Stockman Slams "Deep State Handmaid" NYTimes Over Trump Smear: "Are You F**king Kidding Me?"

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Authored by David Stockman via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

The Donald has been on a red hot twitter rampage, and he's completely justified. Actually, we didn't think the Russian Collusion Hoax could get any stupider until we saw the New York Times' Friday evening bushwhack.

The trio of authors, apparently self-tortured victims of the Trump Derangement Syndrome, actually had the gall to print a story in the once and former Gray Lady of journalistic rectitude which was nothing more than an ugly smear on the sitting President of the United States - one that would have done Joe McCarthy proud:

In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.

It doesn't get lower than that. The only thing that they didn't mention was presidential Treason, but it's hard to say that "working in behalf of Russia against American interests" would constitute anything less.

So exactly what did the trio of wet behind the ears nincompoops at the New York Times—Adam Goldman, Michael Schmidt and Nicholas Fandos—dig up from the diarrhetic bowels of the FBI that warranted the above characterization?

Why, it is apparently the following, which is surely a red hot smoking gun. That is, one that condemns the FBI, not Trump; and shows that the NYT, which once courageously published the Pentagon Papers and had earned the above sobriquet for its journalistic stateliness, sense of responsibility and possession of high virtue, has degenerated into a War Party shill—not to say the journalistic equivalent of a comfort woman: Mr. Trump had caught the attention of FBI counterintelligence agents when...

...he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.

Well, for crying out loud!

Any journalist worth his salt would know that Trump's July 2016 shout-out to the Russians was a campaign joke. At best, it was merely an attempt to cleverly state in one more way the running GOP theme about Hillary's missing 30,000 emails. How many times before that had Sean Hannity delivered his riff about Hillary's alleged hammer-smashing of 13 devices and acid-washing with BleachBit of the missing emails?

More importantly, how in the world of constitutional government, free speech, and contested elections does Trump's refusal to criticize a foreign leader that we we're not at war with constitute something worthy of a counter-intelligence investigation by the FBI?

Indeed, in the case of the Ukraine resolution at the GOP convention, the issue was about making the GOP's prior pro-Ukraine platform even more hawkish, which Trump thought was a bad idea on policy grounds.

Besides, the Democratic platform ended up more dovish than the GOP's final wording. And, no, the FBI didn't think to investigate the Dems for being squishy soft on support for the crypto-Nazi's who took control of Ukraine during an illegal, US funded/supported coup on the street of Kiev in 2014.

What we are saying is that the trio pictured  here—one of whom graduated from Harvard in 2015 and the other two not much older—don't seem to even know that foreign policy is a debatable issue. Or that the American people actually voted into office a candidate who took the other side of Imperial Washington's unwarranted demonization of Putin and made no bones about his desire for a rapprochement with Russia.

Actually, as to pursuing rapprochement, so did: 

• JFK, after the near catastrophe of the Cuban Missile Crisis; 

• Lyndon Johnson, after the Seven Days War during his meeting with Kosygin at Glassboro NJ; 

• Richard Nixon, with the ABM Treaty, detente and his visit with Brezhnev in Moscow; 

• Jimmy Carter, when he signed the SALT-II agreement; 

• Ronald Reagan, when he went to Moscow to virtually end the Cold War; and 

• Bill Clinton, when he sent a multi-billion IMF aid package to Yeltsin to help him get re-elected in 1996. 

The fact is, all of the above presidential policy initiatives were heatedly debated in Washington during a period when the US and Soviet Union each had roughly 9,000 nuclear warheads pointed at the other. But that did not lead to FBI counter-intelligence investigations of politicians—to say nothing of sitting Presidents—who took the "wrong" side of these thoroughly democratic debates.

And that includes the outright "peace" candidacies of Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972. Indeed, shortly thereafter it was the Church Committee in the US Senate that aggressively investigated the CIA and FBI, not the incipient Deep State which investigated the elected politicians of that era.

Stated differently, Senator Lloyd Bentsen would have to said to the trio pictured below, "I knew Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam and Seymour Hersh—and you are no Sheehan/Halberstam/Hersh!"

In that regard, your editor did not know the latter three personally back in the day. But those of us on the anti-war barricades during the Vietnam era read them assiduously; and we did not mistake their honest journalistic coverage of that calamitous foreign policy episode for Robert McNamara's lie-filled talking points and genocidal "body counts".

Indeed, back in those days mainstream journalists tended to be the nemesis of the Deep State (yes, it has existed ever since WWII), not it's handmaid.

For instance, in the 1980s Congressman Ed Boland's amendment stopped the effort of neocons in the Reagan Administration to undermine the duly elected "Sandinista" government of Nicaragua. But back then, the press went after the meddlers and interventionists in the national security bureaucracy, not Congressman Boland and the Congressional majority which voted to shackle the Deep State.

In fact, several of the Reagan meddlers went to prison—not to sinecures at CNN or NBC.

Moreover, the alleged "communist" threat in those days was on America's doorstep in central America, not thousands of miles away on Russia's doorstep, as in the case of the Ukraine and Crimea.

Have the three knuckleheads ever read a history book?

Do they not know, for instance, that there are virtually no Ukrainians in Crimea (the population is mainly Russian, Tartar etc.); that the latter was a integral province of Mother Russia for 171 years after it was purchased from the Ottomans by Catherine the Great in 1783; and that Crimea only was added as a territorial appendage to the Socialist Republic of the Ukraine in 1954 by the order of the Soviet Presidium as a door prize to the comrades in Kiev who had supported their favorite son, Nikita Khrushchev, in the bloody battle for Stalin's succession?

Has it not occurred to them that when the scourge and historical anomaly of the Soviet Empire finally slithered off the pages of history that untangling the utterly artificial borders that had enslaved 350 million people might be a tad messy, and that the rump-state of Russia had a valid security interest in the manner in which it unfolded?

