I’m no fan of English politicians. Born a Rhodesian, I consider myself a casualty, having been on the receiving end of their deceit and moral cowardice when they deemed it expedient to abandon principle, promises, and their own kith and kin, simply because the world suddenly decided that Europeans had no right to be in Africa. But watching the shambles unfold at Westminster is not something I celebrate. If the English got nothing else right, they were the absolute masters of good governance. Thanks in no small way to them, the structures of government and law they introduced to countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand, to name only a few, provided the bedrock for the success of some of the most stable and prosperous nations in history. But they seem to have lost the capacity to do what they once did so brilliantly, and a once great power seems well on the way to self-inflicted anarchy.

Part of the problem may lie in the lamentable arrival of the age of the professional politicians who now dominate the country’s political landscape. Jeremy Corbyn, a Trotskyite, who is in with a good chance of forming the next government, is a charmless party hack who has never had a proper job and doesn’t seem to like his country much. John Bercow, the influential Speaker and former right-winger, who has added to the parliamentary chaos with his arbitrariness, has spent most of his adult life in politics. Diane Abbott, who seems possessed of the same mathematical acumen as Jacob Zuma, is another brain-dead political pro who may be the next Home Secretary, guarding the country’s borders and keeping the citizenry safe. The most recent vote in the Commons, which frustrates the will of a majority of over 17 million Brexiteers, has been passed thanks to last-minute support of the motion from MP Fiona Onasanya. She did so wearing the electronic ankle tag with which she was fitted on leaving Her Majesty’s Prison Bronzefield in Surrey, where she was doing time for lying to the police. The British ruling class is awash with like people who have devoted most of their lives to climbing the party ladder as an end in itself and, in the process, have lost touch with the ordinary people who elevated them in the naive hope that their MPs cared about them.

“Looking at the country’s political leadership, one is struck by an overwhelming sense of weakness and mediocrity.”
Looking at the country’s political leadership, one is struck by an overwhelming sense of weakness and mediocrity. But maybe this is democracy, in action; reflective of an aimless, docile electorate that has lost confidence in itself. This loss of self-belief and pride in country has its roots in a school system that enforces a history curriculum designed to induce a sense of shame. As Lenin famously and accurately said, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.” Since the end of WWII Britons have been exposed to a relentless barrage of guilt-inducing propaganda aimed at convincing them that they should be ashamed of themselves because they once ran a great empire based on pride in their systems, their military might, and their economic success. This has all been snuffed out, and this is why the sudden rise of Donald Trump across the Atlantic was greeted with a profound sense of dismay by so many Brits.

Trump is cut from a different cloth from most of them. He is not a professional politician, but a determined pragmatist who has worked and prospered in business in some tough neighborhoods. He shook the political stage because he understood the plight of his people better than the intellectuals; the media and politicians in their ivory towers, comfortably distanced from the real world on the streets. Thus, he paved his path to power with the votes of a middle class weary of being ignored by the professional politicians who have taken over the Democratic Party. Once he had gotten their attention, his masterstroke was to excite his supporters with his pugnacious patriotism, his loudly proclaimed pride in his country and its history, and his strident call to “Make America Great Again.”

Trump’s campaign horrified millions of cowed Brits and triggered outrage from the press, as well as the politicians who have done such a thoroughly good job of whipping the electorate into submission. They were and remain terrified of the prospect of the British working class being roused into the same sort of sweeping response to a similar message.

Such was the fury of the leadership, some of their politicians, including Corbyn and London mayor Sadiq Khan, have considered refusing the leader of the country’s most powerful and loyal ally entry into the U.K. One cannot help but think it is the messenger, not the message, that has enraged these people. Why else would a man be so loathed because he wants to secure his borders, cut the best trade deals for his country, grow the economy, cut taxes, reduce unemployment, make peace with North Korea, and withdraw from senseless wars?

