Monday, October 31, 2016

Is The VIX Curve Sending A Warning Signal?

Authored by Peter Tchir via Brean Capital,


Is the VIX Curve Too Flat?


For the last couple of weeks, VIX and VIX based ETFs and ETNs (UVXY, TVIX, VXX, XIV, etc) have only been on the fringe of radar screen.  They were there, but they were only mildly interesting.


What I had noticed at the time was:





1. VIX ETPs were seeing shares outstanding increase as VIX dropped (doubling down)



2. Then last week as VIX was rising I commented on the fact that funds were not seeing large decreases in shares outstanding – a signal that the ‘hedgers’ were prepared to be resilient



3. Over the past few days I have had more and more discussions about VIX again and think the one thing worth pointing out for those who like to dismiss it as a ‘pure retail’ product is that UVXY alone has about 25% of the outstanding Nov VIX Futures contracts and almost 30% of the outstanding Dec VIX Futures contracts.  That is a large percentage of any market – let alone one where the product doubles down on direction each night to maintain its leverage balance.  It has a market cap of $800 million, but since that is 2x leveraged that represents $1.6 billion of VIX exposure.  VXX is unleveraged and seems about 6 to 8 times as volatile as the S&P 500 in terms of realized vol.  That to me, means UVXY controls roughly $10 billion of S&P 500 equivalent risk – less easy to dismiss – especially given the daily volumes, the outsized ownership of the futures and the overall complexity of the product.



Unlike Treasury VIX which I hit on last week (which I think played a roll in Treasury and Credit Market price action last week), the absolute level of VIX isn’t particularly scary – its not unusually low or at fear levels.


But the “Kiss of Death” for the VIX products is the steepness of the VIX curve not the absolute levels in any case.  That curve hammers the VIX based products (which is why the ETFs and ETNs are inevitably forced to do extremely large reverse splits).  I fully expected the VIX curve to be steep and was going to highlight that as a problem, but it was flat – eerily flat.


Flat Like August 2015?


I started to analyze the data.  The shape of the VIX curve is correlated to the absolute levels of VIX.  Whenever VIX spikes (about 20) it often becomes inverted.


Low levels of VIX tend to have the steepest curves as people hedge some event on the horizon even if there is nothing to worry about today.


So I took all the days since January 2015 when the VIX had closed between 15 and 17.5 (Friday’s close of 16.2 is a rough midpoint).


There were 110 such days.  3 days in October, including Friday, ranked in the top 14 flattest curves.  So we have a cluster of relatively flat curves given the current level of VIX.


More striking was that of the remaining 11 days that were flatter, 6 occurred in July and August 2015 – including August 19th.


VIX in the summer of 2015



Could this happen again?


Is the combination of a potentially deep and committed hedging community, coupled with self-reinforcing daily rebalancing where the election news cycle seems to be getting more surreal if anything going to lead to another spike in VIX?


I don’t know, but it is yet another thing to be cautious of.

Risk Happens Fast

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at


As a teenager brimming with testosterone my reptilian brain loved action movies.


Top of my list were Steven Seagal movies. Clearly it wasn"t for his acting skills, which are only marginally better than Barney the dinosaur.


What I loved about Seagal was that he was both deadly and terribly fast. His opponents had mere seconds before their arms, legs, or other bones were snapped like twigs. Or they suffered a severe beating leaving them either dead or in a bludgeoned unrecognisable mess. Fabulous stuff!


With Seagal risk happened fast. The targets of his aggression never had time to get out once the onslaught began, and then it was all over in seconds. None of this drawn out biff-baff nonsense, taking forever to finally get to where you knew things were headed anyways.


Back in January of 2015 the currency markets had a "Seagal moment".


The Swiss National Bank (SNB) had pegged the Swiss Franc to the Euro at 1.20 and by the end of 2014 had already spent billions defending the peg.


All the numbers told us the peg was untenable. We didn"t know how long the peg would hold but we did know that with every passing day what was clearly untenable simply became more untenable. The stress was building.


Failing to participate is one of my regrets. I saw the imbalance, the fact that volatility was unbelievably cheap presenting awesome asymmetry, and instead made another cup of coffee thinking, I"ll get an entry sign. Something that allows me to identify timing. Dumber than thinking you can get out of Seagal"s way after disrespecting his mama.


Back in March of 2015 we explained why the probability of the Chinese renminbi being devalued was high and increasing daily. Five months later the PBOC shocked markets by devaluing the yuan. Here is what we said at the time when discussing the CHF:



“By pegging the CHF to the euro at 1.20 the SNB put a lid on how much it would appreciate against the euro. In doing so the SNB’s balance sheet grew faster than even the US Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, and finally in January the SNB realized it was fighting a losing battle and threw the towel in. This resulted in an “off the Richter scale” move (+30%) in a few minutes!



This disorderly revaluation shook the currency markets and impaired a number of financial institutions! In trying to suppress volatility and create more certainty all the SNB euro pegging efforts succeeded in doing was to achieve the exact opposite!”



At least having sat and watched the franc peg break the lesson wasn"t lost. And so when it came to watching the renminbi and the problems we"d identified in the Chinese interbank market (something we discussed on the blog as well) we could evaluate the cost of entering the short renminbi trade accordingly since volatility was priced as if it not only didn’t exist as a threat but that it would NEVER exist. We all know how that ended.


The same had been true of the Swiss franc. When it broke, the move was even more explosive.


CHF Volatility


See that long green line at the bottom of the screen?


That’s what you call complacency, trust, and faith. This made no sense given the fundamentals. It was as loony as planning a driving trip across Africa in a Lada, expecting trouble-free motoring.


Now if you look closely you’ll see the line at the very end of the chart is a 90 degree angle. This is the volatility in the EUR/CHF pair when it broke.


As reported by Bloomberg at the time in an article entitled, “No One Was Supposed to Lose This Much Money on Swiss Francs”:



“Goldman Sachs Chief Financial Officer Harvey Schwartz said on this morning’s earnings call that this was something like a 20-standard-deviation event, and while the exact number of standard deviations is of course a subjective matter, that’s the right ballpark.




Over the 12 months ended on Wednesday, the annual volatility - that is, the annualized standard deviation of daily returns - of the euro/franc relationship was a bit over 1.7 percent; over the last three months of that period the volatility was less than 1 percent. That converts to a daily standard deviation of something like 0.1 percent.




On Thursday, the euro ended down almost 19 percent, or call it 180 standard deviations, depending on what period you use.”



The chart below shows the EUR/CHF currency move which coincided with the volatility shown above.


