America, Your Gift Is Still En Route

All of the following events happened in just ten days:

12/15/2017 – Bloomberg publishes a story about how Coinbase is working to expand its business by leveraging its relationship with regulators and leveraging the confidence investors have in it by virtue of the fact it hasn't been hacked. As of 12/15, bitcoin traded at $17,589.

12/15/2017 – Reuters relayed reports from South Korea that North Korean hackers were responsible for attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges throughout 2017, resulting in control over roughly $6.99 million worth of currency being stolen.

12/20/2017 – The House re-voted to re-pass an amended version of a previously amended version of a tax bill conservatively estimated to generate $1.48 trillion in deficits after virtually no Congressional members supporting the bill had read ANY of it. As of 12/20, Bitcoin traded at $16,359.

12/21/2017 – Goldman Sachs announced it was created a trading desk to facilitate trading in digital currencies for its clients and – Goldman Sachs does NOTHING purely for its clients – for its own account. Operations are targeted to begin as soon as June 2018. (Hold that thought…). Bitcoin closed at $15,530 on 12/21.

12/22/2017 – Bitcoin dropped from a high of $19,600 to $13,868, trading as low as $12,148 mid-day. And other crypto-currencies all dropped by more than 20 percent the same day.

12/23/2017 – Bitcoin trading closed at $14,583, reflecting a 20% rebound from the $12,148 mid-day low the day before. We're back baby!

12/24/2017 – Bitcoin trading closed at $13,827, down 5.2% from the prior day rebound.

12/25/2017 – A Los Angeles area psychologist delivered a large box of horse manure to the Bel Air residence of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin with a card attached stating it was a return of the December tax bill, signed "Warmest wishes from the American People."

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Even after dropping that last little holiday prank off the list, the remaining collection of events above should be raising the hair on the back of the neck of anyone capable of remembering what happened starting exactly ten years ago and WHY it happened.

The American economy began collapsing in 2007 due to the feedback loop created by the interaction of four crucial problems in markets:

1) a price bubble in the housing market fueled by fraudulent lending
2) incorrect risk assessments of banks due to over-confidence in securitization as a means of spreading risk from bad loans
3) continued participation in a bubble market by banks who knew better but coldly banked on their too-big-to-fail status as a guarantee from taxpayers if something bad happened
4) completely ineffectual regulation of financial markets by the government

Behind those direct factors, the larger economy was failing to produce new jobs beyond population growth despite the combined tailwind of wartime spending, large deficits and the aforementioned housing bubble.

With all of those factors combined, America's then $15 trillion dollar economy had zero margin for error when failures in the mortgage sector triggered liquidity problems in commercial paper lending segments that literally lubricate the economy and keep things moving on a daily basis. As investors caught wind of looming failures of one institution after another, the failure ricocheted into the core of the financial system, inducing a seizure in the entire economy. Economic output as reflected in GDP dropped $410 billion in 2008 from 2007, dropped another $40 billion in 2009, and didn't return to pre-crash levels until 2011.

However, those dry GDP statistics really don't convey the true cost of the collapse. In reality, many jobs just vanished and never came back, never to be reflected in unemployment statistics which don't capture adults who leave the market. Government spending and revenue, which had been creating deficits ranging from $161 billion and $413 from 2004 to 2007 jumped to between $1,087 billion and $1,413 billion from 2009 to 2012. If you assume there was some magic way to defuse the economic bomb wired by Wall Street leading up to 2008, then what the US government actually did by raising public debt to bail out massive private failures added nearly $3.4 trillion to the national debt that didn't need to be there.

In the present, you have news stories spread over a mere ten days that make it clear the financial industry and the government are wiring up a similar economic bomb to that of 2008. Oh sure, the trigger mechanism is different. In 2008, it was highly leveraged investments based upon fraudulent home mortgages and inflated real estate prices. In 2017, the trigger mechanism is financial institutions setting up trading desks for the benefit of "special clients" to participate in the bubble market of all bubble markets – cryptocurrencies built upon synthesis of new cryptographic token chains based on computing power that can be stolen via viruses to run algorithms no one in government understands.

