Mapping Where Coups Are Most Likely To Occur In 2017

As disaffected Hillary supporters around the U.S. continue to live in "complete terror" that Trump"s Presidency may mark the beginning of the end of American democracy, here is a map highlighting where, according to a study from the Washington Post, coups may actually occur in 2017.

Among other things, the study estimates the probability of a coup based on type of government in place, personal freedoms, economic prosperity and access to the internet and other forms of communication.

We use a small number of statistical models to create separate forecasts for the risk of a successful coup, like in Thailand in 2014, or failed coup attempt, like in Turkey in 2016. Then we combine them to get a single forecast for the risk of a coup attempt for each country. The complete forecasts are available in a CSV file, and we explain the technical details in a separate post.

The models look for patterns in past coup attempts using data from 1960 to 2017 that we assembled using the Powell and Thyne coup data, Polity Project, World Development Indicators, Armed Conflict Dataset, global food prices (FAO), oil prices (BP) and the Gleditsch and Ward list of states.

Here are some of the things that what we included: how long the current leader has been in power, whether he or she was chosen democratically and the type of government in place. We also consider GDP, economic growth, population and infant mortality; these variables are more difficult to construct in war-torn or highly authoritarian societies, but we use estimates wherever required. We tabulate information about the spread of communication technologies — specifically, Internet access and cellphone ownership.

Below is a list of the 30 places that a coup attempt is the most likely in 2017.  Burundi and Thailand came in at the very top of the list with a 12% and 11% chance of a 2017 coup, respectively, while Russia, the election hacking masters of the globe, came in at number 20.

High-risk cases all have markers for instability, however. For example, Burundi has been in crisis since May 2015 when President Pierre Nkurunziza sought and obtained a third term.

Thailand has been under martial law, with strong restrictions on civil liberties, since the 2014 coup. The country approved a new constitution in 2016 and scheduled elections for 2017 — but, as some researchers point out, elections often increase the risk of further coup attempts.

Meanwhile, WaPo asserts that the United States is about one-third as likely to experience a coup in 2017 as Nigeria and Niger due to a "high infant mortality rate" compared to other developed countries.

Russia, maybe. We estimate that the risk in Russia is about 6 percent, which places it in the top 20 countries risk-wise. If one were to occur, the odds are 2 to 1 that if would fail.

The U.S. presidential transition has also led to Russian claims that a coup may occur in the United States. The same statistical models suggest that the U.S. risk is about 2 percent — and ranks the United States No. 103 out of 161 countries. The risk may seem high but reflects the variable for infant mortality, which is higher in the U.S. than in other developed countries.

Why do we suspect that a "high infant mortality rate" wouldn"t have been weighted quite so high on this study had Hillary been elected instead of Trump?

The Other 'Ban' That Was Quietly Announced Last Week

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Most of the world is in an uproar right now over the travel ban that Donald Trump hastily imposed late last week on citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries.

But there was another ban that was quietly proposed last week, and this one has far wider implications: a ban on cash.

The European Union’s primary executive authority, known as the European Commission, issued a “Road Map” last week to initiate continent-wide legislation against cash.

There are already a number of anti-cash legislative measures that have been passed in individual European member states.

In France, for example, it’s illegal to make purchases of more than 1,000 euros in cash.

And any cash deposit or withdrawal to/from a French bank account exceeding 10,000 euros within a single month must be reported to the authorities.

Italy banned cash payments above 1,000 euros back in 2011; Spain has banned cash payments in excess of 2,500 euros.

And the European Central Bank announced last year that it would stop production of 500-euro notes, which will eventually phase them out altogether.

But apparently these disparate rules don’t go far enough.

According to the Commission, the presence of cash controls in some EU countries, coupled with the lack of cash controls in other EU countries, creates loopholes for criminals and terrorists.

So that’s why the European Commission is now working to standardize a ban on cash, or at least implement severe restrictions and reporting, across the entire EU.

The Commission’s roadmap indicates that forthcoming legislation, likely to be enacted next year.

This is happening. And it may serve as the perfect case study for the rest of the world.

