Thursday, November 30, 2017

The Dog That Didn’t Bark

ORIGINAL LINK

The best solutions to difficult problems are simple. The Columbus Egg. The Gordian Knot. The Procrustean Bed. So many people strained their fingers trying to untangle the messy knot, until Alexander came and slashed it open with one fine stroke



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State Department Condemns* Designation of Media as Foreign Agents

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UPDATED below

Today the U.S. State Department hit the ball of hypocrisy out of the park.

It remarked that “legislation that allows .. to label media outlets as ‘foreign agents’ … presents yet another threat to free media”



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Access Denied: US Congress withdraws RT America’s Accreditation on Capitol Hill

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The US Congress has withdrawn RT America’s accreditation on Capitol Hill, citing the company’s “foreign agent” status. That’s hours after the State Department said the US Foreign Agents Registration Act “does not restrict an organization’s ability to operate.” Read more.



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Wednesday, November 29, 2017

The Dow Peaked At 14,000 Before The Last Stock Market Crash, And Now Dow 24,000 Is Here

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The absurdity that we are witnessing in the financial markets is absolutely breathtaking.  Just recently, a good friend reminded me that the Dow peaked at just above 14,000 before the last stock market crash, and stock prices were definitely over-inflated at that time.  Subsequently the Dow crashed below 7,000 before rebounding, and now thanks to this week’s rally we on the threshold of Dow 24,000.  When you look at a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, you would be tempted to think that we must be in the greatest economic boom in American history, but the truth is that our economy has only grown by an average of just 1.33 percent over the last 10 years.  Every crazy stock market bubble throughout our history has always ended badly, and this one will be no exception.

And even though the Dow showed a nice gain on Wednesday, the Nasdaq got absolutely hammered.  In fact, almost every major tech stock was down big.  The following comes from CNN

Meanwhile, big tech stocks — which have propelled the market higher all year — were tanking. The Nasdaq fell more than 1%, led by big drops in Google (GOOGL, Tech30) owner Alphabet, Amazon (AMZN, Tech30), Apple (AAPL, Tech30), Facebook (FB, Tech30) and Netflix (NFLX, Tech30).

Momentum darlings Nvidia (NVDA, Tech30) and PayPal (PYPL, Tech30) and red hot gaming stocks Electronic Arts (EA, Tech30) and Activision Blizzard (ATVI, Tech30) plunged too. They have been some of the market’s top stocks throughout most of 2017.

Many believe that the markets are about to turn down in a major way.  What goes up must eventually come down, and at this point even Goldman Sachs is warning that a bear market is coming

“It has seldom been the case that equities, bonds and credit have been similarly expensive at the same time, only in the Roaring ’20s and the Golden ’50s,” Goldman Sachs International strategists including Christian Mueller-Glissman wrote in a note this week. “All good things must come to an end” and “there will be a bear market, eventually” they said.

As central banks cut back their quantitative easing, pushing up the premiums investors demand to hold longer-dated bonds, returns are “likely to be lower across assets” over the medium term, the analysts said. A second, less likely, scenario would involve “fast pain.” Stock and bond valuations would both get hit, with the mix depending on whether the trigger involved a negative growth shock, or a growth shock alongside an inflation pick-up.

Nobody believes that this crazy stock market party can go on forever.

These days, the real debate seems to be between those that are convinced that the markets will crash violently and those that believe that a “soft landing” can be achieved.

I would definitely be in favor of a “soft landing”, but those that have followed my work for an extended period of time know that I do not think that this will happen.  And with each passing day, more prominent voices in the financial world are coming to the same conclusion.  Here is one recent example

Vanguard’s chief economist Joe Davis said investors need to be prepared for a significant downturn in the stock market, which is now at a 70 percent chance of crashing.  That chance is significantly higher than it has been over the past 60 years.

The economist added, It’s unreasonable to expect rates of returns, which exceeded our own bullish forecast from 2010, to continue.”

A stock market crash has followed every major stock bubble in our history, and right at this moment we are in the terminal phase of one of the greatest stock market bubbles ever.  There are so many indicators that are screaming that we are in danger, and one of the favorite ones that I like to point to is margin debt.  The following commentary and chart were recently published by Wolf Richter

This chart shows margin debt (red line, left scale) and the S&P 500 (blue line, right scale), both adjusted for inflation to tune out the effects of the dwindling value of the dollar over the decades (chart by Advisor Perspectives):

Stock market leverage is the big accelerator on the way up. Leverage supplies liquidity that has been freshly created by the lender. This isn’t money moving from one asset to another. This is money that is being created to be plowed into stocks. And when stocks sink, leverage becomes the big accelerator on the way down.

Markets tend to go down much faster than they go up, and I have a feeling that when this market crashes it is going to happen very, very rapidly.

The only reason stock prices ever got this high in the first place was due to unprecedented intervention by global central banks.  They created trillions of dollars out of thin air and plowed those funds directly into the financial markets, and of course that was going to inflate asset prices.

But now global central banks are putting on the brakes simultaneously, and this has got to be one of the greatest sell signals that we have ever witnessed in modern financial history.

Even Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen says that she is concerned about causing “a boom-bust condition in the economy”, and yet she insists that the Fed is going to continue to gradually raise rates anyway

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said the central bank is concerned with growth get out of hand and thus is committed to continuing to raise rates in a gradual manner.

“We don’t want to cause a boom-bust condition in the economy,” Yellen told Congress in her semiannual testimony Wednesday.

While Yellen did not specifically commit to a December rate hike, her comments indicated that her views have not changed with her desire for the central bank to continue normalizing policy after years of historically high accommodation.

I never thought that this stock market bubble would get this large.  We are way, way overdue for a financial correction, but right now we are in a party that never seems to end.

But end it will, and when that happens the pain that will be experienced on Wall Street will be unlike anything that we have ever seen before.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.



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Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Revelations of a High-Profile Qatari Official Reveal a Wider anti-Syria Conspiracy - Veterans Today

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Jim W. Dean - NEO's Alexander Orlov reviews the full scoop from Qatar's former PM, who really spills the beans on the US coalition debacle in Syria.

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Who’s in the Pocket of the Russians? Why Prosecutor Robert Mueller Is Really Indicting Trump’s One Time Foreign Policy Adviser Michael Flynn

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The mainstream narrative is that squeaky-clean special prosecutor Robert Mueller is going to indict Trump’s one-time foreign policy advisor Michael Flynn because Flynn is in the pocket of the Russians and the Turks.

But the truth might be totally different



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Globalist Funded “Watchdog” Tries To Shut Down Independent Press Event Discussing White Helmets

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white-helmet-infographic-2.jpg

By Brandon Turbeville

Self-proclaimed “press freedom watchdog” Reporters Without Borders launched a new campaign that it deemed of urgent importance – shutting down a short panel discussion by journalist Vanessa Beeley and Swedish Doctors for Human Rights...



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The Dumbest Dumb Money Finally Gets Suckered In

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The Dumbest Dumb Money Finally Gets Suckered In

Posted with permission and written by John Rubino, Dollar Collapse

 

 

The Dumbest Dumb Money Finally Gets Suckered In - John Rubino

 

Corporate share repurchases have turned out to be a great mechanism for converting Federal Reserve easing into higher consumer spending. Just allow public companies to borrow really cheaply and one of the things they do with the resulting found money is repurchase their stock. This pushes up equity prices, making investors feel richer and more willing to splurge on the kinds of frivolous stuff (new cars, big houses, extravagant vacations) that produce rising GDP numbers.

