Oops: When Clearing Clinton, FBI Accidentally Proved She Committed Perjury

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(ANTIMEDIA) United States — Apparently inviolable Hillary Clinton might have been let off the hook by the FBI in its bewildering but unsurprising refusal to recommend the Department of Justice prosecute any number of violations relating to her private email server and account, but that by no means indicates she isn’t guilty.

To the contrary, FBI Director James Comey’s scathing description of Clinton’s “careless” use of a non-secure platform — through which eight email chains contained information considered “Top Secret” and 36 considered “Secret” at the time it was transmitted — provided direct evidence the former secretary of state committed any number of crimes.

And perjury in testimony to Congress tops the list. Testifying before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Clinton lied under oath — no less than three times — and her mendacious statements in no way constituted fumbling forgetfulness, ambiguity, or misinterpretation.

First, Hillary’s claim she ‘turned over’ all emails relating to State Department business just isn’t factual. Asked by committee chair, Rep. Trey Gowdy, whether her previous insistence she ‘turned over everything’ was true, Clinton responded [all emphasis has been added], “All my work-related emails, yes.”

“How do you know that?” Gowdy pressed. Clinton responded, “I know that because there was an exhaustive search done under the supervision of my attorneys, and that is exactly the outcome. We turned over every work-related email […]”

Comey’s statement tells quite a different tale:

“The FBI discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to the State in 2014.”

Not only that, but in a separate segment of testimony in response to Rep. Jim Jordan, the lies continued.

Clinton, claiming her attorneys had “conducted a rigorous review” of all 62,000 or more emails to determine which were or were not business-related, was asked by Jordan to elaborate on the term “rigorous” — to which she replied:

“It means they were asked to provide anything that could possibly be construed as work related.”

Jordan again insisted she clarify, responding, “But I’m asking how — I’m asking how it was done. Was — did someone physically look at the 62,000 e-mails, or did you use search terms, date parameters? I want to know the specifics.”

“They did all of that,” Clinton asserted, “and I did not look over their shoulders, because I thought it would be appropriate for them to conduct that search, and they did.”

Asked to provide those search terms, she flippantly over-generalized:

“The search terms were everything you could imagine that might be related to anything, but they also went through every single e-mail.”

But, as Comey noted:

“The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014.”

Further, as her testimony continued — addressing the hotly-debated issue of classified information transmitted over her unclassified server, Clinton boldly declared:

“There was nothing marked classified on my e-mails, either sent or received.”

Again, a blatant untruth.

“In addition to this highly sensitive information,” Comey continued, discussing the aforementioned Top Secret and Secret matters, as well as additional e-mails considered Sensitive, “we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail (that is, excluding the later ‘up-classified’ e-mails).”

Perjury isn’t the only potentially criminal act the FBI handily revealed Clinton having committed, but it might be the most blatant.

Despite the difficulty in charging someone with the “technical statute” of perjury for lying under oath in congressional testimony, most hiccups appear to lie in the believability of the person in question’s explanation of their perception at the time the perjurious statement was made.

“It is especially difficult, if not impossible to prosecute statements that may be misleading or evasive but subject to an arguably truthful interpretation,” explained attorney Mark Hopson, managing partner with Sidney Austin LLP’s Washington office, to TIME in 2014.

Clinton’s statements, of course, didn’t leave much room for interpretation.

Possible penalties for perjury include a fine of up to $100,000 — mere chump change for Clinton, who makes more than double that with those notorious speeches for the Big Banking crowd — or up to five years in prison.

At least, theoretically that would be the case.

Comey, for failing to recommend the DOJ prosecute the former secretary of state, has now been called to testify in front of  the U.S. House Oversight Committee on Thursday after explosive criticism erupted following the FBI’s announcement.

But will Hillary Clinton ever see the world through prison bars — the same prison bars countless nonviolent criminals subject to penalties from the contentiously overbearing crime bill she championed during her husband’s tenure in the White House?

Judging by the enormity of the deceitful mishandling of the private email server and countless other highly questionable, if not outright criminal acts she is known or alleged to have committed, the answer would almost certainly be never.

Hillary Clinton and James Comey just proved the Clinton dynasty’s sacrosanct status to the establishment — an impunity so impenetrable, it would seem the family truly might be above the law.

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Peasants, Pitchforks & How Corporate Power Destroyed Democracy

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Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

There is no avenue left for advocacy, grievances or redress in a system dominated by global corporations.

In the original version of feudalism, peasants armed with pitchforks knew where to go for redress or regime change: the feudal lord's castle on the hill. Though you won't find this in conventional narratives of the Middle Ages, peasant revolts were a common occurrence; serfs weren't always delighted to toil for their noble masters.

In the present era of corporate dominance, where can serfs go to demand redress and financial freedom from the neofeudal system? Nowhere. The global corporations that own the land and the productive assets have no castle that can be stormed; they exist in an abstract financial world of stock shares, buybacks, bonds, lobbyists and political influence.

When the agribusiness corporation fouls the local water supply with animal waste, where do the local peasantry go to demand restoration of their water quality? The corporation? What if the headquarters are thousands of miles away?

What impact will 100 serfs gathered outside the modern-day castle have on water quality in a distant land? Zero, because the corporation has rendered it illegal (via lobbying the local political flunkies desperate for "jobs" and campaign contributions) to even take photos of their vast animal-waste output or their inadequate disposal.

Where do oppressed serfs go to advocate for transparency in America's private Gulag prison system? If you go to the prison to protest, you'll be arrested and will soon be looking at the world from inside the privately operated gulag.

Once again--where is the castle on the hill? It's not there. The corporate operators of the private Gulag are far away, and security will disperse any troublesome serfs who travel hundreds of miles to air grievances.

Documenting abuses in the privately owned and operated Gulag is illegal. Corporate lobbying and campaign contributions have ensured that any attempt to document neofeudal exploitation by corporations is illegal.