Likewise, did they perchance ever read the strident warnings of the father of Soviet containment and NATO, Professor George Kennan, about the foolishness of extending NATO to the very borders of Russia; and especially after Bush the Elder and his Secretary of State, James Baker, had promised Gorbachev in 1989 that in return for his acquiescence to unification of Germany that NATO would not be extended by "a single inch" to the east?

In fact, have they ever bothered to contemplate why NATO even exists any longer; or the anomaly of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization sending troops to the Hindu Kush to make war upon the Taliban tribesman who had actually defeated the Soviet Empire—and 27 years after the Soviet Union was no more?

That is to say, in the whole ragged to-and-fro of post-Soviet eastern Europe and Washington's arrogant claim to sole superpower status, is it really so hard to see that there are two sides to the debate; and that dissent from Washington's hegemonic claim to say what can and can't happen in Kiev, the Donbas and Crimea is actually the more rational course, and certainly not tantamount to treason?

Or consider what happened to Ronald Reagan's misbegotten infatuation with the Star Wars will-o-wisp of a nuclear shield. The latter had the military-industrial complex drooling over the implied trillions (in today's $) of funding, and the Deep State giddy
with the thought that the putative Star Wars shield would unleash it from the bonds of MAD (mutual assured destruction) and thereby open the path t0 US global hegemony.

Needless to say, the intrepid mainstream journalists of the 1980's still had the Sheehan/Halberstam/Hersh investigative spirit and courage about them. It did not take too many years for their exposes to make Star Wars the laughingstock it actually was, and for their rebukes to the Deep State narrative to embolden the bipartisan opposition on Capitol Hill to essentially shut it down.

At the end of the day, there is no other way to say it. The Goldman/Schmidt/Fandos types of the present era are not journalists at all; they are lazy, intellectually corrupted, mendacious stenographers of Imperial Washington's oppressive group think.

After all, only a decade or two ago any journalist who typed the words "....whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence" would have suffered tremors and palpitations for the very phrasing of it.

Don't these kids know them thar words is McCarthyite code for unmasking commie traitors?

Here's the thing. Until the groupthink of the Imperial City congealed into what amounts to worship of the Warfare State after 9/11, any self-respecting journalist who discovered that the FBI had opened a counter-intelligence investigation of a sitting president for the preposterous reasons outlined in the NYT story would have been all over this insidious affront to constitutional government like a screaming banshee.

That is, under what imaginable constitutional scheme does a second tier law enforcement agency have the prerogative to investigate the duly elected President because he fired the FBI director for good cause; rejected the prevailing anti-Russia foreign policy for solid reasons of national interest; and knew that the Russian collusion meme was Democrat sour grapes for loosing the election and said so publicly, loudly and frequently, as is his prerogative?

In the old days, journalists often had the integrity and summoned the courage to speak truth to power. By contrast, the trio of sanctimonious brats pictured above were too lazy, stupid or mendacious to even connect the dots.

That is, this ballyhooed counter-intelligence investigation was launched the very next day after Comey was fired by two of the most compromised people in the entire Obama Administration posse of anti-Trump election meddlers--if not criminals—led by former CIA director John Brennan.

We are referring to the acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, later fired for leaking to the media and lying about it and his legal council, Lisa Page. After the release of literally tons of anti-Trump SMS messages with her lover-boy, the FBI agent Peter Strzok, over the past 12 months what kind of self-respecting journalists would not see the red flags flying in every direction?

By now any one who knows how to Google, also knows or should know that Strzok and Page sent text messages that suggest they were discussing opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Trump even before Comey’s firing. And when it happened, their exchanges left no doubt:

“And we need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting,” Strzok wrote to Page on the day of Comey’s ouster.

So there you have it. McCabe, Strzok and Page are Deep Staters if the term has any meaning at all. Yet here is why Lisa Page thought Trump was such a threat to national security that she and her colleagues were justified in unilaterally suspending the constitution and prosecuting the elected President of the people because they disagreed with his foreign policy positions.

Indeed, by her own closed door testimony to the House committee (now leaked) it is obvious that Lisa Page is a light-weight numbskull when it comes to thinking about national security. For it turns out, she doesn't even claim that Russia is a military threat to America or that Putin has aggressive intents for territorial conquest.

No, it seems his sin is that he doesn't embrace Washington's self-conferred role as the Indispensable Nation and may even be in mind of thwarting Washington's noble effort to spread "our democratic ideals" and bring the blessings of Coca-Cola, long pants and the ballot box to the otherwise benighted peoples of the planet.

You only need a decent regard for the mayhem that the Washington War party has brought to the world—from the jungles of the Mekong Valley, to the Hindu Kush, to Mesopotamia, the Levant, North Africa and Latin America, too—to say are you f*cking kidding?

'In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself, you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability, America’s ability and the West’s ability to spread our democratic ideals,' Lisa Page, a former bureau lawyer, told House investigators in private testimony reviewed by The Times..... 'That’s the goal, to make us less of a moral authority to spread democratic values,' she added. Parts of her testimony were first reported in the Epoch Times.

Many involved in the case viewed Russia as the chief threat to American democratic values.

'With respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life,' Ms. Page told investigators for a joint House Judiciary and Oversight Committee investigation into Moscow’s election interference.

As to the last bolded line, we will not bother to wonder how a pint-sized economy of $1.5 trillion compared to America's $20 trillion and all of NATO's $36 trillion, with a military budget of $61 billion compared to NATO $1.05 trillion, is going to do what Khrushchev failed to do—bury us!

So we fully appreciate why the Donald is on the rampage...

'Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin’ James Comey, a total sleaze!' the president tweeted.

'Funny thing about James Comey,' he continued. 'Everybody wanted him fired, Republican and Democrat alike. After the rigged & botched Crooked Hillary investigation, where she was interviewed on July 4th Weekend, not recorded or sworn in, and where she said she didn’t know anything (a lie).'