 

For politicians and their bureaucrats this is a win-win. But for the rest of us it’s not, since the debts corporations take on to buy their own stock at market peaks tend to hobble them going forward, leading eventually to bigger share price declines than would otherwise be the case.

 

The ultimate loser? The only people traditionally willing to buy in after corporations are finished overpaying for their stock: Retail investors, of course.

 

Let’s see how it’s playing out this time.

 

First, corporations spent several years elevating stock prices with share repurchases. Note the near perfect correlation between the two lines:

 

corp-buybacks-SP-500-Nov-17.jpg?resize=6

 

Now they’re scaling back their purchases:

 

Saying Bye to Buybacks

(Wall Street Journal) – Companies in the S&P 500 are on pace to spend the least on buybacks since 2012

Large companies are repurchasing their shares at the slowest pace in five years, as record U.S. stock indexes and an expanding economy propel more money out of flush corporate coffers into capital spending and mergers.

Corp-share-repurchase-Nov-17.jpg?resize=

Companies in the S&P 500 are on pace to spend $500 billion this year on share buybacks, or about $125 billion a quarter, according to data from INTL FCStone. That is the least since 2012 and down from a quarterly average of $142 billion between 2014 and 2016.

Buyback activity among top-rated nonfinancial debt issuers, many of which have regularly borrowed money to finance share repurchases, declined for the third straight quarter in the July-to-September period, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Meanwhile, mergers and acquisitions among that group of companies had their biggest quarter of the year, analysts at the bank said.

Factors including high stock price, historically high share valuations and uncertainty over the future shape of the tax code mean that “companies may be less likely to favor buybacks over other uses of cash in 2018,” analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said in a report this week.

And – here’s the really sad part – individual investors are taking up the slack:

 

The emboldened retail investor may be a new catalyst to help take stocks higher — for now.

 

(CNBC) – “The level of enthusiasm about the market … has been building. We’re seeing more individuals come in,” said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab.
Sonders said she’s anecdotally seeing signs of more individuals putting money to work in the stock market in the last several months, after years of skepticism and concerns about “every variety of doom and gloom.”

She says she is getting fewer investors asking about bubbles or about what’s the next shoe to drop.

“I think it’s finally starting to suck people in … emotionally, and actually it’s hard to judge why now all of a sudden, but maybe it’s because of how persistent the move has been with so little volatility on the upside and on the downside,” Sonders said. “This year has been different. This kind of year pulls people in.”

Retail brokers have been reporting an influx of accounts. Charles Schwab, in its earnings release, said clients opened more than 100,000 new brokerage accounts a month in the third quarter, making for a record-breaking 10-month streak of new accounts topping 100,000. Its rival, TD Ameritrade, said on its earnings call last month that new accounts, asset inflows and other indicators are at the highest since the financial crisis.

What’s frustrating about this is the repeating pattern of government creating conditions in which smart money (that is, the guys who donate big to political campaigns) is allowed to get in early, make huge profits, and then hand the bag to regular people who aren’t connected or sophisticated enough to see what’s happening. The rich, who are or will soon be shorting the hell out of this market, get richer and the rest see their hopes for a decent (or any) retirement dashed one more time.

 

And the political class wonders why voters don’t like them anymore.

 

 

Questions or comments about this article? Leave your thoughts HERE.

 

 

 


The Dumbest Dumb Money Finally Gets Suckered In

Posted with permission and written by John Rubino, Dollar Collapse

 

 

Check out these other articles by our contributors:


Steve St. Angelo - EXAMINING SILVER MANIPULATION: What Some Analysts Miss

Rory Hall - BRICS Gold Trade Settlement To Begin in 2018?

Keith Weiner - The Hyperinflation That Was Not

Ask The Expert: Jim Willie



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The Great American Sex Panic of 2017

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I confess to being troubled rather than elated by the daily rumble of idols falling to accusations of “sexual misconduct,” the morbid masscult fixation that conceals private titillation, knowing smirks, and sadistic lip-smacking behind a public mask of solemn reproof.

Weinstein and Trump and Roy Moore and Bill Clinton are vile pigs and creeps, no doubt; I have always detested the smug neoliberal performance-art strut of Al Franken and the careerist-toady journalism of Glenn Thrush and Charlie Rose, the latest dominoes to tumble amid the barrage of public accusations of “inappropriate” advances or touching.

But the boundary between cultural tolerance/intolerance blurs and shifts with each passing revelation, as the litany of sins, ancient or recent, cardinal or venial, snowballs into an avalanche of aggrieved, undifferentiated accusation—a stampeding herd of “Me-Tooists.” Successive waves of long-forgotten gropes and slurps now overwhelm the news channel chyrons, leaving us with the sense that no greater crime against humanity is possible than an unsolicited horndog lunge of the hand or tongue, some of them from twenty or thirty years past but divulged only in the past few weeks.

Let’s be honest—these “shocking” revelations about Franken—that he tried to tongue-kiss a woman one time in a rehearsal and mock-grabbed her somnolent breasts in a silly frat-house pose or that maybe his hand strayed too far toward a woman’s derriere as he obliged her with a photo at a state fair five years ago—would have elicited nothing more than a public yawn just a few weeks or months ago in the BW (Before Weinstein) era; in fact, these two women, seemingly unperturbed enough to leave these incidents unreported for five or six years, would likely not have thought to join the solemn procession of the violated on national TV if not for the stampede effect of each successive cri de coeur.

But is it an advance in collective ethical consciousness when the public reservoir of shock and indignation is so easily churned up and tapped out over erotic peccadillos? And here I must, of course, distinguish between outright rape—always a viscerally sickening crime against human dignity— or implied or explicit threats to a woman worker’s livelihood over sexual “favors” on the one hand, and on the other the impetuous volcanic eruptions of erotic passion that inevitably leave one or both partners discomfited or embarrassed or forlorn by unexpected or unwelcome overtures, tactile or verbal. As the left blogger Michael J. Smith points out, “Not all acts are equally grave—an off-color joke is not as bad as a grope, and a grope is not as bad as a rape.” Then what interest of sanity or reason is served by this reckless lumping together of flicks of the tongue and forcible rapes into the single broad-brush term “sexual misconduct,” as though there is no important difference between an oafish pat or crude remark at an office party and a gang rape? This would be like applying the term “communist” alike to advocates of single payer healthcare and campaigners for one-party centralized control of the entire economy—oh wait, we have seen precisely that: during the McCarthy era. Now then . . . is all this beginning to have a familiar ring to it?

And not merely deeds but words have fallen under scrutiny: on Sunday Jeffrey Tambor joined the ranks of the accused, walking the plank by quitting his acclaimed Amazon series Transparent in the wake of two allegations of the use of “lewd” language in front of his assistant and a fellow actor. So the stain of ostracism has now spread from conduct to mere speech.