And of course if documentation is impossible to obtain, then the exploitation doesn't exist. The mainstream media's default setting is to dismiss first-hand accounts as "he said, she said": the imprisoned serf says this, and the private prison spokesperson says that, and without any proof that can stand up in court, the grievance vanishes into thin air.

Try telling the African peasant who is unhappy with the Chinese owners of the land he tills to take his grievances to the owners of the land--a corporation in distant China that is owned by the Chinese army.

The reality is there is no avenue left for advocacy, grievances or redress in a system dominated by global corporations. The castle on the hill doesn't exist; it is diffused all over the planet, and well protected by state minions controlled by neofeudal corporate interests.

Do you really think it's mere coincidence that small business growth has imploded in the era of corporate dominance? As I explained yesterday in Governments Change, the Corporatocracy Endures, central banks dropping interest rates to near-zero for financiers and corporations sealed corporate dominance of finance and governance. There are few opportunities for small businesses when the financial and political structures serve neofeudal corporate interests.

Corporate power destroys democracy. That is the heart of neofeudalism.

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No Longer a Conspiracy Theory: CIA Director Admits Plans of Aerosol Spraying for Geoengineering

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by Matt Agorist

Last week, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John O. Brennan addressed instability and transnational threats to global security at a meeting with the Council on Foreign Relations. During his long-winded talk of threats to US interests and how the largely CIA-created ISIL threat is impacting the world, Brennan brought up the topic of geoengineering.

Another example is the array of technologies—often referred to collectively as geoengineering—that potentially could help reverse the warming effects of global climate change. One that has gained my personal attention is stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI, a method of seeding the stratosphere with particles that can help reflect the sun’s heat, in much the same way that volcanic eruptions do.

Brennan went on to echo the calls from some scientists who have called for aerial spraying.

An SAI program could limit global temperature increases, reducing some risks associated with higher temperatures and providing the world economy additional time to transition from fossil fuels. The process is also relatively inexpensive—the National Research Council estimates that a fully deployed SAI program would cost about $10 billion yearly.

The extent at which Brennan talked about stratospheric aerosol injection shows that he and the CIA have likely been considering this for some time.

As promising as it may be, moving forward on SAI would raise a number of challenges for our government and for the international community. On the technical side, greenhouse gas emission reductions would still have to accompany SAI to address other climate change effects, such as ocean acidification, because SAI alone would not remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

On the geopolitical side, the technology’s potential to alter weather patterns and benefit certain regions at the expense of others could trigger sharp opposition by some nations. Others might seize on SAI’s benefits and back away from their commitment to carbon dioxide reductions. And, as with other breakthrough technologies, global norms and standards are lacking to guide the deployment and implementation of SAI.

“Chemtrails” have long been the talk of conspiracy theories with massive amounts of disinformation being posted all over the internet including fake studies and photos. However, several real studies show that some ‘seeding’ or geoengineering may be taking place.

A study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is suggesting that geoengineering has already begun, and the substance being used is a toxic by-product of coal burning call coal-fly ash.

“The widespread, intentional and increasingly frequent chemical emplacement in the troposphere has gone unidentified and unremarked in the scientific literature for years. The author presents evidence that toxic coal combustion fly ash is the most likely aerosolized particulate sprayed by tanker-jets for geoengineering, weather-modification and climate-modification purposes and describes some of the multifold consequences on public health.

Also, it has been proposed that unintentional geoengineering may already be taking place as well. As Derrick Broze points out, researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are suggesting contrails from airplanes may be inadvertently geoengineering the skies.

Chuck Long is a researcher with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory at the University of Colorado in Boulder. At the recent American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, Long and his team released their paper, “Evidence of Clear-Sky Daylight Whitening: Are we already conducting geoengineering?” The analysis found that vapor from airplanes may be altering the climate through accidental geoengineering.

It may be a very long time before we know what, if anything, is actually going on in our skies. However, when the CIA, who is responsible for so much turmoil on a global scale, begins talking about geoengineering, we should listen.

Please share this story with your friends and family who think it’s only conspiracy nuts who talk about spraying things into the sky.

The part of the speech where Brennan talks about geoengineering begins at the 12:05 marker:

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Elite Prepping Private Compounds As Tech Takes Over: “Facebook Could Throw An Election… It’s Scary”

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The future is what they filter.

Silicon Valley has taken over, though ultimate control remains in the hands of bankers.

We have reached the point where Facebook is so powerful, experts admit it could rig an election just by geofiltering where voting reminders appear. Google search results can have a similar diminishing effect on democracy. These new elite have control of the information that our society is made up of.

You will vote for those whom they have selected, and you will read views which have been promoted. As the London Telegraph reports:

[Facebook shrugged off] controversy after being accused of deliberately suppressing conservative views in its trending topics section. “At the end of the day, there’s nothing restraining Zuck’s vision. One of the jokes we had was that Facebook could throw an election by showing reminders to go vote in certain districts but not others. That’s the level of control it has. It’s scary.”

And if those results aren’t credible, or popular, there could quickly be riots spreading across the country – for instance, both if Donald Trump wins the election, or if he has been cheated out of winning. Regardless of the politics involved, Facebook or Google could swing an election by perhaps 20 points.

That’s a tremendous amount of power that has scarcely been considered, and hardly accounted for. Their is little reason to trust the electoral process, as well as many other institutional processes, when corporate money and social programmers are involved.

The innocent image of quaint kids in hoodies making big money distracts from the underlying quest for power.

Beneath the Frat House-esque atmosphere, the company’s elite are painted as sociopaths in hoodies, with an internal security division called ‘The Sec’ monitoring staff members’ movements. Forget the dog-eat-dog capitalism of Wall Street – these guys make Gordon Gekko look like Ghandi.

