The global persecution of Christians has reached unprecedented levels: “260 million Christians experience high levels of persecution” around the world, notes the recently published Open Doors World Watch List 2020, an annual report that ranks the top 50 countries where Christians are most persecuted for their faith.
Additionally, “2,983 Christians were killed for faith-related reasons. On average, that’s 8 Christians killed every day for their faith”: “9,488 churches or Christian buildings were attacked,” and “3,711 Christians were detained without trial, arrested, sentenced and imprisoned.” (Note: All quotes in this article are from the World Watch List 2020 report.)
Dictatorial paranoia continues to make North Korea (#1) the worst nation. “If North Korean Christians are discovered, they are deported to labor camps as political criminals or even killed on the spot.”
Otherwise, and as has been the case in all statistics and reports on the global persecution of Christians, not only does “Islamic oppression” remain the chief “source of persecution” faced by Christians in seven of the absolute ten worst nations, but 38 of the 50 nations composing the list are either Muslim-majority or have a sizeable Muslim population.
The overwhelming majority of these Muslim nations are governed by some form of shari’a (Islamic law). It is either directly enforced by government or society or, more frequently, both, though societies — family members in particular — tend to be more zealous in its application. Brief summaries of the seven Muslim nations making the top ten follow:
Afghanistan (#2) is “an Islamic society where Christianity exists in secret.” Not only is it “illegal for an Afghan person to leave Islam,” but family members are often first to attack or kill them.
In Somalia (#3), “[c]onversion to Christianity is regarded as a betrayal”; ” family members and clan leaders will harass, intimidate and even kill” converts. Al Shabaab, “the youth,” an Islamic group, slaughters Christians “on the spot when discovered.”
In Libya (#4), “There is no freedom of speech, no equal treatment of Christians, no recognition of the church and no churches being built.”
Pakistan (#5) “is afflicted by numerous radical Islamic groups,” which “regularly target” churches. More generally and in the eyes of both government and people, “Christians are regarded as second-class citizens. Also, the country’s anti-blasphemy laws are disproportionately applied against the Christian minority — making it difficult and dangerous to live out one’s faith in public.”
In Sudan (#7), “the government has arrested or intimidated many Christian leaders, and numerous churches have been demolished. Extremists have attacked Christians, especially in the Nuba Mountain region, where thousands of Christians have been killed or displaced.”
In Yemen (#8), civil “war has allowed radical Islamic groups to expand their operations in certain areas, leading to Christians being abducted and killed. Open church activities are forbidden and leaving Islam is forbidden. Muslims who decide to follow Jesus could face the death penalty.”
In Iran (#9), which “is governed by Islamic law,… the rights and professional possibilities for Christians are heavily restricted…. [I]t is illegal to produce Christian literature or hold church services in Farsi. Converts from Islam face persecution from the government.”
Some notable trends are also on the rise. Christians in sub-Saharan Africa are “increasingly under threat from Islamic extremist groups”:
In Burkina Faso (No. 28, a rise of 33 spots from 2019), long-known for its religious tolerance, Christians say they are in a fight for survival. Dozens of Catholic priests have been killed, and Protestant pastors and their families have been killed or kidnapped by violent Islamic militants. In Mali (No. 29), the president said in late 2018 that his country’s existence is under threat because of Islamic jihadists. Central African Republic (No. 25) is in constant upheaval partially due to the fighting of rebel Islamic militants, many of whom target Christians. And Cameroon (No. 48) faces violence in the north—still a stronghold of Boko Haram [which, along with Muslim Fulani herdsmen, are slaughtering Christians in Nigeria, #12].
Militant Islam has also arisen in unexpected areas. “In Sri Lanka (No. 30, up from 46 in 2019) 250 people died and more than 500 were injured in attacks on Catholic and Protestant churches and hotels on Easter Sunday.” Maldives (#14)—popularly recognized as a beautiful island nation and tourist destination—is a bastion of shari’a:
The Maldives’ constitution requires all citizens to be Muslim. Conversion from Islam means that someone can be stripped of their citizenship and punished under Shariah law. Even foreign workers who are Christians are closely watched, which makes church life extremely difficult and practically non-existent. Churches are outlawed, and openly carrying the Bible is illegal. The country is so tightly controlled by Islamic law that there is not even a Bible fully translated into the native language of most citizens of the Maldives.
Algeria worsened by five sports — going from #22 last year to #17 in 2020 — due to “the seemingly systemic closure of Protestant churches. In some of these cases, Christians were forcibly expelled by police in the middle of church services. Pressure from family also remains high, particularly for Christians who were previously Muslim.”
Aside from “Islamic oppression,” the targeting of Christians around the world has become more widespread than ever. Part of this is because “persecution against Christians has taken a technological turn.” For example, in India (#10) — where “Hindu radicals often attack Christians with little to no consequences” — “the government plans to introduce a national facial recognition system. There were at least 447 verified incidents of violence and hate crimes against Christians in India… There is fear that more tracking could increase these attacks.”
Similarly, China (#23) — which seeks to make all religions, including Christianity, “fall in line with their interpretation of communism” — is “rolling out a country-wide Social Credit System (SCS) by which authorities plan to reward ‘good’ citizenship and punish ‘bad'”:
Already, one community has reportedly decided to add penalties for those who “illegally spread Christianity.” It’s easy to see how surveillance technology could be used in tandem with the SCS to make everyday life very difficult for anyone the Chinese government deems insufficiently “Chinese” — including Christians.
Perhaps the most disturbing trend is that the number of persecuted Christians continues to grow year after year: “260 million Christians experience high levels of persecution,” says the new 2020 report. This represents a 6% increase from 2019; then, 245 million Christians were persecuted — and that was a 14% increase from 2018, when 215 million was the number.
Will this trend ever stop and reverse, or will it continue to get worse — and possibly even spill into those nations that, for now, enjoy religious freedom and equality?
In the 1940s and 50s, advocating Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism could get you fired from your job, blacklisted, deplatformed and even imprisoned. Though communists and socialists were instrumental in the struggles of the 1930s and 40s that built the industrial labor movement in the U.S., by the late 1940s those radical ideas were vilified and virtually outlawed.
Communism was purposely conflated with the crimes of Stalin. Communists and socialists were driven out of the unions. A layer of union bureaucrats that supported the witch-hunt was promoted. For fear of reprisals, many radicals kept quiet and self-censored. Some “recanted” socialist beliefs. Some fingered others to save themselves.
The poison unleashed by that witch-hunt dealt a body blow to the labor movement and its devastating effects are felt to this day. It’s no coincidence that the U.S. is the only major capitalist country with no independent labor party, no universal healthcare, no federally mandated vacation and no parental leave.
After a time, the leader of the anti-communist witch-hunt, Joseph McCarthy, was discredited and the formal apparatus for pursuing the campaign was dismantled. But the damage had already been done.
Moreover, McCarthyism was so effective in house-breaking the labor movement that the tool would never be permanently abandoned by the powers that be. It was merely set aside, to be resurrected again once the need arose and memory of its corrosive cost faded.
Two key features of McCarthyism are thought control and guilt-by-association.
Certain ideas are ruled out of bounds.
Anyone who defends the censored ideas or questions the censorship regime itself is harshly dealt with.
Anyone defending or associating with someone accused of running afoul of the thought police is dealt with just has harshly. The net result is generalized fear, self-censorship and compliance.
Fast forward to 2016. The Democratic Party manipulated its own presidential primary process to ensure that neoliberal warmonger and Wall Street servant Hillary Clinton ran against odious billionaire Donald Trump. And the Democrats lost!
Rather than engage in any self-examination to determine why a career Democratic politician lost to a Republican gameshow host, the Democrats concocted the Russiagate conspiracy.
Trump, we were told, colluded with Russia to steal the election. The evidence for this was razor-thin, but anyone who questions the narrative is smeared as a Russian agent or Putin apologist. Anyone associated with or speaking in defense of someone smeared as a Russian collaborator is denounced and attacked as well. A new McCarthyism blossomed.
Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s multi-year investigation into the affair concluded that “…the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government…” But the smears, evidence-free charges and witch-hunt associated with Russiagate persist to this day. Many on the liberal “left” – from Democracy Now! to the New York Times – bought into and continue to promote this baseless conspiracy.
Meanwhile, another McCarthyite witch-hunt has spread like wildfire. This one proclaims that people can be born into the “wrong” body and denounces anyone who questions this belief as a reactionary bigot. Sadly, in this case, the socialist, as well as the liberal left, has jumped onto the McCarthyite bandwagon.
Trans identified males are biological males who think of themselves as females. Trans identified females are biological females who think of themselves as males. No democratic-minded person questions the right of everyone, including transgender individuals, to their own beliefs, behaviors and lifestyle preferences, free from bigotry or discrimination.
But extreme transgender ideology goes a step further.
It demands not only support for the civil rights of trans people but insists that everyone must also embrace the beliefs of trans extremists.
Not only is the imposition of the belief of one group a violation of the democratic rights of others, this particular belief has negative implications for the rights of women, gays, lesbians and children:
Gays and lesbians are accused of bigotry if they insist on choosing partners based on biological sex rather than gender.
Minor children experiencing gender dysphoria are steered toward life-altering surgeries and hormone treatments, even though 80-90% of childhood gender dysphoria resolves itself naturally after puberty, and a many untreated, formerly dysphoric children grow up to be healthy gays and lesbians.
To question extreme trans ideology today is to be denounced, de-platformed, fired, face death threats and physical attack. As with all McCarthyite campaigns, thoughts which question the orthodoxy are ruled out of order. Anyone raising censored thoughts is persecuted and isolated.
In this way, facts and material reality are jettisoned. In this manner, those promoting extreme transgender ideology avoid having to make their case; they simply rule any contrary facts and opinions out of bounds. So, the following facts are deemed heretical, bigoted and in need of suppression:
Sex and gender are not synonyms.
Biological sex is objective and real, while gender is a subjective social construct.
There is no such thing as a distinctly male or female brain.
There are only two sexes because there are only two gametes. One sex (male) is optimized to produce small, mobile gametes. The other sex (female) is optimized to produce large, immobile gametes.
99.98% of all humans are unambiguously identifiable as male or female at birth.
One can change their appearance, but no one can chemically or surgically change their biological sex.
A tiny percentage of people are born with Disorders of Sexual Development (DSDs, or Intersex conditions.) The vast majority of intersex people are not transgender, and the vast majority of transgender people are not intersex.
Homosexuality and transgenderism are not analogous. Homosexuality is a sexual orientation, but extreme trans ideology is based on the denial of biological sex.
There are as many gender expressions as there are human individuals.
Transwomen (i.e. trans identified males) are not literally female.
Transmen (i.e., trans identified females) are not literally male.
Transgender extremists do not speak for all trans people.
According to the largest socialist groups in the US – Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Organization (ISO before it imploded) – accepting or even debating the above assertions cannot be allowed because that would somehow “deny the existence” of trans people.
The same holds for the British Labor Party (which currently has a trans-identified male as its Constituency Women’s Officer) and for many smaller socialist groups in the US and around the world.
Of course, those on the liberal “left,” like Democracy Now!, the ACLU, the Democratic Party and others, march in lockstep with extreme trans ideology and vigorously pile on anyone who might suggest that the emperor has no clothes.
A perfect example is provided by the February 1, 2020 meeting held at the Seattle Public Library entitled Fighting the New Misogyny: A Feminist Critique of Gender Identity which explored many of the above points.
The event was protested by trans activists who slanderously claimed the gathering was a “fundraising event for transphobic hate speakers,” and that “These speakers include professional anti-trans hate writer Meghan Murphy, and a WoLF [Women’s Liberation Front] board member.”
They continued:
We, as a city, must rally against this event to tell transphobic hate groups that they are not welcome here, that transphobia has no place in feminism, and that Seattle Public Library must make major changes to make our libraries safe for trans employees and patrons.
These same activists tried unsuccessfully to have the Library ban the event outright. If they had their way, the important ideas outlined above would be forever censored.
Unfortunately, among those opposing the meeting and siding with the McCarthyites was Socialist Alternative City Councilperson Kshama Sawant, whose office sent representatives to the anti-meeting protest.
Marxism, the philosophical underpinning for the socialist left, relies heavily on historical materialism. That is, the idea that there are tangible, physical reasons for what we observe in the development and interaction of societies and classes of people within those societies.
This makes it all the more astonishing when some socialists so thoroughly reject biology and material reality in their analysis of transgender ideology and its effect on other oppressed groups.
The left’s abdication on this issue – especially the misdirection of the socialist left – is a gift to the right, as it allows those on the right to pose as the sane ones. The socialist left bears particular responsibility because it presents itself as a collection of thoughtful, considered leaders.
All the more tragic, then, is the fact that this new McCarthyism, which disingenuously wraps itself in the mantle of “woke” leftism, could never have taken hold if the real left had spoken out clearly and forcefully from the start.
At this point, it remains to be seen whether the left will correct its error or be bypassed by the multitudes who will surely punish those who tried to gaslight them into rejecting material reality.
Mysterious Deep Space Radio Signal Repeats At Regular Intervals, Baffling Astronomers
A startling scientific find by space researchers which sounds straight from the plot of the 1990’s sci-fi movie “Contact” is the last thing you might expect to read on CNN this week.
“Mysterious radio signals from space have been known to repeat, but for the first time, researchers have noticed a pattern in a series of bursts coming from a single source half a billion light-years from Earth,” the report begins.
Illustrative file image: The Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, via New Scientist
The “mystery radio signal” has been recorded as repeating based on a clear discernible pattern according to a new paper by a team of astrophysicists in Canada that pinpointed bursts which are unprecedented, identified as “fast radio burst” — or a short radio emission, with a 16-day cycle.
“The discovery of a 16.35-day periodicity in a repeating FRB source is an important clue to the nature of this object,” the team of scientists said in the paper. A brief summary of some of the key findings are as follows:
Between September 16, 2018 and October 30, 2019, detected a pattern in bursts occurring every 16.35 days. Over the course of four days, the signal would release a burst or two each hour. Then, it would go silent for another 12 days.
…The signal is a known repeating fast radio burst, FRB 180916.J0158+65. Last year, the CHIME/FRB collaboration detected the sources of eight new repeating fast radio bursts, including this signal. The repeating signal was traced to a massive spiral galaxy around 500 million light-years away.
The team hopes to eventually trace the origin of the mysterious bursts, which has a variety of possibilities, and has even raised the question of alien life “reaching out” to establish contact.
So could it be aliens seeking to establish contact via hidden messages meant to be deciphered from rational patterns?
The MIT Technology Review’s Neel Patel, who first broke the story this week of the research team’s latest breakthrough, thinks it highly unlikely:
Wait, is it aliens? Almost certainly not. The signals are a sign of energetic events that are on the extreme scale of the cosmos. Even a highly intelligent species would be very unlikely to produce energies like this. And there is no detectable pattern so far that would suggest there’s a sentient hand at play.
Patel offers likely scenarios including a celestial body orbiting another object, such as a “low-mass black hole.”
Some analysts have elsewhere suggested it’s the result of a binary system involving two massive stars orbiting each other. And Phys.org described what could be the most mundane theory, that it could be “nothing more than the noise created when two stars collide.”
“Another possibility is that stellar winds might be alternately boosting or blocking signals from a body behind them. Or it could be that the source is a celestial body that is rotating,” the same source offered.
The CHIME telescope in British Columbia will attempt to detect future fast radio bursts (FRBs), via USA Today.
Regardless, the breakthrough observation could help future astronomers better map out the universe.
“Understanding fast radio bursts can also help astronomers learn more about the universe itself,” CNN concludes. “The more bursts they can trace, the better they may be able to use the signals to map how matter is distributed across the universe.”
Facing accusations that it issued a doctored report alleging a chemical attack in Syria, the OPCW has released an inquiry attacking two whistleblowers as rogue actors. Leaked documents obtained by The Grayzone reveal serious distortions in the OPCW inquiry as well as a campaign of intimidation against internal dissenters.
For the past year, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has been roiled by allegations that it manipulated an investigation to falsely accuse the Syrian government of a chemical weapons attack. An OPCW report released in March 2019 lent credence to claims by Islamist militants and Western governments that the Syrian military killed around 40 civilians with toxic gas in the city of Douma in April 2018. The accusation against Damascus led to US-led military strikes on Syrian government sites that same month.
But leaked internal documents published by Wikileaks show that OPCW inspectors who deployed to Douma rejected the official story, and complained that higher-level officials excluded them from the post-mission process, distorted key evidence, and ignored their findings.
After months of virtual silence, the OPCW has responded with an internal inquiry that lambasts two veteran officials who raised internal objections, attacking their credibility and qualifications. The OPCW’s self-described “independent investigation” describes the pair as rogue, low-level actors who played minor roles in the Douma mission and lacked access to crucial evidence. In a briefing to member states, OPCW Director General Fernando Arias dismissed them as disgruntled ex-employees.
The two “are not whistle-blowers,” Arias said.
“They are individuals who could not accept that their views were not backed by evidence.”
But a leaked document calls Arias’ assertions into serious question. Ian Henderson, one of the two inspectors, recently addressed a special session of the United Nations Security Council with his concerns about the Douma mission. Henderson submitted a supplemental written account that was distributed among participating UN member states and obtained by The Grayzone. It offers the most extensive and detailed account of the internal dispute over the OPCW’s Douma investigation to date.
Henderson provides a thorough timeline that bolsters suspicions that the OPCW leadership covered up a staged deception in Douma. Combined with the available record – which includes other OPCW leaks, as well as Arias’ and the OPCW’s own statements – Henderson’s account firmly demonstrates that he and a fellow dissenting colleague occupied veteran leadership roles inside the organization, including during the Douma fact-finding mission.
Henderson also exposes key gaps in the OPCW’s inquiry, which fails to specifically address the revelations that critical evidence was kept out of the OPCW’s published reports; that key findings were manipulated – and that all of this occurred under sustained US government pressure.
In addition to Henderson’s complete testimony, The Grayzone has obtained a chilling email from a third former OPCW official. The former official, who worked in a senior role, blamed external pressure and potential threats to their family for their failure to speak out about the corruption of the Douma investigation.
This official was not among the pair of dissenting inspectors targeted by the inquiry. The email corroborates complaints by Henderson and his colleague about senior management’s suppression of evidence collected by the team that deployed to Syria.
“I fear those behind the crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of ‘humanity and democracy’”
In his briefing about the investigation of the inspectors, Arias, the OPCW Director-General, described the pair as stubborn actors “who took matters into their own hands and committed a breach of their obligations to the Organization.” He characterized their behavior as “egregious.”
But leaked documents and testimony point to an OPCW leadership that has committed egregious acts of its own, including intimidating internal dissenters.
In an email obtained by The Grayzone, a former senior OPCW official described their tenure at the OPCW as “the most stressful and unpleasant ones of [their] life,” and expressed deep shame about the state of the organization they departed in disgust.
“I fear those behind the crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of ‘humanity and democracy,’” the official confided, “they will not hesitate to do harm to me and my family, they have done worse, many times, even in the UK… I don’t want to expose my self and my family to their violence and revenge, I don’t want to live in fear of crossing the street!”
The former OPCW senior official went on to denounce the removal of members of the original fact-finding team to Syria “from the decision making process and management of the most critical operations…” This tracks with complaints expressed in leaked OPCW documents that superiors who had not been a part of the investigation in Douma marginalized those who had.
The atmosphere of intimidation was confirmed by a second member of the OPCW’s original fact-finding mission to Douma. The whistleblower, identified by the pseudonym “Alex,” spoke to the journalist Jonathan Steele and to a panel convened by the Courage Foundation in October 2019. Alex revealed that a delegation of three US officials visited the OPCW at The Hague on July 5th, 2018. They implored the dissenting inspectors to accept the view that the Syrian government carried out a gas attack in Douma and chided them for failing to reach that conclusion. According to Steele, Alex and the other inspectors saw the meeting as “unacceptable pressure.” In his statement to the UN Security Council, Henderson confirmed that he attended the meeting.
The US intervention at the OPCW could possibly violate the chemical weapons convention, which forbids state parties from attempting to influence investigations. It would not be the first time Washington has attempted to bully the OPCW into submission. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002, the George W. Bush administration engineered the ouster of the OPCW’s First Director-General, Jose Bustani. The Bush administration was concerned that Bustani’s negotiations with Iraq about allowing international inspectors could undermine its plans for war.
Bustani later revealed that John Bolton, then an under secretary of state, had personally threatened him and his family with violent retaliation. The US pressure on the OPCW over Douma also took place under Bolton’s watch. When the US bombed Syria in April 2018 and pressured OPCW officials just three months later, Bolton was in the midst of his first months as President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor. (Bustani, meanwhile, was among a group of panelists who heard direct testimony from Alex at a gathering convened by the Courage Foundation in October 2019.)
OPCW’s inconsistent story on “Inspector A”
The OPCW’s internal inquiry goes to great lengths to denigrate and discredit the two former staffers that challenged the official story on Douma. It refers to its two targets as “Inspector A” and “Inspector B.” The latter’s identity has not been publicly confirmed. “A” is Ian Henderson, a South African engineer and veteran OPCW official with extensive military experience.
Henderson’s written testimony to the United Nations, obtained by The Grayzone, undercuts the negative portrayal of his former managers, and offers a window into the pressure campaign and cover-up that he and his colleagues faced.
A suppressed internal study by Henderson first brought the OPCW scandal to public attention. In May 2018, an engineering assessment bearing Henderson’s name was leaked to a group of British academics, the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. The document is a detailed engineering analysis of two gas cylinders found at the scene of the alleged attacks in Douma. Whereas the OPCW’s final March 2019 report concluded that the cylinders were likely dropped from the air, Henderson found that there is “a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed… rather than being delivered from aircraft.” The OPCW’s final report made no mention of this conclusion.
The inference of Henderson’s study is that the attack was staged by the armed opposition. At the time, Douma was under the control of the extremist Saudi-backed militia, Jaysh Al-Islam, and was on the brink of being re-taken by Syrian government forces.
From a political and military standpoint, a chemical weapons attack was the most self-destructive and unnecessary action the Syrian military could possibly take. From the standpoint of a foreign-backed militia on the verge of defeat, however, staging a chemical attack was a desperate Hail Mary operation that offered the hope of US military invention in accordance with Washington’s “red line” policy. The suspected gambit by Jaysh Al-Islam appeared to have paid off when the Trump administration accepted its claims that a chemical attack had killed dozens of civilians in Douma, and initiated cruise missile strikes in response. Yet the US-led attacks failed to prevent the Syrian government from retaking Douma and the whole of eastern Damascus. Within days, Western reporters had entered the area and were able to access local eyewitnesses who claimed that the chemical attack was a staged deception.
Henderson was among the first OPCW staffers to visit the site of the alleged attack in Douma. However, the OPCW inquiry dismissed Henderson’s role in the Douma probe, characterizing his engineering study as a personal, rogue operation. Henderson, the inquiry said, “was not a member of the FFM [Fact Finding Mission]” that deployed to Douma, and only “played a minor supporting role.”
There is ample evidence that contradicts this characterization. In his written UN testimony, Henderson revealed that he served in five Douma deployments as part of the FFM. This includes three instances as a sub-team leader for critical operations: visiting a suspected chemical weapons production site in Douma; conducting interviews and taking chemical samples at the Douma hospital; taking detailed measurements at one of the sites; and inspecting, itemizing, and securing the two cylinders that were removed from the sites of the alleged gas attack. The notion that he “was not a member” of the mission that he played such an active role in strains credulity.
A leaked email shows that at least one of Henderson’s colleagues protested a previous instance in which the OPCW leadership attempted to minimize his role. The “falsehood… that Ian did not form part of the Douma FFM team,” the colleague complained, was “patently untrue” and “pivotal in discrediting him and his work.”
The inquiry also falsely insinuated that Henderson was a low-level official. While acknowledging that Henderson served as an OPCW team leader during his first tenure with the OPCW from 1997 to 2005, the inquiry said that he was “rehired at a lower level” when he returned in 2016, and remained there until his departure in May 2019. Yet the OPCW’s own documents from that latter period showed that Henderson was described as an “OPCW Inspection Team Leader” as late as February 2018, just two months before his deployment to Douma as part of the OPCW’s Fact-Finding Mission (FFM). According to his UN testimony, Henderson served as an inspection team leader for multiple inspections of Syrian laboratory facilities at Barzaeh and Jamrayah in November 2017 and in November 2018, after the US bombed Barzeh on dubious grounds.
After casting doubt on Henderson’s status within the organization, the OPCW inquiry dismissed his engineering report as “a personal document created with incomplete information and without authorisation.” Henderson, the investigators said, defied higher-level officials’ orders and conducted a study on his own with outside contractors.
In his briefing to member states on the inquiry’s findings, OPCW Director General Fernando Arias echoed this conclusion, describing Henderson’s report as “a purported document disseminated outside the Organisation.”
But Arias’ statements today contradict his own words from less than a year ago. Just days after Henderson’s report was leaked in May 2019, Arias delivered an extensive briefing and announced that an inquiry into the disclosure was underway. Arias made no claims of Henderson going rogue, and described his report as an “internal document… produced by a staff member.” It is unclear how Henderson’s report went from an “internal document” by an OPCW staffer in May 2019 to a “purported document disseminated outside the Organisation” in February 2020. Arias has not explained this discrepancy.
In his latest missive, Arias has offered a completely new rationale for keeping Henderson’s report from the public. In May 2019, Arias stated that because Henderson’s report “pointed at possible attribution,” it was therefore “outside of the mandate of the FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] with regard to the formulation of its findings.” The FFM is prevented from assigning blame to parties involved in chemical attacks. However, the OPCW’s published conclusion suggested the Syrian government was to blame for the attack – an act of attribution – since the Syrian military (or its Russian ally) was the only warring party in Douma with aircraft. Even more curiously, by accusing Henderson of freebooting and “subterfuge,” Arias and his organization’s independent inquiry has now offered a completely different explanation than it previously had for the omission of Henderson’s report.
Why was critical evidence excluded?
In yet another highly dubious assertion, the OPCW inquiry claimed Henderson “did not have access to all of the information gathered by the FFM team, including witness interviews, laboratory results, and assessments by independent experts regarding the two cylinders—all of which became known to the team after [Henderson] had stopped providing support to the FFM investigation.”
But an important piece of context is missing from this salvo: by the time Henderson carried through on his study in summer 2018, he and other members of the FFM had already complained to the OPCW leadership that their findings were being manipulated and suppressed.
According to Henderson’s testimony, a draft interim report circulated in June 2018 was subjected to “‘last-minute unexpected modifications” that were “contrary to the consensus that had been reached within the team.” This included a change to “reflect a conclusion that chlorine had been released from cylinders,” which was not consistent with the findings at that stage. An intervention by one of the FFM team members, possibly Inspector B, forced FFM team leader Sami Barrek to revise the interim report before its eventual release on July 6 2018.
Despite agreeing to hear his team’s objections, Barrek personally blocked critical evidence that conflicted with the official story of Syrian government responsibility. One email chain revealed that Barrek resisted pleas from an inspector to include the relatively low levels of chemicals found in Douma. Alex, the anonymous second OPCW whistleblower, told journalist Jonathan Steele that chlorinated organic chemicals at the scene “were no higher than you would expect in any household environment.”
Another leaked document showed the OPCW had consulted with toxicologists in June 2018 to determine whether symptoms observed in victims were consistent with exposure to chlorine. According to minutes of that meeting, “the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure.” But these critical findings, which dramatically undercut the official narrative, were inexplicably omitted from both the interim and final report.
The “core” cover-up team
One day after US officials attempted to bully OPCW staff into submission on July 5 2018, an interim report on Douma was published that reflected some of the inspectors’ key objections, albeit with watered-down language and significant omissions. A critical change then took place. OPCW officials announced that the ensuing final report would be drafted by a “core team” that was separate from the one which deployed to Douma. That left the core team without any of the FFM members who had been on the ground at the site of the supposed attack, with the exception of one paramedic. Henderson told the UN that the move deprived the core team of anyone qualified to conduct the needed engineering assessments on the chlorine cylinders that were said to have been dropped in Douma.
With superiors omitting critical information, Douma inspectors excluded from the so-called “core” team, and US officials applying direct pressure, Henderson attempted to carry on with his report. Despite the inquiry’s claims, Henderson presented evidence to the UN that his work was approved by his superiors. Henderson reported that he held several meetings with top OPCW officials beginning in late summer 2018, where he informed them of his study and relayed concerns about the methodologies of the then-FFM team leader. Henderson said he was told by the then-Chief of Cabinet, Sebastien Braha: “I don’t see why both studies can’t be done.” Henderson took that as a green light.
Henderson completed his engineering study in January 2019 and submitted a “detailed executive summary” for peer review. OPCW colleagues, including members of the Douma FFM, an unidentified former “core team” former inspector, and other “trusted [Technical Secretariat] staff members who had expertise in specific areas,” studied Henderson’s work and offered written feedback.
“This review was considered necessary and responsible,” Henderson wrote, “in that I knew (after the analysis had been completed) that these would be unpopular findings; therefore, I wanted to make sure there were no objections to any of the facts, observations, methodology used or findings reported in the summary.”
In its bid to portray Henderson’s engineering study as the work of a disconnected freelancer, the OPCW’s inquiry strangely made no mention of this peer review.
When he met with FFM team leader Sami Barrek the following month, Henderson ran into more obstructions. Barrek flatly rejected Henderson’s report, “stating that he had been instructed not to accept it.” Alarmed by the possibility that the OPCW would soon release a final report without a sound engineering assessment, Henderson submitted a physical copy to the OPCW’s Documents Registry Archive, and alerted management by email.
It was then that another hostile response arrived from above. Braha, the Chief of Cabinet, emailed back an order: “Please get this document out of DRA (Documents Registry Archive) … And please remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA.”
Days later, on March 1 2019, the OPCW’s final report was released. Omitting Henderson’s engineering findings, it reached a conclusion that contradicted that of its own inspectors. According to the report, the investigation found that there were “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place…This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine.” For its analysis of the cylinders, the report claims it relied on “three independent analyses” without specifying them and only directly citing one.
This raises an ineluctable question: why did the OPCW rely on three unspecified “independent analyses” from outside experts who never set foot in Douma, rather than on the evidence-based reports of a veteran OPCW staffer and his colleagues who investigated the site of the supposed attack? The OPCW has yet to offer an explanation.
“I was shocked by the decision to release the report without having taken into account the engineering report, as all the FFM management knew it had been submitted,” Henderson recounted in his UN testimony. “I had expected the report to reflect the situation that had been the consensus of the Douma FFM team after the deployments, and for the assessment of the cylinders to be consistent with the findings of the engineering assessment, but found the complete opposite. I saw what I considered to be superficial and flawed analysis in the section on the cylinders.”
Henderson tried to resolve his concerns internally. He met with at least six high-level officials, and sought a meeting with Arias. A senior manager angrily rebuffed that request, telling Henderson that “you will never get to the Director-General, and if you try and go around me to get to him, there will be consequences.” Henderson also submitted a detailed dossier outlining his concerns to the Acting Director of the Office of Internal Oversight, which was later rejected.
Perhaps most critically, Henderson sought a meeting where the drafters of the FFM report – the so-called “core” team that had excluded all but one member of the team that visited Douma – “would explain what new information had been provided or new analysis conducted, that had turned around the situation from what had appeared to be clear at the end of deployments to Douma.”
Henderson also requested an opportunity to hear from the “three experts” who had conducted the engineering studies cited by the FFM’s final report. “This would be a technical discussion, comparing the information and inputs used and methodology applied, and interpretation of results, and would very quickly identify any flawed approaches and would help clarify the situation,” Henderson recalled.
“Throughout this period, I acknowledged there was a possibility that I could be wrong, but stressed that I was not the only one with concerns,” he added.
“Investigating the situation would bring things to light and potentially defuse the situation.”
But Henderson’s requests were denied. “Whilst many in management were shocked and concerned, and all expressed sympathy with my concerns,” Henderson told the UN, “the responses I received included ‘this is too big’; ‘it’s too late now’; ‘this would not be good for the [Technical Sectrariat’s] reputation’; ‘don’t make yourself a martyr’; and ‘but this would play into the Russian narrative’.”
A leaked memo written by Henderson to Arias, the OPCW Director General, in March 2019, captures his contemporaneous objections. The final report, Henderson wrote, “does not reflect the views of all the team members that deployed to Douma,” a view he said was shared by about 20 inspectors. (Alex relayed a similar account to Jonathan Steele: “Most of the Douma team felt the two reports on the incident, the Interim Report and the Final Report, were scientifically impoverished, procedurally irregular and possibly fraudulent.”) On top of the fact the report was written by a “core” team that excluded all but one Douma inspector, Henderson complained that its authors “had only operated in Country X” – believed to be Turkey.
Arias instructed Henderson to submit his report to the newly formed Investigation and Identification Team, which had been mandated to further investigate the Douma attack. The IIT met with Henderson in March 2019 and accepted a copy of his report. But two months later, Henderson was suspended and removed from the OPCW building after a leaked copy of his engineering assessment was published on the internet. The OPCW’s inquiry does not accuse Henderson of responsibility for the leak.
Conspicuous claims about “Inspector B”
Less is known about “Inspector B,” the second OPCW inspector targeted by the inquiry. It is possible, though unconfirmed, that B is the same person as “Alex,” the aforementioned Douma team member turned whistleblower. Like Henderson, B has been with the OPCW since its formation. The inquiry notes that B initially served from July 1998 to December 2011, including as Team Leader, and then again from September 2015 until August 2018.
As with Henderson, the inquiry attempted to portray Inspector B as a marginal figure in the Douma inquiry who went rogue after he had left the OPCW. While acknowledging that he was a member of the FFM team that deployed to Syria in April 2018, the report said that B “never left the command post in Damascus”, and therefore did not visit Douma.
By the OPCW’s own standards, however, that was hardly disqualifying: Sami Barrek, the FFM team leader, was only in Damascus for three days and departed before his team members – including Henderson – first reached Douma. Yet Barrek was tasked with drafting the final report, and, as leaked emails show, faced internal complaints that he excluded critical evidence.
According to the Working Group, the British academic collective that received and published Henderson’s leaked report, Barrek subsequently visited Turkey where he met with members of the White Helmets. The White Helmets are a Western government-funded organization known for carrying out rescue operations in areas under the control of foreign-backed anti-government militias. As The Grayzone has reported, the US and UK-funded White Helmets have operated alongside extremist militants during Syria’s proxy war, and been used for propaganda efforts to promote U.S. military intervention and sanctions on Syria. In the case of Douma, the White Helmets participated in a staged video to create the appearance that a local hospital was treating victims of a chemical attack.
Conspicuously, the inquiry offered no specifics on what “Inspector B” did in Damascus or his role in the FFM. This omission could be seen as an indication that an accurate description of his role would reveal that he played a significant one. The inquiry noted that he “was involved in the drafting of the interim report on the Douma incident” – but did not offer further details. It seems unlikely that someone with a limited role in the investigation would have been entrusted to participate in drafting the public report on its findings.
As with its portrayal of Henderson, the inquiry claimed that the FFM “undertook the bulk of its analytical work, examined a large number of witness interviews, and received the results of sampling and analysis,” in the months after Inspector B was no longer involved. But it had nothing to say about Inspector B departing only after raising concerns that the Douma team’s analytical work was manipulated and excluded, including on vital chemical samples. Accordingly, the fact that more work was done after B’s ouster did not resolve his concerns; if anything, it only raised further questions about the OPCW’s faulty final product.
Western media outlets complicit in cover-up
The OPCW’s unprecedented rebuke of two career officials has received a warm reception in mainstream media outlets that have carefully ignored the OPCW scandal to date, turning a blind eye as one explosive internal document after another appeared on Wikileaks.
Though the scandal was itself a product of disclosures by the OPCW’s own staff, The Guardian bizarrely described it instead as “a Russia-led campaign” that has now “been dealt a blow” by the OPCW’s inquiry. The New York Times published reports by Reuters and the Associated Press that also aired the inquiry’s conclusions without a scintilla of critical scrutiny.
At a time when whistleblowing is supposed to be held in high esteem, the Western political and media establishment’s flagrant disinterest and disregard for the two dissenting inspectors and the explosive leaked documents is glaring. This carries significant dangers.
As the email by a “former senior official at the OPCW” – someone who was not among the pair of dissenting inspectors – made clear, fear within the organization is almost as profound as the pressure to self-censor and conform to the dominant narrative.
The experience of the OPCW’s first director-general, Jose Bustani – who was ousted from his position after direct threats from John Bolton to him and his family – attests to the threats these new whistleblowers face. When Bustani heard Alex’s testimony, he came away from the meeting firmly convinced that something had gone extremely wrong at the OPCW.
“The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had,” Bustani said after the session.
“The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing.” Bustani added that he hoped the Douma revelations “will catalyse a process by which the [OPCW] can be resurrected to become the independent and non-discriminatory body it used to be.”
In his statement to the United Nations, Henderson echoed this sentiment. The ousted expert called on the United Nations to allow for a scientific, peer review process to weigh his report against the three “independent experts” whom the OPCW claimed to rely on for its final report. The “method of scientific rigour,” Henderson wrote, “dictates that one side cannot profess to be the sole owner of the truth.
“Should an independent scientific panel be allowed, he concluded, “I have no doubt that this would successfully clarify what happened in Douma.”
With his explosive UN testimony and the leaks that preceded it, Ian Henderson and his colleagues have made clear that the OPCW experts who deployed to Syria are determined to bring the cover-up of an elaborate deception to light.
Federal Judge Dismisses Some Charges Against Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes
Late on Tuesday, a Federal judge dropped several charges against former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes but allowed wire fraud charges to stand. The wire fraud charges accuse Holmes and her former boy-toy, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, of misleading patients about the abilities of Theranos’ blood tests.
The court ruled that since the tests were paid by customers’ medical insurance companies, that the patients were not deprived of any money or property in using Theranos’ blood testing services, according to Reuters. The court also found that there was “no evidence” to show that Holmes and Balwani directed doctors to make misrepresentations to their patients.
The indictment alleges that Holmes and Balwani knew that Theranos was not capable of consistently producing accurate results, yet they encouraged doctors and patients to use their tests regardless. They were both indicted in June of 2018 on 11 counts of conspiracy and wire fraud.
Recall, about two weeks ago, we noted that Holmes literally phoned in her defense in an Arizona fraud lawsuit after her civil lawyers quit due to non-payment.
Holmes still maintains a team of “high caliber” attorneys for her criminal case in San Jose federal court. But in the concurrent civil suit taking place in Phoenix, Holmes was forced to dial into an audio feed without a lawyer several weeks ago, telling the judge she wouldn’t make any arguments.
The civil hearing, which ended without a decision, was to try and determine whether or not the case should advance as a class action. The judge asked Holmes at the beginning of the hearing if she wanted to make any arguments and Holmes said she was relying on the arguments made by attorneys for her co-defendants.
The lawyers representing her in Arizona quit back in September, claiming Holmes hasn’t paid them. As Bloomberg noted at the time, “it’s highly unusual for a defendant of Holmes’s stature in such a suit to not be represented by an attorney, prompting some speculation on her financial situation.”
Tracy Connors tweeted a video of herself attempting to have Siri read out a Daily Caller headline entitled ‘Virginia House of Delegates Passes Gun Ban, Seizure Bill’.
Instead of saying the word ‘gun’, Siri spelled out the letters G-U-N.
This is wild! Check out what happened when I had my iPad read me a @DailyCaller headline about the gun ban bill that passed VA’s House today. pic.twitter.com/MoXcbv6GKY
“Apple is now our parent and we’re fragile little children who can’t hear scary words,” said Connors.
As far back as 2016, Apple replaced its gun emoji with a water pistol in response to “a series of shootings in the US.”
Apparently, censoring words and changing how cartoon drawings appear is going to stop mass shootings.
Good luck with that, Apple.
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Hong Kong’s Largest Mall Owner Cuts Rents Up To 50%
Commenting on the regional impact of the Covid-2019 epidemic, Morgan Stanley writes that Hong Kong’s tourism, trade and domestic consumption could be significantly affected, further aggravating the technical recession the financial hub found itself going into 2020.
Looking ahead, MS lays out two scenarios: should the outbreak peak in February/March with swift normalization of economic activity (Scenario 1), the bank estimates a 1-2% drag on 1Q GDP growth, meaning the recession started by Hong Kong’s protests will likely extend for one more quarter, but the impact could be larger at 2-4% if existing travel restrictions stay for longer and the production normalization process is slow in mainland China (Scenario 2). In the worst-case scenario 3, where the outbreak lasts for months, the impact on growth could reach 3-4.5% in 1H.
As such, Morgan Stanley remains cautious on the local stock market (the Hang Seng Index) and keeps MSCI HK Underweight given their sizeable revenue exposure to the local Hong Kong market (19% for Hang Seng and 50% for MSCI HK), and see greater near-term pressure for Banks and Retail than Telecom, Insurance and Macau Gaming.
One sector where Morgan Stanley is especially concerned is retail property, as landlords are especially vulnerable to the Coronavius impact, which would further dampen already weakened retail sales.
