Kellogg’s Pulls Ads From Breitbart for ‘Not Aligning’ With Their Values; Amnesty International Accuses Them of Child Labor Violations

Let’s put this into perspective. The maker of poisonous breakfast cereals pulled their ads from Breitbart, a very popular news site associated with the Trump campaign, because it didn’t align with their values — set forth in their advertising guidelines.

They said associating with brands like Breitbart wasn’t ‘consistent with their brand or corporate image.’

In a scathing report on child labor violations for procuring palm oil in Indonesia, Amnesty International lays waste to corporate giants like Unilever, Colgate, Proctor and Gamble and you guessed it Kellogg’s.

Amnesty has testimony and video of children as young as 8 years old, pulled from school to work on a slave plantation to endure ‘back breaking labor’,  exposed to harsh chemicals and very heavy materials.

Let’s be clear, placing ads on pro Trump site is not conducive with Kellogg’s corporate image, but buying palm oil from a slave plantation that works 8 year old children is.

The human rights organisation traced a range of well-known products back to the palm oil company Wilmar, which it alleged employs children to do back-breaking physical labour on refineries in Indonesia.

Singapore-based Wilmar counts multinational companies including Kellogg’s, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Reckitt Benckiser and Nestlé among its major clients, according to Amnesty.

In a 110-page report accompanied by a video, Amnesty alleged products sold by those companies were “tainted by appalling human rights abuses … with children as young as eight working in hazardous conditions”.

“There is nothing sustainable about palm oil that is produced using child labour and forced labour. Something is wrong when nine companies turning over a combined revenue of £260bn in 2015 are unable to do anything about the atrocious treatment of palm oil workers earning a pittance.”

She said allegations of child labour at Wilmar were not “isolated incidents but are systemic and a predictable result of the way Wilmar does business”.

In the report, Amnesty alleged that children aged from eight to 14 were carrying out dangerous work without safety equipment, were exposed to toxic pesticides and regularly carried sacks of palm fruit weighing 25kg.

One 10-year-old boy, who claims he started working for a Wilmar supplier aged eight, said he gets up at 6am to gather fruit and works every day but Sunday. “I don’t go to school … I carry the sacks with the loose fruit by myself but can only carry it half full. My hands hurt and my body aches,” he said.

In response to this report, Kellogg’s said “any supply chain violations of our global palm oil principles, we work with the supplier to understand corrective actions and ensure they understand our commitments. If the concerns are not adequately addressed, we take action to remove them from our supply chain.”

The joys of globalism.

#DumpKelloggs

Pardon me, but I physically recoil when I read yellow journalism by shills trying to promote a narrative that is either entirely false or exaggerated for political purposes. During the election, at the vanguard of the Clinton talking points were to ignore all of the scandals coming out of Wikileaks or the DNCleaks because they were the byproduct of Russian hacking — a charge that was never backed up with any real evidence.

CNN even went as far to say that it was ILLEGAL to possess the Wikileaks and that viewers should only watch CNN to see what it was all about. Utter and complete bullshit.

Now we have a consummate professional shill, Chris Strohm, reporting for Bloomberg — suggesting that one of the leading internet security companies in the country believes Russia ‘weaponized social media’ to affect the elections. By doing so, Strohm is attempting to legitimize a talking point that hitherto has proven to be nothing short of conspiratorial guess work.

Let’s examine his evidence.

Claim:
Russia’s government didn’t just hack and leak documents from U.S. political groups during the presidential campaign: It used social media as a weapon to influence perceptions about the election, according to cybersecurity company FireEye Inc.

Material stolen by Russia’s intelligence services was feverishly promoted by online personas and numerous fake accounts through links to leaked material and misleading narratives, according to an analysis of thousands of postings, links and documents by FireEye, which tracks Russian and Chinese hackers breaking into U.S. systems. The operation was a new and belligerent escalation by Moscow in the cyber domain, company Chairman David DeWalt said.

Firstly, FireEye has been making a lot of claims for a very long time. This isn’t anything new. Plus, their stock is a steaming pile of shit, down about 90% over the past few years — the very worst mut in a kennel filled with dogs.

Secondly, there are hackers everywhere, many of which live right here in the US. Just because something is coming from Russia doesn’t mean the fucking government is doing it to crush the democrats. This is lazy thinking and not at all rational.

“The dawning of Russia as a cyber power is at a whole other level than it ever was before,” DeWalt said in an interview in Washington. “We’ve seen what I believe is the most historical event maybe in American democracy history in terms of the Russian campaign.”

