Political author Dick Morris waged on Newsmax that the rush to rescue depositors of Silicon Valley Bank or, more precisely, a bank directly associated with Silicon Valley, which he terms as the "Democratic stronghold of the world," is as big a "crony payoff as you possibly can have."

"I think that the Silicon Valley Bank is enjoying a charmed life because it's in Silicon Valley," Morris told "American Agenda" on Monday.

"It's the Democratic stronghold of the world. And 99% of their people are probably Democrats and depositors that raised hell they're all democratic donors, so this is as crony a payoff as you possibly can have."

Morris's statement comes after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen proclaimed to CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday that the government's assistance to depositors is not a bailout, which some experts have deemed a game of semantics in order to quash fear of spreading contagion.

One of the biggest financial stories of the moment is the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. And now Goldman Sachs is being pulled into the drama.

The investment bank is set to receive more than $100 million dollars after the failure of SVB, The New York Times reported on Wednesday. That’s because Goldman bought $21.4 billion of debt from the beleaguered bank, which came at a loss of $1.8 billion to SVB. (A spokesperson for Goldman declined to comment to the Times.)

The United States Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission were investigating whether Signature Bank failed to prevent money laundering before the firm collapsed on Sunday.

Federal investigators in Washington DC and Manhattan, New York were specifically looking into the bank's dealings with cryptocurrency clients, to assess if the institution took sufficient steps to detect potential money laundering, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources.

It is not clear what came of the investigation, but the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was forced to take over operations of the bank on Sunday when it could not meet the demands of customers withdrawing their funds.

Credit Suisse shares soared by over 35% on Thursday after the company secured a $54 billion lifeline from the Swiss National Bank to shore up liquidity and investor confidence.

JPMorgan analysts still said the loan from the SNB would not be enough to soothe investor concerns and 'status quo was no longer an option', leaving a takeover for Credit Suisse - especially by rival bank UBS - as the most likely outcome.

Credit Suisse shares were indicated at 2.3 Swiss francs ($2.48), up 35% from Wednesday's close. 

Credit Suisse shares soared by over 35% on Thursday after the company secured a $54 billion lifeline from the Swiss National Bank to shore up liquidity and investor confidence.

JPMorgan analysts still said the loan from the SNB would not be enough to soothe investor concerns and 'status quo was no longer an option', leaving a takeover for Credit Suisse - especially by rival bank UBS - as the most likely outcome.

Credit Suisse shares were indicated at 2.3 Swiss francs ($2.48), up 35% from Wednesday's close. 

 El Salvador’s government sent 2,000 more suspects to a huge new prison built especially for gang members Wednesday, and the the justice minister vowed that “they will never return” to the streets.

The tough statement came as the administration of President Nayib Bukele asked for yet another extension of an anti-gang emergency measures that would take the crackdown into its 13th month.

Over the last 354 days, about 65,000 people have been arrested in the antigang campaign. Human rights groups say that there have been many instances of prisoner abuses and that innocent people have been swept up in police raids.

The government announced the mass inmate transfer with a slickly produced video posted on social media. It showed prisoners forced to run barefoot and handcuffed down stairways and over bare ground, clad only in regulation white shorts. They were then forced to sit with their legs locked in closely clumped groups in cells.

Americans need to be prepared to eat a lot less beef, because the size of the national cattle herd is steadily shrinking.  And of course this is happening in the context of a much larger crisis.  As I detailed in a previous article, even CNN is admitting that we are currently in the midst of “the worst food crisis in modern history”.  But even though children are literally dropping dead from starvation on the other side of the planet, a lot of people here in the United States refuse to take this crisis seriously.  As long as their stomachs are full they think that everything is just fine.  But the truth is that conditions are also starting to get tight here in the United States.

According to the latest biannual report from the USDA, the number of beef cows in this country has fallen to the lowest level since 1962…

Macgregor: "The last thing Americans need is a war. No more political and military incompetence, ineptitude, corruption. They want an economy that works, and they're not going to stand around and watch the financial system go under. They want real leadership, not a cardboard cutout President."

The US has the lowest life expectancy of all G7 nations, according to an alarming league table.

Seventy years ago people in America could expect to live until they were 68, with the country ranking 13th globally behind the likes of Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

Although the average person now lives a decade longer than in 1950, progress has stalled compared to other developed nations.

The Biden administration has threatened to ban TikTok in the US unless its Chinese owner sells its shares in the app.

It is the first time the administration has explicitly threatened a ban and represents a shift in its attitude towards the platform, which Republicans have said is a national security threat for the way it harvests data from US citizens.

The demand was made by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States and specifies that TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, sell its stake in the US version of the app.