At the heart of the cryptocurrency evolution is a question few seem to be asking. Exactly WHO is going to back Bitcoin? When you say it's worth $18,760 and I say it's worth $11,900, how is that debate going to be settled? The American dollar isn't worth what we think it is worth just because we have the most colorful flag or our accounting systems produce nice quarterly reports or we look honest. Our currency is worth what it is because other entities have SOME faith we will be around to pay our bills and operate our economy because we can protect that economy. That faith can (and will) fade over time but it certainly doesn't vary 40 percent in a day. A currency fluctuating that much in a month or a year is worthless as a store of value, much less fluctuating that much in a DAY.

To be perfectly clear, no one buying bitcoin on exchanges is "investing" in ANY productive sense of the word. Anyone buying cryptocurrencies at this point is playing the lottery or possibly trying to launder money to buy the fixin's for nuclear weapons. However, it's not Joe Public that we need to worry about if he's stupid enough to buy in. No one in government is going to backstop Joe's bet if he puts Junior's college money in Bitcoin, loses 40 percent of it and has to pack the kid off to Whatsamatta U instead of an Ivy League school.

No, the real worry is if a Wall Street exec bets big on cryptocurrencies they don't understand, leverages those bets with "real" assets, then produces a liquidity crisis after a 5-10 percent swing in the wrong direction. And what if one of those arrogant, testosterone fueled traders starts mixing his personal gambles on a cryptocurrency with his firm's book and no one catches it for a few weeks and he suddenly gets caught short – in the company's book?

It can't happen? It DID happen. Remember the "London Whale" working for JP Morgan? If you believe Jamie Dimon, that trader lost $2.3 billion over two months from attempts to hedge risks which instead magnified them, eventually wiping $10 billion off JP Morgan's stock price. And that happened AFTER the 2008 meltdown, when big banks were supposed to be far more cautious than they were prior to 2008.

And as an unsurprising footnote, it's worth mentioning that no one at JP Morgan wound up going to jail. US Attorneys dropped all charges after the trader, Bruno Iksil, changed testimony he was going to give in the trial of two other traders to state that he was hired by JP Morgan execs including Dimon as a cover for trading strategies they had already decided to pursue in 2010.

If another meltdown occurs, the government lending required to restore liquidity is unimaginable and the country's fiscal position has even less slack to smooth out a shock even if nothing else goes wrong.

Steve Mnunchin may have had a box of horse manure delivered to his house as a gag gift for the holidays. But don't worry America, your real gift is still en route. It's impossible to know exactly when it will arrive, but there will be no problem recognizing it when it comes. Sure as ****.

WTH

Organized Crime and the Opioid Crisis

In "the old days," thirty to forty years ago, use of heroin was a fringe problem associated with edgy jazz musicians and rich rock stars who clearly had more money than they knew what to do with. Few back then could have imagined a world where heroin would have seemed as popular and available as marijuana. Tying the explosion of opioid use to supposed downward trends in morals, "traditional family values" and corrosive public assistance that destroys individual responsibility might be an easy straight line to draw and might be politically useful but such connections have nothing to do with reality.

 

Like everything else in life, when a trend emerges out of seemingly nowhere and grows exponentially beyond normally understood sources to support its growth, you aren't looking at magic -- or genius, or "evil". You're looking at a baseball field through a knothole and seeing nothing but home plate.

Two stories, one from The New Yorker and one from NPR, make it very clear the roots of the opioid crisis stem from a pattern of organized crime. Not "Organized Crime" as in the mafia -- the mob could never muster the combination of intellectual property and legal muscle required -- just organized crime. Big business (BIG) with an existing understanding of a market, understanding of the science underlying the behavior of their product, understanding of marketing techniques to customers (patients) and distributors (doctors) and an understanding of regulations and laws needed to cynically profit without any concern for anything beyond their bottom line.