Alarmingly, the Pecksniffian word lewd has enjoyed a recent rehabilitation among the corporate-media “news” networks, cogs in giant infotainment conglomerates whose cash flow depends precisely on mass dissemination of HD cinematic depictions of explicit sexual “lewdness” and violence that their news departments then deplore when evidenced in real life. “Lewd” enjoyed a boomlet during the presidential campaign when the pro-Clinton newsies and talking-head strategists were professing daily bouts of horror at the revelations of the Donald’s coarse frat-boy talk on Access Hollywood. This seems to have been the first time this word had gained any traction since seventeenth-century Salem and Victorian England. This battalion of elite lewdness police are the same Ivy League graduates who in college probably considered Henry Miller a genius, not in spite of, but because of, his portrayal of raw lust in language that makes Trump’s private palaver or Tambor’s japes seem tepid and repressed by comparison. (It’s not impossible that some of these same people consider Quentin Tarantino, cinematic maestro of the vile obscenities of language and violence, a great auteur as well.) The whole spectacle is at once comical and nauseating.

And it indeed looks as though huge swaths of the world’s art and literature, from Pindar to Botticelli to Shakespeare to Joyce to Updike, will soon fall to the axe of the lewdness police. Let’s say that a college English professor, in a unit on American Transcendentalism, assigns the Whitman poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” and reads the poem aloud to his students, including the following passage:

This is the female form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed,
Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable,
Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.

What if just one woman student were to wilt in distress at the sound of “quivering jelly of love” and then report the professor for imposing “lewd” and disturbing language on his students? Would he be hauled before the Ethics Committee? Stripped of tenure? Forced to resign? You find this preposterous? Then consider the following report from The Atlantic on the alarming trend of bowdlerizing the great canon of Western literature because of potentially offensive erotic content:

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. . . . A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses. . . . Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. . . . Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.

And this virus of censorious American PC puritanism has leapt across the Atlantic to inhibit even the teaching of Shakespeare—yes, Shakespeare—at British universities, as reported just last month in the The Independent:

Academics have criticised “trigger warnings” after Cambridge University students were warned about “potentially distressing topics” in plays by Shakespeare. English literature undergraduates were apparently cautioned that a lecture focusing on Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors would include “discussions of sexual violence” and “sexual assault.” According to The Telegraph, the trigger warnings were posted in the English Faculty’s “Notes on Lectures” document which is circulated to students at the university. Academics have expressed concern that colleges trying to protect young adults from certain issues may render them incapable of dealing with real life when they graduate. Supporters of trigger warnings say they serve to help students who may be upset if a text reminds them of a personal traumatic experience.

However, critics such as Mary Beard, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge, say allowing students to avoid learning about traumatic episodes of history and literature is “fundamentally dishonest.” Beard said previously: “We have to encourage students to be able to face that, even when they find they’re awkward and difficult for all kinds of good reasons.” David Crilly, artistic director at The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, said: “If a student of English Literature doesn’t know that Titus Andronicus contains scenes of violence they shouldn’t be on the course.”

But voices of sanity such as Beard’s and Crilly’s may be fighting a noble but lost cause against the PC cultural vigilantes, clamoring for the blood of the next prominent stumbler into errant sexual expression, in the lecture hall or office or rehearsal hall or bar. But if we may be allowed to descend from the High Courts of Sexual Inquisition to the land of the living—that is, the merely fallible, sex-tormented mortals who actually make up the human race—who hasn’t lived through anguished or comical moments, either as predator or prey or both at once, in the throes of the temporary madness of desire? And did such impulsive leaps of lust or passion strike anyone as a cause for ritual mass tongue-lashing and tongue-clucking and compulsive daily confessionals and public media crucifixions in the BW era, except perhaps among the most severe of anti-sex feminists like Andrea Dworkin, who considered every heterosexual act of intercourse to be a form of rape? Did anyone but reactionary blue-noses think about suppressing or avoiding the works of Henry Miller? Or D. H Lawrence? Or even Al Goldstein? Yet now even Shakespeare finds himself on the PC Index. Among the sexual-politics contingents of early second-wave feminists, there were, to be sure, literary eviscerations and cultural firestorms, but nothing like the current pell-mell instant media arraignment for crimes against humanity warranting public investigations, tribunals, denunciations and career death sentences. It all smacks of the hellfire zeal of a religious persecution, a jarring devolution of establishment liberals into old-fashioned American sexual head hunters and cultural bluenoses in the tradition of their forebears in Salem and the fundamentalist South.

Betraying a fundamentally elitist impulse to manage and control, the PC inquisitors instinctively recoil from the unruly tempests of human sexuality—the source of desire, the primal torrent driving all passion and pleasure, the wellspring of life itself—that at times deafens and blinds and exalts all of us. With the soul of an accountant and the temperament of the professional manager, the PC inquisitors seeks to confine the Dionysian chaos of Eros within the strictures of a bureaucratic handbook of procedure and etiquette, as though a sexual impulse or encounter were a banking transaction or a court proceeding. Thus do the neoliberal elites conduct this front in their incessant war on nature, including the unruly source of nature itself: behold the dismaying spectacle of these joyless, bloodless mortals doing futile battle with the god Eros. The vigilantes cannot win this battle, of course, but they can inflict needless damage on reputations, careers, on our entire cultural heritage in enforcing their groupthink compendium of trigger warnings, speech codes, and rules of order.

Something surpassingly strange is at work here—a wrong-headed authoritarian ire over the spasmodic misfires of the human comedy combined with some primal meltdown of a besieged and increasingly desperate ruling class and its longstanding winking sexual hypocrisies. It is a moral panic that is, ironically, immoral at its core: repressive and diversionary, an identity-politics orgy of misdirected moral energies that breeds a chilling conformity of word and deed and, in so doing, cripples the critical faculties and independence of spirit needed to challenge the status quo the PC monitors profess to abhor. In reality, their speech and conduct codes foster a spirit of regimentation rather than rebellion, thereby shoring up the power of the repressive elites that are leading the human race to social, economic, and ecological disaster.

So this is not just a moral panic—but a bizarre inversion of values in which Bill Clinton can murder 500,000 Iraqi children, throw millions of poor women and their children off welfare, and instigate the global rule of transnational corporations with NAFTA, but he is not impeached or stigmatized for any of those atrocities but rather for a workplace blowjob; in which Hillary Clinton can lead the charge for the destruction of Libya, reducing that country to primeval rubble, and is not only not fired or ostracized but is rewarded with the Democrats’ presidential nomination and lauded by corporate feminists as a champion of “inclusiveness”; in which Barack Obama pushed fraudulent health-care reform that leaves a barbaric 27 million people with zero coverage and millions more with crippling premiums and deductibles that render their “coverage” all but unusable, thus sentencing tens of thousands of people to death every year because they cannot afford timely medical care, and dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone, and yet he is not only not reviled and abominated as a con artist but is worshipped as an icon of enlightened governance; in which the entire ruling elite and its associates in the corporate media are chronically underplaying—indeed, scarcely mentioning—the gravity of the climate change crisis, which could merely spell the end of the human species within a hundred years, yet no copycat 24/7 umbrage or five-alarm indignation on the part of anyone in those elite circles or their acolytes over this unprecedented planetary emergency.

Hence the long-buried, freshly unearthed ego bruises of the privileged identity-politics crowd eclipse mass murder and ecocide on the outrage meters of this country’s opinion shapers.  The same solemn cohort—mostly white and middle-class, many of them ardent McResistance DNC partisans (or, in the case of Leean Tweeden, Franken’s tongue-kiss accuser, a movement conservative who twice voted for George W. Bush)—is so easily roused to near-apoplexy about a naughty lunge of the hand or tongue yet discreetly ignores or openly cheers on unparalleled crimes against humanity: endless debilitating wars against nameless enemies abroad, the toxic mercenary corruption and annihilation of democracy, staggering political/social inequality (the top one percent of the world’s population now owns half of the world’s wealth), and ecocide everywhere—committed and abetted with impunity by the PC brigades’ culture heroes like the Clintons and Obama and their cohorts in the media and the corporate/political elites.

