Baltic Dry Index. 645
-05 Brent Crude 41.88
“If we went back on the gold standard and we adhered to the actual structure of the gold standard as it existed prior to 1913, we’d be fine. Remember that the period 1870 to 1913 was one of the most aggressive periods economically that we’ve had in the United States, and that was a golden period of the gold standard. I’m known as a gold bug and everyone laughs at me, but why do central banks own gold now?”
Alan Greenspan. June 28, 2016.
Today, will Poland be the next country to leave the
dying EUSSR, or will it be Denmark? Sweden? Finland? Holland?
Poland’s Democracy Row With EU Not Going Away as New Law Passed
August 1,
2016 — 2:02 PM BST
Poland’s standoff with the European Union over democratic values
escalated after Polish President Andrzej Duda over the weekend signed into law
an overhaul of the country’s Constitutional Tribunal that failed to address EU
concerns.
The European Commission, the EU executive in Brussels, last week gave
Poland three months to respond to recommendations on restoring the court’s
ability to effectively review legislation, moving ahead with its first-ever
probe into the rule-of-law of a member country. The tribunal’s revamp, designed
by the ruling Law & Justice party and signed into law by Duda over the
weekend, fell short of meeting recommendations from Europe’s democracy
watchdog, the Venice Commission.
“The main issues which threaten the rule of law in Poland have not been
resolved,” EU Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva told reporters in Brussels
on Monday. “We continue to be ready to engage in a constructive dialog with the
Polish authorities.”
Law & Justice won power in last year’s elections after promising to
stand up to Brussels and pursue more nationalistic policies, setting the EU’s
biggest eastern member on a collision course with Western allies. The stand-off, which
can ultimately lead to Poland losing its vote on European laws and political
decisions, has weighed on Polish assets and undercut investment, while
prompting S&P Global ratings to downgrade the sovereign.‘Internal Procedure’
The overhaul fails to force the government to implement past tribunal rulings, including one from March which ruled an earlier revamp of the court unconstitutional, as well as Duda’s refusal to swear in three justices lawfully picked by the previous parliament.Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski called the EU’s rule-of-law procedure into question, saying that Brussels procedures are going beyond what’s written into European treaties.
“We told the European Commission that this is their internal procedure, which we won’t reply to,” he told radio RMF FM on Monday. “We’re a sovereign country.”
The EU is founded on a common set of values, such as respect for the rule of law, the commission says. Its procedure for checking a member nation’s democracy is firmly anchored in EU treaties and was welcomed by national governments in December 2014.
What is Dexit? Will Denmark leave the EU next?
AFTER Britain leaves the EU, could Denmark be the next country to break away from the European bloc?
18:42, Mon, Aug
1, 2016
The EU referendum result has sparked calls for a Dexit, a Danish exit
from the EU.
The right-wing Danish People's Party (DPP) renewed their calls for a
vote over Denmark’s membership of the EU in wake of the Brexit vote.
DPP leader Kristian Thulesen Dahl, said the “EU has made its bed” by
underestimating the growing Euroscepticism across Europe.
He said: “I also believe Danes should, of course, have a referendum on
whether we want to follow Britain or stay in the EU.”
The Red-Green Alliance (RGA) - the most left-wing party in the Danish
Parliament - has also echoed the call for a EU referendum.
Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen has rejected the calls for an EU
referendum in Denmark but has not ruled out a “slimmer EU”.
“We belong in the EU” he told the press. “I do not foresee that there
will be a situation in the foreseeable future where we need to take a break
with that."
The Danish minority Government holds just 34 seats and relies on support
from other parties. The DPP and RGA hold 51 seats in total.
But the biggest opposition party the Social Democrats, who have 47 seats,
also supports remaining in the EU.
More
Next US Dane geld. Presented without comment. Welcome to the lawless 21st century.
$400 million sent to Iran as U.S. prisoners released, raising questions
Published: Aug 2, 2016 8:25 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of
$400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of
four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and
congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.
Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies
were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials.
The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and
Switzerland, they said.
The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement
the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute
over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last
monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The settlement, which resolved claims before an international tribunal
in The Hague, also coincided with the formal implementation that same weekend
of the landmark nuclear agreement reached between Tehran, the U.S. and other
global powers the summer before.
“With the nuclear deal done, prisoners released, the time was right to
resolve this dispute as well,” President Barack Obama said at the White House
on Jan. 17 — without disclosing the $400 million cash payment.
Senior U.S. officials denied any link between the payment and the
prisoner exchange. They say the way the various strands came together
simultaneously was coincidental, not the result of any quid pro quo.
Morehttp://www.marketwatch.com/story/400-million-sent-to-iran-as-us-prisoners-released-raising-questions-2016-08-02
And in the dying EUSSR, a spat between Italy and Turkey’s increasingly unstable Sultan. Is Erdogan’s Turkey really fit to be a member of NATO or to join the EU? Meanwhile French teenage love-rat Hollande declares his love for Hillary Clinton. An ally of fallen former UK Prime Minister Dodgy Dave Cameron, his crass attempt at bullying UK voters in the Brexit referendum helped cost Dodgy Dave his job.