EURCHF


The truth is that even though the situation was untenable and the cost to going long the CHF extremely low, it was unpopular since the market believed in the status quo, and its ability to sustain the unsustainable.


The Lesson


Experience has taught us that typically the greater the asymmetry, the less the opportunity for us to position when a move has already begun. There isn"t time! Risk happens fast.


The opportunities we focus on present asymmetry and often happen all at once. It is important to be positioned BEFORE the move. This requires risk management, and intelligent position sizing.


Thinking you will get to position once a move starts in a market exhibiting extraordinary asymmetry is a bit like thinking you can get out of the way when Seagal gets to work on you. It"s probably too late though perhaps I should use someone other than Seagal nowadays since the only thing "under siege" appears to be his arteries.


Discipline and patience are imperative. You will inevitably be a day or two early at the train station and waiting sucks but a minute too late and it"s a loooong walk.


What to Expect


Investing in such opportunities you can rest assured we have to suffer fools parroting phrases such as “being early is the same thing as being wrong” until a collapse demonstrates that actually no, it’s really not.


Hubris is one sign that asymmetry may exist. Volatility and the pricing of volatility is usually key. In scrounging around the global macro landscape in search of opportunity, and in speaking with the dozens and dozens of truly great investment minds, one thing that so often becomes vividly apparent is that the very best investment minds in the world are never complacent and you shouldn"t be either.


Complacency


Have a great week!


- Chris


"This kind of event is the kind of thing that will trigger volatility. This is not a one day thing now." — Darren Courtney-Cook, Head of trading at Central Markets Investment Management on the SNB abandoning the euro peg


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Brazile Exclaims "Please God, Let This End Soon" As CNN Fires Her For "Uncomfortable Interactions" With Clinton Campaign

Update: Politico reports that in yet another statement, CNN spokeswoman Lauren Pratapas said that on Oct. 14, the network accepted Brazile"s resignation.





"On October 14th, CNN accepted Donna Brazile’s resignation as a CNN contributor. (Her deal had previously been suspended in July when she became the interim head of the DNC."



In a tweet, Brazile thanked CNN and her former colleagues there.





"Thank you @CNN. Honored to be a Democratic Strategist and commentator on the network. Godspeed to all my former colleagues," she wrote.



*  *  *


As we detailed earlier, it seems DNC Chair Donna Brazile is hoping for rescue by a higher power as the net narrows around her lies and obfuscation. Following more examples of Brazile passing debate questions to the Clinton Campaign, CNN spokesperson Lauren Pratapas said in a statement that:





CNN "never gave Brazile access to any questions, prep material, attendee list, background information or meetings in advance of a town hall or debate."



"We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor."



While there has ben no official statement from the DNC, here is Donna Brazile"s latest tweet...



As The Hill reports, CNN said it would "revisit" Brazile"s contract "once Brazile concludes her role.”


Maybe she will get a position on The Clinton Campaign too once she steps down... just like DWS!

Huma Abedin: "I Have No Idea How The Emails Got On Weiner's Computer"

With the FBI having obtained a warrant to begin poring over the 650,000 reported emails found on Anthony Weiner"s computer, attention shifts to just what the FBI may find, with Democrats alleging that much of the thousands of emails allegedly sent from Huma Abedin"s computer are duplicates or otherwise innocuous, while critics alleging more deleted and/or confidential emails may emerge. On her, behalf, however, long-time Hillary aide Huma Abedin has told the FBI she was not aware any of her emails were on the laptop investigators seized as part of its probe info Anthony Weiner"s investigation.


According to Politico, the FBI engaged in a back and forth over the weekend with Abedin or her attorney, when Abedin explained the situation.


"She says she didn"t know they were there," a source familiar with the investigation said. This is a sensitive topic for Abedin and the Clinton campaign, because on previous occasions, Huma - under oath - disclosed that all the emails in her possession had been accounted for and handed over to the FBI.


As CNBC adds,"there are a number of scenarios that would explain how the emails got onto the laptop without Abedin"s knowledge, including that they were somehow automatically backed up from the cloud. But investigators will want to know how this happened and if there is any indication that Abedin misled them about the existence of emails.





It is a large project. Agents determined there were as many as 650,000 emails on the laptop, dating back years. The number of emails related to the Clinton investigation is likely to be much smaller.



On Saturday, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said Abedin had been fully cooperative with the FBI investigation.  "I don"t think she knows anything more than what we"ve seen in the press to date," Podesta said Sunday on CNN"s "State of the Union."


"I’m sure...if people—proper authorities want to ask her questions, they"ll ask her questions, but she"s been fully cooperative in this investigation.”


The FBI is now filtering the emails using a software program that will separate out any emails that investigators have not seen before. Those will be kept in a separate file and will be examined by FBI agents to see if they contain classified material or information relevant to the Clinton probe. It is not clear what FBI Director James Comey will do with the information once the FBI obtains it. Standard practice is for the FBI not to comment on investigations — but this is not a standard situation. "We"re in uncharted territory," the source said.


It is possible that Comey could indicate publicly what the FBI finds before Election Day next week, but that decision has not been made yet.

Welcome To The Halloween Nation

Submitted by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,


What was with James Comey’s Friday letter to congress? It looks to me like the FBI Director had to go nuclear against his parent agency, the Department of Justice, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, his boss, in particular. Why? Because the Attorney General refused to pursue the Clinton email case when more evidence turned up in the underage sexting case against Anthony Weiner, husband of Hillary’s chief of staff, Huma Abedin.


Over the weekend, the astounding news story broke that the FBI had not obtained a warrant to examine the emails on Weiner’s computer and other devices after three weeks of getting stonewalled by DOJ attorneys. What does it mean when the Director of the FBI can’t get a warrant in a New York minute? It must mean that the DOJ is at war with the FBI. Watergate is looking like thin gruel compared to this fantastic Bouillabaisse of a presidential campaign fiasco.


One way you can tell is that The New York Times is playing down the story Monday morning. Columnist Paul Krugman calls the Comey letter “cryptic.” Krugman’s personal cryptograph insinuates that Comey is trying to squash an investigation of “Russian meddling in American elections.” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid chimed in with a statement that “it has become clear that you [Comey] possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers and the Russian government.” How’s that for stupid and ugly? It’s the Russian’s fault that Hillary finds herself in trouble again?


Earlier this week, lawyers at the DOJ attempted to quash a parallel investigation of the Clinton Foundation. They must be out of their minds to think that story will go away. Isn’t it about time that a House or Senate committee subpoenaed Bill Clinton to testify under oath about his June airport meeting with Loretta Lynch. He doesn’t enjoy any special immunity in this case.


