Trump’s cabinet is shaping up! 

As Democratic Senator, Claire McCaskill noted over the weekend, “Donald Trump has a three ‘G’ Cabinet,” filled with Goldman, generals, and gazillionaires.” While I’m not sure how much a gazillion actually is, estimates are the net worth of Trump’s cabinet has passed the $15Bn mark and that’s before appointing Exxon (XOM) CEO, Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State.  Boy, if you think the rest of the World was concerned about our strong-arm oil policies before!  

Proving once again that politics do matter to the markets, oil shot up  to $54.50 this morning (where I put a note out to our Members to short Oil Futures (/CL)). OPEC also sealed a deal with non-OPEC nations like Russia, who have also agreed to cut 558,000 barrels a day of production (one-half of 1%) but, of course, that’s not very much out of 93Mb/d of current production, which is still about 1.5Mb/d more than the World is consuming – so the glut continues.

Meanwhile, we can’t throw around terms like Gazillionaires because the Republican Senate has now passed the Republican House’s “Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act” which defines media manipulation as follows:

The section lists the following definitions of media manipulation:

  • Establishment or funding of a front group.
  • Covert broadcasting.
  • Media manipulation.
  • Disinformation and forgeries.
  • Funding agents of influence.
  • Incitement and offensive counterintelligence.
  • Assassinations.
  • Terrorist acts.

As noted by Zero Hedge, who are henceforth considered an outlaw web site: “It is easy to see how this law, if signed by the president, could be used to target, threaten, or eliminate so-called “fake news” websites, a list which has been used to arbitrarily define any website, or blog, that does not share the mainstream media’s proclivity to serve as the Public Relations arm of a given administration.”

 The bill (and I am not making this up) tasks  the Secretary of State with coordinating the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to “establish a Center for Information Analysis and Response,” which will pinpoint sources of disinformation, analyze data, and — in true dystopic manner — ‘develop and disseminate’ “fact-based narratives” to counter effrontery propaganda.

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