What does that even mean? Yes, hacking is at an all time high. Yes, people need to remain vigilant. But when you say ‘Russia as a cyber power’, are you implying that the Russian government is doing it? If so, show us the evidence.

The closeness of the Nov. 8 election sparked scrutiny over the spread of fake news and has fueled demands from Green Party candidate Jill Stein, backed by some Democrats and independents, for a recount in key states lost by Democrat Hillary Clinton. President-elect Donald Trump responded on Twitter that “millions” of people voted illegally, which he said may have been what cost him the popular vote, but he offered no evidence.

Fucking idiot.

‘Minor’ Incidents

A computer scientist for Stein said security flaws in voting machines and suspicions of Russian meddling justified the recount efforts. J. Alex Halderman, a professor at the University of Michigan, said hackers could have infected Pennsylvania’s voting machines with malware designed to lay dormant for weeks, pop up on Election Day and then erase itself without a trace. Trump narrowly won Pennsylvania as well as two other states where Stein’s campaign may seek recounts, Michigan and Wisconsin.

None of what he just said in the paragraph above is true. All parties, including Stein and Clinton have said, repeatedly, that there is no evidence that the elections were tampered with. Nate Silver, hardly a fan of Trump, explains to people drolling about the earth, like Strohm, that it’s the demographics stupid, not the Russians.

We found no apparent correlation5 between voting method and outcome in six of the eight states, and a thin possible link between voting method and results in Wisconsin and Texas. However, the two states showed opposite results: The use of any machine voting in a county was associated with a 5.6-percentage-point reduction in Democratic two-party vote share in Wisconsin but a 2.7-point increase in Texas, both of which were statistically significant.6 Even if we focus only on Wisconsin, the effect disappears when we weight our results by population. More than 75 percent of Wisconsin’s population lives in the 23 most populous counties, which don’t appear to show any evidence for an effect driven by voting systems.7 To have effectively manipulated the statewide vote total, hackers probably would have needed to target some of these larger counties. When we included all counties but weighted the regression by the number of people living in each county, the statistical significance of the opposite effects in Wisconsin and Texas both evaporated.

Even if the borderline significant result for Wisconsin didn’t vanish when weighting by population, it would be doubtful, for a few reasons. You’re more likely to find a significant result when you make multiple tests, as we did by looking at eight states with and without weighting by population.9 Also, different places in Wisconsin and Texas use different kinds of voting machines; presumably if someone really did figure out how to hack certain machines, we’d see different results depending on which type of machines were used in a county, but we don’t. And Nate Cohn of The New York Times found that when he added another control variable to race and education — density of the population — the effect of paper ballots vanished.

Back to Bloomberg’s Russian scare.

Kevin Mandia, chief executive officer, of Milpitas, California-based FireEye, and DeWalt said in the interview this week that they haven’t seen any evidence that U.S. vote tabulation systems were hacked. And U.S. officials have said they saw only “minor” cyber incidents on Election Day.

What the fuck is that all about? If you weren’t paying attention, the headline said ‘social media’ was playing a role in the elections, not hacking. But then the reporter delved right into hacking, making it seem like FireEye was implying there might’ve been a breach. Strohm even mentioned some guy who said some miracle voting virus could’ve been planted ahead of time and activated on election day. Yeah, and I could’ve won the lottery the other day, had I played it.

“We did not see anything that I would characterize as significant,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said at a Bloomberg Government event Nov. 14 in Washington. “There were minor incidents here and there of the type that you would normally expect, but nothing significant.”

End of story, right? Of course not, the lies have to be woven into an intricate web of deceit in order to confuse an otherwise idiot public.

He continues.

Russian officials have repeatedly rejected accusations that the government hacks or supports groups that does so on its behalf.

That hasn’t quelled concerns. The activity detected in the FireEye analysis echoed the Russian strategy of information warfare seen previously in cyber attacks on Estonia, Georgia and Ukraine, where a simmering border conflict has claimed almost 10,000 lives over 2 1/2 years.

As far as I can tell, the so called ‘information warfare’ is nothing more than a few trolls opening up Twitter and Facebook accounts to fuck with people. Hello, wakey the fuck up. This is stupid.

The strategy isn’t limited to online media. The U.K. in October closed the British bank account for RT, a Russian state-controlled news service that was reprimanded by the U.K. media regulator Ofcom for biased or misleading reporting on Syria and Ukraine. Russia protested the move, saying it was being targeted for political reasons.