Speaking of immunity, when will we learn what kind of immunity Huma Abedin may have been granted in previous cycles of the email investigation? Plenty of other Clinton campaign associates got immunity from prosecution earlier this year, rendering bales of evidence on their own laptops inadmissible in the email server case.


Things as yet unknown: Where is US Attorney (for the Southern District of New York) Preet Bharara in this case? He works for the DOJ, but he is known to be an independent operator, and he must be already involved at least in the underage sexting case against Weiner, meaning he’s had access to an awful lot of collateral evidence from Weiner’s laptop, and must have obtained some kind of warrants of his own.


What appears to be unraveling is the AG Loretta Lynch’s effort to protect Hillary Clinton and now, in this Alfred Hitchcock movie of a presidential election, she’s trying to make it look like James Comey is stabbing Hillary in the shower. (Film buffs note: in Hitchcock’s Psycho the character played by Janet Leigh made off with a bundle of money from her place of employment before Norman Bates worked his hoodoo on her at the motel.)


Trump, of course, is playing the escapade up in his usual idiotic way. It would be unfortunate if it ended up getting him elected — but how would it not be unfortunate for Hillary to wind up in the White House under a cloud of possible indictment? She will be doing Chinese fire drills with a special prosecutor the whole time she is in office, tempted at every moment to start a war with the Russians to divert attention from her legal problems.


Soon we will learn what kind of tensions are roiling between the FBI and the DOJ, and internally within each of these agencies. There are too many pissed off people there to prevent leakage, and probably plenty of email memoranda among the officials that would nicely lay out a trail of incrimination leading into the Attorney General’s office itself.


What a fine mess. And anybody who thinks that any of it might be resolved before November 8 will be disappointed. This story has so many legs, it looks like a Amazonian centipede compared to the lumbering cockroach that was Watergate. The awful proceedings will grind on and on while the US economy and its vampire squid matrix of financial rackets implode in 2017 along with the European Union and global trade. How do you like The Long Emergency now?

Two Early Voting Charts That Look Disastrous For Hillary

Both Clinton and Trump have highlighted early voting statistics that suggest their campaigns are performing well relative to the 2012 campaigns of Obama and Romney.  That said, new statistics presented by the New York Times on early voting in several states seem to reveal some devastating trends for team Hillary.


As background, early voting has grown substantially over the past 2 decades and now accounts for roughly one-third of all votes cast. 





More states are offering early voting, Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida, said. “Once a state adopts early voting, more people vote early as a part of their election regimen,” he said.



The modern resurgence of early voting can be traced to 1980, when California lifted a requirement that voters must have an excuse to vote early. Other states in the West followed. In 1996, Southern states like Florida, Tennessee and Texas began to allow in-person early voting in special satellite polling locations.



Another landmark year in early voting was 2001, when a legal challenge was brought against Oregon’s early voting laws. The decision in that case, Voting Integrity Project v. Keisling, set a precedent mandating that early voting should be allowed, as long as votes were not officially counted before Election Day.



Early Voting



Meanwhile, most of the critical presidential "swing states" now allow early voting, with the exception of South Carolina and Pennsylvania.


Early Voting



While higher rates of early voting are generally a positive for the democratic candidate, a deeper dive into the demographic mix of early voters reveals some very troubling signs for the Clinton camp.  First, early voting by millennials is down sharply in several swing states including North Carolina, Nevada and Ohio. 


As we"ve pointed out before, this is obviously a troubling sign for Hillary since millennials voters skewed to Obama by 34 points in 2008 and 24 points in 2012.  We guess there will be fewer Hillary posters on the basement walls of young millennials living at home with mom after the "Hope and Change" they were promised in 2008 and 2012 didn"t pan out so well.


Early Voting



Perhaps even more troubling for the Clinton campaign are early voting statistics of black voters which show substantial declines in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia and Ohio.  These stats are disastrous for Hillary as black voters have historically skewed towards democratic candidates by 80 points or more. 


As we pointed out last month, President Obama enjoyed a huge surge in black voter participation in 2008 and 2012.  After averaging around 50-55% for several decades, black voter participation surged to over 60% during Obama"s races.  A failure of the Clinton campaign to turnout black voters by the same margins could be disastrous for Clinton in states like Florida, North Carolina and Ohio. 


Early Voting



Meanwhile, the one silver lining for Hillary is that Hispanic early voting seems to have increased across the board.  That said, Hispanic voters represent a much smaller overall percentage of the electorate and have historically not skewed as heavily toward the democratic candidate as black voters (though that could certainly change in this election cycle).


Early Voting



Just more evidence that pollsters, by using models tied to the 2008 and 2012 election cycles, may be way off in their assessment of how the 2016 election cycle will play out...we"ll see in 8 days.

The United States Is Pre-Positioning “Enemy Assets” In Preparation For A Rigged Election

obama-martial-law


There are a number of excellent pieces circulating that hypothesize on what will happen before, during, and after the election.  Mike Adams of Natural News and Dave Hodges of The Common Sense Show have both dug deeply, examining the overall situation with outstanding insights as to the possibilities.  Mike’s piece listed the scenarios that can happen regarding either outcome, and government actions that can be triggered by the result.  Dave’s videos and telephone conversations expose the fact that the government is indeed preparing to have plans ready and in place with drills and exercises that can turn into an actual operation immediately.


You can watch Dave Hodge’s full report with Paul Martin below:



That being mentioned, an article came out the other day written by Deb Riechmann of the Associated Press, October 26 entitled US Official: Russia Might Shoot Down US Aircraft in Syria.  The article highlights dialogue from a Charlie Rose interview via CBS at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York that was conducted with National Intelligence Director James Clapper The answers that Clapper gave to the questions gives two “insights” into the Obama administration’s mindset.  This comment came regarding the potential for the US and Russia engaging one another militarily:



“I wouldn’t put it past them to shoot down an American aircraft if they felt that [it] was threatening to their forces on the ground.  Russia has deployed a very advanced and capable air defense system in Syria and would not have done that if it [Russia] wouldn’t use it.”


James Clapper



Then Clapper was questioned about North Korea, and he had this to say:



“…the U.S. policy of trying to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons is probably futile.  Perhaps the only thing the U.S. could get would be limitations on North Korea’s nuclear capabilities.  I think the notion of getting the North Koreans to denuclearize is probably a lost cause.  They are under siege and they are very paranoid, so the notion of giving up their nuclear capability, whatever it is, is a nonstarter with them.”