“Wall Street is the open ruthlessness of gladiatorial combat,” says Martínez. “You’re tossed in there, a lot of blood flows and one man triumphs. In Silicon Valley, it’s more like this mafioso drama with a lot of aggressive behaviour and back-room dealing.

Their data collection and network pooling is worth a great deal to those engaged in spying, cyber warfare and intelligence work.

With the foreboding control that a handful of companies have over the Internet, many of Silicon Valley’s wealthy entrepreneurs are strategically building up off grid compounds to escape from the chaotic hoards that are being stirred up, and take refuge in privacy and retreat.

Publicly, flashing cash is against the Facebook ethos – Zuckerberg famously wears a grey t-shirt to work every day, claiming, “I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous”. Newly minted tech-millennials, therefore, are forced to set up private groups (on Facebook, of course), where they can discuss the pressing needs of the super rich, such as where to buy private aviation, the best five-star resorts in Maui and “how to buy a bunch of land then put it in a trust so people don’t realise you’re amassing a compound and you can maintain your privacy”.

As SHTF has previously reported, the elite are concerned about growing inequality and the conditions of social unrest. Though banksters have deliberately stirred things up, the individuals working for that system certainly don’t want to be caught up in that chaos.

They want to survive – in style and comfort.

Landing Strips, Farms and Hideaways: Secret Escapes of the Elite: “The Rich Are Worried and They Should Be”

That is precisely where they are using private jets to escape to private bunkers and hideaway farms:

“I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway,” he said.

He added that the global economic situation may soon become intolerable for many, including people in the richest nations, because inequality appears steadily on the rise.

Wallis said, “Getaway cars the airstrips in New Zealand and all that sort of thing, so basically a way to get off. If they can get off, onto another planet, some of them would.”

Hopefully you’ve got a place to hideaway, too. Because at this rate, chaos and unrest can’t be far behind.

Read more:

Landing Strips, Farms and Hideaways: Secret Escapes of the Elite: “The Rich Are Worried and They Should Be”

The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster Paperback

What Hell Is Coming? Even Obama Is Warning Americans ‘To Prepare For Disaster’

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In Clinton Case, Obama Administration Nullifies 6 Criminal Laws

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Authored by Eric Zuesse,

When the Obama Administration, on July 5th, ruled that in regard to Hillary Clinton’s privatized email system while she was Secretary of State, "Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case” to a grand jury, because “We cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges,” they ignored the following six U.S. criminal laws, each of which undeniably describes very well what she did:

18 U.S. Code § 2232 — Destruction or removal of property to prevent seizure

(a) Destruction or Removal of Property To Prevent Seizure

Whoever, before, during, or after any search for or seizure of property by any person authorized to make such search or seizure, knowingly destroys, damages, wastes, disposes of, transfers, or otherwise takes any action, or knowingly attempts to destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, transfer, or otherwise take any action, for the purpose of preventing or impairing the Government’s lawful authority to take such property into its custody or control or to continue holding such property under its lawful custody and control, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

(b) Impairment of In Rem Jurisdiction

Whoever, knowing that property is subject to the in rem jurisdiction of a United States court for purposes of civil forfeiture under Federal law, knowingly and without authority from that court, destroys, damages, wastes, disposes of, transfers, or otherwise takes any action, or knowingly attempts to destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, transfer, or otherwise take any action, for the purpose of impairing or defeating the court’s continuing in rem jurisdiction over the property, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

18 U.S. Code § 1512 — Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant

(c) Whoever corruptly

(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,

shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

 

18 U.S. Code § 1519 — Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy

Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

 

18 U.S. Code § 2071 — Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally

(a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.

 

18 U.S. Code § 641 — Public money, property or records

Whoever embezzles, steals, purloins, or knowingly converts to his use, or the use of another, or without authority, sells, conveys or disposes of any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States or of any department or agency thereof, or any property made or being made under contract for the United States or any department or agency thereof, …

Shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years or both. …

 

18 U.S. Code § 793 — Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information …

(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer —  

Shall be fined not more than $10, 000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both. (g) If two or more persons conspire to violate any of the foregoing provisions of this section, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each of the parties to such conspiracy, shall be subject to the punishment provided for the offense which is the object of such conspiracy.

Those laws are consequently null and void, by Executive action. When Congress (which is supposed to be the Legislative branch of the government) passed those laws, what were they describing, if not this? Of course, they did describe there what Clinton has, in fact, done.

If we are a nation “of laws, not of men” (as that old basic description of democracy phrased it), then Ms. Clinton will be prosecuted, at least through the grand jury stage, on (at least) those grounds. The decision regarding her innocence or guilt will be made by jurors (first by the grand jurors, of course, and if they find there to be a case, then by a trial jury), not by the broader public - and also not by the nation’s Executive: the President and his appointed Administration. That is what it means for a government to be a functioning democracy. Any government which violates this principle - that it is “of laws, not of men [including women]” - is not functioning as a democracy: it’s something else.

In addition to these criminal laws, there are also federal regulations against these matters, but violations merely of federal regulations (such as these) are far less serious than are actions that violate alsofederal criminal laws (such as the six laws that are listed above).

She isn’t even being sanctioned for the violations the the State Department’s own regulations (or “rules”).

This is not a partisan issue. I was until recently an active Democrat, and I joined with millions of other Democrats who expressed condemnation when George W. Bush was allowed to get away with many severe crimes (such as this) while he was in office; and one of the reasons why I was trying to find someone to contest against President Obama in Democratic primaries for the 2012 Democratic Presidential nomination was that Obama had refused to prosecute his predecessor’s crimes against this nation. But now this same Obama is nullifying at least these six laws in order to win as his successor Hillary Clinton, who surely will not prosecute Obama for his many crimes (such as this and this) while he has been leading this nation and destroying our democracy.