'the FBI was in complete turmoil (see N.Y. Post) because of Comey’s poor leadership and the way he handled the Clinton mess (not to mention his usurpation of powers from the Justice Department). My firing of James Comey was a great day for America.'

"He was a Crooked Cop,” Saturday’s tweetstorm concluded, “who is being totally protected by his best friend, Bob Mueller, & the 13 Angry Democrats – leaking machines who have NO interest in going after the Real Collusion (and much more) by Crooked Hillary Clinton, her Campaign, and the Democratic National Committee. Just Watch!” 

..., and in this instance, couldn't more wholeheartedly agree.

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Here’s What Happens When The Gender-Gap Index Is Adjusted For Bias.

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The apparently neutral phrase, “gender inequality,” is not neutrally understood in our society. It normally conjures up women’s lower numbers in male-dominated corporate directorships and STEM professorships or other high-status domains that are in fact accessible only to a sliver of the male population, never mind the narrower female sliver.

Social scientists allegedly strive for a much more holistic picture, especially when setting nations beside each other for a global assessment of gender inequality.

One frequently cited authority is the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), introduced in 2006, and relied on by policy makers worldwide. But a provocative new study, released Jan. 3, takes critical distance from GGGI premises, providing its own set of metrics for analyzing gender inequalities and arriving at some startlingly disparate conclusions.

Entitled “A Simplified Approach to Measuring National Gender Inequality,” authors Gijsbert Stoet from the U.K.’s University of Essex, and David C. Geary from the University of Missouri, contend that the GGGI is unreliable, because it is “biased to highlight women’s issues.”

They argue that the GGGI does not measure men’s areas of disadvantage, such as compulsory military service, harsher punishments for the same crime, and workplace deaths — 95 per cent male.

By definition, they say, the GGGI “excludes the possibility that men can be less well off than women – this is because the GGGI focuses on women’s advancement.” As well, they contend that the GGGI uses indicators that are only relevant to elite women, and that the GGGI includes indicators more reflective of choice than of discrimination.

The researchers propose a truly gender-neutral set of metrics for calculating equality scores, named the Basic Index of Gender Inequality (BIGI). BIGI focuses on three factors: educational opportunities (literacy, years of primary and secondary education), healthy life expectancy (years expected to live in good health), and overall life satisfaction which, taken together, are the “minimum ingredients of a good life.”

These metrics can be applied anywhere, regardless of income level, cultural paradigm or national economic development tier. In the words of the study abstract, because of its focus on issues that are important to all men and women in any nation, BIGI “better captures variation in gender inequality than other measures, with inclusion of outcomes that can be favourable or unfavourable to either sex, not simply unfavourable to women.”

Stoet and Geary calculated BIGI scores over five years (2012 through 2016) for 134 nations, representing 6.8 billion people. They relied on GGGI reports published by the World Economic Forum and the Gallup World Poll for data.

To their surprise, they found that using the BIGI as a yardstick, men are on average disadvantaged in 91 countries, while women are disadvantaged in 43 countries, most of them economically under-developed.

Sometimes the deviations from parity are quite small or even negligible, as for example in the case of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Turkey, China and Switzerland.

Saudi Arabia? Parity? Yes. Because equality between the sexes does not mean men and women are doing equally well, on average, “just that they are more or less equal within their life circumstances.” While women in countries with a poor reputation for gender equality may fall behind men in one area, men may fall behind in another area, cancelling out both scores.

Saudi Arabia is a highly developed nation in which women fall behind in education, but score higher on healthy life expectancy and life satisfaction. This may seem counterintuitive to Western women, but culture, with the expectations it imposes, is a strong determinant of what constitutes “satisfaction.”

A Saudi wife in a polygynous marriage to a wealthy husband might find life quite satisfying, while a poor Saudi man with almost no marriage prospects at all may find life quite unsatisfying.

Canada’s figures put it amongst the countries with a slight female advantage. Feminists may not be delighted to hear this. But given the BIGI metrics, it makes sense.

Canadian women’s life expectancy is seven years longer than men’s. Men’s health in Canada is on average poorer than women’s. They are more prone to alcoholism and drug abuse, and more vulnerable to violence.

Male suicide rates are considerably higher, especially during Family Court battles, where women are greatly advantaged (and which causes great life dissatisfaction in fathers).

Canadian men are nine times more likely than women to be imprisoned. They perpetrate more crimes, to be sure, but they also receive harsher sentences for the same crimes, even when committing the same crime in tandem.

Men constitute about 85 per cent of homeless adults. Canadian men show higher dropout rates at every level from primary school to university. Canadian women own a disproportionate share of private wealth. (I could go on.)

This is an important study, not nearly as simplistic as it may seem in this reductive summary, and worth reading — without gender bias if possible — before judging.

This article has been republished with permission from Mercator.net.

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{Image Credit:  Pixabay, PixababyLicense]

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The Heart of the Matter: Families and Fatherhood

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In “Back To Discipline: Disparate Impact Reflects Disparate Reality”, Heather MacDonald applauds the Federal Commission on School Safety’s repudiation “of disparate-impact analysis.” She writes:

Disparate-impact analysis holds that if a facially-neutral policy negatively affects blacks and Hispanics at a higher rate than whites and Asians, it is discriminatory. Noticing the behavioral differences that lead to those disparate effects is forbidden. In the area of school discipline, disparate-impact analysis results in the conclusion that racially neutral rules must nevertheless contain bias, since black students nationally are suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students. In 2014, the Obama administration relied on this methodology to announce that schools that suspended or expelled black students at higher rates than white students were violating anti-discrimination laws.

