President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deliver remarks to the media prior to dinner together at the residence of Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu.
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The private dinner concludes the first day for President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump in Israel.
In January of 2015 Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi began a journey of peace by asking the holiest and most influential Islamic Scholars in the Arab world to join him in stepping away from the noise of extremist voices and engaging in long-term introspective review of their Islamic faith. President al-Sisi called for a religious revolution to focus Islam toward a future of peace. The engaged Dar al-Iftaa scholarly audience erupted in applause.
President al-Sisi stood up, resolute, spoke of large truths with bold leadership, and took great risk upon himself. After the speech a coalition of like-minded voices began to grow in number and consequence. That moment became the pebble dropped in the shoe of the Arab leadership of consequence – the emphasis shifted toward peace.
That influential speech, and more importantly the leadership of all joining member states, including the praise of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia before his untimely death, paved the way forward toward this upcoming weekend. King Abdullah’s successor, his brother King Salman, is now positioned to put his own footprint in history.
All of the necessary elements, many of them taking years to organize, are aligned in common purpose for this specific moment in time.
More than a dozen heads of state from Arab and Islamic nations have been invited by Saudi Arabia’s King Salman to attend the conference with President Trump including: Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (Egypt), King Abdullah III (Jordan), Muhammad Fuad Masum (Iraq), Mamnoon Hussain (Pakistan) and all six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE). All are expected to be in attendance.
We are living in one of those rare moments when we are fortunate enough to see the building blocks of historic enterprise being erected while we watch. The results of these next several days will shape how our children view the landscape of the middle east in all the years to come.
Sip slowly, this explainer was hard to write. There is a considerable amount of perplexed frustration following on the heels of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin testifying to the Senate Banking Committee earlier today and specifically saying:
02:20 Glass-Steagall? “we do not support a separation of banks from investment banks, we think that would have a very significant problem on the financial markets, on the economy, on liquidity; and we think that there is proper things that potentially we could look at around regulation, but we do not support a separation of banks and investment banks.”
That statement runs counter to the Trump administration’s prior policy statements outlining a preference for a reinstatement of some form of “Glass-Steagall” regulatory separation between commercial banking and investment banking.
In essence when combined with the totality of Mnuchin’s testimony before the committee, Mnuchin is saying the current “too big to fail” (‘too big to succeed’) issue has created a problem for lending liquidity. Specifically, if divisional separation is required – the banks best interests would naturally put the investment division ahead of commercial lending and the liquid capital within the overall economy would shrink.
I think we have a handle on what the administration is doing based on the executive orders signed and explained earlier. Bear with me…
Something appears to be happening within the administration that is currently impossible to define with regard to intent of construct. For the sake of my own internal disposition, and to ensure a geographic distance from sharp things, a modicum of levity is necessarily required. Cue suspicious cats:
Unfortunately, it’s too early (not fully developed pixels) to see the picture, but there appears to be an intentionally constructed parallel set of administrative policies that almost gives the appearance of a paralleling administration. It should be emphasized the construct herein is not necessarily definable as good or bad; it’s just simply too early.
It begins with Vice President Mike Pence delivering a speech at the Invest in America Summit today, which is primarily a gathering of the largest lobbying group in Washington DC via The U.S. Chamber of Commerce. No single lobbying organization has done more to advance global trade interests and diminish the U.S. manufacturing economy than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and its president Tom Donohue.
Simultaneous to this event, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was on Capitol Hill testifying to the Senate Banking Committee, and appears to have recently accepted the premise that the U.S. banking system is institutionally too big to fail, and more alarmingly too big to reform.
First, the Summit remarks:
President Donald Trump meets today with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. Trump and Santos were meeting to discuss collaborative policies on the drug trade and drug cartels. Together they will hold a joint press conference from the White House at approximately 3:45pm:
UPDATE: Video Added:
To understand the larger objectives of the G7 Financial Ministers meeting it is important to understand the three-decade global financial construct they seek to protect. Global financial exploitation of national markets:
♦Multinational corporations purchase controlling interests in various national elements of developed industrial western nations.
♦The Multinational Corporations making the purchases are underwritten by massive global financial institutions, multinational banks.
♦The Multinational Banks and the Multinational Corporations then utilize lobbying interests to manipulate the internal political policy of the targeted nation state(s).
♦With control over the targeted national industry or interest, the multinationals then leverage export of the national asset (exfiltration) through trade agreements structured to the benefit of lesser developed nation states – where they have previously established a proactive financial footprint.
The ‘America First’ Trump-Trade Doctrine upsets the entire construct of this multinational export/control dynamic. Team Trump focuses exclusively on bilateral trade deals with specific policy only looking out for the national interests of the United States.
