Left Click Here for Video: then click on open link in new window and listen to "Shoulder Taps."
My son taught me how to transfer this type of e mail - hurrah for Daniel
I have listened to most of the hysteria regarding how Trump sold America down the river, he let Putin get away with murder, Trump is a traitor, blah, blah, blah. I even listened to Gen. Jack Keane, who I very much respect, and who I am trying to be the next President Day Speaker. He was very specific that Trump did not handle the meeting as he should have. I am not sure I totally agree with Keane but I think he made some telling points.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I am no State Department type but I do not believe McCain, Biden, Obama, most of
our State Department cookie pusher, stripe pants types have been excessively correct in calling the shots. So Trump is trying to weave his way through the mess he inherited, the diplomatic mistakes we have made and Putin's own level of insecurity and desire to keep Russia world stage player.
I am willing to let this meeting, N Korea's meeting and Iran play themselves out because too early to tell where Trump's efforts will take the world. I am no lawyer but I did learn in law school to let facts reveal themselves and allow time for that to happen.
That said, I still believe when Obama told Medvedev to tell Putin 'wait til after the election when I will have more flexibility' was far more dangerous and gave Putin all he needed to know he was dealing with a golf playing patsy.
Trump expels Russian diplomats, increases domestic oil drilling, is maintaining Russian sanctions, is getting NATO to up their contributions while Obama drew red lines and sent pallets of cash to Iran and lied.
I listened to the entire Wallace interview of Putin who came across as the equivalent of The FBI's Strzok without the smirk. In Putin's case he has cold blue eyes.
It is obvious, both The FBI and The KGB train from a similar playbook which allows them to twist facts, avoid questions and reply to their own reconstructed concept. Of course nothing happens at the level of Russian interference without it being fully known by Putin and his government's operatives.
Even the history of those who were involved with the Clinton's and mysteriously disappeared bears a close resemblance to Putin's adversaries.
That said, I am not sure those who attack Trump for not being more aggressive are necessarily correct. I do understand many are attacking Trump for appeasement yet failed to hang that tag on Obama when he went to Egypt and attacked Mubarak and praised The Muslim Brotherhood but then double standards are fair game when it comes to protecting the anointed Hillary and Obama. When it comes to hating Trump anything goes.
I stick with what Trump is doing not always with what he says or the way he handles himself as demonstrated by the cartoon I posted showing The Queen carrying his golf clubs as he trooped the line..
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What Israel did. (See 1 below.)
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Ross Rants again. (See 2 below.)
Dick
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1) Inside Israel’s Raid to Seize Nuclear Documents in Iran
Agents infiltrated Tehran warehouse, extracted trove including partial warhead designs, officials say
By Gerald F. Seib
TEL AVIV—Israeli agents covertly extracted documents detailing Iran’s nuclear program in a dramatic 6½-hour operation in Tehran in January, removing a trove of materials that included partial designs for a nuclear warhead, senior Israeli intelligence officials said.
The Israeli team secretly reached the warehouse holding the materials and broke in during a tight time window when it knew the building would be unguarded, the officials said. To avoid drawing attention to the nondescript facility, Iran hadn’t posted full-time guards, they said, but rather relied on alarm systems that the Israeli agents disabled.
The Israeli operation was first revealed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at an April press conference in which he declared that the stolen documents proved Iran had lied for years in claiming it didn’t have a nuclear-weapons program.
In a lengthy briefing at a security facility here last week, senior Israeli intelligence officials disclosed additional details about the operation. Those include specifics on how the documents were removed from Iran; the existence within the documents of the warhead designs, for which Israel said Iran got unspecified foreign assistance; the operation of a secret explosives-testing facility that international inspectors had long searched for in vain; and a scramble by Iranian officials to keep their nuclear program alive after international inspectors concluded it had been suspended.
An image of what Israeli officials say is an original document from Iran that describes plans to make some nuclear programs “covert.” PHOTO:ISRAELI GOVERNMENT
All those assertions go beyond what Mr. Netanyahu disclosed in April, and in most cases were buttressed by photographs and Power Point presentations that the Israeli officials said were taken directly from the Iranian files. The documents track, and in some cases repeat,revelations and assumptions made previously by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but also provide specifics—including, for example, the existence of an underground metallurgical testing facility—about which international inspectors were unaware.