Renzi Takes a Swipe at Erdogan in Row Over Turkish Leader’s Son
August 2, 2016 — 8:20 PM BST
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi took to Twitter to hit back at Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who lashed out at the Italian justice system for
targeting his son and who has been on an anti-West tirade since thwarting a coup.The skirmish between the two leaders, whose nations have a complicated history of commercial rivalry going back to the Ottoman Empire, took place across medias starting with a television interview where Erdogan complained that his son, Bilal Erdogan, can’t return to Italy because he could be arrested in a money-laundering probe that “he doesn’t know the reasons for.”
In the interview with Rainews24 Erdogan called on Italian judges to focus instead on the mafia and said the issue could tarnish Turkey’s relationship with Italy. Erdogan’s comments were translated into Italian.
Renzi shot back, in Italian, in the 140-character format: “In this country judges respond to laws and to the Italian constitution, not to the Turkish president. It’s called rule of law.”
Bilal, 35, is one of Erdogan’s four children. He was finishing a doctorate degree in Bologna, home to the country’s oldest university, before the money-laundering probe. It’s unclear when he left the northern Italian city, which has a history of strong political activism and was once a Communist stronghold. Erdogan denied any wrongdoing by his son and accused prosecutors of bias.
“In that city they call me dictator and they do demonstrations to back the PKK,” Erdogan told Rainews 24, referring to the autonomy-seeking Kurdistan Workers’ Party. “My son is a smart man and is accused of money laundering. Why don’t they deal with mafia and not with my son?”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-02/renzi-takes-a-swipe-at-erdogan-in-row-over-turkish-leader-s-son
Hollande Says Trump Excesses in U.S. Elections Make Him Sick
August 2, 2016 — 9:24 PM BST Updated on August 3, 2016 — 12:01 AM BST
French President Francois Hollande expressed extreme revulsion at Donald
Trump’s “excesses” in the U.S. presidential campaign and warned against the
authoritarian tone adopted by the Republican nominee and billionaire
reality-television celebrity.“In the U.S., one of the world’s great democracies, maybe the greatest democracy, where democracy was born, before the French one, we see some excesses that are sickening,” Hollande said in Paris during the annual meeting with the presidential press.
Particularly, Hollande added, when Trump “speaks ill of a soldier, of the memory of a soldier,” an allusion to his feud with the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan, a Muslim-American soldier killed in Iraq in 2004.
Hollande and Trump have already swapped barbs, most recently when the real-estate mogul said in the aftermath of a string of terror attacks on France that he would not visit the country because “France is no longer France.” Hollande responded his country would stay true to its values.
In his comments to French journalists, Hollande this time did not hold back his disdain and dismay at the prospect of a Trump White House: “If the American people choose Trump it will have consequences worldwide because the U.S. is a global economy,” he told a hotel conference room of 66 reporters over drinks.
----French presidential elections are next year and it’s unclear if Hollande, the most unpopular leader in modern French history, will run again.
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-02/hollande-labels-trump-s-excesses-in-election-race-as-sickening
“The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.”
“Adam Smith” aka George Goodman.
At the Comex silver depositories Tuesday final figures were: Registered
26.98 Moz,
Eligible 127.07 Moz, Total 154.05 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, the history of America that they all forgot.
When a woman first ran for POTUS and with African American Frederick Douglass
on the ticket as Veep. If only the present Democratic ticket were so
principled, albeit so wrong.
The prostitute who ran for president
HILLARY CLINTON claims to have shattered the glass ceiling as America’s first female nominee for the White House but 144 years ago an extraordinary woman, who believed in “free love”, women’s rights and was reportedly a prostitute, beat her to it.
By Peter
Sheridan 09:47, Tue, Aug 2,
2016 | UPDATED: 10:16, Tue, Aug 2, 2016
Leaving only a marble plaque in a churchyard in the Cotswolds, where she
spent the final decades of her controversial life, Victoria Woodhull was the
first woman nominated by a political party to run for president of the
US.
Almost forgotten in today’s rush to hail Hillary Clinton’s ground
breaking nomination, Woodhull achieved that against far tougher odds 48 years
before American women won the vote in 1920.
A handsome woman, inevitably squeezed into a high-collared black dress
and with short dark hair, Woodhull was formidable: a 19thcentury mix of
Margaret Thatcher, Madonna and Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss.
She was one of the first women to open a stock brokers on Wall Street
and publish a newspaper.
A pioneering advocate for women’s suffrage, birth control and legalised
prostitution she was elected the nominee for the Equal Rights Party, the
largest third party in the 1872 US presidential election.
But her steamy love life shocked Victorian sensibilities with her three
marriages and allegations – possibly promulgated by enemies – that she ran a
brothel.
Others were offended by her belief in spiritualism and
clairvoyance.
Yes, I am a free lover,” she told a rally in 1871.
“I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I
may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every
day if I please and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have
any right to interfere.”