I parted company from the Democratic Party when I gave up on both Parties in 2012 as they and the government they operate have been since at least 1980 — not at all democratic, but instead aristocratic: holding some persons to be above the law (that researcher there called the U.S. an “oligarchy,” which is simply another word for the same thing — rule by the top wealth-holders, not by the public: not a “democracy").

There can be no excuse for Obama’s depriving the public, via a grand jury decision, of the right to determine whether a full court case should be pursued in order to determine in a jury trial whether Hillary Clinton’s email system constituted a crime (or several crimes) under U.S. laws. The Obama Administration’s ‘finding’ that “clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information” would need to have been proven, in order for her to have been prosecuted under any U.S. criminal law, is a flagrant lie: none of the above six U.S. criminal laws requires that, but the only way to determine whether even that description (“clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information”) also applies to Clinton would be to go through a grand jury (presenting the above-cited six laws) and then to a jury case (to try her on those plus possibly also the charge that there was “clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information”). But now, those six laws are effectively gone: anyone who in the future would be charged with violating any one of those six laws could reasonably cite the precedent that Ms. Clinton was not even charged, much less prosecuted, for actions which clearly fit the description provided in each one of those U.S. criminal laws. Anyone in the future who would be charged under any one of these six laws could prove discriminatory enforcement against himself or herself. (In the particular case discussed there, discriminatory enforcement was ruled not to have existed because the enforcement of the criminal law involved was judged to have been random enforcement, but this condition would certainly not apply in Clinton’s case, it was clearly “purposeful discrimination” in her favor, and therefore enforcement of the law against anyone else, where in Clinton’s case she wasn’t even charged — much less prosecuted — for that offense, would certainly constitute discriminatory enforcement.) So: that’s the end of these six criminal laws. The U.S. President effectively nullified those laws, which were duly passed by Congress and signed into law by prior Presidents

And that’s the end, the clear termination, of a governemnt “of laws, not of men”.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

 

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15 FBI Findings and Why It’s Not All About Hillary

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The following is a news commentary and analysis

It’s a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way.

It’s a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities.

On these points, there’s unanimity.

There’s not so much unanimity when it comes to how one interprets “intention,” “knowingly” and “gross negligence.”

The Definitive Hillary Clinton Email Timeline

Here’s a breakdown of FBI Director James Comey’s findings in explaining why Hillary Clinton won’t be prosecuted in the infamous email case.

1. Did Clinton improperly use personal email and systems for government work? Yes.
2. Was classified information improperly stored on Clinton’s personal systems? Yes, although she claimed the opposite.
3. Was classified information improperly transmitted through Clinton’s personal systems? Yes, about 2,000 emails, although she claimed the opposite.
4. Was any of the information marked classified at the time it was sent or received? Yes, although she claimed otherwise. (Though the FBI could not recover all of Clinton’s emails, among the ones it reviewed, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains contained classified information, including Top Secret, at the time they were sent or received.)
5. Did the presence of the classified emails violate protocol? Yes. The FBI noted, “None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system.”
6. Should she have known better? Yes.
7. Were Clinton and her colleagues careless in their handling of the public’s classified information? Yes, the FBI found Clinton and her colleagues were “extremely careless” in their handling of “very sensitive, highly classified information.” But the FBI did not find “clear evidence” that they intended to violate laws.
8. Were Clinton’s systems vulnerable, thus exposing the classified information? Yes, the FBI found Clinton used systems that were even less secure than “a commercial service like Gmail.”
9. Did Clinton’s actions jeopardize classified information? Yes.

10. Was Clinton’s email information, including classified material, likely accessed by hostile forces? Yes, because the FBI found, Clinton “extensively” used her personal, unsecure email systems “in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.” Additionally, the FBI found, “hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.”

11. Did Clinton likely destroy public, work-related emails that are unrecoverable? Yes.
12. Did Clinton’s lawyers “clean” their devices in a way to “preclude complete forensic recovery”? Yes.
13. Was the FBI able to reconstruct the mysterious electronic sorting of records done by Clinton’s lawyers? No. The FBI says it does not have “complete visibility” but assumes there was no “intentional misconduct.”
14. Is there evidence that Clinton potentially violated laws on handling of classified information? Yes, but the FBI says, “our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
15. Would someone in similar circumstances face consequences? Yes, the FBI says such individuals have often been “subject to security or administrative sanctions.” But the FBI said that’s not what it was deciding “now.”

Beyond the FBI Probe

There were further important public issues not addressed by the FBI today. They involve public records laws and the cost borne by the public, due to Clinton’s failures.

Did Clinton allegedly violate public records laws? Yes, through use of the private servers and devices, failure to maintain required public records, temporary and permanent deletion of many records, and failure to fully disclose the records when asked.

Did Clinton turn over all her public work records to the State Department in 2014 when her public servers were discovered? No.

Did Clinton make all of the public’s records available when requested under Freedom of Information (FOI) law (as far back as 2012 or even earlier)? No.

Have all those records now been provided to FOI requesters? No.

Due to Clinton’s actions, the FBI said that recovering documents and piecing together facts was “a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort.” And your tax dollars paid for it.

It’s Not All About Hillary

In some respects, the implications of the FBI’s findings aren’t about Hillary– they’re about the rest of us. As a layman, here’s my interpretation:

Any federal employee is now free, despite what the law may say, to make personal arrangements to communicate the public’s business using private servers, administrators, accounts and devices. They may send and receive classified material using these servers, even in hostile territory subject to hacking by sophisticated adversaries. They may routinely destroy the public-owned records they create–some of them permanently–and, if their actions are discovered, they may provide false public statements about their content. They are free to violate public records law and fail to turn over public records upon request (making Freedom of Information law meaningless and toothless). And prosecutors will view questionable acts in the most innocent light and one that’s the most favorable to the subject of the investigation. Unless they can find what they term “clear evidence” of “intent to violate laws,” you’re off the hook!

