According to Forbes, the ratio of nonfinancial corporate debt to U.S. GDP is now nearly 50 percent… This time around the corporate debt bubble is larger than it has ever been before, and risky corporate debt has been growing faster than any other category…Needless to say, the stage is set for a corporate debt meltdown of epic proportions.

Instead of spending the money to build factories, hire workers and expand their businesses, our big corporations have been spending more money on stock buybacks than anything else. Every year, publicly traded corporations spend hundreds of billions of dollars buying back their own stocks from shareholders, and much of that is being done with borrowed money.

For example, in recent years General Motors has spent nearly 14 billion dollars on stock buybacks. And that number certainly sounds quite impressive until you learn that General Electric has spent a whopping 40 billion dollars on stock buybacks. Sadly, both corporate behemoths are now absolutely drowning in debt as a result of their foolishness.

No, everything is not going to be just fine. In fact, we have perfectly set the stage for the worst financial meltdown in human history. At this point nobody has put forth a plan to fundamentally change the system, and there is no way out. All that is left to do is to keep this current bubble going for as long as humanly possible, and then to duck and cover when disaster finally strikes.

US Secretary of State Pompeo recently reiterated his rhetoric that Iran is a “global threat”, this time basing it on his claims that the country’s network of influence in Latin America is supporting “transnational crime” and “terrorism”. This comes shortly after Washington designated the IRGC as a “terrorist” organization and approximately half a year since the Justice Department began investigating Iranian ally Hezbollah’s alleged links to drug cartels as a follow-up to the scandalous Obama-era “Operation Cassandra“.

Taken together, it’s clear that the US desires to dismantle Iran and Venezuela’s supposedly interconnected influence networks in Latin America as the next step in fortifying “Fortress America”, and while “deep state” wars such as this one have been going on for decades, it’s hitherto unprecedented for any country to make such a crusade public since the end of the Old Cold War when the US used to make similar claims about the USSR and its communist proxies.

If successful in what it’s setting out to do, then the US will undoubtedly expand its operations against Venezuela and Iran’s “deep states” to include Russia and China’s as well...

From the Sift website: "Each time we get an event be it a page view or an API event we extract features related to those events and compute the Sift Score. These features are then weighed based on fraud we've seen both on your site and within our global network, and determine a user's Score. There are features that can negatively impact a Score as well as ones which have a positive impact."

The system is similar to a credit score except there's no way to find out your own Sift score. Factors which contribute to one's Sift score (per the WSJ):

Is the account new?

Are there are a lot of digits at the end of an email address?

Is the transaction coming from an IP address that's unusual for your account?

Is the transaction coming from a region where there are a lot of hackers, such as China, Russia or Eastern Europe?

Is the transaction coming from an anonymization network?

Is the transaction happening at an odd time of day?

Has the credit card being used had chargebacks associated with it?

Is the browser different from what you typically use?

Is the device different from what you typically use?

Is the cadence of the way you typed out your password typical for you? (tracked by some advanced systems)

President Emmanuel Macron called it a "terrible tragedy". The cause of the fire is not yet clear. Officials say it could be linked to the renovation work that began after cracks appeared in the stone, sparking fears the structure could become unstable. The fire began at around 18:30 (16:30 GMT) and quickly reached the roof of the cathedral, destroying its stained-glass windows and the wooden interior before toppling the spire. Paris prosecutor's office said it had opened an inquiry into "accidental destruction by fire".

No other site represents France quite like Notre-Dame. Its main rival as a national symbol, the Eiffel Tower, is little more than a century old. Notre-Dame has stood tall above Paris since the 1200s. It has given its name to one of the country's literary masterpieces. Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is known to the French simply as Notre-Dame de Paris.

The last time the cathedral suffered major damage was during the French Revolution. It survived two world wars largely unscathed. Watching such an embodiment of the permanence of a nation burn and its spire collapse is profoundly shocking to any French person.

France has been hit with a string of fires at Catholic churches, some of which occurred alongside desecration of sacred objects and acts of vandalism. While the fire at Notre Dame appears to be an accident connected to renovations of the church, the image of the famous spire engulfed in flames is a hard hit on the historically deeply Catholic France, as well as Catholics all over who have seen their religion reeling from devastating scandals, cover-ups and attacks.

While Notre Dame is undoubtedly the most well-known landmark to be affected, Paris’ second largest church, Saint-Sulpice, briefly burst into flames on March 17, the fire damaging doors and stained glass windows on the building's exterior. Police later reported that the incident had not been an accident.

The attacks come at a time when the Church is hurting for sympathy, enwrapped in child sex abuse scandals that have left even the pope declaring “all out battle” on criminal clergy.

At least 10 incidents of vandalism and desecration of Catholic churches have been reported across the Channel since the beginning of February. French Roman-Catholic newspaper La Croix International reported how the attacks on churches took place across France. Senseless acts included the desecration of altars, the defacing of Christ on the cross and in an extreme case, human excrement being spread across the walls of a holy place of worship.

The fresh wave of attacks come two years into a campaign of Christian persecution targeting Catholic churches across France and Belgium in 2016. The incidents were said to be carried out by the Islamic State (IS). One of the most gruesome attacks included the murder of priest Jacques Hamel, who was killed by jihadists while holding Mass at a church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy.