All of this sounds very lackadaisical, coming from the Director of National Intelligence.  That is because it is: Obama is pursuing a laissez-faire policy regarding “threats,” either from Russia or North Korea.  The reason?  He created them to use later.  Clapper’s next responses are very interesting regarding the questions of whether or not Russia has been tampering with the election process and the recent threat by Vice President Joe Biden that the U.S. will respond to the (alleged) tampering with a Cyberattack designed “to embarrass and humiliate” the Kremlin.  Here is an excerpt of that interview:



“Clapper also was asked about the Obama administration’s claim that recent hacking of political sites was orchestrated by top Russian officials.  The U.S. response might not come in the form of a reciprocal cyberattack on Russia, Clapper said.


Pressed on the subject, Rose, the interviewer, noted that there is a sense that the Russians were not paying any price for the hacking.


“Maybe not yet,” Clapper replied.


“Maybe after the election?” Rose asked.


“I’m not going to pre-empt,” Clapper said.”



There we have it, in the absence of verbal commitment, no matter how nebulous the answer may seem.  Just because it is nebulous, however, does not belie the nefarious nature of the answer, and it is obvious: The Obama administration is setting the Russians up for the time of the election to blame any deviance or hacks on them.


It is no secret that election fraud is being committed now, even with the early voting that is occurring in several states.  The Cyberattacks conducted on Friday, October 21st were a Beta-test for what is to come: full-blown election fraud and an attack on the infrastructure of the U.S., to be blamed on Russia or North Korea and used as justification to either suspend the elections or declare them null and void.


On October 25, an article was released entitled DMV Computer Outage Raises Fear of Election-Day Cyber Attacksas presented on losangeles.cbslocal.com.  Apparently 100 DMV offices in California had a gigantic computer malfunction that was not attributed to hacking.  The article interviewed a USC professor who had the following to say:



“Election day may be a different story.  Government computer systems are vulnerable to cyber attacks.  I think there will certainly be some sort of cyber security issue in some location.”


Clifford Neuman, Director, USC Center for Computer Systems Security



From a standpoint of greater simplicity, the government can simply collapse the power grid, and this can be blamed on an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) weapon from North Korea or Russia.  If this is not done, the government can use the Soros-provided voting machines and other nefarious measures (such as dead people’s names being used to vote, illegal aliens casting a ballot, or people voting in numerous states, to name a few) to steal the votes.  Then blame can be shifted to the Russians.


Keep in mind that the Cyberattack on October 21 was found to “not be done by a government’s actions through state actors,” as the Mainstream media termed it.  How true.  Not one concrete shred of justification that Russia has been conducting any Cyberattacks has been provided.  Certainly the Russian government has taken the time to investigate the source of the hacking on the U.S. systems.  They will certainly monitor the elections in some manner to protect themselves from any accusations of hacking and prove they do not hold any culpability when the Democrats skew the numbers of the election and steal it themselves.


This is why the federal government has warned Russia that simply to monitor the elections may warrant criminal charges being brought against the Russian government.


But it’s OK to have UN election monitors, which in itself is a violation of the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, right? 


The law doesn’t apply to the Democrats; the law only matters as long as they can inflict it upon you.  Soros just came out recently and cursed democracy in general: though toad like in appearance and mannerisms, this communist foreigner is responsible for the collapse and/or debilitation of almost a dozen governments.  In a previous article we covered how the voting machines in the early voting in Illinois did not register the original choice of the voter and “chose” the Democratic candidates.  This was labeled as a “calibration error,” so simply and innocently.  The communists masquerading as Democrats know the truth of the matter, that it is those who count the votes and not the voters who decide the elections.


In summary, the U.S. is prepositioning its “enemy-assets” to blame – on what the administration does – for a collapsed election labeled as “rigged” or the suspension of the election for any number of reasons, real or illusory, such as a genuine attack the U.S. provokes or an attack the U.S. carries out on itself.  Civil unrest and/or war are the escape hatches to bail out of the Constitution and to take control of the country…not letting either crisis go to waste.  With civil rest or a world war, the administration will be handed the country on a platter – indefinitely – and the election will be a moot point, whether it happened or not.



Jeremiah Johnson is the Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne).  Mr. Johnson is also a Gunsmith, a Certified Master Herbalist, a Montana Master Food Preserver, and a graduate of the U.S. Army’s SERE school (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape).  He lives in a cabin in the mountains of Western Montana with his wife and three cats. You can follow Jeremiah’s regular writings at SHTFplan.com or contact him here.


This article may be republished or excerpted with proper attribution to the author and a link to www.SHTFplan.com.



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Former DEA Prescription Head Drops a BombShell — Congress Protects Big Pharma & Fuels Opioid Crisis

Congress would rather protect the profits of pharmaceutical companies than the health of those addicted to dangerous opioid drugs, says a former head of the DEA responsible for preventing abuse of medications.


Joseph Rannazzisi, former Deputy Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, asserts Big Pharma and its lobbyists have a “stranglehold” on legislators in Congress and have engineered the protection of a $9 billion per year industry over the health of American citizens, according to a report from the Guardian.


“Congress would rather listen to people who had a profit motive rather than a public health and safety motive,” he said, according to the outlet. “As long as the industry has this stranglehold through lobbyists, nothing’s going to change.”


Rannazzisi explained lobbyists have spent millions thwarting legislative and policy efforts to provide guidelines for reducing the prescribing of opioid medications closely related to heroin — and helped limit the DEA’s powers to discipline those who dispense unusually high dosages of the same.


A pharmacist himself, Rannazzisi severely criticized lawmakers he claims hold a double standard — publicly vowing to combat the opioid epidemic, while essentially working on behalf of pharmaceutical companies to ensure the industry’s profits.


“These congressmen and senators who are using this because they are up for re-election, it’s a sham,” he told the Guardian. “The congressmen and senators who are championing this fight, the ones who really believe in what they’re doing, their voices are drowned out because the industry has too much influence.”


With the unique insight of having been an insider, Rannazzisi excoriated the duplicity evidenced between legislators’ public lamentation of addiction and deaths from the opioid crisis during election years, and private efforts to protect drugmakers from liability.


And he would know. According to Rannazzisi’s LinkedIn profile, as Chief of Diversion, he had been tasked with “oversight and control of all regulatory compliance inspections and civil and criminal investigations of approximately 1.6 million DEA registrants” — but if the standards are lowered by Congress to allow greater leeway in prescribing opioids, the threshold of criminality is raised.