So yes—prosecute the rapists and pedophiles and let them suffer in jail. But you will excuse me if I stand aside from the stampede of outrage about Al Franken’s wayward tongue or even Donald Trump’s juvenile frat-house boasts while the world teeters on the brink. The scale of values of this country’s liberal elites, and the issues that fuel and exhaust their capacity for outrage, border on moral dementia. Their vaunted “values” lead us not to virtue and to spiritual renewal, but to the nauseating sanctimony of the custodians of a charnel house—to the abyss.

• This article originally appeared in CounterPunch



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Monday, November 27, 2017

NEW O'KEEFE: Hidden Cam Captures WaPo Natl Security Reporter Aghast At Anti-Trump Bias

ORIGINAL LINK

iworkfor-300x175.pngContent originally published at iBankCoin.com

Hours after the Washington Post 'busted' Project Veritas for trying to trick the paper into publishing a fake Roy Moore accusation, investigative journalist James O'Keefe of Project Veritas released a new undercover video featuring WaPo National Security reporter Dan Lamothe admitting that, shocker, WaPo reporters "definitely don't like Trump,"and that the paper's "institutional voice," or "opinion from God" publishes hit pieces against the President that are so beyond the pale that Lamothe can't believe he works for the paper:

PV Journalist: "So they just like, rip on him?"

 

Dan Lamothe: "Those have become critical to the point where I'll read some of them and I'm like whoa! Like I work for this place?

Lamothe - who seems like a nice guy that's genuinely interested in reporting facts - goes on to say that while journalists cover Trump more fairly ("they also give him credit where there's credit"), the 'institutional voice' of the paper is trying to "educate people but with a point of view." "It's, like, a very different mission" says the National Security reporter.

Democracy Dies In Bias

When asked about the Washington Post's bias, Lamothe says that while the paper is "right on the story," they're "spending a lot of emphasis on this or that," meaning that the Jeff Bezos owned outlet will spend a disproportionate amount of time spotlighting stories which might make President Trump look bad, or what he's tweeted.

"it sucks so much oxygen out of the room. It's just so much emphasis on what he said and what he tweeted," Lamothe said, adding "I can't tell you how many times we get an email at work: "Oh did you see what he (Trump) just tweeted? What are we gonna do about it?"" 

NYT and CNN are worse? 

When asked if reporters at the Washington Post insert individual bias against Trump in their reporting, Lamothe replied "Oh totally, and... I think the Post tries to reign it in a lot. New York Times does it less so. Some of the New York Times reporters are way over the top. CNN is always over the top."

Trump Effect

Another Project Veritas undercover operative recorded Joey Marburger, Director of Product for the Washington Post, admitting that Trump is a primary driver of traffic to the publication.

"If Trump just disappeared tomorrow, our traffic would drop by forty percent. So, yeah, we think about that." -Joey Marburger, WaPo

So what have we learned?

-Most WaPo reporters hate Trump but try to report honestly, according to Dan Lamothe, giving the President "credit where there's credit"

-WaPo's "institutional voice," however, is very anti-Trump

-CNN and the New York Times are way worse, according to Lamothe

-Without Trump, WaPo's traffic would drop by 40%

Watch here: 

 

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Saturday, November 25, 2017

SHARYL ATTKISSON IN THE HILL: Sex abuse allegations expose the media’s hypocrisy on Trump. “No…

ORIGINAL LINK

SHARYL ATTKISSON IN THE HILL: Sex abuse allegations expose the media’s hypocrisy on Trump.

“Not every horny narcissist with bad judgment is named Donald Trump.”

That was the actual “reportage” of New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush last year, in an article referring to the online sexual exploits of former congressman Anthony Weiner.

It appears, in retrospect, that Thrush might well have been describing himself.

News reports about his behavior, allegedly inflicting unwanted advances on a series of young women, describe the fedora-wearing Thrush as a successful and influential reporter who once worked for Politico and was then plucked away by the New York Times — once, perhaps, the most prestigious news publication in the world.

Some of his accusers say they feared his industry connections and felt smeared by him after they rebuffed his advances — all of which Thrush has denied.

But there’s a question as to how he was allowed to become an influential force in newsrooms and in political journalism, as described by offended female colleagues.

His politics were right, by which I mean left.



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No, the entirety of US media are fixated on the Russiagate controversy.

ORIGINAL LINK
No, you are fixated on the Russia-Gate controversy

No, the entirety of US media are fixated on the Russiagate controversy. I provide commentary on that extremely obvious fixation.

and in lieu of being able to comprehensively debunk the continuing stream of news,

I do that. You just described the thing that my job is. You are deliberately ignoring the comprehensive debunkings I do constantly.

There’s tons more. That took me two minutes. You’re either being intellectually lazy or deliberately obtuse. You’ll need to stop that.

You also write that Trump is “a more overt version of his neoliberal, neoconservative, ecocidal omnicidal predecessors”, so why are some neo-cons (David Frum, Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin) supporting the anti-Trump Russia-Gate narrative?

Because neocons have an anti-Russia agenda and Trump doesn’t. An extremely hawkish, anti-detente posture toward the USSR was the original founding principle of neoconservatism.

You present a convoluted theory that Russia-Gate is intended to distract attention from similarities between Bush and Obama Administrations.

No I don’t. I argue that the Democrats can’t attack Trump on things they themselves have done and continue to do, so they focus on a fake psyop instead.

Russia-Gate is looked on as a way to get rid of him, not start a war with Russia.

For the Democrats this may be true. For the deep state the agenda is definitely to quash Russia to cripple China.

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Friday, November 24, 2017

Fukushima Darkness

ORIGINAL LINK

The impact of Fukushima Daiichi’s nuclear meltdown extends far and wide, as the hemispheric ecosystem gets hit by tons of radioactive water. Additionally, surreptitiousness surrounds untold death and illness, yet it remains one of the least understood and deceitfully reported episodes of journalism in modern history.

At the same time as Japan passed its totalitarian secrecy act in December 2013, it passed an obstructive Cancer Registration Law, which made it illegal to share medical data or information on radiation-related issues, denying public access to medical records, with violators subject to fines of two million Yen or 5-10 years in prison, a pretty stiff penalty for peeking into medical records, giving the appearance of somebody running scared.

Furthermore, and more egregiously yet, a confidentiality agreement to control medical information about radiation exposure was signed in January 2014 by IAEA, UNSCEAR, and Fukushima Prefecture and Fukushima Medical University. Thereafter, all info of illness from radiation is reported to a central repository run by Fukushima Medical Centre and IAEA. In turn, the Fukushima Centre for Environmental Creation was created in 2015 to communicate “accurate information on radiation to the public and dispel anxiety.” Ahem!

