McCain Proposes Massive $5 Trillion, 5-Year Defense Budget; Blames "Flawed Obama Defense Strategy"

via by Tyler Durden on Tue, 17 Jan 2017 20:30:00 GMT

Just weeks after it was revealed that the Pentagon attempted to bury a study, that it itself had actually commissioned, which revealed staggering financial waste on Department of Defense programs, John McCain has proposed a new military budget that would exceed Obama's proposed spending by $430 billion over 5 years and total over $5 trillion, in aggregate.  In a 33-page white paper called "Restoring American Power", McCain described his proposals as just a start toward repairing the "damage that has been done to our military over the past eight years" under the Obama administration.

“President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to ‘fully eliminate the defense sequester’ and ‘submit a new budget to rebuild our military.’ This cannot happen soon enough."

 

“The damage that has been done to our military over the past eight years will not be reversed in one year. Just stemming the bleeding caused by recent budget cuts will take most of the next five years, to say nothing of the sustained increases in funding required thereafter.”

 

In a scathing review of the Obama administration's military strategy, McCains blasts the "flawed assumptions" that justified substantial military spending cuts over the past eight years and resulted in a "military caught in a downward spiral of depleted readiness and deferred modernization."

We are now at a tipping point.  Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has often swung from retrenchment to over-extension with a dearth of strategy, depleting our margin of global influence.  We now face, at once, a persistent war against terrorist enemies and a new era of great power competition.  The wide margin for error that America once enjoyed is gone.

 

This deterioration of America's global position has accelerated in recent years, in part, because the Obama administration's defense strategy was built on a series of flawed assumptions.  It assumed the United States could pull back from the Middle East and contain the threat of violent Islamist extremism.  It assumed that "strategic patience" toward North Korea would improve conditions for negotiations and exacerbate the threat.  It assumed that a nuclear deal with Iran would moderate its regional ambitions and malign behavior.  It assumed that U.S.-Russia relations could be "reset" into a partnership and that American forces in Europe could be reduced.  It assumed that a minimal "rebalance" of efforts could deter China from using its rising power to coerce American partners and revise the regional order.  And it assumed with the Budget Control Act of 2011 that defense spending could be cut significantly for a decade. 

 

Though all of these assumptions have been overtaken by events, the President and many in Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, have nonetheless failed to invest sufficiently in our nations' defense.  Indeed, for most of the past eight years, including this one, Congress has forced the Department of Defense to start the year locked into the previous year's budget and priorities, which in practice is a budget cut.  As a result, our military is caught in a downward spiral of depleted readiness and deferred modernization.  Readiness is suffering, in part, because the force is too small and being asked to do more with less.  This, in turn, harms modernization, as future defense investments are delayed and mortgaged to pay for present operations.  That helps to explain why all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have stated that our military cannot accomplish the nation's strategic objectives at acceptable risk to the force and the mission.

Of course, as we pointed out in a post entitled "Pentagon Buries Study Revealing $125 Billion In Waste On 'Bloated Bureaucracy'", the Pentagon seems to already be under the impression that they're wasting about $125 billion per year on mismanagement and bloated bureaucracy so that might be a good place for McCain to find some of the money for his proposal.

The Pentagon's goal was simple, empower the Defense Business Board (DBB), a federal advisory panel of corporate executives, to retain consultants to identify potential cost savings in the Department of Defense's $580 billion budget.  But, when the DBB study revealed a "clear path to saving over $125 billion," a level of waste which spoke to the egregious mismanagement and incompetence of DoD leaders, it was clear something had to be done to bury the story.  Now, according to the Washington Post, that is exactly what happened.

 

With that, here is the full white paper for your reading pleasure:

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Video Exposes Anti-Trump Group Plans To Shut Down DC Bridges And Highways With "Clusterfuck Blockades"

via by Tyler Durden on Tue, 17 Jan 2017 19:56:28 GMT

Yesterday we noted Part I of a new Project Veritas undercover series that exposed the efforts of several protest groups to disrupt the Trump inauguration by deploying butyric acid (aka "stink bombs") at the National Press Club during the Deploraball event scheduled for January 19th.  Part II of that series was just released and exposes further plotting by a group know as "DisruptJ20" to completely paralyze various modes of transportation on inauguration day.