It is impossible to verify Israel’s claims about the documents, which Iranian officials dismissed in April as an “orchestrated play” designed to turn the Trump administration against the agreement President Barack Obama and other world leaders negotiated to curb Iran’s nuclear activities. President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the accord in May.
Alireza Miryousefi, a minister-counselor at Iran’s U.N. mission,said in response to the new allegations: “Iran has always been clear that creating indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction is against what we stand for as a country and the notion that Iran would abandon any kind of sensitive information in some random warehouse in Tehran is laughably absurd. It’s almost as if they are trying to see what outlandish claims they can get a Western audience to believe.”
The Israelis said that Mr. Trump was briefed on the materials in Washington early this year, and that the documents now have been shared with the IAEA.
The Israeli officials said the seeds for the operation were planted when they received intelligence in 2016 that Iran had decided to consolidate and then hide away documents detailing its past nuclear activities, in the wake of its agreement with the U.S. and five other world powers that stopped it uranium-enrichment activities. Israel tracked the movement of the documents until January 2017, when they were moved into the warehouse on the southern outskirts of Tehran, the officials said.
Israel then began planning to steal the trove, in an operation that one official likened to the casino heist in the movie “Ocean’s Eleven.” The officials worried along the way that Iran might again move them to avoid discovery.
Upon entering the warehouse, the Israeli agents found two large containers housing 32 safes, the officials said. Israel had intelligence steering the agents to focus their efforts on specific safes.
The officials declined to say precisely how the agents broke into the safes, or the route they then used to exit Iran. They said the stash is enormous, running to some 50,000 pages of printed material, plus 183 computer disks with additional files.
Israeli officials acknowledge that the documents are dated; much of the activity they allegedly chronicle occurred before 2003. That is when Iran disclosed and appeared to halt much of its known nuclear research in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and President George W. Bush’s designation of Iran as part of an “axis of evil,” which led to speculation Iran might be next on the American hit list.
Moreover, much of the activity the documents chronicle already was disclosed or suggested in IAEA reports in 2011 and 2015
In particular, the Israeli intelligence officials showed documents indicating that Iranian nuclear experts, after shutting down a nuclear research program known by the code name AMAD in 2003, moved by early September of that year to shift many of its activities into the newly formed Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research.
But Israeli officials contend that the documents are significant in two respects: They show that Iran’s weapons-related activities advanced further than previously realized, the officials asserted, and that they substantiate previous suspicions that Iran shifted some of those activities into new, disguised channels so they could continue well after 2003.
Iranian nuclear scientists, two of whom later were assassinated under mysterious circumstances, are quoted in one document discussing the need to distinguish between “overt” nuclear research activities, which could continue because they could be shown to have peaceful purposes, and “covert” activities that had to be hidden because they could only be attributed to a nuclear-weapons program.
A series of other documents and photos purportedly involve one particularly sensitive Iranian facility, within a military complex known as Parchin, which the IAEA long suspected housed a firing chamber used to test explosives that could be used to ignite a nuclear explosion.
When the IAEA finally gained access to the facility in 2015, it found no such chamber, but said extensive demolition and refurbishing of the site had seriously undermined the agency’s ability to determine whether such a chamber had been there.
The new materials include more than a dozen photographs of what Israeli intelligence officials said was the explosives chamber at Parchin, as well as reports on experiments conducted there.
Israeli officials said they hope the disclosure of the new details will prompt the IAEA to demand new inspections of sites in Iran and draw out further explanations of the program’s parameters from Iranian officials.
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2)
We continue to hear a lot about the yield curve, and the fear that it is flattening and could become inverted. In the past, inverted yield curves have generally meant a recession is following. This time may be different, and the hype about the yield curve might be unfulfilled. The difference now between the ten year and 30 year is around 10 basis points, depending on the day. That is essentially flat. The difference is long term rates generally gets impacted by what the market believes will be inflation longer term, as that would push up the term premium. The market seems to be saying that there will be modest inflation long term which keeps the long rate low. Hopefully that will prove right.