Read FBI Director Comey’s statement: https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-director-james-b.-comey-on-the-investigation-of-secretary-hillary-clintons-use-of-a-personal-e-mail-system

Of course, maybe that isn’t the takeaway. Maybe things would turn out differently if the circumstances were the same, but the subject of the investigation were different.

Last year, a Naval Reservist who mishandled classified information was prosecuted, fined and his security clearance permanently revoked, though “The investigation did not reveal evidence that [he] intended to distribute classified information to unauthorized personnel.”

Read the FBI case against Nishimura: https://www.fbi.gov/sacramento/press-releases/2015/folsom-naval-reservist-is-sentenced-after-pleading-guilty-to-unauthorized-removal-and-retention-of-classified-materials

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America Has Become A Lawless Nation – Hillary Clinton Magically Cleared By The FBI

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It is hard to be proud to be an American today after watching FBI director James Comey magically clear Hillary Clinton of all wrongdoing.  Sadly, Comey is likely to go down in history as the man that struck the final death blow to the rule of law in America.  During his address to the media, Comey admitted that Clinton sent or received 110 emails in 52 email chains that contained classified material at the time they were sent.  But of course there were probably many more.  Comey told the press that it was “likely that there are other work-related emails that they did not produce … that are now gone because they deleted all emails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices.”  So basically Clinton turned over to the FBI whatever she felt like turning over, and then she destroyed the rest of the evidence.  As a former lawyer, this infuriates me, but it doesn’t surprise me.

In fact, it doesn’t surprise me at all that Hillary Clinton was allowed to skate.  I expected this all along.  If you search the thousands of articles that I have posted on The Economic Collapse Blog and End Of The American Dream, you will find many articles where I say that Hillary Clinton should be in prison, but not a single one where I ever said that I thought she would be going to prison.

This is how politics in America works today.  People like Bill and Hillary Clinton could openly sacrifice children to Satan on the White House lawn and still probably not get into trouble.  Despite scandal after scandal going all the way back to Arkansas in the 1980s, nothing ever sticks to them, and nothing probably ever will.

In this case, FBI director James Comey essentially had to rewrite federal law in order to clear Clinton.  This is something that Andrew McCarthy explained very well in his article entitled “FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook”…

There is no way of getting around this: According to Director James Comey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services.

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In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.

The amazing thing is that the FBI handled a highly similar case very, very differently less than a year ago.  Just check out what happened to Naval reservist Bryan Nishimura…

U.S. Magistrate Judge Kendall J. Newman immediately sentenced Nishimura to two years of probation, a $7,500 fine, and forfeiture of personal media containing classified materials. Nishimura was further ordered to surrender any currently held security clearance and to never again seek such a clearance.

According to court documents, Nishimura was a Naval reservist deployed in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. In his role as a Regional Engineer for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Nishimura had access to classified briefings and digital records that could only be retained and viewed on authorized government computers. Nishimura, however, caused the materials to be downloaded and stored on his personal, unclassified electronic devices and storage media. He carried such classified materials on his unauthorized media when he traveled off-base in Afghanistan and, ultimately, carried those materials back to the United States at the end of his deployment. In the United States, Nishimura continued to maintain the information on unclassified systems in unauthorized locations, and copied the materials onto at least one additional unauthorized and unclassified system.

Nishimura’s actions came to light in early 2012, when he admitted to Naval personnel that he had handled classified materials inappropriately. Nishimura later admitted that, following his statement to Naval personnel, he destroyed a large quantity of classified materials he had maintained in his home. Despite that, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched Nishimura’s home in May 2012, agents recovered numerous classified materials in digital and hard copy forms. The investigation did not reveal evidence that Nishimura intended to distribute classified information to unauthorized personnel.

So what is the difference between Nishimura and Clinton?

Neither of them ever intended to do anything wrong.

So why were they treated so differently?

Needless to say, social media is exploding with outrage over this decision to let Clinton go free.  Many Americans are openly asking why they should continue to play by the rules if politicians like Hillary Clinton are not required to do so.

Unfortunately, this is what America has become.  Our politicians are a reflection of who we are as a society, and as I have stated before Hillary Clinton is going to be the overwhelming favorite if there is an election in November.  At this moment, she has solid leads in all of the “swing states”, and she only really needs to win one of them…

Perhaps you enjoy talk of battleground states. Well, there’s a scenario for you, too. First, pick the six “closest” swing states (VA, NH, IA, OH, FL, NC). Got it? Now understand that New Hampshire excepted, Clinton only has to win one of them in order to reach the requisite 270 electoral votes to win. (Optional third step for Republicans only: start shotgunning Pabst Blue Ribbon and don’t stop until November.)

Lest any Trump supporters seek solace in poll numbers, recent polls have Trump sliding further behind in all the relevant swing states. According to a Ballotpedia battleground poll released last week, Trump trails by 14% in Florida, 4% in Iowa, 10% in North Carolina, 9% in Ohio, and 7% in Virginia.

Hillary Clinton is a horrible, evil, miserable human being, and right now she is the odds-on favorite to become the next president of the United States.

But ultimately it is the American people that are to blame for blindly supporting corrupt politicians such as Clinton, and if they willingly pick her to be our next president then we will certainly deserve whatever consequences follow.

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Martin Armstrong: "James Comey Had No Problem Keeping Me In Prison Without Any Charges"

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Submitted by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,

 

To indict someone, the criteria is supposed to be “intent.” Comey has used that to pretend there is no evidence that Hillary “intentionally” erased anything. Comey also stated that Hillary’s lawyers erased her emails using a keyword search program and they did not “read” the emails. He added that he would not recommend charges against Hillary or her aides.

“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” Comey declared.

It was Comey who indicted Frank Quattrone for claiming he instructed his people to erase emails in his technology-industry banking group at Credit Suisse Group’s Credit Suisse First Boston, based upon a single email that read “clean up those files” in December 2000. That was more than enough for his “intent” requirement to obstruct justice. This further illustrates the double standard of justice for them vs. us.