Well now, isn’t that convenient, a central depository controlled by the International Atomic Energy Agency – IAEA – to report on Fukushima Daiichi radiation exposure and medical illness. It’s not hard to figure that’s rotten to the core, sounding a lot like words lifted directly off the pages of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Meanwhile, much, but not all, mainstream media reports about radiation-induced illnesses and deaths at Fukushima are feeble grossly incompetent journalism, as follows: “The latest update (in April) by the World Nuclear Association re the Fukushima disaster: There have been no deaths or cases of radiation sickness from the nuclear accident…”1

According to The World Nuclear Association, as of October 2017:

There have been no deaths or cases of radiation sickness from the nuclear accident, but over 100,000 people were evacuated from their homes to ensure this. Government nervousness delays the return of many.

Here’s one more statement of zero deaths at Fukushima, by Hannah Ritchie, published in Our World in Data, July 24, 2017:

In the case of Fukushima, although 40-50 people experienced physical injury or radiation burns at the nuclear facility, the number of direct deaths from the incident are quoted to be zero.2

And one more, an article in Forbes by Dr. James Conca, an expert on energy, nuclear and dirty bombs:

Strangely, the costs that never materialized were the most feared, those of radiation-induced cancer and death… No one received enough dose, even the 20,000 workers who have worked tirelessly to recover form this event.3

Au contraire, it is believed that official reports of Fukushima radiation-induced sicknesses and deaths are horribly under-reported and/or intentionally manipulated to show few, if any, cases. Based upon numerous testimonials obtained by independent journalists and researchers in Japan and U.S. attorneys, there is considerable evidence of radiation-induced deaths and sicknesses.

Seemingly, somebody is dead wrong on the issue of radiation-induced deaths, whether it’s (1) official sources via mainstream news or (2) independent researchers/journalists/U.S. attorneys that claim to personally know of deaths. One of those two sources is dead wrong and seriously misleading the world, which, in and of itself, should be classified as a criminal act, like the Nazi Nuremberg trials (1945-49). In point of fact, if it can be proven that people are covering up and/or lying about Fukushima radiation-induced illness and death, they should be tried and imprisoned, similar to Nazi war criminals. The implications of widespread radiation are not a trifle.

When it comes to uncontrollable radiation, there’s an ecumenical obligation for full transparency as a basic right for all humanity, worldwide.

It’s a real shame that the authorities hide the truth from the whole world, from the UN. We need to admit that actually many people are dying. We are not allowed to say that, but TEPCO employees also are dying. But they keep mum about it.4

Individual medical doctors in Japan have reported serious radiation-related problems, for example:

In April 2014, Dr Tsuda Toshihide, an epidemiologist at Okayama University, declared this a ‘thyroid cancer epidemic’ and predicted multiple illnesses from long-term internal radiation below 100 mSv/y and advocated for a program of outbreak (emergency or rapid) epidemiology in and outside Fukushima.5

Similarly, a Tokyo-based physician, Dr Mita Shigeru, circulated a public statement notifying his colleagues of his intention to relocate his practice to Okayama due to overwhelming evidence of unusual symptoms in his patients (roughly 2,000). Given that soil in Tokyo post-Fukushima returned between 1,000 and 4,000 Bq/kg, as compared to an average of 500 Bq/kg (Cs 137 only) in Kiev soil, Mita pointed to a correlation between these symptoms and the significant radiation contamination in Tōhoku and metropolitan Tokyo.6

The ashes of half a dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in a town just north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Some of the dead men had no papers; others left no emergency contacts. Their names could not be confirmed and no family members had been tracked down to claim their remains. They were simply labeled “decontamination troops” — unknown soldiers in Japan’s massive cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation poisoned the fertile countryside.7

Mako Oshidori, director of Free Press Corporation/Japan, investigated several unreported worker deaths, and interviewed a former nurse who quit TEPCO:

I would like to talk about my interview of a nurse who used to work at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) after the accident… He quit his job with TEPCO, and that’s when I interviewed him… As of now, there are multiple NPP workers that have died, but only the ones who died on the job are reported publicly. Some of them have died suddenly while off work, for instance, during the weekend or in their sleep, but none of their deaths are reported.8

They are not included in the worker death count. For example, there are some workers who quit the job after a lot of radiation exposure… and end up dying a month later, but none of these deaths are either reported, or included in the death toll. This is the reality of the NPP workers.6

Greenpeace has been conducting radiation readings throughout Fukushima ever since 311. Accordingly:

The Japanese government will soon lift evacuation orders for 6,000 citizens of Iitate village in Fukushima Prefecture where radiation levels in nearby forests are comparable to the current levels within the Chernobyl 30km exclusion zone – an area that more than 30 years after the accident remains formally closed to habitation. Seventy-five percent (75%) of Iitate is contaminated forested mountains.9

Over time, high levels of radiation from the mountains leach onto cleaned up areas down below. In point of fact, based upon several Greenpeace analyses throughout Fukushima Prefecture, former inhabitants of several communities are returning to towns and villages where spot checks show unacceptable levels of radiation.

Faced with the post-311 reality of government (and corporate) policy that protects economic and security interests over public health and well-being, the majority of the 2 million inhabitants of Fukushima Prefecture are either unconscious of or have been encouraged to accept living with radioactive contamination. People dry their clothes outside, drink local tap water and consume local food, swim in outdoor pools and the ocean, consume and sell their own produce or catches. Financial pressure after 311 as well as the persistent danger of social marginalisation has made it more difficult to take precautionary measures (i.e. permanent relocation, dual accommodation, importing food and water) and develop and share counter-narratives to the official message. Nevertheless, some continue to conceal their anxiety beneath a mask of superficial calm.

As Fukushima city resident Shiina Chieko observed, the majority of people seem to have adopted denial as a way to excise the present danger from their consciousness. Her sister-in-law, for example, ignored her son’s ‘continuous nosebleeds’; while her mother had decided that the community must endure by pretending that things were no different from pre-311 conditions. (Broinowski)

Radiation exposure shows up years later as one of several illnesses. This gives the nuclear industry an advantage of time lapses in its position statements about the safety of nuclear energy. After all when enough time lapses, who knows for sure the cause of death?

However, Chernobyl provides a perfect case study of radiation-caused deaths of workers with a direct link, “liquidators,” exposed to Chernobyl radiation (1986), keeping in mind that radiation takes several years to show up as cancer and other severe ailments:

By 2001, of 800,000 healthy Russian and Ukrainian liquidators (with an average age of 33 years) sent to decontaminate, isolate and stabilise the reactor, 10 per cent had died and 30 per cent were disabled. By 2009, 120,000 liquidators had died, and an epidemic of chronic illness and genetic and perigenetic damage in nuclear workers’ descendants appeared (this is predicted to increase over subsequent generations). The full extent of the damage will not be understood until the fifth generation of descendants. By the mid-2000s, 985,000 additional deaths between 1986 and 2004 across Europe were estimated as a direct result from radiation exposure from Chernobyl. (Broinowski)

Chernobyl likely foreshadows a dismal future for those exposed to Fukushima radiation whether residents, workers, or untold recipients throughout the extent of flowing seas, which is universal.