Confirming Morgan Stanley’s concern that a bloodbath is coming to the retail sector, earlier today Reuters reported that some shopping mall landlords in Hong Kong, including Sun Hung Kai Properties, the city’s largest property developer, are offering relief measures such as rental concession to their tenants during the coronavirus outbreak.
Sun Hung Kai Properties, which owns major malls in some of the local districts that host international fashion brands ranging from Coach to Zara, said on Wednesday it would reduce February rent by up to 50% for most of its tenants, in an effort to stabilize economy and protect employment.
Separately, MTR Corp, which runs malls on top some of its subway stations, said it will adjust rent for small-medium companies, and after collecting the sales data of its international tenants, it will launch relief measures for them too.
Link Real Estate Investment Trust, whose tenants are mostly small to medium businesses, also said it has set up a HK$80 million relief scheme, which includes allowing rent payment in installments, waiving late payment interest and service charges, granting rent-free periods and reducing rents.
In short, Hong Kong’s retail sector, already battered by months of often violent anti-government protests, which has already sent retail sales into a worse contraction than during the financial crisis and China’s 2015/2016 market crash and devaluation…
… is on the verge of collapse with following the coronavirus outbreak in mainland China, which has emptied shopping centres and closed down tourist attractions, and will likely push countless CRE developers to the verge of bankruptcy.
When one era ends and another begins is always a hot topic for historians and academics, because history does not make it easy. The old staggers on for a long time, despite it having become pointless or exhausted. The new is not always ready to take center stage, so it is never clear as to when it started. It is Sorites Paradox. Just as we know there is a point where grains of sand eventually become a heap, we know one epoch gives way to another, but exactly when is impossible to say.
Of course, while you are in such a transition period, it is even more difficult to know when the old has finally receded into the past and when the new has begun. History is full of false starts and false transitions. Ideologues are always sure the great transition is right around the corner. For the people living through a transition, it just feels like a “great muddling through” for those aware of what’s happening. For the rest it is just the way things are, as they try to not to think about such things.
Whether we are in such a great transition is hard to know for certain, but people who think of such things are thinking about it. This paper on how NATO can adapt to the populist era is such an example. It is written by Jeff Giesea, someone who has been on the edges of populist politics in America. The focus on the paper in how NATO can adapt to the rise of populism in Europe in order to maintain itself and address some of the issues that give rise to populist movements.
NATO is a great example of why marking the end of one period and the start of the next is so difficult, especially for the people living through it. The senior administrative staff in NATO probably started their careers in the Cold War. Many of the senior political leaders in the West are still people who came of age in that era. NATO has already outlived the Cold War and now may be outliving the age of globalism. It is a legacy institution that still staggers on for no obvious reason.
That’s why they invest time and money thinking about how the institution can adapt to the new age, whatever one calls it. What started as a temporary alliance among Western nations to guard against Soviet aggression in Europe, is now a permanent part of the European landscape. It’s like a union job or a government contract. No one wants to see it end. The Red Army is long gone, but NATO remains ready for them if they ever reappear on the European Plain.
It is a good example of the problems of post-nationalism. NATO was always a national entity, designed to defend nations. In a world without borders, having a military organization built for defending borders makes little sense. Critics of the organization always point to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the bigger problem for NATO is that it is rooted in the concept of sovereign nations. Each member contributes men, material, bases and money to maintain a joint military force.
In a world where European countries don’t have control of control over their own budgets and cannot mint their own coins, how can they possibly have an active voice in a military alliance? Italy, for example, has to get permission from Brussels to operate a new landfill or power plant. The EU regulates the acceptable size of bananas and how much can be spent on picking up dog droppings. Globalism reduced nations to dependents with no agency of their own.
NATO also underscores a hidden truth about globalism and that is it only exists because the American empire exists. NATO exist because America keeps it going. If America ever started acting like a real country again, it would abandon legacy entities like NATO, as they serve no national interest. The same is true about globalism. The EU has been allowed to flourish, because it enjoys American protection. Take that protection away and Europe returns to a continent of nations.
It’s also an example of how the people muddling through a transition period may be all wrong about what they are noticing. The conventional wisdom says the world is transitioning from nationalism to post-nationalism. Global entities will supplant nation states and global corporations will manage the global economy. These populist uprisings we see in the West are just rearguard actions by those who will not be part of the glorious multicultural global paradise that is tomorrow.
In reality, we may be living through the opposite. The Cold War era may have been the globalist era, dominated by two great democratic empires. On the one side was the democracy of communism. On the other was the democracy of natural rights. First the Soviet Empire collapsed and now the American Empire is receding. The flurry of cosmopolitan globalism is not a rearguard action, but more like the scavengers profiting from the end of that great epoch in Western history.
What is called populism today is simply the West waking up from the long slumber that was the great battle between two empires. Generations of Europeans sublimating national interests for a common defense are now waking up from that period to assert those interests again. In the US, regional and now racial interests that have long been suppressed are bubbling up to the surface. Just as NATO is an entity from a bygone era, cosmopolitan globalism is the echo of a bygone age.
Sudden Militarization Of Wuhan’s P4 Lab Raises New Questions About The Origin Of The Deadly Covid-19 Virus
The reported militarization of Wuhan’s P4 Lab has raised new questions about the origin of the Covid-19 virus and the apparent cover-up that has occurred since it was first made public.
Following the removal of the most senior health officials in Wuhan yesterday, Chinese State Media has just reported that Chen Wei, China’s chief biochemical weapon defense expert, is now to be stationed in Wuhan to lead the efforts to overcome the deadly, pneumonia-like pathogen.
According to the PLA Daily report, Chen Wei holds the rank of major general, and along with reports that Chinese troops have started to “assist”, it strongly suggests that the PLA has taken control of the situation.
As Epoch Times reports, before this latest report, Chen’s military rank and specialization was not widely known. She was first interviewed on Jan. 30 by the state-run China Science Daily. In a second interview the next day, she predicted that the outbreak in Wuhan would let up over the next few days, but could worsen again soon…
“We need to prepare for the worst-case scenario, find the best solutions, and be ready to fight the longest battle,” she said.
Amid constant propaganda from CCP officials, and widespread censorship, many – including US Senator Tom Cotton – have wondered if the virus was bio-engineered, and was ‘leaked’ from the lab (which just happens to be located at the epicenter ofg the virus).
The militarization, and bringing in of China’s foremost bio-weapons expert raises the question once again of whether the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus (Covid-19) is the result of naturally emergent mutations against the possibility that it may be a bio-engineered strain meant for defensive immunotherapy protocols that was released into the public, most likely by accident since China’s rate of occupational accidents is about ten-times higher than America’s, and some twenty-times more than Europe’s – the only other regions with high-level virology labs.
A new report –a product of a collaboration between a retired professional scientist with 30 years of experience in genomic sequencing and analysis who helped design several ubiquitous bioinformatic software tools, and a former NSA counterterrorism analyst – suggests that this possible mistake may have been precipitated by the need to quickly finish research that was being rushed for John Hopkin’s Event 201 which was held this past October and meant to gameplan the containment of a global pandemic. Research may also have been hurried due to deadlines before the impending Chinese New Year – the timing of these events point to increased human error, not a globalist conspiracy.
Given that this outbreak was said to begin in late December when most bat species in the region are hibernatingand the Chinese horseshoe bat’s habitat covers an enormous swath of the region containing scores of cities and hundreds of millions people to begin with, the fact that this Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, denoted as Covid-19, emerged in close proximity to the only BSL-4 virology lab in China, now notoriously located in Wuhan, which in turn was staffed with at least two Chinese scientists – Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge (both virologists who had previously worked at an American lab which already bio-engineered an incredibly virulent strain of bat coronavirus) – the accidental release of a bio-engineered virus meant for defensive immunotherapy research from Wuhan’s virology lab cannot be automatically discounted, especially when the Wuhan Strain’s unnatural genomic signals are considered.
Zhengli Shi notably co-authored a controversial paper in 2015 which describes the creation of a new virus by combining a coronavirus found in Chinese horseshoe bats with another that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice.
This research sparked a huge debate at the time over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.
As Nature.com reported in 2015, the findings reinforce suspicions that bat coronaviruses capable of directly infecting humans (rather than first needing to evolve in an intermediate animal host) may be more common than previously thought, the researchers say.
But other virologists question whether the information gleaned from the experiment justifies the potential risk. Although the extent of any risk is difficult to assess, Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, points out that the researchers have created a novel virus that “grows remarkably well” in human cells.
“If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” he says.
“The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” agrees Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey.
Ebright and his co-author also conceded that funders may think twice about allowing such experiments in the future.
“Scientific review panels may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue,” they write, adding that discussion is needed as to “whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved”.
Previously, scientists had believed, on the basis of molecular modelling and other studies, that it should not be able to infect human cells. The latest work shows that the virus has already overcome critical barriers, such as being able to latch onto human receptors and efficiently infect human airway cells, he says.
“I don’t think you can ignore that.”
Which brings us to perhaps the mostnotable finding.
A genetic analysis of the spike-protein genes – the exact region that was bio-engineered by the UNC lab in 2015, where Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge previously isolated a batty coronavirus that targets the ACE2 receptor just like this 2019-nCoV strain of the coronavirus does – indicates an artificial and unnatural origins of the Wuhan Strain’s spike-protein genes when they are compared to the genomes of wild relatives.
Instead of appearing similar and homologous to its wild relatives, an important section of the Wuhan Strain’s spike-protein region shares the most genetic similarity with a bio-engineered commercially available gene sequence that’s designed to help with immunotherapy research. It is mathematically possible for this to happen in nature – but only in a ten-thousand bats chained to ten-thousand Petri dishes and given until infinity sense.
And so, as the report goes on, a scientist who’s been prolifically involved with studying the molecular interaction of coronaviruses and humanity, spending decades and millions of dollars, and having even helped build a hyper-virulent coronavirus from scratch at UNC – just so happens to be working at the only BSL-4 virology lab in China that also just so happens to be at the epicenter of an outbreak involved a coronavirus that’s escaping zoological classification and whose novel spike-protein region shares more in common with a commercial genetic vector than any of its wild relatives
However, most recently, as an increasing number of global experts questioned China’s initial official story that this came from the food market in Wuhan, Zhengli Shi hurriedly wrote a new report, claiming instead of the initial findings that the novel virus came from a bat in Yunnan, the Chinese chrysanthemum. She said that this was a new discovery that she had worked hard for several years, and coincidentally wrote a paper after the outbreak and published it in the famous international academic journal Nature.
Which all seems like a very sudden about face for someone who had been working on bio-engineering the exact virus for decades…
The reason why #CCP held on releasing info about #CoronavirusOutbreak
is that they were waiting for Dr. Shi Zhengli’s paper to be published at Nature so that they could claim bat is the origin. #COVID2019
中共推遲公佈 #武汉肺炎 疫情 是為等石正麗提交論文https://t.co/Su5odFacas
A coronavirus spontaneously mutated and jumped to humans at a wet market or deep in some random bat cave which just so happened to be 20 miles from China’s only BSL-4 virology lab, a virus with an unusually slippery never-before-seen genome that’s evading zoological classification, and whose spike-protein region which allows it to enter host cells appears most like a bio-engineered commercial product, that somehow managed to infect its first three and roughly one-third of its initial victims despite them not being connected to this market, and then be so fined-tuned to humans that it’s gone on to create the single greatest public health crisis in Chinese history with approaching 100 million citizens locked-down or quarantined – also causing Mongolia to close its border with its largest trading partner for the first time in modern history.
Or, Chinese scientists failed to follow correct sanitation protocols possibly while in a rush during their boisterous holiday season, something that had been anticipated since the opening of the BSL-4 lab and has happened at least four times previously, and accidentally released this bio-engineered Wuhan Strain – likely created by scientists researching immunotherapy regimes against bat coronaviruses, who’ve already demonstrated the ability to perform every step necessary to bio-engineer the Wuhan Strain 2019-nCov – into their population, and now the world. As would be expected, this virus appears to have been bio-engineered at the spike-protein genes which was already done at UNC to make an extraordinarily virulent coronavirus. Chinese efforts to stop the full story about what’s going on are because they want the scales to be even since they’re now facing a severe pandemic and depopulation event. No facts point against this conclusion.
And, following tonight’s huge jump in reported cases and deaths…
…we thought the admittedly doomsday-ish conclusion from harvardtothebighouse.com seemed worthwhile noting:
“Simply and horribly, this is likely to become another Chernobyl or Fukushima – a catastrophic illustration of mankind’s hubris and intransigence clashing with Nature, as fate again reaps a once unimaginably tragic toll.”
As Professor Neil Ferguson warned, “we’re at the eary stages of a global pandemic”
Bernie, et al, imagine there exists some means to redistribute wealth, most likely following the economist Thomas Piketty, via a progressive tax on the rich. Just talking about that may be enough to scare the wealthy into putsching a corporate Democrat in Bernie’s place yet again, despite his human shield of nose-pierced volunteers. But even if Sanders were to win, it would not be enough to change America. It’s a reality problem.
The reality of wealth is that the gap between most Americans and those who sit atop our economy continues to grow. During the two decades after 1960, the real incomes of the top 5 percent and the remaining 95 percent increased at almost the same rate, about 4 percent a year. But between 1980 and 2007, incomes diverged, with those at the bottom seeing annual increases only half that of those at the top. Then it got worse.
Lower savings and hyper-available credit (remember fraudulent Countrywidemortgages, ARMs, and usurious re-fi’s?) put the middle and bottom portions of society on an unsustainable financial path that crashed into the Great Recession of 2008. Yet America’s top earners’ wealth still grew; the one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth, as the stock market recovered, while the bottom people became poorer, as their missing homes did not. Their wealth, such as it was, was a Potemkin vision, held in the form of houses they didn’t actually own. The recession represented the largest redistribution of money in a century. How did the rich pull this off?
It came down to the reality of possession. The wealthy own stock and real estate, not just personal homes.Yet just under half of Americans own no stock (the wealthiest own over 80 percent of all stock, along with 40 percent of America’s land). Markets over time go up and those who own parts of them do well. A rising tide lifts all yachts, as historian Morris Berman observed. People who do not own homes have to rent them from those who do. Owners can raise rents anytime they want more money.
It can be hard to comprehend the sheer level of wealth possessed by the rich: Redfin figured out Bill Gates could buy all of the real estate in Boston. Candidate Michael Bloomberg, meanwhile, could pick up Anaheim. Google’s Larry Page is able to buy Boca Raton. Never mind yachts; they can buy whole cities.
It is the reality of the system.Walmart associates make minimum wage. Most of them are nowhere near full-time, so their take-home pay is well below the poverty threshold. Employer-assisted Obamacare, such as it is, only kicks in after one works 20 hours a week or more, so following the implementation of that policy, most employees were cut to less than 20 hours, meaning they had to juggle multiple jobs to live and still did not have health care, as qualifying hours are not cumulative.
Walmart can pay low wages, creating a new status known as working poor, without having to see workers literally starve on the job, because their employees receive $2.66 billion in government poverty assistance each year. That works out to about $5,815 per worker, or about $420,000 per store.
Food assistance is also key in profiting from income inequality. According to one study, in a single year, nine Walmarts in Massachusetts received more than $33 million in food stamp dollars spent at their stores. In two years, Walmart received about half of the $1 billion in food stamp expenditures in Oklahoma. Overall, 18 percent of all food benefits money nationwide is spent at Walmart. That’s about $14 billion.
So let’s Robin Hood the wealthy, Bernie, Elizabeth, and others say. After all, Jeff Bezos’ net worth is $109 billion. But that’s everything he has, not just the 6 percent tax Elizabeth Warren wants him to pay. The net worth of the entire Forbes 400 is under $3 trillion. That’s everything they own. The reforms Warren has proposed to address economic inequality will cost us some $20 trillion. The gap has gotten too big to raise everyone up.
But you have to start somewhere, right?
Given that America’s largest companies already pay little to no tax, it is unclear how such a system could ever be enforced in the long run, given that the wealthy will just offshore their money. Taxes still leave in place other factors driving economic inequality, including inheritance laws (money is immortal. The children of rich people are born rich and unless they get really into hookers and blow, will inevitably get richer. They almost can’t help it) and the ability of the wealthy to control wages and the availability of jobs. Unions are increasingly a thing of the past and automation threatens jobs daily. The rich decide when to pull the trigger on touch screens in fast food restaurants and deep-six cashier jobs. And never mind the mass extinction that driverless delivery vehicles will bring on, to say nothing of the one after that when advances in AI crush entry-level coding jobs.
The single most significant factor is that financial growth via capital ownership (what the rich do for money) always outstrips wage growth (what the rest of us do for money). Getting richer by owning stuff is always a better deal than trying to get rich by working for wages from the people who own stuff. Even if a magic wand were to somehow reset society, the nature of capitalism would soon set things back on the path to income inequality.
Rich people get money through capital gains, via assets they buy cheaply that become worth more over time (until slavery was replaced with the minimum wage, human beings were also considered a form of capital asset—seriously, check with human “resources” where you work). That’s why a short-term downturn that’s bad for you (you lose what you have, like a home) is ultimately good for most of them (downturns are discount buying opportunities for those with spare money). It’s why the stock market troubles that uninformed people wish for will not make Trump go away. Math!
The only hope lies in the reality of politics, right? Over large swaths of the earth, there are no elections. In some of the wealthiest countries in the Middle East and Asia, there is not even the pretext of anyone choosing a government. Most governments are controlled by family ascension, not unlike the Middle Ages. In more modern places, corruption and manipulation control things, as power and wealth work together.
Such is the case now in the United States. According to the once-prescient Lawrence Lessing (who has since lost his mind to Twitter and TDS), thanks to concentration of wealth, 132 people in the U.S. essentially control elections. They do so by donating—just that handful of people—over 60 percent of Super PAC money. Those 132 represent 0.000042 percent of the total number of voters; most other contributions to candidates are small, many below $200. It sounds nice when a candidate talks about this, but it diffuses power even as you think he owes you something now. That’s because it’s impossible under such circumstances for government to create laws against the interests of the wealthy; after all, they work for them.
The reality is there is no answer, no solution. That’s because things are working more or less as they are supposed to. From a certain perspective, income inequality means things are going according to the rigged rules. The system is designed to squeeze wealth up into a smaller and smaller group of hands. A byproduct is the creation of more and more poor at the bottom. It is the inevitable endpoint for a society set up to fund the wealthy via capital appreciation by paying low or stagnant wages to everyone else.
To say it can’t be is to ignore the last time it sort of was, one king in one castle sustained by tens of thousands of serfs living in sloven conditions, with feudalism the dominant force. A very, very few owned most everything of value. The 99.999 percent majority—serfs then, valued Target associates now—worked for whatever the feudal lords allowed them to have.
It’s very American to believe there are always answers, that there are not forces stronger than change at work, especially in an election year. Yet if you’re still looking for those answers—solutions—well, you’ve gotten to the end of the article.
Dozens Of Dead Birds Seized From Luggage Of Passenger Traveling From Beijing To Washington DC
We’re not quite sure the Chinese have the right idea for containing the climate of disease and virii coming out of their country. After all, what good is wearing a surgical mask on a flight when you have crammed several dozen dead birds into a bag for a 10 hour plus flight to the United States?
That’s exactly what happened two weeks ago: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, seized a bag of dead birds that was being carried in the luggage of an airline passenger traveling from China to Washington D.C. on January 27.
The birds were packaged in a bag that had cartoon images on it and was seized at Dulles Airport from a passenger, who was arriving from Beijing, according to the NY Post. The passenger claimed that the birds were “cat food” and that he was planning to bring them to Maryland after his flight.
Birds from China are (obviously) not allowed in the U.S. for fear of spreading the avian flu. The birds were “destroyed by incineration” with approval from the USDA.
Casey Durst, director of field operations for the agency’s Baltimore field office said: “Customs and Border Protection agriculture specialists continue to exercise extraordinary vigilance every day in their fight to protect our nation’s agricultural and economic prosperity from invasive pests and animal diseases.”
“These dead birds are prohibited from importation to the United States as unprocessed birds pose a potentially significant disease threat to our nation’s poultry industries and more alarmingly to our citizens as potential vectors of avian influenza,” he concluded.
The House of Representatives in the state of Virginia is quickly ramming liberal legislation down the throats of innocent people. They have passed an “assault weapons” ban, which would criminalize thousands of people who haven’t committed a crime.
The 51-48 vote in the House of Delegates moves H.B. 961 (the assault weapons ban) to the state Senate. Passage among senators could be in jeopardy, however, as Democrats only have a two-seat majority, meaning they can only afford to lose one vote should all the Republicans oppose the bill. But don’t assume it’s passage won’t happen. Taking away guns is essential for tyranny. But the propaganda is all about safety:
“This legislation, just like other bills passed by the House this year, is intended to make Virginians safer every day,” House Democrats said in a statement after the vote. –Fox News
This is to make tyrants safer against those they want control over. This is obvious to anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of history.
Virginia has become ground zero in the national gun debate as Democrats have made gun control the cornerstone of this year’s legislative session after capturing a full majority for the first time in two decades.
Fully prepping for tyranny is difficult because it takes relying on history for evidence of just how far humans will go to enforce laws on those who haven’t done anything wrong. But if the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are any gauges, Virginians could be in big trouble.
Coronavirus “Likely To Wreak Havoc” And Decimate February China Auto Sales
Just days ago, we reported about a major inventory glut in the Chinese auto market due to the effects of the coronavirus on an industry that has already been mired in recession for months.
Now, auto industry executives are admitting that the virus could “wreak havoc” on sales and production for the first quarter, according to the Asia Times. Automakers across the country have been forced to cancel sales targets and offer subsidies to hold over dealers during the outbreak.
The coronavirus has now killed over 1,000 people (if you are to believe the CCP’s likely understated numbers) and more than 40,000 people are now confirmed to be infected in China.
Accordingly, traffic to showrooms has collapsed across the country since late January. A China Automobile Dealer’s association poll shows that dealers predict a drastic drop in sales of 50% to 80% this month, compared to February 2019. 70% of dealers have said they have seen “almost no customers” since the end of January.
Volvo has announced same day subsidies totaling about $1.42 million and BMW has cancelled dealers’ sales targets in February. It has also said targets for March will be “flexibly set”. Ford and Hyundai have simply decided not to assess the sales performance of their Chinese dealers in Q1.
The CADA said auto sales “show a cliff-like decline”.
Recall, we also reported just days ago that average inventory levels were at 62.7% for January, according to the China Automobile Dealer Association. These numbers are far above the standard 50% level that is considered normal in the industry.
This follows China’s Miao Wei, Minister of Industry and Information Technology, saying in mid-January (prior to the coronavirus outbreak becoming severe) that the industry still faces “big downward pressure”.
At the time, he predicted sales of just 25 million units for the year. We obviously think that this number could wind up being materially lower.
Recall, sales for 2019 totaled 25.769 million units. Sales of just 25 million units – an optimistic prediction in our eyes – would mark a third straight year of declines for the world’s largest auto market regardless.
The MIIT also said at the time that it would further study and review its NEV vehicle subsidies. Recall, Beijing backing away from these subsidies caused NEV sales to taper off toward the end of 2019, sullying what was an otherwise consistent silver lining for the country, even amidst the overall recession in autos.
With no signs of the country recovering from its ongoing epidemic, there doesn’t seem to be any silver linings left.
We noted in December that NEV sales plunged 42% in November after Beijing backed away. The government is ostensibly dedicating all of its efforts to deal with the country’s ongoing outbreak, and so Beijing has not revisited its comments about EVs yet, and we are already halfway through Q1 2020.
China did say, however, it is going to “maintain support” for NEVs, without getting into too much detail. Miao also said he’s confident that the country will ensure “stable industrial production in 2020” while phasing out “zombie firms”.
There may have been some spooky foreshadowing in those words from mid-January, as almost every business in the locked down major cities of China now looks like a “zombie firm”.
China Reports Huge Jump In New Coronavirus Infections And Deaths; Oil, Stocks Tumble
All those clueless hacks who warned us for years not to trust China’s economic numbers, yet were so gullible to believe any coronavirus pandemic “data” released by Beijing are going to look pretty stupid right about now.
Hubei just released its latest round of coronavirus outbreak figures, and in a clear confirmation of the ‘conspiracy theory’ that China had altered the way it was reporting Covid-19 deaths and cases – clearly in order to suggest that things were improving and you should go back to work, while ideally buying stocks, the province at the epicenter of the Coronavirus pandemic just came clean and the numbers are stunning.
The number of cases exploded by 14,840, resulting in a total of 48,206 cases, including 13,332 clinically diagnose cases:
Well, it appears that a few days later, China changed its mind and has reverted to the original definition of “infection” while also including “clinical diagonisis” to determine if a new infection had take place. This is how Hubei explained the change:.
With the deepening of understanding of new coronavirus pneumonia and the accumulation of experience in diagnosis and treatment, in view of the characteristics of the epidemic in Hubei Province, the General Office of the National Health and Health Commission and the Office of the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine issued the “Diagnosis and Treatment Plan for New Coronavirus Infected Pneumonia (Trial (Version) “adds” clinical diagnosis “to the case diagnosis classification in Hubei Province, so that patients can receive standardized treatment according to confirmed cases as early as possible to further improve the success rate of treatment.
According to the plan, Hubei Province has recently conducted investigations on suspected cases and revised the diagnosis results, and newly diagnosed patients were diagnosed according to the new diagnosis classification. In order to be consistent with the classification of case diagnosis issued by other provinces across the country, starting today, Hubei Province will include the number of clinically diagnosed cases into the number of confirmed cases for publication.
Of course, the real reason for the original change as noted above was to give the impression that China was succeeding in containing the infection, which helped boost stocks – both in China and globally – sharply higher, and in the case of the S&P, to new all time highs.
As for the catastrophic revision, it may also explain why on Tuesday morning, China’s CCTV reported that Hubei province removed its two top health officials, namely health commission head Liu Yingzi and party chief Zhang Jin from their posts. Almost as if, in retrospect, they were caught hiding something…
And while China can now claim it wants to be more transparent (which is odd for a nation that is still refusing to admit the US CDC on the ground) and wants a more comprehensive definition of “infection” because it is suddenly so concerned about all those people it ordered to go back to work on Monday (with new cases now emerging in people’s workplaces forcing an immediate quarantine of all workers and co-workers), it somehow also changed the definition of “death”, because at the same time as the explosion in new cases, which clearly indicates that the pandemic is now clearly out of control, the number of reported deaths in Hubei alone spiked by 242 to 1,310 (we are still waiting for the official number of deaths across all of China which will likely add quite a few more cases to the Hubei total).
What is absolutely terrifying about the chart above is that, of the 242 new deaths, more than double the previous day’s total, is that according to the Hubei government, 135 are from the new “clinically diagnosed” category. This means that for weeks China was likely assigning coronavirus deaths to pneumonia (as we warned it was doing on Jan 25 in “This Is How China Is Hiding The True Number Of Coronavirus Deaths“),which also means that the real number of Coronavirus deaths is likely in the thousands.
For those curious what the now completely discredited fake coronavirus data, reported by China until today with the sole intent of boosting risk assets was, here is the full breakdown. Naturally none of these numbers matter anymore following today’s sudden burst of Chinese truthiness.
Who could have seen that coming? The stock market wanted so badly to believe the Chinese data… bonds and commodities knew better. The clearest indication that all Chinese data was fake, however, came from Global Times Editor on Chief who earlier today tweeted that “New infection cases outside of Hubei have dropped for 8 consecutive days. It is now time for the US and other countries to actively consider resuming flights to China.”
New infection cases outside of Hubei have dropped for 8 consecutive days. In Beijing with more than 21 million population, the daily new case of infection is around 10 recently. It is now time for the US and other countries to actively consider resuming flights to China.
Finally, we now look forward to what explanation China’s global tourism impressario, WHO Director Tedros Adhanom best known as the “WHO Candidate Accused of Covering Up Epidemics“, will come up with now after spending the past two weeks praising China’s response and claiming there is no risk of a global pandemic, while criticizing the US for daring to halt flights to China.
No more than 50% have said this in past election cycles
Evaluations of U.S. world standing mostly similar to past elections
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sixty-one percent of Americans say they are better off than they were three years ago, a higher percentage than in prior election years when an incumbent president was running. In the 1992, 1996 and 2004 election cycles, exactly half said they were better off. In three separate measures during the 2012 election cycle, an average of 45% said they were better off.
Relatedly, 52% of U.S. adults say it is easier for them to “go and buy things in the stores” than it was three years ago, higher than in the 1992, 1996 and 2004 election cycles, when the figures were closer to 40%.
Americans’ perceptions of whether they are personally better off, and whether it is easier to buy things, appear to be influenced much more by their party leanings than by their economic situations. Sixty percentage points separate Republicans’ (89%) and Democrats’ (29%) assessments of whether they are better off than three years ago. Independents are essentially in the middle of the two groups, at 60%. Meanwhile, 64% of those in both upper- and middle-income households say they are better off, as do 49% of those in lower-income households.
The Republican-Democratic gap is smaller — 44 points — when people indicate whether it is easier for them to buy things than it was three years ago: 76% of Republicans versus 32% of Democrats say it is, as do 49% of independents.
The party gaps on the “better off than three years ago” question were much smaller in the past, partly because supporters of the incumbent president’s party were less upbeat about their situations than Republicans are today.
In addition to higher ratings among Republicans, today’s higher figures are also driven by more positive ratings among independents — 60% today, compared with ratings near 50% in prior years.
Assessments of U.S. International Standing Similar to Past Elections
The majority of Americans do not believe the U.S. is as respected throughout the world as it was three years ago — 38% say it is and 59% say it is not. The percentage who think the U.S. is as respected is no worse than in past election years, with only as many as 40% saying so (in 1992 and 2000).
Additionally, 51% say the nation is as safe and strong as it was three years ago, while 43% say it is not. These readings are similar to what Gallup measured in the 2004 and 2012 election cycles, but lower than in 1992.
As on the economic items, wide party gaps exist on the international items. Seventy percent of Republicans, but only 9% of Democrats, believe the U.S. is as respected throughout the world as it was three years ago. Thirty-two percent of independents hold this view.
Also, 76% of Republicans, 51% of independents and 22% of Democrats believe the nation is as safe and strong as when President Donald Trump took office.
Trump Given More Credit Than Obama for Economic Improvements
Sixty-two percent give Trump a great deal or fair amount of credit for improvement in the state of the economy in the past few years — more than the 51% giving former President Barack Obama the same level of credit.
The economy will likely be as potent an election issue as any other, but there is no dominant issue in the public’s minds. In December, the economy was among the top six issues that U.S. adults rated as “extremely important” to their presidential vote. The latest poll, which asked Americans to choose among those six issues as the single most important to their vote, finds 29% choosing the economy and 25% healthcare. Fewer indicated that immigration (14%), gun policy (13%), education (11%) or terrorism (6%) is their top overall issue.
Bottom Line
If Trump asks Americans whether they are better off than before he came into office, most would say they are. Trump also gets more credit for recent economic improvements than Obama does, though majorities give both credit.
Trump was clear during his State of the Union that he plans to make the strength of the economy a major focus of his reelection campaign. Given Americans’ generally positive ratings of the economy — including a 63% job approval rating for Trump on the issue — it is a sensible strategy. But with Trump’s overall job approval rating still below the majority level, the ultimate question is whether his economic success will mean more to voters than the more controversial aspects of his presidency.
This Is What Happened After One Chinese Company Rushed To Reopen After The Corona-Chaos
Earlier today, Rabobank’s Michael Every laid out succinctly the dilemma facing Beijing, when he said that “China appears to have perhaps decided that the economic damage being wrought by a demand collapse and supply-chain shutdown is just too much to bear.” As reported overnight, Xi Jinping stated that China will meet its economic goals AND win the battle vs. the virus, and Beijing is urging firms to increase output even as the capital itself is largely locked down – and other cities are physically locking people into their homes. That’s as even the US admits that the Phase One trade deal will be slow off the market due to the virus impact.
Of course, China is no stranger to Double Think: as Every put it, “a freely-floating, controlled currency; market-determined, state-directed interest rates; and free-trade mercantilism. Yet increase economic activity from here and the virus will spread, both internally and globally. Concentrate on just the virus, and the local and global economic impact will be enormous.”
That, in a nutshell, was how Rabobank saw China’s “dialectic that has no comfortable Fichtean synthesis to the thesis and antithesis” and concluded that “things are going to get nasty for economies and markets – especially with official WHO word that a vaccine is 18-months away.”
Today, two days after China officially returned to work, we got the first confirmation of just how catastrophic Beijing’s order to local enterprises and businesses to rush back reboot the economy could be, when Jennifer Zeng reported that a company in Suzhou reopened, and immediately at least one CoVid2019 case found. As a result, the company’s 200+ employees couldn’t go home and were immediately placed under quarantine. At least the workers managed to “organize” quilts for themselves.
Company in #Suzhou reopened. One #CoVid2019 case found. Over 200 employed couldn’t go home and immediately under quarantine. They managed to organize quilts for themselves.
苏︍州单位提前开工，确诊一例 #武汉肺炎 ，全单位的人上了一天班，家都回不去了，200多人自带被子，全部隔离 pic.twitter.com/Fd660RKfqL
This is just the first such case. Expect many more – especially across Hubei and its neighboring provinces – as latent cases of Coronavirus which were never caught and cured spark new infections and mini epidemics, all of which dutifully captured on a smartphone clip for everyone in China to watch and freak out even more.
Which reminds us of another comment from Rabobank, which last week explained why the dilemma facing China is “truly awful”:
The quandary for China between releasing the quarantine straitjacket in days to stop its economy from getting truly sick, and allowing a virus like this to spread further as people start to mingle again is truly awful. There are no good options. For a world with a serious lack of final end-demand, and which has been relying on China, along with increasingly “Chinese” central banks, this is going to be a nasty shock either way that Mr Market is treating like he is Mr Magoo.
And since Beijing has no way out, especially since the epidemic is still raging despite Beijing’s “doctored”, no pun intended, infection and death numbers, expect China to unleash the most draconian censorship crackdown on any reports Covid-2019 has not only not been purged but is making unwelcome appearances across China’s enterprises, which will be quietly put under blanket quarantine even as Beijing pretends that all is well and its economy is once again humming on all cylinders until eventually the epidemic reaches a critical mass and China has no choice but to once again admit the full extent of the social and economic fallout. And just like in the case of SARS, don’t expect such “honesty” to emerge for at least several weeks if not months.
US Bombers Fly Near Taiwan After Chinese ‘Aggression’; Beijing Warned To “Focus On Fighting Coronavirus”
Though all eyes are on the deadly coronavirus pandemic, another dangerous military close encounter just played out off Taiwan’s coast on Wednesday.
“Three U.S. Air Force planes, including two B-52 bombers, flew near Taiwan on Wednesday, the island’s defense ministry said, after Taiwan’s air force scrambled earlier in the week to intercept Chinese jets,”Reuters reports.
The prior Sunday and Monday incidents involved Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) bombers and fighters approaching the self-declared Republic of China (Taiwan), before Taiwan scrambled its own US-supplied F-16 fighters to shadow the ‘invading’ aircraft.
Chinese air force H-6 bomber near a Taiwan F-16. February 10 photo by Taiwan Ministry of National Defense, via Reuters.
A senior US State Department official in the region called China’s behavior “completely inappropriate” and condemned the “aggressive act.”
Wednesday’s “response” by the Americans consisted in the following:
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said one U.S. MC-130, a special mission aircraft based on the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, flew down the Taiwan Strait in a southerly direction on Wednesday.
The two U.S. B-52 bombers skirted Taiwan’s east coast, also in a southerly direction, the ministry added.
Beijing has been engaged in provocative “island encirclement drills” somewhat routinely over the past half decade, resulting in multiple close encounters with US and Taiwanese forces, especially in the air and water, especially the contested Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou pledged that such Chinese aggression will only “deepen cooperation with countries with similar ideals, including the United States, in response to the rising Chinese military threat.”
There’s little new here in such provocations and reactions, and counter-statements out of Taipei; however, Taiwan officials have tapped into a new argument sure to add insult to injury amid its ongoing standoff to assert territorial control in the face of much larger and more powerful China.
Reuters reports of a deeply provocative statement amid China’s worst crisis in years:
Taiwan has urged China to focus its efforts on fighting the new coronavirus rather than menacing the island.
No doubt this will do little to east tensions, and will only exacerbate them, likely only giving further invitation for China to “save face” and attempt to show that its military is stronger than ever and remains ‘undistracted’ by the deadly and society-threatening pandemic in its midst.
In the wake of the latest Hollywood buffoonery displayed at the Oscars, I think it is time for the American public to denounce in the strongest possible terms the rampant hypocrisy of sanctimonious cretins who make their living pretending to be someone other than themselves.
Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix and Barbara Streisand pop to mind as representative examples. All three are eager to lecture the American public on the need for equality and non-discrimination. Yet, not one of the recipients of the Oscar gift bags worth $225,000 spoke out against that extraordinary excess nor demanded that the money spent purchasing these “gifts” be used to benefit the poor and the homeless. Nope, take the money and run.
It is especially galling to see how the Hollywood Community has embraced the era of red-baiting Joseph McCarthy as the new standard for what is acceptable. There was a time that a few brave souls in Hollywood (I am thinking Lucille Ball, Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck), spoke out against the blacklisting of actors, writers and directors for their past political ties to the Soviet Union. Now I have lived long enough to see the so-called liberals in Hollywood rail against Donald Trump and his supporters as “agents of Russia.” Many in Hollywood, who weep crocodile tears over the abuses of the Hollywood Blacklist, are now doing the same damn thing without a hint of irony.
If you are a film buff (and I consider myself one) you should be familiar with these great movies that remind the viewer of the horrors visited upon actors, writers and directors during the Hollywood Blacklist:
The Front–a 1976 comedy-drama film set against the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s. It was written by Walter Bernstein, directed by Martin Ritt, and stars Woody Allen and Zero Mostel.
Good Night, and Good Luck–a 2005 historical drama film directed by George Clooney, tells the story of Edward R. Murrow fighting back against the hysterical red-baiting of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Trumbo–a 2015 American biographical drama film directed by Jay Roach that follows the life of Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted but continued to write award winning movies in alias (e.g. Spartacus).
This was an ugly, awful and evil time in America. It was a period of time fed by fear and ignorance. While it is true that there were Americans who identified as Communists and embraced the politics of the Soviet Union, we scared ourselves into believing that communist subversion was everywhere and that America was teetering on the brink of being submerged in a red tide.
Thirty years ago I reflected on this era and wondered how such mass hysteria could happen. Now I know. We have lived with the same kind of madness since Donald Trump was tagged as a Russian agent in the summer of 2016. And the irony is extraordinary. The very same Hollywood elite that heaped opprobrium on Director Elia Kazan for naming names in Hollywood in front of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, are now leading the charge in labeling anyone who dares speak out against the failed coup as “stooges” of the Kremlin or Putin.
Hillary Clinton’s crazy rant accusing U.S. Army Major and Member of Congress, Tulsi Gabbard, as a Kremlin puppet is not a deviation from the norm. Clinton exemplifies the terrifying norm of the political and cultural elite in this country. Accusing political opponents of being controlled by foreign enemies, real or imagined, is an old political tactic.
Makes me wonder what Edward R. Murrow or Dalton Trumbo would say if we could bring them back from the dead.
2nd Coronavirus Case Confirmed In San Diego As China Sends 2,600 Army “Medical Staff” To Wuhan
Summary:
China’s Hubei province admits a massive spike in virus cases and deaths (14,840 additional cases and 242 additional deaths)
CDC confirms second case in San Diego
The Sun reports first case confirmed in London, bringing UK total to 9
China Grand Prix cancelled
Couple onboard ‘Diamond Princess’ tell CNBC situation is “frankly terrifying”.
AFP publishes report exposing worsening shortages of food and supplies in Wuhan
Cruise ship rejected by four countries allowed to dock in Cambodia
Rumors of 10k in Wuhan not included in official count of cases
NYT follows WSJ in exploring problems with Chinese testing kits
Global Times says US should restart travel to China
US officials complain about China still denying American help
First ship-to-shore infection occurs in Japan from ‘Diamond Princess’
State Department lets non-essential personnel and their families leave Hong Kong because of outbreak
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Update (2050ET): Here comes martial law with Chinese characteristics. Moments ago, Bloomberg reported that China is sending 2,600 medical staff from the military to Wuhan, two weeks after it first deployed 450 “military medical staff” to Wuhan just as the pandemic was starting to spread.
It wasn’t quite clear just what “medical staff from military” means, but what is clear is that nearly 3,000 military personnel are going to Wuhan to make sure that there are no more incidents, like someone leaking another deadly pandemic from China’s only Level 4 biohazard lab, which just happens to be in Wuhan. That, or someone actually escaping alive from the quarantine zone for 11 million people.
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Update (1950ET): CDC officials confirmed to a local TV station that a second case of the virus has been confirmed in San Diego, bringing the total in the US to 14.