It struck me the British attitude to Trump is comparable to their treatment of the late Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith and the government and people he led when he defied British demands to surrender power. Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister at the time, was essentially a communist, one of the early architects of the nanny state and an intellectual (in his eyes anyway) whose heart seemed to be in the Soviet Union rather than with the people and country he was elected to lead. He was ashamed of Britain’s colonial past, so when confronted by Smith, who was a proud product of that era, Wilson was repulsed and set out to destroy the Rhodesian leader regardless of the merits of the Rhodesian leader’s case. Alas, the British succeeded. But there is some irony in this; the British refused to grant independence to Rhodesia, and now the E.U. is doing the same thing to them. They say what goes around comes around.

Big Old Problem Just Re-Erupted on Eurozone’s Southern Flank
by Don Quijones • Apr 11, 2019 • 23 Comments • Email to a friend

Don QuijonesApr 11, 2019
Italy’s fiscal health is once again in serious decline.

By Don Quijones, Spain, UK, & Mexico, editor at WOLF STREET.

On Wednesday, Italy’s coalition government slashed its growth forecast for the Italian economy in 2019 to 0.2% – the weakest forecast in the Eurozone – from a previous forecast of 1%. Italy is already in a technical recession after chalking up two straight quarters of negative GDP growth in the second half of 2018.

The government’s budget for this year was based on the assumption that the economy would expand by 1% this year. Now, it seems the economy may not grow at all; it could even shrink.

One direct result of this is that Italy’s current account deficit for 2019 will be substantially higher than the 2.04% of GDP Italy’s government pledged to stick to late last year. And that can mean only thing: another standoff between Rome and Brussels over the direction of fiscal policy is in the offing.

Italy already boasts the largest public debt pile in Europe in nominal terms, clocking in at €2.14 trillion, as well as the second largest in relative terms after Greece’s twice bailed out economy. Rome just forecast that public debt would hit a new record high of 132.6% of GDP this year. That record is unlikely to last very long given Italy’s stagnating economy and the government’s determination to cut taxes, reduce the retirement age and introduce a citizens’ basic income.

The biggest problem with Italy’s economy is that many of its problems are chronic and deep seated. Many of them date back to the adoption of the euro, in 2000, or in the case of Rome’s massive addiction to public debt, to the 1980s. As the OECD points out, real GDP in Italy is still well below its pre-crisis peak. Italy is also the only OECD country where incomes (as measured by GDP per capita) are no higher than in 2000. By contrast, in France, Spain, the UK and Germany they have risen during the same period by 13%, 17%, 21% and 23 respectively.

The IMF now envisages Italy’s public debt ratio ratcheting up to 134.4% of GDP in 2020 to 138.5% in 2024. As the debt increases, so too will the interest payments on the debt. That is unsustainable, especially with much of that debt scheduled to fall due in the next few years. In 2019 alone, Italy has an eye-watering €250 billion of bond redemptions to fund, which is roughly the equivalent of all Eurozone bond maturities this year.

And now Rome doesn’t even have the ECB to rely on to buy up over half of the bonds it issues. Of course, in these yield-starved times investors will gobble up higher yielding Italian bonds, at least for a while. But a risk that those yields will climb too high, at which point bond vigilantes will take matters into their own hands, as happened in 2012 when the yields on Italy’s 10-year bonds soared to 7%.

Before that happens again, something will have to give. If Italy had its own currency and were in control of its own monetary policy, it could try to inflate the debt away — whatever that might do to its own currency. But it isn’t and it can’t. Alternatively, it could, like Greece, default on its debt, with dire consequences for holders of that debt, including Italian households and domestic and foreign banks.

The one other option open to Rome is one that has also already been tried, with limited success, by Greece — i.e., to slash public spending, hike taxes, privatize public assets, squeeze the informal economy, and impose a harsh austerity regime. This is the path recommended by the OECD, but it would virtually guarantee electoral suicide for Italy’s coalition government partners which will do whatever they can to avoid alienating the very voters who gave them their first real taste of power.