As the Guardian points out, legislation to fight the opioid epidemic, Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, did, in fact, pass in July — but partisan controversy erupted when Republicans failed to provide funding to give the law sharp teeth. Democrats then issued a report titled “Dying Waiting for Treatment” in response, which “likened the Republican response to the opioid crisis to ‘using a piece of chewing gum to patch a cracked dam.’”


Indeed the report sharply criticized the bill, equating its policies to ‘empty promises’ for the lack of financial follow-through.


As the Washington Post detailed in a report earlier this month, the DEA launched an aggressive campaign to rein in distribution of opioids by pharmaceutical manufacturers to illegal ‘pill mills’ and corrupt pharmacies, who cared little whether the drugs wound up on the streets.


Headed by Rannazzisi, the Office of Diversion Control sent investigators into the field, and began issuing hefty fines and filing lawsuits against the distributors responsible for the proliferation of opioids on the streets.


But the disproportionately powerful pharmaceutical industry — fearing a potential significant loss in profits — fought back. Hard.


According to the Post, the deputy attorney general summoned Rannazzisi to a meeting in 2012, concerning the cases of two unnamed major drug companies.


“That meeting was to chastise me for going after industry, and that’s all that meeting was about,” the now-retired DEA official told the Post.


Then, in 2014, came what constituted a hand out to the pharmaceutical industry by the Department of Justice and congressional legislators: the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act — legislation initiated by the Healthcare Distribution Management Association — the industry group representing distributors at the heart of the controversy.


An analysis of lobbying records by the Post found “the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, spent $13 million lobbying House and Senate members and their staffs on the legislation and other issues between 2014 and 2016.”


Rannazzisi argued his case to congressional staffers in a phone conference in July 2014, and recalled telling them, “This bill passes the way it’s written we won’t be able to get immediate suspension orders, we won’t be able to stop the hemorrhaging of these drugs out of these bad pharmacies and these bad corporations.”


Stunned at the massive — and ultimately successful — effort to take the bite out of DEA attempts to hold distributors and drugmakers responsible for their role in an epidemic estimated to take 19,000 lives every year, Rannazzisi likened the legislation to a “free pass” for legal drug pushers.


“This doesn’t ensure patient access and it doesn’t help drug enforcement at all,” he told the Guardian. “What this bill does has nothing to do with the medical process. What this bill does is take away DEA’s ability to go after a pharmacist, a wholesaler, manufacturer or distributor.”


“This was a gift. A gift to the industry,” he added.


After heading the diversion office for a decade, Rannazzisi retired in 2015 — likely disgusted over legislators’ dedication to the legal drug industry, rather than the people whose interests they’re ostensibly obligated to protect.


“The bill passed because ‘Big Pharma’ wanted it to pass,” he told the Guardian in no uncertain terms. “The DEA is both an enforcement agency and a regulatory agency. When I was in charge what I tried to do was explain to my investigators and my agents that our job was to regulate the industry and they’re not going to like being regulated.”



Big Pharma relies overwhelmingly on lobbyists filling the coffers of politicians to ensure they ignore the crisis gripping the nation. As the Center for Public Integrity found, the Guardian noted, Purdue Pharma — at the heart of the epidemic for its highly-addictive drug introduced in the late 1990s, OxyContin — spent a breathtaking $740 million in the last ten years on congressional lobbying efforts.


However, Big Pharma’s power to influence policy and legislation extends far beyond simple but effective lobbying — the government-run Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (IPRCC) has been accused by Sen. Ron Wyden of being a tool to “weaken” CDC guidelines for limiting overprescribing of opioids.


Wyden wrote to Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell of his concerns the IPRCC had been staffed with ‘experts’ with conflicts of interest for their close ties to Big Pharma, including a scientist with a $1.5 million endowment from Purdue, reported the Guardian.


“You’ve got a panel that’s certainly got a fair number of people that have a vested interest in this problem of overprescribing. That’s something you’ve got to root out,” Wyden asserted. “The role of the pharmaceutical companies on these advisory panels troubles me greatly. Science is getting short shrift compared to the political clout of these influential interests.”


Families of countless addicts and victims of the opioid industry would undoubtedly find the direct influence of Big Pharma’s pro-opioid cash appalling — yet it continues to this day. Policies and legislation have not yet been given the appropriate funding needed to effectively combat the problem, which swirls out of control while politicians and drugmakers reap blood-tainted profits.


“Corporations have no conscience,” Rannazzisi flatly told the Guardian. “Unfortunately, with my job, I was the guy who had to go out and talk to families that lost kids. If one of those CEOs went out there and talked to anybody, or if one of those CEOs happened to lose a kid to this horrible, horrible domestic tragedy we have, I’d bet you they’d change their mind.


“When you sit with a parent who can’t understand why there’s so many pharmaceuticals out in the illicit marketplace, and why isn’t the government doing anything, well the DEA was doing something. Unfortunately what we’re trying to do is thwarted by people who are writing laws.”

OPEC Fails to Agree as U.S. Energy Industry Ramps Up

After 12 hours of effort to hash out an agreement to cut oil production that can be presented formally to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (flag shown) in November, 14 oil ministers meeting in Vienna over the weekend gave birth to — a goose egg. Without an agreement, the November 30 gathering is likely to be irrelevant, just as the cartel itself is becoming.  


Every cartel eventually blows up due to members unwilling to abide by agreements, cheating, creating side agreements, and in general seeking their own self interests. So it is with OPEC. At the Vienna meeting, Iran complained that it is really producing more than reported, while Iraq wanted a dispensation similar to Iran’s (which has allowed the country to expand its production back to pre-sanction levels), claiming that it has a war to fight and needs the revenues.


Venezuela, the UAE (United Arab Emirates), and Kuwait are each facing their own special problems — Venezuela in particular. President Nicolás Maduro made a personal trip to Vienna (some said in order to get away from the increasing unrest back home) to press the point: He needs more money to cover the increasing deficits his socialist policies are costing his government.


At the end of the day, several things were clear: First, there was no agreement, nor is one likely. If OPEC countries can’t agree, how could any non-OPEC oil producers (such as Russia) be persuaded to go along with any agreement to cut production to raise prices?


Second, any production cut (if there is one) would likely be borne primarily by OPEC’s largest producer, Saudi Arabia, which just completed its first (and perhaps last?) global bond offering for $18 billion initiated to slow the liquidation of its foreign reserves. Last year it liquidated nearly $100 billion of those reserves while playing the increasingly unsuccessful and costly game of chicken with U.S. producers.