Pakistan's ex-Prime Minister Imran Khan tells AFP the government wants him behind bars in order to stop him taking part in elections due later this year. Riot police halted an attempt to arrest the 70-year-old former leader and onetime star cricketer, ending a siege of his residence after violent clashes with hundreds of his supporters.

Mr. Hirofumi, Yanagase speaks out:

“Compared to 2021, the number of deaths has increased by more than 140,000. Compared to 2020, the number of deaths has increased by 210,000…the highest number since World War II”

“Japan has been flooded with people complaining of feeling ill after receiving the COVID vaccine”

“Amazingly, even though more than 2000 people have died after vaccination, more than 99% of these deaths cannot be evaluated”

“According to our calculations, the percentage of reported deaths after COVID vaccine is more than 38 times higher in comparison with the flu vaccine”

Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to law; chance is but a name for law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the law.” —Kybalion

It is no coincidence that within 48 hours, two California commercial banks failed. The not much talked-about Silvergate Capital, a central lender to the crypto industry, declared on March 8, 2023, it would wind down its operations. On March 10, the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), primary lender for tech-startups, collapsed.

SVB was immediately taken over by federal regulators. It is the largest bank failure since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Relatively unknown outside of the Silicon Valley, SVB was the 16th largest US commercial bank with US$ 209 billion in assets at the end of 2022.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has assured SVB insured depositors that they will have access to their full funds within the FDIC-fixed limits of US$ 250,000 per depositor.

However, the FDIC total fund covers only about 2% of the $9.6 trillion in US-insured deposits.

What happens when other banks collapse at the same time and uninformed depositors believe their deposits up to US$ 250,000 are safe? But then find out that they are not?

Our thoughts are with the people of Iraq, who’s country has been literally destroyed by US-NATO.

It’s a hegemonic agenda which consists in transforming countries into territories. 

March 2023 marks 20 years since the US-UK led war on Iraq in 2003. And that war is still ongoing. 

Historically however this war on Iraq did not start in 2003. It was preceded by the so-called “Gulf War” in 1991 (The First War against Iraq)

And in 2014, a Third US led War against Iraq was launched under the banner of Obama’s 2014 “counter-terrorism bombing campaign”.  

It’s permanent warfare. And now Joe Biden is preparing the fourth stage of this war against the people of Iraq.

The problem with both the German reporting and that of The New York Times (whose source was clearly referring to the same data reported by the German reporters) is that the Andromeda narrative doesn’t hold water.

Take, for instance, the Tom Clancy-like tale of derring-do that has four allegedly Ukraine-affiliated divers defy physiology by conducting dives that would require the use of a decompression chamber for them to survive an ascent of 240 feet (the depth of the Nord Stream pipelines that were destroyed). A rule of thumb is that decompression takes approximately one day per 100 feet of seawater plus a day.

This means that the team of divers would have required three days of decompression per dive. But to decompress, one needs a decompression chamber. For a dive involving two divers, the Andromeda would have to have been outfitted with either a two-person Class A decompression chamber, or two single-person Class B chambers, as well as the number of large oxygen bottles needed to operate these chambers over time. \

A simple examination of the interior cabin space of the Bavarian C50 yacht would quickly dispossess one of any notion that either option was viable.

Simply put — no decompression chamber, no dive, no story.

U.N. nuclear watchdog inspectors have found that roughly 2.5 tons of natural uranium have gone missing from a Libyan site that is not under government control, the watchdog told member states in a statement on Wednesday seen by Reuters.

The finding is the result of an inspection originally planned for last year that "had to be postponed because of the security situation in the region" and was finally carried out on Tuesday, according to the confidential statement by International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi.

IAEA inspectors "found that 10 drums containing approximately 2.5 tons of natural uranium in the form of UOC (uranium ore concentrate) previously declared by (Libya) ... as being stored at that location were not present at the location," the one-page statement said.

The 1999 legislation had repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, a pillar of President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” which was put in place in response to the climate of corruption, financial manipulation and “insider trading” which led to more than 5,000 bank failures in the years following the 1929 Wall Street crash. 

Effective control over the entire US financial services industry (including insurance companies, pension funds, securities companies, etc.) had been transferred to a handful of financial conglomerates – which are also the creditors and shareholders of high tech companies, the defense industry, major oil and mining consortia, etc.

Moreover, as underwriters of the public debt at federal, state and municipal levels, the financial giants have also reinforced their stranglehold on politicians, as well as their command over the conduct of public policy.

Rather than taming financial markets in the wake of the storm, Washington was busy pushing through the US Senate legislation, which was to significantly increase the powers of the financial services giants and their associated hedge funds.