In other words, none of these classic solutions are realistic options for a country as big and as systematically important as Italy. That the country is now being run by two relatively nascent anti-austerity parties that are not wholly enamored with the European project and as such are willing to face down diktats from Brussels, at least up to a point, further heightens the risk of conditions spiraling out of control.

Italy is home to an extremely fragile financial sector with the highest NPL ratio and lowest return on assets of any of the major European economies. The French government has already warned that an economic recession in Italy could pose as great a risk, if not greater, to the EU than Brexit.

And it makes sense for the French government to be worried. The economies of both Italy and France are tightly interwoven, with annual trade flows of around €90 billion. More important still, French banks are, by a long shot, the largest foreign owners of Italian public and private debt, with total holdings of €311 billion as of the 3rd quarter of 2018, according to the Bank for International Settlements. If Italy defaulted, French banks would take an almighty hit to their balance sheets. By Don Quijones.

“The traditional private equity model should have no place in retail.” Read… UK-Based Multinational Department Store Debenhams Collapses, After 200 Years of Trading

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Socialism again raises its ugly head.

Source: Germany to Decide if It Can Nationalize Private Property | Armstrong Economics

Source: Living a Legend

My take is that Julian is being arrested for doing the same thing to Western Governments that they are doing to their own citizens. The irony of such an action flies in the face of logic.

Source: What Julian Assange’s Arrest Tells Us

Liquidity injections and zero interest rate policies disguise risk and may give a false sense of security. This risk could not be more evident today.  Not only have we seen large downgrades to consensus growth estimates and central banks’ expectations of GDP and inflation, leading indic

Source: Central Banks Are Heading Toward a Stagnant Global Zombie Economy | Daniel Lacalle

Source: Democrats Pushing Us to War? | Armstrong Economics

Take My Wives, Please
photo credit: Bigstock
Take My Wives, Please
MILWAUKEE—There’s never been a better time to be a polygamist.

All over Africa and the Middle East they’re loosening up the laws so that a man can rack up as many marriages as he can pay for, although I think the strictly Islamic countries are gonna hold you to four women at a time. If you want that fifth one, you have to eeny-meeny-miny-mo the others and pick one to divorce. Sounds a little harsh, I know, but thankfully they make the actual divorce easy. I think all you have to do is go to the town square, scream out “I divorce thee” seven times, roast a pigeon, throw back a Red Bull, and voilà! you’re divorced! You don’t need Gloria Allred. You don’t need Raoul Felder. You don’t even need a Grand Caymans bank account. You might have to give her family a couple of goats, but that’s it.

But that’s not what I mean when I say it’s a good time to be thinking, “I’m gonna go big on wives this year.”

It’s happening right here in the Newnited States.

Slowly making their way through the courts are some cases that say it’s unfair and possibly unconstitutional to make polygamy a crime. The legal reasoning harks back to the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage. Since many of the overturned state laws defined marriage as “one man and one woman,” and since the court said the words “man” and “woman” were illegal, people are saying, “Well, yeah, okay, then the word ‘one’ is illegal too.” What right does the state have to say marriage is two people? It could be seventy people, and if you’re Warren Jeffs, it actually is seventy people. Warren is currently serving life-plus-twenty at the Powledge Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections in Palestine, Texas, but if one of these cases gains traction, who knows? He could be back in action as the stud bull of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Warren would probably be a free man today if he’d just shown a little restraint and followed the example of his father, who left a mere eighty children by a measly twenty wives, and therefore never served a day in jail.

But that’s the whole point of these cases, many of which, by the way, are being brought by the women in the harems. They feel like their civil rights are being violated by cops and prosecutors constantly harassing the man who keeps ’em all pregnant and sheltered. What are they supposed to do if he’s hauled off to San Quentin? Put a group photo on Match-dot-com?

