It’s happening faster than we could have ever imagined.
Every time we turn around, it seems, there’s another major assault in the War on Cash.
India is the most notable recent example– the embarrassing debacle a few weeks ago in which the government, overnight, “demonetized” its two largest denominations of cash, leaving an entire nation in chaos.
Rudy Havenstein Tweeted an interesting chart earlier today on real negative interest rates.
I recreated the chart below and also share a chart from Doug Short on real median incomes to help put this financial repression by the Fed in proper perspective.
A pipeline explosion that caused a large fire in Platte County, just north of Kansas City, on Tuesday evening, clearly revealed exactly why the water protectors at Standing Rock are standing up against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The pipeline, operated by Mid-America Pipeline Company, thankfully ruptured in an isolated area near the Kansas City International Airport, causing a massive explosion and fire – but no injuries.
Plumes of fire and heavy smoke were showing from the scene and lit up the sky from miles away. An hour after the fire started, it was still burning, but the flames had reduced significantly. The fire was burning itself out a short time later.
A crew from Mid-America Pipeline Company came to shut off the valves so the pipelines’ mix of ethane and propane didn’t fuel the fire.
The pipeline explosion highlights exactly why thousands have shown up in Standing Rock to support the #NoDAPL movement.
While this pipeline explosion ruptured on private property in an isolated area, if a similar incident were to occur near the Missouri River, it would decimate the water supply of the Standing Rock reservation.
Exposing the highly unreliable nature of the fossil fuel infrastructure, Mid-America Pipeline Company’s parent company Enterprise Products Partners, at the end of October 2016, shut down its Seaway Crude Pipeline, a 400,000-barrel per day conduit, after an oil leak near Cushing, Oklahoma, but did not provide an estimate of the volume of oil spilled.
“Seaway personnel continue to make progress in cleaning up the spill, substantially all of which has been contained in a retention pond at Enbridge’s facility,” the company said in a press release. EPP noted that the pipeline is a “50/50 joint venture” between Enterprise and Enbridge Inc. Enbridge, in concert with Marathon Oil, hold roughly a 37 percent stake in the Dakota Access Pipeline.
“Vacuum trucks are being used to recover the crude oil and return it to storage tanks on-site,” the statement noted. “The impacted segment of the legacy pipeline has a capacity of 50,000 barrels,” the release added, “however the actual amount of crude oil released will be significantly less and won’t be determined until recovery efforts are complete.”
These hollow words by an energy company would offer little comfort to the Standing Rock Sioux if the DAPL were to leak poison into the tribe’s source of drinking water.
Mid-American Pipeline Company was fined $1,242,000 in 2012 for an unspecified environmental violation. The cause of Tuesday evening’s explosion has yet to be determined but is under investigation.
Standing Rock Sioux water protectors and Native Americans and Indigenous peoples from over 200 tribes and their supporters fear that pipeline’s route — undercutting the Missouri River in several places — threatens to poison the tribal water supply and that of no less than 18 million others living downstream.
“Oil pipelines break, spill, and leak—it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of where and when,” 13-year-old Anna Lee Rain YellowHammer, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, wrote in a petition to stop the DAPL.
“With such a high chance that this pipeline will leak,” she wrote of the Enbridge-backed DAPL, “I can only guess that the oil industry keeps pushing for it because it doesn’t care about our health and safety. The industry seems to think our lives are more expendable than others’.”
It seems crazy that a 13-year-old can have a better understanding of reality than the proponents of the DAPL, but perhaps that is due to the fact that they have vested financial interest in seeing oil flow, while she cares solely about the health and safety of her family, friends, and neighbors.
This latest explosion only serves to highlight why there is such vehement public opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Please share this story as a wake-up call to all of the dangers inherent to building a pipeline under this vital source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux!
When Trump started his historic run for the White House last year, I blogged that he would change more than politics. I said he would forever change how we view reality. And so he has.
The mainstream media and the public now accept the idea that Trump ignored facts, science, and even common decency… and still got elected. I have been telling readers of this blog for a year that facts don’t matter. Policies don’t matter. The only thing that matters is persuasion. And Trump has plenty of persuasion.