The patient was under quarantine at the same U.S. airbase in San Diego where another repatriated American was previously diagnosed with the disease known as Covid-19. There had been no contact between the two patients, who were on different flights coming out of China and were housed in separate facilities, indicating that the virus hadn’t spread between them. That suggests that more cases are highly likely as one case likely didn’t infect the other.
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Update (1855ET): Hubei just released its latest round of coronavirus outbreak figures, and in a clear confirmation of the ‘conspiracy theory’ that China had altered the way it was reporting Covid-19 deaths and cases – clearly in order to suggest that things were improving and you should go back to work, while ideally buying stocks, the province at the epicenter of the Coronavirus pandemic just came clean and the numbers are stunning.
The number of cases exploded by 14,840, resulting in a total of 48,206 cases, including 13,332 clinically diagnose cases:
What happened? Recall that on Monday we published “This Is How China Is Rigging The Number Of Coronavirus Infections” in which we explained that China on Feb 7 moved the goalposts by changing the definition of the term “infection” and that “going forward patients who tested positive for the virus but have no symptoms will no longer be regarded as confirmed.“
Well, it appears that a few days later, China changed its mind and has reverted to the original definition of “infection” while also including “clinical diagonisis” to determine if a new infection had take place. This is how Hubei explained the change:.
With the deepening of understanding of new coronavirus pneumonia and the accumulation of experience in diagnosis and treatment, in view of the characteristics of the epidemic in Hubei Province, the General Office of the National Health and Health Commission and the Office of the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine issued the “Diagnosis and Treatment Plan for New Coronavirus Infected Pneumonia (Trial (Version) “adds” clinical diagnosis “to the case diagnosis classification in Hubei Province, so that patients can receive standardized treatment according to confirmed cases as early as possible to further improve the success rate of treatment.
According to the plan, Hubei Province has recently conducted investigations on suspected cases and revised the diagnosis results, and newly diagnosed patients were diagnosed according to the new diagnosis classification. In order to be consistent with the classification of case diagnosis issued by other provinces across the country, starting today, Hubei Province will include the number of clinically diagnosed cases into the number of confirmed cases for publication.
Of course, the real reason for the original change as noted above was to give the impression that China was succeeding in containing the infection, which helped boost stocks – both in China and globally – sharply higher, and in the case of the S&P, to new all time highs.
And while China can now claim it wants a more comprehensive definition of “infection” because it is suddenly so concerned about all those people it ordered to go back to work on Monday (with new cases now emerging in people’s workplaces forcing an immediate quarantine of all workers and co-workers), it somehow also changed the definition of “death”, because at the same time as the explosion in new cases, which clearly indicates that the pandemic is now clearly out of control, the number of reported deaths in Hubei alone spiked by 242 to 1,310 (we are still waiting for the official number of deaths across all of China which will likely add quite a few more cases to the Hubei total).
Who could have seen that coming? The stock market wanted so badly to believe the Chinese data… bonds and commodities knew better.
But of course, smart traders who were paying attention yesterday might have been able to deduce that something was up. Beijing dismissed some of the top health officials in Wuhan and Hubei earlier this week, and last week it administered administrative punishments to hundreds of lower-level bureaucrats.
They have already been set up to take the fall for President Xi and his inner circle. Let the scapegoating begin.
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Update (1515ET): What are they hiding? Well, isn’t it obvious?
Yesterday, Dr. Tedros revealed at a WHO press conference that China had finally agreed to allow a team of international experts to study the outbreak on the mainland. This ended weeks of Beijing steadfastly refusing any international aid as more than a thousand people died in Hubei’s overwhelmed hospitals.
Now, US health officials are complaining that Beijing is still blocking them from visiting China by refusing to allow Americans to join the WHO team traveling to China. US officials affirmed Wednesday afternoon in New York that they still hadn’t been given a reason for the refusal, and we strongly doubt one will be offered. After all, the Politburo certainly isn’t in the habit of explaining its decisions.
In the US, the CDC warned during a press conference too early to know if warm spring weather will slow or stop the coronavirus outbreak, as it usually is enough to bring the annual North American flu season to an end.
Contradicting President Trump, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said Wednesday that she hopes “it will go down as the weather warms up, but it’s premature to assume that.”
The CDC also revealed earlier that some of the test kits it had distributed to state health officials might be defective, amid broader scrutiny of the tests that have so often failed to detect the virus in infected patients.
On Monday, Trump once again said from the White House that “heat” would kill the virus. President Trump promised China any help it needs weeks ago, and the CDC has repeatedly offered to send doctors and nurses, but China has repeatedly refused.
In other news, Treasury Secretary Steven Muchin said during a Wednesday interview that the virus outbreak would likely slow implementation of the US-China trade deal, the latest warning about the viability of the pact. We still need three to four more weeks of data from the outbreak to really begin to understand what the impact will be, Mnuchin added.
After a senior regime economist assured the Chinese public that the hit to economic growth as a result of the virus would be minimal, President Xi and the Communist Party’s senior leaders have ordered local officials to accelerate the reopening of China’s economy, including ordering local factories and offices back to work.
Earlier, President Xi and the leadership announced a slate of monetary and fiscal policy measures to support the Chinese economy, including tax cuts and yet more monetary easing.
But as markets found some degree of comfort in today’s news out of China (despite looming doubts about Beijing’s ability to contain the outbreak and whether the numbers released by the regime are legitimate), the ‘Diamond Princess’, a cruise ship quarantined at a port in Yokohama, has become the site of the first confirmed ship-to-shore transmission, as a Japanese government official who boarded the ship to survey the situation has been diagnosed with the virus, according to the New York Times. That brings the number of coronavirus cases stemming from the ship to 176.
In Hong Kong, the US State Department is allowing all nonemergency consulate employees and their families to leave because of the coronavirus outbreak.
Not long after China’s top officials pledged to stabilize the Chinese economy and restore the world’s confidence in the Middle Kingdom, WSJ reports that a survey of economists found 83% believe the outbreak will hurt Q1 growth in the US, where only 13 cases have been identified.
“The negative demand shock from coronavirus is significant,” said Constance Hunter, chief economist at KPMG. China’s GDP will be impacted significantly and this will show up in everything from commodity prices to demand for global goods and services,” she said.
Not to worry, though. We’re sure that the patriotic socialist values of the Chinese people (or perhaps some badly goalseeked economic data) will come through in a pinch to save the Chinese economy from a house of cards style liquidity crisis.
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Update (1325ET): As Twitter digests reports of the first confirmed case in London, adding to Wednesday’s torrent of coronavirus outbreak-related news, WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is speaking from Lausanne, delivering the WHO’s latest update on the outbreak, briefings that have become a daily occurrence.
Sounding uncharacteristically pessimistic, Dr. Tedros warned that the outbreak could still go in any direction, suggesting that Beijng’s heroic efforts aren’t really the “model for emerging nations”, as he once described it.
In other news, Global Times editor Hu Xijin, a longtime mouthpiece for the Communist regime on Twitter, also took the next step in Beijing’s carefully crafted narrative (which CNBC’s Eunice Yoon unravels in a string of tweets included below): He demanded that Western airlines reopen travel to China.
This comes as a senior economist for the regime said Wednesday that China can still hit its growth targets for 2020, and that the outbreak would likely be only a temporary bump.
New infection cases outside of Hubei have dropped for 8 consecutive days. In Beijing with more than 21 million population, the daily new case of infection is around 10 recently. It is now time for the US and other countries to actively consider resuming flights to China.
As evidence, Hu cites a drop in new cases outside Hubei, ignoring all the other frightening stats that his own regime has voluntarily shared with the press.
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Update (1310ET): After a relatively slow day for coronavirus news, the Murdoch-owned UK tabloid the Sun reported Wednesday afternoon that the first coronavirus case has been confirmed in London.
The infected individual is a Chinese national. The paper said officials will now be scrambling to trace his steps and find and test everybody whom he came in contact with.
The news comes as 12 Sussex schools have been placed on infection alert as some teachers and students have been asked to quarantine themselves.
The paper is citing a source as city hall.
BBC reports all 83 people who were being held in quarantine at Arrowe Park Hospital in Wirral have tested negative.
This case in London is the UK’s ninth.
The news hits just as the WHO’s is beginning its latest press update at its headquarters in Switzerland.
WATCH LIVE: World Health Organization update on the novel coronavirus — Feb. 12, 2020 https://t.co/eXl1tLefDn
* * * Update (0955ET): CNBC’s Eunice Yoon, one of the most reliable western journalists covering the coronavirus outbreak from Beijing, just perfectly summed up the current state of things in China, as the regime projects a message of optimism to appease markets and investors…while many remain skeptical of China’s numbers.
#China reports lowest # new #COVID19 cases since late-Jan. Health off’ls say drop in new confirmed cases from 3,887 on Feb 4 to 2,015 Feb 11 “positive changes”. Drop seems to support prediction by gov’t epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan outbreak to peak late-Feb, maybe over by April.
Upbeat remarks coincide with slight change in attitude of government priorities. #China now describes local requirements on factories as “inappropriate”, “inconsistent” for “orderly” reopening. Gov’t economist says China can hit goal to double GDP by 2020 with 5.7% annual growth.
State TV reports President Xi chaired cabinet meeting on #virus prevention. #China to implement prudent yet flexible monetary policy; roll out targeted tax, fee cuts; boost investment projects; lower loan rates to firms; push factories to resume work; vows to avoid mass layoffs.
Leaders reveal their concerns about econ damage. Online people happy about drop in cases, hope outbreak to peak soon. Others skeptical about numbers, want more evidence virus squashed. (My read: so it could take more time for people to shop, see movies, go back to normal life.)
Late last night, Reuters reported on remarks from an influential economist at a top regime-controlled think tank. Cai Fang, the vice head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, insisted in a column published in the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s main newspaper, that the impact of the virus-inspired lockdown would be a “one off”, and that China’s economy will quickly recover and meet the government’s growth goals for the year.
And don’t forget – as Reuters reminds us – this year is critical for the Communist Party to fulfill its goal of doubling GDP in the ten years to 2020. They’re just about on track, but a pullback now could ruin the whole enterprise and make them look weak. Which is why we suspect the data will be as doctored as it can reasonably be without it being immediately dismissed as unreliable.
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Update (0824ET): At this point, some of the world’s most prestigious media organizations, including WSJ and NYT, have reported that health officials are probably undercounting the number of coronavirus cases in Wuhan.
After WSJ spotlighted the issue in a story published online last night recounting how officials turned away seriously ill patients who failed to pass swabtests, the NYT followed up this morning with a piece about Beijing’s efforts to speed up testing.
Dr. Zhang Xiaochun, who works in a hospital in Wuhan, was in dismay. Her patient had been running a fever for nine days, and a CT scan showed signs of pneumonia — symptoms of the new coronavirus sweeping across the central Chinese city.
But a test to confirm the diagnosis would take at least two days. To Dr. Zhang, that meant a delay in isolating her patient — and getting potentially lifesaving treatment.
This past week, Dr. Zhang started a social media campaign with an urgent call to simplify screening for the new coronavirus. It was an unusually public effort that quickly found support among public health experts and the government as China grapples with one of the deadliest epidemics in its recent history.
“The purpose is to isolate and treat quickly,” Dr. Zhang said in a telephone interview. “It amounts to extraordinary measures taken in extraordinary times.”
To fix the issue, Chinese health officials are trying to increase the supply of nucleic acid coronavirus tests, which they believe to be more reliable than swap tests, which often don’t go deep enough into a patient’s chest to find evidence of the virus.
A major bottleneck has been a shortage of nucleic acid testing kits used to confirm the presence of the coronavirus. So Dr. Zhang proposed that doctors could first use CT scans to detect pneumonia and quickly isolate and treat patients who have it.
CT scans are convenient and can produce immediate results, Dr. Zhang said. Experts say people infected with the coronavirus would be likely to have lesions in both lungs.
Following a week of Chinese police rounding up anyone suspected to be infected and locking them away in an official quarantine, the rumors are that there are 10,000 cases in Wuhan who have been clinically diagnosed via CAT scans of their chest (as we explained earlier, swab tests being used in viral tests are notoriously unreliable), but haven’t been included in the official statistics, as twitter user @fxmacro reminds us.
Numbers have peaked but don’t be surprised to see an uptick over the next week because there are 10k clinically diagnosed via cat scans but not counted as confirmed in hubei … with another 10k still awaiting testing the rest of China is well on its way to recovery
Even the WHO has warned that we’re only seeing “the tip of the iceberg.”
It’s definitely something worth thinking about.
The number of cases and deaths hasn’t changed since Tuesday night in the US, with the number of confirmed cases around the world topping 45,000, with 44,653 of those in mainland China, according to the SCMP.
We leave you with this clip shared by reporter Jennifer Zeng of hazmat-suit-wearing workers loading bodies into a van…horrifying scenes that have become common in Wuhan.
Stock markets across the globe are back on the front foot Wednesday morning after officials in Hubei reported a lower number of confirmed cases, and a lower number of deaths, in their morning update, inspiring optimism that the “People’s War” – as President Xi put it – against Covid-19 can be won.
Interestingly enough, while the market felt satisfied that Chinese health authorities are finally getting a handle on the virus now that Beijing and Shanghai have joined the ranks of cities suffering ‘partial lockdowns’, most of the major newsflow concerning the outbreak shifted to Britain, where a ‘super spreader’ who picked up the virus in Singapore has apparently wreaked havoc on the country’s national health system, having infected at least two medical personnel.
Officials at Worthing Hospital in West Sussex confirmed late Tuesday that a member of their hospital staff was among the eight confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the UK announced earlier this week. The Worthing staff member is different from a locum doctor working in Brighton who is also among the eight confirmed cases.
Yesterday, it was reported that two prisoners at HMP Bullingdon – including one who was recently extradited from Thailand – are being tested for the virus and being held in isolation. They are both reported to be suffering flu-like symptoms.
As of Tuesday evening, a total of 1,358 people have been tested for coronavirus in the UK, of which 1,350 were confirmed negative and eight positive, the Department of Health said. But as the WSJ reminded us last night, virus tests are often inaccurate and can even rule out patients who are obviously suffering from symptoms of viral pneumonia.
The health-care worker at Worthing went on to treat “a small number” of patients over two days before he was pulled into a quarantine.
As Worthing hospital posted signs calling for patients to immediately report any mysterious flu-like symptoms, the seventh Brighton and Hove schools issued warnings to parents about the coronavirus outbreak on the south coast, prompting some to keep their children home. Two families with children at Carden Primary School have been told to isolate in place.
The Guardian also reported some details about the British man and alleged druggie who was expatriated back from Thailand and may have carried the virus with him.
The 31-year-old man’s name is Mark Rumble, was flown back to the UK on Jan. 27. He was arrested in Pattaya, Thailand, last November
In other news, CNBC conducted an interview with a couple stuck aboard the Diamond Princess, two of more than two dozen Americans stuck on board the ship. The couple said the experience of watching people get carted off the ship day to day has been “frankly terrifying”, and they questioned why authorities have been evacuating healthy people in recent days.
“They say [Feb. 19] – if we’re healthy on that date we can go. They say we’re all safest here quarantining in place. If that’s true, then why are they offloading buses of people who they don’t want to get sick? We’ve had 100 new cases since the quarantine started. This is not making sense.”
Will they ever go on another cruise? “It’ll be a while.”
“Those numbers that we hear from the captain over the loudspeaker are terrifying,” says Gay Courter, a quarantined passenger on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. “This whole thing has failed and they are using triage to prevent deaths of the most elderly.” #coronaviruspic.twitter.com/CHjokC588K
The couple added that they had found a hospital in Fla. that would take them under quarantine conditions, and aren’t sure why they need to stay here on a cruise ship moored in Japan if they haven’t tested positive for the virus.
Since being quarantined eight days ago, 136 passengers and crew aboard the ‘Diamond Princess’ have been found to have contracted the virus, making it the center of the largest outbreak outside mainland China.
In Wuhan, intensifying supply shortages of food, medicine, fuel and other critical supplies are beginning to weigh on the local population, who have been trapped in place for more than two weeks, according to an Epoch Times reporter.
A brave team of AFP reporters who have been documenting the effort to combat the virus on the frontlines of the outbreak published a sweeping report on Tuesday exposing how truly isolated Wuhan had become.
Racing fans received some disappointing news last night when it was reported that the Chinese Grand Prix is expected to be postponed because of the outbreak. The Formula-1 race was scheduled to be held in Shanghai on April 19.
In other news, Indonesia has rejected experts suspicions that health officials might be hiding instances of viral infection. In Russia, two Chinese who were found to be infected and quarantined in Siberia last month have recovered, and been released. Both had ‘mild’ forms of the virus. Russia has closed its border with China and North Korea because of the outbreak and suspended
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
– Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005
While truth-tellers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning sit inside jail cells and Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia, the American people hole up in an illusionary dwelling constructed to reduce them to children afraid of the truth. Or is it the dark?
This is not new; it has been so for a very long time, but it has become a more sophisticated haunted doll’s house, an electronic one with many bells and whistles and images that move faster than the eye can see. We now inhabit a digital technological nightmare controlled by government and corporate forces intent on dominating every aspect of people’s lives.
This is true despite the valiant efforts of dissidents to use the technology for human liberation. The old wooden doll houses, where you needed small fingers to rearrange the furniture, now only need thumbs that can click you into your cell’s fantasy world. So many dwell there in the fabricated reality otherwise known as propaganda. The result is mass hallucination.
In a 1969 interview, Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans and the only person to ever bring to trial a case involving the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, said that as a result of the CIA’s murderous coup d’état on behalf of the military-industrial-financial-media-intelligence complex that rules the country to this day, the American people have been subjected to a fabricated reality that has rendered them a nation of passive Eichmanns, who sit in their living rooms, popping pills and watching television as their country’s military machine mows down people by the millions and the announcers tell them all the things they should be afraid of, such as bacteria on cutting boards and Russian spies infiltrating their hair salons.
Garrison said:
The creation of such inanities as acceptable reality and unacceptable reality is necessary for the self-preservation of the super-state against its greatest danger: understanding on the part of the people as to what is really happening.
All factors which contribute to its burgeoning power are exaggerated.
All factors which might reveal its corrosive effect on the nation are concealed.
The result is to place the populace in the position of persons living in a house whose windows no longer reveal the outside but on which murals have been painted.
Some of the murals are frightening and have the effect of reminding the occupants of the outside menaces against which the paternal war machine is protecting them. Other murals are pleasant to remind them how nice things are inside the house.
But to live like this is to live in a doll’s house. If life has one lesson to teach us, it is that to live in illusion is ultimately disastrous.
In the doll’s house into which America gradually has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.
Fifty years have disappeared behind us since the eloquent and courageous Garrison (read On the Trail of the Assassins) metaphorically voiced the truth, despite the CIA’s persistent efforts to paint him as an unhinged lunatic through its media mouthpieces.
These days they would probably just lock him up or send him fleeing across borders, as with Assange, Manning, and Snowden.
It is stunning to take a cue from his comment regarding the JFK assassination, when he suggested that one reverse the lone assassin scenario and place it in the U.S.S.R.
No American could possibly believe a tale that a former Russian soldier, trained in English and having served at a top Soviet secret military base, who had defected to the U.S. and then returned home with the help of the K.G.B., could kill the Russian Premier with a defective and shoddy rifle and then be shot to death in police headquarters in Moscow by a K.G.B. connected hit man so there would be no trial and the K.G.B. would go scot-free.
That would be a howler! So too, of course, are the Warren Commission’s fictions about Oswald.
SNOWDEN, ASSANGE, AND MANNING
If we then update this mental exercise and imagine that Snowden, Assange, and Manning were all Russian, and that they released information about Russian war crimes, political corruption, and a system of total electronic surveillance of the Russian population, and were then jailed or sent fleeing into exile as a result, who in the U.S., liberal, libertarian or conservative, would possibly believe the Russian government’s accusations that these three were criminals.
Nevertheless, Barack Obama, the transparency president, made sure to treat them as such, all the while parading as a “liberal” concerned for freedom of speech and the First Amendment. He made sure that Snowden and Manning were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, and that Assange was corralled via false Swedish sex charges so he had to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (a form of jail).
He brought Espionage Act prosecutions against eight people, more than all former presidents combined. He hypocritically pardoned Manning on his way out the door as if this would polish his deluded liberal legacy after making her suffer terribly through seven years of imprisonment.
He set the stage for Trump to re-jail Manning to try to get this most courageous woman to testify against Assange, which she will not do, and for the collaborationist British government to jail Assange in preparation for his extradition to the United States and a show trial. As for Snowden, he has been relegated to invisibility, good for news headlines once and for a movie, but now gone and forgotten.
Obama and Trump, arch political “enemies,” have made sure that those who reveal the sordid acts of the American murderous state are cruelly punished and silenced.
This is how the system works, and for most Americans, it is not happening. It doesn’t matter. They don’t care, just as they don’t care that Obama backed the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras that has resulted in so many deaths at the hands of U.S trained killers, and then Trump ranted about all these “non-white” people fleeing to the U.S. to escape a hell created by the U.S., as it has been doing throughout Latin America for so long.
Who does care about the truth? Has anyone even noticed how the corporate media has disappeared the “news” of all those desperate people clamouring to enter the U.S.A. from Mexico? One day they were there and in the headlines; the next day, gone. It’s called news.
THE SLEEPWALKERS
But even though a majority of Americans have never believed the government’s explanation for JFK’s murder, they nevertheless have insouciantly gone to sleep for half a century in the doll’s house of illusions as the killing and the lies of their own government have increased over the years and any semblance of a democratic and peaceful America has gone extinct.
The fates of courageous whistle-blowers Assange, Manning, and Snowden don’t concern them. The fates of Hondurans don’t concern them. The fates of Syrians don’t concern them. The fates of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Palestinians don’t concern them. The fates of America’s victims all around the world don’t concern them. Indifference reigns.
Obviously, if you are reading this, you are not one of the sleepwalkers and are awake to the parade of endless lies and illusions and do care. But you are in a minority.
That is not the case for most Americans. When approximately 129 million people cast their votes for Donald Trump and HilIary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, you know idiocy reigns and nothing has been learned. Ditto for the votes for Obama, Bush, Clinton, et al. You can keep counting back. It is an ugly fact and sad to say.
Such a repetition compulsion is a sign of a deep sickness, and it will no doubt be repeated in the 2020 election. The systemic illusion must be preserved at all costs and the warfare state supported in its killing. It is the American way.
It is true that average Americans have not built the doll’s house; that is the handiwork of the vast interconnected and far-reaching propaganda arms of the U.S. government and their media accomplices. But that does not render them innocent for accepting decades of fabricated reality for so-called peace of mind by believing that a totally corrupt system works.
The will to believe is very powerful, as is the propaganda.
The lesson that Garrison spoke of has been lost on far too many people, even on those who occasionally leave the doll house for a walk, but who only go slightly down the path for fear of seeing too much reality and connecting too many dots. There is plain ignorance, then there is culpable ignorance, to which I shall return.
DENYING EXISTENTIAL FREEDOM
One of the first things an authoritarian governing elite must do is to convince people that they are not free. This has been going on for at least forty years, ever since the Church Committee’s revelations about the CIA in the mid-seventies, including its mind-control program, MKULTRA. Everyone was appalled at the epiphany, so a different tactic was added.
Say those programs have been ended when in fact they were continued under other even deeper secret programs, and just have “experts” – social, psychological, and biological “scientists” – repeat ad infinitum that there is no longer any mind control since we now know there is no mind; it is an illusion, and it all comes down to the brain.
Biology is destiny, except in culturally diversionary ways in which freedom to choose is extolled – e.g. the latest fashions, gender identity, the best hairstyle, etc. Create and lavishly fund programs for the study of the brain, while supporting and promoting a vast expansion of pharmaceutical drugs to control people.
Do this in the name of helping people with their emotional and behavioral problems that are rooted in their biology and are beyond their control. And create criteria to convince people that they are sick and that their distress has nothing to do with the coup d’état that has rendered them “citizens” of a police state.
We have been interminably told that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). How convenient! George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump — what a difference! But this is science and the welfare of the world. Science for idiots.
Drip by drip, here and there, in the pattern of the best propaganda, as the French sociologist Jacques Ellul says – “for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates conviction and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition” – articles, books, media reports have reiterated that people are “determined” by biological, genetic, social, and psychological forces over which they have no control.
To assert that people are free in the Sartrean sense (en soir, condemned to freedom, or free will) has come to be seen as the belief of a delusional fool living in the past, a bad philosopher, an anti-scientist, a poorly informed religionist, one nostalgic for existential cafes, Gauloises, and black berets.
One who doesn’t grasp the truth since he doesn’t read the New York Times or watch CBS television. One who believes in nutty conspiracy theories.
The conventional propaganda – I almost said wisdom – created through decades-long media and academic repetition, is that we are not free.
Let me repeat: we are not free. We are not free.
Investigator reporter John Rappoport has consistently exposed the propaganda involved in the creation and expansion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) with its pseudo-scientific falsehoods and collusion between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry. As he correctly notes, the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control program has morphed into modern psychiatry, both with the same objectives of disabling and controlling people by convincing them that they are not free and are in need of a chemical brain bath.
RFK assassin, RFK assassin, RFK assassin … all the media said the same thing, which they have been doing for fifty-two years. Their persistency endures despite all the facts that refute their disinformation and show that Senator Kennedy, who was on his way to becoming president, was murdered, like his brother John, by forces of the national security state.
SARTRE AND BAD FAITH
Lying and dissembling are ubiquitous. Being deceived by the media liars is mirrored in people’s personal lives.
People lie and want to be deceived. They choose to play dumb, to avoid a confrontation with truth. They want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked. They want to tuck themselves into a safe social and cultural framework where they imagine they will be safe. They like the doll’s house. They choose to live in what Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi).
In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. But with this ‘lie’ to myself, the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.
Such bad faith allows people to fabricate a second act of bad faith: that they are not responsible for their ignorance of the truths behind the government’s and corporate media’s lies and propaganda, even as the shades of the prison house ominously close around us and the world edges toward global death that could arrive in an instant with nuclear war or limp along for years of increasing suffering.
Those of us who write about the U.S. led demented wars and provocations around the world and the complementary death of democracy at home are constantly flabbergasted and discouraged by the willed ignorance of so many Americans.
For while the mainstream media does the bidding of the power elite, there is ample alternative news and analyses available on the internet from fine journalists and writers committed to truth, not propaganda. There is actually far too much truth available, which poses another problem.
But it doesn’t take a genius to learn how to research important issues and to learn how to distinguish between bogus and genuine information. It takes a bit of effort, and, more importantly, the desire to compare multiple, opposing viewpoints and untangle the webs the Web weaves.
We are awash in information (and disinformation) and both good and bad reporting, but it is still available to the caring inquirer.
The problem is the will to know. But why? Why the refusal to investigate and question; why the indifference? Stupidity? Okay, there is that. Ignorance? That too. Willful ignorance, ditto. Laziness, indeed. Careerism and ideology? For certain.
Upton Sinclair put it mildly when he said,“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.” Difficult? No, it’s almost impossible.
But then there are many very intelligent people who have nothing to lose and yet adamantly refuse to entertain alternative possibilities to the reigning orthodoxies that have them in their grip.
As do many others, I know many such people who will yes me to death and then never fully research issues. They will remain in limbo or else wink to themselves that what may be true couldn’t be true. They close down.
This is a great dilemma and frustration faced by those who seek to convince people to take an active part in understanding what is really going on in the world today, especially as the United States wages war across the globe, threatens Russia, China, and Iran, among many others, and expands and modernizes its nuclear weapons capabilities.
As for Assange, Manning, and Snowden, their plight matters not a whit.
In fact, they have been rendered invisible inside the doll’s house, except as the murals on the windows flashback their images as threats to the occupants, Russian monsters out to eat them up.
As the great poet Constantine Cavafy wrote long ago in his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” and they never come: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.”
Then again, for people like U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, who knows the Russian barbarians have and will come again, life must be terrifying as he tries so manfully to bar the gates. The Russians have been the American solution in this fairy tale for so long that it’s hard for many Americans to believe another story.
THE TWO-HEADED MONSTER
On the one hand, there is the massive propaganda apparatus operated by American intelligence agencies in conjunction with their media partners.
On the other, there is the human predilection for untruth and illusions, the sad need to be comforted and to submit to greater “authority,” gratefully to accept the myths proffered by one’s masters. This tendency applies not just to the common people, but even more so to the intellectual classes, who act as though they are immune.
Erich Fromm, writing about Germans and Hitler, but by extension people everywhere, termed this the need to “escape from freedom,” since freedom conjures up fears of vertiginous aloneness and the need to decide, which in turn evokes the fear of death. There are also many kinds of little deaths that precede the final one: social, career, money, familiar, etc., that are used to keep people in the doll’s house.
Fifty years ago, the CIA coined the term “conspiracy theory” as a weapon to be used to dismiss the truths expressed by critics of its murder of President Kennedy, and those of Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK. All the media echoed the CIA line.
While they still use the term to dismiss and denounce, their control of the mainstream media is so complete today that every evil government action is immediately seconded, whether it be the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, etc., the coups disguised as color revolutions in Ukraine, Venezuela, Bolivia, Hong Kong, the downing of the Malaysian jetliner there, drone murders, the Iranian “threat,” the looting of the American people by the elites, alleged sarin gas attacks in Syria, the anti-Russia bashing and the Russia-gate farce, the “criminals” Assange, Manning, Snowden – everything.
The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Fox News, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc. – all are stenographers for the deep state.
So much of the ongoing propaganda travels under the banner of “the war on terror,” which is, of course, an outgrowth of the attacks of September 11, 2001, appropriately named and constantly reinforced as 9/11 in a wonderful example of linguistic mind-control: a constant emergency reminder to engender anxiety, depression, panic, and confusion, four of the symptoms that lead the DSM “experts” and their followers to diagnose and drug individuals.
The term 9/11 was first used in the New York Times on September 12, 2001 by Bill Keller, the future Times’ editor and Iraq war cheerleader. Just a fortuitous coincidence, of course.
JACQUES ELLUL ON PROPAGANDA
Jacques Ellul has argued convincingly that modern propaganda in a technological mass society is more complicated than the state and media lying and deceiving the population.
He argues that propaganda meets certain needs of modern people and therefore the process of deceit is reciprocal. The modern person feels lost, powerless, and empty.
Ellul says, “He realizes that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair.” But he can’t live in despair; desires that life be meaningful; and wants to feel he lives in a world that makes sense.
He wants to participate and have opinions that suggest he grasps the flow of events. He doesn’t so much want information, but value judgments and preconceived positions that provide him with a framework for living. Ellul wrote the following in 1965 in his classic book Propaganda:
The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: this gives them the feeling of participation. For they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a ‘key’ that will permit them to take a position, and even readymade opinions….The man who keeps himself informed needs a framework….the more complicated the problems are, the more simple the explanations must be; the more fragmented the canvas, the simpler the pattern; the more difficult the question, the more all-embracing the solution; the more menacing the reduction of his own worth, the greater the need for boosting his ego. All this propaganda – and only propaganda – can give him.
Another way of saying this is that people want to be provided with myths to direct them to the “truth.” But such so-called truth has been preconceived within the overarching myth provided by propaganda, and while it satisfies people’s emotional need for coherence, it also allows them to think of themselves as free individuals arriving at their own conclusions, which is a basic function of good propaganda.
In today’s mass technological society, it is essential that people be convinced that they are free-thinking individuals acting in good faith. Then they can feel good about themselves as they lie and act in bad faith.
CULPABLE IGNORANCE
It is widely accepted that political leaders and the mass media lie and dissemble regularly, which, of course, they do. That is their job in an oligarchy. Today we are subjected to almost total, unrelenting media and government propaganda.
Depending on their political leanings, people direct their anger toward politicians of parties they oppose and media they believe slant their coverage to favor the opposition.
Trump is a liar. No, Obama is a liar. And Hillary Clinton. No, Fox News. Ridiculous! – it’s CNN or NBC.
And so on and so forth in this theater of the absurd that plays out within a megaplex of mainstream media propaganda, where there are many shows but one producer, whose overall aim is to engineer the consent of all who enter, while setting the different audiences against each other. It is a very successful charade that evokes name-calling from all quarters.
In other words, for many people their opponents lie, as do other people, but not them. This is as true in personal as well as public life. Here the personal and the political converge, despite protestations to the contrary. Dedication to truth is very rare.
But there is another issue with propaganda that complicates the picture further. People of varying political persuasions can agree that propaganda is widespread. Many people on the left, and some on the right, would agree with Lisa Pease’s statement in her book on the RFK assassination, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, that “the way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time.”
That is also what Garrison thought when he spoke of the doll’s house.
If that is so, then today’s propaganda is anchored in the events of the 1960s, specifically the infamous government assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK, the truth of which the CIA has worked so hard to conceal. In the fifty or so years since, a vast amount of new information has made it explicitly clear that these murders were carried out by elements within the U.S. government, and were done so to silence the voices of four charismatic leaders who were opposed to the American war machine and the continuation of the Cold War.
To turn away from this truth and to ignore its implications can only be described as an act of bad faith and culpable ignorance, or worse. But that is exactly what many prominent leftists have done. Then to compound the problem, they have done the same with the attacks of September 11, 2001.
One cannot help thinking of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called these people in the 1950s: “the compatible left.” He felt that effective CIA propaganda, beside the need for fascist-minded types such as Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton, depended on “courting” leftists and liberal into its orbit. For so many of the compatible left, those making a lot of money posing as opponents of the ruling elites but often taking the money of the super-rich, the JFK assassination and the truth of September 11, 2001 are inconsequential, never to be broached, as if they never happened, except as the authorities say they did. By ignoring these most in-your-face events with their eyes wide shut, a coterie of influential leftists has done the work of Orwell’s crime-stop and has effectively succeeded in situating current events in an ahistorical and therefore misleading context that abets U.S. propaganda. They truncate the full story to present a narrative that distorts the truth.
Without drawing a bold line connecting the dots from November 22, 1963 up to the present, a critique of the murderous forces ruling the United States is impossible.
Among the most notable of such failures are Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Howard Zinn, and Chris Hedges, men idolized by many liberals and leftists. And there are many others who have been deeply influenced by Chomsky, Cockburn, and Zinn and follow in their footsteps.
Their motivations remain a mystery, but there is no doubt their refusals have contributed to the increased power of those who control the doll’s house. To know better and do as they have is surely culpable ignorance.
FROM BAD TO WORSE
Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites?
The answer is obvious.
It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter.
The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why. All the while the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful with the growth of electronic media and cell phone usage.
The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population.
This fragmentation of consciousness prevents people from grasping the present from within because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data.
Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other. The latter, whose bibles are the New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, Democracy Now, The Guardian, etc. – can only see propaganda when they can attribute it to Trump or the Russians. The former see everything as a liberal conspiracy to take down Trump.
The liberals have embraced a new McCarthyism and allied themselves with the deep-state forces that they were once allegedly appalled by, including Republicans. Their embrace of the formerly despised war-monger John Bolton in the impeachment trial of Trump is a laughable case in point, if it weren’t so depraved and slimy.
It surely isn’t the bloodthirsty policies of the Trump administration or his bloviating personality, for these liberals allied themselves with Obama’s anti-Russian rhetoric, his support for the U.S. orchestrated neo-fascist Ukrainian coup, his destruction of Libya, his wars of aggression across the Middle East, his war on terror, his trillion-dollar nuclear weapons modernization, his enjoyment of drone killing, his support for the coup in Honduras, his embrace of the CIA and his CIA Director John Brennan, his prosecution of whistle-blowers, etc.
The same media that served the CIA so admirably over the decades became the liberals’ paragons of truth. It’s enough to make your head spin, which is the point.
Spin left, spin right, spin all around, because we have possessed your mind in this spectacular image game where seeming antinomies are the constancy of the same through difference, all the presidents coined by the same manufacturer who knows that coin-flipping serves to entertain the audience eager for hope and change.
This is how the political system works to prevent change. It is why little has changed for the better over half a century and the American empire has expanded.
While it may be true that there are signs that this American hegemony is coming to an end (I am not convinced), I would not underestimate the power of the U.S. propaganda apparatus to keep people docile and deluded in the doll’s house, despite the valiant efforts of independent truth-tellers.
How, for example, is it possible for so many people to see such a stark difference between the despicable Trump and the pleasant Obama? They are both puppets dancing to their masters’ tunes – the same masters.
As Glen Ford, of Black Agenda Report, says in the first sentence of his forward, “Barack Obama may go down in presidential history as the most effective-and deceptive-imperialist of them all.” Read the book if you want all the details. They form an overwhelming indictment of the con artist and war criminal that is irrefutable.
But will those who worship at the altar of Barack Obama read it? Of course not.
Just as those deluded ones who voted for the reality television flim-flam man Trump will ignore all the accumulating evidence that they’ve been had and are living under a president who is Obama’s disguised doppelganger, carrying out the orders of his national security state bosses. This, too, is well documented, and no doubt another writer will arise in the years to come to put it between a book’s covers.
Yet even Jeremy Kuzmarov fails to see the link between the JFK assassination and Obama’s shilling for the warfare state. His few references to Kennedy are all negative, suggesting he either is unaware of what Kennedy was doing in the last year of his life and why he was murdered by the CIA, or something else. He seems to follow Noam Chomsky, a Kennedy hater, in this regard.
I point out this slight flaw in an excellent book because it is symptomatic of certain people on the left who refuse to complete the circle.
If, as Kuzmarov, argues, Obama was CIA from the start and that explains his extraordinarily close relationship with the CIA’s John Brennan, an architect, among many things, of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, and that Obama told CIA Director Panetta that the CIA would “get everything it wanted,” and the CIA killed JFK, well, something’s amiss, an enormous gap in the analysis of our current condition.
The doll’s house is a mind game of extraordinary proportions, orchestrated by the perverted power elites that run the show and ably abetted by their partners in the corporate mass media, even some in the alternative press who mean well but are confused, or are disinformation agents in the business of sowing confusion together with their mainstream Operation Mockingbird partners. It is a spectacle of open secrecy, in which the CIA has effectively suckered everyone into a game of to-and-fro in which only they win.
Our only hope for change is to try and educate as many people as possible about the linkages between events that started with the CIA coup d’état in Dallas on November 22, 1963, continued through the killings of Malcolm X, MLK, RFK and on through so much else up to September 11, 2001, and have brought us to the deeply depressing situation we now find ourselves in where truthtellers like Julian Assange, Chelsey Manning, and Edward Snowden are criminalized, while the real perpetrators of terrible evils roam free.
Yes, we must educate but also agitate for the release of this courageous trio. Their freedom is ours; their imprisonment is ours, whether we know it or not. The walls are closing in.
Lisa Pease is so right: “The way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time, and too few recognize this. We can’t fix a problem we can’t even acknowledge exists.”
If we don’t follow her advice, we will be toyed with like dolls for a long time to come. There will be no one else to blame.
Meanwhile In Brazil… Scientists Discover ‘Puzzling’ Virus Of Unknown Origins Without Recognizable Genes
The findings of a new virus by Brazilian researchers have ‘puzzled’ the scientific community, consisting of unrecognizable genes, a new study revealed, published in bioRxiv.
The “mysterious” virus was discovered in amoebas in an artificial lake in Brazil has been considered the world’s smallest lifeforms, because none can survive and reproduce without a host, some scientists have questioned whether they should even be considered living creatures.
Researcher, Jônatas Abrahão, a virologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, called the new virus “yaravirus,” a character from Brazilian mythology that means “mother of all waters.”
When Abrahão and his team sequenced the new virus genome, they discovered that 90% of the DNA sequence was from unknown origins.
Elodie Ghedin of New York University, who sequences viruses in sewage, said the finding of yaravirus isn’t surprising.
Ghedin said 95% of viruses in sewage have “no matches to reference genomes [in databases],” adding that, in Abrahão’s case, new viruses are found all the time.
Researchers were unclear about the impact of the new virus on human health. Future tests could include making those connections. The approach “is an important tool to learn the distribution of hundreds or thousands of viral genomes,” Abrahão said.
Curtis Suttle, an environmental virologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, said that some viruses that are found within humans keep us healthy, and others are essential for keeping ecosystems humming smoothly. “We could not survive without [them],” Suttle said. “There are enormous benefits to the discovery and characterization of viruses.”
The recent finding by Abrahão and his team shows just how much modern science lacks in their characterization of viruses found on Earth.
This is currently the case in Nigeria, where the government has warned about a “strange epidemic” of a mystery virus that has claimed the life of 15 people in less than one week.
The outbreak of coronavirus in China and across the world has also shown just how underprepared governments and the scientific community are to emerging infectious diseases.
The ACLU has released an important white paper on airport facial recognition by ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley. Citing some of our previous reporting and analysis, the ACLU white paper focuses, appropriately, not so much on the details of current use of facial recognition at airports, but on where governments and the aviation industry — who share a an explicitly-recognized interest in common use of facial recognition — say it will lead if we don’t stop them.
