Xi spoke at China’s largest ever military parade, featuring 100,000 performers, to observe the 70th anniversary of the re-founding of China as a communist state. While Xi spoke in Beijing, thousands took the streets in Hong Kong for a “day of mourning” in observance of the victims of communism – 45 million under Mao Zedong alone – and most in Taiwan shrugged at the idea that they had a place in the festivities.

Taiwan is a sovereign nation and was established as the Republic of China following Mao’s ascent to the leadership of China. It has never been under communist rule by Beijing. Xi’s dictatorship views Taiwan as a rogue province and refuses any diplomatic ties to states that accept the reality of Taiwan’s sovereignty. The United States does not acknowledge Taiwan as a state to maintain ties to the Communist Party. Xi insisted in his speech Tuesday that the era where Taiwan asserts itself as a fully functional state will soon come to an end.

“As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!” Trump said in a pair of tweets Tuesday evening.

The Deep State criminals in Obama’s FBI/CIA/DOJ failed to remove President Trump with the Russian collusion canard so they are going for broke this time around. The Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry after a Deep State CIA spy filed a whistleblower complaint against Trump over his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky based on second-hand knowledge and hearsay.

The Democrats have yet to name a crime that President Trump committed which is further proof that this is indeed a coup.

According to the Washington Post, Trump was “screaming, ranting and raving” that for the border wall, “I wanted a moat, and in the moat I wanted alligators and snakes. And I wanted the wall to be a fence. And I wanted it to be electrified. And I wanted sharp spikes at the top so if anyone gets it, it goes piercing through their skin – is somewhat the way they said it. Skin piercing spikes!” Trump recited dramatically, adding parenthetically that “moat” is “not a word I use.” It was a total lie. It was corrupt reporting.

The president singled out the Post for a special shaming, noting “almost everything the Washington Post does is fake. It’s a fake newspaper. It’s owned by a rich guy for the purposes of giving him power in Washington.” But the whole press corps got a dressing-down, as Trump suggested he would retire the term “fake news” in favor of “corrupt news, because …. much of the media in this country is corrupt. And it truly is the enemy of the people.”

The pope’s “public statement of support” for Father Martin comes just days after several US bishops voiced concerns over the “ambiguity” of the priest’s words and actions regarding homosexuality. “Father Martin’s public messages create confusion among the faithful and disrupt the unity of the Church by promoting a false sense that immoral sexual behavior is acceptable under God’s law,” wrote Bishop Thomas John Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, in a statement on the diocesan website.

Those who experience same-sex attraction need the Church’s support “in the Christian struggle for virtue, sanctification, and purity,” the bishop said, while Father Martin “either encourages or fails to correct behavior that separates a person” from God’s love. “This is deeply scandalous in the sense of leading people to believe that wrongful behavior is not sinful,” he said.

What will next week bring? When Wall Street can get super cheap loans from the Fed in the tens of billions of dollars with no questions asked by Congress, it will continue upping its demands until the Fed is once again secretly shelling out trillions of dollars while Congress willfully remains in the dark – in other words, a replay of the 2007-2010 financial crisis.

The New York Fed is only allowed to engage in these repo transactions with its 24 primary dealers. That list of 24 primary dealers includes the securities units of big US banks like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, but it also includes the US based securities units of troubled foreign banks like Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and Societe Generale (SocGen).

Because the New York Fed is not announcing which banks are drawing down the bulk of its loans, neither Congress nor the American people know if the money is flowing to US banks or foreign bank subsidiaries in the US. Propping up troubled foreign banks is not what most Americans want their central bank to be doing. If the New York Fed is secretly funneling money to a unit of Deutsche Bank to prop it up, the American people need to know about it and Congress needs to be asking questions.

Wall Street On Parade is not the only financial news outlet that thinks there is something much bigger than a technical/seasonal funding problem happening on Wall Street. John Dizard wrote this yesterday at the Financial Times: “In recent days, some banks and dealers have wound up paying hundreds of basis points over the Fed funds target rate for their short-term money. The implication, to money market people, is there are big unknown counterparty risks out there and nobody wants to get caught in another ‘Lehman’ workout.”

The entire GDP for the United States last year was $20.5 trillion. The four banks mentioned above have 27 percent of the entire US GDP in deposits. How could it be possible that those four banks can’t come up with $100 billion in repo loans per day and thus are forcing the Fed to once again become the lender of last resort?

But lately banks have gotten cold feet, demanding ever-higher interest rates from their brethren and threatening to screw up all kinds of activities that depend on ready cash. The Fed, as a result, was forced to dump tens of billions of dollars into the repo market each morning for the past week, a kind of baby QE that was as baffling as it was sudden. When asked why this was happening the best the Fed could come with was that there are difficulties with the market’s “plumbing.”

As any good doctor knows, half the battle is giving the complaint a name, because a patient’s imagination is frequently much worse than the reality. Our inability to explain the sudden repo market seizure has participants wondering if they’re witnessing heartburn or full-on cardiac arrest. This is not conducive to frictionless lending. As a money manager told CNN: “If the Fed can’t maintain orderly cash markets in quiet times, what might happen during chaotic ones?”

- The British Supreme Court just arrogated unprecedented power to itself by inserting itself into any dispute between the Government and Parliament.

- The Democrats have announced they will pursue impeachment charges against President Trump because an unverified, hearsay whistleblower made a complaint about a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenski.

- Bitcoin’s hashrate mysteriously flash-crashed more than 40% presaging a massive $1500 drop in price.

- Donald Trump delivered a blistering critique of socialism at the United Nations General Assembly. Too bad he’s nearly as bad as the ones he’s fighting on the far left.

- The Federal Reserve continues to bail out banks to the tune of $65 to $75 billion per day through overnight repo operations that no one can give us an explanation as to why they’re needed.

This feels to me like a multi-level coup against those that dare stand athwart the global power structure. Both British and American leadership institutions are under sincere attack with these moves. The not-so-subtle message is, “We own you. We are in control and always will be.” Your champions will be harassed until they are completely neutered and bereft of any ability to implement the changes you want.

It’s a coup folks. And the full court press is in on this coup for your sanity and to radicalize you into violence. They are daring us to strike back here so then they can be justified in going on full lockdown and cancel future elections.

Breaking the compact between rulers and the ruled sets a dangerous precedent for reciprocal violence. Because overthrowing a President for doing his job and destroying government to nullify a democratic referendum are points of no return. Brits and Americans alike are learning the terrible lesson that it is time to put away childish things like representative government and that elections matter. They don’t. You will be presented with nothing but Hobson’s Choices from here forward.

The image you hold in your head of your country is not the reality of the one you live in. The dystopia is real.

A slowdown in Germany’s economy that started a year ago was initially expected to be short-lived. But the gloom has deepened. Output shrank in the second quarter, and many economists, including those at the Bundesbank, think it is still contracting — satisfying the definition of a recession. As a consequence, the euro zone seems set barely to grow.

Global trade has moderated, and with it industrial activity across Europe. The continent has suffered collateral damage in the trade war between America and China. But there are other reasons for its woes. Take Germany’s exports to both countries, for instance. Carsten Brzeski of ing, a Dutch bank, points out that these have held up better than exports to other markets. Brexit-related uncertainty means that exports to Britain have taken a bigger hit.

Even so, researchers at the European Central Bank (ecb) find that external causes explain only around a third of the decline in the euro zone’s industrial production over the past year. The rest of the trouble originates within the currency union.