Among other things, the protesters in the video plot to shut down surface traffic with "checkpoint blockades" and "a series of clusterfuck blockades" intended to shut down "all the major ingress points in the city."

"So simultaneous to the checkpoint blockades in the morning, we are also doing a series of clusterfuck blockades, where we are going to try to blockade all the major ingress points in the city."

 

"Which include, they can include shutting down major bridges and highway access points as well as shutting down metro rail.  So to do that we are going to try to break into several teams kind of like the checkpoints."

 

"So fears in doing that, we don't think these are going to be necessarily arrestable actions but there is a possibility you could be; so keep that in mind if you want to participate."

Disruption efforts apparently also include plans to shut down rail lines by attaching chains to metro cars...

"We have a plan for how to shut down a metro..."

 

"So, we figured out this, the trains pull up...one person is going to lock one end of a chain to an edge, and on the other end of the chain the end of the car, so on and so forth.  Done."

 

"It takes 15 seconds and everyone can leave and literally it
can't go anywhere at that point, it's anchored.  And you can use a
really thin chain, you don't need a heavy chain...that would require like a bolt cutter to under, basically to shut down that line."

With that, here is the full video from Project Veritas:

* * *

For those who missed it, here is our post regarding Part 1 from yesterday:

In the latest undercover video from Project Veritas, investigators uncovered a group of protesters known as the DC Anti-fascist Coalition plotting to disrupt President-Elect Donald Trump’s inauguration by deploying butyric acid (aka "stink bombs") at the National Press Club during the Deploraball event scheduled for January 19th.  In a dose of irony, the planning meeting for the attack was held at Comet Ping Pong, the DC pizza restaurant that recently gained infamy as the location of the Pizzagate controversy.

Apparently "Plan A" of the disaffected agitators was to set off "stink bombs" in the ventilation systems of the building hosting the "Deploraball."

"I was thinking of things that ruin, that would ruin the evening, ruin their outfits or otherwise make it impossible to continue with their plans.  Make sure they get nothing accomplished."

 

"Yeah, if you had...a pint of butyric acid, I don't care how big the building is, it's closing...And this stuff is very efficient, it's very very smelly, lasts a long time a little of it goes a long way."

 

"If you get it into the HVAC system it will get into the whole building."

Meanwhile, "Plan B" entailed an effort to simultaneously set off the sprinkler systems throughout the building which had the "added benefit" of sending party goers "outside in the freezing cold."

"I'm trying to think through how to get all the sprinklers to go off at once.  There's usually a piece of like fusible metal or a piece of glass with liquid in it that will blow"

 

"And the added benefit, everybody is going to walk outside in the freezing cold."

Because of the nature of the threats, Project Veritas notes that they notified the FBI, Secret Service and DC Metro Police of the content of this video prior to its release.

With that, here is the full video:

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Reagan And Trump: American Nationalists

via by Tyler Durden on Tue, 17 Jan 2017 19:20:16 GMT

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Since World War II, the two men who have most terrified this city by winning the presidency are Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

And they have much in common.

Both came out of the popular culture, Reagan out of Hollywood, Trump out of a successful reality TV show. Both possessed the gifts of showmen — extraordinarily valuable political assets in a television age that deals cruelly with the uncharismatic.

Both became instruments of insurgencies out to overthrow the establishment of the party whose nomination they were seeking.

Reagan emerged as the champion of the postwar conservatism that had captured the Republican Party with Barry Goldwater’s nomination in 1964. His victory in 1980 came at the apogee of conservative power.

The populism that enabled Trump to crush 16 Republican rivals and put him over the top in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan had also arisen a decade and a half before — in the 1990s.

A decisive advantage Reagan and Trump both enjoyed is that in their decisive years, the establishments of both parties were seen as having failed the nation.

Reagan was victorious after Russia invaded Afghanistan; Americans were taken hostage in Tehran; and the U.S. had endured 21 percent interest rates, 13 percent inflation, 7 percent unemployment and zero growth.

When Trump won, Americans had gone through years of wage stagnation. Our industrial base had been hollowed out. And we seemed unable to win or end a half-dozen Middle East wars in which we had become ensnared.

