In The News

U.S. Condemns Planned Construction In East Jerusalem

The US State Department criticized on Wednesday the announcement that municipal planners had approved the construction of 558 new apartments in Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem.“Our position on Jerusalem is clear,” said State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters at a daily briefing. “We oppose any unilateral actions by either party that attempt to prejudge final status issues, including the status of Jerusalem.”

“We’ve called on both sides to take steps to create a positive atmosphere for the negotiations.”

Kerry has been trying to get Israelis and Palestinians to agree on a nonbinding framework agreement before the current nine-month time frame for talks runs out. Palestinian officials said earlier Wednesday that the decision to build in east Jerusalem undermined the fragile US-brokered negotiations.

The Jerusalem municipality said its planning committee approved building permits in the neighborhoods of Har Homa, Neve Yaakov and Pisgat Zeev, built on land Israel captured in the 1967 war and later annexed. Most of the international community considers them illegal settlements.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Israel was undermining Kerry’s peace efforts with the move. “The international community must hold Israel accountable for this policy,” he said.

The announcement of new construction was blasted by veteran PLO politician Hanan Ashrawi, who said “Israel is engaging in the deliberate provocation of the Palestinians to drive them to leave the negotiations in protest of Israeli violations.”

Israel is attempting to “ensure the failure of negotiations and the destruction of the two-state solution” with its ”violations of international and humanitarian law,” she added.

Lior Amihai of the Israeli settlement watchdog group Peace Now said the new approvals were “shameful” at a time when negotiations are in a sensitive stage.

Collapse To Be 'Brutal'

With continued chaos and uncertainty in global markets, today KWN is publishing an incredibly powerful piece that was written by a 60-year market veteran.  The Godfather of newsletter writers, Richard Russell, is warning that the coming collapse will be brutal

The markets (which normally tell us the truth) are being controlled and manipulated by the government and the Federal Reserve.

Interestingly, big box retailers are losing their middle class buyers, and it’s only the wealthy that are brightening their favorite retail stores, such as Tiffany and Nordstrom.  The battered middle class are frequenting their favorite discounters, leaving their previous favorites such as Target, JC Penney and Best Buy wondering why their same store sales are fading.  Again I advise subscribers to stay on the side and watch history unfold.”

With all of the chaos and radical events that are taking place around the world, these are the moments when living legends such as Richard Russell are needed the most.  He has been writing about these markets for over 60 years.  Recently his warnings have intensified.  I take that as a sign that he is right and the coming tribulation will be one for the history books. 

28 Signs That The Middle Class Is Heading Towards Extinction

The death of the middle class in America has become so painfully obvious that now even the New York Timesis doing stories about it.  Millions of middle class jobs have disappeared, incomes are steadily decreasing, the rate of homeownership has declined for eight years in a row and U.S. consumers have accumulated record-setting levels of debt.  Being independent is at the heart of what it means to be "middle class", and unfortunately the percentage of Americans that are able to take care of themselves without government assistance continues to decline.  In fact, the percentage of Americans that are receiving government assistance is now at an all-time record high.  This is not a good thing.  Sadly, the number of people on food stamps has increased by nearly 50 percent while Barack Obama has been in the White House, and at this point nearly half the entire country gets money from the government each month.  Anyone that tries to tell you that the middle class is going to be "okay" simply has no idea what they are talking about.  The following are 28 signs that the middle class is heading toward extinction...

As politicians and pundits in Washington continue to spar over whether economic inequality is in fact deepening, in corporate America there really is no debate at all. The post-recession reality is that the customer base for businesses that appeal to the middle class is shrinking as the top tier pulls even further away.

4th Banker Suicide In Past Week Found

The apparent suicide death of the chief economist of a US investment house brings the number of financial workers who have died allegedly by their own hand to four in the last week.

50-year-old Mike Dueker, who had worked for Russell Investment for five years, was found dead close to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State, says AP.

Local police say he could have jumped over a fence and fallen 15 meters to his death, and are treating the case as a suicide.

Dueker’s apparent suicide was the fourth among financial experts in a week.