To be perfectly clear, when I say facts don’t matter, I mean that in the limited sense of decision-making. If you make the wrong decision, the facts can kill you. That’s not in debate. I’m talking about the process or arriving at a decision – whether it is a good decision or not. The decision-making process is largely divorced from facts and reason. We live under a consistent illusion that facts and logic guide our decisions. They don’t.
I have a bone to pick with the Washington Post. A few days back, as some of my readers may be aware, it published a list of some two hundred blogs that it claimed were circulating Russian propaganda, and I was disappointed to find that The Archdruid Report didn’t make the cut.
Oh, granted, I don’t wait each week for secret orders from Boris Badenov, the mock-iconic Russian spy from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show of my youth, but that shouldn’t disqualify me. I’ve seen no evidence that any of the blogs on the list take orders from Moscow, either; certainly the Postoffered none worth mentioning. Rather, what seems to have brought down the wrath of “Pravda on the Potomac,” as the Post is unfondly called by many DC locals, is that none of these blogs have been willing to buy into the failed neoconservative consensus that’s guided American foreign policy for the last sixteen years. Of that latter offense, in turn, The Archdruid Report is certainly guilty.
Here’s another one for the weird space news category…
Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei claims he experienced eerie knocking sounds on his Shenzhen 5 spaceship during his first space flight that have never been explained.
He compared the random noise to the sound produced by hitting a bucket with a hammer.
“It neither came from outside nor inside the spaceship, but sounded like someone is knocking the body of the spaceship just as knocking an iron bucket with a wooden hammer,” Yang said.
Obviously the sound made him quite nervous, but when Yang looked out the porthole in an attempt to locate the source of the sound, he could see nothing out of the ordinary that would explain the noise.
Yang isn’t alone. Chinese media reports that astronauts piloting both Shenzhen 6 and 7 ships also heard the mysterious sound. Technicians could never locate the cause.
India's demonetization campaign is not going as expected.
Overnight, banks played down expectations of a dramatic improvement in currency availability, raising the prospect of queues lengthening as salaries get paid and people look to withdraw money from their accounts the Economic Times reported.
While much of India has become habituated to the sight of people lining up at banks and cash dispensers since the November 8 demonetisation announcement, bank officials said the message from the Reserve Bank of India is that supplies may not get any easier in the near future and that they should push digital transactions. “We had sought a hearing with RBI as we were not allocated enough cash, but we were told that rationing of cash may continue for some time,” said a banker who was present at one of several meetings with central bank officials.
“Reserve Bank has asked us to push the use of digital channels to all our customers and ensure that we bring down use of cash in the economy,” said a banker. This confirms a previous report according to which the demonstization campaign has been a not so subtle attempt to impose digital currency on the entire population.
While I’m not a Dodd-Frank fan, it’s not because it was too harsh, but because it didn’t really do much of anything. It was the typical neoliberal bait and switch, designed to look tough for public consumption, while merely making tweaks around the edges of a financial system that requires systemic, paradigm level change.
Trump’s support of repealing Dodd-Frank tells you all you need to know. A Trump Presidency will see Wall Street felons who should be in prison, running as wild and free as ever.
He will be the same thing to distressed working class whites that Obama was to the black community. A fake messiah and a shyster.
The fact that Steve Mnuchin was a Goldman Sachs partner is the least of my concerns when it comes to the man. Indeed, if someone wanted to create a playing card deck of sleazy Wall Street financial crisis opportunists, it’d be hard not to include Steve Mnuchin.
What exactly am I talking about? Specifically, I’m referring to the collapse of IndyMac (renamed One West), and the generous helping of government welfare Mnuchin and his partners received upon purchasing the failed banking institution. This is a financial crisis saga that is unknown to most, despite having received some extensive coverage over the past year. One of the best articles on the topic was written by David Dayen in his piece, Donald Trump’s Finance Chair Is the Anti-Populist From Hell. Here are a few excerpts:
Most of the time, the president says things we more or less agree with. When he says things along the lines of attacks on civilians must be stopped, of course, we all approve. How can we not?