A growing bandwagon of academics and policy makers in other countries, including the United States, UK, Australia, etc. has been calling for prohibitions against cash.

It’s always the same song: cash is a tool for criminals and terrorists.

Harvard economist Ken Rogoff is a leading voice in the War on Cash; his new book The Curse of Cash claims that physical currency makes the world less safe.

Rogoff further states “all that cash” is being used for “tax evasion, corruption, terrorism, the drug trade, human trafficking. . .”

Wow. Sounds pretty grim.

Apparently pulling out a $5 bill to tip your valet makes you a member of ISIS now.

Of course, this is total nonsense.

A recent Gallup poll from last year shows that a healthy 24% of Americans still use cash to make all or most of their purchases, compared to the other options like debit cards, credit cards, checks, bank transfers, PayPal, etc.

And the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released a ton of data late last year showing that:

• 52% of grocery purchases, along with personal care products, are made in cash


• 62% of purchases up to $10 are made in cash


• But even at much higher amounts over $100, nearly 1 in 5 purchases are still made using physical cash

This doesn’t sound life nefarious criminal activity to me.

It seems that perfectly normal, law-abiding citizens still use cash on a regular basis.

But that doesn’t seem to matter.

A bunch of university professors who have probably never been within 1,000 miles of ISIS think that a ban on cash would make us all safer from terrorists.

You probably recall the horrible Christmas attack in Berlin last month in which a Tunisian man drove a truck through a crowded pedestrian mall, killing 12 people.

Well, the attacker was found with 1,000 euros in cash.

The logic, therefore, is to ban cash.

I’m sure he was also found wearing pants. Perhaps we should ban those too.

This idea that criminals and terrorists only deal in bricks of cash is a pathetic fantasy regurgitated by the serially uninformed.

I learned this first hand, years ago, when I was an intelligence officer in the Middle East: criminals and terrorists don’t need to rely on cash.

The 9/11 attackers spent months living in the United States, and they routinely used bank accounts, credit cards, and traveler’s checks to finance themselves.

And both criminal organizations and terrorist networks have access to a multitude of funding options from legitimate businesses and charities, along with access to a highly developed internal system of credit.

A cash ban wouldn’t have prevented 9/11, nor would it have prevented the Berlin Christmas attack.

What cash controls do affect, however, are the financial options of law-abiding people.

These policymakers and academics acknowledge that banning cash would reduce consumers’ financial privacy. And that’s true.

But they’re totally missing the point. Cash isn’t about privacy.

It’s one of the only remaining options in a financial system that has gone totally crazy.

Especially in Europe, where interest rates are negative and many banks are on the verge of collapse, cash is a protective shelter in a storm of chaos.

Think about it: every time you make a deposit at your bank, that savings no longer belongs to you. It’s now the bank’s money. It’s their asset, not yours.

You become an unsecured creditor of the bank with nothing more than a claim on their balance sheet, beholden to all the stupidity and shenanigans that they have a history of perpetrating.

Banks never miss an opportunity to prove to the rest of the world that they do not deserve the trust that we place in them.

And for now, anyone who wishes to divorce themselves from these consequences can simply withdraw a portion of their savings and hold cash.

Cash means there is no middleman standing between you and your savings.

Banning it, for any reason, destroys this option and subjects every consumer to the whims of a financial system that is stacked against us.

Do you have a Plan B?

Congresswoman Who Says U.S. Funds ISIS Just Got Back from Syria: Here's What She Found

Submitted by Darius Shahtahmasebi via TheAntiMedia.org,

Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, the lawmaker who accused the U.S. government of funding and arming ISIS and introduced a bill to prevent it from happening in future, recently disclosed that she met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during her recent trip to Syria. The move has reportedly angered many of her fellow congressmen and women.

Upon returning from the war-stricken nation, Gabbard released the following statement in the form of a press release:

“My visit to Syria has made it abundantly clear: Our counterproductive regime change war does not serve America’s interest, and it certainly isn’t in the interest of the Syrian people.