In addition, U.S. energy producers are already announcing new capital expenditures while bringing on rigs that were temporarily idled during the downturn. Nick Cunningham, writing for OilPrice.com, noted another problem facing OPEC: In January there were 5,576 DUCs — drilled but uncompleted wells — just waiting for the right conditions for them to be completed. Since then more than 500 of them have been brought online, profitably, with most of the rest, according to observers, likely to be completed by the second quarter of 2017 — barely five months from now. What OPEC ultimately is facing is the vast and increasing disparity between what it costs them to bring a barrel of oil to the surface, and what it costs for American producers to complete a DUC. Since most of the up-front costs have already been expended, the marginal cost to bring a DUC well online is way below the current price of $50 a barrel. The math is persuasive, and U.S. oil producers are reacting accordingly.





In other words, OPEC is engaged in a game that it initiated and which it is now discovering that it cannot win and cannot quit. In the process, OPEC is becoming increasingly irrelevant while U.S. producers are pushing ahead, continuing to turn America into a country that is not only self-sufficient for its own energy needs but is also increasingly supplying the world.


The OPEC bickering is likely to intensify as the reality sinks in that the cartel has painted itself into a corner. Venezuela is facing existential questions, while most of the others are on an unsustainable path of decreasing revenues to fund socialist welfare programs that were never affordable and are now strangling the governments.  


It’s likely that those revenues will continue to fall despite what OPEC may do (or more likely, not do) in November. Investors and producers are expecting oil prices to fall sharply, as measured by their “short” positions in the futures markets. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), there were more than 540,000 short positions (taken by those expecting oil prices to fall) as of October 11 — the most in nearly 10 years.


 Image: OPEC flag


An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

California’s Anti-gun Prop 63 Likely to Pass

California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom’s (shown) campaign to run for something (either governor of the state or for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat when she retires) in 2018 is likely to get a significant boost when Proposition 63 passes next month. Prop 63 won’t do anything to restrict criminal gun violence, but it will raise him from obscurity, provide his campaign (which he announced in February last year) with mailing lists and funding sources, and propel him into national prominence.


In other words, Prop 63 is all about Newsom. As sponsor of the anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment bill, Newsom has taken plays from the Brady anti-gun playbook and sold them to the California low-information voters, who are being influenced by the bill’s support from Senators Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, various mayors, and three of the state’s largest newspapers. At last count, more than 90 percent of Democrats and a hefty majority of Republicans support the bill.


The bill, which Newsom calls his “Safety for All” measure, would, he says, “help save countless lives.” Its primary focus, according to Newsom, is on ammunition: It would, effective January 1, 2018, require purchasers of ammunition to undergo background checks and have the sale recorded permanently onto a new database maintained by the California Department of Justice. If a seller sells more than 500 rounds in any 30-day period, he would have to become a licensed ammunition vender and would be forced to sell ammunition only face-to-face, not by mail.





In addition the proposition would create a “new court process … for the removal of firearms from individuals upon conviction of certain crimes” according to the state’s voter information guide. In addition, it would ban the possession of magazines holding more than 10 rounds. That guide goes on to parrot the traditional anti-gun promises of similar bills:


Proposition 63 will improve public safety by keeping guns and ammunition out of the wrong hands. Law enforcement and public safety leaders support Prop. 63 because it will reduce gun violence by preventing violent felons, domestic abusers, and the dangerously mentally ill from obtaining and using deadly weapons and ammo.


That it’s a phony political ploy is evident from the fact that the bill would only apply to California residents. Nonresidents would be exempt. Nonresidents such as criminals, illegal immigrants, out-of-state terrorists, gang members and convicted felons “can bring ammunition into California all they want,” according to Kim Rhode. Rhode, a six-time Olympic medal winner in the shooting sports and an honorary life member of the National Rifle Association, added: “This tells you how fundamentally twisted this proposition really is. It will cause the police and the state to divert resources to monitor law-abiding citizens [who] are not causing any problems, but will do nothing to stop criminals.”


Rhode is joined by numerous individuals and groups who see the bill for what it really is, including 10 professional law-enforcement associations and John Malcolm, director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation:


This law would make criminals out of people who are morally blameless. These are special taxes and background checks on ammunition, just to make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms. It’s an assault on the Second Amendment.


Agreeing with Malcolm’s assessment of the bill’s malevolent results is Michele Hanisee, president of California’s Association of Deputy District Attorneys for Los Angeles County:


For one thing, this initiative would do nothing to stop criminals from acquiring ammunition, guns, or large-capacity magazines. But it would make it prohibitively difficult for responsible gun owners to obtain ammunition for sport and home defense.


As prosecutors, we would enthusiastically support any proposed law that promised to be a realistic tool against gun violence. But Prop. 63 is simply bad public policy. Its passage would have zero effect on criminals — other than to encourage them to commit more crimes. At the same time, it would criminalize the conduct of ordinary citizens.


Passage of Proposition 63, which now appears to be certain, will turn out to be a two-fer: 1) a further infringement of precious rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the citizens of California, and 2) a boost from obscurity to national prominence the highly popular former mayor of San Francisco and current radio host who has his eyes set on 2018 political opportunities.


An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Schools All Over America Are Closing On Election Day Due To Fears Of Violence

empty-schools-classroom


Will this be the most chaotic election day in modern American history? All across the nation, schools are being closed on election day due to safety fears. Traditionally, schools have been very popular as voting locations because they can accommodate a lot of people, they usually have lots of parking, and everyone in the community knows where they are and can usually get to them fairly easily. But now there is a big movement to remove voting from schools or to shut schools down on election day so that children are not present when voting takes place. According to Fox News, “voting has been removed or classes have been canceled on Election Day at schools in Illinois, Maine, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and elsewhere.” Just a couple days ago, I shared with you a survey that found that 51 percent of all Americans are concerned about violence happening on election day, and all of these schools closing is just another sign of how on edge much of the population is as we approach November 8th.


Many officials are being very honest about the fact that schools are being shut down on election day because they are afraid of election violence. The following comes from Fox News



Several schools across the nation have decided to close on Election Day over fears of possible violence in the hallways stemming from the fallout from the heated rhetoric that consumed the campaign trail.


The fear is the ugliness of the election season could escalate into confrontations and even violence in the school hallways, endangering students.


“If anybody can sit there and say they don’t think this is a contentious election, then they aren’t paying much attention,” Ed Tolan, the Falmouth, Maine police chief, said Tuesday. His community has already called off classes on Nov. 8 and an increased police presence will be felt around town.