The only problem is that usually, he is only applying those standards to uncooperative governments and never to himself or his allies.
The war on alternative media is a prime example of this. Obama’s spiel at a recent press conference in Germany is hard to argue with on its face, as he stated that fake news undermines the American political process:
“If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.”
In case you missed it, an anonymous website called ProporNot.com has recently sprung up on the web with a list of supposed Russian propaganda sites. Its tagline is “Your friendly neighborhood propaganda identification service since 2016!”
There is no WHOIS information about the site other than it was registered through GoDaddy.com. It has only existed since August 2016. The bio on the site claims it is “an independent team of concerned American citizens with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise, including professional experience in computer science, statistics, public policy, and national security affairs,” but the site has refused to identify anyone involved with it.
A few months ago my wife and I made a trip into the city from our small rural community for an evening of dining and visiting with some of her old childhood friends. We started our date with just the two of us at a well known vegetarian restaurant. Later we met up with the rest of the crew at a local park near the beach to watch some skits and some dancing while the sun went down over English Bay. It was a beautiful sunset in an amazing setting.
While we’re sitting and chatting in the bleachers of the small amphitheatre my wife’s friend asks us at which restaurant we ate. We told her and with a raised eyebrow she replies: “Really, Francis actually ate in a vegetarian restaurant? Wow. That must have been quite an experience for you!”
Let’s be honest about something we see nonstop but seldom appreciate: Politics makes life ugly. Politics turns people you disagree with into twisted, cartoon images of what they really are, and it pushes you into degrading and hating them. In short, it’s vile, corrosive, and hate-filled.
These things are not “necessary evils”; they’re just evil.
We’ve been programmed to believe that politics is how we rule ourselves… that politics is what saves us from tyranny… that our political system is the necessary and ultimate end of human civilization.
All of that is false, and future generations will either laugh at such thoughts, shake their heads in disbelief, or perhaps cry. As they should. All of it is propaganda, benefitting an abusive elite. Whether or not we learned it from beloved parents or even taught it to our children, it was false and it led us toward darkness.
A well-intentioned and kind-hearted man is learning the cold and callous nature of the state after he was fined $101 for offering free hugs to voluntary recipients.
Tommy Boucher was at the Jean-Talon Metro station in Montreal last week when he was approached and fined for an act that is completely legal between two individuals.
Two Société de transport de Montréal (STM) inspectors approached Boucher as his arms were open, wearing his usual attire — a green shirt that read, ‘free hugs.’
“I was arms open wearing my green free hugs t-shirt offering free hugs to the passers-by and two STM inspectors approached me asking me if I had my permit,” Boucher wrote on his blog.
When he asked which permit they were referring to, the inspectors pulled out a tiny book and began thumbing through it in a seemingly desperate attempt to find something wrong with Boucher’s behavior.
“He ended up giving me the fine for the Rule 17, Subsection II of the Section VIII of law R-036,” Boucher explained. Which state the following: ’17. In a metro station, after obtaining the authorisation of the Société, it is permitted to offer for sale or lease services or merchandise, or to exhibit or distribute such services or merchandise, subject to the other restrictions in the present By-law.’
According to Boucher, he’s been giving out free hugs for over a year now and this is the first time he’s ever been fined for it — perhaps a sign of the times.
“I had a bad morning and I met someone who was giving free hugs and I decided to take it,” he said. “This guy changed it. It’s all I needed to get a good day.”
The good news is Boucher plans on fighting the ticket as it is hardly legitimate.
“I do plan to contest the fine because I don’t sell or lease any services,” he told Global News.
Equally good news is that the fine did nothing to stop Boucher from spreading his love. On Monday morning, this caring and brave man headed right back out to the metro station, donning his green t-shirt and his arms open.
He isn’t pushing his luck, however. He told Global News that he plans on standing just outside the metro station — so as not to be extorted.
“I know these guys have the mission to keep the peace in the subway… but when they give a ticket to those who actually are in peace, where is the world going?” Boucher poignantly explained.
In the military a rearguard action is defined as ‘a defensive action carried out by a retreating army’ and it is an appropriate description of the desperate scrabbling by NATO to convince the rest of the world — and especially Donald Trump — that its existence is justified.