Baseless.

Democrats’ Request

On Tuesday, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee sent President Barack Obama a letter asking him to declassify information about Russian activity related to the U.S. election.

“We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public,” the senators wrote. “We are conveying specifics through classified channels.”

Then do it and show us the evidence. Anything short of evidence is idle speculation or propaganda.

A month before the election, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Homeland Security Department issued a joint statement saying American intelligence agencies were confident that Russia directed hacking against U.S. political groups.

“The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts,” according to the statement. “The Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

Remember Seth Rich. Again, there is zero evidence tying Russian agents to DCleaks or Wikileaks. This is childish already.

False Personas

In line with those findings, FireEye has mapped what it says is a Russian-backed campaign using at least six key false hacktivist personas to advance the country’s interests, including Guccifer 2.0, DC Leaks, Anonymous Poland and Fancy Bears’ Hack Team. The company’s autopsy also includes thousands of postings on Twitter as well as fake social-media accounts used to pass the information back and forth to generate an online buzz.

So, FireEye has concluded that people from Russia have Twitter accounts and shitpost. Anything more? This is groundbreaking.

The hacking extends to trying to use legitimate websites to promote stolen material. Guccifer 2.0, for example, first promoted stolen documents from the Democratic National Committee through The Smoking Gun and Gawker. There’s no evidence that those websites knew that hacked material given to them was part of a broad campaign to meddle in the U.S. election.

The ‘evidence’ tying Guccifer 2.0 to Russia is a proxy IP address. How silly is this?  In an interview with RT, Guccifer laughed the whole thing off.

“I read several reports, some experts found out that my proxy IP is hosted at a service that’s somehow connected with Russia and has a version in Russian as well as in English,” the individual wrote as cited by WSJ. “This is their strong evidence,” he wrote, adding a smile emoticon.

“It made me angry they attributed my deals to the Russians,” the hacker wrote. “But then I realised the deeper they go this way the safer I am.”

“My goal is to bring the truth, I call it to bring the light,” the hacker wrote, adding that “the big capital has occupied the policy” and “big [IT] companies are leading us to the disaster.”

Back to Bloomberg.

The campaign also includes what FireEye terms “direct advocacy,” in which the personas direct tweets promoting stolen or false information at the accounts of influential people such as journalists, and “indirect advocacy”in which social-media accounts seemingly unaffiliated with the personas also engage in promotion.

Which social media accounts have been hacked and which ‘influential journalists’ have been infiltrated by Russian hackers? I do this everyday and cannot recall seeing one in the news. Again, show me, the curious reader, actual evidence.

Even after the U.S. election, there are few signs that Russia’s actions are abating, creating a complicated, emerging challenge for the incoming Trump administration, FireEye’s DeWalt said. During the campaign, Trump was deferential to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, and repeatedly questioned the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia was meddling in American elections. For years, Russian spies carried out stealthy hacking attacks aimed at hiding their identities, said Mandia, the FireEye CEO. Their tactics began to change around the fall of 2014 and have now escalated to include leaking stolen documents and apparently caring less about operational security or getting caught, Mandia said.

“That’s a change in the rules of engagement,” Mandia said. “All of a sudden, they’re more of a tank through the cornfield when they hack, not a whisper or a ghost.”

Fucking drama Queens. Russian spies. Hacked Twitter accounts. People retweeting fake news. Tanks through the corn field. When will the madness end?

Oh this is rich. There are so many ironies in this article, it’s almost too much to bear. This, coming from the party that seeks to assign social scores to its citizens is asking its decadent party of dog eating officials to refrain from exhibiting public displays of wealth, in an effort to assuage the people to accept a more frugal lifestyle. By taking away aspiration, the communist party will control its populace of slave factory workers with greater efficiency.

Should the slaves bear witness to excess and prosperity, they might become jealous and storm the capitol with pitched forks.

What’s immensely ironic here is the fact that the totalitarian communists, operating a grotesquely corrupt network of state run conglomerates, is seeking to rebrand itself as ‘democratic.’ Following the lead of trailblazers like Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama, you could see where the Chinese got their inspiration — or vice versa.

Annual checks will be had, and the hedonistic lifestyles of party members will be examined, thoroughly, by party officials. Failure to adhere to these new austere rules might lead to a sundry of penalties, such as no more fine dining of half cooked live fish, or a rationaing of prime canine meat.