What is the common denominator of both the Reagan landslide of 1980 and Trump’s victory?

Both candidates appealed to American nationalism.

In the late 1970s, Reagan took the lead in the campaign to save the Panama Canal. “We bought it. We paid for it. It’s ours. And we’re going to keep it,” thundered the Gipper.

While he lost the fight for the Canal when the GOP establishment in the Senate lined up behind Jimmy Carter, the battle established Reagan as a leader who put his country first.

Trump unapologetically seized upon the nationalist slogan that was most detested by our globalist elites, “America first!”

He would build a wall, secure the border, stop the invasion. He would trash the rotten trade treaties negotiated by transnational elites who had sold out our sovereignty and sent our jobs to China.

He would demand that freeloading allies in Europe, the Far East and the Persian Gulf pay their fair share of the cost of their defense.

In the rhetoric of Reagan and Trump there is a simplicity and a directness that is familiar to, and appeals to, the men and women out in Middle America, to whom both directed their campaigns.

In his first press conference in January of 1981, Reagan said of the Kremlin, “They reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat. … We operate on a different set of standards.”

He called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and the “focus of evil in the modern world.”

The State Department was as wary of what Reagan might say or do then as they are of what Trump might tweet now.

But while there are similarities between these outsiders who captured their nominations and won the presidency by defying and then defeating the establishments of both political parties, the situations they confront are dissimilar.

Reagan took office in a time of Cold War clarity.

Though there was sharp disagreement over how tough the United States should be and what was needed for national defense, there was no real question as to who our adversaries were.

As had been true since the time of Harry Truman, the world struggle was between communism and freedom, the USSR and the West, the Warsaw Pact and the NATO alliance.

There was a moral clarity then that no longer exists now.

Today, the Soviet Empire is gone, the Warsaw Pact is gone, the Soviet Union is gone, and the Communist movement is moribund.

NATO embraces three former republics of the USSR, and we confront Moscow in places like Crimea and the Donbass that no American of the Reagan era would have regarded as a national interest of the United States.

We no longer agree on who our greatest enemies are, or what the greatest threats are.

Is it Vladimir Putin’s Russia? Is it Iran? Is it China, which Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson says must be made to vacate the air, missile and naval bases it has built on rocks and reefs in a South China Sea that Beijing claims as its national territory?

Is it North Korea, now testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles?

Beyond issues of war and peace, there are issues at home — race, crime, policing, abortion, LGBT rights, immigration (legal and illegal) and countless others on which this multicultural, multiracial and multiethnic nation is split two, three, many ways.

The existential question of the Trump era might be framed thus: How long will this divided democracy endure as one nation and one people?

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Ackman's Pershing Square Busted For Violating Pay-To-Play Rule; Fined $75,000

via by Tyler Durden on Tue, 17 Jan 2017 18:41:05 GMT

Following a disappointing year for Bill Ackman, in which his Pershing Square returned -13.5% (although it has at least started off 2017 on the right foot, up 1.9% YTD), moments ago Ackman got some bad and some good news. The bad news is the Pershing Square was among 10 investment advisory firms who were busted by the SEC for engaging in pay-to-play schemes, or accepting pension fund fees within two years of making donations. The good news: the penalty is a whopping $75,000.

The details:

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that 10 investment advisory firms have agreed to pay penalties ranging from $35,000 to $100,000 to settle charges that they violated the SEC’s investment adviser pay-to-play rule by receiving compensation from public pension funds within two years after campaign contributions made by the firms’ associates.

 

According to the SEC’s orders, investment advisers are subject to a two-year timeout from providing compensatory advisory services either directly to a government client or through a pooled investment vehicle after political contributions were made to a candidate who could influence the investment adviser selection process for a public pension fund or appoint someone with such influence.  The SEC’s orders find that these 10 firms violated the two-year timeout by accepting fees from city or state pension funds after their associates made campaign contributions to elected officials or political candidates with the potential to wield influence over those pension funds.

 

“The two-year timeout is intended to discourage pay-to-play practices in the investment of public money, including public pension funds,” said LeeAnn Ghazil Gaunt, Chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s Public Finance Abuse Unit.  “Advisory firms must be mindful of the restrictions that can arise from campaign contributions made by their associates.”