As Chernobyl clearly demonstrates: Over time, radiation cumulates in bodily organs. For an example of how radiation devastates human bodies generation by generation, consider:

There are 2,397,863 people registered with Ukraine’s health ministry to receive ongoing Chernobyl-related health care. Of these, 453,391 are children — none born at the time of the accident. Their parents were children in 1986. These children have a range of illnesses: respiratory, digestive, musculoskeletal, eye diseases, blood diseases, cancer, congenital malformations, genetic abnormalities, trauma.10

As for Fukushima’s direct impact on Americans that helped at the time of the meltdowns, former Senator John Edwards is representing cancer-ridden sailors who interceded on a humanitarian basis aboard the USS Ronald Reagan. According to Edwards:

We have all these sailors. Sailors whose case is now five years old, who have died or are in the process of dying right now. Edwards noted that some of his sailor clients have children born with birth defects.11

We now have a 250+ young sailors with all kinds of illnesses, we’ve had three die. We had one of the sailors who came home and impregnated his wife. They gave birth to a little baby born with brain cancer and cancer down the spine, lived for two years, and just died in March of this year.12

TEPCO’s attorney Gregory Stone claims his client accepts responsibility for the radiation released but maintains the amount sailors were exposed to was negligible. Stone: “People get sick at different times of their lives for different reasons.”

As people unceremoniously, more times than not anonymously, die from radiation exposure, the Abe administration keeps a tight lid on the reality and the potency of Fukushima Daiichi radiation. And, when faced with the prospect of not knowing what to do, bring on the Olympics! That’s pretty good cover for a messy situation, making it appear to hundreds of thousands of attendees, as well as to the world community “all is well.”

But, is it really?

Postscript:

These sailors are supposed to be very healthy. It’s not a normal situation. It is unbelievable that just in four or five years that these healthy sailors would become sick… I think that both the U.S. and Japanese government have something to hide.13

• Read Part One here.

  1. Michael W. Chapman, “5 Years Later, Deaths Caused by Radiation Leak at Fukushima -O-“, CNS News, May 11, 2016.
  2. Hannah Ritchie, Our World in Data, July 24, 2017.
  3. Dr. James Conca, After Five Years, What Is The Cost Of Fukushima?” Forbes, March 10, 2016.
  4. Katsutaka Idogawa, former mayor of Futaba (Fukushima Prefecture), “Fukushima Disaster: Tokyo Hides Truth as Children Die, Become Ill from Radiation”, Ex-Mayor, RT News, April 21, 2014.
  5. Adam Broinowski, PhD (author of 25 major academic publications and Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Australian National University): “Informal Labour, Local Citizens and the Tokyo Electric Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Crisis: Responses to Neoliberal Disaster Management,” Australian National University, 2017.
  6. Ibid.
  7. Mari Yamaguchi, “Fukushima ‘Decontamination Troops’ Often Exploited, Shunned”, AP & ABC News, Minamisona, Japan, March 10, 2016.
  8. “The Hidden Truth about Fukushima” by Mako Oshidori, delivered at the International Conference, Effects of Nuclear Disasters on Natural Environment and Human Health held in Germany, 2014 co-organized by International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War.
  9. Greenpeace/Japan Press Release, Tokyo, 21 February 2017.
  10. “Chernobyl’s Legacy: Kids With Bodies Ravaged by Disaster”, USA Today, C April 17, 2016.
  11. Bianca Bruno, “Dying Navy Sailors Push for Trial on Fukushima Meltdown”, Courthouse News.com, September 1, 2017.
  12. Attorney Charles Bonner, representing US service members exposed to Fukushima fallout, July 21, 2015 at 10:45, YouTube.
  13. Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan 2001-06 quoted in New York Times, December 31, 2016.


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Vegas Massacre Cover-Up: PR Firm Hired by Mandalay Bay Exposed Pushing Conspiracy Theories

ORIGINAL LINK

Mandalay-Bay-Photo-from-Wikipedia.jpg?re

In another strange twist to the largest mass-shooting in recent U.S. history, a damning report indicates that the parent company of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, MGM Resorts International, is paying crisis management firm Joele Frank to spread disinformation about the massacre online.

According to a bombshell report, published by Thomas Michael on Medium, the crisis management firm is deliberately spreading ridiculous conspiracy theories on social media in an attempt to discredit legitimate inquiry into the bizarre official narrative—and actively trying to muddy the water about events surrounding the mass-shooting.

The report details how MGM International hired Joele Frank to run damage control in the wake of the deadly attack that left 58 people dead on Oct. 1. Michael’s report subsequently exposes ties between the crisis management firm and numerous Twitter accounts posting clearly bogus conspiracy theories about the mass-shooting, claiming “the shooting was fake, there was no blood, no victims, crisis actors, the whole nine-yards.”



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Thursday, November 23, 2017

THE SCIENCE WAS RIGGED: Researchers Publish Bombshell Report That Suggests Sugar Industry Conspirac…

ORIGINAL LINK

THE SCIENCE WAS RIGGED: Researchers Publish Bombshell Report That Suggests Sugar Industry Conspiracy.



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Fracking chemicals remain secret despite EPA knowledge of health hazards

ORIGINAL LINK

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) knows that dozens of the chemicals used in fracking pose health hazards. The agency not only allows their use, but also lets the oil and gas industry keep the chemicals secret, according to a new report.Between 2003 and 2014 the EPA identified health hazards for 41 chemicals used in fracking, according to a report from the Partnership for Policy Integrity and Earthworks, based on documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Fracking is the ...

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As Americans Eat Turkey, Mainstream Media Quietly Admits US Gov’t Planned False Flags to Start WW3

ORIGINAL LINK
false flagsAs Americans gather with friends and family to celebrate Thanksgiving, the US government's desire to create false flags to start wars was quietly admitted by the mainstream media.

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COMPROMISED: Sex-abuser Congressmen are open to massive blackmail

ORIGINAL LINK

COMPROMISED: Sex-abuser Congressmen are open to massive blackmail

By Jon Rappoport

Most people are naïve about how intelligence operations are run. Holding damaging secrets on public figures equals the opportunity for blackmail. This strategy was probably discovered by cave men.

—Sex-abuse claims filed against members of Congress—beyond Al Franken and John Conyers—

Where are all the names of these Congressmen? We’re now told that, in the past 10 years, $17 million has been paid out to accusers in small sums. An unknown part of that money was compensation for explicitly sexual offenses.

There are more cases where the accusers simply gave up and refused to pursue claims. They’re potentially waiting in the wings.

Not only are the Congressmen guilty, they’re open to blackmail. As they vote on bills; as they decide which lobbyists to favor; as they decide what advice to follow from intelligence agencies; as they decide whether to take meetings with agents from other countries; they’re always looking over their shoulders, wondering: HOW MUCH DO THESE PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT ME? WHAT SHOULD I DO TO STAY SAFE?

And in some hotel room, late at night, when a person slips them a folder with details of their sexual misdemeanors or felonies, what are they going to do? How are they going to resist whatever is being asked for?

COMPROMISED.

This is the political elephant in the room the mainstream press isn’t talking about.

What about the NSA and the CIA and other spying agencies in the US (and other countries)? How much devastating information about sexual abuse have they gathered on these Congressmen?

How much covert control have the agencies chosen to exercise?

WE OWN YOU.

The levels of complexity can be dizzying. Suppose a guilty Congressman learns actual secrets about another politician? His impulse is to blow the whistle. But can he? What will he bring down on his own head?

Suppose he knows vital secrets about Monsanto, Dow, Exxon, Eli Lilly?

I’LL KEEP YOUR SECRETS IF YOU KEEP MINE.

A BROTHERHOOD OF SECRET-KEEPERS.

An awareness, over the years, spreads through Congress: “Many of us are guilty and we need to protect each other.”

Because it isn’t just the sexual secrets anymore. It’s the subsequent immoral actions taken and not taken, based on being compromised. Based on being controlled.