Source: Reuters
China’s ruling Communist Party has issued new rules to push its fight against deeply entrenched corruption, telling senior officials to travel “without pomp”, not to have too many staff and not take too many holidays.

President Xi Jinping has waged war against graft since assuming office four years ago, warning, like others before him, that the problem is so severe it could weaken the party’s grip on power.

The party has already cracked down on what it terms extravagance, hedonism and bureaucratism. The new rules, issued late on Wednesday, further formalize practices and guidelines already generally in effect.

Top officials should “travel without pomp, minimize impact on public life, and not have vehicles exceeding the set standards”, say the rules, which were released by the official Xinhua news agency.

Holidays should be limited and properly approved, the “right” number of staff should be employed, relatives and employees must be “strictly constrained” and top officials should not delay leaving their offices on retirement, the rules state.

The Politburo, one of the party’s elite ruling bodies headed by Xi, would be the first to follow the rules, and Xi himself is leading by example, Xinhua said.

“To forge an iron, one must be strong oneself,” it said.
“Whatever you demand others do, you should first do yourself; whatever you forbid others to do, you should firmly forbid to yourself,” it said.

Government departments should now draft detailed plans to implement the new rules and strengthen supervision, which should be implemented without compromise, it said.

On Wednesday, the party also adopted measures on what it refers to as “democratic life” to ensure officials have the “correct political consciousness”.

“Authorities should organize 2016 annual democratic life meetings to analyze party members’ integrity by criteria such as loyalty, honesty, frugality and whether they insist on seeking truth from facts,” it added.

China has more billionaires than any country in the world at 568.

A little more than a week ago, it was revealed that the CEO of Reddit, Steve ‘Cannibal’ Huffman edited user comments that were mean to him. While he might’ve thought his actions were cute and funny, the community, especially in the very popular and active The_Donald subreddit, went apeshit and the people turned on him, in the most acrimonious ways possible.

For those unfamiliar, The_Donald subreddit has grown into a community of truth seekers, delving into all sort of topics, ranging from John Podesta’s alleged child trafficking ring (Pizzagate) to Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments. In many ways, it has become ground zero for news and information — often scooping stories first before the legendary Matt Drudge.

Head Cuck and Chief of Reddit, Steve Huffman, isn’t interested in any of that success and in a letter out today threatened an outright ban on The_Donald, in addition to announcing the corporate overlords at Reddit have identified many ‘troublesome users’ and will be taking action soon.

Additionally, The_Donald will no longer enjoy the privilege of having their content featured on the r/all page — due to uncivil and troll like behavior.

tl;dr: I fucked up. I ruined Thanksgiving. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. We are taking a more aggressive stance against toxic users and poorly behaving communities. You can filter r/all now.

Hi All,

I am sorry: I am sorry for compromising the trust you all have in Reddit, and I am sorry to those that I created work and stress for, particularly over the holidays. It is heartbreaking to think that my actions distracted people from their family over the holiday; instigated harassment of our moderators; and may have harmed Reddit itself, which I love more than just about anything.

The United States is more divided than ever, and we see that tension within Reddit itself. The community that was formed in support of President-elect Donald Trump organized and grew rapidly, but within it were users that devoted themselves to antagonising the broader Reddit community.

Many of you are aware of my attempt to troll the trolls last week. I honestly thought I might find some common ground with that community by meeting them on their level. It did not go as planned. I restored the original comments after less than an hour, and explained what I did.

I spent my formative years as a young troll on the Internet. I also led the team that built Reddit ten years ago, and spent years moderating the original Reddit communities, so I am as comfortable online as anyone. As CEO, I am often out in the world speaking about how Reddit is the home to conversation online, and a follow on question about harassment on our site is always asked. We have dedicated many of our resources to fighting harassment on Reddit, which is why letting one of our most engaged communities openly harass me felt hypocritical.

While many users across the site found what I did funny, or appreciated that I was standing up to the bullies (I received plenty of support from users of r/the_donald), many others did not. I understand what I did has greater implications than my relationship with one community, and it is fair to raise the question of whether this erodes trust in Reddit. I hope our transparency around this event is an indication that we take matters of trust seriously. Reddit is no longer the little website my college roommate, u/kn0thing, and I started more than eleven years ago. It is a massive collection of communities that provides news, entertainment, and fulfillment for millions of people around the world, and I am continually humbled by what Reddit has grown into. I will never risk your trust like this again, and we are updating our internal controls to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.