In an era fascinated with spiritualism Woodhull earned a reputation and
wealth as a clairvoyant and healer, using magnetic fields to supposedly cure
ailments.
She became the spiritualist adviser to America’s wealthiest man,
railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt.
With a small fortune donated by Vanderbilt, Woodhull and sister
Tennessee Claflin opened a brokerage on Wall Street in 1870, shortly followed
by their own newspaper Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.
The sisters were hailed as the Queens of Finance but critics condemned
the “immorality” of unchaperoned women in banking.
In New York, Woodhull grew concerned about the plight of 20,000 abused
prostitutes.
She called for the legalisation of prostitution and toured red-light
districts, reportedly imbibing the opiate laudanum to ease her discomfort at
the squalid scenes.
Several biographies even claim she was a prostitute who ran her own
house of ill-repute, though no records have been found of arrests – perhaps thanks
to her wealth and powerful friends.
Woodhull was angered by the double-standards that allowed respected men
to publicly keep mistresses yet condemned women for such affairs.
When it emerged that famed preacher Henry Ward Beecher was having an
adulterous fling with a parishioner her newspaper exposed his hypocrisy.
The Equal Rights Party elected Woodhull as its presidential nominee in
1872, supporting women’s right to vote, work and love freely, free speech and a
free press.
Such equality terrified critics.
Harper’s Weekly published a caricature by cartoonist Thomas Nast
depicting her as a devil, horns on her head and holding a sign: “Be saved by
free love.”
In the full-page engraving a woman tells Woodhull: “Get thee behind me,
(Mrs) Satan!”
Opponents undermined her businesses and unable to find rental housing in
Manhattan her family spent weeks sleeping at her newspaper office.
Her 12-year-old daughter assumed an alias to attend school without being
bullied.
Woodhull had little realistic chance of being elected to the White
House: the hugely popular Republican president Ulysses S Grant was running for
a second term and won by a landslide.
It hardly helped when Woodhull was arrested days before the election for
“publishing an obscene newspaper” because of her allegations against the
adulterous preacher.
She spent election night behind bars and it was two years before she was
acquitted of obscenity and libel.
Bankrupt, depressed and demoralised Woodhull divorced her second husband
in 1876 and the following year left for a new life in England, buoyed by a
small fortune donated by Cornelius Vanderbilt’s son William.
Woodhull began lecturing again in 1877 in London, where among her
audience was British banker John Martin, who began a courtship that led to
marriage in 1883.
In Britain she published the magazine The Humanitarian but after her
husband’s death in 1901 she closed the periodical and retired to Bredon’s
Norton beside the River Avon in Worcestershire.
She devoted the last 26 years of her life to her adopted Cotswolds home,
establishing a village school and agricultural college for women.
On her death at 88 in 1927 Woodhull was memorialised by a cenotaph at
Tewkesbury Abbey, with a plaque commemorating what was then considered one of
her few socially acceptable passions: her fostering of Anglo-American
relations.
Fittingly her ashes were scattered in mid-Atlantic between England that
became her beloved home and America.
Tennessee Celeste Claflin
Solar & Related Update.
With events
happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this
section. Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap
AC or DC energy mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards? DC?
A quantum computer next?
Back to cheap coal
power stations for backup power, with solar power used to convert the CO2 into
internal combustion engine fuel? Tesla might have a problem with that.
Scientists turn CO2 into fuel with solar power
Which could spell the end for traditional gasoline production.
August 1, 2016
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago believe that they've perfected the art of photosynthetic solar cells. It's a technology that mimics a plant's ability to inhale carbon dioxide and, with water, convert it into glucose and oxygen. This system is capable of drawing in carbon dioxide and processing it into a synthetic fuel that could be used to power vehicles. Theoretically, this device could create a virtuous cycle where climate-altering carbon could be removed from the atmosphere and pumped back into cars.The artificial leaf contains a pair of solar cells that power an infinitely more complex version of the electrolysis you learned about in high school science. Energy from the sun is used to catalyze a reaction with various obscure compounds like nanoflake tungsten diselenide (which is a transition metal dichalcogenide). Synthetic gas comes out of the other side, which can either be used directly by vehicles that can take it, or converted further into diesel.
But this isn't the first time we've seen artificial photosynthesis being used as a potential weapon in the war on climate change. Early last year, we saw a team from Berkeley using a similar process, albeit with genetically-modified E. coli bacteria at the heart of the system. That version didn't output synthetic gas but acetate, a building block of several compounds like biofuel, anti-malaria drugs and biodegradable plastics.
Should UIC's newer process prove to be cost-effective, it could spell the end of traditional gasoline production as we know it. Instead, a network of these cells would be installed at a solar farm, creating fuel and reducing the quantity of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the same time. The only downside is that we'd still be re-releasing the deadly gas back into the atmosphere, but it's a decent stop-gap while we work on reducing our carbon emissions more permanently.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished July
DJIA: 18432
+03 Up NASDAQ: 5162 +10 Up. SP500: 2173 +01 Up.
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