Links to the stories are provided below:

The Family That Built an Empire of Pain

Pharmaceutical Founder Arrested In Alleged Nationwide Opioid Scheme

The New Yorker story focuses on decades of business strategy on the part of the Sackler family, which owns privately held Purdue Pharma which reaps billions in profits from the current opioid epidemic. The story provides the history of Purdue's creation of OxyContin in 1995 and their subsequent efforts to squelch bad news about the drug's consequences but goes back further in the company's history to make the case that their "success" with OxyContin was no fluke. Purdue Pharma was founded by people who studied medicine -- many family members are trained doctors -- but also studied marketing and specifically created promotional strategies aimed at obscuring the drug's addictive qualities and encouraging wider use in circumstances previously considered to not warrant "big gun" pain killer medication.

In tracing the history of the family and its business, the story mentions that one family member, Arthur Sackler, was instrumental in the marketing of Librium and Valium in the sixties.

The ad ran in a medical journal. Sackler promoted Valium for such a wide range of uses that, in 1965, a physician writing in the journal Psychosomatics asked, “When do we not use this drug?” One campaign encouraged doctors to prescribe Valium to people with no psychiatric symptoms whatsoever: “For this kind of patient—with no demonstrable pathology—consider the usefulness of Valium.” Roche, the maker of Valium, had conducted no studies of its addictive potential. Win Gerson, who worked with Sackler at the agency, told the journalist Sam Quinones years later that the Valium campaign was a great success, in part because the drug was so effective. “It kind of made junkies of people, but that drug worked,” Gerson said. By 1973, American doctors were writing more than a hundred million tranquillizer prescriptions a year, and countless patients became hooked.

Sound familiar?

Purdue created OxyContin as a replacement for an existing drug it sold called MS Contin which delivered morphine using a "Continuous" release formulation. The MS Contin formulation was patented but the patent was expiring, jeopardizing the firm's cash flow. OxyContin was designed to use oxycodone rather than morphine. However, instead of just offering tablets with low 10mg doses, they also created HUGE doses of 80 and 160mg. (Uh oh...)

Purdue conducted no studies to confirm any tendencies of patients to become addicted to the new formulation, especially with the jumbo doses. The launch of the product benefited from two inexplicable quirks of fate. First, despite no clinical tests being performed regarding its addictive properties, the FDA at the time

approved a package insert for OxyContin which announced that the drug was safer than rival painkillers, because the patented delayed-absorption mechanism “is believed to reduce the abuse liability.” David Kessler, who ran the F.D.A. at the time, told me that he was “not involved in the approval.” The F.D.A. examiner who oversaw the process, Dr. Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterward. Within two years, he had taken a job at Purdue.

Purdue's marketing not only pushed the drug for a much wider set of uses beyond cancer but actively targeted physicians who were not experts in pain management and even the public itself.

A major thrust of the sales campaign was that OxyContin should be prescribed not merely for the kind of severe short-term pain associated with surgery or cancer but also for less acute, longer-lasting pain: arthritis, back pain, sports injuries, fibromyalgia. The number of conditions that OxyContin could treat seemed almost unlimited. According to internal documents, Purdue officials discovered that many doctors wrongly assumed that oxycodone was less potent than morphine—a misconception that the company exploited.

Problems with the drug became apparent across the country in 3-4 years. Purdue itself was aware of the problems from the start.

A recent exposé by the Los Angeles Times revealed that the first patients to use OxyContin, in a study conducted by Purdue, were ninety women recovering from surgery in Puerto Rico. Roughly half the women required more medication before the twelve-hour mark. The study was never published. For Purdue, the business reason for obscuring such results was clear: the claim of twelve-hour relief was an invaluable marketing tool. But prescribing a pill on a twelve-hour schedule when, for many patients, it works for only eight is a recipe for withdrawal, addiction, and abuse. Notwithstanding Purdue’s claims, many people who were not drug abusers—and who took OxyContin exactly as their doctors instructed—began experiencing withdrawal symptoms between doses. In March, 2001, a Purdue employee e-mailed a supervisor, describing some internal data on withdrawal and wondering whether or not to write up the results, even though doing so would only “add to the current negative press.” The supervisor responded, “I would not write it up at this point.”