TSA Biometrics Roadmap, September 2018. Note that face ID will be used for all air travelers and that all use of physical ID credentials is “phasing out” in favor of facial recognition and digital tokens on mobile devices.
Driving the dystopian trend called out in the ACLU white paper is the malign convergence of interest between governments that want to use facial recognition and other techniques of compelled and automated identification for surveillance and control of travelers’ movements, and airlines, airports, and other businesses that want to share use of the same identification systems and data for business process automation and commercial tracking and profiling of travel customers.
CBP officials argue that this program doesn’t involve mass surveillance. But CBP’s program still involves the mass collection of photographs of the general public….
The biggest harm from this program, however, is likely to come from the investment that it represents, the precedent it sets, and the path it puts us on as a society.
And where that path leads is a nightmare. It hardly takes a paranoid flight of fancy to foresee this program morphing into something far more comprehensive and dystopian — a world where face recognition is used throughout our public spaces to scrutinize our identity, record our movements, and create a world where everyone is constantly watched….
DHS and the aviation industry as a whole have a sweeping vision of expanded use of face recognition in the air travel context, and the government itself has already laid out — and begun following — a very specific, clear, and well-defined pathway for how the current program leads to a much broader implementations of face surveillance at the airport. And from there, it will be poised to expand far beyond the airport.
Here is what that pathway looks like:…
Once face recognition becomes entrenched at TSA checkpoints, there will be enormous pressure to turn those checkpoints into broader law enforcement checkpoints where people are subject to watchlist, criminal, and immigration checks. The TSA is not a law enforcement agency, and its checkpoints are not general law enforcement stops. The TSA’s authority to search people without a warrant is strictly confined to what is necessary to protect aircraft safety; TSA agents can’t conduct general criminal investigations when they find things suspicious….
CBP, however, does consider itself a law enforcement agency. The agency already partners with TSA in creating and applying flawed watch lists and algorithmic risk assessments of passengers based on biographical data (and secretive criteria), but CBP said in 2018 that it planned to also start running some passenger photos through the government’s IDENT biometric watchlist, which, according to DHS, includes “known or suspected terrorists, criminals, and immigration violators.” Among other things that raises the prospect that the TSA checkpoints will be turned into something new: a place where arrests of wanted people… routinely takes place….
Expanding government face recognition dovetails with airline face recognition… The airlines have a crucial role in the government’s face recognition vision. CBP is trying to create an infrastructure that the United States (unlike some other countries) has never had: border checkpoints for those exiting the country. But supporters of this system apparently don’t want it badly enough to actually pay for the government system they think we should have. Instead, they’re trying to do it on the cheap … by prodding the airlines to supply the equipment and manpower to actually run the system. And that, in turn, is implicitly based on CBP’s understanding that the airlines are embracing biometrics for their own purposes.
And the airlines are certainly interested in doing so. With over 2 million people a day flying domestically, these companies run what is essentially a giant factory for the movement of people, and are always looking for ways to improve their “industrial process.” Delta Airlines, for example, is already cooperating with CBP to experiment with face recognition for self-service check-in and bag check. Flyers presents themselves at the relevant kiosk where their photos are taken and sent to CBP’s cloud photo service. “CBP is excited at the possibility of biometric matching from curb to gate,” the agency proclaims in materials directed at its airline “partners.” “Airlines and airport authorities have an extraordinary opportunity to influence the future of secure air travel by co-developing processes that meet business, traveler and security needs.”
We’ve been down this road before. The TSA’s “Secure Flight” program, first implemented in 2009, forces passengers to hand over personal data to the airlines (their full name, gender, and date of birth) but lets the airlines do whatever they want with that information, providing a valuable data windfall for those companies. One question is whether we’ll see the same thing happen with traveler mug shots. CBP currently says the airlines won’t be permitted to keep the photographs those airlines take with their own equipment, but not that’s written in any law or regulation and it’s far from clear if and how that will be rigorously enforced….
Airport bag searches were new in American life when they were first introduced in response to a wave of hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, they have expanded throughout American life to many office buildings, schools, museums, sports stadiums, and even some gatherings in public spaces such as fireworks on the National Mall. Unfortunately there are too many reasons to think that face recognition, if it becomes accepted at airports, will follow this existing path toward the “airportization of American life.”
CBP’s TVS program is the first government face recognition checkpoint in American history. If America decides to allow its deployment to continue, where will things go from there? We don’t have to wonder because the government has already told us much of the story. This kind of mission creep is one reason why it is important to raise awareness over, ask sharp questions about, and ultimately oppose the CBP program
Massive Auto Inventory Begins To Stockpile As Coronavirus Zaps An Already Anemic Chinese Car Market
Things couldn’t possibly be looking any worse for the Chinese auto industry.
Even before the coronavirus scare, the industry had already been mired in a steep recession that we have been covering at length for nearly the last two years. To make matters worse, that recession was predicted to continue for a third straight year, through 2020, with sales forecasted to fall yet again. And this was before the coronavirus…
Now, with the entire country locked down due to the coronavirus, things look as though they could be much worse for China’s auto industry. And that, in turn, could very easily pull down the auto industry globally.
Last month, inventory of unsold cars in China rose by 6.5%, according to Bloomberg. Average inventory levels were at 62.7% for January, according to the China Automobile Dealer Association. These numbers are far above the standard 50% level that is considered normal in the industry.
And the forecast for the immediate future, let alone the rest of the year, looks pessimistic. Dealers are expecting sales in February to be less than half of those a year ago. In fact, Bloomberg notes that 70% of dealers polled by the CADA said they had seen “almost no customers” since the end of January.
This follows China’s Miao Wei, Minister of Industry and Information Technology, saying in mid-January (prior to the coronavirus outbreak becoming severe) that the industry still faces “big downward pressure”.
At the time, he predicted sales of just 25 million units for the year. We obviously think that this number could wind up being materially lower.
Recall, sales for 2019 totaled 25.769 million units. Sales of just 25 million units – an optimistic prediction in our eyes – would mark a third straight year of declines for the world’s largest auto market regardless.
The MIIT also said at the time that it would further study and review its NEV vehicle subsidies. Recall, Beijing backing away from these subsidies caused NEV sales to taper off toward the end of 2019, sullying what was an otherwise consistent silver lining for the country, even amidst the overall recession in autos.
With no signs of the country recovering from its ongoing epidemic, there doesn’t seem to be any silver linings left.
We noted in December that NEV sales plunged 42% in November after Beijing backed away. The government is ostensibly dedicating all of its efforts to deal with the country’s ongoing outbreak, and so Beijing has not revisited its comments about EVs yet, and we are already halfway through Q1 2020.
China did say, however, it is going to “maintain support” for NEVs, without getting into too much detail. Miao also said he’s confident that the country will ensure “stable industrial production in 2020” while phasing out “zombie firms”.
There may have been some spooky foreshadowing in those words from mid-January, as almost every business in the locked down major cities of China now looks like a “zombie firm”.
As we noted several weeks ago, passenger car vehicle sales in China fell to end 2019, plunging 3.6% to 2.17 million units, according to the China Passenger Car Association.
It marked the 18th drop in the past 19 months for the country. For the full year 2019, sales in China declined 7.5%, marking the country’s second straight annual decline.
“We cannot risk dividing Americans’ future further, saying that you must either be for a revolution or you must be for the status quo,” Buttigieg said.
“Let’s make room for everybody in this movement.”
This is a talking point that the tightly scripted and focus group-tested Buttigieg has been repeatedlyregurgitatingall month, so it’s worth taking a look at.
Pete is just the latest model in a long line of CIA-funded counterrevolutions pic.twitter.com/PBAbIIzoxP
Claiming that it isn’t necessary to choose between revolution and the status quo is claiming that you can change the status quo without any kind of revolution. You are saying that the establishment which has created and reinforced the status quo can now suddenly, for some strange and mysterious reason, be counted upon to change it. That the status quo will change the status quo.
Anyone who has paid attention to US politics for more than a few years already knows that this is objectively false. From administration to administration, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office or who controls the House or the Senate, the status quo has been adamantly enforced along a rigid trajectory toward ever-increasing military expansionism, exploitative neoliberal economic policies, income and wealth inequality, police militarization, mass-scale imprisonment, Orwellian surveillance programs and increasing restrictions on journalism and free speech.
Change is not going to come from those institutions, it’s going to come from the people using the power of their numbers to force important changes that those institutions do not want to make. And Pete Buttigieg knows this. And so do the spooks and oligarchs who are backing him.
Progressives already got suckered into forfeiting their revolutionary spirit in exchange for flowery prose and empty rhetoric the last time they elected Pete Buttigieg for president, back when Pete Buttigieg was named Barack Obama. It was literally the exact same script they’re trying to recycle with Puppet Pete: a plucky young underdog with a knack for sparkly verbiage overcomes the frontrunner in Iowa in a stunning upset, then rides the momentum from that initial victory on to the Democratic nomination.
That’s what not choosing between revolution and the status quo looks like. It looks like continuing the status quo.
Which is why it’s so dumb when Buttigieg says “Let’s make room for everybody in this movement.” Movement? What movement? You don’t get to call it a “movement” when its entire agenda is to prevent any movement. Use a different word. “Let’s make room for everybody in this inertia,” or “Let’s make room for everybody in this stasis” or something.
Things that are more real than Pete Buttigieg:
– Milli Vanilli
– aspartame
– astroturf
– boobs in LA
– smiles at a Martha’s Vineyard cocktail party
– the Gulf of Tonkin incident
– Bryan Williams’ helicopter crash
– Joy Reid’s time travelling hackers
– Epstein’s suicide
As I’ve said many times before, I’m interested in this presidential election not because I am under the delusion that presidential elections tend to change things, but because the attempts to manipulate it, and the public’s response to those manipulations, could shake something loose that actually might. If enough people in the world’s most powerful nation wake up to the fact that they don’t have the kind of political system they were taught about in school, if they realize that everything they’ve been told about how their government operates is a lie, if they realize their lives have been made so unnecessarily difficult by a ruling oligarchic class with a vested interest in keeping them impoverished and distracted, well, then we’re looking at an actual transformative force.
Then we’re looking at the possibility of a real revolution. Not a violent revolution; those always result in a continuation of the same ills under a different system, and there’s nothing revolutionary about that.
I’m talking about a real revolution. One where people begin to open their eyes to the reality that their entire understanding of what’s going on in the world has been the result of mass psychological manipulation throughout their entire lives at the hands of the school system, the billionaire-controlled news media, and the political establishment. One where people open their eyes so wide to the power of narrative control that they become impossible to propagandize. One where people begin weaving their own narratives. Their own understandings of the world. Built not for the benefit of the powerful, but for the benefit of the people.
We’re seeing a lot of movement already in 2020, and it’s just getting started. I see the potential for a lot of light to reach a lot of new areas between the cracks which open up in that movement. And I see the guardians of the status quo having a harder and harder time maintaining the state of stasis. Their increasingly ham-fisted manipulations, such as installing a jarringly phony puppet like Pete Buttigieg, say a lot about their desperation.
Find ways of forcing them to overextend themselves and overplay their hand. Let’s show everyone what they’re hiding behind the puppet theater.
The virus that has spread through much of China has yet to be confirmed in Africa, but global health authorities are increasingly worried about the threat to the continent where an estimated 1 million Chinese now live, as some health workers on the ground warn they are not ready to handle an outbreak.
As we detailed previously, if travel bans to and from the infected parts of China turn out to have been justified then one country in particular may be worth watching, Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s Bole International airport is the main African gateway to and from China. On average 1500 passengers per day arrive from China every day. Ethiopia scans them all for symptoms which essentially means taking their temperature.
Many of those passengers then fly on to other parts of Africa where Chinese companies are doing business. These are 2018 figures courtesy of Brookings.
Unfortunately, as AP reports, it does not appear so… at least yet. Countries are racing to take precautions as hundreds of travelers arrive from China every day. Safeguards include stronger surveillance at ports of entry and improved quarantine and testing measures across Africa, home to 1.2 billion people and some of the world’s weakest systems for detecting and treating disease.
But the effort has been complicated by a critical shortage of testing kits and numerous illnesses that display symptoms similar to the flu-like virus.
“The problem is, even if it’s mild, it can paralyze the whole community,” said Dr. Michel Yao, emergency operations manager in Africa for the World Health Organization.
Those growing worried include employees at the Sino-Zambia Friendship Hospital in the mining city of Kitwe in northern Zambia, near the Congo border. Chinese companies operate mines on the outskirts of the city of more than half a million people. One company is headquartered in Wuhan, the city at the center of the virus outbreak. Hundreds of workers traveled between Zambia and China in recent weeks.
“We’re definitely not prepared. If we had a couple of cases, it would spread very quickly,” physiotherapist Fundi Sinkala said.
“We’re doing the best we can with what resources we have.”
The Sino-Zambia Friendship Hospital, or Sinozam, a low-slung facility near the city’s train station, has taken some precautions, including checking patient temperatures with infrared thermometers and establishing isolation areas.
Without testing, officials are “just relying on the symptoms” and whether they persist.
“But from what we are learning right now, some people show hardly any symptoms at all,” physiotherapist Fundi Sinkala said, calling that the hospital’s biggest worry.
Chinese embassies in Zambia and elsewhere in Africa have been unusually outspoken, giving news conferences and television interviews to discuss their response to the outbreak. Embassies require arriving Chinese citizens to declare where they have been in China. They also urge citizens to voluntarily isolate themselves for 14 days.
“We are now practicing hygiene, even in the mines,” said the Kitwe-based president of the Mine Workers Union of Zambia, Joseph Chewe.
“Any report of a person with coronavirus here will be very disastrous.”
The WHO says countries are obligated to inform it of any confirmed cases and are requested to report suspected cases as well. The WHO chief has publicly urged countries to share information. So far, African countries appear to be complying, a WHO adviser on health security, Dr. Ambrose Talisuna, told reporters.
A TV show in South Korea reunited a mother with her deceased 7-year-old daughter via a virtual reality recreation in what some observers thought was a dystopian and exploitative move.
A clip from the show Meeting You features the mother, wearing a VR headset and touch-sensitive gloves, walking around a green screen set and interacting with a 3D representation of her daughter.
The two are able to engage in a limited form of conversation as the mother caresses the representation of her daughter while crying.
The situation is similar in some ways to a plot from the popular dystopian TV series Black Mirror.
In an episode entitled Be Right Back, a young woman’s boyfriend is killed in a car accident and she decides to replace him with an android clone by having her boyfriend’s AI personality downloaded into the robot’s body.
While this woman’s VR interaction with a graphical representation of her dead daughter is a long way off that, it’s almost as creepy.
As Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett points out, no one would have an issue with it if the interaction helped the mother get over her grief, but the fact that the whole thing is being broadcast for the consumption of TV viewers makes it somewhat suspect.
“Having some code pretend to be a living thing that she loved might only add to the trauma. Only time, and research, will tell,” comments Plunkett, adding, “Whatever the long-term moral and ethical questions are that we’re going to have to face, this is extremely fucked up.”
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China’s Smartphone Sales And Production To Crater Amid Supply Chain Shock
One major threat to the recovery in global growth this year is the coronavirus outbreak that is centered around Greater China.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has now labeled the deadly virus a global health emergency as more than 902 people have died, surpassing all of SARS (813) in just three weeks.
Global confirmed cases hit 40,544 in China and 382 offshore on Sunday. The WHO Director-General warned: “we may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to the outbreak.
The virus poses a significant economic risk to the Chinese economy amid 400 million people quarantined, dozens of cities on lockdown, shuttered manufacturing hubs, and a collapse in retail and tourism. We’ve also noted that complex supply chains in and out of China have been severed, which will lead to an economic shock felt around the world in the coming weeks and or months.
One significant disruption that is becoming all too obvious at the moment, which Qualcomm warned last week, is that coronavirus has disrupted the smartphone industry.
A new report, according to Reuters, details China’s smartphone sales could plunge upwards of 50% in 1Q, as retail phone stores and production of semiconductors/smartphones remain closed.
“Vendors’ planned product launches will be canceled or delayed, given that large public events are not allowed in China,” research firm Canalys said in a note.
“It will take time for vendors to change their product launch roadmaps in China, which is likely to dampen 5G shipments.”
While Canalys expects China’s smartphone shipments to halve this quarter, International Data Corporation (IDC) expects shipments to drop by about 30% for the period.
TrendForce Corp. said Apple could see a 10% decline in iPhone sales in 1Q, from 45.5 million to about 41 million units.
TrendForce slashed its 1Q global smartphone production forecast -12% Y/Y, due to factory closings across Greater China. It warned global smartphone production in 1Q would be around 275 million units, a 5-year low in production.
We’ve noted, in the last several weeks, that if factories cannot resume production early this week and have full production by the end of the month, shortages would develop and hit the largest brands in the world, such as Apple iPhone and AirPods.
The one sector with the most exposure to Greater China and Asia Pacific is also the sector that has outperformed the most in recent months: Tech.
Ample Fed liquidity has made Wall Street blind as a bat when it comes to recognizing the unraveling of complex supply chains in Asia, and the slowdown in global growth.
The V-shape recovery in global growth could be more like a U-shape or continuation to the downside for 1H20 – as it appears, coronavirus will stick around for the immediate future.
The outrage over the Iowa caucus scandal has continued to burn white hot as more and more establishment manipulations against the Bernie Sanders campaign come into view.
At the beginning of a CNN town hall with Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg last night, immediately following the network’s town hall with Sanders, the event’s host Chris Cuomo announced that 100 percent of the caucus results were now in and the former South Bend mayor had narrowly won the contest. These results had been announced by the Iowa Democratic Party moments before Buttigieg’s town hall appearance.
Think about the level of coordination it takes to try to pull off such a brazen fraudulent move. It takes the Iowa Dem Party, the DNC and CNN. All working in cahoots.
So we’re way ahead of schedule in terms of emotional intensity tied to this presidential primary race, and possibly at a more heated point after the very first 2020 primary contest than at any point in the 2016 race between Sanders and Clinton. And it’s only going to get crazier from here.
And that’s just looking at the US Democratic presidential primary. Later this month we’ve got the beginning of Julian Assange’s extradition trial, we’ve got the OPCW narrative managing its own scandal by smearing the whistleblowers who revealed that the US, UK and France almost certainly bombed Syria in 2018 under false pretenses, we’ve got continuing revelations that pretty much everything the Trump administration told the world to justify the assassination of Qassem Soleimani was a lie, we’ve got an escalating new cold war between the US and Russia, increasing establishment attempts to censor the internet, an increasing propaganda war against China, the general militaristic belligerence of the US-centralized empire, and God knows what else.
As I said back in November, things are going to get weirder and weirder throughout the foreseeable future. We’re coming to a point in history where the only reliable pattern is the disintegration of patterns, and 2020 has come storming out of its corner swinging for the fences working to establish this pattern with extreme aggression. We’re not going to hit a point of stability or normality this year, we’re going to see things get crazier and crazier and crazier. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know it’s going to be nuts.
Things Are Only Going To Get Weirder
“I often hear people in my line of work saying ‘Man, we’re going to look back on all this crazy shit and think about how absolutely weird it was!’
No we won’t. Because it’s only going to get weirder.”https://t.co/z5ivGMEMoY
In such an environment, it’s going to be absolutely essential to take exceptional care of your psychological health if you want to remain engaged with what’s going on in the world in a positive way.
And I do mean exceptional. Whatever you’re doing now, do more. Start cultivating new habits to keep yourself lucid and serene, and start now before things get super crazy. Work out your issues with your family and with yourself. Remember to move your body in ways that feel good to you. Carve out some time out each day for just being quiet with yourself. Notice the beauty around you. Give cuddles, get cuddles. Take a shower and sing your heart out. Feel your feet on the floor, nestle your bum into your chair and listen to yourself breath like it’s a song on the radio. Yawn. Belch. Stretch. Roar. Put on some loud music and rock out. Whatever you know works for you to get you out of your head and back in to your body, remember to do it, and remember to do it regularly. Make it habitual.
Be proactive with this rather than reactive; if you wait until you have to react to things going ass-side up later on it’s going to feel like you’re fighting to get your head above water. If you do it now you’ll have the mental space needed to navigate tumultuous waters.
This is what will be necessary if you want to engage with the increasingly frenetic narrative matrix in the future. The only alternative will be to disengage completely and throw your attention into escapism, or at least away from politics and news. And if you don’t make the cultivation of mental well-being your first and foremost priority you will be forced, in a very unpleasant way, to disengage anyhow.
And honestly this is something all activist types should be doing anyway. Believing you can help the world without doing serious inner work is like believing you can clean the house while covered in raw sewage. You can always spot the political activists who engage without doing any inner work by the chaotic, unskillful and frequently counterproductive form their actions take. They can’t see clearly enough to operate efficaciously, because their vision is clouded with unresolved suffering and conflict. Get in the shower and wash the yuck off yourself before trying to clean the house.
Some of my readers want a Sanders insurgency in the Democratic Party, some support third parties or independents, while others eschew electoral politics altogether and endorse other approaches to pushing for real change. But in my experience you all care deeply about the world, regardless of your preferred path toward doing so, and that’s going to take a heavy toll as all manner of things unravel over the next year if you don’t have the psychological spaciousness to navigate it lucidly.
Above all, be gentle with yourself. We got a ways ahead of us, and we need you fresh and feeling good. You won’t be able to help wake the world up if you let the chaos and confusion drag you down. Know when to take a break from the information stream and all the babbling narratives trying to twist your perception of it. Use your tools to distance yourself from the narratives so that you can perceive them objectively. Ground yourself, find your center, then, when you’re ready, wade back in.
No matter how chaotic things get, your ability to navigate that chaos skillfully needs to be your first and foremost priority. Put your mental well-being first, and everything else will fall into place.
Be the peace and harmony you want to see in the world.
Officials confirmed that Trump and national security adviser Robert O’Brien have cut 70 positions inherited from former President Barack Obama, who had fattened the staff to 200.
Many were loaners from other agencies and have been sent back. Others left government work.
Trump was notably impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate after a NSC ‘whistleblower’ on loan from the CIA lodged a complaint after approaching the office of House Intel Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA), who guided him to a Democratic operative attorney (who loves going to Disneyland alone and once bragged about getting security clearances for ‘guys with child porn issues‘).
We digress.
Last week, anti-Trump impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother Yevgeny were fired from the NSC and escorted out of the White House by security. While critics have called the move beyond the pale, President Trump noted Alexander Vindman’s ‘horrendous report’ given to him by his supervisor.
….was given a horrendous report by his superior, the man he reported to, who publicly stated that Vindman had problems with judgement, adhering to the chain of command and leaking information. In other words, “OUT”.
“This month, we will complete the right-sizing goal Ambassador O’Brien outlined in October, and in fact, may exceed that target by drawing down even more positions,” said NSC senior director for senior communications John Ullyot, in a statement to Secrets.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsAlexander Vindman was reassigned to the Department of the Army, and will attend the US Army War College in Carlisle. No word on his twin.
Gold no longer serves as an official money in the modern financial system, yet it is still considered an important asset due to its established diversification and store of value properties. But what framework(s) should we use to understand the role that gold should play in investment processes and policies? In Part I of this series, I present one useful framework which implies that gold is significantly ‘under-owned’ and, consequently, undervalued at present.
Most investors are familiar with the ancient use of gold and silver as money, and that gold still provided the monetary base for economies well into the 20th century. Indeed, less than a century ago, in the aftermath of WWI and associated large currency devaluations and hyperinflations in Europe, there were several international conferences held to try and strengthen gold’s role as a source of monetary and economic stability. 75 years ago the famous Bretton-Woods conference was held, formally re-establishing gold’s role at the centre of the international monetary system.
For investors of that time, gold held a central role in investment processes. It was the bedrock collateral of the financial system – the ‘risk-free’ asset – and the benchmark for measuring investment performance. Gold was also an instrument that the central banks of the day could use to help contain financial crises. In the event of a run on deposits or an interbank collateral squeeze, central banks could lend out their reserves (normally at penalty rates of interest) in order to buy time for the system to restructure and reorganise. For example, gold lending was one of the actions taken by JP Morgan to help contain the US Banking Panic of 1907. This provided a model for how the Federal Reserve was subsequently designed to act as a lender of last resort.
The last international conference to determine the role that gold should play in the global financial system was held in December 1971 at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. Following President Nixon’s infamous ‘closing of the gold window’ in August that year, this conference was a last-ditch attempt to salvage what was left of the Bretton-Woods arrangements that were credited with having provided a stable monetary foundation for the rebuilding of Europe and Japan and the widespread prosperity following WWII.
The result of the negotiations was that the US agreed to devalue the dollar by 8% vs gold; major trading partners would revalue versus the dollar by 8-16%; and currencies would fluctuate in narrow bands of 2.25% versus the dollar thereafter. The hope was that this would rebalance global trade and capital flows, thereby removing the previous balance-of-payments pressure draining the US gold stock. This hope was in vain, however. The US continued to run growing balance-of-payments deficits and by 1973 the agreement was abandoned, currencies went into free-float versus one another, and, as it happened, into freefall versus gold for the remainder of that decade.
The Role of Gold Today
Most central banks hold a portion of their reserves in the form of physical gold. Subsequent to the global financial crisis of 2008-9, central banks have been accumulating gold at a historically elevated pace. As seen in the chart below, purchases reached a record high in 2019.
Chart 1: Central Bank Purchases of Gold Increased in 2019
Source: Metals Focus, Refinitiv GFMS, World Gold Council
Private investors have also been accumulating gold. While Asian investors tend to acquire physical gold, those in the West commonly do so through ETFs – a proxy for overall Western investment demand, which was also particularly strong in 2019.
Chart 2: Holdings in Global Gold-backed ETFs Reached a New Record in September
Source: Bloomberg, Company Filings, ICE Benchmark Administration, Shanghai Gold Exchange, World Gold Council
A Modern Investment Framework
Although the evidence shows gold holdings increasing, my discussions with investors often centre around the lack of a robust valuation framework and gold integration into their asset-allocation processes. I provide more than one such framework, yet I always begin with an explanation not only of what gold is, but also of what it is not.
If gold is no longer official money, what exactly is it? After all, gold, an inert metal, has not changed over the past century. There remains widespread demand for gold both as jewellery and as a safe-haven asset. It is easy to understand why gold is, in fact, the safest of safe-haven assets: it carries no credit or counterparty risk, it cannot be arbitrarily devalued by governments the way their currencies can, and it requires no government to give it value with legal tender or any other official status. As such, gold can be considered both a universal, global, liquid alternative to fiat currency as a store of value. It is also an ‘anti-asset’ that, unlike all financial assets, cannot be defaulted on, restructured, repudiated, or simply rendered worthless by government action.
As such, one way in which to consider gold’s value for investors is as a form of insurance against the various risks to fiat currencies and financial assets. The concept of insurance is intuitive, and we all pay for it in one form or another. With gold, insurance is not intrinsically productive. It doesn’t provide a yield or other ex-ante return. Indeed, it ‘carries negatively’ in the form of premiums paid, just as gold normally carries negatively by not paying any interest yet incurring costs for secure storage and the insurance thereon.
The ultimate providers of insurance against risk are either governments themselves or reinsurance companies. By owning gold, investors are ‘insuring’ their financial portfolios against default and devaluation. By corollary, they are also insuring them against financial crises – a common cause of both, and one that occurs with some regularity throughout history.
How, then, are we to consider how much ‘insurance’ investors should normally hold in the form of gold? One way is to use history as a guide and to derive the ex-post optimal weighting for gold in a simple portfolio of financial assets, stocks, and bonds. Taking the longest available robust historical dataset for total returns for stocks and bonds over the past century, and solving for the gold weighting that pushes the efficient frontier out to the portfolio maximum, the answer comes out at about 15%.
Focusing on the modern financial world however (that is, the one since 1971 in which gold is no longer the basis of the international monetary system), the ideal gold weighting climbs to around 20%.
It should be stressed that these weightings are derived entirely from passive, ex-post, efficient frontier calculations using public datasets stretching back a century. Were you to take an actual ‘view’ on the future ex-ante returns, volatilities, and correlations of stocks, bonds, and gold, the derived weightings of the efficient portfolio would be different. For this exercise, we simply run the numbers as they are with no ‘view’ at all.
When I show investors the results of this analysis the initial reaction is frequently one of shock. It is the rare investor who allocates 15% of more of their portfolio to gold. But the numbers don’t lie. Indeed, they reveal some normalcy bias. When you look more closely at the data, what you see are consistently higher returns provided by a portfolio of stocks and bonds alone: the conventional wisdom. Yet there are rare periods in which stocks decline so sharply that the positive performance of bonds doesn’t compensate and, rarer still, when both stocks and bonds decline in value. So unless you were able to predict such periods in advance, you would have wanted to hold ‘insurance’ against them with a portfolio gold weighting on the order of magnitude derived above.
A Valuation Methodology for Gold’s Insurance Properties
Now let’s go one step further and consider what the implications are for the valuation of gold. Available data show that gold holdings comprise no more than 1-2% of investor portfolios. Stocks, bonds, and other assets comprise the other 98%. But unlike financial assets, which can be issued theoretically ad infinitum, the supply of gold is essentially fixed, growing at about 1% per year, much of which is absorbed into jewellery production. Therefore, the only realistic way for portfolios to shift towards the efficient frontier derived above is for the price of gold to rise versus that of financial assets generally.
Chart 3: Gold Percentage of Global Financial Assets
If, over time, investors were to gravitate towards the historically optimal portfolio weightings derived above, holding the value of financial assets constant, gold would have to increase in value by a tenfold order of magnitude to around $15,000. Were the market capitalisation of financial assets to increase as well, say as the result of generally expansionary monetary policies, the rise in the gold price would need to be commensurately higher.
One can visualise this adjustment by assuming that the supply of gold is an essentially constant, vertical line, with demand for gold as financial portfolio insurance having some slope. As the quantity of gold ‘insurance’ demanded increases, the gold demand function shifts to the right, thereby driving the price higher.
Supply of Gold is Inelastic, While Demand Can Fluctuate
Chart 4: Supply of Gold is Inelastic, While Demand Can Fluctuate
It is spurious to try and get more precise, but this gives us an order of magnitude for the price of gold that would correspond to the historically derived, implied value of gold’s ‘insurance’ properties. Yes, this is a big figure, but it is worth keeping in mind that tenfold increases in the price of gold over multiple-year periods are hardly unprecedented. Indeed, the price of gold would rise by even more than tenfold in the 1970s, and by about fivefold in the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.
Alternatively, stocks and bonds could collectively decline in value by some 80% versus gold, presumably driven by stocks falling significantly more than bonds. But given the policy regime in effect today, that would be highly unlikely. Central banks and/or fiscal authorities would almost certainly act to prevent such a huge selloff with expansionary policies. And as observed in 2009-11 and other such periods, these policies would give upward momentum to the price of gold. I consider $15,000 gold and flat stocks+bonds to be a more realistic scenario than $1,500 gold and the SPX back under 2,000. Most realistic of all could be that bonds remain stable, stocks continue to at least keep pace with inflation, and gold outperforms over time.
As this gold framework is based on the concept of gold as the ultimate form of financial portfolio insurance, the factors impacting investor confidence are critical. As investors become increasingly concerned about the stability of the financial system, as they did during the mid-2000s, they will demand more ‘insurance’, driving the price of gold higher. As they become more complacent, the opposite should be the case.
While hindsight is always 20/20, we can see this pattern clearly in the historical data. Looking forward, investors need to consider what specific factors are likely to impact investor confidence in the future. However, from the current starting point, an ‘insurance’-based valuation framework for gold would be strongly biased towards a relative outperformance of gold.
In Part II of this series I will present a fundamental fair-value approach to modelling the price of gold, with reference to specific economic variables. As a more practical trading tool this will complement the generic ‘insurance’ framework presented here.
Chinese Firms Ask For Billions In Loans Amid Virus Outbreak
In response to the economic paralysis brought about by the coronavirus, Chinese banks are offering billions of dollars in loans to Chinese companies, according to two banking sources via Reuters.
About 300 Chinese firms, including top food delivery company Meituan Dianping and smartphone maker Xiaomi, have requested upwards 57.2 billion yuan ($8.2 billion) in loans to prevent a hard landing as China’s economy grinds to a halt.
The sources said the firms seeking loans are either the hardest hit or have an active role in the control of the virus outbreak.
Evercore ISI Chairman Ed Hyman warned last week that China’s GDP growth could post “zero for the first quarter … China is really slowing and that’s worrying people for sure.”
“We are so solid,” Hyman said. “It’s not the virus, it’s the trade that matters. People are not going out. They are not shopping, and that’s what’s hurting particularly China.”
Extended factory closings and supply chain disruptions have forced many companies to request loans for “fast-track approvals and preferential rates,” the sources said.
The sources reviewed several lists of companies that Chinese banks will be distributing loans to. They said no official data is showing total loans requested.
The list includes pharmaceutical firms and restaurants, who’ve requested help from banking authorities.
“Banks will have the final say on lending decisions,” one of the sources said. “The interest rates are likely to be on par with those offered to banks’ top clients.”
The list included Xiaomi, which requested 5 billion yuan ($716.24 million) in loans to convert several production lines into mask and medical equipment making.
Meituan Dianping has asked for 4 billion yuan ($572.99 million) to finance free food and delivery to first responders and other government workers helping to contain the outbreak in Wuhan.
Didi Chuxing, “severely impacted by the virus outbreak,” is requesting 50 million yuan ($7.16 million).
Beijing-based internet security company Qihoo 360 has asked for 1 billion yuan ($143.25 million) to purchase and distribute medical-related products. The internet company will also fund new programs that will build apps for virus tracking.
Facial recognition startup Megvii asked for 100 million yuan ($14.32 million) to develop AI technology that would be used in china’s surveillance network to monitor if people are wearing masks.
We’ve noted that the People’s Bank of China pumped $243 billion into financial markets to prevent a market crash. On Monday, Feb. 03, China’s equity market shed $393 billion of its value.
When a crisis emerges, China has always thrown money at the problem to “cushion” the side effects and create a soft landing. But this time is different, and excessive monetary policy, which failed to turn up the second-largest economy late last year, is now flooding the system with even more loans for businesses. If it’s a ploy by Beijing to spark new credit creation, it’s likely temporary, as a hard landing could be nearing.
After three long years of brutal oppression under Donald Trump’s Russia-backed Nazi Reich, it turns out the only Democratic candidate with a chance of unseating him in November and rescuing the world from the Putin-Nazis is a 78-year-old bloodthirsty Commie with a Khmer Rouge-like army of kill-crazy followers.
Yes, I’m afraid the rumors are true. Apparently, elements of Jeremy Corbyn’s recently-disbanded Nazi Death Cult have regrouped in the United States, formed an alliance with Bernie Sanders fanatics, and together this Mega-Commie Kill Swarm is roaming the Internet with complete impunity, sadistically mass-murdering Sanders critics and defenseless differently-abled persons with vulgar language and vicious poo-memes.
The corporate media are doing their best to alert Americans to the imminent threat. CNN broadcast a special report explaining how Sanders’ “army of supporters” are “bullying” and “frightening” his critics into silence. An “outspoken Elizabeth Warren supporter whose daughter with Downs syndrome is recovering from cancer” was verbally-abused to within an inch of her life. An “activist dying of ALS” was instructed to go “f___” himself. The Working Families Party was subjected to a series of inappropriate adjectives. The Party’s leader, an African American and a personal friend of Bernie Sanders, was taunted with a racist Tweet, which Sanders took to Twitter and condemned, but by that time it was much too late. His Commie Kill Swarm was beyond his control; they started tweeting memes comparing Elizabeth Warren to a snake and Pete Buttigieg to a rat, and otherwise terrorizing the American public.
Senior Investigative Correspondent Drew Griffin spoke to several other “victims” of Sanders’ Commie Kill Swarm’s tweets who are recovering from their Internet traumas in undisclosed secure locations and so insisted on remaining anonymous. According to Griffin, these emotionally-traumatized victims are so emotionally traumatized by what they experienced on the Internet that they wouldn’t even let him describe the traumatic “circumstances” surrounding their “attacks.”
And the proof of Sanders’ Commie Kill Swarm’s atrocities isn’t just anecdotal. No, Griffin also spoke to Ben Decker, “CEO” of something called “Memetica” (which appears to be Ben’s Twitter account), whose “Facebook analysis” conclusively proves that Sanders has a lot of online supporters, more than all the other candidates, which creates “the potential for greater harm.” This type of online “bullying-at-scale,” according to Ben, is just … well, “crazy.”
Of course, CNN is not the only corporate media outlet on the case. In the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses (which Sanders would go on to attempt to steal from Buttigieg by winning thousands more votes), a spate of dire warnings were issued. According to The Washington Post, “Sanders supporters have weaponized Facebook” and are terrorizing people with “angry memes.” The New York Times reported that “Bernie Sanders and His Internet Army have forced progressives who refuse to back him into hiring private security details to protect them from “death threats” and off-color jokes. Daily Beast warned of “Toxic Bernie Bros.” NBC likened them to MAGA supporters, who everyone knows are Russia-loving Nazis. SNL writers went even further, painting Sanders as the darling of 4chan … and these are just a few examples.
But by far the most bombastic display of unbridled Sanders-Commie-Kill-Swarm-Panic was MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who totally lost it after the last debate and started sputtering about “socialists” staging public mass-executions in Central Park. Matthews is apparently firmly convinced that Sanders, if he wins the election, plans to dress up like Fidel Castro, march Matthews and his cronies out onto the Great Lawn, and go full-bore Daenerys Targaryen on them. He sat there, trembling, on national television, eyes afire with paranoia, jabbering about the godless “Reds” like a scene from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove that got cut because it was too over-the-top.
Seriously, though, I doubt he has much to worry about. Regardless of who wins the election this year, the supranational corporatocracy that essentially owns the U.S. government is not about to let Bernie Sanders implement the same basic social programs that most capitalist countries throughout world have provided to their people for decades. Jesus, just imagine the freedomless horror if Americans could go to university, and, you know, maybe raise a child or two, without spending the rest of their lives in debt! Think of the suffering that would inflict on the banks, and insurance companies, and military contractors, not to mention the pharmaceutical industry. God help America, should it go down that road! The next thing you know there’d be high-speed trains, subsidized art, and un-chlorinated chicken … there’s no telling where the nightmare would end.
Look, I don’t normally get invested in the quadrennial Simulation of Democracy, but I’m kind of pulling for Bernie this time. I don’t believe he has a chance, but if he somehow managed to outfox the Democrats and win the nomination this summer, it would be fun to watch as the corporate media and the rest of the neoliberal Resistance react to a Sanders vs. Trump election.
Not that either Sanders or Trump, the men themselves, are a threat to the empire (as we have witnessed over the course of the last three years). But we’re in the middle of a War on Populism, which the global corporatocracy needs to win if it is going to continue to relentlessly destabilize, privatize, and restructure everything, as it has been doing since the end of the Cold War. Sanders and Trump are just symbols, of course, lightning rods for “populist” anger … but they are symbols the empire needs to destroy in order to reestablish “normality.”
The neoliberal Resistance’s ham-fisted efforts to prevent a Bernie Sanders nomination are desperate attempts to avoid a scenario where they are forced to ensure Donald Trump’s reelection, which, make no mistake, they will do if they have to. (Jonathan Chait has already whipped up some boilerplate to be used in that effort.) They did it to Corbyn, and they will do it to Sanders, but it is likely to get extremely awkward, pretending to reluctantly support him (because the alternative will be a man they’ve spent the last three years accusing of being a Russian spy and literally Hitler) while simultaneously painting him as a genocidal commie terrorist whose supporters are a bunch of white supremacist, billionaire-butchering neo-Maoists.
Thus the “Sanders Swarm” hysteria, and the Iowa caucuses “technical difficulties,” and whatever other propaganda and dirty tricks the Resistance has planned to prevent a Sanders nomination, so they can lose to Trump with a non-populist candidate and play “Resistance” for another four years.
So, unless you relish the thought of that, or the thought of watching a humiliated Bernie obsequiously shuffle around the country campaigning for Buttigieg, like he did for Clinton, please do what you can to get him nominated, so we can enjoy a Pol Pot vs. Hitler election.
Do it for purely entertainment purposes. It is mostly just a show, after all.
* * *
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volume I of his Consent Factory Essays is published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.
Larry Doyle and John Moynihan informed those observing that they filed a formal Whistleblower Submission replete with a hundred-plus formal exhibits in excess of 6,000 pages of evidence with the Internal Revenue Service on the Clinton Foundation in August 2017. They further testified that they had submitted the same materials to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and selected US Attorneys in the Department of Justice as well and that their documents included:
reviews of the foundation’s tax returns and those of the foundation’s donors
reviews including audits of the foundation’s programs and operations, foreign and domestic
email exchanges between foundation executives and foreign government officials
contracts with foreign governments and engagements with other public and private entities
reviews of partnerships with an array of private companies, private universities, and other 501c3 public charities
interviews with both current and former senior Clinton Foundation officials
reviews of state registration materials
documents covering the foundation’s own internal reviews
During the hearing, Doyle and Moynihan highlighted that they believe the evidence they presented in their submission provided probable cause that the Clinton Foundation violated IRS codes relating to the Organization and Operational Tests for a 501c3 public charity with specific details addressing Misrepresentations and Misuse of Donated Public Funds. On top of that, they also addressed their probable cause assertion that the Clinton Foundation acted as an agent in violation of IRS code and the Foreign Agent Registration Act. These whistleblowers also highlighted that private foundations, including the Gates Foundation, that have donated to the Clinton Foundation are themselves subject to taxation based on IRS codes relating to Donors’ Responsibilities. Ultimately, Doyle and Moynihan maintained that the Clinton Foundation could be subject to paying tax on anywhere from $400mm to potentially as much as $2.5 billion of revenue.