 

MacDonald gives evidence demonstrating why this policy increased violence and poor discipline in the classroom. Faced with possible charges of discrimination if they dismissed a disproportionate number of black students, regardless of their offenses, school administrators allowed troublemakers and gang members to remain in classrooms. Once they realized the school would not punish them for their misbehavior, these miscreants spread disorder, including physical attacks on teachers and fellow students.

 

That such permissiveness  would only encourage aberrant behavior may seem obvious to even casual observers, but apparently not to some school and government officials. They maintained the policy, classroom discipline in many schools took a dive, and the schools suffered accordingly.

Embedded in MacDonald’s  article are the real reasons for juvenile crime and incivility, both in and out of school: the breakdown of families and absentee fathers.

About 33% of American children live in single-parent households. Among African-Americans, approximately 72% of children live with a single parent, most often the mother. Family breakdown, MacDonald asserts, is the “cause of urban crime and disorder.”

As is so often the case, however, we look to the government for Band-Aids rather than getting to the root of a problem. Many Americans, liberals and progressives, yes, but even a large number of conservatives, turn to the government for help when there are problems with our young people. Every time these people genuflect to the federal government, they not only allow that government to take the place of the traditional family, but they also hand over more power to an entity that is both inept and greedy for control.

Many observers understand the devastation done to our culture and society by the implosion of the family. Which raises the question, as MacDonald does in the article: Why don’t our politicians and others begin a campaign to “revalorize fathers and men?”

Such a campaign would cost little money but might bring great gains in nearly all parts of our society. Think what might happen if local leaders, business executives, pastors, teachers, the media, Hollywood, members of the Congress, and the president himself made an effort, whenever the opportunity presented itself, to stress the importance of the intact family. Think what might happen if we began a serious national dialogue on the importance of fatherhood. Think what might happen if we put aside our current disparagement of men and manliness, our assaults through the law and culture on marriage, and the sneering attacks, mainly from radicals in so many of our universities, on the traditional family unit, and instead promoted the family: mothers, fathers, and children.

Such a program might diminish the battalions of inmates in our prisons, decrease the discipline problems in our schools, increase the capabilities of our students, and reduce monies spent on federal welfare programs.

Perhaps most importantly, by making the family once again the foundation stone of society and by stressing the importance of men and fathers to our culture, we might recover our diminishing freedoms, liberties lost to the government as the family has broken down, a crack-up predicted over fifty years ago by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

“The family is the test of freedom,” G.K. Chesterton wrote, “because the family is the only thing the free man makes for himself and by himself.”

Revalorize fathers and men. Revalorize the idea of family. And maybe in the process we will revalorize the United States of America.

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[Image Credit:  Francisco Osorio, Flickr, CC BY 2.0]

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Wells Just Reported The Worst Mortgage Number Since The Financial Crisis

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When we reported Wells Fargo's Q3 earnings back in October, we drew readers' attention to one specific line of business, the one we have repeatedly dubbed the bank's "bread and butter", namely mortgage lending, and which as we then reported was "the biggest alarm" because "as a result of rising rates, Wells' residential mortgage applications and pipelines both tumbled, sliding just shy of the post-crisis lows recorded in late 2013."

Well, unfortunately for Wells, despite the sharp drop in yields in Q4 which many had expected would boost mortgage lending or at least refi activity for the bank that was until recently America's largest mortgage lender, the decline in mortgage activity has continued,  because buried deep in its presentation accompanying otherwise unremarkable Q4 results (modest EPS best; sizable revenue miss), Wells just reported that its 'bread and butter' is once again missing, and in Q4 2018 the amount in the all-important Wells Fargo Mortgage Application pipeline shrank again, dropping to $18 billion, the lowest level since the financial crisis.

Meanwhile, Wells' mortgage originations number, which usually trails the pipeline by 3-4 quarters, was just as bad, dropping a whopping $12BN sequentially from $46 billion to just $38 billion, and effectively tied for the lowest print since the financial crisis.  Putting this number in context, just six years ago, when the US housing market was actually solid, Wells was originating 4 times as many mortgages, or about $120 billion.

And since this number lags the mortgage applications, we expect it to continue posting fresh post-crisis lows in the coming quarter especially if rates resume their rise.

Going back to the headline numbers, here is a recap of the key metrics:

• 4Q adj. EPS $1.21, est. $1.19
• 4Q revenue $20.98 billion, Exp. $24.7BN
• 4Q net interest income $12.64 billion
• 4Q loans $953.11 billion vs. $942.3 billion q/q
• 4Q mortgage non-interest income $467 million
• 4Q residential mortgage originations $38 billion
• 4Q margin on residential held-for-sale mortgage originations 0.89%
• 4Q non- performing assets $6.95 billion
• 4Q net charge-offs $721 million, estimate $736.8 million (BD)
• 4Q total avg. deposits $1.27 trillion

There was more bad news for Wells. First, as the chart below shows, Noninterest Income has been a disaster and is only getting worse with virtually every revenue category posting Y/Y declines.

Things were not better on the interest income side where the bank's Net Interest Margin managed ended its recent streak of increases, and was unchanged at 2.94% resulting in $12.644 billion in Net Interest Income, and missing expectations of an increase to 2.95%. This is what Wells said: "NIM of 2.94% stable LQ as a benefit from higher interest rates and favorable hedge ineffectiveness accounting results were offset by the impacts of all other balance sheet mix and lower variable income."

While Wells loss provisions declined modestly in Q4, its actual charge-offs jumped from $680MM to $721MM, the highest since Q1.

There was another problem facing Buffett's favorite bank: while NIM failed to increase, deposits costs are rising fast, and in Q4, the bank was charged an average deposit cost of 0.55% on $914.3MM in interest-bearing deposits, double what its deposit costs were a year ago.