More than anything, I want Reddit to heal, and I want our country to heal, and although many of you have asked us to ban the r/the_donald outright, it is with this spirit of healing that I have resisted doing so. If there is anything about this election that we have learned, it is that there are communities that feel alienated and just want to be heard, and Reddit has always been a place where those voices can be heard.

However, when we separate the behavior of some of r/the_donald users from their politics, it is their behavior we cannot tolerate. The opening statement of our Content Policy asks that we all show enough respect to others so that we all may continue to enjoy Reddit for what it is. It is my first duty to do what is best for Reddit, and the current situation is not sustainable.

Historically, we have relied on our relationship with moderators to curb bad behaviors. While some of the moderators have been helpful, this has not been wholly effective, and we are now taking a more proactive approach to policing behavior that is detrimental to Reddit:
We have identified hundreds of the most toxic users and are taking action against them, ranging from warnings to timeouts to permanent bans. Posts stickied on r/the_donald will no longer appear in r/all. r/all is not our frontpage, but is a popular listing that our most engaged users frequent, including myself. The sticky feature was designed for moderators to make announcements or highlight specific posts. It was not meant to circumvent organic voting, which r/the_donald does to slingshot posts into r/all, often in a manner that is antagonistic to the rest of the community.

We will continue taking on the most troublesome users, and going forward, if we do not see the situation improve, we will continue to take privileges from communities whose users continually cross the line—up to an outright ban.

Again, I am sorry for the trouble I have caused. While I intended no harm, that was not the result, and I hope these changes improve your experience on Reddit.

Steve

PS: As a bonus, I have enabled filtering for r/all for all users. You can modify the filters by visiting r/all on the desktop web (I’m old, sorry), but it will affect all platforms, including our native apps on iOS and Android.

The_Donald users aren’t happy at all by Huffman’s ‘coming together’ letter of healing.

Please participate in my non-biased poll.

Is the CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, a cannibal?

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) November 30, 2016

Another day under the protection of Trumpenomics, making things and people great again, and another sharp uptick in the dollar. While most of the layman, moron, media advertises this as a good thing, the truth of the matter is foreign governments are raking us over the coals — brazenly manipulating their currencies v the dollar to gain an unfair advantage in trade.

The dollar index is at new highs.

Our chief trading nemesis, Japan, has recently enjoyed a 14% reduction in the yen. Do you have any idea how badly that fucks us?

In spite of this windfall, Japanese shares have grossly underperformed in the US, primarily due to the sharp drop in the yen.

A reckoning is coming.

Rejoice, both Fannie and Freddie are going to make Fairholme’s Berkowitz whole again, two monster positions for the wretched and horrible retailer leading Sears into the ground.

Incoming Mnuchin promises to release both Fannie and Freddie from Obama’s torture dungeons, permitting them to be great again.

Steven Mnuchin, president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be U.S. Treasury Secretary, said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should leave government control and that the incoming administration “will get it done reasonably fast.”

The fight over the future of the mortgage companies has been raging since they were bailed out in 2008 for an eventual cost of $187.5 billion. There’s been competing legislation proposed in Congress and battles with shareholders over the U.S. Treasury taking most of the companies’ profits. Since the takeover, the companies have sent the Treasury more than $250 billion.

“We will make sure that when they are restructured, they are absolutely safe and don’t get taken over again. But we’ve got to get them out of government control,” Mnuchin said.

Both Fannie and Freddie are ecstatic to the upside.

Berkowitz owns upwards of 12m shares of Fannie.

That’s not rain you see outside of your windows today, but the tears of Bill Ackman — after talks broke down between Valeant and Takeda to sell Salix — a transaction that would’ve permitted them to retire more than $10b of the $30b in debt they’re currently bedraggled by.

Most people wanted VRX to keep Salix because of its growth prospects. However, with the share price in the dumps and debt/eq ratios blowing out to dangerous levels, the VRX board decided to sell core assets to wind down the clown show before it’s too late.

Takeda is likely applying pressure to VRX, squeezing them in the hopes of picking up the unit at a cheaper price. Either way, Bill Ackman loses.

God save Bill.

Bank stocks have enjoyed their best post election run ever. Its been a long time since anyone cared about a banker, I mean really cared. With the appointment of Mnuchin, Trump all but assures wanton support by Wall Street for his reelection run in 2020. If he should appoint Romney as his Secretary of State, he’ll lock down the old school republican vote too.