Comey has said that he could not find anyone else who had been prosecuted for such a thing, but then added after clearing Hillary that this is not to say everyone in the government can do this or that they would not prosecute someone else for the same thing. Comey said,“[O]ur judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

Comey presented a scathing rebuke of Hillary’s conduct that anyone else would have certainly been indicted for. For Obama to have announced in advance he would campaign for Hillary, it was clear that this was a cover-up and he knew the results before today. For Comey to say, “Although we did not find clear evidence [of any intentional misconduct] there is evidence that they were extremely careless of very sensitive, highly classified information.” It is the jury’s role to determine if there is any evidence and the case should have been presented for a Grand Jury to decide if she should have been indicted. That, of course, is off limits as well.

Comey went on to all but acknowledge that Russia hacked Hillary’s emails:

“With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.”

For Comey to claim neither the Department of Justice nor the White House knew what he was going to announce, seriously undermines his trustworthiness in this matter. Of course, Obama knew or he would not have scheduled to campaign for Hillary since, if indicted, she would have had to be on bail to stay out of jail to even campaign. This is by no means credible. But nobody would have expected Hillary to be indicted when the Democrats control the executive branch. Had Hillary been indicted, she could not have run for office, for even that statute says such a person would be disqualified for such an office. The entire election would have been a fiasco and the Democratic Party would have collapsed. This is what Bernie was holding out for and why he had his talk with Obama who informed him forget it — there would be no indictment for Hillary.

“From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent,” Comey said.

Then, Comey contradicted Lynch in making it clear that the final decision was her’s: “As a result, although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.”

 

James Comey was the chief prosecutor in the Southern District of New York between 2003 and 2005. He had no problem keeping me in Federal Prison on contempt of court without any charges, indictment, or a civil complaint describing any crime whatsoever that they even admitted openly in court. There were never any charges or complaint filed, and they publicly stated, “[T]here is no description of criminal liability.” Yet, Comey allowed me to be held in prison, entirely arbitrarily, with absolutely nothing whatsoever; Comey completely violated my civil rights, those of my family, and all 240 employees. So he is not someone who upholds the Constitution when it goes against government or the banks. As they say, the Department of Justice is really “Just Us” in reality. He has proven that once again.

Comey also allowed a LIFETIME GAG ORDER on me to prevent me from providing any assistance to my clients in Japan to sue the bankers. Now the State Department has asked for a two-year stay in turning over any of Hillary’s emails. Why  would they do that if there is nothing criminal? This only proves that this is a cover-up, as always, because the Democratic Party cannot allow Hillary to go down for they would lose everything. Sorry, but Comey has a track record of defending the banks even when they stole billions and pleaded criminally guilty before having to pay them back. He kept me in prison on contempt to turn over assets for a “possible” restitution, but when I got into the Supreme Court, I was released and no such charges were ever filed nor did I ever have any restitution. They then tried to prevent “The Forecaster” from being shown in the USA.

So much for any honesty from the Department of Justice. It is the Department of “Just Us,” as they say.

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Washington Has Been Obsessed With Punishing Secrecy Violations — until Hillary Clinton

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Secrecy is a virtual religion in Washington. Those who violate its dogma have been punished in the harshest and most excessive manner – at least when they possess little political power or influence. As has been widely noted, the Obama administration has prosecuted more leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined. Secrecy in DC is so revered that even the most banal documents are reflexively marked classified, making their disclosure or mishandling a felony. As former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden said in 2010, “Everything’s secret. I mean, I got an email saying ‘Merry Christmas.’ It carried a top secret NSA classification marking.”

People who leak to media outlets for the selfless purpose of informing the public – Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Drake, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden – face decades in prison. Those who leak for more ignoble and self-serving ends – such as enabling hagiography (Leon Panetta, David Petreaus) or ingratiating oneself to one’s mistress (Petraeus) – face career destruction, though they are usually spared if they are sufficiently Important-in-DC. For low-level, powerless Nobodies-in-DC, even the mere mishandling of classified information – without any intent to leak but merely to, say, work from home – has resulted in criminal prosecution, career destruction and the permanent loss of security clearance.

This extreme, unforgiving, unreasonable, excessive posture toward classified information came to an instant halt in Washington today – just in time to save Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations. FBI Director James Comey, an Obama appointee who served in the Bush DOJ, held a press conference earlier this afternoon in which he condemned Clinton on the ground that she and her colleagues were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” including Top Secret material.

Comey also detailed that her key public statements defending her conduct – i.e., she never sent classified information over her personal email account and that she had turned over all “work-related” emails to the State Department – were utterly false; insisted “that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position . . . should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation”; and argued that she endangered national security because of the possibility “that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.” Comey also noted that others who have done what Clinton did “are often subject to security or administrative sanctions” – such as demotion, career harm, or loss of security clearance.

Despite all of these highly incriminating findings, Comey explained, the FBI is recommending to the Justice Department that Clinton not be charged with any crime. “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information,” he said, “our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” To justify this claim, Comey cited “the context of a person’s actions” and her “intent.” In other words, there is evidence that she did exactly what the criminal law prohibits, but it was more negligent and careless than malicious and deliberate.

Looked at in isolation, I have no particular objection to this decision. In fact, I agree with it: I don’t think what Clinton did rose to the level of criminality, and if I were in the Justice Department, I would not want to see her prosecuted for it. I do think there was malignant intent: using a personal email account and installing a home server always seemed to be designed, at least in part, to control her communications and hide them from FOIA and similar disclosure obligations. As The New York Times noted in May about a highly incriminating report from the State Department’s own Auditor General: “emails disclosed in the report made it clear that she worried that personal emails could be publicly released under the Freedom of Information Act.”