“As I visited with people from across the country, and heard heartbreaking stories of how this war has devastated their lives, I was asked, ‘Why is the United States and its allies helping al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups try to take over Syria? Syria did not attack the United States. Al-Qaeda did.’ I had no answer.”

According to the press release, Gabbard met with refugees, Syrian opposition leaders who led protesters in 2011, widows and family members who fight alongside al-Qaeda groups, pro-Assad troops, humanitarian workers, and students, to name a few. Gabbard also met with high-ranking officials such as Lebanon’s newly-elected President Aon and Prime Minister Hariri, as well as U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Elizabeth Richard, Syrian President Assad, Grand Mufti Hassoun, and Archbishop Denys Antoine Chahda of the Syrian Catholic Church of Aleppo.

Initially, Gabbard allegedly had no intention of meeting Assad, as she stated in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

“When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so because I felt that it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we can achieve peace,” she told Tapper.

The meeting with Assad is incredibly controversial because of numerous allegations by the U.N. that Assad has committed crimes against humanity.

“Whatever you think about President Assad, the fact is that he is the president of Syria,” she added. “In order for any peace agreement, in order for any possibility of a viable peace agreement to occur there has to be a conversation with him.”

Not surprisingly, the media has hyped up this visit as outrageous but has omitted some very glaring hypocrisies that arise as a result of Gabbard’s trip to Syria.

First, the Obama administration and Bush administration both drew serious allegations of war crimes, but if Gabbard had met with either of those former presidents, it’s doubtful anyone would have batted an eyelid.

Second, former Secretary of State John Kerry met with Assad in 2009, even though, after nine years in office, Assad was clearly responsible for all of the things western media has been relentlessly accusing him of doing since 2011.

Third, Gabbard’s meeting symbolizes the ridiculousness of America’s foreign policy decision-making system. A few hundred old men and women who have never been to Syria — nor care to go — sit in a room and deliberate a piece of paper deciding whether or not to drop million dollar tomahawk missiles on a relatively poor country. Even when these decision-makers are well aware of the horror their edicts will unleash, they are never required to visit the country, talk to its people, or understand the situation and better educate themselves. In the case of Syria, Congress wasn’t even required to approve the air campaign that began in 2014, as Obama authorized airstrikes without their approval anyway.

Gabbard’s move should be applauded — not ridiculed. Singling Assad out as some sort of mass-murdering psychopath while foreign leaders routinely meet with alleged war criminals such as Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia’s leadership, and Henry Kissinger, to name a few, is the epitome of U.S.-NATO arrogance.

Gabbard may have met with a mass murderer, but she also met with numerous people on the ground — the people who matter most. After doing so, she concluded:

“I return to Washington, DC with even greater resolve to end our illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government. I call upon Congress and the new Administration to answer the pleas of the Syrian people immediately and support the Stop Arming Terrorists Act. We must stop directly and indirectly supporting terrorists—directly by providing weapons, training and logistical support to rebel groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and ISIS; and indirectly through Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Turkey, who, in turn, support these terrorist groups. We must end our war to overthrow the Syrian government and focus our attention on defeating al-Qaeda and ISIS.”

No one can criticize her strategy because, for the last six years, no one has even attempted it.

Trump Announces Supreme Court Nominee - Live Feed

Moments from now, President Trump will announce his much anticipated nominee to fill Antonin Scalia"s vacant seat on the Supreme Court of the United States.  Rumors of the most likely picks have been making the rounds for weeks with Judge Neil Gorsuch of Colorado emerging as a front-runner in recent days.  That said, per the Washington Post, Trump has beckoned both Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman to Washington D.C. in advance of tonight"s announcement sparking rampant social media debate over whether their will be a last-minute Apprentice-style challenge to determine the ultimate winner.

CNN reported that Judge Neil Gorsuch of Colorado was already in Washington and that Judge Thomas Hardiman was on his way from Pittsburgh. There was no comment from the White House about why both men were needed in the capital, but social media exploded with satirical comparisons to Trump’s television show “The Apprentice,” as well as “The Bachelor.”