There was a silver lining however: amid concerns over the ongoing slide in the scandal-plagued bank's deposits, which declined 3% or $40.1BN in Q3 Y/Y (down $2.3BN Q/Q) to $1.27 trillion, in Q4 Wells finally succeeded in getting a modest increase in deposits, which rose to $1.286 trillion, if still down 4% Y/Y. This was driven by growth in Wealth & Investment Management deposits driven by higher retail brokerage sweep deposits, "partially reflecting a change in our customers’ risk appetite, as well as higher private
banking deposits." Offsetting this were declines in small business banking deposits, partially offset by growth in retail banking consumer deposits.

And some more good news: the recent ongoing shrinkage in the company's balance sheet appears to have finally reversed, because one quarter after average loans declined from $944.3BN to $939.5BN, the lowest in years, and down $12.8 billion YoY, average loans outstanding increased fractionally to $946.3BN, up $6.8BN, or 1% Q/Q. This rebound was entirely due to commercial loans , which were up $7.7 billion LQ on higher commercial & industrial loans. Meanwhile, consumer loans continued to decline, and were down $835 million LQ as growth in nonconforming first mortgage loans and credit card loans was more than offset by declines in legacy consumer real estate portfolios including Pick-a-Pay and junior lien mortgage loans due to run-off and sales, as well as lower auto loans.

And finally, there was the chart showing the bank's overall consumer loan trends: these reveal that the troubling broad decline in credit demand continues, as consumer loans were down a total of $13.7BN Y/Y across most product groups.

What these numbers reveal, is that the average US consumer can barely afford to take out a new mortgage even at a time when rates are once again sliding. It also means that if the Fed is truly intent in engineering a parallel shift in the curve of 2-3%, the US can kiss its domestic housing market goodbye.

Source: Wells Fargo Earnings Supplement

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Integrity Initiative: By All Means Smear & Attack, But At Least Be Honest About It

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Authored by Simon Rite, op-ed via RT.com,

We've all met those people who describe themselves as laid back, when in reality they're just one loud noise from a mouth frothing breakdown. So when something describes itself as having integrity, be wary.

Enter the Integrity Initiative (II), Britain's very own government funded influence network which is currently in the process of having its underpants revealed to the world. There's no doubting it's an initiative, the jury's out on the other bit. Some of the people behind it are alleged former spies (can you be a former spy?), a calling not often linked to integrity.

There's a good chance you may not know much about the Integrity Initiative, the mainstream media is not exactly straining to tell you about it. Labour MP Chris Williamson suggests that's because a number of mainstream journalists have signed up to work with it.

The only time II briefly attracted the attention of the mainstream world was when it became clear it had been pushing conspiracies about Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's links to the Kremlin. That's not a good look for an organization which receives cash from the Foreign Office.

It describes itself as non-partisan, but then as we've discussed, it also has "Integrity" in the title. Maybe it can get away with it, always worth a try I suppose. It also claims to be "combating propaganda and disinformation," but as you'll see for yourself on its Twitter account, it's simply a stream of invective and criticism about Russia. If you want to spend cash smearing an entire nation, fine, fill your boots, but don't then act all moral about it.

Integrity Initiative deals in propaganda, mainly against Russia, and if anyone involved tries to deny that, then they've clearly been drinking their own Kool Aid. Of course, it defends itself by saying it's on the front line of the fight against so-called Russian disinformation, which is a pretty wide category these days. But it doesn't matter if it's propaganda you agree with or disagree with, it's still propaganda.

One of its main aims is to put together what it calls 'clusters' of journalists, writers and the like who are sympathetic to the cause. If you've been paying attention, you won't be surprised to find out who are making up those clusters.

Some of those journalists who have had their links revealed are carefully backtracking. One interesting form of mea culpa from some of them is to admit that while they did do some work for II, they didn't get paid much to do it, which is a curious defense if you think about it. If you're involved in something you might feel the need to defend in the future, at least make sure you getting paid! About £200 for a talk or an article seems to be the going rate if you're interested.

I don’t know how I can be clearer. They. Paid. Me. Once. For. One. Freelance. Piece. About £200.

— Edward Lucas (@edwardlucas) January 6, 2019

Good luck to anyone signing up to work with II, we've all got mortgages to pay, there's no judgement from me, but at least take responsibility for it. And if you really didn't know you were engaging in propaganda, then perhaps a period of self-reflection is in order. 

Guardian journalist James Ball, for example, wrote a column in which he came clean on his links to II (he gave a training talk for about 225 quid) but there was no real self-reflection. The headline "When free societies copy Russian media tactics, there's only one winner" is indicative of the myopia which drives the movement against so-called Russian disinformation. Even when he is literally caught up in a Western government funded propaganda effort, he somehow still manages to reflect it back on Russia. Moscow made me do it!

Ball literally describes the Integrity Initiative as a 'victim'. Beautiful!

— Media Lens (@medialens) January 11, 2019

Ball goes on to lament the hacking of Integrity Initiative in a newspaper which revelled in publishing juicy stories from WikiLeaks.

He even analyses the events around the Salisbury poisoning by saying: "Russian-backed outlets and supporters threw question after question to cast doubt on the official narrative."

There we have it, the biggest crime of all – casting doubt on the official narrative.

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Now That They Have Deeply Insulted All Men With Their “Toxic Masculinity” Ad, Let’s Respond By Boycotting Gillette

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Does Gillette really think that they are going to sell more razors to men after millions of men watch their horrific new ad that is essentially an all-out assault on masculinity? The new ad is entitled “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be”, and within the first few seconds the term “toxic masculinity” is used. This is a deeply, deeply offensive term, and it has no place in our society. After all, could you imagine the uproar that would ensue if a large corporation dared to use the term “toxic femininity” in an advertisement? Women would be freaking out from coast to coast, and for good reason. There would simply be no excuse for using the term “toxic femininity”, and there is simply no excuse for using the term “toxic masculinity”. Gillette owes every man in America an apology, and they better make it a good one.