Moreover, Comey expressly found that – contrary to her repeated statements  – “the FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.” The Inspector General’s report similarly, in the words of the NYT, “undermined some of Mrs. Clinton’s previous statements defending her use of the server.” Still, charging someone with a felony requires more than lying or unethical motives; it should require a clear intent to break the law along with substantial intended harm, none of which is sufficiently present here.

But this case does not exist in isolation. It exists in a political climate where secrecy is regarded as the highest end, where people have their lives destroyed for the most trivial – or, worse, the most well-intentioned – violations of secrecy laws, even in the absence of any evidence of harm or malignant intent. And these are injustices that Hillary Clinton and most of her stalwart Democratic followers have never once opposed – but rather enthusiastically cheered. In 2011, Army Private Chelsea Manning was charged with multiple felonies and faced decades in prison for leaking documents that she firmly believed the public had the right to see; unlike the documents Clinton recklessly mishandled, none of those was Top Secret. Nonetheless, this is what then-Secretary Clinton said in justifying her prosecution:

I think that in an age where so much information is flying through cyberspace, we all have to be aware of the fact that some information which is sensitive, which does affect the security of individuals and relationships, deserves to be protected and we will continue to take necessary steps to do so.

Comey’s announcement also takes place in a society that imprisons more of its citizens than any other in the world by far, for more trivial offenses than any western nation – overwhelmingly when they are poor or otherwise marginalized due to their race or ethnicity. The sort of leniency and mercy and prosecutorial restraint Comey extended today to Hillary Clinton is simply unavailable for most Americans.

What happened here is glaringly obvious. It is the tawdry by-product of a criminal justice mentality in which – as I documented in my 2011 book With Liberty and Justice for Some – those who wield the greatest political and economic power are virtually exempt from the rule of law even when they commit the most egregious crimes, while only those who are powerless and marginalized are harshly punished, often for the most trivial transgressions.

Had someone who was obscure and unimportant and powerless done what Hillary Clinton did – recklessly and secretly install a shoddy home server and worked on Top Secret information on it, then outright lied to the public about it when they were caught – they would have been criminally charged long ago, with little fuss or objection. But Hillary Clinton is the opposite of unimportant. She’s the multi-millionaire former First Lady, Senator from New York, and Secretary of State, supported by virtually the entire political, financial and media establishment to be the next President, arguably the only person standing between Donald Trump and the White House.

Like the Wall Street tycoons whose systemic fraud triggered the 2008 global financial crisis, and like the military and political officials who instituted a worldwide regime of torture, Hillary Clinton is too important to be treated the same as everyone else under the law. “Felony charges appear to be reserved for people of the lowest ranks. Everyone else who does it either doesn’t get charged or gets charged with a misdemeanor,” Virginia defense attorney Edward MacMahon told Politico last year about secrecy prosecutions. Washington defense attorney Abbe Lowell has similarly denounced the “profound double standard” governing how the Obama DOJ prosecutes secrecy cases: “lower-level employees are prosecuted . . . because they are easy targets and lack the resources and political connections to fight back.”

The fact that Clinton is who she is undoubtedly what caused the FBI to accord her the massive benefit of the doubt when assessing her motives, when finding nothing that was – in the words of Comey – “clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice.”

But a system that accords treatment based on who someone is, rather than what they’ve done, is the opposite of one conducted under the rule of law. It is, instead, one of systemic privilege. As Thomas Jefferson put it in a 1784 letter to George Washington, the ultimate foundation of any constitutional order is “the denial of every preeminence.” Hillary Clinton has long been the beneficiary of this systemic privilege in so many ways, and today, she received her biggest gift from it yet.

The Obama-appointed FBI Director gave a press conference showing that she recklessly handled Top Secret information, engaged in conduct prohibited by law, and lied about it repeatedly to the public. But she won’t be prosecuted or imprisoned for any of that, so Democrats are celebrating. But if there is to be anything positive that can come from this lowly affair, perhaps Democrats might start demanding the same reasonable leniency and prosecutorial restraint for everyone else who isn’t Hillary Clinton.

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"China Is Headed For A 1929-Style Depression"

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Authored by Sue Chang via MarketWatch.com,

Andy Xie isn’t known for tepid opinions.

The provocative Xie, who was a top economist at the World Bank and Morgan Stanley, found notoriety a decade ago when he left the Wall Street bank after a controversial internal report went public. Today, he is among the loudest voices warning of an inevitable implosion in China, the world’s second-largest economy.

Xie, now working independently and based in Shanghai, says the coming collapse won’t be like the Asian currency crisis of 1997 or the U.S. financial meltdown of 2008.

In a recent interview with MarketWatch, Xie said China’s trajectory instead resembles the one that led to the Great Depression, when the expansion of credit, loose monetary policy and a widespread belief that asset prices would never fall contributed to rampant speculation that ended with a crippling market crash.

 

China in 2016 looks much the same, according to Xie, with half of the country’s debt propping up real-estate prices and heavy leverage in the stock market — indicating that conditions are ripe for a correction.

“The government is allowing speculation by providing cheap financing,” Xie told MarketWatch. China “is riding a tiger and is terrified of a crash. So it keeps pumping cash into the economy. It is difficult to see how China can avoid a crisis.”

A longtime critic of Chinese economic growth

Xie’s viewpoints have at times attracted unwelcome attention. In 2006, when he was a star Asia economist at Morgan Stanley, a leaked email to colleagues in which he said money laundering was bolstering growth in Singapore led to his abrupt departure from the bank.

In early 2007, he termed China’s surging markets a “bubble” that could lead to a banking crisis,” and in 2009 he likened them to a “Ponzi scheme.”

Xie, who is from China but was educated at — and earned a Ph.D. from — Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has said Chinese authorities have tried to characterize him as an American spy sent to disrupt their markets after his 2007 prediction. China’s consulate general in San Francisco and its embassy in Washington did not reply to requests for comment.