And without a doubt, voting locations are “soft targets” that often have little or no security. We have been blessed to have had such peaceful elections in the past, but we also need to realize that times have changed. I believe that there is wisdom in what Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp told reporters



“There is a concern, just like at a concert, sporting event or other public gathering that we didn’t have 15 or 20 years ago,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, co-chairman of the National Association of Secretaries of State election committee. “What if someone walks in a polling location with a backpack bomb or something? If that happens at a school, then that’s certainly concerning.”



All it is going to take is a single incident to change everything.


Let us hope that it is not this election day when we see something like that.


Another reason why polling locations are under increased scrutiny this election season is because of concerns about election fraud. This is something that Donald Trump has alluded to repeatedly on the campaign trail. For instance, just consider what he told a rally in Pennsylvania



“We don’t want to lose an election because you know what I’m talking about,” Trump told an overwhelmingly white crowd in Manheim, Pa., earlier this month. “Because you know what? That’s a big, big problem, and nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody has the guts to talk about it. So go and watch these polling places.”



And of course reports are already pouring in from around the country of big problems with the voting machines. In Illinois this week, one candidate personally experienced a machine switching his votes from Republicans to Democrats…



Early voting in Illinois got off to a rocky start Monday, as votes being cast for Republican candidates were transformed into votes for Democrats.


Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan went to vote Monday at the Schaumburg Public Library.


“I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” Moynihan said. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.”



In addition, if you keep up with my work on The Economic Collapse Blog, then you already know that a number of voters down in Texas have reported that their votes were switched from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton.


Well, it turns out that those voting machines appear to have a link to the Clinton Foundation



According to OpenSecrets, the company who provided the alleged glitching voting machines is a subsidiary of The McCarthy Group.


The McCarthy group is a major donor to the Clinton Foundation – apparently donating 200,000 dollars in 2007 – when it was the largest owner of United States voting machines. Or perhaps the 200,000 dollars went to paying Bill Clinton for speeches?


Either way, it doesn’t look good.



After everything that we saw in 2012, I am convinced that there is good reason to be concerned about the integrity of our voting machines.


But Democrats don’t like poll observers, because they think that having too many poll observers will intimidate their voters…



“It’s un-American, but at the same time we have a long history of doing things like that,” Ari Berman, author of the 2016 book “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” previously told The Christian Science Monitor. “Voting was very, very dangerous. I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that we’re at the same place today. I just think the loss of the [official poll observers] is going to be really problematic.”



Without a doubt, this has been the craziest election season that we have seen in decades, and I have a feeling that it is about to get even crazier.


But will the end result be the election of the most corrupt politician in the history of our country?


If that is the outcome after all that we have been through, it will be exceedingly depressing indeed.


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NEW Donna Brazile email shows more questions given to Hillary in advance.

Download raw source



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From: Donna Brazile <donna@brazileassociates.com>
To: "john.podesta@gmail.com" <john.podesta@gmail.com>,
Jennifer Palmieri <jpalmieri@hillaryclinton.com>
CC: Adrienne Elrod <aelrod@hillaryclinton.com>,
Minyon Moore <Minyon.Moore@deweysquare.com>
Subject: One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with
a rash
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with a rash
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Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2016 23:16:34 +0000
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Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary=
do as president to help the ppl of Flint.

Folks, I did a service project today. It"s so tragic. And what"s worse, som=
e homes have not been tested and it"s important to encourage seniors to als=
o get tested.

Sent from Donna"s I Pad. Follow me on twitter @donnabrazile

Is This Why Comey Broke: A Stack Of Resignation Letters From Furious FBI Agents

Conspiracy theories have swirled in recent days as to why FBI Director James Comey reopened Hillary"s email investigation after just closing it back in July concluding that, although Hillary had demonstrated gross negligence in her establishment of a private email server, that "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring a case against her.  Democrats, after lavishing Comey with praise for months on concluding his investigation in an "impartial" way, have since lashed out at him for seeking to influence the 2016 election cycle with Hillary herself describing his recent actions as "deeply troubling".  Republicans, on the other hand, have praised Comey"s recent efforts as an attempt to correct a corrupt investigation that seemingly ignored critical evidence while granting numerous immunity agreements to Clinton staffers.


According to the Daily Mail, and a source close to James Comey, the decision, at least in part, came after he "could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI" who "felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist."



James Comey"s decision to revive the investigation of Hillary Clinton"s email server and her handling of classified material came after he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI, including some of his top deputies, according to a source close to the embattled FBI director.


"The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn"t recommend an indictment against Hillary," said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass every week.


"Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall," said the source. "They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist."


According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice.


He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom.


"The people he trusts the most have been the angriest at him," the source continued. "And that includes his wife, Pat. She kept urging him to admit that he had been wrong when he refused to press charges against the former secretary of state.



Though we"re sure there are many facets behind Comey"s decision making process, we can all be quite certain, at this point, that he"s not motivated by a desire to make friends having now alienated just about everyone in Washington, both in law enforcement and in both political parties.  In fact, after Tim Kaine just last week praised Comey as a "wonderful" career public servant with the "highest standards of integrity"....



...everything has now been turned on it"s head with Hillary calling his latest moves "unprecedented and deeply troubling"...seemingly implying an attempt, on the part of Comey, to "rig" the election from Trump.



Meanwhile, President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch are apparently also "furious" with Comey over his recent decision.



His announcement about the revived investigation, which came just 11 days before the presidential election, was greeted with shock and dismay by Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the prosecutors at the Justice Department.


"Jim told me that Lynch and Obama are furious with him," the source said.


"Lynch and Obama haven"t contacted Jim directly," said the source, "but they"ve made it crystal clear through third parties that they disapprove of his effort to save face."



And while the decision to reopen the case may appease FBI agents and republicans, in the short-term, we suspect it does very little to restore overall faith in his competence.  As such, we continue to question just how long Comey can hold out before being forced to resign his post.  At a bare minimum, in light of his continued questionable judgement and serious doubts raised about the integrity of the first investigation, we fail to understand how an independent investigation into Hillary"s email server isn"t warranted.

Genetically Modified Crops in U.S. Fail to Deliver on Promise of Greater Crop Yield and Diminished Pesticide Use

LONDON — The controversy over genetically modified crops has long focused on largely unsubstantiated fears that they are unsafe to eat.


But an extensive examination by The New York Times indicates that the debate has missed a more basic problem — genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides.


The promise of genetic modification was twofold: By making crops immune to the effects of weedkillers and inherently resistant to many pests, they would grow so robustly that they would become indispensable to feeding the world’s growing population, while also requiring fewer applications of sprayed pesticides.