The New Yorker story is quite lengthy and well worth reading. Perhaps the best point made in the story involves a final barrier to holding the family accountable for the damage done by its products and its conduct -- the fact the company has billions to give away to universities and charities.

“It’s amazing how they are left out of the debate about causation, but also about solutions,” Allen Frances, the Duke psychiatrist, said of the Sacklers. “A truly philanthropic family, looking at the last twenty years, would say, ‘You know, there’s several million Americans who are addicted, directly or indirectly, because of us.’ Real philanthropy would be to contribute money to taking care of them. At this point, adding their name to a building—it rings hollow. It’s not philanthropy. It’s just a glorification of the Sackler family.”

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The NPR story provides details on the arrest of John Kapoor for fraud and racketeering charges related to his firm's promotion of off-label uses of Subsys which delivers the highly potent drug fentanyl in spray form. From the article,

But according to prosecutors, Kapoor and several other former high-ranking executives at the company conspired to bribe doctors to write "large numbers of prescriptions for the patients, most of whom were not diagnosed with cancer." They also allegedly "conspired to mislead and defraud health insurance providers who were reluctant to approve payment for the drug when it was prescribed for non-cancer patients."

=========================

There really is no mystery to the opioid crisis. This isn't an opioid crisis at all. It's an organized crime crisis, brought about by big businesses that knew the health risks to the public and decided to go for cash rather than public safety and systemically lied to regulators and corrupted professionals in the field with an efficiency the mob could never imagine, much less achieve.

His Silence Was Permissive

The Atlantic, like a few other online sources, published a story aimed at unraveling 100 years of fabricated history about Robert E. Lee and the Civil War in general. The story at

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/

is entitled The Myth of the Kindly General Lee and is well worth reading.

One quote in the story jumps out into the context of today. The story outlines numerous behaviors that Lee exhibited or allowed prior to the Civil War and during the war:

• splitting up slave families
• personally whipping runaways or providing explicit, cruel instruction
• reneging on terms in the wills of his in-laws to keep slaves in bondage
• capturing free slaves while battling in Pennsylvania and forcibly returning them to the south
• massacring black soldiers who surrendered in battle

The story quotes a historian who wrote about the Battle of the Crater where the black union soldiers were massacred after surrendering. That historian also described how Lee paraded other Union soldiers that were captured in battle through the local town of Petersburg, VA with townspeople gathered around to taunt the new prisoners. Lee never said a word about any of these practices. As the historian put it, "his silence was permissive."

As one local citizen of Charlottesville put it to a reporter on camera, no one is trying to forget Robert E. Lee, but instead of worshiping him as some mythical figure of Southern grace and honor, we should be remembering him for what he was... A monster.

It should be easy for Americans to understand the roots of mid-east terrorism in decades of religious and social distortions drilled into children's minds in madrassas. Why didn't the Saudis do anything about the terrorists that grew up in their country and went off to join al Queda or the Taliban or ISIS? Why are young men in the middle east unable to see that the lack of economic opportunity they face is due to the corruption and complacency of their own governments, not the rest of the world's infidel ways?

For the same reason we have tens of thousands of grossly mis-educated people walking around in Nazi-inspired attire spouting off about racial injustice, economic discrimination against "true Americans" and half-baked concepts of "pride" and Christian righteousness. The people who believe this **** have been steeped in it for 150 years like half-witted tea bags in a toxic jar by the placement of thousands of memorials and public places named after the men who initiated the disaster that was the Civil War. And now they have not only a single man at the top of government silently approving their efforts, that man is accompanied by an entire leadership team that is publicly and actively reversing if not dismantling fifty years of policy that supported education, policing and prosecution efforts aimed at correcting these problems.

Perhaps most ironically of all, the efforts to reverse and dismantle these programs -- while WILDLY popular with this ignorant base of voters -- will hurt them just as much as the "others" they so despise.