“What right does the state have to say marriage is two people?”
My own view is that would-be wife collectors would be better off following the example of the late Ted V. Mikels, the Las Vegas filmmaker responsible for the immortal Astro-Zombies, the women-in-prison action flick 10 Violent Women, plus forty or so other movies including The Corpse Grinders, Blood Orgy of the She-Devils, and The Doll Squad. (By the way, you guys on the internet who keep crediting Mikels with the 1972 classic Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things should be ashamed of yourselves. That was Bob Clark, who would go on to drive-in sainthood with Black Christmas, Porky’s, and A Christmas Story.)

But my point is this: Besides being the last guy in America to successfully sport a handlebar mustache, Ted was all about group sex, multiple women, orgies, whatever, and so he bought a Vegas mansion with many rooms and just moved women in until the place was full. No marital contract. No cops. He had a come-and-go harem not unlike Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, first in Chicago and then later in Los Angeles. The difference is that Hugh tended to get attached to one woman and put a lot of restrictions on the women staying there, whereas Ted was playing erotic musical chairs to keep those rooms full. The Lifetime Network has a hit series called Escaping Polygamy, but if the producers tried to infiltrate the Ted Mikels compound, they would just end up with some pissed-off hookers and strippers who didn’t like being photographed without full body makeup. Ted was following the lead of another great artist, William Faulkner, who believed the atmosphere most conducive to writing was an apartment upstairs from a whorehouse.

But since it looks like the future is gonna include all kinds of sexual groupings, both legalized and impromptu, I’d like to offer some advice to the strapping young would-be sultans who plan to buy a condo on South Beach and populate it with wives and/or concubines.

Numero Uno: It’s not the sex that kills you, it’s the social media.

A couple of decades ago I was doing TV specials every year from the Super Bowl. So one year I was at the Super Bowl in Miami doing some videos with the great Fred Williamson, better known as The Hammer, who played in the very first Super Bowl but went on to even greater fame as the star and sometime director of such classics as Black Caesar, Hell Up in Harlem, Black Cobra, Three the Hard Way, and dozens of other tough-guy movies.

During the course of our shooting week, the girlfriend of an NFL player “outed” her beau by announcing that he actually had 28 other girlfriends—this may have been an early email hack, but I don’t remember—and the media reaction was to castigate the guy as a womanizer. (Duh.) So I made a few jokes about it and noted that the reason he got caught was that he couldn’t keep up with the phone calls, much less the birthdays—and, let’s face it, he wouldn’t have been able to sustain that much action beyond Feb. 14 anyway without faking his own death and then faking his own resurrection. So in the course of discussing it, Linda Williamson, Fred’s wife of many years, chimes in that Fred had probably easily outdistanced a mere 28-girl Rolodex at the time they met, and Fred responded with one of those million-dollar smiles that told me he would neither confirm nor deny but that, indeed, the logistics can destroy you.

Now transpose that into marriage. You’re not gonna be able to handle the calls, the texting, the “how was your day” thing, even when you get your second wife, much less your fifth one. Sure, you can buy an SUV and take them all to one big Valentine’s Day dinner, but it better cost thousands of dollars because…

Numero Two-o: You should probably calculate $5 million per wife, already banked, before you embark on this lifestyle. Then add a million every time you father a child.

You wanted to be Big Daddy, right? Okay, that’s what Big Daddy does. He pays for the day spa, the Botox, the weekly trip to Bergdorf’s, and the around-the-world cruise with the stars of Arrested Development (because Wife No. 3 just loves Arrested Development). The footwear bill alone is gonna stretch toward seven figures annually.

Numero Three-o: If you do what most of these guys do, and keep bringing in younger and younger wife material, the management of the original wife and her immediate successors becomes exceedingly complex.

As strife develops among the wives, you will be presented with arguments so byzantine that they would vex a senior judge at the Hague. You will become a household lawmaker, police chief, and enforcer of meal times. This will be unending. This will require answering email at 4 a.m. Bedrooms will need to be reassigned. Entire wings will be constructed for internal political reasons. This will become a full-time job in addition to the full-time real job that keeps your house of cards from collapsing.

Numero Four-o: Two words: health insurance. Lloyd’s of London.

But the main reason you probably wanna pass on the opportunity to run a seraglio is all about vanity.