“Appreciate your committee vote to kill the bill yesterday, Senator. I assure you that thing in Miami last summer…”

“When does our deal end? When are we even? This is worse than prison.”

“It’s not worse. And it never ends. But don’t worry, be happy. Keep playing the game. It’s no skin off your nose.”

“What about honor?”

“Please. You gave that away a long time ago. In Miami. But we also know about the hotel rooms in New York, Washington, Chicago, LA…”

The Congressman can’t believe the bind he’s in. He’s having the above conversation with a man from the CIA. He and the CIA are supposed to be on the same team. And they are, if he’ll understand who is higher in the pecking order, who gives the commands.

One day, he’ll wake up and realize that, among the four women he abused, three were innocent, but one was sent in by the Agency with the task of seducing him. If necessary, at a later date, she could use their night together as blackmail. (For a rough variation on this theme, see numerous accounts of NY Governor Eliot Spitzer’s 2008 hooker scandal, which caused his resignation from office. Spitzer was attacking Wall Street and Big Pharma.)

Then we come to the issue of reporters, who themselves could be compromised, because they’re secretly guilty of sexual abuse.

For example, long-time political reporter, Glenn Thrush (Politico, NY Times, MSNBC), has just been accused of kissing and groping four women. The Times has suspended him from his position covering the White House.

If Thrush, at any time, has been aware of politicians’ misdeeds, did he cover them and expose them fully—or was he “under the gun” to play ball because of his own secrets?

One could reasonably ask this question about Thrush’s relations with the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign.

Case in point. WikiLeaks (October 2016) released an email from Thrush to John Podesta, Hillary’s campaign manager. Thrush was writing an article that referred to Podesta. He emailed Podesta part of the draft, asking him to “fact-check” it. Astonishingly, Thrush remarked in the email:

“No worries Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u. Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I fucked up anything.”

Podesta replied: “no problems here.”

Politico’s vice president of communications, Brad Dayspring, made an impassioned and transparently moronic defense of his reporter:

“Glenn is one of the top political reporters in the country [!], in no small part because he understands that it is his job to get inside information, not appear perfect when someone illegally hacks email [!]…I can speak with firsthand knowledge and experience that Glenn checks the validity of often complex reporting with everybody, on both sides of the aisle.”

So who is Brad Dayspring, the ardent defender of his “top political reporter?”

Years earlier, on October 25, 2011, while Dayspring was working as Communications Director for House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, ADWEEK reported:

“Turns out Dayspring’s personal Twitter feed, @BDayspring… follows 1,007 accounts, one of which is SexyTwitPics… Description: ‘We RT [retweet] only the HOTTEST Pics DIRECTLY from Sexy Ladies’ Twitter Accts! (No random girls, xxx, guys) Ladies Mention us w your pics! 18+’”

Maybe it’s a stretch, but I’d say the level of intelligence Dayspring exhibited in defending Glenn Thrush is matched by his interest in SexyTwitPics.

One of the elephants in the room is, of course, Bill Clinton. For several decades, people having been writing about his sexual predations. It’s assumed that he and his allies (including his wife) have been able to avoid final excommunication from politics because of their power—but it would be foolish to assume he has been free from blackmail.

We wouldn’t be talking about some reporter with a damning file on Bill Clinton. We would be talking about an agency like the CIA and their file. No one who is a serial abuser simply shrugs off the CIA and blithely walks away.

In other words, the Clintons may have nine lives precisely BECAUSE they made a deal with the devil…


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Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Fukushima Darkness

ORIGINAL LINK

The radiation effects of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant triple meltdowns are felt worldwide, whether lodged in sea life or in humans, it cumulates over time. The impact is now slowly grinding away only to show its true colors at some unpredictable date in the future. That’s how radiation works, slow but assuredly destructive, which serves to identify its risks, meaning, one nuke meltdown has the impact, over decades, of a 1,000 regular industrial accidents, maybe more.

It’s been six years since the triple 100% nuke meltdowns occurred at Fukushima Daiichi (March 11th, 2011), nowadays referred to as “311”. Over time, it’s easy for the world at large to lose track of the serious implications of the world’s largest-ever industrial disaster; out of sight out of mind works that way.

According to Japanese government and TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) estimates, decommissioning is a decade-by-decade work-in-progress, most likely four decades at a cost of up to ¥21 trillion ($189B). However, that’s the simple part to understanding the Fukushima nuclear disaster story. The difficult painful part is largely hidden from pubic view via a highly restrictive harsh national secrecy law (Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets, Act No. 108/2013), political pressure galore, and fear of exposing the truth about the inherent dangers of nuclear reactor meltdowns. Powerful vested interests want it concealed.

Following passage of the 2013 government secrecy act, which says that civil servants or others who “leak secrets” will face up to 10 years in prison, and those who “instigate leaks,” especially journalists, will be subject to a prison term of up to 5 years, Japan fell below Serbia and Botswana in the Reporters Without Borders 2014 World Press Freedom Index. The secrecy act, sharply criticized by the Japanese Federation of Bar Associations, is a shameless act of buttoned-up totalitarianism at the very moment when citizens need and, in fact, require transparency.

The current status, according to Mr. Okamura, a TEPCO manager, as of November 2017:

We’re struggling with four problems: (1) reducing the radiation at the site (2) stopping the influx of groundwater (3) retrieving the spent fuel rods and (4) removing the molten nuclear fuel.1

In short, nothing much has changed in nearly seven years at the plant facilities, even though tens of thousands of workers have combed the Fukushima countryside, washing down structures, removing topsoil and storing it in large black plastic bags, which end-to-end would extend from Tokyo to Denver and back.

As it happens, sorrowfully, complete nuclear meltdowns are nearly impossible to fix because, in part, nobody knows what to do next. That’s why Chernobyl sealed off the greater area surrounding its meltdown of 1986. Along those same lines, according to Fukushima Daiichi plant manager Shunji Uchida:

Robots and cameras have already provided us with valuable pictures. But it is still unclear what is really going on inside.2

Seven years and they do not know what’s going on inside. Is it the China Syndrome dilemma of molten hot radioactive corium burrowing into Earth? Is it contaminating aquifers? Nobody knows, nobody can possibly know, which is one of the major risks of nuclear meltdowns. Nobody knows what to do. There is no playbook for 100% meltdowns. Fukushima Daiichi proves the point.

When a major radiological disaster happens and impacts vast tracts of land, it cannot be ‘cleaned up’ or ‘fixed’.3

Meanwhile, the world nuclear industry has ambitious growth plans, 50-60 reactors currently under construction, mostly in Asia, with up to 400 more on drawing boards.  Nuke advocates claim Fukushima is well along in the cleanup phase so not to worry as the Olympics are coming in a couple of years, including events held smack dab in the heart of Fukushima, where the agricultural economy will provide fresh foodstuff.

The Olympics are PM Abe’s major PR punch to prove to the world that all-is-well at the world’s most dangerous, and out of control, industrial accident site. And, yes, it is still out of control. Nevertheless, the Abe government is not concerned. Be that as it may, the risks are multi-fold and likely not well understood. For example, what if another earthquake causes further damage to already-damaged nuclear facilities that are precariously held together with hopes and prayers, subject to massive radiation explosions? Then what? After all, Japan is earthquake country, which defines the boundaries of the country. Japan typically has 400-500 earthquakes in 365 days, or nearly 1.5 quakes per day.