Some view this as Trump caving in by operating under a business as usual administration. If his policies turn out to be of the globalist neocon nature, I’ll be the first one to toss Trump under the bus. For now, I’m assuming this is a Machiavellian ploy to keep his enemies close, in order to control them.

We’ve had a magnanimous run. Crude stocks are higher by 13% today — sporting moves which harken back to a place and time on Wall Street that was glorious.

While the prep schools in the Northeast of America celebrate the resurgence of Wall Street, the techfags in Silicon Valley are enduring an acrimonious assault upon their valuations, one that shouldn’t be dismissed.

The FAANG stocks are down again — leading the NASDAQ lower on a day of reckless speculation. Over the last month, this monopolistic cadre of stocks have lost more than 5% in market cap, a group which has a conjoined market cap of $1.9t. The entire basic material sector, including $XOM and the other giants, equals $4.2t.

Biotech stocks are also lower today, off by 2%.

The greatness of The Donald is being praised and lauded almost everywhere. That’s odd, just one month ago he was depicted by the media and most investment banks are the devil, literally.

Deutsche Bank is out with a note this morning, suggesting shares of $GS are about to soar — thanks to a rip roaring economy and widening spreads.

source: CNBC

The rally in bank stocks has priced in higher interest rates, but there is much more upside in the sector’s shares from the economic growth that will come from the Trump administration’s plans for deregulation and lower taxes, according to Deutsche Bank. Goldman Sachs will be one of the particular beneficiaries of the second part of this rally, Deutsche said, upgrading the share to buy from hold.

“GS seems well positioned for a stronger macro environment given revenue upside, good cost control and a valuation below peers (despite similar/higher current and expected returns),” wrote analyst Matt O’Connor in a note Tuesday.

“A stronger economy should benefit many capital market businesses—incl advisory, equity capital markets, and both fixed and equity trading (all areas of strength at GS). This should also be a positive backdrop for investing and lending (even assuming no regulatory changes).”

The analyst raised his 12-month price target to $255 a share from $180. The new forecast represents a 20 percent increase from Goldman’s Tuesday’s close.

“GS shares have mostly kept pace in the post election rally, but this was after lagging peers since the February lows (GS shares are up 50% since the 2/11 bottom vs. a ~60% rise for Market Sensitives on average),” stated the note.

“We sense that leverage to higher rates is mostly reflected in stock prices, but that higher lending and fee volumes from a stronger economy may not be,” stated O’Connor.

The analyst said he believes there is a total of 25 to 30 percent earnings upside for the banking sector based on “a combination of stronger economic growth (better loan growth and fee revenues), higher interest rates (driving higher net interest margins), less regulation and lower tax rates.”

With Goldman’s Mnuchin being tapped as the new Treasury Secretary, it appears the great vampire squid wins again — in spite of their best efforts to support Hillary Clinton and prevent Trump from taking office.

They seem to be doing quite well.

Such generosity by the House of Saud, restricting the supply of crude to record levels, burdening their people with deleterious volume reductions in order to smash us over the skulls with sharply higher prices.

RIGGEDENOMICS

What’s interesting to note, aside from the cartel’s first cut in 8 years, is the fact that traders are jumping in like lemmings without putting these cuts into context. Let’s explore, shall we?

As you can see, quite clearly, OPEC had been pumping out crude as fast as their devilish hands could pump the stuff, up until now. With these cuts, production will plunge to 32.5m bpd — levels not seen since  April of 2016!

Clearly traders are squeezing the life out of those who bet against this cut. Goldman lured their clients to the cliff and kicked them over — suggesting an OPEC cut had only a 30% chance of occurring.

OPEC clinched a deal to curtail oil supply, confounding skeptics as the need to clear a record global crude glut — and prove the group’s credibility — brought about its first cuts in eight years, Bloomberg News reports.

OPEC will reduce production by 1.2 million barrels a day to 32.5 million a day, a delegate said Wednesday in Vienna, asking not to be identified as the decision isn’t yet public. Oil jumped 7.6 percent to $49.90 a barrel in London at 1:23 p.m. local time.

After weeks of often tense negotiations, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ three biggest producers — Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran — resolved differences over sharing the burden of cuts to rein in supply for the first time since 2008. Notably, it appears the Saudis accepted that Iran, as a special case, can raise production to about 3.9 million barrels a day. The agreement is also likely to include a reduction of about 600,000 barrels a day by non-OPEC countries.

WTI and Brent are enthusiastically soaring this morning, higher by more than 7%.

Commerzbank calls the cuts ‘completely worthless’.