Politics

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

It baffles me how some people can continue to say that Donald Trump is politically inept and doesn’t understand how Washington works.

For the third time in 10 days, WTI Crude futures broke above $51 (this time running stops back to its highest level since May) amid growing concerns over the potential reactions to the results of the forthcoming Kurdish independence vote.

Positive comments from Russia and OPEC over clearing the global glut helped, but it is the potential for supply disruption from the Kurdish independence vote that is having the most impact on WTI and Brent.

As if the just concluded German elections, and the upcoming referendums in Catalonia and Iraqi Kurdistan were not enough, here comes Japan.

Following yesterday's German election, which despite Merkel's 4th victory was a rout for the establishment "grand coalition" parties of CDU/CSU and SPD which saw its worst election performance since the 1940s offset by a surge in the ascendant right-wing AfD, there have been numerous analyst reactions to the "sudden reemergence" of populism in Europe, but one we find perhaps the most insightful and useful, comes from Bloomberg macro commentator Mark Cudmore, who writes this morning that for all the concerns, it's not so much Germany as what is about to happen in European peer Spain, where C

Authored by Chris Hedges via TruthDig.com,

The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to their critics. The attacks within this campaign include blacklisting, censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and purveyors of “fake news.”