Mês: maio 2019

Bill Bonner’s Diary

Por | 26 maio, 2019 | , |

America’s Debtball Express Picks Up Speed   Van Bryan May 26, 2019 This week, dots were connected. Claptrap was busted. Bill looks to the woeful tale of Venezuela… the revival of the same old mistakes from the Great Financial Crisis… and even gives a firsthand account of Ireland’s red-hot real estate market. But, like a satellite around a star, much of Bill’s attention orbited the thoughts of one dear reader, who suggested that Bill should just hop on the Trump bandwagon. “Well,” begins Bill, “it’s really quite simple.” As our editor explains, President Trump took office in early 2017. He became head conductor of America’s Debtball Express. The Donald could have thrown on the brakes and sounded the alarm. But he didn’t. He stoked the flames and pushed the engine for more. Now, the old locomotive is picking up speed. And the tracks are coming undone. Ireland’s “Great Crumble” For decades, many of Ireland’s homes were left to fall into disrepair. This “great crumble” left many great estates a shadow of their former selves. But now, investment is flooding into the Emerald Isle once again. House prices are on the rise. And that’s caught the attention of Ireland’s “world improvers.” How America Goes Full-Venezuela As Bill so often says, Venezuela is an “economic basket case.” This country was once the richest in Latin America. Now, it’s destitute. What happened?...

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USAmerica Attack on China

Por | 25 maio, 2019 | , , |

America’s Delusional Attack On Huawei And The Start Of A New Era   Matthew Ehret May 25, 2019   American policy makers continue their delusional bid to control the world exhibiting a scale of denial that would make Hitler’s belief in Germany’s possible victory during his final days in the bunker appear to be totally reasonable. The most recent foray into delusion includes the recent executive order passed by the White House putting an effective ban on Huawei’s entry into the USA and slashing of American business relations with the telecommunications giant. The executive order declares a state of emergency due to the “unacceptible risk posed to american interests” by the fact that China’s intelligence agencies apparently control Huawei and are at the heart of cyber-espionage and sabotage of America’s greatness. The 5 Eyes/Deep State Attack on China The forces who have led this McCarthyite attack on China over the past years are directly tied to the deep state structures that controlled the Obama presidency and began this attack on the potential cooperative platform of USA-China scientific partnership in earnest with the 2011 banning of China’s involvement with NASA. This act, which led to China’s elimination from the International Space Station (ISS) forced an incredible leap to technological self-sufficiency when China created its own space station (Heavenly Palace) and ambitious Chang-e space program that has quickly made it a...

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USAmerica’s Dictatorship and Democracy

Por | 21 maio, 2019 | , |

D Is for a Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy   John W. Whitehead May 7, 2019   “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” — Professor Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Discourse in the Age of Show Business What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theater. And what political theater it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing. Played out on the national stage and eagerly broadcast to a captive audience by media sponsors, this farcical exercise in political theater can, at times, seem riveting, life-changing and suspenseful, even for those who know better. Week after week, the script changes (Donald Trump’s Tweets, Congress’ hearings on Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, the military’s endless war drums, the ever-widening field of candidates for the 2020 presidential race, etc.) with each new script following on the heels of the last, never any let-up, never any relief from the constant melodrama. The players come and...

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Donald Trump’s Ironies

Por | 21 maio, 2019 | , |

[US]America, You Are Fired!   Dmitry Orlov May 7, 2019 Some ironies are just too precious to pass by. The 2016 US presidential elections gave us Donald Trump, a reality TV star whose famous tag line from his show “The Apprentice” was “You are fired!” Focus on this tag line; it is all that is important to this story. Some Trump Derangement Disorder sufferers might disagree. This is because they are laboring under certain misapprehensions: that the US is a democracy; or that it matters who is president. It isn’t and it doesn’t. By this point, the choice of president matters as much as the choice of conductor for the band that plays aboard a ship as it vanishes beneath the waves. I have made these points continuously since before Trump got into office. Whether or not you think that Trump was actually elected, he did get in somehow, and there are reasons to believe that this had something to do with his wonderfully refreshing “You are fired!” tag line. It’s a fair guess that what motivated people to vote for him was their ardent wish that somebody would come along and fire all of the miscreants that infest Washington, DC and surrounding areas. Alas, that he couldn’t do. Figurehead leaders are never granted the authority to dismantle the political establishments that install them. But that is not to...

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Civilization

Por | 21 maio, 2019 | , , |

Clash or Crisis   Pepe Escobar May 18, 2019   Talk about a graphic display of soft power: Beijing this week hosted the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations.  Organized under the direct supervision of President Xi Jinping it  took place amid an “Asian Culture Carnival.”  Sure, there were dubious, kitschy and syrupy overtones, but what really mattered was what Xi himself had to say to China and all of Asia. In his keynote speech, the Chinese leader essentially stressed that one civilization forcing itself upon another is “foolish” and “disastrous.” In Xi’s concept of a dialogue of civilizations, he referred to the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as programs that “have expanded the channels for communication exchanges.” Xi’s composure and rationality present a stark, contrasting message to US President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign. West vs East and South Compare and contrast Xi’s comments with what happened at a security forum in Washington just over two weeks earlier. Then, a bureaucrat by the name of Kiron Skinner, the State Department’s policy planning director, characterized US-China rivalry as a “clash of civilizations,” and “a fight with a really different civilization and ideology the US hasn’t had before.” And it got worse. This civilization was “not Caucasian” – a not so subtle 21st century resurrection of the “Yellow Peril.” (Let us recall: The “not Caucasian” Japan of World War...

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