While he now works independently, Xie’s opinions on Asian affairs remain influential. He writes regularly for the South China Morning Post, among other publications, in May saying China is running a “gigantic monetary bubble that has corrupted virtually every corner of the economy.”

Xie “is a respected economist,” said Huawei Ling, managing editor of Caixin Weekly and a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. “I appreciate his consistency and his analysis on China’s economic issues,” she said.

His 2007 forecast, meanwhile, turned out correct. Soon after his prediction, the Shanghai Composite Index started plunging. After hitting a peak of 6,092 on Oct. 19, 2007, it fell below 2,000 over the next 12 months.

Years before hedge-fund managers like Kynikos Associates founder Jim Chanos turned bearish and George Soros predicted a hard landing, Xie was a dissenting voice amid a chorus of prognosticators enamored with China’s late 20th Century emergence from poverty.

In an interview with this reporter more than a decade ago, Xie warned of a lack of depth in China’s dazzling rise, saying the rapid growth on the country’s coastal cities masked the fact that many inner areas of the country were stuck in the “Stone Age.”

Concerns about China’s economy are more commonplace now. Two camps have formed in 2016: those like Templeton Emerging Markets Group Executive Chairman Mark Mobius, who believe a resilient China is experiencing temporary growing pains, and those who, like Soros, foresee an imminent collapse.

Xie is firmly in the latter camp.

“China grew too fast,” Xie said. “The government is using its power to stop the unraveling but not address the issue. It is just buying more time.”

Fresh worries about China after the Brexit vote

Xie’s criticism coincides with fresh worries about China after the U.K.’s vote to quit the European Union, which triggered an across-the-board selloff in risky assets as investors sought cover in safe-haven assets. Global markets have rebounded somewhat, but uncertainty remains.

Subsequent strength in the U.S. dollar has prompted analysts to predict an accelerated weakness in the Chinese yuan. The yuan slumped to a nearly six-year low against the greenback this week, according to FactSet.

More broadly, fissures have started to appear in the world’s second largest economy. After years of expanding at a blistering pace. China’s gross domestic product grew 6.9% in 2015, its slowest pace in a quarter-century.

For 2016, Beijing has set a GDP target of 6.5% to 7%; The latest spate of global uncertainties prompted Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank to trim their forecasts to 6.4% and 6.6%, respectively.

The export sector, long a driver of Chinese growth, is sputtering due to global saturation and household consumption is barely 30% of China’s GDP, Xie said. In the U.S., household consumption accounted for more than 68% of GDP in 2014, according to the World Bank.

China’s stock market last year dove in June, losing more than 30% in a month as regulators tightened margin-trading and short selling rules, making it more difficult for investors to borrow money to invest in stocks. A belief that the government was not properly responding to the economic slowdown also weighed on sentiment.

Then in August, authorities unexpectedly devalued the yuan in a bid to support the flagging economy, sparking unprecedented capital flight.

Xie and other observers say the surest way to get China out of its rut is to boost consumption, marking a deliberate turn away from a manufacturing-focused economy. Efforts are under way to move China in that direction, but analysts say the process could take years or even decades — during which China could reach a breaking point.

Total social financing, a broad measure of funds secured by households and nonfinancial companies, topped $22 trillion in March, more than twice China’s $10.4 trillion GDP, according to official data.

There’s no equivalent metric in the U.S., but household debt stood at $14.3 trillion while nonfinancial debt totaled $13 trillion at the end of the first quarter, according to the Federal Reserve. The combined tally of $27.3 trillion is roughly 1.5 times the U.S. GDP.

Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank said in May that China’s credit bubble is worse than the U.S. subprime buildup that led to the last financial crisis. “It is clear that in China in recent years more and more capital has been misallocated and not resulted in higher GDP growth,” said Slok.

 

 

Kyle Bass of Hayman Capital Management, who was among the few on Wall Street to correctly predict the subprime mortgage crisis, shorted the Chinese yuan earlier this year, warning investors in a 13-page February letter that China is making the same mistakes the U.S. did 10 years ago.

“The unwavering faith that the Chinese will somehow be able to successfully avoid anything more severe than a moderate economic slowdown by continuing to rely on the perpetual expansion of credit reminds us of the belief in 2006 that U.S. home prices would never decline,” Bass wrote.

Xie, meanwhile, says he is doubtful of the Communist’s Party’s ability to manage and grow China’s economy — but believes that, if they become more hands-off, the country could become the world’s leading economic force. At the core of Xie’s concerns about China is the contention that the government is doing more harm than good.

“If government takes a step back instead of dominating the economy so much, China can be twice as big as the U.S. in 20 years,” he said.

‘The Communist Party isn't compatible with the future of China’

Today’s regime in China recalls the U.S.-backed Chinese National Party, or Kuomintang, that ruled the country until its defeat at the hands of the Communist rebels in 1949, according to Xie.

The Nationalists, he says, flooded the economy with easy money to support speculation that led to runaway inflation. That, in turn, shifted public sentiment in favor of the Communists, who drove the Nationalists out of the country.

“It was very similar to what is going on right now,” said Xie. “If you keep on printing money to use for speculation, you will have hyperinflation and a currency crash,” he said. “The Communist Party isn't compatible with the future of China.”

Xie’s criticism of the government hasn't resulted in his arrest although he was not certain whether that will not change in the future. Chinese officials have started to muzzle analysts and journalists who have published pessimistic reports on the economy, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

And his research reports are not currently distributed in China. “There are safety mechanisms to stop someone like me reaching the ordinary people,” said Xie.

Despite his frustration, however, he occasionally belies immense pride in his country and bemoans the fact that the global community may be underestimating China’s potential.

“The economists in the West who say that China isn't very important are wrong,” he said. “China isn't an emerging economy. It is the only country that caught up with the West, and it will shape the path of the global economy in the future.”

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