Globalization and the Amazon affect, plus AI keeping costs down, all will help inflation stay lower than we would have expected in the past, so the 30 year will probably stay low for a while. Wages are the key now, and so far there seems to be many more people on the sidelines who have decided to look for a job now that the job market is so strong. On the other hand, there are no workers left for oil field work, hotels, food service or other low end dirty jobs. There is a real issue in the oil fields since it takes a lot of training to do drilling, and there are just no workers left with the training. It is not just having a few days training. It takes time. Wages for well qualified rig workers is around $150,000-$200,000, but even that is not getting the trained guys since there are none left not working. At the low end, hotel and food service workers can go to a factory or warehouse and make much more than in a hotel. The hotel industry has a major problem that it is aware of, but nobody wants to talk about NOI, and they just talk about Revpar, since that hides the real crisis unfolding with cash flow as the worker shortage worsens. The next year for hotels cash flow is going to get ugly in many cases. Either wages go way up, or rooms do not get cleaned and food service becomes bad. This means guests get angry, and rates and occupancy suffer eventually. There is no answer for shortages of labor other than higher wages in hotels, restaurants and similar places. It is unlikely the flat yield curve will predict a recession this time.
CLO's -collateralized loan obligations, are back. These are similar to the old CDO's in that they are pieces of loans left after a CMBS offering or in some cases floaters, or other loans originated outside of the CMBS market. For the moment, they are real loans fairly well underwritten, but over time they will morph into lower quality and dicer securities. Happens every cycle. Along comes the next batch of "smart MBA's" who push the envelope, and then comes the dicier deals. There are differences from CMBS, but in the end it is the quality of the underlying loans that matters. Quality will deteriorate at some point.
Now the UK is in the same bad place as Germany in that the leader is very weak and might be voted out at any time if the Conservatives can find a viable candidate. It is just one more reason that the world is undergoing a vast change from the post war rules of the game to a new generation of leaders driven by more of a populist approach. Since the war, the world operated with a certain set of ways of doing things, and diplomatic niceties. Human rights was a major issue. Stopping the Soviets and now Russia, and basically the US subsidizing everyone, was the way things were done. That era is now over. Trump has drawn a line in the sand and voters in the EU and the US have said it is time for a new approach. Most commentators and politicians worry we are causing our "allies" to be angry with us. Reality check- "allies" are only allies so long as they can take advantage of us. The EU used us to protect them from the Soviets in the cold war, and to fund their recovery from the war. Unfortunately, once recovery happened and the cold war ended, the US continued to be the sucker, and to fund the EU, and to pay for 80% of their military protection. The EU were our allies so long as we paid them to be. Geopolitics is just like business, a party is your friend only so long as it is to his economic advantage to be a friend. If a better offer comes along, your "friend" and ally is off to the better offer. Countries are no different. They are like people, they act in their own best interests. So long as the Soviets, and then Russia, presented a threat, and so long as we were paying the bills, they are our "allies". Now Trump is saying out loud, the king has no clothes. He is calling on the EU to share their own defense costs and responsibilities, and to trade with us on a fair basis, and not on the old basis which advantaged them. He is correct that the gas pipeline give Putin complete control of the EU, and especially Germany, now that they closed all of the coal and nuke power plants, and left themselves at Putin's mercy in the name of climate change. Merkel correctly figured that so long as the US (Obama) was willing to pay and be disadvantaged on trade, and on NATO costs, why not take advantage. Obama was weak, so they took advantage of his ignorance and weakness. In the end, the EU needs us, now more than before, while political chaos reigns in the EU and the UK, and as Russia presents a threat. Trump is simply dealing with reality knowing they need us, and knowing they are our friends only so long as they need us. It is now the US that has the ultimate economic and military power in the world, and under the Reagan /Schultz doctrine, when you are strong, you have the advantage. The EU has no choice- they need the US much more than the US needs them, and Trump has said it out loud. The EU is angry because he has called their bluff, and he has the royal flush. The press and the establishment just do not understand how to play the power game.
Many say Trump has no strategy. Here it is. He follows the Reagan/Schultz doctrine- rebuild the military to be overwhelmingly strong, and make it clear you are willing to use it, and make the economy very strong so you win the trade fights. Make it so everyone fears and needs us, and make it clear we are not backing down. They found out this week this is a new world order and the US is no longer the patsy. From that base you can bend the other countries to your will if you are willing to be tough, demanding, and take the time to get the right deal, and walk out unless they bend. I understand Trump since I have always operated in business from the approach that I want what I want, trust nobody, and will walk and say no until I get close to what I want. I have always been willing to bet I can prevail in the end by hanging tough, even when it was a pure bluff. Nice guys don't win ball games. In my two major lawsuits it worked. In neither case did I have the resources to extend the fight, but I was willing to risk it, and bluff, and make it seem I could go on forever, turning down multiple settlement offers. In both cases it paid off hugely. In both cases I walked when offered an attractive deal, just not one good enough. Trump plays the same game. Make demands, turn the screws, and hold out until the other guy loses or caves, even if it causes some short term pain. Don't do what is expected, and what is the norm. It is the same thing he is doing on tariffs. You just have to be tough, take the pain and criticism, and wait out the other guy. Persevere in what you really believe in, regardless of the criticism and pressure, and no matter how ugly it may get. Trump is playing the long game on tariffs, and is willing to wait until the EU cries uncle, and Canada suffers. The press and politicians are playing the short game, which is always the losing hand. After the NATO meeting the EU now knows they can't pressure Trump, and so the tariffs will get sorted out soon.