Until January 2017, you could say Trump's silence was permissive.

Since January 2017, Trump's ACTIONS are active encouragement to these idiotic, deadly forces.

There's no mystery about why these events are happening. The main mystery now is whether average voting Americans are going to do anything different to change the direction of the country. You don't have to get out of your chair. You don't have to risk getting crushed by a 20-year old hate-filled idiot on a pubic street. You just have to pay attention. VERY CLOSE attention. Study this country's history. Resist when politicians attempt to buy jobs from big business by diverting taxes from public education. Pay attention when your President and Attorney General de-prioritize civil rights investigations regarding voting and policing. And VOTE.

WTH

No Predictions, Just Observations

Reports in The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and on CNN state that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has convened a grand jury and has already issued subpoenas related to the New York City meeting between Trump's son and campaign officials and Russian contacts with financial ties to Russian government entities. Other reports earlier in the week noted that Mueller hired an additional prosecutor named Greg Andes who served two years in the Justice Department specializing in fraud and foreign bribery casework.

My imagination has utterly failed to keep up with the possibilities of a reality in which Trump won election on November 8, 2016 so I won't attempt to make any predictions about specific charges, future defendants and dates. However, it's worth running through what is already known to understand the threat Trump poses to the United States by continuing to hold office.

First, a few things about grand juries:

• the proceedings are secret
• prosecutors, judges, lawyers and jurors are sworn to secrecy
• witnesses brought in front of a grand jury to testify are NOT sworn to secrecy, they can talk about any answer provided (though some states prevent them from divulging information they learned during proceedings)
• the burden of proof for a grand jury to indict "probable cause" which is lower than "preponderance of the evidence" used to convict in civil cases which is lower than "beyond a reasonable doubt" required for convictions in criminal cases.

It is a safe bet that a large swath of current Trump Administration employees will be subpoenaed exposing them to huge legal bills, enormous pressure, and even greater public embarrassment. (Then again, anyone serving in this Administration would seem to have some unnatural immunity to ethical, moral or intellectual shame.) As lower level players are roped into the morass, more churn followed by more leaks and back biting can be assured which will just feed the investigation and increase pressure on Trump, his Administration officials and staff and his inner circle of business and political contacts. Since few in his political and personal circles seem to be terribly bright and many seem to have a nearly instinctual urge to LIE in any circumstance, the odds of additional charges of perjury and obstruction of justice would seem to be quite high.

Although the new grand jury was first empanelled to review findings related to "the Russia meeting," subsequent reports have confirmed the work of the grand jury has already moved beyond "the meeting" to Trump's larger business dealings. There is virtually no way to AVOID this given Trump's financial history over the last 20 years. If you want the details, watch this Dutch documentary from May 2017:

Part 1 -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bEdMuKq30I (45 mins)
Part 2 -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvd7PqI_Lx0 (36 mins)

This is well produced -- it looks and sounds like it could have been produced by WGBH for Frontline. The nutshell narrative boils down to this:

After Trump's multiple bankruptcies in the late 1980s, no US bank would lend money to him or his companies. Nonetheless, he was busy "doing deals" to resurrect his real estate empire. At the same time, the collapse of Yeltsin-era Russia concentrated extreme wealth into the hands of the original generation of oligarchs. Once Putin came to power, he began ruthlessly restructuring the economy to pull that flow of wealth to him and going after the current oligarchs -- financially, politically and personally. This triggered HUGE waves of capital outflows from Russia to destinations around the world with a common modus operandi: string investments through convoluted shell companies and buy up real estate. Given Trump's 100% dependency on non-traditional sources of investment funds, it would seem IMPOSSIBLE for Trump and his firm to NOT have ties to illegally laundered money and next to impossible for him to NOT have understood that at the time of the deals. A LARGE portion of some of Trump's biggest properties were and still are owned by parties from Russia and former Soviet bloc states.

