments were, of course, met with an immediate snarky reply from Assange over twitter.
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Marx, Orwell and State-Cartel Socialism
When “socialist” states have to impose finance-capital extremes that even exceed the financialization of nominally capitalist economies, it gives the lie to their claims of “socialism.”
OK, so our collective eyes start glazing over when we see Marx and Orwell in the subject line, but refill your beverage and stay with me on this. We’re going to explore the premise that what’s called “socialism”–yes, Scandinavian-style socialism and its variants–is really nothing more than finance-capital state-cartel elitism that has done a better job of co-opting its debt-serfs than its state-cartel “capitalist” cronies.
We have to start with the question “what is socialism”? The standard definition is: a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
In practice, the community as a whole is the state. Either the state owns a controlling interest in the enterprise, or it controls the surplus (profits), labor rules, etc. via taxation and regulation.
The problem with equating the community with the state is the community is a completely different order from the centralized state, which is operated and controlled by a self-serving clerisy class that institutionalizes benefiting the few at the expense of the many.
The more accurate definition of socialism is: the means of production are owned and controlled by those who produce the goods and services.
Marx wrote a great many things in his career, and those who view his writings as scripture will argue endlessly over various interpretations and passages, much like people argue over the Bible.
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The Anything President And The Everything Bubble
The Anything President And The Everything Bubble
[Ed. Note: To see exactly what this former Reagan insider has to say about Trump and the fiscal threats from politics and the debt ceiling, David Stockman is sending out a copy of his book Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back to any American willing to listen – before it is too late. To learn how to get your free copy CLICK HERE.]
The lemmings were running hard towards the cliffs yesterday. Despite a renewed burst of bombs and drones careening into the already rubble-strewn wastelands of Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
Or the outbreak of cold war style nuclear brinksmanship on the Korean peninsula — what one commentator properly called a Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.
Likewise, forget that the vacationing Congress is set to return on April 25 to an endless sequence of shoutdowns, showdowns and shutdowns on continuing resolutions and debt ceiling increases.
That is, it will be struggling to keep the fiscal lights on in the Imperial City, not enacting the Donald’s DBA (dead before arrival) fantasy about making the American economy great again.
Indeed, while the Donald has been out huffing and puffing in his new role as global Spanker-in-Chief, the domestic front has turned from bad to worse. His economic policy machinery has now been seized entirely by the Vampire Squid’s latest chieftains in the White House — Gary Cohn, Steve Mnuchin and Jared Kushner.
I am quite confident that none of these three has ever voted Republican in their life or have even the foggiest idea of how to craft a fiscal plan and tax program that could coalesce the warring GOP factions from the hardline Freedom Caucus to the moderate Tuesday Group.
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April 18, 2017
How Western civilisation could collapse
Some possible precipitating factors are already in place. How the West reacts to them will determine the world’s future, says Rachel Nuwer.
The political economist Benjamin Friedman once comparedmodern Western society to a stable bicycle whose wheels are kept spinning by economic growth. Should that forward-propelling motion slow or cease, the pillars that define our society – democracy, individual liberties, social tolerance and more – would begin to teeter. Our world would become an increasingly ugly place, one defined by a scramble over limited resources and a rejection of anyone outside of our immediate group. Should we find no way to get the wheels back in motion, we’d eventually face total societal collapse.
Such collapses have occurred many times in human history, and no civilisation, no matter how seemingly great, is immune to the vulnerabilities that may lead a society to its end. Regardless of how well things are going in the present moment, the situation can always change. Putting aside species-ending events like an asteroid strike, nuclear winter or deadly pandemic, history tells us that it’s usually a plethora of factors that contribute to collapse. What are they, and which, if any, have already begun to surface? It should come as no surprise that humanity is currently on an unsustainable and uncertain path – but just how close are we to reaching the point of no return?
A South African police van is set on fire following protests about inequality in 2016 (Credit: Getty Images)
While it’s impossible to predict the future with certainty, mathematics, science and history can provide hints about the prospects of Western societies for long-term continuation.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Stockman: We’re Borrowing Our Way to Economic Disaster
Stockman: We’re Borrowing Our Way to Economic Disaster
David Stockman joined the Fox Business and the show Mornings with Maria to discuss the tax reform highlights for the current White House and GOP platform and what he views as a real threat of economic disaster in the U.S. During the discussion Stockman highlights what to expect from a border adjustment tax possibility, the creation of jobs and the impact on Wall Street in the age of Donald Trump.