It was a painful, halting process, but it helped transform Germany from pariah state to the moral leader of continental Europe. In recent years, though, the achievements of the postwar era have come under scrutiny. “Our culture of remembrance is crumbling,” Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said recently.

The most damning evidence is the hard-right Alternative for Germany party, which surged into the Bundestag in 2017; in parts of eastern Germany it is the most popular party. The AfD is riding a shocking rise of German anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Forty percent of Germans say it’s right to blame Jews for Israel’s policies in the Middle East. In my neighborhood in Berlin, and others across the country, people wearing Jewish headgear are harassed on the street.

And in the aftermath of the refugee crisis of 2015-16, many Germans — including mainstream, middle-class citizens — embraced the far right’s premises. In surveys, even more say they desire an authoritarian leader and distrust liberal democracy.

Vaccines are far from perfect; in fact, they are classified as “unavoidably unsafe”; worse still, is that some mandated vaccines for infants and young children  are known to be unsafe, while the efficacy of others is poor, putting both vaccinated and unvaccinated at risk of infectious disease.

Why is the public being deceived about the known facts? One major reason for the deception is a gross financial conflict of interest. CDC’s mission is ostensibly to protect the public health. However, CDC officials are reluctant to tell the truth about vaccine safety and efficacy because of the agency’s extensive intertwined financial partnerships with vaccine manufacturers through the CDC Foundation [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].

...at the end of the presentation, those with questions were asked to form a queue and advance one at a time to a microphone. I was last in a line of about a dozen. Here’s my recollection of what followed:

Me: You say that you (the Fed) have the power to increase the money supply. Is that right?

Fed: Yes.

Me: And you have indeed increased the money supply. Is that right?

Fed: Yes.

Me: And the money that you create was generated out of thin air. It wasn’t there before, but it’s there now. Is that right?

Fed (Getting nervous): Yes.

Me: And you say that creating this money out of thin air is beneficial to the economy. Is that right?

Fed (Now nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof): Yes.

Me: Then why do you prosecute counterfeiters?

(The audience, after a few seconds’ delay: Yeah, why DO you prosecute counterfeiters?)

Fed: This meeting is closed.

My point is that there is no difference in the economic consequences to society between the Fed creating money out of thin air and a counterfeiter doing the same thing. The difference is solely legal and one of scale. Private counterfeiters are punished, and rightly so, whereas the Fed is lauded for its actions.

...in the nineteen years from January 2000 to January 2019 the Fed has increased the monetary base — bank reserves plus cash in circulation, over which the Fed has absolute control — from $0.591 trillion to $3.323 trillion. That’s an increase of almost three trillion dollars! Yet the Fed tours the country touting its wonders to mostly fawning audiences… except perhaps in Des Moines, Iowa.

Taking the breadth and depth of their illegal conduct as a whole, the six biggest banks in the country look like criminal enterprises with RAP sheets that would make most career criminals green with envy. That was the case not just before the 2008 crash, but also during and after the crash and their lifesaving bailouts… In fact, the number of cases against the banks has actually increased relative to the pre-crash era.”

The six mega banks profiled in the report are: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. A reliable source tells us that all major business media received the report on Tuesday, April 9. We know that Politico had the report by 8:00 am because its “Morning Money” column provided a small news nugget at that time announcing that the report was out. Politico did not follow up, however, with any detailed coverage of the shocking revelations in the report.

Wall Street On Parade, after carefully reading and digesting the report, published an article on its contents the next morning, April 10. Then we began to hear from our outraged readers, who wanted to know why they weren’t reading about this report at major business media outlets. We checked the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Reuters, CNBC, and CNN. We could find no mention of the Better Markets report. (We checked again this morning. There is still a news blackout.)

“Over the past 20 years, authorities have made more than a quarter of a billion arrests, the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates. As a result, the FBI currently has 77.7 million individuals on file in its master criminal database — or nearly one out of every three American adults.” Despite almost one-third of American adults having been arrested, not one CEO or top executive of the serially charged mega banks has seen the inside of a jail cell, despite criminal referrals from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

“Bannon advised Salvini himself that the actual pope is a sort of enemy. He suggested for sure to attack, frontally,” said a senior League insider with knowledge of the meeting in an interview with the website SourceMaterial.

After the meeting, Salvini became more outspoken against the pope, claiming that conservatives in the Vatican were on his side. One tweet from Salvini’s account, in May 2016, said: “The pope says migrants are not a danger. Whatever!” On 6 May 2016, Salvini, after the pope’s plea for compassion towards migrants, stated: “Uncontrolled immigration, an organised and financed invasion, brings chaos and problems, not peace.”

If it passes, all attempts to win exemptions from vaccination will be henceforth submitted by a doctor, on a single standard form, to a State Public Health Officer, who will decide whether to approve or deny them. A doctor’s word will no longer be sufficient. The State will rule. State scrutiny of doctors, already at an all-time high in California, will escalate. Applying for a vaccine exemption will itself constitute evidence of professional malpractice.

This is how fascism works in a “modern democracy.” All repressive edicts and laws are undertaken “for the good of the people,” “for the children,” etc — as rights and freedoms are sucked away by elected and appointed officials. When necessary, science is bent and twisted and reversed, to give credence to “new progressive laws.” In California, when SB276 passes, a whole new bureau of State Health will be created. Little corrupt officials will be on the hunt for “law-breaking doctors.”