During that hearing, Moynihan specifically emphasized that their submission was “a tax claim”. Moynihan also informed those on the committee that depending on how the IRS ruled that the two whistleblowers would have other causes of action that they could and would pursue including filing an appeal to the US Tax Court if in fact they received a Final Denial from the IRS.
Well, it appears that these two ‘financial bounty hunter’ whistleblowers have done just that. How is that appeal playing out? It looks like over the course of the last few months Doyle and Moynihan have been in the midst of an extensive array of motions and responses, many filed under seal, going back and forth with IRS Counsel in the course of their having their day in the US Tax Court v the Internal Revenue Service. Those interested in the case can track it via this US Tax Court site:
Authoritarianism has made this outbreak worse, not better. The state’s strength in controlling information and suppressing dissent is a weakness in fighting disease…
Nature is unpredictable and sometimes vengeful. Different societies and political systems have different ways of managing it.
Viruses and epidemics can occur in any country. But they have become more dangerous and challenging in modern times as globalisation means they spread faster and farther than ever.
Thus the coronavirus, thought to have originated in the mainland Chinese city of Wuhan, is spreading across the world.
As it does so, it tests not only China’s health infrastructure and management. The course of the epidemic and the government’s responses raise profound questions about the capacity and dynamism of China’s system of one-party rule.
For sure, China’s leadership is now doing everything to contain the virus, just as they had done in fights against natural disasters such as the Sichuan Earthquake in 2008. In fact, China’s command-and-control systems might prove more efficient than anything the free democracies could manage when it comes to mobilising resources.
Beijing won international plaudits for the massive scale of its mobilisation and dramatic measures against the coronavirus. The government has built several temporary hospitals from scratch in just a few weeks, locked down tens of millions of people in quarantine in more than two dozen cities, banned tens of millions more from travelling across the nation and so on.
But the saga has also, once again, exposed the inherent contradictions and flaws in its self-acclaimed political system.
China missed the best opportunity to contain the spread of the virus because officials at first delayed – or possibly covered up – the release of information and were slow in taking precautionary actions. The first patient who experienced symptoms was found on December 1, 2019, suggesting the origin of the disease was even earlier. And there has been some evidence of human-to-human transmissions since late December, with more emerging in early January when several medical workers were infected.
These vital bits of information were not released to the public in time. Nor was any decisive action taken between early December and January 23, the day Beijing told the world about the severity of the epidemic and declared war on it just two days before the Lunar New Year on January 25. Lives continued as normal in Wuhan in the week before then. On January 18, the Wuhan government hosted a banquet attended by more than 40,000 families in a bid to set a Guinness world record. On January 20, the municipal government said it was distributing 200,000 free tickets to residents for festive new year activities.
Videos show few people wearing face masks in Wuhan before mid-January. Compare that to Hong Kong, where since early January the government has been updating people on the situation daily and holding frequent news briefings.
In terms of human-to-human transmissions, the alarm wasn’t raised until the prominent epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan spoke out on January 20 – nearly 50 days after the first patient was found and three weeks after it was established that human-to-human infections were taking place.
Instead of acting against the virus, the government focused on controlling the information. In an effort to underscore the Communist Party’s determination to crack down on unsanctioned information, the broadcaster CCTV reported on January 2 that Wuhan police had interrogated and warned eight whistle-blowers, frontline doctors, for “rumourmongering” about the epidemic. It seemed all too familiar to 2003, when military doctor Jiang Yanyong defied government rules and risked his own life to break the news about the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) to the international media.
China’s censorship of news has made the country fertile ground for rumours, as people do not trust official information. Indeed, there are numerous cases in which officials have downplayed or covered up large-scale disasters, from Sars to the contamination of the Songhua River in 2005, the milk powder scandal of 2008 and the Wenzhou train crash of 2011.
The official rhetoric before Zhong’s revelation was, at least, consistent: the disease was controllable and preventable; there was no evidence that the virus could be transmitted between human beings. There is no doubt that the delay in the release of information led to a delay in precautionary actions, both by the public and the government. Both the government and the public are obviously unprepared for the outbreak, as evidenced by the mess in hospitals and major shortages of testing kits, masks, protective gear and other materials.
Yet the fight against this epidemic is like a race between the virus and human beings. The faster will be the winner, the slower the loser. Party officials usually put social control ahead of fighting natural disasters, often playing down the severity of instances. In a leaked internal circular, the public health ministry says there are three principles in dealing with epidemics. They are, in order: “politics, safety and science”.
Under the party’s draconian censorship system, any information about epidemics is a top state secret. So much was admitted by Wuhan mayor Zhou Xianwang. He told CCTV he had delayed the disclosure of information as internal rules barred him from doing so without permission.
Until now, any unsanctioned information about the epidemic or negative opinion about the government’s handling of it on social media will have been deleted by party censors. Posters of such material face severe punishment, even jail.
The irony is that the party’s strength in controlling information and suppressing dissent is also its weakness in fighting epidemics. This contradiction has become more acute in the 17 years since Sars, as the country has become more authoritarian after President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012.
The coronavirus is a vivid and tragic example of how China’s one-party rule not only impedes the public’s response to epidemics, but also helps turn problems from localised health scares into catastrophes on a nationwide and even worldwide scale.
Nobel economist Amartya Kumar Sen once concluded that the free flow of information and transparency were the best weapons in the battle against the spread of epidemics. China lacks both. China’s leadership should have learned lessons from Sars. Beijing’s sweeping anti-contagion measures have come too late. Early on, its political institutions allowed the virus to fester freely, repeating the tragedy of Sars. That means what we are witnessing is not simply a public health problem. It is one of the most severe sociopolitical crises the party has faced and it threatens to undermine its absolute grip on power.
Mother nature has not been merciful to humans during this crisis. And China’s authoritarianism is making it only more vulnerable to nature’s wrath.
Prosecutors Recommend 7-9 Year Prison Sentence For Roger Stone
The prosecutors who successfully convicted Republican strategist and decades-old Trump pal Roger Stone on charges of witness tampering and lying to Congress are now lobbying the judge presiding over his Feb. 20 sentencing to give Stone seven to nine years in prison.
In the sentencing memo, the prosecutors make clear that they’re recommending such a hefty sentence for relatively benign charges because of Stone’s insistence on speaking out in his defense (though he didn’t testify at his trial in November). Specifically, the lawyers cited Stone’s expressed “contempt” for the legal system.
Writing in the Daily Caller, former Rep. Bob Barr (no relation to the AG) defended Stone, and reminded the world that he remains silenced under a federal court gag order that prevents him from publicly saying anything about the conviction last November. The former Republican strategist and early Trump booster is awaiting sentencing for up to 20 years on Feb. 20. The sentencing has been called the last “loose end remaining from the Mueller investigation.”
Barr added that it’s also the last travesty of the Mueller probe.
One more thing: Stone was never charged with any real crimes. Essentially, he was charged with lying to Congress during a voluntary appearance in 2017, and another bullshit charge of witness tampering (the individual ended up testifying against him anyway).
Here’s a summary of the circumstances surrounding Stone’s charges from the AP:
Prosecutors alleged Stone lied to Congress about his conversations about WikiLeaks with New York radio host and comedian Randy Credico – who scored an interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2016, when he was avoiding prosecution by sheltering in the Ecuadoran embassy in London – and conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi.
During the 2016 campaign, Stone had mentioned in interviews and public appearances that he was in contact with Assange through a trusted intermediary and hinted at inside knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans. But he started pressing Credico to broker a contact, and Credico testified that he told Stone to work through his own intermediary.
Earlier testimony revealed that Stone, while appearing before the House Intelligence Committee, named Credico as his intermediary to Assange and pressured Credico not to contradict him.
After Credico was contacted by Congress, he reached out to Stone, who told him he should “stonewall it” and “plead the fifth,” he testified.
Credico also testified during Stone’s trial that Stone repeatedly told him to “do a ‘Frank Pentangeli,’” a reference to a character in “The Godfather: Part II” who lies before Congress.
Prosecutors said Stone had also threatened Credico’s therapy dog, Bianca, saying he was “going to take that dog away from you.”
In the memo, prosecutors claimed that Stone displayed “contempt for the rule of law” after his indictment. Stone was the sixth Trump associate or employee to be convicted in the probe.
DOJ’s Roger Stone sentencing memo suggests 7 to 9 years in prison is just: ‘When his crimes were revealed by the indictment in this case, he displayed contempt for this Court and the rule of law’ https://t.co/FNjnjbNiwOpic.twitter.com/kx985WgtuU
Over time, continual bad news will discourage any civilian population, and Americans had the lowest tolerance on the planet for bad news.
Karl Marlantes, “Matterhorn” (2009)
Have you read Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes? You should. It’s not just the best novel I’ve ever read about the Vietnam War, but it’s also one of my irreplaceable sources of inspiration for understanding The Maw – that unlimited gluttony of the violent State to chomp on our bones and suck out our minds … and the oddly not-so-rare instances of individual human bravery to persevere regardless.
I would bet my life that there are thousands of instances of individual human bravery persevering against The Maw happening right now … in Wuhan … in Wenzhou … in dozens of other quarantined cities throughout China.
What was my first experience with The Maw? It was as a seven-year-old boy watching the nightly news on our little black-and-white set, where every night … EVERY NIGHT … we were told exactly how many American and South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese soldiers had been killed that day.
The American numbers were accurate, I guess, and the South Vietnamese numbers were probably in the right ballpark. But the North Vietnamese numbers of wounded and killed? Pure fiction.
The daily body count of killed and wounded North Vietnamese soldiers was, in Epsilon Theory-speak, a cartoon – an abstraction of an abstraction in service to the creation of Common Knowledge.
Hey, everyone knows that everyone knows that we’re winning the war in Vietnam. Didn’t you see the body count numbers on CBS last night?
Once you start looking for cartoons, you will see them everywhere.
And yes, we write a lot about cartoons. You can read more here, here, here, here, hereand here. For starters.
But this is the kicker.
Because it was so important to maintain the fiction that we were Winning the War ™, and that fiction required metrics like a body count of North Vietnamese that was always a multiple of the South Vietnamese casualties and always a factor of the American casualties, American war-fighting policy was soon driven by the narrative requirement to find and count the “right number” of North Vietnamese casualties!
The point of this quadratic regression on Chinese infection and death numbers as reported by the World Health Organization from the first official announcement through February 4 was the publication of this projection.
Sure enough, the WHO announcements since this prediction was published have been eerily close.
2/5 — 24,363 cases — 491 fatalities
2/6 — 28,060 cases — 564 fatalities
2/7 — 31,211 cases — 637 fatalities
2/8 — 34,598 cases — 723 fatalities
2/9 — 37,251 cases — 812 fatalities
2/10 — 40,171 cases — 908 fatalities
Crazy, right? The deaths being reported out of China are particularly accurate to the model, while the reported cases are leveling off (which is what you’d expect from a politically adjusted epidemic model over time … at some point you have to show a rate-of-change improvement from your epidemic control measures).
But wait, there’s more.
The really damning part of Antimonic’s modeling of the reported data with a quadratic formula is that this should be impossible. This is not how epidemics work.
All epidemics take the form of an exponential function, not a quadratic function.
All epidemics – before they are brought under control – take the form of a green line, an exponential function of some sort. It is impossible for them to take the form of a blue line, a quadratic formula of some sort. This is what the R-0 metric of basic reproduction rate means, and if – as the WHO has been telling us from the outset – the nCov2019 R-0 is >2, then the propagation rate must be described by a pretty steep exponential curve. As the kids would say, it’s just math.
Now I don’t want to get into the weeds as to whether it’s possible to model this specific data set with an exponential function (it probably is), and we’ll never have access to the detail of data we’d need to be certain about all this. And to be clear, at some point the original exponential spread of a disease becomes “sub-exponential” as containment and treatment measures kick in.
But I’ll say this … it’s pretty suspicious that a quadratic expression fits the reported data so very, very closely. In fact, I simply can’t imagine any real-world exponentially-propagating virus combined with real-world containment and treatment regimes that would fit a simple quadratic expression so beautifully.
I believe that the Chinese government is massively under-reporting infection data in the pandemic regions of Hubei and Zhejiang provinces.
Just like the American government massively over-reported North Vietnamese casualty data in the Vietnam War.
It’s not only that I believe the numbers coming out of China are largely made up.
More importantly, I also believe that Chinese epidemic-fighting policy – just like American war-fighting policy in the Vietnam War – is now being driven by the narrative requirement to find and count the “right number” of coronavirus casualties.
From a narrative perspective, China is fighting this war against nCov2019 exactly like the US fought its war against North Vietnam.
It’s what the Best and the Brightest always do … they convince themselves that the people can’t handle the truth, particularly if the truth ain’t such good news. They convince themselves that they can buy enough time to win the real-world war by designing and employing a carefully constructed “communication strategy” to win the narrative-world war.
That strategy proved to be a social and political disaster for the United States, as the cartoon tail (gotta get more NV casualties for Cronkite to report) ended up wagging the policy dog (send out more counterproductive search-and-destroy missions).
I think exactly the same thing is happening in China.
And I think the social and political repercussions will be exactly as disastrous.
The Diamond Princess, the cruise ship that has been quarantined off the coast of Yokohama, Japan for a week now, saw a jump in a total number of confirmed coronavirus infections climb to 136.
A growing sense of paranoia among the 3,600 people stuck on board the ship has been increasing since late last week as confirmed cases soar.
But for one Australian couple, they’re sitting back and relaxing, enjoying bottles of cheap wine to numb the fears of an infectious disease taking over the ship, reported The Courier-Mail.
Last Thursday, Jan and Dave Binskin allegedly ordered several cases of wine, not from the ship’s bar, but a drone.
The couple said they contacted a wine club that arranged the drone delivery.
Jan and Dave Binskin wrote, “Naked Wine Club your incredible just got the First Drop Thank God For Drones the Japanese Coast Guard did not know what the F*ck was going on 🍷🍷🍷🍷🍷👌👌👌👌.”
They wrote: “Happy hour drone wine 🍷, even have a wine filter, day three going troppo 😜😜😜😜😜.”
Another post allegedly shows Dave Binskin enjoying the wine in the cabin on Friday.
The couple posts a selfie of them on the deck of the ship after five days of quarantine.
On Sunday, the couple posted two more bottles of wine that they supposedly had delivered via drone.
There was no confirmation by authorities if a drone was spotted airdropping wine aboard the ship.
Over the last several decades, have we ever seen a year start as strangely as 2020 has? Global weather patterns have gone completely nuts, large earthquakes are popping off like firecrackers, it looks like the plague of locusts in Africa could soon develop into the worst in modern history, and a massive plague of bats is severely terrorizing parts of Australia. On top of all that, African Swine Fever is wiping out millions upon millions of pigs around the globe, the H1N1 Swine Flu is killing people in Taiwan, there have been H5N1 Bird Flu outbreaks in China and in India, and the H5N8 Bird Flu has made an appearance at a poultry facility in Saudi Arabia. Of course the coronavirus outbreak which is causing people to literally drop dead in the streets in China is making more headlines than anything that I have mentioned so far, and it could potentially turn into a horrifying global pandemic that kills millions of people.
But other than that, it has been a rather calm beginning to the year, eh?
I have been repeatedly warning that the time of “the perfect storm” is upon us, and many others have also been using this terminology to describe what we are now facing.
Basically, we have entered a period of time when we will be dealing with one terrible crisis after another, and all of these challenges will collectively create a horrific nightmare that will just continue to intensify as time rolls along.
Surprisingly, even the mainstream media is now starting to talk about a coming “perfect storm”, although they have a bit of a different spin on it. The following comes from a Guardian article entitled “Humanity under threat from perfect storm of crises – study”…
The world is facing a series of interlinked emergencies that are threatening the existence of humans, because the sum of the effects of the crises is much greater than their individual impacts, according to a new global study.
Climate breakdown and extreme weather, species loss, water scarcity and a food production crisis are all serious in themselves, but the combination of all five together is amplifying the risks of each, creating a perfect storm that threatens to engulf humanity unless swift action is taken.
Of course the mainstream media would like to blame just about every crisis that humanity is facing on “man-made climate change”.
In essence, they would have us believe that humanity’s “carbon footprint” is way too large and that if we would just do everything that the socialists are telling us to do that everything will go back to normal.
To much of the population, their arguments can seem rather compelling at times, because without a doubt the weather is going nuts.
THE PUBLIC has been advised to stay indoors today as Storm Ciara is expected to batter Britain with 90mph winds and heavy rain.
The 1,000 mile-wide storm, the strongest to sweep across the country for seven years, will bring travel chaos and the advice is: only travel if absolutely necessary.
And “climate change” is also being blamed for the absolutely crazy locust plague that is devastating parts of the Middle East and eastern Africa right now. Approximately 360 billion locusts are eating everything that they can find, and UN officials continue to claim that the number of locusts could actually get “500 times” larger by the time June arrives…
With more rains expected in the region in the coming weeks, the number of locusts if unchecked could grow by up to 500 times by June, when drier weather is expected.
Meanwhile, the crust of our planet is literally shaking like a leaf.
Are we supposed to blame “climate change” for this too?
Over the past week, the Ring of Fire has been hit by big earthquakes day after day…
EARTHQUAKES today hammered the Ring of Fire in the Pacific, as officials detected more than 50 tremors throughout the region. One of the biggest was a magnitude 6.2 earthquake in Indonesia.
Earthquakes have consistently rocked the Ring of Fire this week, with an average of 50 in the region every day, most in a middling magnitude of two or more. Some have grazed higher levels, however, with the largest pushing magnitude 6.
But right now people are more concerned about the coronavirus outbreak in China than anything else.
According to the latest official numbers coming out of China, there are now more than 40,000 confirmed cases and more than 900 confirmed deaths.
Of course there is an enormous amount of skepticism about the validity of those numbers. In fact, one exiled Chinese billionaire believes that the true death toll could be more than 50 times higher…
Exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui recently revealed leaks from Wuhan crematoriums. He claims based on the number of bodies their furnaces are burning, the death toll could be as high as 50,000. Wengui made the bombshell allegations in an interview with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.
I wish that Chinese officials would just be straight with us, but one thing that is becoming exceedingly clear is that this virus passes from person to person very, very easily. In fact, nine members of one family in Hong Kong all got infected “after sharing a hotpot and barbecue meal”…
Concerns about the way the virus spreads are likely to surge following a report that nine members of the same Hong Kong family have been infected with the deadly new coronavirus after sharing a hotpot and barbecue meal. A hotpot – also known as a steamboat – is a bubbling cauldron of stock shared communally, to which diners add ingredients.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the food was contaminated with the virus, or if one of those present for dinner was a carrier.
Let us hope that the containment measures being taken in China and elsewhere will help, but at this point the number of cases just continues to escalate.
Unfortunately, what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.
We are only in the leading edge of “the perfect storm”, and the great challenges that are still ahead of us will shake everyone to the core.
The botched Iowa caucuses have raised many legitimate questions about the Democratic establishment, but to understand the point we’re at now, it’s necessary to think back several years. According to Grayzone journalist and editor Max Blumenthal, Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer’s guest on the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” part of the backlash Bernie Sanders is currently experiencing as he attempts to transform the Democratic Party dates back to Bill Clinton’s presidency.
“[Bill and Hillary Clinton] set up a machine that was really a juggernaut with all this corporate money they brought in through the Democratic Leadership Committee,” says Blumenthal.
“It was a very different structure than we’d seen with previous Democratic candidates who relied heavily on unions and the civil rights coalition.
“And that machine never went away,” the journalist goes on.
“It kept growing, kind of like this amoeba that began to engulf the party and politics itself. So that when Bill Clinton was out of power, the machine was passed to Hillary Clinton, and the machine followed her into the Senate. And the machine grew into the Clinton Global Initiative.”
Speaking of his personal experience with the Clintons, Blumenthal tells Scheer he once met Chelsea Clinton and thought of her as an “admirable figure at that time” who had undergone humiliation and bullying on a national scale as she went through an “awkward phase” as a child. His memory of the child he once met made what followed all the more devastating to watch, Blumenthal laments.
“I’ve watched her grow into adulthood and become a complete kind of replication of the monstrous political apparatus that her family has set up, without really charting her own path,” he says.
“She just basically inherited the reign of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. She does paid talks for Israel. Her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, he gambled on Greece’s debt along with Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs.
“I mean, as a young person,” Blumenthal adds, “seeing someone of my generation grow up and follow that path, do nothing to carve out her own space — it just absolutely disgusts me.”
The conversation between Blumenthal and Scheer centers largely on two subjects that overlap with the current presidential election and primaries: the rightward shift of the Democratic Party and Israeli politics. Partly the two subjects converge in talking about Sanders, the man who could very well become the first Jewish president of the United States. Scheer asks Blumenthal to draw on his experiences growing up close to the Clintons, due to the ties of his parents, Sidney and Jacqueline Blumenthal, to the administration, and is linked to Blumenthal’s most recent book, “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, Isis, and Donald Trump.”
“It seems to me [there is] a real contradiction [in] the Democratic Party, which you know quite a bit about,” when it comes to Israel, says Scheer.
“There’s this great loathsome feeling about Donald Trump. And many of these people don’t really like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. You know, the polling data shows that Jews are, you know, just about as open to the concern for the Palestinians as any other group. And Bernie Sanders, the one Jewish candidate, is the one who dared to bring up the Palestinians — that they have rights also, that they’re human beings. He’s being attacked for it as, like you, a self-hating Jew.”
Blumenthal, whose 2013 book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,” touches upon many questions absent in the American conversation about Israel, points out how the Vermont senator’s own position on Palestine has shifted over time.
“Bernie Sanders [is] better than most of the other [Democratic] candidates on this issue,” says the Grayzone reporter. “After we put a lot of pressure on him in the left-wing grassroots — I mean, I personally protested him at a 2016 event for his position on Palestinians, and we shamed him until he took at least a slightly better position, where you acknowledge the humanity of Palestinians.”
The two journalists discuss what some of the main reasons are that Sanders is facing so much resistance within the Democratic Party, in addition to his views on Palestine. Blumenthal believes there will be a repeat of what happened in 1972 when George McGovern ran for president.
“I think that if Bernie Sanders gets the nomination, there will be an effort to ‘McGovern’ him,” he posits. The Democratic Party will “hope that Bernie Sanders gets destroyed by Donald Trump, and then wag their fingers at the left for the next 20 years until they get another Bill Clinton.
“I think that they don’t know how to stop him at this point, but they’re willing to let him be the nominee and go down to Donald Trump, because Bernie Sanders threatens their interests, and the movement behind him particularly, more than Donald Trump does.”
Listen to the full discussion between Blumenthal and Scheer, which took place aptly on the eve of the Iowa caucuses that, at the time, Blumenthal assumed would be a landslide win for Sanders. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.
ROBERT SCHEER: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case Max Blumenthal, who I must say is one of the gutsiest journalists we have in the United States, and have had for the last five years or so. He’s, in addition to having considerable courage and [going] out on these third-rail issues — like Israel, being one of the more prominent ones — and challenging some of the major conceits of even liberal politics in the United States about our virtue, our constant virtue, he’s done just great journalism. I really loved his book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,” which came out in 2013, because it was based on just good, solid journalism of interviewing people and trying to figure out what’s going on.
I’d done something a half century earlier, or not quite that long ago, during the Six-Day War in Israel, where I went over when I was the editor of Ramparts. And I know how difficult it is to deal with that issue, because I put Ramparts into bankruptcy over the controversy about it. [Laughter] So maybe that’s a good place to begin. You know, you dared touch this issue of Israel, and it didn’t help that you are Jewish. I guess you are Jewish, right? Do you have a background, did you practice any aspect of Judaism? Literature, culture, religion?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I’m a Jew who had a bar mitzvah, and I even had a bris.
RS: Oh. [Laughs]
MB: And you know, I’ve continued to pop in in synagogues here and there on High Holy Days. I guess you could say, you know, when the rabbi asked, you know, asked me to join the army of God, I tell him I’m in the Secret Service. But I’m definitely Jewish, you know, and it’s a big part of who I am and why I do what I do.
RS: Well, and I thought your writing on that, and your journalism, was informed by that. Because after all, a very important part of the whole experience of Jewish people as victims, as people forced into refugee status, living in the diaspora, was to develop a sense of universal values, and of decency and obligation to the other. And I think your reporting reflected that. However, my goodness, you got a lot of heat over it. And it’s the heat I want to talk about. I want to talk about the difficulty, in this post-Cold War world, of actually writing about the U.S. imperial presence, or writing critically about what our government does, and some of its allies.
And I think Israel is a really good case in point, because we have one narrative that said in the last election we had foreign interference, mostly coming from Russia. And we talk about Russia as if it’s the old communist Soviet Union, with a top-down, big, organized party — forgetting that [Vladimir] Putin actually defeated the Communist Party, and even though he had been in the KGB, and most Russians had been in some kind of official connection with society or another. Nonetheless, Russia really has gotten very little out of whatever interference it did. Israel, that is very rarely talked about, interfered in the election in a very open, blatant way in the presence of Netanyahu, who denounced Barack Obama’s major foreign policy achievement, the deal with Iran, and has focused U.S. policy mostly against the enemy being Iran, and ignoring Saudi Arabia and everything else.
And the interesting thing is that Israel’s interference in the election, and Netanyahu, has been rewarded over and over — the embassy got shifted, the settlers got more validation, now there’s a big peace plan that gives the hawks in Israel everything they want. So why don’t we begin with that, and your own writing about U.S.-Israel relations. It’s kind of odd that there’s — or maybe not odd, maybe it’s just because it is the third rail — that there’s been so little discussion about Donald Trump’s relation to Israel and his payoff to Netanyahu.
MB: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to chew on there. I would first start with just an observation, because you mentioned that we’re in a post-Cold War world — well, we’re not in a post-Cold War world anymore, we’re in a new Cold War. And for all the attacks I got over Israel, which were absolutely vicious, personalized, you know, framed through emotional blackmail, attacking my identity as a Jew, calling me a Jewish anti-Semite — the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is this right-wing racket over there in L.A., made me the No. 4 anti-Semite of 2015. You know, I was right behind Ayatollah Khomeini. But you know, the worst attacks, the most vicious attacks I’ve received have actually been from centrists and liberal elements over my criticism of the Russiagate narrative that they foisted on the American public starting in 2016, and also on the dirty war that the U.S. has been waging on Syria, and how we at the site that I edit, the Grayzone, started unpacking a lot of the deceptions and lies that were used to try to stimulate support among middle-class liberals in the west for this proxy war on Syria, for regime change in Syria. This was absolutely forbidden, and that attack actually turned out to be more vicious and is ongoing.
With Israel, you have a situation where you have, not maybe a plurality, but maybe a majority of secular Jewish Americans, progressive Jews, who have completely turned their back on the whole Zionist project. And it has a lot to do with Netanyahu. Netanyahu is someone who came out of the American — out of American life. He went to high school in suburban Philadelphia, he went to MIT, he was at Boston Consulting with Mitt Romney. His father ended his life in upstate New York as Jabotinsky’s press secretary, the press secretary for the revisionist wing of the Zionist movement that inspired the Likud party. So Netanyahu is really kind of an American figure, number one; number two, he’s a Republican figure. He’s like a card-carrying neoconservative Republican.
So a lot of Jews who’ve historically aligned themselves with the Democratic Party, who see being a Democrat as almost synonymous with being Jewish in American life, just absolutely revile Netanyahu. And here he is, basically the longest-serving prime minister in Israel; he’s completely redefined the face of Israel and what it is. And he’s provoked — I wouldn’t say provoked, but he’s accelerated the civil war in American Jewish life over Zionism. And what I did was come in at a time when it wasn’t entirely popular, to not just challenge Israel as a kind of occupying entity, but to actually challenge it at its core, to challenge the entire philosophy of Zionism, and to analyze the Israeli occupation as the byproduct of a system of apartheid which has been in place from the beginning, since 1948, which was a product of a settler colonial movement.
That really upset a lot of people who kind of reflect the same elements that I’m getting, who are attacking me on Syria or Russia. People like Eric Alterman at The Nation. He wrote 11 very personal attack pieces on me when my book “Goliath” came out in 2013. Truthdig, you, Chris Hedges, it was a great source of support. And you, you know, you opened up the debate at Truthdig, you allowed people to come in and criticize the book, but kind of in a principled, constructive way. Whereas Eric Alterman was demanding that The Nation censor me, blacklist me, ban me for life, and was comparing me to a neo-Nazi by the end, and claiming I was secretly in league with David Duke. And that was because he had simply no response to my reporting and my analysis of the kind of, the inner contradictions of Zionism.
And so to me, it was really a sign of the success of the book, that someone like Alterman was sort of dispatched, or took it upon himself to wage this really self-destructive attack. And in the end, he really had nothing to show for himself; he wasn’t arguing on the merits. And that’s just what I find time and again with my reporting is, you know, you get these personal attacks and people try to dissuade you from going and touching these third-rail issues, but ultimately there’s no substance to the attacks. I mean, if they really wanted to nail me and take me down, they would address the facts, and they really haven’t been able to do that.
RS: Right. But Max, if I can, let’s focus on the power of your analysis in that book, which is that it is a settler colonialism. And Netanyahu actually is — we can talk about the old labor Zionists, you know, and what was meant by progressive Zionism and so forth. Even at the time of the Six-Day War when I interviewed people like Moshe Dayan and Ya’alon and these people, they all were against a full occupation of the West Bank. They didn’t act on that, unfortunately. But they were aware of the dangers of a colonial model. But right now you have a figure in Israel in Netanyahu, who is, very clearly embodies a racialized view, a jingoistic view of the other, which is really, you know, very troubling. And he’s embraced by this troubling American figure.
And so what your book really predicted is that the settler colonialism was a rot at the center of the Israeli enterprise — and historically, one could justify that enterprise. I don’t know if you would agree. But even the old Soviet Union, I think, was the second, if not the first country to recognize Israel. There was vast worldwide support for some sort of refuge for the Jewish people after such horrible, you know, genocidal policies visited upon them. But what we’re really talking about now is something very different. And that is whether political leadership, and interference and so forth comes mainly for Democrats, very often; obviously, for republicans and Bible-belters and all that, who seem to like this image of the end of time coming in Israel. But really what’s happening — and it’s not discussed in this election, except to attack Bernie Sanders, who dared make some criticisms of Israel in some of these debates — you have a very weird notion of the Jewish experience, as identified with a very hardline, as you say, sort of South African settler colonialist mentality.
And so I want to ask you the question as someone–and we’ll get to it later — you grew up sort of within the Democratic liberal establishment in Washington. Your parents both worked for the Clinton administration, were close to it. How do you explain this blind eye toward Trump’s relationship to Netanyahu? And ironically, for all the Russia-bashing, Netanyahu and Putin seem to get along splendidly, you know. And that doesn’t bother people as far as criticizing Netanyahu. So why don’t we visit that a little bit, and forget about Eric Alterman for a while.
MB: [Laughs] Well, he’s already forgotten, so we don’t have much work to do there. But there’s a lot, again, a lot to chew on, a lot of questions packed into that. You know, just starting with your mention of Moshe Dayan — who is a seminal figure in the Nakba, the initial ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in 1948 to establish Israel — he was the southern commander of the Israeli military. And he later kind of became a kind of schizophrenic figure in Israeli politics; he would sometimes offer some kind of left-wing opinions, and then be extremely militaristic. But you know, when it came down to it, Moshe Dayan — like every other member of the Israeli Labor Party — was absolutely opposed to a viable Palestinian state. He even said that we cannot have a Palestinian state because it will connect psychologically, in the minds of the Palestinian public who are citizens of Israel — that 20% of Israel who are indigenous Palestinians — it will connect them to Nablus in the West Bank, and it will provide them with a basis for rebelling against the Israeli state to expand the Palestinian state.
The other labor leaders spoke in terms of the kind of, with the racist language of the demographic time bomb that, you know, we need to give Palestinians a state, otherwise we will be overwhelmed demographically. And so the state that they were proposed was what Yitzhak Rabin, in his final address before the Israeli Knesset, the Israeli parliament, called “less than a state.” He promised Israel that at Oslo, he would deliver the Palestinians less than a state. And if you look at the actual plan that the Palestinians were handed at Oslo — which Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority chairman, didn’t even review before signing — the map was not that different from the map that Donald Trump has offered with the “ultimate deal.” And they’d say, oh, you get 97% of what was, you know, offered in U.N. Resolution 242 in 1967. But it really just isn’t the case when you get down to the details. What the strategy has been with the Labor Party, and with successive Israeli administrations — and with Netanyahu until he got Trump in — was to kind of kick the can down the road with the so-called peace process, so that Israel could keep putting more facts on the ground.
So it was actually Ehud Barak of the Labor Party, Yitzhak Rabin’s successor, who moved more settlers into the West Bank, by a landslide, than Netanyahu did. Ehud Barak actually campaigned on his connection to the settlers. And then Netanyahu capitalizes on the strength of the settlement movement to build this kind of Titanic rock of a right-wing coalition that’s kept him in power for so long. And if you look at who the leading figures are in Israeli life — Naftali Bennett, who was from the Jewish Home Party, he comes out of the Likud party and he’s someone who was an assistant to Netanyahu. Avigdor Lieberman, who was for a long time the leader of the Russian Party. Yisrael Beiteinu, this is someone who came out of the Likud Party, who helped Netanyahu rustle up Russian votes. It’s a Likud one-party state — but then you have, culturally, a dynamic where starting with 1967, the public just becomes more infused with religious Messianism.
The West Bank is the site of the real, emotionally potent Jewish historical sites, particularly in a city like Hebron. And the public becomes attached to it and attains its dynamism through this expansionist project, and the public changes. A lot of people from the kind of liberal labor wing became religious Messianists, started wearing kippot, wearing yarmulkes, the kind of cloth yarmulkes that the modern orthodox settlers where.
RS: OK, but —
MB: Today you not only have that, you have a new movement called the temple movement, which aims to actually replace Jewish prayer at the Western Wall with animal sacrifice, as Jews supposedly practiced thousands of years ago, and to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque, and practice Jewish prayer there. This is not just a messianic movement, but an apocalyptic movement that is actually gaining strength in the Likud party. So when you mentioned Donald Trump’s “ultimate deal,” there’s one detail that everyone seems to have missed there, which is prayer for all at the Dome of the Rock, at Al-Aqsa. That means there will be Jewish prayer there, officially, that Palestinians must be forced to accept that and destroy the status quo, which has prevailed since 1967.
RS: I know, but Max, before I lose this whole interview here — because I think that’s all really interesting; people should read your book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.” That’s not the focus of this discussion I want to have with you.
MB: OK.
RS: And I want to discuss, in this aspect, the whole idea of Israel as a third-rail issue for American politics.
MB: Yeah.
RS: American politics. And the reason I want to do that is there’s obviously a contradiction in the Jewish experience, because Jews — as much or more so than any other group of people in the world — understand what settler colonialism does. They understand what oppression does, they’ve been under the thumb of oppressors. And so I would argue the major part of the Jewish experience was one of revolt against oppression, and recognition of the danger of unbridled power. And that represents a very important force in liberal politics in the United States: a fear of coercive power, a desire for tolerance, and so forth. And we know that Jews have, in the United States and elsewhere in the world, been a source of concern for the other, and tolerance, and criticism of power.
And the reason I’m bringing that up is it seems to me it’s a real contradiction for the Democratic Party, which you know quite a bit about. And in this Democratic Party, there’s this great loathsome feeling about Donald Trump. And many of these people don’t really like Netanyahu. You know, the polling data shows that Jews are, you know, just about as open to the concern for the Palestinians as any other group. And Bernie Sanders, the one Jewish candidate, is the one who dared to bring up the Palestinians — that they have rights also, that they’re human beings. He’s being attacked for it as, like you, a self-hating Jew. And so I want to get at that contradiction. And, you know, full confession, as a Jewish person I believe it’s an honorable tradition of dissent, and concern for the others, and respect for individual freedom. And I think it’s sullied by the identification of the Jewish experience with a colonialist experience. It is a reality that we have to deal with, but that’s not the whole tradition. And I daresay your own family, whatever your contradiction — and I should mention here your father and mother both were quite active in the Clinton administration, right.
And your father, a well-known journalist, Sidney Blumenthal, and your mother, Jacqueline Blumenthal, was I think a White House fellow or something in the Clinton administration? I forget what her job was, but has been active. And they certainly come out of a more liberal Jewish experience, as do most well-known Jewish writers and journalists in the United States. That’s the contradiction that I don’t see being dealt with here. Because after all, it’s easy to blast Putin and his interference, but as I say, Netanyahu interfered very openly, but in a really unseemly way, in the American election by attacking a sitting American president in an appearance before the Congress, and attacking his major foreign-policy initiative. And there’s hardly a word ever said about it. It doesn’t come up in the democratic debates. You know, and the — as I say, there was this incredible moment where Netanyahu, after coming over here and praising Trump for his peace deal, as did his opponent, then he goes off and meets with Putin. And so suddenly it’s OK, and yet the Democrats who want to blast Putin don’t mention Netanyahu, and they don’t mention his relation to Trump.
MB: Well, yeah, I was trying to illustrate kind of the reality of Israel, which just, it’s gotten so extreme that it repels people who even come out of the kind of Democratic Party mainstream. And the Democratic Party was the original bastion in the U.S. for supporting Israel. So my father actually held a book party for my book, “Goliath,” back in 2013. It’s the kind of thing that, you know, a parent who had been a journalist would do for a son or daughter who’s a journalist. And he was harshly attacked when word got out that he had held that party in a neoconservative publication called the Free Beacon, which is kind of part of Netanyahu’s PR operation in D.C. You know, it was like my father had supported, provided material support for terrorism by having a book party for his son.
But the interesting part about that party was who showed up. I didn’t actually know what it was going to be like, and it was absolutely packed. I mean, they live in a pretty small townhouse in D.C, and there just was nowhere to walk, there was nowhere to move. And I found myself in the corner of their dining room shouting through the house to kind of explain what my book was about and answer questions. And a lot of the people there were people who were in or around Hillary’s State Department, people who worked for kind of Democratic Party-linked organizations — just a lot of mainstream Democrat people. And they were giving me a wink and a nod, shaking my hand, giving me a pat on the back, and saying thank you, thank God you did this. Because they cannot stand the Israel lobby, they despise Netanyahu, and they’re disgusted with what Israel’s become.
And we had reached a point by 2013 where it was pretty obvious there was not going to be a two-state solution, and that whole project, the liberal Zionist project, wasn’t going to work out. You know, and the fact that they just could give me a wink and a nod shows also how cowardly a lot of people are in Washington. They weren’t even stepping up to the level my father had, where when his emails with Hillary Clinton were exposed, it became clear that he was sending her my work. And he was actually trying to move people within the State Department toward a more, maybe you could say a more humanistic view, but also a more realistic view of Israel, Palestine and the Netanyahu operation in Washington. Working through [Sheldon] Adelson, using this fraud hack of a rabbi, Shmuley Boteach, has kind of their front man. They ran like a full-page ad in the New York Times painting me and my father as Hillary Clinton’s secret Middle East advisers.
And then one day in the middle of the campaign, Elie Wiesel died. You know, someone who is supposed to be this patron saint of Judaism and the kind of secular theology of Auschwitz, who had spent the last years of his life as part of Sheldon Adelson’s political network. Basically, he had lost all his money to Bernie Madoff, and so he was getting paid off by Adelson. He got half a million dollars from this Christian Zionist, apocalyptic, rapture-ready fanatic, Pastor John Hagee. He was going around with Ted Cruz giving talks. And so when he died, I went on Twitter and tweeted a few photos of Elie Wiesel with these extremist characters.
And I said, you know, here are photos of Elie Wiesel palling around with fascists. And the kind of Netanyahu-Adelson network activated to attack me. And ultimately it led — I actually, within a matter of a few days, it led to Hillary Clinton’s campaign officially denouncing me and demanding that I cease and desist. And so, you know, I looked at the debate on Twitter, and a lot of people were actually supporting me. And it was clear Elie Wiesel, this person who was supposed to be a saint, was actually no longer seen as stainless, that the whole debate had been opened up by 2016.