President-elect Trump has never said that the US should actually leave NATO. Certainly Hillary Clinton declared that he ‘wants to pull out of NATO’ but this was just another of her lies, and what he said back in April was that it is ‘obsolete’ which is a gentle way of indicating that it’s hopeless. He did, after all, tell a town hall meeting in Wisconsin: «Maybe Nato will dissolve and that’s OK, not the worst thing in the world», but although that may have sent shivers up the supple spine of NATO’s Secretary General Stoltenberg, it was by no means a definitive statement of intention.
During the last eight years, the Obama administration failed to live up to its promise reverse the Bush era’s mass surveillance of American citizens. In fact, it was expanded and justified. If you were silent, the sweeping power controlled by the president may not be on your radar for the right reasons. While there is a deep fear resonating, at least half looked the other way when “their guy” held the powers of the presidency.
So let’s put aside the distractions roaring through the media, and let’s walk down memory lane.
The Fourth Amendment was assaulted relentlessly under Bush and it continued through both of Obama’s presidential terms. The hits came from two sides, one by mass surveillance and the other by undermining data security. Now, as my focus may just be on progressives for the moment, the truth remains that neither party, Republican nor Democratic has limited its power, especially in regards to surveillance. Know full well, I have no illusion that Trump will set a new trend of limitations.
Valdimir Putin President of Russia Moscow 28 November 2016
Dear President Putin,
Now that CIA agent Craig Timberg posing as a Washington Post reporter has blown my cover and exposed me as a Russian agent, I was wondering if I might ask you for a Russian passport and a bit of diplomatic cover, perhaps assistant press officer at the Russian embassy in Washington, until I can get out of the country. I saw that you gave a passport to Steven Seagal, so I am hopeful that being a Russian agent is as important as teaching martial arts to Russians.
I don’t know what the pay scale for Russian agents is, but whatever I have coming to me please deposit in a Russian bank. The Swiss banks are no longer useful as the Swiss government allowed Washington to write its banking laws. Perhaps also you could line me up with a publisher for my memoirs—“My Life As A Putin Stooge.”
Do they know something that the rest of us do not? There are tens of millions of ordinary Americans that are feeling really good about the future now that Donald Trump has won the election, but meanwhile the elite are feverishly constructing luxury bunkers at a pace unlike anything we have ever seen before. So why are so many among the elite preparing for an imminent “apocalypse” when tens of millions of other Americans are anticipating a new era of peace and prosperity? Are they smarter than most of the rest of us, or are they simply being paranoid?
Without a doubt, something is going on among the elite. Earlier today, WND published an article that discussed the fact that wealthy people “are quietly moving away from major cities” all over the globe because of concerns about security…
The year was 451, and the battle of Chalons (also known as Catalaunian Fields and Campus Martius) was fought between a coalition of Roman legionnaires, Germanic Visigoths, and Gauls against the Huns. Flavius Aetius was the Roman commanding general, and he led his forces to defeat Attila, king of the Huns and commander of the Hun armies. The loss caused Attila to withdraw and skirmish into Italy, but again (this time through diplomacy and concessions) he withdrew in 452, returning into what is now modern Hungary. Attila died in 453, and the Hun menace to Europe had ended.
Aetius had been the declining (and fragmented) Western Roman Empire’s best chance to restructure itself. He had fought in Gaul and throughout Italy and Europe for decades, sometimes even with support from the Huns before Attila began his quest for empire. A master strategist, tactician, diplomat, and warrior, he effectively stemmed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire for another 25 years. In all probability, he may have been able to turn things around for a longer period of time.
This was not to be, as he was assassinated by none other than the Emperor Valentinian III and his henchman Heraclius on 22 September 454.
The Obama administration’s revolving door with Google has been anything but subtle over the last eight years, and a new report from a government watchdog out this week shows the Silicon Valley giant hoped to extend that relationship to what many expected would be a Hillary Clinton presidency.