Right now Trump is in the driver's seat. May badly needs a deal with the US on trade, but with her new policy she has boxed herself out of that . The soft Brexit deal is no deal, and will not survive. May played it all wrong. It is not what Brexit is about. She wants a middle ground still subject to EU rules, but Brexit was about ending the ability of Brussels to make any rules. They may end up with a hard Brexit. They need a tough bastard to replace May now. Merkel will give on auto tariffs, and then steel quotas, and then farm products. The auto deal, the most key, is already well along to getting done, she has already agreed preliminarily to steel quotas, so it is really only farm products to get done. Then Canada falls into line. NAFTA will wait until later in the year. Merkel has now agreed to increase spend on NATO, and today agreed to much more than she intended once she and the others realized Trump was really willing to really play hardball. Germany has played us for suckers for decades. Trump is absolutely right that the EU lived off the US taxpayer, and that game is now over. Even some in the EU have admitted he is right. Several agree he is right on the pipeline issue. Today Trump won far more than a much bigger NATO contribution. He won the war of wills, which was far more important. Now the world really knows the Obama era is over. The EU fears Trump now, and cannot predict what he may do, and that gives him all the leverage in the negotiations. Liberals and the press simply do not understand how this game is played because it is not how it was done all these decades, but we just need to look at the world today to see a mess with threats on all sides as a direct result of the past polices, and ways of doing things. Politeness gets you into a weak place, and leaves the other guy in control. Just look at Libya, Iran, Russia, China, and places like Egypt. They are all dictatorships, and the people are oppressed as badly as ever. Pakistan is now reported to have moved aggressively against the Taliban and other terror groups in the northwest due to Trump canceling $1 billion in aid until they do it. So what good was all the play nice approach for all these years. It left the world a big, dangerous mess. That is what Obama and years of playing nice got us. By playing the Reagan policy of, we will outspend you in armaments and drive you into bankruptcy, Trump leaves adversaries like Iran and N Korea unable to compete and survive. Putin has the same issue that Gorbachev had. He cannot afford to compete. It takes time and gets ugly sometimes, but in the end, being strong is a winning formula. Go read the history of the Reagan period, and you see the similarities. Reagan was also mocked in the press, heavily criticized, called dangerous and a warmonger by the establishment, the state department tried to change his best speeches, and were sometimes horrified by what he said, but in the end he won big.
The populist anti-immigrant movement in the EU is ending Merkel's rule, and Brexit will end May, and will push the EU and UK into the much better cooperation with the US. EU anti-immigration rules, as of now, require detention in camps, and deportation, and are no softer than Trump. The fences are going up in Europe, and detention centers are opening. We are witnessing the end of the post war policies and ways of diplomatic process as it has been done for decades. All the human rights stuff and democracy crap has resulted in weakness, and in the end more human rights abuses now occur all across the world, more refugees, more terrorism, and less peace. The liberal approach failed miserably. Turmoil is now in Iran, There are no human rights in the Mideast other than Israel. China has none. North Africa has none other than Morocco. China did not comply with the rules once it joined WTO, and once it opened trade, despite that it was the naïve belief and policy of the west that China would play nice if trade was opened. The Chinese just played the west for suckers. There is no real democracy in most places -even in some places in the EU like Hungary and Poland. The old way has yielded disaster and death, refugees and misery, and no real democracy. It is why Pompeo said clearly, we are prioritizing the real issues first, then we will deal with human rights later. We will not try to tell others how to run their government. The exact same approach as Reagan/ Schultz for which they were also roundly criticized by the media.
Trump is doing exactly what he was elected to do despite the coastal elites, many of you, and the establishment being horrified.
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