The documentary makes clear that -- as is common with real estate deals -- the structure of the shell companies involved are LLCs which means all of the partners have to sign all of the financial documents related to the deal. Donald Trump was a named partner in deals involving at least three different shell company LLCs who worked out of Trump Tower. One of the companies involved -- Bayrock Group LLC -- is currently under criminal indictment by the State of New York for tax fraud. Another company Bayrock BV set up in the Netherlands by Bayrock LLC was established with paperwork filed by the law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani -- yea, THAT Giuliani.

In short, it is probably more likely a short investigation into the attendees of the 2016 meeting in New York City and laughingly incompetent effort to hide that turned up more glaring criminal activity related to actual real estate deals between Trump shell corporations and Russian parties. The attempts to obfuscate campaign-era dealings WITH those parties likely PALE in comparison to the severity of the criminal charges that could stem from the actual real estate deals. To give you an idea of the magnitude of dollars involved, one of the partnership deals involved Bayrock Group LLC and a firm called FL Group BV, an Icelandic firm backed by Russians who are active supporters of Putin. That deal was worth $250 million and officials looking at the deal think it is a gigantic tax fraud.

But here's the thing.

Are any of those possible crimes really material? To the rest of us?

Compared to the ongoing conduct of Trump in office and the operation of his entire Administration? Look at the headlines over the last two weeks:

• he hired a new "communications director" who couldn't last 11 days
• he ad libbed a speech in front of thousands of Boy Scouts alluding to rich billionaires having illicit sex aboard yachts
• he has publicly undermined the authority of his own Attorney General
• that Attorney General still seems motivated to stay on not out of loyalty but to preserve his chance to pursue his own far-right conservative agenda of rolling back civil rights enforcement, fighting affirmative action practices at universities and green-lighting the resumption of asset forfeiture by local police departments
• he stated he would purposely undermine current laws regarding health care funding in order to intentional tank "Obamacare" harming millions of citizens
• he issued a military policy statement via Twitter (???) which was immediately rejected IN PUBLIC by the military leadership
• he denigrated the General commanding troops in Afghanistan because he can't figure out why we haven't won the war after 16 years which was immediately leaked by his own staff
• he is fabricating phone calls from organizations and governments lauding his "bigliness" that never happened
• he is triggering staff to leak transcripts of phone calls and meetings refuting his public claims

While this is going on, we have an insane idiot totally disconnected from reality threatening the country. (I mean Kim Jong Un, not Trump, in case that description wasn't clear enough). Trump has been literally threatening war with North Korea. THAT fact is frightening enough. However, it isn't clear at all if Trump is suitable for command. Think about it.

Half of the appointed senior staff positions in the State Department have been left vacant -- not what you want during or after a war.

It isn't clear if military leaders trust his direction or mental state.

It isn't clear if his own senior staff trust his direction or mental state.

It isn't clear if the complete absence of trust allows him to have any seriously confidential conversation that won't get leaked.

It is pretty clear now the VAST majority of American citizens do not trust him.

How would Donald Trump possibly fulfill his duty as Commander in Chief in this environment, created entirely by his own intellectual / ethical / moral shortcomings and lack of impulse control?

Putting a finer point on the question... Would YOU want to serve or have a family member serve in the military and go to war with Donald Trump calling the shots?

If he can't be trusted to responsibly handle that fundamental duty, he needs to be impeached and removed from office. To those that would say Pence would be worse, note that the impeachment mechanism doesn't have a four-year hold after Congress hits the EJECT button. The only limit on impeachment is the willingness of the House to invoke it. It is also worth mentioning there is some chance that Pence could wind up ensnared in this as well. A member of the House wrote a letter to Pence PRIOR to the beginning of the Trump Administration with concerns about Flynn's prior dealings as a foreign agent. Yet Pence didn't seem to object to Flynn's appointment and provided cover for Flynn on Face the Nation stating Flynn had no campaign-era contacts with Russian officials about sanctions imposed by the US. That was quite a claim to make, given that Pence was not INVOLVED in the campaign until the convention so by making that claim, he was implying he ASKED about the issue, was given an answer of NO and conveyed the party line, despite knowing at the time of the question that Flynn had acted as a foreign agent.