According to Dr. Shuzo Takemoto, professor, Department of Geophysics, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University:

The problem of Unit 2… If it should encounter a big earth tremor, it will be destroyed and scatter the remaining nuclear fuel and its debris, making the Tokyo metropolitan area uninhabitable. The Tokyo Olympics in 2020 will then be utterly out of the question.4

Since the Olympics will be held not far from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident site, it’s worthwhile knowing what to expect; i.e., repercussions hidden from public view. After all, it’s highly improbable that the Japan Olympic Committee will address the radiation-risk factors for upcoming athletes and spectators. Which prompts a question: What criteria did the International Olympic Committee (IOC) follow in selecting Japan for the 2020 Summer Olympics in the face of three 100% nuclear meltdowns totally out of control? On its face, it seems reckless.

This article, in part, is based upon an academic study that brings to light serious concerns about overall transparency, TEPCO workforce health and sudden deaths, as well as upcoming Olympians, bringing to mind the proposition: Is the decision to hold the Olympics in Japan in 2020 a foolish act of insanity and a crude attempt to help cover up the ravages of radiation?

Thus therefore, a preview of what’s happening behind, as well as within, the scenes researched by Adam Broinowski, PhD (author of 25 major academic publications and Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Australian National University):5

The title of Dr. Broinowski’s study provides a hint of the inherent conflict, as well as opportunism, that arises with neoliberal capitalism applied to “disaster management” principles. (Naomi Klein explored a similar concept in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Knopf Canada, 2007).

Dr. Broinowski’s research is detailed, thorough, and complex. His study begins by delving into the impact of neoliberal capitalism, bringing to the fore an equivalence of slave labor to the Japanese economy, especially in regards to what he references as “informal labour.” He preeminently describes the onslaught of supply side/neoliberal tendencies throughout the economy of Japan. The Fukushima nuke meltdowns simply bring to surface all of the warts and blemishes endemic to the neoliberal brand of capitalism.

According to Professor Broinowski:

The ongoing disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station (FDNPS), operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), since 11 March 2011 can be recognised as part of a global phenomenon that has been in development over some time. This disaster occurred within a social and political shift that began in the mid-1970s (ed. supply-side economics, which is strongly reflected in America’s current tax bill under consideration) and that became more acute in the early 1990s in Japan with the downturn of economic growth and greater deregulation and financialisation in the global economy. After 40 years of corporate fealty in return for lifetime contracts guaranteed by corporate unions, as tariff protections were lifted further and the workforce was increasingly casualised, those most acutely affected by a weakening welfare regime were irregular day labourers, or what we might call ‘informal labour’.

In short, the 45,000-60,000 workers recruited to deconstruct decontaminate Fukushima Daiichi and the surrounding prefecture mostly came off the streets, castoffs of neoliberalism’s impact on

… independent unions, rendered powerless, growing numbers of unemployed, unskilled and precarious youths (freeters) alongside older, vulnerable and homeless day labourers (these groups together comprising roughly 38 per cent of the workforce in 2015) found themselves not only (a) lacking insurance or (b) industrial protection but also in many cases (c) basic living needs. With increasing deindustrialisation and capital flight, regular public outbursts of frustration and anger from these groups have manifested since the Osaka riots of 1992. (Broinowski)

The Osaka Riots of 25 years ago depict the breakdown of modern society’s working class, a problem that has spilled over into national political elections worldwide as populism/nationalism dictate winners/losers. In Osaka 1,500 rampaging laborers besieged a police station (somewhat similar to John Carpenter’s 1976 iconic film Assault on Precinct 13) over outrage of interconnecting links between police and Japan’s powerful “Yakuza” or gangsters that bribe police to turn a blind eye to gangster syndicates that get paid to recruit, often forcibly, workers for low-paying manual jobs for industry.

That’s how TEPCO gets workers to work in radiation-sensitive high risks jobs. Along the way, subcontractors rake off most of the money allocated for workers, resulting in a subhuman life style for the riskiest most life-threatening jobs in Japan, maybe the riskiest most life threatening in the world.

Japan has a long history of assembling and recruiting unskilled labor pools at cheap rates, which is typical of nearly all large-scale modern industrial projects. Labor is simply one more commodity to be used and discarded. Tokyo Electric Power Company (“TEPCO”) of Fukushima Daiichi fame adheres to those long-standing feudalistic employment practices. They hire workers via layers of subcontractors in order to avoid liabilities; i.e., accidents, health insurance, safety standards, by penetrating into the bottom social layers that have no voice in society.

As such, TEPCO is not legally obligated to report industrial accidents when workers are hired through complex webs or networks of subcontractors; there are approximately 733 subcontractors for TEPCO. Here’s the process: TEPCO employs a subcontractor “shita-uke,” which in turn employs another subcontractor “mago-uke” that relies upon labor brokers “tehaishilninpu-dashi.” At the end of the day, who’s responsible for the health and safety of workers? Who’s responsible for reporting cases of radiation sickness and/or death caused by radiation exposure?

Based upon anecdotal evidence from reliable sources in Japan, there is good reason to believe TEPCO, as well as the Japanese government, suppress public knowledge of worker radiation sickness and death, as well as the civilian population of Fukushima. Thereby, essentially hoodwinking worldwide public opinion, for example, pro-nuke enthusiasts/advocates point to the safety of nuclear power generation because of so few reported deaths in Japan. But, then again, who’s responsible for reporting worker deaths? Answer: Other than an occasional token death report by official sources, nobody!

Furthermore, TEPCO does not report worker deaths that occur outside of the workplace even though the death is a direct result of excessive radiation exposure at the workplace. For example, if a worker with radiation sickness becomes too ill to go to work, they’ll obviously die at home and therefore not be reported as a work-related death. As a result, pro-nuke advocates claim Fukushima proves how safe nuclear power is, even when it goes haywire, because there are so few, if any, deaths, as to be inconsequential. That’s a boldfaced lie that is discussed in the sequel: Fukushima Darkness (Part 2.)

As one labourer stated re Fukushima Daiichi: ‘TEPCO is God. The main contractors are kings, and we are slaves’. In short, Fukushima Daiichi clearly illustrates the social reproduction, exploitation and disposability of informal labour, in the state protection of capital, corporations and their assets. (Broinowski)

Indeed, Japan is a totalitarian corporate state where corporate interests are protected from liability by layers of subcontractors and by vested interests of powerful political bodies and extremely harsh state secrecy laws. As such, it is believed that nuclear safety and health issues, including deaths, are under-reported and likely not reported at all in most cases. Therefore, the worldview of nuclear power, as represented in Japan at Fukushima Daiichi, is horribly distorted in favor of nuclear power advocacy.

Fukushima’s Darkness: Part 2 sequel, to be published at a future date, discusses consequences.

  1. Martin Fritz, “The Illusion of Normality at Fukushima”, Deutsche Welle–Asia, November 3, 2017.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Hanis Maketab, Environmental Impacts of Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Will Last ‘decades to centuries’, Greenpeace, Asia Correspondent, March 4, 2016.
  4. Shuzo Takemoto, “Potential Global Catastrophe of the Reactor No. 2 at Fukushima Daiichi”, February 11, 2017.
  5. “Informal Labour, Local Citizens and the Tokyo Electric Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Crisis: Responses to Neoliberal Disaster Management,” Australian National University, 2017.


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