Gorsuch, 49, and Hardiman, 51, have emerged as Trump’s most likely choices. A third person on the shortlist — Judge William Pryor of Alabama — has seen his chances diminish as some Republican Senate leaders have said his confirmation would be a difficult.

Pryor’s outspokenness about overturning Roe v. Wade and other controversial remarks when he was Alabama’s attorney general made even his confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit a years-long ordeal.

Of course, with several Democrats in the Senate vowing to fight any nominee that Trump puts forward, tonight"s announcement is likely the easiest part of what will undoubtedly be a very contentious and drawn out path to confirmation.  As we noted before (see "Schumer Vows To Fight Trump Supreme Court Nominee: "We’re Gonna Oppose Him Tooth And Nail""), "Fake Tears Chuck Schumer" recently told MSNBC"s Rachel Maddow that he plans to fight Trump"s pick "tooth and nail."

“We are not going to settle on a Supreme Court nominee."

"If they don’t appoint someone who’s really good, we’re gonna oppose him tooth and nail.”

"It"s hard for me to imagine a nominee that Donald Trump chooses that would get Republican support that we could support."

All of which brings us to the inevitable final question of whether Republicans in the Senate have the intestinal fortitude to implement the "nuclear option", something we suspect Democrats would do, and have done, with minimal hesitation.

The odds are heavily skewed towards Gorsuch...

With that, here is President Trump with his decision:

Meet America's Newest Supreme Court Justice: Judge Neil Gorsuch

Confirming a choice that many had already pegged as a front-runner to fill Antonin Scalia"s vacant seat, President Trump just officially announced Judge Neil Gorsuch as his nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States. 

Per Politico, Gorsuch has the typical pedigree of a Supreme Court Justice with degrees from Columbia, Harvard and Oxford.  Moreover, Gorsuch"s professional background includes time at a Washington law firm, the Department of Justice and clerkships with Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy.

Gorsuch has the typical pedigree of a high court justice. He graduated from Columbia, Harvard and Oxford, clerked for two Supreme Court justices and did a stint at the Department of Justice.  He attended Harvard Law with former President Barack Obama.

His work background includes time as a partner with the Washington law firm Kellogg Huber Hansen Todd Evans & Figel, a stint with the U.S. Department of Justice and clerkships with Supreme Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy.

Since 2006, he has served on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, in Colorado. His supporters note that he is an outdoorsman who fishes, hunts and skies. On the court, conservatives hope he could become the intellectual heir to Scalia, long the outspoken leader of the conservative bloc.

For conservatives, Gorsuch meets conservative standards as an originalist and a textualist — someone who interprets the Constitution and statutes as they were originally written. His family has ties to the Republican party locally and in Washington, and at the age of 49, he could sit on the high court for decades — a big plus for conservative supporters.  Per The Denver Post:

Gorsuch is best known nationally for taking the side of religious organizations that opposed parts of the Affordable Care Act that compelled coverage of contraceptives. In one of those cases, Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, he wrote of the need for U.S. courts to give broad latitude to religious beliefs.

“It is not for secular courts to rewrite the religious complaint of a faithful adherent, or to decide whether a religious teaching about complicity imposes ‘too much’ moral disapproval on those only ‘indirectly’ assisting wrongful conduct,” he noted in a concurring opinion.

The Supreme Court later ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, which now is not required to subsidize birth control that it finds objectionable.

Gorsuch also has written against euthanasia and assisted suicide, the latter of which Colorado legalized last November. “All human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong,” he wrote in his 2006 book “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia.”

Of course, while his conservative record will no doubt be enticing to Republican Senators, Gorsuch"s past support of term limits may draw criticism from both sides of the aisle...we can"t have anyone disrupting the power structure of Washington D.C. now can we?

One position that might give pause to the lawmakers voting on his nomination is his past advocacy on behalf of term limits. In 1992 he co-wrote a paper for the Cato Institute that argued term limits are “constitutionally permissible.”

“Recognizing that men are not angels, the Framers of the Constitution put in place a number of institutional checks designed to prevent abuse of the enormous powers they had vested in the legislative branch,” he wrote. “A term limit, we suggest, is simply an analogous procedure designed to advance much the same substantive end.”