And now when we look at the Democratic Party and we look at the Democratic field, you know, Bernie Sanders — he’s better than most of the other candidates, or the other candidates, on this issue. After we put a lot of pressure on him in the left wing-grassroots — I mean, I personally protested him at a 2016 event for his position on Palestinians, and we shamed him until he took at least a slightly better position, where you acknowledge the humanity of Palestinians. But what we’re hearing, even from Bernie Sanders, doesn’t even reflect where the grassroots of the Democratic Party — particularly all those young people who are coming out and delivering him a landslide victory tonight in Iowa — are. The Democratic Party is not democratic on Israel, but it’s no longer a third-rail issue. You can talk about it, and the only way that you can be stopped is through legislation, like the legislation we see in statehouses to actually outlaw people who support the Palestinian boycott of Israel. So we’re just in an amazing time where all of the contradictions are completely out in the open.
RS: OK, let me just take a quick break so public radio stations like KCRW that make this available can stick in some advertisements for themselves, which is a good cause. And we’ll be right back with Max Blumenthal. Back with Max Blumenthal, who has written — I mean, I only mentioned one of his books. He wrote a very important book on the right wing in America that was a bestseller; he has been honored in many ways, and yet is a source of great controversy. And I must say, I respect your ability to create this controversy, because it’s controversy about issues people don’t want to deal with. You know, they want to deal with them in sort of feel-good slogans, and it doesn’t work, because people get hurt. And including Jewish people, in the case of Israel. If you develop a settler, colonialist society, and that stands for the Jewish position, and you’re oppressing large numbers of people, be they Palestinian or others, that’s hardly an advertisement for what has been really great about the Jewish experience, which I will argue until my death.
It was represented by people like my mother, who were in the Jewish socialist bund, and two of her sisters were killed by the Czar’s police in Russia. And they believed in Universalist values, an idea of being Jewish as standing for the values of the oppressed, and concern for the oppressed. And most of their experience in the shtetls, and out there in the diaspora, had been being oppressed.
And so I don’t want to lose that there. But I wanted to get now to the last part of this, to what I think is the hypocrisy of the liberal wing of American politics, or so-called. And now they call themselves more progressive. And it really kind of centers around Hillary Clinton. And whatever you want to say about Bernie Sanders — you know, Hillary Clinton’s recent attack on Bernie Sanders, that no one likes him and he stands for nothing and he gets nothing done. And I think this is a, you know, a person that I thought, you know, at one point — despite her starting out as a Goldwater girl and being quite conservative — I thought was, you know, somewhat decent.
And I’m going to make this personal now. I was brought to a more favorable view of Bill and Hillary Clinton, in considerable measure, by your father, as a journalist at the Washington Post, and then working in the administration. And I respect your father and mother, you know, and Sidney Blumenthal and Jacqueline Blumenthal, I think are intelligent people. And I once, you know, went through a White House dinner; I think I only got in because your father put me on the list, and Hillary Clinton said I was her favorite columnist in America — no, the whole world — and it was very flattering. But I look back on it now — Hillary Clinton has really represented a kind of loathsome, interventionist, aggressive, America-first politics that in some ways is even more offensive than Trump. When Trump said he’s going to make America great again, Hillary Clinton said, America’s always been great. What?
MB: Yeah.
RS: What? Slavery, segregation, killing the Native Americans — always been great? You grew up with these people, right? You were in that world. What — so yes, they can come up to you at a book party and say, yes, it’s about time somebody said that. But what are they really about? That they — you know, you mentioned Syria. You know, their great achievement, they created a mess of that society. And she’s the one who went to, said about Libya, oh, we came, we saw, and he’s dead. You know, sodomized to death. So take me into the heart of the so-called liberal experience.
MB: Well, first of all, since you invoke Sidney Blumenthal so frequently, he has a — I think his fourth book in a five-part series on Abraham Lincoln out. And you know, these books address Lincoln almost as if he were a contemporary politician. It’s a completely new contribution to the history of Lincoln, and if you invite him on, be sure —
RS: I’m familiar with it, and I’ll endorse it —
MB: If you invite him on, you can ask him, I would love to hear that debate —
RS: I certainly would, and I have — as I said, I have a lot of respect for your father and mother. I’m asking a different question. Why do good people look the other way? Or how does it work? Just, you know, to the degree you can, take me inside that Washington culture. And where there’s a certain arrogance in it, that they are always, even when they do the wrong things, they’re just always accidents. They’re always mistakes. You know, it never comes out of their ideology, their aggression. So I want to know more about that.
MB: I mean, I saw all these — so many different sides of Washington. And so — and I was always supported by my parents, no matter what view I took. So I don’t feel like I have to live in my father’s shadow or something like that. They remain really supportive of me. I have a new book out — it’s not really new, it came out last April. It’s called “The Management of Savagery,” and it deals substantially with my view of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, but particularly the Hillary State Department, the Obama foreign policy team, and the destruction they wrought in Libya and Syria. So, you know, I put everything I knew about Washington and foreign policy into that book. And so I really would recommend that as well.
But, you know, how does it work with the Clintons? They were — they set up a machine that was really a juggernaut with all this corporate money they brought in through the DLC, the Democratic Leadership Committee. It was a very different structure than we’d seen with previous Democratic candidates who built — who relied heavily on unions and, you know, the civil rights coalition. And that machine never went away. It kept growing like this — kind of like this amoeba that began to engulf the party and politics itself. So that when Bill Clinton was out of power, the machine was passed to Hillary Clinton, and the machine followed her into the Senate. And the machine grew into the Clinton Global Initiative, which was this giant influence-peddling scam that just cashed in on disasters in Haiti, brought in tons of money, tens of millions of dollars from Gulf monarchies, and big oil and the arms industry — everything that funds all the repulsive think tanks on K Street through the Clinton Foundation.
And everyone who was trying to get close to the Clinton Foundation, whether they were in Clinton’s inner circle or not, was just trying to gather influence. That’s why you saw at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, behind her, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was basically Jeffrey Epstein’s personal child sex trafficker, just trying to cultivate influence with people who have this gigantic political machine.
So that’s why so many people, I think, have stayed loyal to this odious project, and have looked the other way as entire countries were destroyed under the direct watch of Hillary Clinton. Libya today — where Hillary Clinton took personal credit for destroying this country, which was at the time before its destruction, I think the wealthiest African nation with the highest quality of life — is now in, still in civil war. We’ve seen footage of open-air slave auctions taking place, and large parts of the country for years were occupied by affiliates of Al Qaeda or ISIS, including Muammar Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte. It was immediately transformed into a haven for the Islamic State.
This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton. There would have been no Benghazi scandal if she hadn’t gone into Libya to come, see, and kill, as she bragged that she did. And in Syria, she attempted the same thing; fortunately failed, thanks to assistance from Iran and Russia. But this was, it consisted of a billion dollars, multibillion-dollar operation to arm and equip some of the most dangerous, psychotic fanatics on the face of the planet in Al Qaeda and 31 flavors of Salafi jihadi. Hillary Clinton said we can’t be negotiating with the Syrian government; the hard men with guns will solve this problem. She said that in an interview, and that’s her legacy.
Beyond that, you know, I in Washington grew up in a very complex situation. I don’t know what view people have of me, but I grew up in what was – D.C. when D.C. was known as C.C., or Chocolate City. It was a mostly black city, run by a local black power structure with a strong black middle class, and I grew up in a black neighborhood. And I kind of saw apartheid firsthand, where I saw how a small white minority actually controlled the city from behind the scenes. And then, you know, and I saw that reality, and then I went to school across town in the one white ward to a private school, and I got to know some of the children of the kind of mostly Democratic Party elite. And so I saw both sides of the city. And it was through that other side, and also my parents’ connection to the Clintons, that I — I mean, I barely interacted with the Clintons. I’ve had very minimal interaction with them ever.
But I did get to meet Chelsea Clinton once. And you know, for all my reservations about the Clintons or what they were, I thought you know, she was kind of an admirable figure at that time. She was a — she was a kid, she was an adolescent who was being mocked on “Saturday Night Live” because she was going through an awkward phase. She went to school down the street at Sidwell Friends, and I met her at a White House Christmas party; she was really friendly and personable. And you know, since then, I’ve watched her grow into adulthood and become a complete kind of replication of the monstrous political apparatus that her family has set up, without really charting her own path. She just basically inherited the reign of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. She does paid talks for Israel. Her husband Marc Mezvinsky, he gambled on Greece’s debt along with Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. You know, the squid fish. I mean, there’s just — I mean, as a young person, seeing someone of my generation grow up and follow that path, do nothing to carve out her own space — it just absolutely disgusts me.
And now Hillary Clinton is still there! She won’t go away! She’s not only helped fuel this Russiagate hysteria that’s plunged us into a new Cold War, but she’s trying to destroy the hopes and dreams of millions of young people who are saddled with endless debt by destroying Bernie Sanders. And it’s because she sees her own legacy being smashed to pieces, not by any right-wing, vast conspiracy, but by the electorate, the new electorate of the Democratic Party. And I absolutely welcome that. I think, you know, tonight in Iowa, a landslide Bernie victory, one of the takeaways is this will be the end of Clintonism. It’s time to move on and hand things over to a new generation. They had their chance, and they not only failed, they caused disasters across the world.
RS: So this is — we’re going to wind this up, but I think we’ve hit a really important subject. And I want to take a little bit more time on it. And I thought you expressed it quite powerfully. But the error, if you’ll permit me, is to center it on the personality, or the family. And I don’t think Clintonism is going to go away. Because what it represents — and I know you —
MB: It could be become Bloombergism, you know?
RS: Well, that’s where I’m going. I think what Clintonism represents is this triangulation, this new Democrat. And I interviewed him when he was governor, just when he was campaigning. And I did a lot of writing on the Financial Services Modernization Act and on welfare reform, and all of these ingredients of this policy. And what it really represents — no wonder they’re rewarded by the super wealthy. But the Democratic Party lost its organizational base with the destruction of the labor movement and weakening of other sources of progressive class-based politics, concern about working people and ordinary people.
And what Clinton did is he came along, and he had a sort of variation of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, how he got the Republicans to be so important in the South. And it was this new politics, this redefinition. And it’s not going away, because it’s the cover for Wall Street. It’s the cover for exploitation. And the main thing that happened from when you were young — or born, actually; you’re 42 years — it’s 42 years of, since Clinton really, and you can blame Reagan, you can blame the first President Bush, you can blame other people, and certainly blame the whole bloody Republican Party. I’m not going to give them a pass.
But the fact is, what the Clinton revolution did was it made class warfare for the rich fashionable, in a way that no one else was able to do it, no other movement. And it said these thieves on Wall Street, these people who are going to rip you off 20 different ways to Sunday — they’re good people, and they support good causes. And you mentioned Lloyd Blankfein, you know; “government” Goldman Sachs, you know. Robert Rubin came from Goldman Sachs; he was Clinton’s treasury secretary. And the whole thing of unleashing Wall Street and getting, destroying the New Deal — that was a serious program to basically betray the average American and betray their interest. And that’s why we’ve had this growing income inequality since that time. That’s the Clinton legacy in this world, really, is the billionaire coup, the billionaire culture.
MB: Yep, the oligarchy was put on fast-forward by the new politics of the Clintons. What they promised wasn’t, you know, a break from Reaganism, although there was certainly a cultural difference. They promised continuity, and that’s what we saw through the Obama administration. Obama presided over the biggest decline in black home ownership in the United States since, I think, prior to World War II. You mentioned Glass-Steagall; this set the stage for the financial crisis; NAFTA, destroyed the unions, shipped American jobs first to Mexico and then to China, and destabilized northern Mexico along with the drug war that Clinton put on overdrive, creating the immigration crisis that helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump.
Welfare reform — all of these policies were just, were odious to me and so many people at the time, but there was just this desire to just beat the Republicans and out-triangulate them. Now that we’ve seen the effects on them and so many people have felt the effects, you have an entire generation that sees no future, that realizes they’re living in an oligarchy, realizes that the alternative to Bernie Sanders is a literal oligarch, this miniature Scrooge McDuck in Mike Bloomberg, and they’re just not having it.
I don’t know if Hillary Clinton understands this history; I don’t think she sees it in context. She just blames Russian boogeyman and fake news for everything. But the rest of us who’ve lived through it really do, and it’s the continuity that is so dangerous, especially on foreign policy. I mean, the Libya proxy war and the Syria proxy war, the stage was set in Yugoslavia with NATO’s war that destroyed a socialist country and unleashed hell on a large part of its population. And we still don’t debate that war. The stage for the Iraq invasion was set in 1998 with Bill Clinton passing the Iraqi Liberation Act, which sent $90 million into the pocket of the con-man Ahmed Chalabi and made regime change the official policy of the United States.
It’s tragic that Bernie Sanders voted for that. But we have to see the cause and the effect to understand why so many people are in open revolt against that legacy. And you’re right, it goes well beyond the Clintons. It’s a program that markets right-wing economics and a right-wing foreign policy in a sort of progressive bottle. Now what they’re trying to do with the label on that progressive bottle, the way they’re trying to preserve it — we see it a lot through the [Elizabeth] Warren campaign — is through a kind of neoliberal identity politics that divorces class from race and gender, and attempts to basically distract people with needless arguments about Bernie Sanders saying a woman couldn’t have gotten elected in a private conversation that only Elizabeth Warren was party to.
So I’m really encouraged, I guess, by the results that we’re seeing. We’re talking tonight on the eve of the Iowa caucus. I’m encouraged by those results, just because I see them as a repudiation of the politics that have just dominated my life as a 42-year-old, and just been so absolutely cynical and destructive at their core. But I would just remind anyone who is supporting Bernie Sanders and listening to this — he’s not just running for president. He’s running for the next target of a deep state coup, and the deep state exists, and will respond with more force and viciousness than it did to Donald Trump, who actually has much more in common with them than Bernie Sanders.
RS: I didn’t quite get the grammar of that last paragraph, not any fault of yours. You said he’s not just running — can you —
MB: He’s running for the next target of a deep state coup, the forces of Wall Street. You know, the —
RS: Oh, you mean he will be the target.
MB: He will be the target.
RS: Yeah, you know, it’s — you just said something really — OK, I know we have to wrap this up, but it’s actually just getting interesting for me. [Laughs]
MB: Sorry about that.
RS: No, no, no, come on, come on. [Laughter] What I mean is, I do these things because I learn, and I think, and you know, my selfish interests. And really the question right now, I did a wonderful interview with Chomsky on this podcast, and he took me to school for not appreciating the importance of the lesser evil. And I’ve lost sleep over it since. You know, well — and we always fall for that, you know. On the other hand, some of the things you’ve been talking about, you know — and this is going to get me in big trouble — but you know, Trump is so blatant. He’s so out there in favor of greed and corruption.
He’s so obnoxious. And actually, in terms of his policy impact — not his rhetoric, but his policy impact — is he really that much worse? Well, for instance, you mentioned NAFTA. The rewrite of NAFTA, even before, you know, some progressives got involved in it, it was a substantially better trade agreement than the first NAFTA. You know, he hasn’t gotten us into Syria-type, Iraq-type wars.
He actually — so I’m not — you know, yes, I consider him a neofascist; rhetoric can be very dangerous. He’s obviously spread very evil, poisonous ideas about immigrants and what have you, you know, I can go down the list. But the people that you’ve been talking about, that–you know, and I voted for all of them, and I’ve supported them — are they really the lesser evil? You know, or are they a more effective form of evil?
MB: I mean, to understand Trump, we just have to see him as the apotheosis of an oligarchy. In its most unsheathed, unvarnished form, he’s just lifted the mask off the corruption, the legal corruption that’s prevailed, and been completely unabashed about it. Donald Trump was targeted with this kind of Russiagate campaign, which was partly run by Clintonite dead-enders who wanted to blame Russia for her loss, and to attack Donald Trump with this kind of McCarthyite rhetoric. But it was also being influenced by the intelligence services — figures like John Brennan and James Comey, and neoconservative hardliners who could easily jump back into the Democratic Party. And they were just seeking a new Cold War, to justify the budgets of the intelligence services, and the defense budget and so on.
But at his core, Donald Trump, what he’s actually done, especially domestically, I think outside of the immigration stuff, is he’s been kind of a traditional Republican. And he won a lot of consent from Republicans in Congress when he passed a trillion-dollar tax cut. He’s given corporate America everything he wanted after kind of campaigning with this populist, Bannonite tone. So in a lot of ways, Donald Trump does share more in common with the Democratic Party elite — with a lot of the figures who’ve been nominated to serve on the DNC platform committee, who are just from the Beltway blob and the Beltway bandits — than they do with Bernie Sanders.
And I think that if Bernie Sanders gets the nomination, there will be an effort to McGovern him. To just kind of turn him — turn this whole process into McGovern ’72, hope that Bernie Sanders gets destroyed by Donald Trump, and then wag their fingers at the left for the next 20 years until they get another Bill Clinton. I think that they don’t know how to stop him at this point, but they’re willing to let him be the nominee and go down to Donald Trump, because Bernie Sanders threatens their interests, and the movement behind him particularly, more than Donald Trump does.
RS: You know, they will stop Bernie Sanders, and they will do it by the argument of lesser evilism. And you see the line developing —
MB: But who is the lesser evil, Bob? I mean, Joe Biden is like this doddering wreck. There is no other candidate who seems even remotely viable against Trump.
RS: No, no, no — I understand that. I’m telling you what — well, it seems to me there’s — you know, you want to talk about fake news, the, misreporting of Bernie Sanders — in fact, the misreporting of what democratic socialism is. I mean, he’s now branded in the mainstream media as some hopeless fanatic because he dared to defend democratic socialism. Democratic socialism has been the norm for the most successful economies in the world, even to a degree when we’ve been successful. That was the legacy of Roosevelt, after all, is to try to save capitalism from itself. That’s why you had some enlightened government programs, you know, right down the list, and that’s what saved Germany after the war, and that’s what France and England and so forth, that’s why they have health care systems.
But the mainstream media has actually taken a very moderate figure, Bernie Sanders, and demonized him as some kind of hopeless ideologue, right? And as you point out, Bernie Sanders is hardly a radical thinker on issues — particularly, as you mentioned, about the Mideast and so forth. What he is, is somebody who actually is honoring the best side of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: you can’t let these greed merchants control everything, you have to worry about some compensation for ordinary people. That’s what Bernie Sanders is all about. And it should be an argument that has great appeal to people of power, otherwise they’re going to come after you with the pitchforks. Instead the mainstream media, in its hysteria, you know, has taken this word “democratic socialist” and used it to vilify him.
But the point that I want — and we will end on this, but I’d like to get your reaction — that came up in my discussion with Chomsky, who I have great admiration for. But it is this lesser evilism. And I think while, yes, people in their vote can think about that, they can vote that way — I’ve done it much of my life; I’ve voted for all sorts of evil people because they were lesser. But as a journalist — and I want to end about your journalism — as a journalist, I think we have to get that idea out of our head. And it means being able to be objective about a Donald Trump when he comes up with his NAFTA rewrite, and say hey, there are some good things in it, including the fact that you have to pay $16 an hour to people in Mexico who are working on cars that are going to be sold in the United States, OK. And what the liberal community has been able to do in the mainstream media, MSNBC, is Trumpwash everything.
Which brings us back to your critique. They’ve been able to say — they’ve made warmongering liberal and fashionable. They’ve taken the — they’ve made the CIA now a wonderful institution, the FBI a wonderful institution, [John] Bolton a wonderful hero. And I want to take my hat off to your journalism, because you have — and I do recommend that people go to your website, the Grayzone. Because you have had the courage to say, wait a minute, what’s called a lesser evil can’t be given a pass. Because in fact, maybe in some ways, or in many ways, it’s a more effective evil. We know what Trump is; he stands exposed every hour of every day.
But you know, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton — and I’m not trying to pick on them, but you know, they represented this embrace of the Wall Street center — they were much more effective in redistributing income to the rich. You know, you can talk about Trump’s tax break, but the real redistribution came with letting Wall Street do its collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that caused the destruction of 70% of black wealth in America, 60% of brown wealth in America, according to the Federal Reserve. So really, in this election, people have to think — you know, yes, I’ll hold my nose and I’ll vote for the lesser evil. But what’s that going to get us? Does it get us a more effective evil, a better-packaged evil? Last word from you?
MB: Well, I mean, one of the things that we do at the Grayzone.com, our mission is to oppose this policy of regime change that the U.S. imposes across the world against any state that seeks some independence from the U.S. sphere of influence that wants to craft its own economic policies in a socialist way, like Venezuela, Nicaragua. We, you know, we exposed a lot of the deceptions that were trying to stimulate public support for regime change in Syria, that would have been absolutely disastrous. And in all of these situations, we don’t stand alone, but we stand among a really, really small group of alternative outlets who don’t play the lesser-evil game on regime change.
Where we say, well, this leader or that leader are horrible, and they are evil dictators, but we should also be kind of suspicious of the, you know, of the war that the U.S. might wage. Or we should be critical of these brutal economic sanctions that have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans through excess deaths. We say — we actually look at the alternative to the current government and show that there actually isn’t the lesser evil, that the alternative is far worse. In Syria it was Al Qaeda and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood; in Venezuela it’s Juan Guaidó’s right-wing, white collar mafia, which is a front for Exxon Mobil. Same thing in Nicaragua.
And you know, as much as I respect and I’ve learned from Noam Chomsky, he plays that lesser-evil game on regime change. He’s trashed all of the, all of these governments. He celebrated the collapse of the Soviet Union, and we saw what happened to Russia after that. So it’s important to look at lesser evilism through a historical context, and then we can apply it to the United States as well. Look at who’s been sold to us as the lesser evil that we had to support. Well, we’ve been talking about them, Bob, for the last half hour, and they’ve subjected Americans to the same evil the Republican Party has, for the most part. Maybe they’ve limited it to some degree. But now there’s actually an option for something that I’d say is moderate in the United States.
You’re right — Bernie Sanders does nothing, and proposes nothing, outside the framework of the New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. I don’t even think he’s a democratic socialist. I don’t know what that term really means. He’s a social democrat. And he is someone who at least offers a change from the consensus where the government actually starts to intervene to prevent people from dying excess deaths across the country, from the opioid crisis, from poverty, from homelessness. Eighty percent of new homes that have been built in the U.S. in the past two years are luxury housing. And you know who else is supporting Bernie Sanders besides all these debt-saddled youth? Active duty U.S. military veterans who are sick of permanent war. $160,000 in campaign contributions have been given to Bernie by active duty vets. That’s something like eight times more than have gone to Joe Biden, who is involved at the forefront of almost every American war since Gulf War I.
And we’re really capitalizing on that at the Grayzone. We understand the American public and the western public are sick of being lied into war, and they’re sick of being pushed into lesser evilism, whether it’s abroad in countries that are targeted by the U.S., or at home. And so we’re just there providing balance and exposing whatever the lie is of the day.
RS: Let me, as an older person, end with a little editorial about what — and I agree with the thrust of what you’ve been saying — but why I think this word “democratic socialism” is important, not just social democrat. Because it acknowledges the vast harm that has been done by the left in human history. It’s not just the right, it’s not just the corporate elite, and it’s not just the oligarchs. That people got hold of a message of concern for the ordinary person. It happened in religion too, after all, you know; structures were developed, people who claimed they were following the message of Christ, and they ended up building edifices to the exploitation of ordinary people.
I think what Bernie Sanders represents — and I’ll ask your response, but what I think he represents, the reason he’s so authentic — he actually believes in the grassroots. He actually believes that an ordinary person in Vermont can make intelligent decisions about the human condition, and about justice and freedom. And I think the reason Bernie Sanders can survive the rhetorical assaults on his leftism or his socialism, is that what people of power in the capitalist world have managed to do is identify this cause of social justice, a notion of democratic socialism with totalitarianism, with elitism. And Bernie Sanders — and this is a good night to celebrate Bernie Sanders, if it’s true; I hadn’t caught up with the news, but if he’s really doing that well in Iowa. Because I thought he would get 1% of the vote four years ago when he started; I never thought this would happen.
I think what makes Bernie Sanders authentic is his respect for the ordinary person. He is the opposite of that leftist elitist–and you have them as well as rightist elitists — who thinks they have to distort history to protect the average person from reality. And Bernie Sanders is — he speaks truth about what’s going on. And at a time when people on the right and the left have nothing but contempt for most of the politicians, and journalistic leaders and everything else, for having betrayed them. So I think Bernie Sanders is a ray of hope. I wish he would be around a lot longer, but then again, I wish I’d be around a lot longer. But it’s nice to run into Max Blumenthal, who’s half my age and has all of that spirit that I’d like to see in journalism. So thanks, Max, for doing this.
MB: Thank you, Bob. It’s a real honor.
RS: And by the way, I ignored that last book of yours. Could you give the title again and how people get it?
MB: It’s called “The Management of Savagery.” And let me pull it off the shelf so I can actually read the subheader. You can edit this. It’s called “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump.” And it’s really kind of my look at the, sort of how the politics of my lifetime and my generation has been shaped by foreign policy disasters that an unelected foreign-policy establishment has subjected us to.
RS: Full disclosure, I actually have not read it, and I will get it as soon as I can.
MB: I’ll send you a copy —
RS: No, no, no, you got — it’s hard enough to make a living as a writer. I don’t think you should give these things away for nothing. I’ll get myself a copy. And I want to thank you again. I’ve been talking to Max Blumenthal, check out his work, check out the Grayzone. These podcasts are done basically for KCRW, the public radio station in Santa Monica, where Christopher Ho is the engineer who gets it up on the air.
At Truthdig, Natasha Hakimi Zapata writes the brilliant intros and overview of these things and posts them up there. Here at USC, Sebastian Grubaugh, the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, really gets the whole thing going and hooks up everyone, thanks to him. And finally, there’d be no “Scheer Intelligence” without the main Scheer, Joshua Scheer, who’s the show’s producer. And we’ll see you next week with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence.”
Which Stock Sector Has The Highest Revenue Exposure To China
Earlier this week, when discussing Goldman’s latest downgrade to global GDP which the bank now expects to be cut as much as 2% in Q1 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, only to rebound in subsequent quarters as the spread of the virus is contained…
… we asked why Goldman ignored the hit to corporate profitability, saying that “we are curious why Goldman did not account for the crunch that global supply chains are already sustaining: while Chinese tourism and exports are certainly important economic pathways, we wonder what will happen to both vendors and customers of intermediate goods that rely on Chinese factory tolling for output and for downstream products. Or perhaps that will be the topic of a subsequent Goldman report looking at how badly corporate earnings will be hit as the GDP hit impacts the corporate top and bottom line. We eagerly await such a report not only from Goldman but the other banks who have been oddly mute on the topic. Perhaps they are just waiting for the wave of guidance cuts that will inevitably be unleashed in the coming weeks by S&P500 member companies.”
Well, we didn’t have long to wait, because just two days later, Goldman’s chief equity strategist, David Kostin did a report looking at the “fundamental impacts of the coronavirus” on US companies.
Clearly, this was long overdue, because as we remarked earlier, “the crisis in China is creating havoc in global business: when commerce is interrupted, slowed or idled completely company revenues and profits drop hard. Analysts and investors have been viewing the developments in China as if business is merely deferred, not lost. That might be true for some of the businesses that deal with large-scale products, but for a number of businesses a large portion of sales are lost forever. For example, a lot of regular business and leisure travel that has been postponed is probably lost, so too are the sales at a number of consumer-related companies – there is no pent up demand for a hotel room, a coffee or a burger. And no one is considering the loss of labor income – due to the idling of production lost travel as well as the complete closure of sales offices – on all sides of the ocean that could reduce consumer spending in current and coming quarters.”
Indeed, the list of companies that so far have indicated that Q1 business operations will be impacted cut across a number of industries, and includes Delta, American, United, GM, Ford, Tesla, Google, Starbucks, McDonalds, Boeing, Nike, Wynn Resorts, Hilton Hyatt and Marriott – and the list will undoubtedly grow in coming months.
So what does Goldman think?
Well, curiously, to Kostin the coronavirus’s main impact on the US equity market will come through valuation changes rather than earnings, which is bizarre because if there is one thing that China’s economy grinding a halt in Q1 will do, is send earnings in free fall as copper producers around the globe have already found out. And while we think this is ludicrous, to Kostin what matters is just the multiple, specifically he writes that “S&P 500 NTM P/E peaked at 18.7x on January 17, traded down to a low of 18.1x (January 31) as coronavirus concerns intensified, and has rebounded to 19.1x as the market has become more sanguine on the economic reverberations of the spreading illness.”
Paradoxically, Kostin ignores all the evidence to the contrary and predicts that “the impact of lower global and US economic activity on 2020 S&P 500 EPS will be limited.” Well, that’s now timestamped, and we will certainly revisit it in three months time. In any case, Kostin justifies his cheerful prediction based on Goldman’s forecast that the overall impact on full-year global GDP growth is expected to be -0.1 to -0.2 pp, which would result in a $0.30 to $0.60 reduction in the bank’s full-year EPS estimate of $174 (20 to 40 bp decline in 2020E growth of 6%).
While Goldman’s big picture assessment is suspiciously optimistic, the bank does note – correctly – that the impact of coronavirus on US equities will likely be focused on select firms with the most exposure to China (which is obvious in a day and age when virtually every firm has some exposure to China).
It also goes without saying, that those most exposed to China are Chinese firms: since January 13, Chinese stock indices have plummeted: CSI 300 has declined by 7% and Shanghai Shenzhen Composite by 8%. During that same period, a basket of US firms with high China sales exposure has underperformed the S&P 500 by 5 pp (-3% vs. +2%). Basket constituents with the highest sales exposure to Greater China are YUMC (100%), WYNN (75%), and QRVO (74%).
Here are some additional observations from Kostin on which sectors will be hit the hardest:
Many consumer-facing US firms have halted operations in select Chinese locations. For example, CCL and RCL temporarily suspended cruise operations in China. SBUX has closed more than half of stores in China, which amounts to more than 13% of its global, company-operated storefronts. MCD closed hundreds of restaurants in the Hubei province, a small portion of the firm’s 37,000 global restaurants. Major airlines AAL, UAL, and DAL announced that they would suspend all flights to and from mainland China through March 27, March 28, and April 30, respectively. After reporting promising results from its new streaming service, DIS announced that it would close its parks in both Shanghai and Hong Kong. The expected income headwind of $175 million from those closures represents over 30% of the firm’s annual operating income from international parks.
Airlines and Gaming are among the industries that will be most affected by the coronavirus. GS airlines analysts highlighted that UAL had more than two times the capacity exposure to China than AAL or DAL. The coronavirus will also have a significant impact on the gaming industry. Many US casinos have operations in Macau, which will be affected by venue closures and by potential extended travel restrictions even after the casinos reopen. According to their most recent annual filings, WYNN has the largest exposure to Greater China (75% of revenues; 46% of assets), followed by LVS (62%; 54%) and MGM (22%; 20%). For the profitability of these firms, the halt in operations comes at an inopportune moment because the Chinese New Year is typically the most lucrative time of year for Macao gaming.
Amusingly, even as it lays out its confusingly bullish take on how modest the Coronavirus impact will be, Goldman admits that nobody really knows anything, and that managements have given only limited guidance regarding the likely impact of coronavirus on business activity. And while most managements elected not to provide guidance due to the uncertainty surrounding the virus – and the longer the pandemic goes on, the greater the guidance cut will eventually be – a few firms with significant exposure to China estimated the potential impact to 1Q 2020 results. And here is where things start to make some sense, because of the 58 S&P 500 firms that guided on 1Q 2020 EPS, 67% provided EPS guidance below the prevailing consensus expectations, roughly in line with the historical average. Firms including ALGN, AVY, NKE, PH, and ITW explicitly cited the coronavirus as a factor contributing to reduced EPS guidance.
What are Goldman’s recommendations? According to Kostin, investors who believe the economic consequences of the coronavirus will be limited should increase exposure to cyclicals and value stocks. Despite above-average dividend yields, the bank’s Dividend Growth basket has declined sharply alongside cyclicals and currently trades with depressed valuations. The sector-neutral basket of 50 stocks offers an annualized dividend yield of 3.5% (vs. 1.9% for S&P 500) and is expected to grow dividends 9% annually during the next several years (compared with 5% for the S&P 500). The median constituent currently trades at a nearly 40% discount to the market (forward P/E of 12x vs. 19x for S&P 500).
In short, if fears of global pandemic are allayed, the basket should outperform. Basket constituents with the highest market betas are SWKS (1.77), DXC (1.74), WYNN (1.57), AVGO (1.55), and CAT (1.49).
On the other hand, if Goldman – which is legendary for its irrational bullishness and in Dec 2018 predicted 4 rate hikes, even as the Fed ended up cutting rates 3 times – is once again wrong, and the coronavirus breakout is more serious than expected, then all bets are clearly off not just for the dividend growth basket, but all stocks, although one sector stands out. As we wrote last week in “Is Tech About To Suffer A “Dot Com” Bubble Collapse? It’s Suddenly All In China’s Hands”, the one sector with the greatest exposure to Greater China and Asia Pacific in general, is also the sector that has outperformed the most in recent months. Tech.
Barely into the New Year, 2020 vision has brought many revelations into better focus, making several ongoing observations perfectly clear. Although there are those who’ve been watching the dots of The Matrix assemble into the big picture for decades now, the election of Donald Trump has increasingly exposed what was hidden in plain sight for so long.
The awakening for many Americans could be compared to that of actor Jim Carrey’s character in the 1998 film “The Truman Show”. In that narrative, the unsuspecting star of a global reality television program came to the realization his entire worldview was formed within a bubble; a literal bubble that generated bubblevision in Carrey’s character as all of those around (and above) him performed right on cue.
Truly, it feels like that now in America. The times have become surreal.
And there is a great percentage of Americans who still live within the bubble. They are everywhere: In the workplace, in schools and colleges and at restaurants and in bars. They vigorously debate each other on who would make a better president between Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, or Joe Biden. They LOVE the fact that Trump was impeached and consider Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, and the Devil’s butler (Chuck Schumer) to be American heroes.
Those in the bottom of the bubble are also concerned about Syria’s chemical weapons and patriotically desire bombs to fall on Iran. Of course the pundits and politicians cajoling these played plebeians are all part of the act. The Establishment’s middle managers know exactly what they are doing, and they know they’d have zero leverage if not for the dupes. It’s why they use carefully crafted language to conceal their motives and lies.
There also remains the possibility of an even grander deception that involves Donald J. Trump directly, or indirectly. This prospect has caused many, including this skeptical blogger, to question if everything we are now witnessing in American politics is occurring naturally or if is there something else going on. In any event, it seems the ongoing left-right dialectics have become a diversion as the Surveillance State expands unabated.
Furthermore, it appears the Democratic Party is fracturing down the middle, with moderates to the left of us and socialists to the even further left. The warfare was front and center during the recent Iowa Caucuses. For the first time in 76 years, the Des Moines Register canceled the release of its “gold-standard” Iowa Poll after a respondent “raised concerns”. Then an app caused a coding error that tarnished the Democratic Party results in Iowa on the day of the nation’s first caucus. What were the odds of both of these occurrences happening right on cue? And the tech-firm behind the “screw-up” on Iowa’s caucus day was run by “former staffers for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Obama’s presidential campaign, as well as Google, Apple and former DNC employees”.
Obviously, the Iowa Caucus fiasco was rigged to diminish Bernie Claus while raising Joe Biden’s stake to the minimum viability – because, just like in 2016, the Democratic National Committee will attempt to steal the election away from Sanders. Evidently, the Democratic Party elites still don’t trust a socialist to win the U.S. Presidency.
Pass the popcorn.
And, by the way, isn’t the following interesting:
– A gay guy who is running for president has the word “butt” in his name.
– Operation Ukraine/Impeachment CIA “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella’s surname contains the letters C-I-A and in the correct order.
– The name of the tech firm who “botched” the Iowa Caucus results (and run by former Clinton and Obama staffers) is called “Shadow, Inc”
– While, at every turn, a former reality TV star will “Trump” them all
It isn’t ALL just made for TV, right? Because it really is happening, right?
Right?
In any event, like true versus false, or life versus death, or cold versus hot, perhaps Conservative versus Swamp Rat is a valid ideological construct upon which we can expound.
With that in mind, here are seven (7) facts that have become completely obvious since Trump’s election in 2016:
1.) The Swamp Prefers Power over Justice
If The Swamp could be defined as the political establishment, the corporatocracy, globalists, elite bankers, and unelected bureaucrats or the Military-Industrial Complex – then those aligned with The Swamp currently would include RiNOs (Republicans in Name Only), Neocons, the Democratic Party, the Mainstream Media, the Loony Left, social media propagandists and censors, Marxists, liberals, globalists, elderly hippies, welfare moochers, unicorn chasers, transgendered bathroom rights crusaders, rabid feminists, rainbow chasing socialists, Black Lives Matter racists, Antifa agitators, Never Trumpers, Millennial snowflakes, and ALL who subvert the U.S. Constitution for their taxpayer-subsidized paychecks.
Indeed. The value systems of conservative Americans are quite different than those of The Swamp. This is why words like “liberty” and “equality” and “fairness” hold separate meanings for each. In the example of the former, these concepts are the result of natural law. In the latter, they derive more from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Will to Power”; an idea for which the German philosopher also claimed was demonstrated in Darwinism as the “Will to Survive”.
Accordingly, the survival instinct can add entirely new dimensions to the consequences of political power and its inherently fictitious exculpation: “The ends justify the means”. It’s why The Swamp propagates the illusions of narratives over facts; and, in so doing, they have constructed a veritable panopticon of power – a literal bubble where We the People are constantly surveilled, enslaved by debt, and fed a steady diet of falsehoods and opiates; while being selectively censored on YouTube and Twitter, no less.
Pursuant to being tricked by FBI agents, Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to a process crime during Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation in 2017. Just then former FBI Director James Comey tweeted the following Bible scripture:
“But justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”
– Amos 5:24
Paradoxically, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer cited the same verse in the well of the U.S. Senate during the closing arguments of Trump’s impeachment trial. Of course, James Comey and Chuck Schumer referencing Biblical justice is a joke because they know full well what they have done. But, to them, it’s an act put on for the bubbleheads who swallow it all because they believe Trump to be a xenophobic, misogynistic, and racist hater.
Truly, The Swamp has manufactured its own “reality” in the bubble. It’s why race and gender and sexual preference are prioritized over such lofty conceptions of constitutional law and due process. It’s also why open borders and the phony presidential impeachment debacle have taken precedence over routing out corruption from the highest offices of American government.
For over three years, the public has been told President Trump is an illegitimate president because he colluded with the Russians to win in 2016. It was not true, but, in spite of the fact that Democrats actually DID conspire with foreign agents in the 2016 Presidential Election, the Russiagate falsehood was used by the same Democrats to win the U.S. House in the 2018 Midterm Elections so they could, in turn, launch a sham impeachment of the president in order to hack the 2020 Election.
Sadly, today, most Americans are more concerned regarding abortion rights, climate change, and racism than constitutional law and the collapse of longstanding American institutions.
Social Justice and Political Correctness are codes of faux justice that has subverted genuine law and impartiality in the bubble; it is how the New Morality empowers those at the top of the pyramid while enslaving those below. The system will never fix itself. Why would it?
2.) Deception, Legal Gimmicks, and Political Chicanery are Tools The Swamp Uses as Means to its Ends
As witnessed during the Mueller investigation following the 2016 Presidential Election, the Kavanaugh hearings before the 2018 Midterm Elections, and the recent Ukrainegate Impeachment circus prior to the 2020 Presidential Election, the Swamp Rats will say or do anything to achieve political leverage.
Just as a dirty-dossier was used to launch Operation Russiagate against Trump and his supporters, a “whistleblower” was used to launch the Operation Ukrainian Impeachment. Furthermore, Operation Ukraine’s whistleblower complaint was most certainly crafted by Lawfare, LLC. – the same firm that has successfully indicted Team Trump for process crimes while successfully defending the likes of Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Rice, Lynch, Strzok, Page, the Ohr’s, Bill & Hill, et al.
Just as The Swamp delivered Judge Kavanaugh’s alleged rape victims right on cue, so, too did they have Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, served up on a platter for a subpoena surprise in the waning days of their fading impeachment.
To be sure, the impeachment process in the U.S. House was a wholly politically partisan affair, and quite unfair – even to the point of refusing witnesses on behalf of Team Trump. Still, coordinated efforts to sustain the initiative were persistently availed: The Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled that Trump illegally withheld aid to Ukraine as the House Democrats additionally released a “cache of notes and texts from Lev Parnas, a former associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
In fact, President Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon called for an investigation into “coordination between Congressional Democrats and members of the media” regarding the timely release of various last-minute impeachment “bombshells”.
And just days before the final impeachment vote in the U.S. Senate, George Conway, the husband of presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway, projected the bias and fears of Lawfare, LLC onto Senate Republicans for not allowing John Bolton to testify. In an opinion piece, he wrote:
Fear of Trump drives the actions of the spineless GOP caucus, as does fear of the truth, and fear of a partisan base to which none dare speak the truth.
Yet, in Conway’s brazenly partisan advocacy for the US Constitution, and truth, he failed to equally demand the testimonies of faux whistleblower Eric Ciaramella or unofficial Ukrainian lottery winner Hunter Biden.