Let’s pause right here for a moment. This is far from the first time that the CEO of a questionable bank was sitting on the Board of a Federal Reserve Bank. As Citigroup CEO, Sandy Weill, was burying the bank under off balance sheet vehicles that would eventually crater the bank in 2008; send its stock price to 99 cents in early 2009; and require the largest bank bailout by the Fed in U.S. history, Weill was also serving on the Board of Directors of the New York Fed. And while Jamie Dimon was CEO of JPMorgan Chase and it was losing what eventually grew to $6.2 billion of bank depositors’ money in wild derivative bets in London, Dimon was also sitting on the Board of the New York Fed. Even when there was a big public uproar over Dimon’s presence on the New York Fed Board as the London Whale derivatives scandal came to light, Dimon remained in place.

Most of the Israeli public have been unaware of the existence of the Kohelet Policy Forum or its reach among right-wing parties, and even less of its growing influence on politicians.

Until recently, the right-wing think tank operated relatively quietly, targeting Israeli politicians whose world views were already conservative or those who were understood to be receptive to these principles.

However, in light of the political instability in Israel, and against a background of repeated election campaigns, the Jerusalem-based forum and its messages have gradually become more visible, first to the media and now to the public.

Last Friday, March 10, we had the honor to participate in a medical and constitutional freedom convention in Rochester, New York with attorney and Brownstone Institute Fellow, Bobbie Anne Cox, who was the lead plaintiff attorney in challenging New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s Third Reich style “Isolation and Quarantine Procedures.”

The case (Borrello v Hochul) went to the NY State Supreme Court, and on July 8, 2022, Judge Ronald Ploetz ruled that the “Isolation and Quarantine Procedures” regulation is unconstitutional and “violative of New York State law as promulgated and enacted, and therefore null, void and unenforceable as a matter of law.”

At the event last Friday in Rochester, we applauded Ms. Cox for her victory against Governor Hochul and New York Attorney General, Letitia James. She graciously thanked us, but also reminded us that her adversaries had a few days left to appeal. As Ms. Cox just reported, appeal they did.

After forcing the readmission of COVID-19 positive patients into New York State nursing homes in the spring of 2020—thereby causing the largest COVID-19 mass casualty event in the country—New York State administrators decided they need greater emergency powers for responding to infectious disease outbreaks.

Thousands of workers at hospitals, schools and railways across Sri Lanka have gone on strike to protest against high costs of living, including increased taxes imposed as a precondition for an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout, amid the country’s worst financial crisis in decades.

Schools on Wednesday cancelled term tests and outpatient departments at hospitals closed due to the public sector work stoppage that involved more than 40 trade unions. Fewer vehicles were seen on roads.

China's efforts to broker improved relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia have caught the US by surprise, with officials, and members of the Washington establishment, scrambling to brush off concerns that American influence in the region is waning.

On Monday, State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said the US supported the talks "every step of the way," and downplayed China's role in burying the hatchet between the regional foes.

"This was not about the PRC [People's Republic of China]. This was about what Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia committed to."

Israel’s regional policy has long been based on hegemony, superiority and arrogance. Leaders Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu often repeated the notion of an alliance based on “Israeli brains and Arab money”, while also promoting the concept of protecting Arab regimes with Israeli intelligence technologies and strategies for economic peace.

The aim was always twofold: to achieve normalisation and bolster Israel’s regional influence, and to accelerate the disappearance of the Palestinian cause.

For Israel, Iran presented an opportunity to ally with Arab states on both an economic-security basis and a strategic basis, with regards to confronting their “mutual enemy”. In this way, Israel has sought a multilateral strategy: a regional alliance under the auspices of the US, seeking to declare war on Iran and overthrow the regime.

A bipartisan pair of US senators introduced a resolution on Wednesday that would require President Biden's administration to report on Saudi Arabia's human rights record and possibly cut off all US security assistance to the kingdom, as ties between Riyadh and Washington continue to fray.

Democrat Chris Murphy and Republican Mike Lee drew upon a provision of the US Foreign Assistance Act, which allows Congress to vote to request information on a particular country's human rights practices.

Senator Lee called the proposal a “simple and fair request” for the State Department to provide more insight into the status of human rights in Saudi Arabia. 

“US weapons don't belong in the hands of human rights abusers,” he said in a statement. “The [American] people and their elected representatives have a right to know the types of activity we are tacitly supporting.”

Webmaster addition: This is the kind of ham-fisted foreign policy that causes wars. The best way to woo Saudi Arabia back from Iran and China is to be more attractive than Iran and China, not engage in actions that will push Saudi Arabia further away!

China, Russia and Iran are holding joint military exercises in the Gulf of Oman, the Russian and Chinese defence ministries announced on Wednesday.

The exercises, which will last from Wednesday to Sunday, aim to enhance the respective militaries' abilities to conduct "joint maneuvers” and daytime and night-time artillery firing, according to the Russian military. The navies are also training on liberating captured ships and assistance to vessels in distress.