As a side note, per the The Denver Post, Gorsuch comes from a well known Republican family whose mother served in the Reagan Administration before being forced to resign in 1983, facing a criminal investigation and a House contempt of Congress citation over records related to alleged political favoritism in toxic-waste cleanups. 

Gorsuch comes from a well-known Colorado Republican family. His mother, the late Anne Gorsuch Burford, was Environmental Protection Agency director for the Reagan administration for 22 months. She slashed the agency’s budget and resigned under fire in 1983 during a scandal over mismanagement of a $1.6 billion program to clean up hazardous waste dumps.

With that, let the Senate confirmation theatrics commence!

Sizing Up The Bubble - A Major Inflection Point Is Coming

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

Fund manager John Hussman is always good for dramatic charts. Here’s a recent one:

This ratio is even scarier than it looks, says Hussman:

Historically-reliable valuation measures now approach those observed at the 2000 bubble peak. Yet even this comparison overlooks the fact that in 2000, the overvaluation featured a subset of very large-capitalization stocks that were breathtakingly overvalued, while most stocks were more reasonably valued (see Sizing Up the Bubble for details). In many ways, the current speculative episode is worse, because it has extended to virtually all risk-assets.

To offer some idea of the precipice the market has reached, this chart shows the median price/revenue ratio of individual S&P 500 component stocks. This median now stands just over 2.45, easily the highest level in history. The longer-term norm for the S&P 500 price/revenue ratio is less than 1.0. Even a retreat to 1.3, which we’ve observed at many points even in recent cycles, would take the stock market to nearly half of present levels.

One of the reasons share prices have risen so dramatically relative to revenues is that corporations are earning a lot more on each dollar of sales these days. How are they doing that? By squeezing their workers.

The following chart, from the Economic Policy Institute shows labor’s share of corporate income plunging recently.

The next chart illustrates the same point from a different angle. Workers, it seems, have been producing more per hour but their pay hasn’t kept up as their bosses held onto more of the resulting profit.

A big part of this has been due to offshoring. If you close a factory where the workers make $30 an hour and set up in a place where your new workers make $5, then the $25 difference flows to the bottom line. Other contributors are automation, which is both inexorable and hugely favorable for the guys who own the robots, and the fact that the minimum wage in many states has kept up with neither the true inflation rate nor the increase in free-trade driven corporate earnings.

As EPI’s Josh Bivens puts it:

This 6.8 percentage-point decline in labor’s share of corporate income might not seem like a lot, but if labor’s share had not fallen, employees in the corporate sector would have $535 billion more in their paychecks today. If this amount was spread over the entire labor force (not just corporate sector employees) this would translate into a $3,770 raise for each worker.

For stock market investors, the scary thing about this imbalance between capital and labor is that it’s only temporary. As the details and magnitude of the scam have been exposed, the political tide has shifted. At the national level, fed-up US workers have installed an anti-free trade administration that is already tilting the playing field towards domestic workers. At the state and local level, calls for a higher minimum wage are being heard and acted upon. A major French party has even nominated a presidential candidate who wants to tax robots.

So it’s safe to assume that the above charts will develop serious inflection points going forward, as a rising share of profits flow to the nether regions of the org chart and investors respond by lowering the value they place on a given dollar of corporate revenues.

As Hussman notes, just a return to 1990s valuation levels would cut the average US stock in half.

Crisis of EU Banking, Break-Up of the European Union (EU)? ECB Head Mario Draghi

Draghi’s speech at an investment conference in London boosted markets at the time and forced down Spain and Italy’s borrowing costs after saying; “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.” The markets responded because they were effectively being manipulated.

Known as “Outright Monetary Transactions” the scheme was to have been deployed alongside a QE programme from March 2015, itself racking up ¢80billion a month. Several trillion euros later and the EU looks as precarious as ever with growth a distant memory.