See how that works? The Swamp remains consistently and completely shameless even as We the People are perfectly captivated by high slimes and intervenors.
3.) There are No Moderates in The Swamp
When all elected politicians represent bipartisan constituencies to varying degrees, then why are the Democrats always unified while a percentage of Republicans consistently strive to reach across the political aisle? Why? Perhaps because only some U.S. Republicans and ALL U.S. Democrats solely serve The Swamp. And, although the myth of moderates in The Swamp continues inside the bubble, the truth is that there are none.
Consider the recent impeachment trial of President Trump: The Senate Democrats, and Republican Mitt Romney, fully understand the high crimes of the Obama administration in Ukraine that were projected onto President Trump. They cannot deny the FISA abuse as outlined within Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report, the fact that House Manager Adam Schiff’s office colluded with the “whistleblower” and then submitted weakly contrived articles of impeachment after a third-world sham process in the U.S. House.
Yet every single Democrat senator voted to overturn the presidency of Donald J. Trump. In so doing, they demonstrated their willingness to disenfranchise over 60 million American voters via illicit articles advanced by a kangaroo court.
Indeed. The allegorical curtain has been torn away, the wizards have been completely exposed, and, Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Even Minnesota’s first elected female U.S. Senator, Amy Klobuchar, as a Democratic Party presidential candidate, claims to be a Midwestern moderate – but she voted in the U.S. Senate to honor and uphold the impeachment fraud. And, certainly, that came as no surprise because she once fooled Judge Brett Kavanaugh when, early in his Supreme Court nomination process, he “expressed appreciation for the way Klobuchar asked probing but respectful questions”; just before she voted to ruin his life without evidence, of course. This, from a University of Chicago Law School graduate who later become a county attorney. But, obviously, not a moderate.
Because there are no moderates in The Swamp.
4.) The Swamp Desires to Disarm the American Public
As established in the paragraphs above, The Swamp seeks power over justice with certain fanaticism. In so doing, the Swamp Rats utilize deception, illusions, and political chicanery. Then what, you may ask, stands in the way of their ultimate goal of global tyranny?
One way to address that question would be to consider what has stalled their nefarious plans for America during the past two centuries. The answer, so far, has been the United States Constitution. Although it’s been badly twisted and bent into its current shape, it has not yet been entirely broken. And why is that? Because the Second Amendment has, by and large, secured constitutional liberties against would-be tyrants and their encroaching totalitarianism.
So far.
But know this: The wolves are in the house.
In his 1991 book, “Behold a Pale Horse”, former United States Naval Intelligence Briefing Team member William Cooper warned of a secret initiative by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency whereby drugs and hypnosis were to be used on mental patients coerced into shooting children in schools.
The government encouraged the manufacture and importation of military firearms for the criminals to use. This is intended to foster a feeling of insecurity, which would lead the American people to voluntarily disarm themselves by passing laws against firearms. Using drugs and hypnosis on mental patients in a process called Orion, the CIA inculcated the desire in these people to open fire on schoolyards and thus inflame the antigun lobby. This plan is well under way, and so far is working perfectly. The middle class is begging the government to do away with the 2nd amendment.
– Cooper, Milton William. (1991). “Behold a Pale Horse”, Light Technology Publications, page 225
Years later Cooper was shot and killed at his home in Eagar, Arizona while resisting arrest.
Now consider the United Kingdom where, for more than a century, various laws restricting firearms were passed until handguns were completely banned in the wake of the 1996 Dunblane School Massacre. After 16 children were shot in that mass shooting, the U.K. passed the Firearms Act 1997 in order to save the children. Except, now, those same children can be knifed at whim in London and even incarcerated for verbally challenging the false precepts of the foreign religion behind such medieval barbarism.
And over the decades in America, mass shootings have continued to occur with certain similarities: First, there is some sort of an active drill, either scheduled or ongoing, and then shots are fired, followed by eyewitness accounts of more than one shooter. Soon, the YouTube videos of those reporting on multiple attackers are scrubbed from the internet. Within hours, the murderer is reported to be extremely troubled, if not insane, and likely on psychotropic drugs, as several people claim they all “saw it coming”, or, in some instances, saying they are completely surprised that the person they knew could massacre so many.
Accordingly, manifestos and/or prophetic postings on social media by the shooter are revealed and, sadly, they are always discovered too late. Most commonly, of course, an AR-type weapon, handgun, or other semi-automatic firearm will have been used with the necessary large-capacity magazines. It is all quite convenient because these are highly coveted targets in the sites of politicians and globalists convening behind armed security on Capitol Hill or at the United Nations.
Finally, like the sun rising after a long dark night, the political establishment crows like roosters about “doing something” so “it never happens again”.
In the aftermath of the Sandyhook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, President Obama issued 23 executive actions and proposed 19 legislative actions. After the Virginia Tech shooting new rules were passed that allowed the Social Security Administration to provide information to the gun background check system of people with “mental disabilities”. After Vegas and Parkland, it was bump-stocks and Red Flag Laws.
Following more recent mass events, such as the Isla Vista California, Gilroy Garlic Festival, El Paso, and Dayton Ohio shootings, the push for federal Red Flag Gun legislation has gained increasing bipartisan support. And if one wants to understand where it’s all going, look no further than what is being proposed and passed in the Democratic-Party-controlled state of Virginia: Universal background checks, gun registry, limitations of AR-type rifles and large-capacity magazines, limits on the number of guns purchased over specific periods of time, and suppressor bans.
All of these measures are labeled as “common sense” initiatives by those deciding how We the People might defend our families in the bottom of the bubble. Common sense? For The Swamp, maybe.
In truth, incremental gun control measures are a spider’s web of encroaching tyranny constructed by The Swamp and prosecuted by Lawfare, LLC; all in accordance to #’s 1, 2, and 3 above.
5.) The Mainstream Media Promotes the Propaganda of The Swamp
Be assured the deception, illusions, and political chicanery utilized by The Swamp would NOT be possible without the complicity of the handful of corporations that comprise the Orwellian Media. Not only does the Mainstream Media misinform the public, but it blatantly deceives the entire world. Truly, the election of Donald Trump has exposed the activist media to all but the most moronic of the morons stumbling around in the bubble.
Undeniably, The Swamp could be drained if not for the endless propagandic spin spewed forth by the modern-day purveyors of bubblevision. Just as the fictional Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s book “1984” rewrote history to realign it with Swamp doctrine and make The Swamp look infallible, it also promoted war hysteria designed to manufacture consensus; and unite citizens against whatever, or whomever, The Swamp deemed culpable.
Orwell’s writings proved prophetic. Because, not only did the corporate media most recently promote The Swamp’s false narratives behind the Russiagate and Ukraine political operations, it specifically targeted Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin as modern-day incarnations of Orwell’s infamous scapegoat, Emmanuel Goldstein. In fact, it has been reported that television networks spent “more than twice as much airtime on the Ukraine probe as they did on the Russia probe” and with “93% negativity toward President Trump”.
Additionally, just before American patriots rallied in Virginia’s capital to protest Democrat Governor Ralph Northam’s draconian gun control proposals, the activist media breathlessly reported on the FBI arresting “three alleged members of a white-supremacist group on federal gun and alien-harboring charges, amid growing concerns about safety surrounding planned gun rights protests in Virginia’s capital…”
Furthermore, as the propagandic press promoted “Hail Mary” bombshells meant to “jolt” Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, it also memory-holed portions of the president’s address to the nation after the airstrike that killed Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani.
Mr. Trump didn’t propose negotiations with Iran and fanned partisan fires in Washington by blaming the Obama administration for signing onto a 2015 nuclear deal that freed up Iran’s access to billions of dollars, asserting those funds paid for weapons used in the attack [on Iraqi bases housing American and allied military forces].
Yet many Americans who didn’t see the address live, will never know.
The Orwellian Media’s mission is NOT to inform the public, but, instead, its purpose is to propagandize the people. Its false narratives are undeniably designed to expedite the downfall of the republic.
6.) Identity Politics and Climate Change are the Twin Pillars of the New Religion
If Trump was elected on the twin platforms of immigration and trade, The Resistance has countered back with melanin, genitalia, and the weather.
Identity politics and the legislation of social justice policies have stifled the rights of free speech and freedom of association throughout the democratic nations of the western world. And they materialized as the result of language manipulation. Remember when gender used to represent male or female? Yet, in that example, the word “identity” was added after “gender” thus opening a verifiable Pandora’s Box of Orwellian Newspeak.
Today in formerly free societies, men and women are forced to navigate Genderqueer and Non-Binary Identities, consisting of an entirely new lexicon including neo-designations such as Agender, Cisgender, Ceterosexual, Ceteroromantic, Demigender, Enby, and Epicene; just to name a few.
Political Correctness is a means of thought control in the bubble, designed to protect imaginary victims from the societal sins of xenophobia, sexism, homophobism, and racism.
And climate change is a means for global regulation and taxation.
The Swamp has implemented both schemes in order to unite the world via social justice and open borders illegal immigration. It works because many people in the bubble acknowledge the wisdom of loving others while caring for Mother Earth. Moreover, many others must believe in the new morality as atonement for their guilt.
It is a new religion. Or, perhaps, an old one with new names.
Nevertheless, the new morality has NOT waned since the election of Donald Trump. On the contrary, The Swamp has translated Trump into a veritable orange-haired devil in order to agitate the bubbleheads, thus breathing new life into the social justice movement. It’s why Deplorables now think twice before wearing MAGA caps in public and why climate change has a new prophetess in Greta Thunberg®.
Advertising works best when emotions run high; because all consensus is manufactured in a bubble.
7.) The Technocratic Surveillance State Grows Unabated
In the wake of September 11, 2001, the passing of the Patriot Act, and the revelations of former government contractor, Edward Snowden, the concerns of Americans regarding violations to the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution have not mattered to The Swamp.
As a result of what became known as Edward Snowden’s 2013 Global Surveillance Disclosures, American and British initiatives were exposed including PRISM and Tempora that revealed cooperation with governments around the world working in connection with multi-national corporations including Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, British Telecommunications, and Verizon. Moreover, backdoor data-gathering programs such as XKeyscore were unveiled along with other various ways by which government spooks could intercept phone calls, text messages, and private data from commonly used internet platforms like Yahoo.
Just as technological breakthroughs in computing and the proliferation of “smart” communication and entertainment devices gave rise to government spying, it was not a very large leap of understanding to see how easy it would be to blackmail and control not only citizens, but government administrators, politicians, officials, and even judges, around the world.
This is why Senator Chuck Schumer said the following in an MSNBC interview on January 3rd, 2017:
Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you.
Although Donald Trump appears to have survived attempts by the Five Eyes to take down his presidency, his administration has not slowed the development of the Surveillance State. Not in the least. There is no denying that “Big Tech is bigger than ever” and “the five most valuable U.S. tech companies now account for over 17% of the S&P 500, up from 11% in 2015”.
To the sounds of mouse-clicks, once free people have “accepted” the “terms” of their surrender and have forfeited their liberty in the name of convenience. Like buzzing insects, the citizens of modern societies are caught in silicon honey traps mortgaged with plastic and electronically powered via USB cable nooses wrapped tightly around their collective throats.
The Technocratic Powers That Be wield weapons far more powerful than any time prior in history and soon, people will wake up to realize the electronic buzzing sound ringing in their ears was not emanating from their own wings, but rather, it was merely the sound of drones over their heads.
And it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to see where the trends are leading:
In truth, the charade is that all political theater plays out on a stage constructed by the surveillance state. It means, over time, selective pressure can be applied, at will, during the show.
When Trump tweeted that we’d be on World War 6 if he listened to his disgruntled former national security advisor, John Bolton, it was quite brilliant on several levels – the least of which was putting the Democrats in the position of defending a warmongering Neocon they used to hate; a civil-war era appearing Caucasian who the president fired, no less.
It was riveting bubblevision. No doubt.
And now, top GOP Senators have claimed the Horowitz Report actually misled the public and are demanding Attorney General William Barr declassify some footnotes. But, sadly, it will likely make little difference because television has programmed our generation into sheep. And social media has further progressed a percentage of plebes into robotic puppets in the bubble. They’ve been psychologically programmed for one world under power.
Although Trump may appear invincible at the time of this writing, ask yourselves who controls the helium to the biggest economic balloons. The stock market is the pressure release valve. But when the bond market blows, the USD is toast. And, as supply chains snap and the bankers foreclose on the world, there will be ever-expanding pain for everyone to varying degrees, as the earth exhales.
Therefore, all current global trends, including especially Coronavirus®, are about establishing control prior to the advent of a new order. Although the immediate future will be anarchy, out of that chaos will come order administered by technological switches and gates. And the future will be cashless because slavery is rooted in economics.
Until then, expect The Swamp to continuously spin electronic and digital visions like dreamweavers casting a cabled web of anima mundi over the earth. Be assured, they will propagandize the orthodoxies of human secularism and social justice on behalf of Earth’s children as they anxiously await the arrival of Bernie Claus riding on his glorious unicorn down a vibrantly shining rainbow.
Confusion After Nikkei Denies Reuters Story That Foxconn Will Restart Production At Key Plant
Update: after futures sprinted into the green following a Reuters report that Foxconn had received Chinese government approval to resume production at a key plant in the northern China city of Zhengzhou, Nikkei now denies this, reporting that “Foxconn’s plan to resume production on Monday has been called off by the Chinese authorities due to worries surrounding the coronavirus outbreak”
The Japanese publication adds that “the action further worsens the supply chain disruption for global electronics companies, including Apple, Amazon, Google and Huawei. Foxconn is the world’s biggest iPhone assembler, and it makes Huawei smartphones and Amazon Kindle tablets as well as echo speakers, while it also supplies HP, Dell and most the major electronics brands.”
Public health experts in Shenzhen informed Foxconn, which trades as Hon Hai Precision Industry, that its factories there face “high risks of coronavirus infection” after conducting on-site inspections and therefore are not suitable to restart work, four people familiar with the matter told Nikkei.
“Violation of epidemic prevention and control could potentially face the death penalty,” the internal meeting memo seen by the Nikkei Asian Review said. More importantly, Foxconn’s Zhengzhou complex, which according to Reuters would reopen on Monday, also canceled plans to resume work on Monday, they said.
As for S&P futures, they continue to trade in the green, and far above overnight lows of 3303.50, refusing to believe the denial of the report that sent them higher.
* * *
With traders anxiously eyeing the surge in overnight coronavirus deaths in China as evidence the pandemic is far from contained, amid fears that China will not be able to reopen for business tomorrow despite the government’s assurance that somehow everything will be ok on Feb 10 and supply chains will once again be humming as before, futures slumped in early trading, but promptly erased losses of as much as 0.7%…
… after Reuters reported that Apple’s main iPhone production partner and fab, Taiwan’s Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, had received Chinese government approval to resume production at a key plant in the northern China city of Zhengzhou, where half of the world’s iPhones are made.
Earlier in the day, Bloomberg reported that Foxconn’s factories worldwide are coordinating with authorities in carrying out virus protection and are preparing safety measures with the approval of local governments.
“Our group hasn’t received any client requests to move production resumption earlier,” Foxconn said in a statement Saturday, adding that operating schedules will be arranged according to local governments’ requirements.
But as Reuters notes it’s not all clear, and the company is still in talks with the government to resume production at another plant in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, confirming a Bloomberg report that Foxconn had asked Shenzhen employees not to return to work when the extended Lunar New Year break ends on Monday.
On Saturday, Nikkei reported that China blocked a plan by Foxconn to resume production in China from Monday amid concerns about the spread of the new coronavirus.
As such, the greenlighting of at least some work by Foxconn – so critical for Apple’s production schedule – was seen by the market as a vote of confidence in Beijing’s ability to contain the virus from the giant Zhengzhou facility, which employs about 350,000 of Foxconn’s 1.3 million employees in China.
But is that indeed the case, or is China merely being cavaliers with the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers? The answer will emerge in the news few days, when either there is a confirmed infection among Foxconn’s massive worker army, or there isn’t. Or maybe even sooner, if faith in the containment of the virus among Foxconn’s workers is non-existent and nobody shows up to work on Monday despite the company’s reopening…
Ford's Lending Arm Does The Dirty Work For Parent Company, Generating More Profit Now Than Ever
At a time when the global automotive market is mired in deep recession – and things likely aren’t going to be getting any better, with China in the midst of an epidemic – Ford’s lending arm is acting as the profit backbone for the company, generating more profit now than it ever has for the company.
Amid an epic loss, and the resignation of the company’s president, Ford credit now generates a remarkable half of the automaker’s profit, according to Bloomberg, which is up from 15% to 20% in the past. The company’s credit arm makes loans to dealers stocking vehicles and then the consumers who buy them. Ford is relying on its financing unit to help it fund “multi-billion outlays on electric and self-driving cars” now.
The parent corporation, however, is dealing with $11 billion in charges from a restructuring that “could take years”.
Lawrence Orlowski, an analyst at S&P Global Ratings said of Ford’s credit arm: “It’s like the ballast that keeps the ship steady. It’s a balancing act.”
The amount of vehicles that Ford has been selling has been on the decline for the last three years and the company is losing money in China.
But the company would be “far worse off” without its Ford Motor Credit unit, which is paying for the company’s capex by borrowing in the debt markets and paying a dividend back to the parent company. Expectations are for the credit arm to contribute nearly $3 billion annually to Ford over the next 2 years. In 2017, that contribution was just $400 million.
The company’s credit arm borrowed about $10 billion in the U.S. investment grade bond market over the last 12 months. Meanwhile, it has been over 3 years since Ford itself has issued bonds. Moody’s downgraded Ford to junk in September and S&P cut its rating on the company to its lowest investment grade rating in October. Another downgrade from S&P could remove Ford out of some major indices, which has weighed on the minds of investors for the better part of the last year.
All eyes are on the credit division now, especially, as the global automotive market continues to falter. Ford is going to be rolling out a new line of SUVs and redesigning its F-150 as part of its recent restructuring, as well.
Analysts are wary of both cost risk and execution risk.
David Whiston, an equity strategist with Morningstar said: “It’s quite clear Ford is not where it should be, but the finance arm is a bright spot. Obviously you want the whole company operating at full power, which you don’t have right now.”
Ford credit is also responsible for protecting the parent company’s dividend. The $2.4 billion it paid back to its parent in 2019 may be “unsustainable” in the future, analysts say, because Ford’s dividend consumers a much greater percentage of its cash flow than peers.
In fact, Bloomberg notes how further important the credit arm would become/is during a recession:
In a recession, Ford Credit’s role becomes even more important. It doesn’t play much in the subprime market, so the ratio of its losses to total customer bills outstanding stayed below 2% during the Great Recession, a low level. Its repossession rate never got higher than 3.2%.
Those strong metrics allowed Ford’s captive finance unit to generate a dividend for the parent even in 2009, when U.S. auto sales slumped to a 27-year low.
Tim Stone, Ford’s chief financial officer, said during a November interview: “With a healthy portfolio, a captive balance sheet in an economic downturn actually starts generating and kicking off a bunch of cash flow. We take a very thoughtful approach to that business.”
Ford Credit has sent $28 billion over the last two decades to Ford.
WUHAN (CAIXIN GLOBAL) – In the coronavirus epidemic, doctors on the front lines take on the greatest risk and best understand the situation. Dr Peng Zhiyong, director of acute medicine at the Wuhan University South Central Hospital, is one of those doctors.
In an interview on Tuesday with Caixin, Dr Peng described his personal experiences in first encountering the disease in early January and quickly grasping its virulent potential and the need for stringent quarantine measures.
As the contagion spread and flooded his ICU, the doctor observed that three weeks seemed to determine the difference between life and death. Patients with stronger immune systems would start to recover in a couple of weeks, but in the second week, some cases would take a turn for the worse.
In the third week, keeping some of these acute patients alive might require extraordinary intervention. For this group, the death rate seems to be 4 per cent to 5 per cent, Dr Peng said. After working his 12-hour daytime shifts, the doctor spends his evenings researching the disease and has summarised his observations in a thesis.
The doctors and nurses at his hospital are overwhelmed with patients. Once they don protective hazmat suits, they go without food, drink and bathroom breaks for their entire shifts. That’s because there aren’t enough of the suits for a mid-shift change, he said.
Exclusive: #Wuhan funeral home staffer reveals real death toll of #coronavirus
Over the past month on the front lines of the coronavirus battle, Dr Peng has been brought to tears many times when forced to turn away patients for lack of staffing and beds. He said what really got to him, though, was the death of an acutely ill pregnant woman when treatment stopped for lack of money – the day before the government decided to pick up the costs of all coronavirus treatments.
Here’s our interview with the ICU doctor:
Caixin: When did you encounter your first novel coronavirus patient?
Dr Peng Zhiyong: Jan 6, 2020. There was a patient from Huanggang who had been refused by multiple hospitals, who was sent to the South Central Hospital emergency room. I attended the consultation. At the time, the patient’s illness was already severe, and he had difficulty breathing. I knew right then that he contracted this disease. We debated at length whether to accept the patient. If we didn’t, he had nowhere to go; if we did, there was a high likelihood the disease would infect others. We had to do a very stringent quarantine. We decided to take the patient in the end.
I called the hospital director and told him the story, including the fact that we had to clear the hospital room of other patients and to remodel it after Sars standards by setting up a contamination area, buffer area, cleaning area, and separate the living areas of the hospital staff from the patients’.
On Jan 6, with the patient in the emergency room, we did quarantine remodelling in the emergency room and did major renovations to the ICU (intensive care unit). South Central Hospital’s ICU has 66 beds in total. We kept a space dedicated to coronavirus patients. I knew the infectiousness of the disease. There were bound to be more people coming in, so we set aside 16 beds. We did quarantine renovations on the infectious diseases area because respiratory illnesses are transmitted through the air, so even air has to be quarantined so that inside the rooms the air can’t escape. At the time, some said that the ICU had a limited number of beds and 16 was excessive. I said it wasn’t excessive at all.
Caixin: You predicted back in January that there would be person-to-person transmission and even took quarantine measures. Did you report the situation to the higher-ups?
Peng: This disease really did spread very fast. By Jan 10, the 16 beds in our ICU were full. We saw how dire the situation was and told the hospital’s leadership that they had to report even higher. Our head felt it was urgent too and reported this to the Wuhan city health committee. On Jan 12, the department sent a team of three specialists to South Central to investigate. The specialists said that clinical symptoms really resembled Sars, but they were still talking about diagnosis criteria, that kind of stuff. We replied that those standards were too stringent. Very few people would get diagnosed based on those criteria. The head of our hospital told them this multiple times during this period. I know other hospitals were doing the same.
Before this, the specialists already went to Jinyintan Hospital to investigate and made a set of diagnosis criteria. You had to have had exposure to the South China Seafood Market, you needed to have had a fever and test positive for the virus. You had to meet all three criteria in order to be diagnosed. The third one was especially stringent. In reality, very few people were able to test for a virus.
On Jan 18, the high-level specialists from the National Health Commission came to Wuhan, to South Central Hospital to inspect. I told them again that the criteria were too high. This way it was easy to miss infections. I told them this was infectious; if you made the criteria too high and let patients go, you’re putting society in danger. After the second national team of specialists came, the criteria were changed. The number of diagnosed patients rose quickly.
Security guards check the temperature of visitors at a seafood market in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China, on Feb 6, 2020. PHOTO: EPA-EFE
Caixin: What made you believe that the new coronavirus could be transmitted between people?
Peng: Based on my clinical experience and knowledge, I believed that the disease would be an acutely infectious disease and that we had to do high-level protection. The virus isn’t going to change based on man’s will. I felt we needed to respect it and act according to science. Under my requirements, South Central Hospital’s ICU took strict quarantine measures, and as a result, our department only had two infections. As of Jan 28, of the entire hospital’s medical personnel, only 40 have been infected. This is way less compared with other hospitals in terms of percentage of total medical staff.
It pains us to see the coronavirus develop to such a desperate state. But the priority now is to treat people; do everything we can to save people.
Caixin: Based on your clinical experience, what’s the disease progression of the new coronavirus?
Peng: Lately I’ve been spending the daytime seeing patients in the ICU, then doing some research in the evenings. I just wrote a thesis. I drew on data from 138 cases that South Central Hospital had from Jan 7 to Jan 28 and attempted to summarise some patterns of the novel coronavirus.
A lot of viruses will die off on their own after a certain amount of time. We call these self-limited diseases.
I’ve observed that the breakout period of the novel coronavirus tends to be three weeks, from the onset of symptoms to developing difficulties breathing. Basically going from mild to severe symptoms takes about a week. There are all sorts of mild symptoms: feebleness, shortness of breath, some people have fevers, some don’t. Based on studies of our 138 cases, the most common symptoms in the first stage are fever (98.6 per cent of cases), feebleness (69.6 per cent), cough (59.4 per cent), muscle pains (34.8 per cent), difficulties breathing (31.2%), while less common symptoms include headaches, dizziness, stomach pain, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting.
But some patients who enter the second week will suddenly get worse. At this stage, people should go to the hospital. The elderly with underlying conditions may develop complications; some may need machine-assisted respiration. When the body’s other organs start to fail, that’s when it becomes severe, while those with strong immune systems see their symptoms decrease in severity at this stage and gradually recover. So the second week is what determines whether the illness becomes critical.
The third week determines whether critical illness leads to death. Some in critical condition who receive treatment can raise their level of lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell, and see an improvement in their immune systems, and have been brought back, so to speak. But those whose lymphocyte numbers continue to decline, those whose immune systems are destroyed in the end, experience multiple organ failure and die.
For most, the illness is over in two weeks, whereas for those for whom the illness becomes severe, if they can survive three weeks, they’re good. Those that can’t will die in three weeks.
A patient covered with a bed sheet at an exhibition centre converted into a hospital as it starts to accept patients displaying mild symptoms of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province, on Feb 5, 2020. PHOTO: AFP
Caixin: Will you please give more details on clinical research? What percentage of cases would develop from mild conditions to severe conditions? What percentage of serious cases would develop into life-threatening cases? What is the mortality rate?
Peng: Based on my clinical observations, this disease is highly contagious, but the mortality rate is low. Those that progressed into the life-threatening stage often occurred in the elderly already with chronic diseases.
As of Jan 28, of 138 cases, 36 were in the ICU, 28 recovered, five died. That is to say, the mortality rate of patients with severe conditions was 3.6 per cent. Yesterday (Feb 3), another patient died, bringing the mortality rate to 4.3 per cent. Given patients in the ICU, it is likely to have more deaths. The mortality rate is also likely to edge up but not significantly.
Those hospitalised tend to have severe or life-threatening conditions. Patients with slight symptoms are placed in quarantine at home. We have not gathered data on the percentage of cases that progress from slight symptoms to serious symptoms. If a patient goes from serious conditions to life-threatening conditions, the patient will be sent to the ICU. Among 138 patients, 36 were transferred to the ICU, representing 26 per cent of all patients.
The percentage of deaths among life-threatening cases is about 15 per cent. The mean period to go from slight conditions to life-threatening conditions is about 10 days. Twenty-eight patients recovered and were discharged. Right now, the recovery rate is 20.3 per cent, while other patients remain hospitalised.
It is notable that 12 cases were linked to South China Seafood Market; 57 were infected while being hospitalised, including 17 patients already hospitalised in other departments; and 40 medical staff, among 138 cases (as of Jan 28). That demonstrates that a hospital is a high-risk zone and appropriate protection must be taken.
Caixin: What is the highest risk a serious patient faces?
Peng: The biggest assault the virus launches is on a patient’s immune system. It causes a fall in the count of lymphocytes, the damage in the lungs and shortness of breath. Many serious patients died of choking. Others died of the failure of multiple organs following complications in their organs resulting from a collapse of the immune system.
People lining up to buy face masks in Hong Kong, on Feb 5, 2020. PHOTO: EPA-EFE
Caixin: A 39-year-old patient in Hong Kong suffered from cardiac arrest, and his death ensued quickly. A few patients did not have severe symptoms upon the onslaught of the virus or in early stages, but they died suddenly. Some experts argue that the virus triggers a cytokine storm, which ravages the stronger immune system of young adults. Eventually excessive inflammations caused by cytokine result in the higher mortality rate. Have you seen such a phenomenon in the coronavirus outbreak?
Peng: Based on my observations, a third of patients exhibited inflammation in their whole body. It was not necessarily limited to young adults. The mechanism of a cytokine storm is about whole-body inflammation, which leads to a failure of multiple organs and quickly evolves into the terminal stage. In some fast-progressing cases, it took two to three days to progress from whole-body inflammation to the life-threatening stage.
Caixin: How do you treat serious and life-threatening cases?
Peng: For serious and life-threatening cases, our main approach is to provide oxygen, high-volume oxygen. At first noninvasive machine-pumped oxygen, followed by intubated oxygen if conditions worsen. For life-threatening cases, we use Ecmo (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or pumping the patient’s blood through an artificial lung machine). In four cases, we applied Ecmo to rescue patients from the verge of death.
Currently there are no special drugs for the coronavirus. The primary purpose of the ICU is to help patients sustain the functions of their body. Different patients have different symptoms. In case of shortness of breath, we provided oxygen; in case of a kidney failure, we gave dialysis; in case of a coma, we deployed Ecmo. We provide support wherever a patient needs it to sustain his life. Once the count of lymphocytes goes up and the immune system improves, the virus will be cleared. However, if the count of lymphocytes continues to fall, it is dangerous because the virus continues to replicate. Once a patient’s immune system is demolished, it is hard to save a patient.
Scientists working in the VirPath university laboratory, classified as “P3” level of safety, on Feb 5, 2020 as they try to find an effective treatment against the new Sars-like coronavirus. PHOTO: AFP
Caixin: There is news of some drugs that work. People are hopeful of the effect of US-made remdesivir, which cured the first case in the United States. What do you think of the drugs?
Peng: There are no 2019 novel coronavirus-targeted drugs so far. Some patients may recover after taking some drugs along with supportive treatment. But such individual cases do not indicate the universal effect of the drugs. The effect is also related to how serious each case is and their individual health conditions. People want a cure urgently, and that is understandable. But we need to be cautious.
Caixin: Do you have any advice for coronavirus-infected patients?
Peng: The most effective approach to the virus epidemic is to control the source of the virus, stem the spread of the virus and prevent human-to-human transmission. My advice for a patient is going to a special ward for infectious diseases, early detection, early diagnosis, early quarantine and early treatment. Once it has developed into a severe case, hospitalisation is a must. It is better to contain the disease at an early stage. Once it reaches the life-threatening stage, it is way more difficult to treat it and requires more medical resources. With regard to life-threatening cases, try to save them with ICU measures to reduce the mortality rate.
Caixin: How many patients with life-threatening conditions have you treated? How many have recovered?
Peng: As of Feb 4, six patients in the ICU of South Central Hospital died. Eighty per cent of them have been improving, a quarter are approaching their discharge and the remainder are still recovering in segregated wards.
The patient who impressed me most came from Huanggang. He was the first to be saved with the assistance of Ecmo. He had contact with South China Seafood Market and was in very serious conditions. He was transferred to the ICU and we saved him with Ecmo. He was discharged from the hospital Jan 28.
Medical workers in protective suits receive a patient at the Wuhan International Conference and Exhibition Center, which has been converted into a makeshift hospital to receive patients with mild symptoms caused by the novel coronavirus, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, on Feb 5, 2020. PHOTO: REUTERS
Caixin: What are your work load and pace like?
Peng: The work in the ICU is overloaded. There are three patient wards with 66 beds in South Central Hospital, housing 150 patients. Since Jan 7, when we received the first patient, no one took any leave. We took turns to work in the ICU. Even pregnant medical staff did not take leave. After the epidemic got worse, none of the medical staff ever went home. We rest in a hotel near the hospital or in the hospital.
In the segregated ward, we wear level-3 protective gear. One shift is 12 hours for a doctor and eight hours for a nurse. Since protective gear is in a shortage, there is only one set for a medical staff member a day. We refrain from eating or drinking during our shift because the gear is no longer protective once we go to the washroom. The gear is thick, airtight and tough on our body. It felt uncomfortable at the beginning, but we are used to it now.
Caixin: Did you experience a very dangerous moment? For example, in case of intubation, what do you do to prevent yourselves from being infected?
Peng: It is a new coronavirus. We are not sure of its nature and its path of spread. It is not true if we say we are not afraid. Medical staff members do fear to some extent. But patients need us. When a patient is out of breath and non-invasive oxygen provision fails, we must apply intubation. The procedure is dangerous as the patient may vomit or spit. Medical staff are likely to be exposed to the danger of infection. We strictly require doctors and nurses to apply the highest-level protection. The biggest problem we face now is the shortage of protective gear. The protective stock for ICU staff is running low, although the hospital prioritises the supply to us.
Caixin: Is there anything that moved you in particular? Did you cry?
Peng: I often cried because so many patients could not be admitted to the hospital. They wailed in front of the hospital. Some patients even knelt down to beg me to accept him into the hospital. But there was nothing I could do since all beds were occupied. I shed tears while I turned them down. I ran out of tears now. I have no other thoughts but to try my best to save more lives.
The most regretful thing to me was a pregnant woman from Huanggang. She was in very serious condition. Nearly 200,000 yuan (S$39,505) was spent after more than a week in the ICU. She was from the countryside, and the money for hospitalisation was borrowed from her relatives and friends. Her condition was improving after the use of Ecmo, and she was likely to survive. But her husband decided to give up. He cried for his decision. I wept too because I felt there was hope for her to be saved. The woman died after we gave up. And exactly the next day, the government announced a new policy that offers free treatment for all coronavirus-infected patients. I feel so sorry for that pregnant woman.
The deputy director of our department told me one thing, and he cried too. Wuhan 7th Hospital is in a partnership with our hospital, South Central Hospital. The deputy director went there to help in their ICU. He found that two-thirds of the medical staff in the ICU were already infected. Doctors there were running “naked” as they knew they were set to be infected given the shortage of protective gear. They still worked there nonetheless. That was why ICU medical staff were almost all sickened. It is too tough for our doctors and nurses.
China Suddenly Has Another Major "Virus" Problem, As Soaring Food Prices Put A Lid On Central Bank Intervention
Soon the only food that will be affordable in China, is coronabat stew.
With over 400 million people across dozens of Chinese cities living in lock down as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, crippling global supply chains and grinding China’s economy to a halt, it is easy to forget that China has been battling another major viral epidemic for the past two years: namely the African Swing Fever virus, aka “pig ebola” which killed off over half of China’s pig population in the past year, sending pork prices soaring, and unleashing a tidal wave of inflation.
Well, moments ago, the world got a stark reminder of this when China reported that in January, its CPI jumped by whopping 5.4% Y/Y, the highest print in nine years…
… driven by a surge in pork prices, which reversed a rare drop in December when the slid by 5.6%, rising 8.5% in just ont month, and a record 116% compared to a year ago.
This unprecedented surge in pork CPI meant that China’s food CPI rose a record 20.6% in January, also the highest on record, as China’s population, now ordered to live under self-imposed quarantine, suddenly finds it can no longer afford to buy food .
Needless to say, this is suddenly a major problem for China, whose central bank has in the past two weeks unleashed an unprecedented liquidity tsunami, including the biggest ever reverse repo injection…
… in hopes of stabilizing the stock market. Well, oops, because some of this liquidity now appears to be making its way into the broader economy, and is making already scarce food (aside from bat stew of course) even more unaffordable, and the already depressed and dejected Chinese population even more hungry, and angry.
There was one silver lining in today’s data: after spending half a year in deflation, China’s Production Prices, a proxy for industrial profits and overall price leverage, finally printed in the positive, rising 0.1% Y/Y, and better than the expected 0.0%
So far so good, however, with China’s economy now on indefinite lock down, expect the correlation shown in the chart above to break any moment now, with industrial profits crashing as a result of the coronavirus putting countless Chinese factories on lock down at least until the coronavirus is contained. When that happens is anyone’s guess, but one thing is certain: at the rate food prices are exploding, soon the only food China’s population will be able to afford will be the experimental bats used by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of which may or may not have been accidentally sold to the local fish market last December triggering what is now the worst viral pandemic in decades.
Just as concerning, if only for Beijing, is that if the surge in food prices isn’t “contained” very soon the arms of the PBOC will be tied and any hopes that China will reflate its economy – and the world – to offset the economic crunch resulting from the coronavirus, will be weaponized and vaporize right through the HVAC, just like any number of manmade viruses currently being developed in Wuhan, as pretty soon China’s population – starving and quarantined – will have no choice but take matters into its own hands.
'Ungrateful Bastard': Kyle Bass Unloads On CCP Mouthpiece In Coronavirus Twitter Feud
As evidence mounts that China’s response to the coronavirus has been as much (if not more) about controlling the narrative than containing the outbreak, hedge fund manager Kyle Bass put CCP mouthpiece Hu Xijin in his place after the Global Times EIC criticized US humanitarian relief as “belated,” and suggested that US offers of help are more talk than action.
“You ungrateful bastard,” Bass replied in a now-deleted tweet, adding “We should take our supplies and go back home. Let the chinese virus rampage through the ranks of the GT and the rest of the communist party.”
Hu then tried to make Bass apologize for ‘bringing shame’ to the investment community, and said he should apologize to Chinese citizens – including Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower who tried to raise the alarm about the new coronavirus in December, caught the virus, and died last week after many believe he was either tortured, denied care, or worse.
.@Jkylebass As an investor with 129K twitter followers, you uttered such a malicious curse. You bring shame to investors community and social media users.CPC members are ordinary citizens, fathers, husbands, wives, daughters… Dr. Li Wenliang is one of them. You should apologize. pic.twitter.com/SNO5c0235i
Bass had none of that – responding “I will not. You arrested, censured, and ‘punished’ (only God knows what you did to him and the other 7 doctors) the heroes of Wuhan. You are a disgrace to humanity,” adding that the Global Times should do a special on organ harvesting – linking to activist website China Tribunal.
I will not. You arrested, censured, and ‘punished’ (only God knows what you did to him and the other 7 doctors) the heroes of Wuhan. You are a disgrace to humanity. I HAVE AN IDEA 💡 , let’s have the GT do a special on https://t.co/SseoCEoM7E . #CrimesAgainstHumanity
The founder and CIO of Dallas-based Hayman Capital Management explained to Bloomberg that he deleted his tweet because he “felt that it was too harsh for the rank and file” of the Global Times, but that he will “never apologize to a self-righteous, attempted manipulator of public opinion,” referring to Hu.
In recent weeks, Bass has been more critical than usual of the CCP – openly posing the question of why we should Trust China when they’ve proven themselves to be liars.
Now we are supposed to believe that the Wuhan Level 4 Virology lab at the center of the current crisis is simply a civilian lab whose mission is to investigate the world’s most dangerous diseases for the betterment of humanity? This is an affront to any educated person. 3)
WHO (Tedros) praising the chinese coronavirus response has been dangerous affront to the global community. @DrTedros should resign. He instilled a false sense of security in western healthcare professionals. #coronaviruschina#WuFlu#Outbreakhttps://t.co/kBUmOWQtkq
Is Tesla The Next Amazon Of Auto Companies? One Investment Bank Offers Their Answer
We often rib on Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas for blindingly supporting Tesla with egregious price targets based on things like “Tesla Mobility”, which don’t even exist. But every once in a while Jonas produces an actual piece of analysis that can be useful.
One of two notes Jonas put out on Thursday was called “A Valuation Guide for Tech PMs” and was dedicated to trying to compare Tesla to other tech titans, now that the automaker’s stock has ascended into the stratosphere for seemingly no reason at all.
Tesla’s meteoric rise has “put it in the discussion with the most popular Teracaps, accelerating the hand-over from traditional
auto investor to tech investor,” Jonas said in his note. He says his firm is getting increasing numbers of calls from tech PMs who have picked up Tesla as a tech investment, instead of an auto investment. The market, Jonas says, is now viewing Tesla as a tech company.
It has to – how else is it going to justify a market cap of $150 billion on a company that has never turned an annual profit?
But, we digress. In his note, Jonas compares Tesla to Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Spotify. He hilariously calls it “more expensive, but higher growth” than the hyper-cash generative Apple and “cheaper than Spotify”:
Is Tesla the next AMZN? Amazon (covered by Brian Nowak) trades at over 7x 2025 EBITDA with over 12% top line growth from 2025 through 2030. On this framework, Tesla is much more expensive and lower growth (on our forecasts)vs. AMZN.
Is Tesla the AAPL of autos? Apple (covered by Katy Huberty) trades at under 12x 2025 EBITDA with 7% top line growth (based on Morgan Stanley’s published FY19-FY23E Revenue and EBITDA CAGR estimates) from 2025 through 2030. On this analysis, Tesla is slightly more expensive but higher growth than Apple.
How about Tesla vs. Netflix? Netflix (covered by Ben Swinburne) trades at around 13x 2025 EBITDA with over 9% top line growth from 2025 through 2030. On this analysis, Tesla is materially more expensive and slightly higher growth.