Twenty years ago, Europe largely rejected genetic modification at the same time the United States and Canada were embracing it. Comparing results on the two continents, using independent data as well as academic and industry research, shows how the technology has fallen short of the promise.


An analysis by The Times using U.N. data showed that the United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany. Also, a recent National Academy of Sciences report found “there was little evidence” that the introduction of genetically modified crops in the United States had led to yield gains beyond those seen in conventional crops.


At the same time, herbicide use has increased in the United States, even as major crops like corn, soybeans and cotton have been converted to modified varieties. And the United States has fallen behind Europe’s biggest producer, France, in reducing the overall use of pesticides, which includes both herbicides and insecticides.


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Clintons Are Under Multiple FBI Investigations as Agents Are Stymied

Disgraced Former Congressman Anthony Weiner and His Wife, Long Time Hillary Clinton Aide, Huma Abedin
Disgraced Former Congressman Anthony Weiner and His Wife, Longtime Hillary Clinton Aide, Huma Abedin


Current and former FBI officials have launched a media counter-offensive to engage head to head with the Clinton media machine and to throw off the shackles the Loretta Lynch Justice Department has used to stymie their multiple investigations into the Clinton pay-to-play network.


Over the past weekend, former FBI Assistant Director and current CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst Tom Fuentes told viewers that “the FBI has an intensive investigation ongoing into the Clinton Foundation.” He said he had received this information from “senior officials” at the FBI, “several of them, in and out of the Bureau.” (See video clip from CNN below.)


That information was further supported by an in-depth article last evening in the Wall Street Journal by Devlin Barrett. According to Barrett, the “probe of the foundation began more than a year ago to determine whether financial crimes or influence peddling occurred related to the charity.” Barrett’s article suggests that the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, has attempted to circumvent the investigation. The new revelations lead to the appearance of wrongdoing on the part of U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch for secretly meeting with Bill Clinton on her plane on the tarmac of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport on the evening of June 28 of this year. Not only was Bill Clinton’s wife under an FBI investigation at the time over her use of a private email server in the basement of her New York home over which Top Secret material was transmitted while she was Secretary of State but his own charitable foundation was also under investigation, a fact that was unknown at the time to the public and the media.


The reports leaking out of the FBI over the weekend came on the heels of FBI Director James Comey sending a letter to members of Congress on Friday acknowledging that the investigation into the Hillary Clinton email server was not closed as he had previously testified to Congress, but had been reopened as a result of “pertinent” emails turning up. According to multiple media sources, those emails were found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide, Huma Abedin.


Weiner was forced to resign from Congress in 2011 over a sexting scandal with more sexting scandals to follow. Early this month, on October 3, the FBI raided Weiner’s apartment in New York with a search warrant in hand and seized multiple electronic devices. At least one of those devices had been used by both Weiner and Abedin to send email messages. The search warrant had been obtained following a detailed report that had appeared in the Daily Mail newspaper in the U.K. in September, showing sordid, sexual emails that Weiner had allegedly sent to a 15-year old girl in North Carolina. According to the content of the published emails, Weiner was aware that the girl was underage.



Read MOre...

John Pilger: Inside The Invisible Government: War, Propaganda, Clinton And Trump

The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda.


The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.


In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade – behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”


Bernays’ influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War. The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order to “control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it”.


He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government”.


Freud had a cousin called Edward Bernays, who has since earned the title “father of Public Relations”. Bernays took Freud’s idea and applied it to consumers. If desire is our driving force, then appealing to emotions is the most powerful way to persuade consumers to act. The idea was to short circuit their rational conscious and get them where they were most vulnerable – the unconscious

Freud had a cousin called Edward Bernays, who has since earned the title “father of Public Relations”. Bernays took Freud’s idea and applied it to consumers. If desire is our driving force, then appealing to emotions is the most powerful way to persuade consumers to act. The idea was to short circuit their rational conscious and get them where they were most vulnerable – the unconscious



Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged.


Imagine two cities. Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people. But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties.


In the second city – in another country nearby – almost exactly the same is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics.


The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by “us” – by the United States and Britain. They even have a media centre that is funded by Britain and America.


Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city – which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city.


Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad.


Iraq War as portrayed on two popular American news magazines. One as the terrorist and one as the hero saviours

Iraq War as portrayed on two popular American news magazines. Terrorists and  hero savours are typical propaganda images



What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria.


Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today.


Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Blair was “vindicated” for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell’s fabrications.
The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, “What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?”


He replied that if journalists had done their job, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq”.


It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question — Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous.


In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul.


There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7th July 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps.


When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoise Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria – and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande’s bombast about France being “at war” and “showing no mercy”. That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak.


“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”


The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.


The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an “agreement” that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable.


As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.


From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage.


Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.”



Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia — and with careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post.


These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.


And they love war.


While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life.


Daily Mail reports thatA Libyan revolutionary fighter has bragged in a leaked video that he was the man who killed Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, that country

Daily Mail 25 Oct 2011: reports that “A Libyan revolutionary fighter has bragged in a leaked video that he was the man who killed Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, that country’s despotic former ruler. The young man, who is pictured but has not yet been identified, said he killed the fallen dictator because he could not bear the thought of taking him alive.”



In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Muammar Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people. That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie.


In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to call “regime change” in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi’s influence in the continent and, above all, his independence were intolerable.


So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France. Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, “We came, we saw, he died!”


The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian: “Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong.”


Intervention – what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction.


According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. The Unicef report on the children killed says, “most [of them] under the age of ten”.


As a direct consequence, Sirte became the capital of ISIS. Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war.


All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.


This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war. Once again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil.


The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine – except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.


Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.


There is almost the joie d’esprit of a class reunion of warmongers. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.


To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show, in which Donald Trump is the arch villain. But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behaviour and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America’s design for the 21st century.


This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia, and, if possible, China.


To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk with the president of China.


In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, “I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.” That was not news.


Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House.


Anti-Trump Boston Globe Sunday Edition Crosses the Line From News into Propaganda

Anti-Trump Boston Globe Sunday Edition Crosses the Line From News into Propaganda



The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world – unlike Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China.


Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq. When she ran against Obama in 2008, she threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran. As Secretary of State, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and Honduras and set in train the baiting of China.


She has now pledged to support a No Fly Zone in Syria – a direct provocation for war with Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime – a distinction for which the competition is fierce.


Without a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public.


That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders.


Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way – in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target.


Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on November 8th, If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will mention Clinton’s victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defence drills being conducted in Russia. None will recall Edward Bernays’ “torches of freedom”.


George Bush’s press spokesman once called the media “complicit enablers”.


Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from history.


In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”



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