Stockman takes to point the cause of tax reform in the current White House. He begins the segment noting, “I think the border adjustment tax will come out of the retailers margin – and it should. We do need revenue. We need to have a consumption tax, or a value added tax or a border adjustment tax – so that we may reduce taxation on wages and income. We desperately need more jobs in this country. If you keep taxing the payroll at 15.5%, which we’re doing today, you’re not going to encourage the creation of jobs. You’re going to take what jobs there are and impact the take-home pay of those jobs.”
David Stockman was then asked about his read on Donald Trump’s border tax proposals and the possibility of what the President described as a ‘reciprocal tax.’ “He has no idea what he’s talking about. He’s making it up as he goes along. Donald Trump is a tourist in the Imperial City of Washington D.C. He’s flipping, flopping and making it up as he goes.”
“The border adjustment tax, or a value added tax is the way to get at the problem he’s talking about. Every other country in the world has a value added tax. You take it off the exports and put it on the imports.
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Split personalities: We like some science, but not all of it
We modern folk are in a bind. We embrace what the sciences and the technology that flows from them have to offer, but we refuse to believe that we live in the world described by those very sciences.
Here I’m not merely talking about climate change deniers who, of course, fit this description. They merrily dial number after number on their cellphones, but they do so without realizing that in their climate change denial they are rejecting the very same science that underpins the phone they are using: physics.
But so many others live in this dual world as well. We humans imagine ourselves set apart from the natural world. And yet, our very bodies are the subject of scientific investigations. So we turn to our minds which we imagine set us apart from the natural world. But what is the mind? Do we not place the mind in the body? Are its manifestations not speech, writing, music, dance, and graphic arts which require the body for their expression.
The science of physics tells us that we live in a thermodynamic system. The universe is a thermodynamic system and so by definition must our Earth be one. Thermodynamic systems produce entropy, lots of it. Some two-thirds of all the energy we use in the United States is wasted. That’s right, wasted. That entropy shows up as climate-changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which is also acidifying the oceans. It shows up as barren landscapes left behind by coal and other mining. It shows up as waste heat and waste products flowing from our factories, our homes and our vehicles.
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‘Voice of America, Radio Liberty, CNN are tools for US to press Russia’ – State Duma MP
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Russian State Duma plenary meeting. © Vladimir Fedorenko / Sputnik
Washington used CNN and Russian-language US outlets Voice of America and Radio Liberty in attempts to meddle into the 2016 Russian elections and the situation in the country in general, the head of a parliamentary lower chamber committee said, urging an investigation.
“We are to look into the specific cases of the US attempts to influence the elections in Russia. However, I’d like to remind you, that the agencies in question are parts of a much bigger US system pressing against our country. It uses a wide range of instruments against Russia,” the head of the lower house Committee for Information Policy, Leonid Levin MP (Fair Russia), said at an extended committee meeting on Tuesday.
CNN and Voice of America representatives were invited to the meeting as well, however, they didn’t show up, according to Levin.
“It would be reasonable to not only consider the possibilities of the US meddling into Russia’s electoral process, but also into our affairs on the whole,” Levin said.
The pressure system as he described it, involves “various funds, NGOs and grants,” that should be subjected to checks, the MP said.
Levin’s idea has been echoed by the head of the Lower House Committee for Eurasian Integration and Ties with Compatriots, Konstantin Zatulin, who was actually the first one to voice it in March after US Senator Jeanne Shaheen had called for investigating RT’s “funding sources and foreign connections” and its activities as a “foreign agent.”
“If they [the US] are legally creating obstacles on our way of spreading information, despite the amendments to the Constitution, freedoms and rights they are so proud of… then we have every reason to limit their corresponding state and parastatal radio stations and TV channels,” Zatulin said.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
USA 2017 vs. France 1789
Most people are familiar with the story of the French Revolution: When the poor revolted against the unfairness and wealth inequality imposed by the aristocrats, they overthrew the monarchy and beheaded more than 40,000 people, mostly clergy and noblemen, as punishment for their crimes and injustices.