The drills come days after China brokered a surprise reconciliation agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, setting the stage for restored diplomatic ties between the two foes and enhancing Beijing’s clout in the Middle East.

While Washington said it supports efforts to de-escalate tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran, it has tried to downplay China’s role in the talks.

“Hate crime” is a made up legal category meant to prop up the systemic racism mythology.

Next to Russiagate neo-Mccarthyism, MSNBC loves nothing more than crowing about the supposed prevalence of “hate crimes” in an America captured by the specter of “White Supremacy™.

Exhibit A: the MSNBC clip below in which news actor Alex Wagner and guest, Rep. Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, lament a Congressional investigation into Dominic Ng.

Ng was appointed to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s Business Advisory Council but is currently under investigation for ties to the Chinese Communist Party.  The relevant portion we’re discussing here — the race-baiting over “hate crimes” — begins at the 3-minute mark.

This eBook by Graeme MacQueen contains a collection of his articles and essays on the attacks of September 11, 2001, the subsequent anthrax attacks, and analyses of other false flag operations.  They are profoundly important and shatter the official versions of those events. No one reading this book can come away from it not convinced that the U.S. government is a terrorist state. MacQueen’s conclusions are not based on rhetoric but on a deep empirical analyses, facts not propaganda. With this volume, Graeme MacQueen takes his place alongside David Ray Griffin as a prophet without honor in his own time. History will declare him a hero.  To write the following introduction is a great honor, for my esteem for Graeme and his work is immense.

The UN’s special envoy for Yemen said Wednesday that he sees a renewed momentum toward ending the war following the surprise normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran that was brokered by China.

The Saudis and Yemen’s Houthis have been in Omani-mediated talks on reaching a settlement to the war or extending a ceasefire that expired in October 2022. “Intense diplomatic efforts are ongoing at different levels to bring the conflict in Yemen to an end,” UN special envoy Hans Grundberg told the UN Security Council.

“We are currently witnessing renewed regional diplomatic momentum, as well as a step change in the scope and depth of the discussions,” he added.

While the war in Yemen is viewed in the West as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Tehran is not nearly as involved as Riyadh. Iran supports the Houthis politically but denies Western allegations that it is arming the Zaydi Shia group.

In chapter 21 of St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus proposes a moral dilemma in the form of a parable: A man asks his two sons to go to work for him in his vineyard. The first son declines, but later ends up going. The second son tells his father he will go, but never does. “Who,” Jesus asks, “did the will of his father?” Although I am loath to argue that Jesus’s point in this parable was an economic one, we may nonetheless derive from it a moral lesson with which to evaluate economic systems in terms of achieving the common good.

Modern history presents us with two divergent models of economic arrangement: socialism and capitalism. One of these appears preoccupied with the common good and social betterment, the other with profits and production. But let us keep the parable in mind as we take a brief tour of economic history.

The idea of socialism, of course, dates back to the ancient world, but here I will focus on its modern incarnation. And if we look to socialism’s modern beginnings, we find it optimistic and well-intentioned. In contrast to contemporary varieties that tend to bemoan prosperity, romanticize poverty, and promote the idea that civil rights are of secondary concern, at least some of the early socialists sought the fullest possible flourishing of humanity—which is to say, the common good.

A half-century before Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto, there was Gracchus Babeuf’s Plebeian Manifesto (later revised by Sylvain Marechal and renamed the Manifesto of the Equals). Babeuf was an early communist who lived from 1760 to 1797 and wrote during the revolutionary period in France. Although he was jailed and eventually executed, his ideas would later have an enormous impact. And his explicit political goal had nothing to do with impeding prosperity. To the contrary, he wrote:

The French Revolution was nothing but a precursor of another revolution, one that will be bigger, more solemn, and which will be the last… We reach for something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of goods! No more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.

A drawn-out back and forth between Ukraine, the U.S. and European NATO countries in January led to the first pledges for deliveries of Western-made tanks to the Ukrainian military.

However, as Statista's Katharina Buchholz reports, at the end of March, only one full battalion will have been delivered to Ukraine from Europe instead of the planned two as even promises from countries pushing for the deliveries were taken back or delayed.

Earlier this week, Ukrainian soldiers finished a four-week training on German-designed Leopard 2 tanks in Spain, making the country's military ready to receive the tanks. Poland will have provided 14 Leopard 2 units by the end of the month - some of which have already arrived in Ukraine -, while Germany and Portugal will have delivered 18 and 3, respectively. This is according to the Ukrainian online publication Defense Express. In fact, Poland is hoping to deliver 16 more tanks it is currently fixing up by the end of April, according to Bloomberg. Spain itself is attempting to get six out of the 10 promised Leopard 2 tanks, which are currently mothballed, ready for delivery this spring.

At a total count of 57, these deliveries would still fall short of the 62 tanks needed for two Ukrainian tank battalions.