Under President Trump’s Trade positions exfiltration of U.S. national wealth is essentially stopped. This puts the multinational corporations, globalists who previously took a stake-hold in the U.S. economy with intention to export the wealth, in a position of holding interest of an asset they cannot exploit.
If you can see the ramifications, and can grasp the inherent anger, you can begin to understand the severity of the opposition to President Trump.
Andrew Breitbart truthfully stated: “politics are downstream from pop culture”. However, what Andrew never fully digested was that “Pop Culture” is downstream from “Economics”. Show me the opposition to President Trump and his policy objectives, and I’ll show you an entity with a vested financial interest in that opposition. Domestic or foreign opposition, it matters not – the financial motives are the same.
Last week commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross delivered remarks at the 47th Annual Washington Conference of the Americas. Within his remarks Wilburine explains the new U.S. administration’s strategy to increase overall commerce while reducing the trade deficit.
The Q&A begins around 19:00 and Secretary Ross explains what the Chinese “One-Belt One-Road” means to U.S. Trade. If you are interested in economic policy and how it will effect your daily lives this is a great watch. Remember, this is raw source material where you can make your own judgements about what is said/happening without the filter of the media telling you what is said/happening.
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When you understand what is outlined in honest explanations like this you can destroy the talking points of oppositional voices. This is the intellectual armament that helps you to discuss with your friends and families and cut through the media nonsense. The important battle-space is between our ears.
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is in Italy at an advance meeting of G7 financial leaders ahead of the full G7 meeting scheduled for May 26th and 27th which will be attended by President Trump. Mnuchin is swamped with international questions about President Trump’s trade, finance, tax and economic policies. It is odd how the U.S. Media is less interested in this important stuff.
Meanwhile Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is leading the Arctic Council Meeting in Fairbanks Alaska. Yes, though they get almost no attention, we actually have national policies targeted directly to the needs and interests of the Arctic Circle.
[Transcript] SECRETARY TILLERSON: Well, it’s my pleasure to welcome all of you, foreign ministers, permanent participant heads of delegation, Arctic Council observers, and honored guests. And I want to thank again the tribal leaders of the aboriginal groups for their greeting this morning and their very meaningful message to all of us, and we appreciate their opening this session for us.
I want to welcome all of you to the 10th Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting and this beautiful city of Fairbanks, and we thank them again for their great hospitality in hosting us. (more…)
All positions have some bearing on the average American; however, some confirmation votes are more directly tied to the well-being of ordinary people than others. This confirmation will directly and specifically make the lives of middle-class workers, and ordinary American people, improve.
Thank you to those who contacted their Senator and applied the pressure. There was a great deal of feedback received by the senate in the past 24 hours. There are those within the swamp lobbying community who are beginning to understand that WE KNOW far more than they ever thought we know. Change is a direct consequence of that reality.
In a strong showing of bi-partisan support for Trump’s ‘America First’ trade platform the nominee for U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer, was confirmed by the Senate with a vote of 82-14. The U.S. Trade Representative is a critical position ahead of renegotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.
Three Republicans voted NO: ♦Cory Gardner (Colorado), ♦John McCain (Arizona), and ♦Ben Sasse (Nebraska).
For the past 30 years Lighthizer has been a trade lawyer representing American steel companies in their efforts to fight dumping of foreign-made steel below costs and unfair steel subsidies from foreign governments. He has pledged to strengthen enforcement of existing trade deals and to find new legal tools to combat unfair trade practices.
Lighthizer has criticized some Republicans for being too pro-free trade. He told a Senate panel this year that the U.S. should have an “America first trade policy.” “We can do better in negotiating our trade agreements and stronger in enforcing our trade laws,” he said.
Actually, seeing this outlined in Reuters is a very good sign of things to come. The pending NAFTA trade renegotiation between the U.S. (Trump/Ross) and Canada (Trudeau) correctly viewed through the prism of Canadian politics. This is exactly the correct perspective.
The larger liberal need is for Trudeau to pander to the constituencies of Quebec, even if it means economic disaster and crushing collapse for the entire country of Canada. This reality is exactly the ideological zero-sum perspective of the liberal mind and worldview.
Complete economic disaster is what Prime Minister Trudeau will do to Canada if he chooses to continue positioning against the U.S. with President Donald J Trump.
VIA REUTERS – Canada escalated a trade dispute with United States by making threats Washington called inappropriate in part because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is under pressure to secure support in a key region ahead of the country’s 2019 elections.
Washington last month slapped tariffs on timber imports, prompting Trudeau to say he was considering a ban on exports of U.S. coal through Pacific ports.