WTH

Could It Be Any More Obvious?

The executive order issued by Trump imposing "extreme vetting" on a discriminatory basis against Muslims from a specific collection of countries isn't really surprising, given the low bar of logic already established with this president. However, the order does highlight yet another combination of hypocrisy and conflict of interest already engulfing the Trump mis-Administration.

The key components of the order are quoted here:

I hereby proclaim that the immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens from countries referred to in section 217(a)(12) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12), would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants and nonimmigrants, of such persons for 90 days from the date of this order (excluding those foreign nationals traveling on diplomatic visas, North Atlantic Treaty Organization visas, C-2 visas for travel to the United Nations, and G-1, G-2, G-3, and G-4 visas).

(snip)

(c) Pursuant to section 212(f) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1182(f), I hereby proclaim that the entry of nationals of Syria as refugees is detrimental to the interests of the United States and thus suspend any such entry until such time as I have determined that sufficient changes have been made to the USRAP to ensure that admission of Syrian refugees is consistent with the national interest.

Trump blathered thusly when announcing the order:

I am establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America. We don't want them here. We want to ensure that we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas. We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country and love deeply our people.

Sooooooooo....

• Trump is worried about visitors, immigrants and refugess...
• who are of Islamic faith...
• who come from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia...
• because those countries have a history of Islamic terrorism...
• and they might bring Islamic terrorism to the United States

That's the story? Got it.

Ok. One question. Why isn't Indonesia on this list?

• it's the largest predominately Muslim country in the world
• in 2002, a choreographed, 3-bomber attack sponsored by Jemaah Islamiyah killed 202 in Bali
• in 2003, a car bomb linked to Jemaah Islamiyah killed 12 at the JW Marriot in Jakarta
• in 2009, a choreographed, 2-bomber attack killed 7 in Jakarta at the JW Marriot and Ritz hotels
• there appear to be dozens of choices of direct flights from Jakarta to the US

Hmmmm. What could be going on here? Why might Indonesia be different?

Think.

THINK.

DING!

Oh yea. Got it. Money.

More specifically, Trump's money.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/world/asia/indonesia-donald-trump-resort.html

Even as President-elect Donald J. Trump promises to end foreign business deals that could pose conflicts of interest — there will be “no new deals” while he is in office, he has said — his company is moving ahead with two Indonesian projects that illustrate how tricky that pledge might be.

None of the construction work to build or renovate structures at the Indonesian resorts has even begun, but Mr. Trump has forged relationships with powerful political figures in Indonesia, where such connections are crucial to pushing through big projects.

That tangle of relationships includes an Indonesian business partner who aspires to high office; a powerful politician accused of trying to extort billions of dollars from an American mining company; as well as Mr. Trump’s adviser on regulatory issues, Carl C. Icahn, who is a top shareholder in the same mining company.

Come to think of it, I have a second question. Why not Malaysia?

• the country is 61 percent Muslim
• a Muslim pilot ditched flight ML370, killing 227 passengers and 11 other crew members
• it isn't clear if the pilot was suicidal over relationship issues or an Islamic extremist

I'll be damned. Same answer.

http://vancouversun.com/business/local-business/son-of-one-of-malaysias-wealthiest-tycoons-planning-vancouver-developments

Trump has financial ties with wealthy business players from Malaysia who owned Trump Tower in Vancouver which recently sold for $360 million.

I think it would be more accurate to explain the rational behind the Islamic immigration / refugee freeze along these lines:

• I can do it with an executive order without actually legislating anything
• the ban is a big chunk of red meat to my low-information base, wanting "action"
• I can season the steak for the low-info base by adding preferences for Christians
• who cares about a bunch of Muslims from places we bomb or would like to bomb?
• but hey, bidness is bidness -- don't alienate the suckers, I mean Muslims, who invest in my Trump development schemes

At this point, we could replace the constitution with an auctioneer. Our rights and any claim to moral leadership in the world are being sold off to the highest bidder. One deal at a time.

WTH