The days of using a guillotine may be behind us – but the anger that led to that revolution is similar to the growing anger at economic inequality in the US today, and could lead to the same kind of unrest.
In France, there were three classes: The First Estate, made up of clergy; The Second Estate, made up of the nobility; and the Third Estate, made up of everyone else. Even though the first two Estates were made up of just 3% of the population, they owned 35% of the land, paid almost no taxes, and held virtually all the political power in the country.
Where are we in America today?
Wealth distribution
If they were around today, heads still attached, French aristocrats would be mightily impressed with the wealth accumulation of America’s rich. The top 1% of the country owns 35% of the wealth; the top 10% owns 77% of the wealth. The bottom 40% owns 0% (here).
Perhaps the best summary of where we are on wealth inequality can be found in the video below:
Tax burden
Certainly, the American rich are paying more in taxes than did their pre-revolutionary French Counterparts. But as a share of income, the American poor are carrying a much heavier burden.
When most people talk about taxes, they think of income taxes, and on that front the rich do pay quite a bit more: According to the Tax Foundation, in 2015, “The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a higher effective income tax rate than any other group, at 27.1 percent, which is over 8 times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (3.3 percent).”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
They Have No Proof: MIT Professor Explains Why the Assad Gas Attack Was a Sham
The mainstream narrative surrounding the sarin gas attack in Syria simply doesn’t add up. Even if you assume that Assad is nothing but a vile monster who would have no problem with gassing his own people, the attack still doesn’t make sense. That’s because even monsters have a sense of self-preservation.
Just days before the attack, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced a reversal of a longstanding policy in Washington. He said that the US was no longer absolutely determined to oust Assad. America’s six year war against his regime was basically over. So why would Assad reignite a conflict with the world’s preeminent superpower with a chemical weapons attack? A conflict that I might add, would greatly reduce the chances of him remaining in power?
Assad is by no means a good guy. He’s not even an okay guy. He is definitely a despot who relies on violence to suppress the population. But he’s never shown any signs of being suicidal. Six years of fighting to maintain his rule proves that. What’s much more likely is that Assad is being set up.
Don’t believe our government’s claims about satellite photography catching Assad’s aircraft dropping the sarin. In fact, the little evidence that has been provided falls on its face once you take a closer look. That’s the determination of Theodore Postol, a physicist and professor at MIT, who reviewed documents released by the White House regarding the gas attack.
Postol said: “I have reviewed the [White House’s] document carefully, and I believe it can be shown, without doubt, that the document does not provide any evidence whatsoever that the US government has concrete knowledge that the government of Syria was the source of the chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria at roughly 6am to 7am on 4 April, 2017.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Why buy new when you can shop used: Reviewing second hand approaches to first world problems
“Measurement owes its existence to Earth; Estimation of quantity to Measurement; Calculation to Estimation of quantity; Balancing of chances to Calculation; and Victory to Balancing of chances.” Sun Tsu
For all of us there is the justified issue of money, we may not like it but money makes the world go around, at least at this time. We can all remember times in our lives where a solid barter or trade superseded any hint of monetary distribution. When all we had to offer for a tool or even food was a trade of our services and or objects we held. Of course if there are those of you who have never seen these times, horse trading or bartering is absolutely one of the greatest skill sets we can absorb and use.
For myself personally, I have worked for multi-billion dollar corporations when a billion dollars meant something. I was middle management by the time I was 21, and making high 5 figures when gold was under $100 an ounce. Not at any point did I consider my future, sure I had a couple months of savings, and old habits instilled in me by my parents die hard so I have always had a decent stock of dry, canned and other food as well as water. However, did I really think the world could end, or that the things that have happened would.
– Honestly –
Yes, I did, see I have the benefit of something others may have never had. At a very young age I was taught there is no shame in asking someone with plenty if my labor or services were of sufficient value to trade for some of what they have. I was also taught to share what we had, even if it was little or barely sufficient for ourselves.
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