In Italy, yields on bonds dropped from 6.3 per cent to 1.2 per cent after that famous speech and all seemed good – on the face of it. But deep down, it was not as we had been led to believe. Italy’s government debt grew and is now equal to 133 per cent of GDP. When Ireland imploded and had to be fully bailed out by the ECB, it’s debt pile was 132.2% of GDP.

With all this intervention, the ECB’s balance sheet ballooned – set to overtake the U.S. Fed Reserve and has now reached over $3trillion according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch (not to be confused with national debt).

Then, totally off the mainstream media radar came news that another Italian bank had disintegrated. And while attention was focused on the rescue of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which is still not fully finalised, news came that Banca Etruria, has quietly slipped into bankruptcy.

“It was announced (Dec 21st) that the first part of an investigation concerning fraudulent bankruptcy charges (at Banca Etruria), in which 21 board members are implicated, had been closed. This strand of the investigation concerns €180 million of loans offered by the bank which were never paid back, leading to the regional lender’s bankruptcy and eventual bail-in/out last November that left bondholders holding virtually worthless bonds.”

Next up and out of the blue comes UniCredit, the country’s largest bank. It is seeking to raise €13bn of desperately needed capital but large as though this is, the biggest problems, according to the FT is that the smaller banks, like Banca Etruria, are now in a perilous position and on the verge of falling over the cliff edge.

Italy has banks on every street corner, with more branches per capita than any other OECD country. The lack of growth (occurred since it joined the Euro), has suppressed much needed profits on the one hand whilst seeing poor wage growth on the other, causing drastically increased non-performing loans that now add up to an eye-watering €360billion.

The FT reports that Italian banks “have long sold their own shares and debt to their retail customers as an attractive alternative to savings products, a disgraceful practice that should never have been allowed. It means that ordinary Italians, many in retirement, have already suffered as bank shares have fallen. They will suffer much more in a bail-in.”

The FT is suggesting that a full bail-in is on the cards. It is. truepublica reported back in September that banks throughout the EU would simply steal depositors money if any of them failed now that new bail-in rules had been implemented. And that is exactly what is happening.

The result of all this is that Mario Draghi, clearly feeling the strain, has finally admitted defeat and said that there is a strong possibility of the EU falling apart. This time the tactic to keep unity was to threaten every country in the EU by stating that leaving the Eurozone would cost dearly and would require any member country to settle its claims or debts with the bloc’s payments system before severing ties. There’s nothing to stop a desperate member country from leaving and simply defaulting.

According to ArmstrongEconomics, “This statement reveals the heated discussion at Davos and the rift that is beginning to spread. This statement, (Draghi) was made in a letter to two Italian lawmakers in the European Parliament.”

Martin Armstrong himself says “Southern Europe, which are the weaker economies including Italy, Spain, and Greece, have accumulated huge liabilities to keep the euro afloat while Germany stands out as the biggest creditor with net claims of €754.1 billion euros. This alone may set off the massive capital flight to the dollar. We are looking at the complete collapse of the Quantitative Easing carried out by the ECB since 2008 without any success.”

German Minister for Economic Affairs Sigmar Gabriel, the most senior Social Democrat in Angela Merkel’s government, also warned just last week that the EU could fall apart if populists in France and the Netherlands win national elections later this year.

So convinced are aides to US President Donald Trump that the EU is on the verge of a breakup that they recently asked EU officials over the phone which countries will be next to leave the bloc after Britain.

In the meantime, the man tipped to be Donald Trump’s ambassador to the European Union has told the BBC the single currency “could collapse” in the next 18 months.

Even the creator of the Euro professor Otmar Issing has predicted that Brussels’ dream of a European superstate will finally be buried amongst the rubble of the crumbling single currency he designed accusing eurocrats and German leader Angela Merkel, of “betraying the principles of the euro and demonstrating scandalous incompetence over its management” – pointing a finger directly at Mario Draghi’s failing monetary policy.

Economists, commentators, experts and pundits are now divided when it comes to the survival prospects of the Euro in the near term and even that fact alone has considerably worsened since last year. With the head of the ECB Mario Draghi admitting an eventual break-up is a possibility, probability is that much higher than previously ever imagined.