Just yesterday I wrote an article about the American Psychological Association’s new guidelines for men which say that “traditional masculinity” is “harmful”, and so when I heard that Gillette had put out this new ad it got my attention right away. Over on YouTube, this ad has already been watched more than 1.4 million times. It has 16,000 likes and more than 159,000 dislikes. That is almost a ten to one margin, and it is clear that this ad is backfiring spectacularly. Here is how Breitbart described this deeply offensive ad…

A new ad from P&G razor brand Gillette encourages men to reexamine themselves and the way that they raise young boys. The ad, which is called “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be,” is essentially a two-minute broad generalization about the way that men act and think.

The ad depicts men getting into fights, standing in front of barbecue grills, and verbally harassing women. The ad also heavily features news clips discussing the recent #MeToo movement.

Look, nobody approves of bullying or sexual harassment. But to make an ad which suggests that “masculinity” is defined by these sorts of behaviors is fundamentally wrong, and it is going to turn off millions of potential customers. I really like how Paul Joseph Watson made this point…

Insulting most of your own customers by insinuating they’re all would-be sexual abusers & creeps has to be one of the most original marketing campaigns in decades.

Somebody at Gillette needs to be fired over this.

Millions of men are going to quit buying Gillette razors because of this ad, and many of them will never forgive Gillette no matter how contrite the company may appear to be in the future.

And they should definitely realize that they have messed up really, really badly if even Piers Morgan is threatening to stop using their products…

I’ve used @Gillette razors my entire adult life but this absurd virtue-signalling PC guff may drive me away to a company less eager to fuel the current pathetic global assault on masculinity.

Perhaps some advertising exec thought it would be a grand idea for Gillette to jump on the social justice bandwagon. After all, it seems to be the hot thing to do.

But to conduct a direct attack on masculinity when nearly all of your customers are men seems to be incredibly foolish.

Of course I am not saying that all men are angels. In fact, earlier today I came across an article about a horrible 32-year-old doctor that is calling his pregnant wife “lazy” and is upset that she is only working 30 hours a week. But such behavior does not have anything to do with masculinity. Rather, that is called being a jerk.

And there is certainly nothing wrong with urging all of us to be the best people that we can possibly become. We should never be afraid to challenge one another to be better and to set higher standards, and on some level I think that is what this ad was attempting to do.

But this ad was so much more than that. It was essentially an all-out attack on masculinity, and it is very easy to understand why virtually every man that watches this ad comes away deeply offended.

So what should we do about it?

I like what one Twitter user is suggesting…

“I am taking action,” one Twitter user said in response to Gillette’s call for action. “I’m researching every product made by Proctor & Gamble, throwing any I have in the trash, and never buying any of them again until everyone involved in this ad from top to bottom is fired and the company issues a public apology.”

Let’s boycott all Gillette products until they apologize to us.

And the apology needs to have the same scale and scope as the original ad did. In other words, Gillette should make a new advertisement of similar length apologizing for the first ad, and they should spend at least as much money promoting it.

Of course they are not likely to do that, because it would not be the politically-correct thing to do.

As I stated yesterday, the elite are absolutely determined to permanently change our culture, and they are becoming more overt about it over time.

In the old days, big corporations would stay out of such controversies in order to avoid offending potential customers, but now they think that they can get away with it.

And the only thing that is going to make them think otherwise is if we quit buying their products, and so that is precisely what we need to do.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

The post Now That They Have Deeply Insulted All Men With Their “Toxic Masculinity” Ad, Let’s Respond By Boycotting Gillette appeared first on The Most Important News.

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Israel's Top Commander Finally Spills Secrets Of "Invisible War" In Syria

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For years Israel denied allegations that it had a role in funding and weaponizing the anti-Assad insurgency in Syria, and in recent years military officials responded "no comment" even when confronted with overwhelming evidence of Israeli weapons documented in al-Qaeda linked insurgents' hands, but this all changed in a new British Sunday Times interview with outgoing Israeli army commander Gadi Eisenkot, who has finally confirmed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) supplied weapons to rebels across the border "for self-defense," and further perhaps more stunningly, has admitted to long waging an "invisible war in Syria" that involved "thousands of attacks".

IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot 

The interview constitutes the first time that any current top Israeli military or government official has fully acknowledged sending anything beyond "humanitarian supplies," such as medical aid to Syrian militants seeking to topple the Assad government; and yet it still appears the country's military chief is slow playing the confirmation, only acknowledging the IDF provided "light weapons" — even after years of reporting has definitively uncovered an expansive Israeli program to arm dozens of insurgent groups and pay their salaries, including known affiliates of al-Qaeda in Syria.

This comes after the Syrian government has for years accused Israel of partnering with the west and gulf countries, such as the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey of funding and weaponizing an al-Qaeda/ISIS insurgency as part of covert regime change operations aimed at Damascus and its allies Iran and Hezbollah. Since then, countries like Qatar have come forward to reveal just how vast their covert role in fueling the Syrian war really was, which we covered in our viral story, In Shocking, Viral Interview, Qatar Confesses Secrets Behind Syrian War.

The Sunday Times relates a key confession that comes out of Lt.-Gen Gadi Eisenkot's explosive interview as follows: 

Eisenkot acknowledged for the first time, however, that Israel had supplied rebel groups in the border area with light weapons “for self-defence”.

Israel was a hidden player on a crowded Syrian battlefield. 

Eisenkot positively boasted in the interview that “We operated in an area controlled by the Russians, sometimes attacking targets a kilometre or two from Russian positions,” in order to strike at Iranian assets in Syria. 

The rare "confession" of sorts comes at a moment the White House says it's moving forward on President Trump's previously announced US troop pullout from Syria, something which has rattled Israel's leadership, which has argued that Iran will become entrenched near Israel's border as a result. Eisenkot's words appear a warning to Iran that Tel Aviv aims to maintain operational capability inside Syria. 