A 58-year-old former senior executive at Deutsche Bank AG, William Broeksmit, was found dead on January 26 in his home after an apparent suicide in South Kensington in central London.

The next day, January 27, Tata Motors managing director Karl Slym, 51, was found dead on the fourth floor of the Shangri-La hotel in Bangkok. Police said he could have committed suicide. Mr. Slym was staying on the 22nd floor with his wife, and was attending a board meeting in the Thai capital.

Another tragic incident occurred on January 28, when a 39-year-old Gabriel Magee, a JP Morgan employee, died after falling from the roof of its European headquarters in London.

'Big Things Are Going Down'

The California Drought, As Seen From Space

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released that photo to illustrate what a year of drought conditions (which have intensified recently) have wrought on the landscape. The amount of snow in California's Sierra region is between 4 percent and 22 percent of normal. And a change that drastic is easily seen from space.

It's possibly the worst drought California has experienced in 500 years. Gov. Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency. Some rural areas may run out of water entirely in the next four months if conditions don't improve. California's State Water Project, an agency that redistributes water from the snowy mountains in the north to the drier south, has announced it cannot deliver water to many communities in the coming months. Those towns will be on their own for water resources. 

Why is this happening? Meteorologists say it's because of persistent high pressure over the region (called in weather media the "resilient ridge"), which is diverting storms northward toward Alaska. It's the same bit of high pressure that has caused the "arctic vortex" to push southward on the eastern half of the United States. (This video provides a great explainer of how the two are related.)

The result is a bone-dry landscape. In this map, also from NASA, you can clearly see how incredibly dry the state is. 

And the frustrating truth is that there's little the state can do but conserve and wait. 

In 19 Minutes, A Team Of Snipers Destroyed 17 Transformers At California Power Station

When a real terrorist attack happens, sometimes we don’t hear about it until months afterward (if we ever hear about it at all).  For example, did you know that a team of snipers shot up a power station in California?  The terrorists destroyed 17 transformers and did so much damage that the power station was shut down for a month.  And it only took them 19 minutes of shooting to do it.  Of course most Americans have absolutely no idea that this ever happened, because they get their news from the mainstream media.  The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at that time says that this was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred”, and yet you won’t hear about it on the big news networks.  They are too busy covering the latest breaking news on the Justin Bieber scandal.

And maybe it is good thing that most people don’t know about this.  The truth is that we are a nation that is absolutely teeming with “soft targets”, and if people realized how vulnerable we truly are they might start freaking out.

If you have not heard about the attack on the Silicon Valley substation yet, you should look into it.  The following is an excerpt from a Business Insider articleabout the sniper assault…

The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith reports that a former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman is acknowledging for the first time that a group of snipers shot up a Silicon Valley substation for 19 minutes last year, knocking out 17 transformers before slipping away into the night.

The attack was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred” in the U.S., Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time, told Smith.

Is Anything Being Done To Protect The Power Grid From 'Catastrophic EMP'?

A national defense analyst and former Defense Department official says the U.S. remains unprepared for an attack that could take down the country's entire electrical grid.Frank Gaffney, who currently runs the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC, served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security during the Reagan administration. During a recent teleconference sponsored by Tea Party Unity, he shared about the formation of a new EMP (electromagnetic pulse) coalition chaired by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Clinton-era CIA director James Woolsey.

"We've done nothing to protect our civilian infrastructure – and most especially the electric grid that powers it – from such an effect," he said. "As a result, should some enemy use a ballistic missile to detonate a nuclear weapon over the United States, it could have an existential impact on our country."
An EMP could also occur naturally, according to Gaffney, such as the result of intense solar activity – and on a more local level by RF (radio frequency) weapons.
In a video posted at StopEMP.org, Gaffney describes the potential effect of an EMP on an unprotected electrical grid: "You could lose not only the electrical system itself, but all of the infrastructures that rely on it – food, transportation, water, medical, telecommunications, finance. In other words, basically everything that makes a 21st century society like ours function."

Also see:

The Angry Left

Militarized Police