According to Campaign for Accountability, a non-profit government watchdog, that door was already growing in scope while Clinton headed the State Department under Obama. At least 57 people shared affiliations with Clinton and Google or related entities at the State Department, the Clinton Foundation and her presidential campaign.
Today Wikileaks published in searchable format more than 60 thousand emails from private intelligence firm HBGary. As Wikileaks reported on its website, "the publication today marks the early release of US political prisoner Barrett Brown, who was detained in 2012 and sentenced to 63 months in prison in connection with his journalism on Stratfor and HBGary. Coinciding with Mr Brown's release from prison WikiLeaks is publishing a searchable index of the HBGary emails. WikiLeaks published the Stratfor emails in 2012."
For those who missed it five years ago, the story behind the leak is fascinating.
The HBGary emails are from four email accounts of key people from HBGary and HBGary Federal. HBGary was founded in 2003 by Greg Hoglund to provide cyber security-related services to corporate clients. A separate entity, HBGary Federal, was managed by Aaron Barr to do similar work for government agencies and so had staff with security clearances and worked with companies such as Booz Allen Hamilton (one of the contractors Edward Snowden worked for).
Years ago, I had cause to be at the Episcopal cathedral in Albany for a mass. A friend was being ordained into the church as a priest, so I went up to celebrate the occasion with his family. I noted the subtle beauty of the church, particularly inside. It just oozed tradition, which is quite imposing in the spiritual setting. The outside of the building was rather plain, which is what made the inside impressive. I walked in expecting a utilitarian facility and instead I walked into a beautiful cathedral with arches and stained glass.
The mass was not well attended, despite the fact there were half a dozen people being minted as priests that day. My guess, at the time, was that most of the people were relatives of the condemned. Talking a bit with some people after the mass, I was told that attendance at Episcopal services in the area was down to a sprinkling and most of the regulars were old people. If what I saw in Albany is typical for the church as a whole, I’d bet they are finished in a generation at best. A church without worshipers is a building.
Well, this is devolving into a ridiculous cluster%&$*.
In a first-ever attempt to demand recounts in multiple states following a presidential election, Dr. Jill Stein has raised more than twice what she raised as a presidential candidate of the green party — over $7 million — to pay for temporary workers, legal fees, and filing costs to demand vote recounts in the key states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
Theoretically, if all three of these states were “flipped” in the recount process, the presidency would go to Hillary Clinton.
Well, now the Wisconsin Elections Commission has denied Stein’s request to have the votes specifically recounted by hand, so she’s announced that she’s suing the whole state.
Just in Wisconsin alone, the cost of hiring the thousands of temp workers that completion of a hand recount would require will be somewhere in the ballpark of $3.5 million to get it all done by the federal deadline of December 12. If she loses the lawsuit, Wisconsin can recount the votes however it chooses (which will, quite obviously, not be by hand).
Pennsylvania said Stein already missed the deadline of November 21, so she’s suing that state too.
According to the Washington Examiner, “And even if Stein manages a recount in Pennsylvania, nothing’s guaranteed. Of the thousands of statewide races in the last 15 years, only 27 have been decided by recounts and only three challengers have pulled off an upset.”
The whole thing seems like a gigantic waste of time and resources that won’t end up changing the outcome, which is in essence what Donald Trump said about it (more specifically, he called it a “scam” and “ridiculous” and mentioned once again that Hillary already conceded).
Trump does at least have a point in the fact that Stein has focused her recount efforts specifically on states which will reverse the outcome of the election and throw the whole thing Hillary’s way. She’s not asking for a recount in, say, New Hampshire where Hillary only won by a measly margin of 2,732 votes.
That state could much more easily be flipped than any of the three states Stein is forcibly having recounted.
It’s that last point that makes the entire thing seem utterly ludicrous. Just think of all the things $7 million could buy… and Jill Stein is basically flushing it down the toilet on a last-ditch scam to force Hillary into the White House.
The real question out of all this is why… Why Jill? Why? What exactly is her motivation here?
Hillary’s camp has — surprise, surprise — joined in the recount efforts (which seem more staged by the minute). It’s also being alleged that none other than George Soros is secretly funding the recount campaign behind the scenes. If that’s true, it figures.