On this point the IDF chief admitted to "thousands" of attacks inside Syria: 

“We carried out thousands of attacks [in recent years] without taking responsibility and without asking for credit,” he told the Sunday Times.

Given that prior military officials have typically put this number at "hundreds", often from 200 to 400, this is an astounding admission that confirms Israel and Syria have been in a de facto state of open war since the first acknowledged Israeli airstrikes began in 2013. 

Commenting on a prior report, The Times of Israel, summarized the timeline of Israel's support to the anti-Assad insurgency as follows:

Foreign Policy said that Israel’s support for the rebel groups began in 2013, funding groups in places such as Quneitra and Daraa. It ended this summer as the regime’s forces advanced and made increasing gains in southern Syria against rebels. Syrian President Bashar Assad’s troops regained control of the border area in July.

The Syrian army said in 2013 that it had seized Israeli weapons in rebel hands.

The report said Israel sent the rebel groups weapons that included assault rifles, machine guns, mortar launchers, and vehicles. It initially sent the rebels US-made M16 rifles that would not identify Jerusalem as the source, and later began supplying guns and ammo from an Iranian shipment to Lebanon’s Hezbollah group that Israel captured in 2009, according to Foreign Policy.

But a number of analysts have suggested Israeli support to the opposition began even closer to the start of the conflict.

A prior Wall Street Journal investigation found that this relationship involved weapons transfers, salary payments to anti-Assad fighters, and treatment of wounded jihadists in Israeli hospitals, the latter which was widely promoted in photo ops picturing Netanyahu himself greeting militants. As even former Acting Director of the CIA Michael Morell once directly told the Israeli public, Israel's "dangerous game" in Syria consists in getting in bed with al-Qaeda in order to fight Shia Iran. 

Prior widely shared photo of Israeli soldiers speaking face to face with al-Qaeda fighters near the Israeli occupied Golan heights in Syria.

In recent years, multiple current and former Israeli defense officials have gone so far as to say that ISIS is ultimately preferable to Iran and Assad. For example, former Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren in 2014 surprised the audience at Colorado's Aspen Ideas Festival when he said in comments related to ISIS that, "the lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shias." Oren, while articulating Israeli defense policy, fully acknowledged he thought ISIS was "the lesser evil." 

Likewise, for Netanyahu and other Israeli officials the chief concern was never the black clad death cult which filmed itself beheading Americans and burning people alive, but the possibility of, in the words of Henry Kissinger, "a Shia and pro-Iran territorial belt reaching from Tehran to Beirut" and establishment of "an Iranian radical empire."

What is clear, and now finally settled for the historical record, is that for years Israeli concealed its "hidden hand" in the proxy war while feigning merely "humanitarian aid" — something now fully admitted by Israel's top military commander. In other words the humanitarian smokescreen was cover for a full-on covert war on Damascus, as we and many other independent outlets have reported many times, and for years. Yet another past "conspiracy theory" becomes  today's incontrovertible fact.

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Top 9 things you can't talk about freely in America

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Remember when you could talk about anything in America without fear of retribution, shaming, harassment?

Do you recall when media was a plural noun, implying a multitude of voices?

What about speech codes? Can you remember a time before they were imposed on college campuses?

How about the internet before Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google set the rules for what you could say and what you couldn’t say?

A generation ago, America was celebrated for its free speech, its free press, its freedom of religion.

But consider the topics today that you can’t talk about, write about or dissent about.

Let’s take a look at the top 9 topics that are basically off-limits in our formerly free society:

1. Evolution: We went from a time when God’s Creation was accepted as fact to a time when public schools can’t even teach about it as a legitimate “theory” – a possibility. Evolution has gone from a theory to a fact in academia while the evidence has gone the other direction. While the scientific world is in near total agreement now that the universe had a beginning, as well as a time when life sprung up in abundance all at once, America’s most powerful cultural institutions continue to push the evolution line exclusively without second thoughts, second looks. Are we better off without the debate, the dialogue, the discussion? Are we more learned, more advanced as a society without dialectics?
2. Man-made climate change: Some “news organizations,” CNN comes to mind, are no longer interested in sources they characterize as “deniers,” those who are skeptical about the urgent need to reorder the world’s economic and political systems around the priority of lowering carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. It’s unlikely you could have a debate at a major university about the evidence against impending doom from catastrophic, man-made climate change. Does that make us more informed or less? Does it make for open political discussions? Are we a healthier, more open society as a result?
3. Donald Trump: We now have a president of the United States for whom it is unsafe in many venues simply to show support. Just wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat is considered provocative. Despite his demonstrated Midas touch on all matters economic and better poll ratings than his recent predecessors, the gatekeepers of media, Big Tech, academia, the entertainment industry and the Democratic Party continue to hound him like an unindicted co-conspirator, a war criminal, a “fascist” authoritarian, an unregistered foreign agent, a “white supremacist” or worse.
4. Illegal immigration: You can’t have a free and open debate about controlling it without being called names – hater, bigot, racist. The sovereignty of America is at stake, but the cacophony of denial about a simple border barrier is hysterical, maniacal, completely over the top and one-sided, full of misinformation, disinformation and fake news.
5. Muslim terrorism: Nearly 20 years after Muslim terrorists declared war on America by hijacking airliners and crashing them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and an open field in Pennsylvania, killing more people than in any foreign on the homeland in American history, incidents and evidence of Muslim terrorism is systematically covered up by the media. Instead, the real problem, according to the thought police, is Islamophobia.
6. Roe v. Wade: It is, according to the cultural institutions that serve as our morality cops, “a settled matter of law.” Anyone who opposes this Supreme Court decision, which denies the right to life for preborn babies, will find a hostile environment in the media. Even restrictions on abortion for the purpose of sex selection are considered threats to “a woman’s right to choose.” But what about freedom to dissent? What about free speech? What about a free hearing on the sanctity of life?
7. Gender: Can you believe we can no longer identify men and women based on biology without fear of “discrimination” and accusation of “bias” and “bigotry”? It’s true. Meanwhile, judges and activists are promoting gender dysphoria as well as irreversible surgical disfiguration and chemical castration even for children. It’s a new and brave new world – but don’t try too hard to dissent unless you’re ready for the consequences. Prepare to be called a “hater,” a “homophobe,” just for the crime of disagreeing.
8. Guns: Just as America is quickly watering down its commitment to the First Amendment, so too is it continually compromising on the Second Amendment. And you won’t get a fair hearing in the media or though social media or through the search engine that commands a nearly worldwide monopoly yet ignores legal requirement for political impartiality in the way it serves and controls content. The anti-gun propaganda never stops. There’s a war on private ownership of guns like never before.
9. The family: Everyone knows the family unit, with a father and mother at the center, is the building block of a self-governing, healthy and prosperous society. Or do they? Who is making that case in America today? Government follows policies that are hostile to families, as is our corporate culture. But just try making that case in a public forum that counts. Kudos to Tucker Carlson for bravely making the effort.