Numero Five-o: Whether you want to be or not, you will become the star of a reality show.

On this reality show, your life will be dissected like a bullfrog in tenth-grade biology class. And eventually someone on one of these shows will say the equivalent of “You know what the surprising thing is? He’s not that good in bed!”

You have orchestrated your own castration. Since everyone watching from the outside wants to believe you’re “not that good in bed,” a cascade of rumors will pursue you. You are an impotent satyr, a ghost of a man, who uses his money to hide his inadequacy. You will be lampooned as a shallow buffoon. Your life is over. All you can do at that point is run for president.

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Financial markets seem to have a great deal of confidence in the effectiveness of central bank monetary policy — in the sense that by keeping interest rates low, or bring interest rates down, the economies will keep expanding and asset prices, in particular, will keep rising.

Source: Central Banks Are Propping Up Stock Prices | Thorsten Polleit

Happening: Obama White House Counsel INDICTED for Lying to Mueller Team
First of many indictments to come in wake of now-completed FBI probe into Russia-Trump collusion

Infowars.com – April 11, 2019
An attorney for the White House under President Barack Obama has been indicted by the Trump Justice Department for allegedly lying about his lobbying work for a former Ukrainian president.

On Thursday DOJ charged former White House Counsel Greg Craig with two counts of making false statements regarding his connections to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

In a twist of irony, Craig’s alleged dealings were brought to light by FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, making him the first Democrat to be indicted as a result of the now-completed probe.

“The Washington-based lawyer was indicted by a grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for allegedly falsifying and concealing “material facts” and making false statements to the DOJ National Security Division’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) Unit, which is responsible for enforcing foreign lobbying laws,” reports Fox News.

“Craig allegedly made false statements to investigators looking into whether he appropriately registered foreign agent under FARA, which requires lobbyists to declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders, governments or their political parties.”

In the indictment [see below], Craig is quoted as asking a partner in a February 12 email: “I don’t want to register as a foreign agent under FARA. I think we don’t have to with this assignment, yes?”

Craig allegedly lobbied for Yanukovych in 2012 while he served as a partner at the Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom law firm, helping the ousted president write a report defending his government’s decision to prosecute the country’s former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko.

“Craig’s former law firm… reached a settlement with the Justice Department in January to resolve an investigation into the firm’s role in working on the Tymoshenko report and the subsequent public relations rollout,” reports Buzzfeed News. “The firm didn’t face criminal charges, but agreed to retroactively register as an agent for a foreign government and pay the US Treasury $4.6 million, representing the money the firm earned for its work.”

The settlement, Buzzfeed notes, cleared the firm as an entity, notably excluding individual partners who could later be charged.

The indictment charges Craig purposely avoided registering as a foreign agent for various purposes and benefits.

“The purpose of the scheme was for Craig to avoid registration as an agent of Ukraine,” the indictment reads. “Registration would require disclosure of the fact that Private Ukrainian had paid Craig and the Law Firm more than $4 million … [and] undermine the Report and Craig’s perceived independence; and impair the ability of Craig and others at the Law Firm to later return to government positions.”

According to Fox News,

Craig faces a total of up to 10 years in prison — up to five years and a possible $250,000 fine for allegedly willfully falsifying and concealing material facts from the FARA Unit, and another five years and $10,000 fine for making false and misleading statements to the FARA Unit.

“Mr. Craig is not guilty of any charge and the government’s stubborn insistence on prosecuting Mr. Craig is a misguided abuse of prosecutorial discretion,” Craig’s lawyers argued in a statement.

Each charge against Craig carries a maximum punishment of up to five years in prison.

Craig served as White House lawyer under President Barack Obama from 2009-2010 and previously served as assistant to the Bill Clinton White House, where he defended Clinton against impeachment.

Read the full indictment below:

CNN admitted that President Trump was aware of news on the Obama spying scandal thanks to Infowars.

Alex Jones points out how that means is Infowars is tomorrow’s new today!