But why focus only on the investment advisor: aren't the pension funds just as culpable for allocating cash to funds they received money from? Well, in the case of Pershing Square, perhaps the thinking goes that giving Ackman money to money was punishment enough.

Amusingly, the complaing filed against Pershing Square, the SEC notes the following:

Pershing Square Capital Management, L.P. is a limited partnership located in New York, New York. Pershing Square is registered with the Commission as an investment adviser. In its Form ADV dated March 30, 2016, Pershing Square reported regulatory assets under management of approximately $15 billion

In light of recent events, the SEC may want to get an updated AUM.

The full complaint is below (link)

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Secret Service Taking Extraordinary Measures To Protect Against "Unprecedented" Inauguration Threats

via by Tyler Durden on Tue, 17 Jan 2017 18:20:32 GMT

Just yesterday we noted the latest undercover video from Project Veritas which revealed anarchist groups plotting to disrupt the Trump inauguration by dumping butyric acid into the heating and ventilation systems of buildings expected to be used for this weekend's festivities.  Add to that, the fact that ~750,000 protesters are expected to descend upon Washington D.C. with a stated intent to "paralyze the city" and Obama's "extremely unusual" move to fire the D.C. National Guard Chief just days before the inauguration ceremonies and you have a recipe for disaster.

Describing the situation to Washington Top News, Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy acknowledged that the threat level at this ingratiation is "different" from previous ones saying that, after a contentious 2016 campaign cycle, people "are willing to do things they may not have been willing to do in the past."

“I think people today are willing to do things they may not have been willing to do in the past,” Clancy said.

 

He cited several episodes that took place during the campaign, “where people jumped over those bike racks or security zones into our buffer. In the past, it was very rare for somebody to do that. Today, in this past campaign, people were willing to do it.”

 

Maness says, however, “From what we have seen the security measures and first-responder preparations have been excellent for the event.”

In addition to D.C. being a perpetual high-profile target for terrorist attacks, Clancy notes that, as confirmed by the latest Project Veritas video, the bigger threat is likely coming from anarchist groups who will stop at nothing to disrupt the inauguration ceremonies in some way. 

“We know that this (Washington region) is a high-profile [terror] target. It’s been attacked in the past, historically,” said Paul Abbate, the FBI’s executive assistant director for the Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch.

 

"The bigger threat is probably coming from anti-government/anarchist
groups who are likely to try and disrupt the inauguration, and may engage in violence to do so,” said Mike Maness, director of Trapwire.

 

Other FBI officials have confirmed that Washington is mentioned on a daily basis as a potential target in intercepted terrorist chatter and communications. “We, from the FBI standpoint, are ready to counter terrorist attacks and are working with our partners in building out the intelligence picture,” Abbate said.

 

On Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson spoke to reporters about preparations for the inauguration.

 

“We know of no specific credible threat directed toward the inauguration,” he said.  But in the same statement, he acknowledged, “that is only part of the story.”

 

Other parts of that story include the unknown, according to Clancy, and that is causing him to lose sleep.

 

“Every night I wake up and I wonder do we have some issue covered,” Clancy said.

Of course, extraordinary threats call for extraordinary preparations and countermeasures as this year's inauguration will include large perimeters that will be heavily fortified with "trucks, dumpsters, buses and the like" to defend against terrorist attacks similar to those that struck Nice, France and Berlin, Germany in 2016 as rogue trucks plowed through masses of people.

Soft perimeters will permit access to only those vehicles belonging to people who live or work in the area. Hard vehicle perimeters will be off limits to all but official vehicles.

 

This year in particular, Johnson said, “The hard vehicle perimeter will be heavily fortified by trucks, dumpsters, buses and the like, given the current threat environment.”

 

That environment he spoke of is created by terror groups’ constant online prodding of sympathizers to conduct not just spectacular attacks like those in Paris, Brussels, Turkey, Germany and Orlando in the past year, but single-casualty attacks as well.

 

Another key part of Secret Service attack prevention planning started months ago, and is designed to cover large and small incidents.

And, if all else fails, we're sure the "Bikers For Trump" will be available on short order to form a "wall of meat" to protect the President-elect.