The post Top 9 things you can't talk about freely in America appeared first on WND.

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Dances of Disinformation: The Partisan Politics of the “Integrity Initiative”

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Is there such a plane of blissful, balanced information, deliberated and debated upon?  No.  Governments mangle; corporations distort.  Interest groups tinker.  Wars must be sold; deception must be perpetrated.  Inconsistencies must be removed.  There will be success, measured in small …

The post Dances of Disinformation: The Partisan Politics of the “Integrity Initiative” appeared first on Global Research.

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Fake News? How About No News?

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Authored by Eric Peters via EricPetersAutos.com,

Trump gets flak for characterizing the mainstream press as purveyors of Fake News. But what about no news at all?

Isn’t lack of coverage even worse than biased coverage?

Well, how much news have you heard or read about the gilets jaunes – or “yellow vest” – protests in France?

CNN hasn’t got anything on its main page today (Jan. 9). Neither did NBC or CBS. Lots of the usual – endless – carpet-chewing coverage of Trump, though. And also of such important stories as “Want to Pay off Your Mortgage? Try Frugal Minimalism.”

You might think France, a major western European country, coming unglued – and on the verge of its government outright banning “unauthorized” criticism of its actions – might at least be  . . .  well,  news.

Instead, nothing.

Which is very interesting, given what the yellow vests are protesting. This being chiefly the purposely punitive taxes on fuel – diesel especially – imposed by the French President, Emmanuel Macron. In the name of “climate change” – but really in the name of squeezing average Frenchmen (and women) out of their cars. These taxes – already extortionate and brutally regressive – were on track to increase the cost of a gallon of fuel to more than $7.

This brought the French not to their knees – but to the streets. The yellow vests – which are reflective jackets every French motorist is required by law to keep in their vehicle, to be worn in the event of an emergency – were donned for a different kind of emergency.

And Macron buckled. The tax hike has been rescinded. But did you read about it?

Probably not – unless you went out of your way to look for it. Mainstream press coverage of this effective protest has been as scanty as its coverage of the reason for the yellow vest protests – which by the way continue, notwithstanding Macron’s retreat.

The reason being that Macron has not retreated in principle from resurrecting the tax, once the protests are well in hand. He hasn’t abandoned the “climate change” excuse for the tax; indeed, he is as adamant as ever that energy austerity be imposed. Well, on the French people.

Not on him and those in his class.

The yellow vests know this, which is why they haven’t gone home yet.

Macron made the great tactical mistake of pushing the people of France too hard, too soon.

And the American press doesn’t want you to know about it.

Nor – apparently – about the latest news out of France, which is that Macron’s government has floated the idea of a new law criminalizing “unauthorized” demonstrations of, well, anything the French government happens not to like its citizens protesting.

Macron’s Prime Minister, Eduouard Philippe, characterizes such citizens as “troublemakers” – a species of word very much of the same species as “climate change” in that both are conveniently vague as well as conveniently defined to be whatever the user wishes them to be.

Big snowstorm? Climate change!

Criticize the government? You are a troublemaker!

French citizens are already being arrested for less – merely for wearing a yellow vest. “Those who question our institutions will not have the last word,” Philippe declared. Mark that. It will be enough, in France, to question our institutions to be subject to arrest, prosecution and caging.

Which means, questioning the policies of the government – including those related to the “climate change” religion. Which brings us full circle to the absence of coverage of these events.

The government of this country is in the process of enacting similar laws, just not too soon and not as hard. We are on the slower-motion plan, and because of this far more strategicapproach to gradually getting the American cattle to accept the transition from being free range cattle to feedlot cattle, the American cattle are – unlike the French – generally oblivious.

Most Americans haven’t noticed, as a for-instance, that while gas prices haven’t gone up, the cost of the cars they put gas into has – and not because of new features they want but because of impositions made by the government. Examples include the sudden appearance of ASS in most new cars. Automatic Stop/Start – a system which turns off the engine whenever the car isn’t moving, in order to fractionally increase individual car mileage for the sake of increasing so-called “corporate” (or fleet) averages, which is necessary because of government fuel efficiency fatwas – which end up being just the same as a tax except on the car, not the fuel.

Because either way, you still pay.

This is subtler, and so smarter – from the standpoint of the people holding the proverbial cattle prod.

The fuel economy fatwas are also forcing mass-production of electric cars, which cars cost tens of thousands of dollars more than otherwise comparable non-electric cars. This amounts to an even more extortionate and regressive tax on mobility – which is pure genius, relative to Macron’s hamfisted (because obvious) direct tax on motor fuels.

But you didn’t read about that here.

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