And vs. Spotify? Spotify (covered by Ben Swinburne) trades at around 15x 2025 EBITDA with over 12% top line growth from 2025 through 2030. On this analysis, Tesla is slightly cheaper than Spotify while materially lower growth.
He then says that Tesla’s valuation can appear “relatively reasonable” to some investors as a technology stock. But ultimately, he concludes, “for an investor to purchase TSLA’s stock today, based upon current 2025e valuation, he or she needs either higher growth or a better business (higher ROIC, recurring revenue, lower volatility, etc.) or both.”
Just yesterday, we pointed out that Morgan Stanley had kept an “underweight” rating on the stock with a $360 price target, amidst the stock’s recent run up, where it had nearly tripled in the span of just weeks.
In that note, Jonas noted the astounding volume with which Tesla has traded. Jonas said that “Tesla traded over 48 million shares on Wednesday (over 25% of shares outstanding) for a value traded of approximately $36bn. For comparison, Apple, a company with roughly 10x the market cap of Tesla traded approximately $9.5bn of value yesterday. Tesla traded nearly 4x the value of the world’s most valuable public company.”
And he also was cautious about calling Tesla the winner in the EV space, given its new entrants: “Moreover, with US and global EV penetration at approximately 2% we believe it may be too early to declare the ultimate winner in the global EV market. At a minimum, there may be substantial risk to modeling the growth and market share of a market at such a low level of maturity today.”
He concluded by noting that even the bulls he was speaking sound like they are starting to change their tone to a slightly more skeptical one:
“We continue to engage with investors in high volume on Tesla, but noted a slight change in feedback where even some bulls on the name we have spoken with have expressed a degree of uncertainty, and in some cases, concern around the recent price action..”
"This Is A Ticking Timebomb": Here's The Chart That Convinced Albert Edwards That Helicopter Money Is On Its Way
Two weeks ago, when looking at the latest CBO forecast which predicted that the cumulative US deficits would increase by $13.1 trillion over the next decade, we highlighted perhaps the most troubling chart in all of finance right now, namely the CBO’s long-term forecast for US debt, which can be described in one word: exponential.
Commenting on this chart rather laconically, we said that “in other words, the MMT that will be launched after the next financial crisis, and which will see the Fed directly monetize US debt issuance from the Treasury until the dollar finally loses its reserve currency status, is now factored in.”
Neither the chart, nor the comment was lost on SocGen’s resident bear Albert Edwards, who after living through a harrowing earthquake during his vacation in Jamaica, chimed in on the chart above, writing in his latest Global Strategy Weekly that “this is a ticking timebomb and the chart… is screaming out for attention. The sources of this debt explosion are well known and documented with, for example, the unfunded liability of an aging population boosting Medicare expenses and the off-budget social security deficit spiralling upwards over the forecast period.”
To underscore his Japanification thesis, Edwards also points to the chart below to the left, and observes that this will be “the first year in which the US cyclically adjusted primary deficit will have exceeded Japan’s since 1992, when Japan was beginning to suffer the serious fiscal impact from the bursting.”
But, as Edwards notes, “it is the change in the cyclically adjusted primary deficit – which economists think measures the discretionary fiscal impulse – that slows or stimulates the economy (see right-hand chart above). The almost 1½% US fiscal stimulus a couple of years back has given way to a slight tightening of policy. Indeed, it is notable that in contrast to all the market chatter about fiscal expansion – and with central banks pressing governments to do more – all major countries are basically fiscally neutral this year. But fiscal neutrality won’t defuse the ticking government debt bomb of their 1980s bubble. This does indeed mark a new level of fiscal debauchery for the US.”
So what to do? Below we present Edwards’ thoughts on what comes next and, you guessed it, it involves MMT, i.e., helicopter money being used to thaw the ice age that over the past 30 years sent bond yields to never before seen lows:
… based on the fiscal projections from the CBO above, I expect the US will likely join Japan in giving up any serious attempt to reduce its government debt to GDP ratios back to the historically ‘normal’ levels. It simply ain’t going to happen. Does anyone seriously believe that any democratically elected government would be willing to raise taxes or cut government spending and future pension/health benefits in a bid to delay the fiscal timebomb? Of course they wouldn’t! And any government that attempts to do so will be hounded from office by an indignant public armed with pitchforks and much else besides.
The CBO chart above showing US federal debt spiralling exponentially out of control screams one indisputable outcome to me (and these sorts of charts are similar for most industrialised countries). Helicopter money is on its way. You can call it Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), you can call it ‘Fiscal and Monetary Co-operation’, or you can call it whatever you like, but there is only one realistic way out of this mess – and that is for governments to inflate away their debts. However, since much of these liabilities will rise with the CPI, like state pension benefits and healthcare, and cannot be inflated away, there will have to be more emphasis on deflating the liabilities that can actually be shrunk via rapid inflation.
Russell Napier reaches the same conclusion in his Macrovoices interview. Like him, I believe the regime change will be such a major event that it can only be implemented during a crisis – and for both of us, the next recession will be that crisis as it will be a deflationary bust! But my views are well known on that topic.
If this outlook of Russell’s and mine is correct, one other thing is likely: helicopter money, and it will be a very effective tool. Mainlining liquidity directly into the veins of the global economy will be much more effective in boosting GDP than QE, which has largely injected liquidity only into the veins of the financial markets. Helicopter money will work for Joe Sixpack much more effectively than it will for Mike Moneybags – and so it will be much more widely popular. And that is the problem. Once politicians have their hands on this policy tool, make no mistake, they will never ever hand it back to the Central Banks. And any policymaker that ever dares try to turn off the monetary taps would be well advised to read about the fate of Korekiyo Takahashi , Japan’s Finance Minister and former Governor of the Bank of Japan.
Takahashi, who is credited with pulling Japan out of the early 1930’s depression with extremely loose fiscal policy financed by helicopter money, is regarded as Japan’s Keynes link. He resisted fiscal tightening in 1935 as too early because of the continued fragility of the economy, but by 1936 with the economy having returned to full employment he set about turning off the fiscal and monetary taps and called the helicopters back to base.
As in all these things, the beneficiaries of super-loose fiscal and monetary largess were not happy when it looked as if the fiscal taps were about to be turned off. The Japanese military, who had been a major beneficiary of his fiscal spending, were especially miffed – so they had Finance Minister Takahashi assassinated.
As helicopter money becomes increasingly inevitable, the big news is that we are calling for the thawing of the Ice Age after the next recession – whenever that arrives. But a deflationary bust, which will take US 10y yields to around -1% (and 30y yields negative), will come first and enable this massive shift in policy to occur.
And within a few years I have not one scintilla of doubt that helicopter money will be so successful that CPI inflation will return like a long-lost relative. But, like a distant uncle we only see every now and again, we will have forgotten just how out-of-control he can become after a few drinks, and woe betide anyone who tries to stop him in his tracks, or in policy terms tries to stand down those confetti dropping helicopters.
Where will it all end? Albert leaves us with these thoughts from Cathy Buckle, reproduced in The Zimbabwean last week.
“This week our government got off the hook with regard to their obligation to pay doctors the same salary they were earning a year ago. Zimbabwean Strive Masiyiwa and his Higherlife Foundation has established a fund that will pay junior doctors US$300 a month for the next six months….
While this deal was being finalised our Supreme Court ruled this week that all debts incurred before February 22 last year will be settled in the local currency on a US$1 to Z$1 basis. The ruling was made by Chief Justice Luke Malaba, the same judge who ruled that Emmerson Mnangagwa had won Zimbabwe’s 2018 disputed, contested election.
In the week that Justice Malaba made the currency/debt ruling, the bank rate for US$1 was Z$17 and the black market rate was US$1 for Z$25. To put Justice Malaba’s ruling into context: if someone owed you US$100 in February 2019, they can now pay you back $100 Zimbabwe bond dollars which today is worth the equivalent of just US$4, not quite enough to buy three mangoes in the supermarket.
The Supreme Court ruling was made in response to an appeal over a US$3.8 million debt owed by Zambezi Gas to mining-related company NR Barber, which is now to be paid in Zimbabwe dollars that are worth only US$145 000.
Undoubtedly this ruling will mostly benefit the well connected and the political elite.”
A little words, but the point is simple, and just to summarize Edwards’ take on what happens next, which is essentially a repeat of what we said both two weeks ago and what we have been saying for years now, the SocGen strategist is “now more convinced than ever before that the coming deflationary bust will take the US 30y yield below zero. I am also convinced that helicopter money will be the chosen way out of this deflationary quagmire, especially as it becomes increasingly clear that there is now no way left to reverse every government’s exploding fiscal liabilities. The Ice Age is nearing the end.”
Nine Members Of Hong Kong Family Infected WIth Coronavirus After Sharing Meal
One of the biggest clinical surprises involving the coronavirus epidemic in recent days was the discovery that in addition to targeting ACE2 (angiotensin converting enzyme 2) receptors in the respiratory tract, resulting in an aggravated “cytokine storm” in the lungs and lethal pneumonia as the cause of death, the virus which increasingly appears as if it was developed in a the Wuhan Institute of Virology, also targets ACE2 receptors in other organs such as heart, kidney, liver, intestine, etc., which in turn explains why the first Hong Kong death from coronavirus was the result of heart failure and not pneumonia.
This discovery also hints at air passage as a likely form of viral transmission, which in addition to the discovery that the virus can survive as long as a week on any surface, has dramatically raised the odds of widespread distribution.
Concerns about the way the virus spreads are likely to surge following a report that nine members of the same Hong Kong family have been infected with the deadly new coronavirus after sharing a hotpot and barbecue meal. A hotpot – also known as a steamboat – is a bubbling cauldron of stock shared communally, to which diners add ingredients.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the food was contaminated with the virus, or if one of those present for dinner was a carrier.
According to the SCMP, the nine made up almost all of the 10 positive cases reported in the city on Sunday after seven people – all members of the family – were confirmed late in the evening as having the infection. Earlier in the day, a 24-year-old male member of the family and his grandmother were confirmed to have the virus. The man’s mother and father, two aunts and three cousins were the others infected. Their ages range from 22 to 68.
Adding to the mystery of the viral spread, the other case confirmed earlier was a 70-year-old man who had not travelled out of Hong Kong since January 9, spending most of his time at home.
With the 10 new cases, the number of people infected in the city jumped by more than a third to 36, heightening fears of a community outbreak. The development came as health authorities warned of “major difficulties” in tracing possible virus carriers because some might only show mild flu-like symptoms at an early stage.
In response to the increasing number of cases, the Hospital Authority, which runs the city’s public health facilities, also said it would drastically adjust non-urgent services in the coming four weeks.
“We’re facing major difficulties in isolating the suspected cases and tracing those who had close contact with the confirmed patients,” Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the communicable disease branch of the Centre for Health Protection, said, adding that it was because some people would only show mild symptoms and thus it was hard to tell who might have the virus.
Nine of the new cases had been to a family gathering on January 19 at the Lento Party Room in Kwun Tong. Nineteen people had joined the dinner, including two relatives from mainland China who left the city at the end of last month.
“I suggest the public cuts down on these gatherings. If they are necessary, try to reduce the time spent together,” said Chuang, who also urged citizens not to share chopsticks with those they dine with.
Ironically, even as authorities warned that the virus may spread even as carriers show mild, or no symptoms, about 3,600 passengers and crew members on board the World Dream cruise ship quarantined in Hong Kong for four days finally left the vessel on Sunday after control measures were completed. According to the report, all of the 1,800 crew members, who possibly had contact with eight passengers infected with the new virus on a previous trip, tested negative for the disease.
Commenting on whether Hong Kong could stop the spread of the virus in the community, Chuang said it depended on how many virus carriers there were who showed little or no symptoms.
“If there are many people who have no symptoms or only mild symptoms, and they have infected many others, then there isn’t much we can do to stop the spread,” she said. “We will do all we can.”
Two medical sources, meanwhile, said a 69-year-old man with diabetes had also tested positive for the coronavirus, possibly raising the total tally further. He remained in critical condition on Sunday at Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital’s intensive care unit. He travelled to the mainland more than a month ago, so well before China scrambled to quarantine hundreds of millions of people across more than 60 cities, a move that in retrospect now appears to have been moot.
Pursuing its own quarantine, the number of people entering Hong Kong dropped sharply as a 14-day mandatory quarantine scheme to tackle the coronavirus outbreak took effect on Saturday.
On that day, only 23,399 people entered the city through the airport, Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge and Shenzhen Bay Port, the three control points that remain open, down from 95,982 on Friday. Of these, only 1,430 came through land crossings on Saturday from Macau and the mainland.
From Saturday to 7pm on Sunday, 918 people were put under mandatory quarantine. They included 814 Hong Kong residents.
Jon Hellevig posted on January 16th at The Saker, “Capitalism in America: How a Dismal Decimal is Robbing Americans Blind” the most extensive and up-to-date compendium anywhere, of data on economic inequality in America, and one fact especially stands out from it: “Today Top 1% are losers compared with Top 0.1% – the Dismal Decimal – who are where the music plays. Top 0.1% now holds as much wealth as Bottom 90% combined.”
These top 0.1% people also donate the lions’ share of the money that finances political ads and organizations for their candidates and against the candidates who are financed instead by the other Party’s billionaires. Any candidate who isn’t backed by the billionaires of any Party is a rarity and (except for the independent Bernie Sanders, who is truly an exception) has no realistic chance of winning or keeping a seat in Congress.
That drastic inequality of wealth in America — “Top 0.1% now holds as much wealth as Bottom 90% combined” — is calculated by Deutsche Bank, in their January 2018 study “U.S. Income and Wealth Inequality”. Here’s more from that study:
On page 3 is shown that U.S. is comparable to Chile, Israel, Mexico, Portugal, and Turkey, as being at the top of the nations studied, in “inequality in household disposable income.”
On page 6: “A record high 30% of households have no wealth” in the United States.
On page 7: All-time high median net worth in constant dollars was 2007, at $119,000, declined to $67,000 in 2010, and rose to $78,000 by 2016.
On page 8: “U.S.: Top 0.1% owns as many assets as the bottom 90%”
On page 10: U.S. has higher income-inequality than any other OECD nation.
On page 11: Income-inequality is rising faster in U.S. than any other OECD nation.
On page 15: Top 1% in pre-tax income in the U.S. in 2014 was $1.3 million+.
Top 0.1% was $6 million+.
So: if the top 0.1% in income in America are also the top 0.1% in wealth in America, then the individuals in America who draw $6 million+ annual income own as much as do all 90% who aren’t in the top 10%.
When a nation’s billionaires control not only its mega-corporations but its government, that small group — who do business with one-another — constitute a national dictatorship which is just as bad as in feudal times when a tiny aristocracy (who also did business with one-another) controlled the government and were a collective dictatorship over the entire nation’s population. A king isn’t required in order for there to be a dictatorship. Most dictatorships are aristocratic, not monarchical. Furthermore, in almost all monarchies, the king represents, and comes from, his class — the aristocracy. A collective dictatorship is no better, or worse, than is a one-person dictatorship.
There are, according to the latest count by Forbes (as of 2019), 607 billionaires in the U.S., and these people include, for example, Jack Dorsey who controls Twitter, and Eric Schmidt and John Doerr who mainly control Google, as well as Mark Zuckerberg who controls Facebook. Of course, Bezos, Buffett, the Waltons, the Kochs, and hundreds of others, are also among these 607: but, still, it’s this group of people (plus perhaps a hundred of the mere centi-millionaires) who actually control mega-corporate America including its government — they also hire and control millions of employees and other agents such as law firms and lobbyists — and the other 330 million Americans do not possess such control, but instead only work for them, and sell to them, and buy from them, and view the world through their media. Most importantly, the other 330 million Americans receive their television and radio and newspaper and magazine ‘news’ from the country’s billionaires, and vote for the U.S. President and members of Congress on the basis of that news, which is virtually entirely filtered by appointees of these 607 people, not only as being controlling owners of the media but as being (controlling) the largest advertisers in all of the major media. The largest advertisers participate, with the media-owners, in controlling the media. It’s all the same group of fewer than a thousand individuals, who collectively control America.
Some of them — such as Trump, and Bloomberg, and Steyer — are also in politics or trying to be, because they want to be controlling America even more directly than they already do, so that their power will be even greater than it already is. Of course, Trump has already succeeded at this, and we can see from what he has been doing to America as its President, a fair representation of the billionaire class’s political intentions, though he is more blatant about it than, for Example, Tom Steyer is, who was the biggest political donor in the 2016 campaign year, having given $91 million to help Hillary Clinton and other Democratic politicians. He was the top donor that year to defeat Bernie Sanders, and thus help Clinton win the Party’s Presidential nomination; so, that’s the type of Democrat which this billionaire actually is: a neoconservative and a neoliberal. No matter what Tom Steyer and another Democratic Party Presidential candidate, Michael Bloomberg, might say in order to win votes, that’s what they all actually are: neoconservative, and neoliberal. They support American imperialism, and they support America’s billionaires — they are the actual beneficiaries from American imperialism, and from an American economy that funnels more and more of the nation’s wealth into their control.
Here are some recent studies which document this dictatorship:
If America were a democracy, then there would be no “narrative control on social media,” because social media wouldn’t be allowed to censor whatever they want to censor. They wouldn’t have that power. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the Government from punishing anyone for any type of “speech,” but doesn’t say anything to limit America’s aristocrats from censoring out whatever they want to be censored-out — using their “social media” so as to reduce the ability of anyone to say or to link to what those super-rich don’t want the public to have access to. Censorship by the billionaires is accepted in America.
Consequently, Julian Assange is kept imprisoned (in one way or another) for around a decade and is now being drugged in a British maximum-security prison while awaiting extradition to the U.S. for final slaughter, and he has never been convicted of anything, but Americans — alone of all the world’s people in this regard — approve of this, and accept both a Democratic President Obama and a Republican President Trump perpetrating this illegal punishment of him for revealing truths about their dictatorship.
And, also consequently, the United States has a higher percentage of its people in prison than does any other nation — and virtually all of them are lower class, not the type of criminal who murders by giving an order or by signing a contract or by selling a dangerous or toxic product but by knifing or shooting someone. The crooks who do the most harm are the richest ones, and they don’t merely violate the laws, they (through their lobbyists etc.) also write the laws.
This working through agents, whom they pay, is how it comes to be that America is now scientifically proven to be one dollar one vote instead of one person one vote.
And that is how it comes to be the case that the billionaire Trump can push into law a $32 billion taxpayer-giveaway to the investors and top executives in America’s biggest banks, which then use the money to increase stockholder dividends and to cut their workforce.
And, as “Capitalism in America: How a Dismal Decimal is Robbing Americans Blind” documents, it’s no longer the top 1% but now is instead the top tenth of one percent who are raking money in from the poorer 99.90% of the U.S. population. You’ve now got to be pretty rich in today’s America in order to be robbing from virtually everyone else. “Top 0.1% now holds as much wealth as Bottom 90% combined.” The top 0.1% are now scamming even the rest of the top 1%. But, of course, in this nation where the top 0.01% have been writing the laws (via their lobbyists) for decades now, none of them is anywhere among the millions of Americans who are in prison. To be that rich is to have a stay-out-of-prison card, no matter how many people you’ve harmed or even killed by your dangerous or harmful products or services, such as trick mortgage contracts or toxic pharmaceuticals.
So, realistically, now: Who can say that America hasn’t become a mega-corporate dictatorship?
Oil Heading For "Mid $40's" In Few Weeks On Lack Of Demand: Starfuels Brokerage
With WTI sliding below $50 on Sunday evening, expect even more downside according to S&P Global Platts’ Claudia Carpenter, who writes that oil prices will probably drop to the “mid-$40s” a barrel in the next couple of weeks because of weak demand, according to Matt Stanley, director of Starfuels commodities brokerage.
Supply isn’t an issue but demand is and demand growth is so fragile that an excuse like coronavirus has caused the 15% drop in prices the past few weeks, Stanley told the 7th annual Global Commodity Outlook conference in Dubai on Sunday.
Crude prices have dropped significantly in in the past few weeks on concern that the virus outbreak could blunt global crude demand. Front-month Brent settled Friday at $54.47/b, 16% below its most recent peak on January 20, while WTI futures were down 14% over the same period.
OPEC and 10 allies, including Russia, are debating whether to institute deeper production cuts to stem the price slide, but Stanley said the coalition, known as OPEC+, should instead be looking to increase output to revive demand growth. “Cutting supply to keep prices up is not the way to do it,” he said.
The only big winner of cutting supply would be US shale producers who would boost production on higher prices, effectively pushing prices even lower, he added. US President Donald Trump has probably had his eye on re-election for his second term ever since the first one started, with an eye on supporting the US energy industry so it becomes a key supplier to China, he said, predicting that Trump will win a second term in office.
An OPEC+ technical committee last week recommended that the coalition cut an additional 600,000 b/d on top of its existing 1.7 million b/d cut accord through the second quarter, to combat the coronavirus’ expected hit to oil demand. Russia, the main non-OPEC participant, has yet to commit to the deal, which requires unanimous approval by all 23 OPEC+ countries.
The coalition is next scheduled to meet March 5-6 in Vienna, but delegates have said it could be moved forward if a consensus on new cuts can be reached in advance.
The coronavirus has sparked fears of a major economic slowdown in China, the world’s largest importer of crude, where quarantines and travel restrictions have caused a contraction in oil consumption. China sources some 70% of its crude imports from OPEC+ members, and its refineries are expected to slash runs by about 1 million b/d in February, according to S&P Global Platts Analytics.
Robert Willock, Middle East and North Africa director at the Economist Corporate Network, part of the Economist Intelligence Unit, said his base outlook for the coronavirus is that China will have the outbreak contained by the end of March. That would mean China’s gross domestic product would grow at 5.4% this year, down from 5.9% forecast before the virus, he said.
If the virus is not under control until the end of June, the GDP would grow by 4.5%, he said. “All bets are off” on the GDP forecast if it’s not under control beyond then, he added.
Angry Chinese Ambassador Slams US Senator For "Absolutely Crazy" Theory Coronavirus Is Biological Weapon
Shortly after Zero Hedge asked in the last week of January if the nVoC-2019 Coronavirus pandemic was not, as some early reports claimed, the product of a Wuhan seafood market, where people were allegedly eating infected bats (which we now know never happened) but instead a Chinese biological weapon that had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (and one lab in particular), which in turn led to an immediate and permanent suspension of our account by the publisher also known as Twitter (and which should thus be subject to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act), none other than Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton echoed our concerns, tweeting that “China claimed—for almost two months—that coronavirus had originated in a Wuhan seafood market. That is not the case. @TheLancet published a study demonstrating that of the original 40 cases, 14 of them had no contact with the seafood market, including Patient Zero.”
Senator Cotton followed up this tweet with another, in which he effectively suggested that the coronavirus had in fact escaped from China’s only level four biohazard superlab (located conveniently in Wuhan), stating that “we still don’t know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company. I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”
We still don’t know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company.
I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/CtuU2czBLp
And despite China’s best efforts to downplay this scary possibility with countless articles written in China’s state-owned press “disproving” that the virus was in fact an escaped Chinese bioweapon, such as this one from Caixin “Shi Zhengli responds to questioning experts agree that the new crown virus is not artificial“, while censoring any allegation across its social medias that the Wuhan Institute was the origin of the virus, last Friday the White House finally stepped in and with more than a month’s delay, and one week after Cotton’s controversial tweet, the Trump administration formally asked scientists if the virus was indeed a Chinese man-made bioweapon (needless to say, an affirmative answer would put whoever it is at twitter that suspended our account in a rather unpleasant position).
That did not prevent China from theatrically getting increasingly more angry at the mere suggestion that the virus which some claim has now infected over 1.5 million people, was a product of the Wuhan Institute of Virology – as if by simply feigning outrage it could convince the world’s population that it had nothing to do in the spread of nCoV despite clear and glaring evidence to the contrary – and on Sunday, the Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai slammed Senator Cotton for doing just what we did first, namely suggesting the coronavirus could have been created in a Chinese biological warfare lab.
“I think it’s true that a lot is still unknown and our scientists, Chinese scientists, American scientists, scientists of other countries, are doing their best to learn more about the virus, but it’s very harmful, it’s very dangerous, to stir up suspicion, rumors and spread them among the people,” he said.
It wasn’t clear if the “suspicion” would be more dangerous than the consequences of arresting your own Whuan whistleblower doctor who tried to warn the world of the imminent danger from the Coronavirus (and who later died after a brief and unsuccessful battle with the virus)? Or maybe it was more dangerous than urging the world to ignore the fact that China has put 400 million of its own in people in over 60 cities on lockdown, and continue flying commercial to China, pretending nothing is happening and ignoring video clips from Wuhan showing local crematoria working 24/7 to dispose of bodies killed by the viral pandemic (without being add to the list of diseases casualties).
No, you see, what Tiankai was concerned about is that the possibility that China created a plague that is now killing its own population, could cause a panic: “For one thing, this will create panic,” Cui said, adding that it would also “fan up racial discrimination and xenophobia.”
Here one also wonders what will create a bigger panic: the fact that China is arresting “whistleblower doctors”, drags away and sequesters anyone who refuses to be put under forced quarantine, and appears to fabricate data involving the epidemic, or cracks down on anyone asking the most reasonable question – did China’s top bioweapon institute, located in Wuhan, spark the deadliest pandemic in decades, which started in… Wuhan?
But yes, we are delighted to see that China has now also stooped to using the oldest trick in the liberal playbook: “…but it’s racist.”
And just like that, anyone accusing China’s Level-4 lab, which as Nature wrote in 2017 was studying the “world’s most dangerous pathogens”, of sparking what may be the world’s worst pandemic in decades, is now a racist, and subject to immediate and permanent suspension by the free speech overlords at twitter such as the company’s associate General Counsel, Jeff Rich (his LinkedIn page is here) who one week ago urged his 1,400 followers to “cull” and “excise” the “cancerous” president Trump from the herd. One wonders, Rich, does this violate Twitter’s “Abuse and harassment” rules?
YES!! Again, this 👇 Excise the Trump cancer, then deliberate over policy differences. He is the single most destructive force against our system of government, way of life and American values EVER! He must be culled from the herd. ASAP! https://t.co/MVfdAylV2H
Anyway, back to China’s rather sensitive ambassador who, instead of promising to look into whether any of the allegations that China created the Coronavirus, simply lashed out at anyone daring to ask the question: “There are all kinds of speculation and rumors,” he added, noting that there were also conspiracy theories about the virus originating in the United States. “How can we believe all these crazy things?”
Well, Cui, “we can believe all these crazy things”, because China has yet to reveal just what animal was responsible for the spread of the virus at the Huanan Seafood Market, as per the official Chinese narrative. Maybe the reason why it can’t is that as scientists have already observed, no animal was capable of actually spreading the virus in such a way as to put the blame on a meat market that had existed for decades and never sparked a deadly pandemic.
Or maybe China can finally allow members of the US CDC to go to Wuhan and inspect the Virology Institute and observe just what went on in there, and whether, as so many have now speculated, it wasn’t one of your public workers who accidentally (or not) spread the virus?
But that wasn’t all: Cui also defended how the Chinese government handled the case of Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who died last week after warning about the virus weeks before the government, with the government arresting him and forcing him to retract his warnings.
“He was a doctor, and a doctor could be alarmed by some individual cases, but as for the government, you have to base your decisions on more solid evidence and signs,” Cui said. “I don’t know who tried to silence him, but there was certainly disagreement…on what exactly the virus, is how it is affecting people.”
“I don’t know who tried to silence him, but there was certainly disagreement…on what exactly the virus, is how it is affecting people,” @AmbCuiTiankai says in the wake of the death of Dr. Li Wenliang who first made public warnings of the #Coronavirus weeks before the government pic.twitter.com/CaQLoz1gOi
Here is a guess who “tried to silence” him – your government, the same government that was responsible for the disappearance of Chen Qiushi, a citizen journalist who has covered the outbreak in China and has since vanished. Asked about Cui responded “I have never heard of this guy, so I don’t have any information to share with you.”
Right.
We’ll conclude with what we said earlier today, namely that “there have been serious questions on whether this Wuhan coronavirus outbreak was due to a leak or mishandling of laboratory animals used in coronavirus studies. This is a reasonable public inquiry regarding the source of the outbreak and it warrants a transparent investigation from the Chinese authorities and foreign disease control and laboratory operation experts. This is not just about the accountability of medical ethics or laboratory safety operations, it is directly related to the current endeavors to contain the virus outbreak.
While the animal host of 2019-nCoV is yet to be identified, the data and information from possible animal hosts and potential zoonic infection is imperative for prevention and controlling disease on an international scale.
The Huanan seafood market has a high potential of harboring the animal host. Animal data and profiling results from the Huanan seafood market need to be disclosed immediately by Chinese authorities even if they are negative results. It is imperative for U.S. CDC and WHO officers to demand that Chinese authorities release the information about animal testing data.
If Chinese authorities refuse to disclose testing data for animal samples, it could imply an intentional cover-up of the true origin of the 2019-nCoV outbreak.
Sadly, we doubt we will ever get an answer to this question, because – as the Chinese ambassador made it clear – any line of inquiry into whether there was an “intentional cover-up of the true origin of the 2019-nCoV outbreak” is now, well… racist.
If a brand is a function of promise (imagery) and performance (interaction), then the brand Iowa is largely a function of the promise. The Hawkeye state is one of the least visited states in the union, attracting fewer tourists than Nebraska or Kentucky. The promise/perception: the caucus and dead baseball players emerging from a cornfield.
The Iowa primary is first for little other reason than it’s first, and has been since the disastrous 1968 Democratic Convention, where the DNC decided it needed a more egalitarian process. So it let Iowa go first, as they had a quaint (antiquated and stupid) caucus process that required more time. The contrast of candidates and deep-fried Snickers was a media hit that cemented the process as “American.” If “American” means damaging and irrational then, yes, go Hawkeyes.
Intimacy = Contact
I write about tech executives, and (no joke) refuse to meet with them. Mostly because I’m an introvert and don’t enjoy meeting new people. But also because intimacy is a function of contact. Often when I meet someone, I like them as a person, feel empathy for them, and find it harder to be objective about their actions. I was recently invited to an “intimate” dinner with the CEO of Uber orchestrated by his PR team, who were looking to spread Vaseline over the lens of the exploitation that Uber levies daily on its 4 million “driver partners.” As Gladwell writes, the people who did not meet Hitler got him right.
It’s difficult for our elected leaders not to shape public policy around the concerns and priorities of the super wealthy when they have more access to their senators. It’s easiest to identify with those who are most like us and those we spend the most time with. The median wealth of Democratic senators is $946,000, Republican senators $1.4 million.
A National Bureau of Economic Research study of the 2004 presidential primary estimated that people in early-voting states had up to five times the influence in candidate selection of voters in later primaries. Since 1972, the Iowa caucus winner for the Democratic party has become the party nominee 70% of the time.
The most influential people on the planet, who decide our laws and wars, spend way too much time interacting with Iowans. Over the last year, the top six candidates for the Democratic nomination collectively spent a year in Iowa. So, who has influence over the most influential people in the world? Old white people. Specifically, about 171,000 of them, about a quarter of the population of Washington, DC, and just 15.7% of Iowans — a state with less than 1% of the U.S. population, and just 1.1% of the electoral votes.
The Iowa caucus has more sway over who gets the nomination than any media firm, ethnic group, or other state, as it provides focus and momentum in the all-important attention graph. So a state with the population of Chicago, whose inhabitants are 90% white, does what almost every policy and institution in America does: transfer wealth from the young and non-white to the old and white. Even in the land of old and white, it gets whiter and older — caucus attendees must have the time and money to caucus. Show me a single Latina mother, and I’ll show you someone who can’t make it to a caucus.
It Gets Worse
The second primary is where a candidate can get real momentum, but it’s also a chance to check and balance Iowa. Unfortunately, New Hampshire boasts the second-oldest population in the union and is even more monochrome with 93% white residents. White households commanding 8x the wealth of black and Hispanic households, skyrocketing student debt, anemic home ownership among millennials, and an agricultural sector where 15% of income is government subsidies — these are not a function of chance.
A democracy on its own is dangerous, as it creeps from egalitarianism to a mob mentality. A liberal democracy is supposed to slow our thinking by inserting institutions and laws that provide guidance and balance. Each of us didn’t send a text message on whether we should launch, on September 12, 2001, nuclear-tipped MGM-52 Lances into Kabul. Our slow thinking saves us from ourselves. But now, our institutions have transformed from bodies of nuance to vehicles of discrimination and cronyism.
Ingesting deep-fried Snickers and town-halling with old white people for a year inhibits our leaders’ ability to move where the puck is headed. Ideas worthy of consideration aren’t heard, and outdated thinking becomes a pillar of our union. For example, Social Security should be disbanded. Yes, I said it. The wealthiest cohort in human history (US baby boomers) should not be the recipients of the largest transfer payments in history.
Without Social Security, senior poverty would escalate from 9% to 39%. This isn’t evidence of the program’s veracity, but its inefficiency. Lifting 15 million seniors out of poverty is noble, but not worth $1 trillion a year, escalating to $1.8 trillion over the next decade. So, each year we are spending $16,500 per person to pull these Americans out of poverty, vs. $5,700 per person for recipients of Medicaid. A targeted program for seniors, similar to most other social programs, would end the universal basic income program that Iowa and New Hampshire have essentially secured for one demographic: seniors. A better investment would be guaranteed income for Americans in their first decade of life vs. their last.
18% of children live in households that are food insecure. We could likely reduce this by two-thirds if we dropped groceries on the front door of every household with children, every day. However, this makes no sense, and neither does Social Security. For two-thirds of seniors, Social Security has detached from the program’s original mission — to eradicate senior poverty — and is now the world’s most expensive upgrade from Carnival to Royal Caribbean for Nana and PopPop. Senator Michael Bennet is correct when he says the reason we don’t discuss universal Pre-K is because toddlers don’t vote. They do, however, caucus. But only when cake is involved.
Suggestions
Racism, income inequality, and a generation less prosperous than their parents are complicated problems with no silver bullet. A decent place to start is to reorder the caucuses. Put Iowa and New Hampshire last. Kevin Sheeky, a Bloomberg advisor, suggested that the three closest states in the previous presidential general election go first in the next primary. This year that would mean Michigan going first, then New Hampshire and Wisconsin. That seems a lot more dynamic and strategic.
Or … eliminate the caucuses altogether. Caucuses are undemocratic in that they require hours of participation that only those with the freedom not to work can afford. Older, wealthier, and more highly educated Americans punch above their weight in electoral terms — they have time to vote and stay engaged politically. Younger, poorer, and less educated Americans punch below their weight; they don’t have the time and resources to be politically involved and to go to the polls. Democrats need to get young and diverse voters to the polls. The Iowa and New Hampshire caucuses accomplish the opposite.
Dems also need to be more strategic. Millions of dollars, hours, ads, and corndogs are concentrated on small states that don’t make a big dent in the effort to organize and activate the national voter base. There are nearly twice as many registered Dems in Brooklyn as the entire state of Iowa. Iowa has a population of 3.2 million, New Hampshire 1.4 million, Nevada 3.1 million, South Carolina 5.1 million. Iowa is currently a non-competitive general election state, and little of all this work can be harnessed in November.
And the strongest cautionary tale of the Iowa caucus — the fallibility of technology. The app, creepily named Shadow, by a firm formed five months ago, was barely tested and crashed. In addition, 4chan users conducted an operation to clog the phones and stop precincts from reporting. All this confusion without a hack.
Technology is hackable, glitchy, and dependent on WiFi, which itself is vulnerable to attacks. An 11-year-old hacked a voting machine prototype in 10 minutes. Ivanka Trump has shown a peculiar interest in trademarking voting machines. The only safe election is a paper ballot election. Count them twice. Leave Russia, tech hubris, and Ivanka’s trademarks out of it.
Gage Hake
At the State of the Union, the president honored 13-year-old Gage Hake and his mom, and recognized their father/husband, who was killed in Iraq. Gage was present, in the moment. But he wasn’t focused on his deceased dad or the recognition. Gage was 100% focused on consoling his obviously distraught mother. Any child of a single mother knows what it means to have your entire universe collapse to one thing: the well-being of your only remaining parent. A 13-year-old boy trying to be the man of his house and comfort his mother is instinct. Our institutions and idolatry of the dollar have arrested another instinct — to ensure the next generation prospers.
White House Budget To Include 'War On Waste' While Boosting Spending On Military, Veterans, And Space
The Trump administration is expected to release a $4.8 trillion budget Monday which will include a ‘bold and detailed chapter on curbing waste, fraud, corruption and taxpayer abuse,’ according to Forbes‘ Adam Andrzejewski, who has seen an advance copy.
The plan would increase military spending 0.3% to $740.5 billion, while cutting non-defense spending by 5% to $590 billion, which falls below the level Congress and the Trump administration agreed to in a two-year budget deal last summer. The budget assumes that a 2017 tax-cut package is extended past its 2025 expiration, and projects revenues in line with last year’s proposal.
That said, the budget also assumes the economy will grow at 3% for the next 15 years, which seems more than a bit ambitious.
“The White House’s election-year budget will show the economy growing at an average rate of 3% for the next 15 years”…..we haven’t grown at 3% for a full calendar year since 2005 and we averaged 1.8% annual growth over the last 15 years.
As the Wall Street Journal notes, “Among the agencies that would receive the biggest boost is NASA, which would see a 12% increase next year as Mr. Trump seeks to fulfill his goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2024. On the other hand, the Environmental Protection Agency’s spending would be slashed by 26%.” The Department of Housing and Urban Development, meanwhile, will see its budget slashed by 15%, however as the Journal adds, the proposal includes $2.8 billion in homelessness assistance grants.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would see its budget decline 9%, but with the coronavirus sparking global panic, $4.3 billion in funding for fighting infectious diseases would be preserved.
Separately, the administration has notified Capitol Hill that it might reprogram $136 million in funds from fiscal year 2020 to address the virus, the administration official said, though no decision has been made on whether the money is needed. –Wall Street Journal
Other winners include the Department of Veterans Affairs, which will receive a 13% boost next year, the National Nuclear Security Administration with a 19% boost, and the Department of Homeland Security, which will receive an additional 3%.
The plan would request $2 billion in new funding for construction of the wall the southern U.S. border, the senior administration official said—Mr. Trump’s signature 2016 campaign promise that sparked fights with Democrats in Congress, leading the president to trigger a historic five-week government shutdown last winter after lawmakers refused to fund the project. The latest $2 billion request is significantly less than the $5 billion the administration sought last year.
The White House proposes to cut spending by $4.4 trillion over a decade. Of that, it targets $2 trillion in savings from mandatory spending programs, including $130 billion from changes to Medicare prescription-drug pricing, $292 billion from safety-net cuts—such as work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps—and $70 billion from tightening eligibility access to federal disability benefits. –Wall Street Journal
Meanwhile, Forbes‘s Andrzejewski sums up “three of the non-partisan reforms the president will highlight in his FY2021 budget to Congress”:
1. End Improper Year-End Waste. The federal government’s use-it-or-lose-it year-end spending spree has been going on for years. In our recent oversight report, we found $97 billion spent by 67 federal agencies during the final month of fiscal year 2018. In the last week of the fiscal year, $53 billion in contracts went out the door – that’s one in every ten dollars spent in the entire year.
The year-end spending spree purchases included:
Inflatable games ($42,500), model rockets ($34,000), china tableware ($53,004), alcohol ($308,994), musical instruments ($1.7 million), workout equipment ($9.8 million) and lobster tail and crab ($4.6 million).
$300 million spent on passenger vehicles, trucks, motorcycles, scooters, and snowmobiles.
$462 million spent on public relations, marketing research, and advertising.
$491 million spent on furniture and redecorating federal agencies.
$61.2 billion spent by the Pentagon in the final 30-days of the fiscal year.
2. Putting an End to Improper Payments. Each year, the twenty largest federal agencies admit to mistakenly paying out approximately $140 billion. For example, we found that nearly $1 billion was improperly paid to dead people. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) improperly paid $18.4 billion through the earned income tax program last year.
Since 2005, we found the federal government has improperly paid $1.2 trillion from the U.S. Treasury.
3. Conducting Oversight of Spending. The Trump administration has already eliminated 31,000 duplicate contracts, saving taxpayers $27 billion since 2017. In the budget, they commit to doing more including comparison shopping, volume discounts, and negotiating better deals.
In response to the economic paralysis brought about by the coronavirus, the Chinese central bank has pumped $243 billion into financial markets. On Monday February 3 2020, China’s equity market shed $393 billion of its value.
Most experts are of the view that in order to counter the damage that the coronavirus has inflicted, loose monetary policy is of utmost importance to stabilize the economy. In this way of thinking, it is believed that the massive monetary pumping will lift overall demand in the economy and this in turn is likely to move the economy out of the stagnation hole.
On this way of thinking consumer confidence, which has weakened as a result of the coronavirus could be lifted by massive monetary pumping.
Now, even if consumers were to become more confident about economic prospects, how is all this related to the damage that the virus continues to inflict? Would the increase in consumer confidence due to the monetary pumping cause individuals to go back to work?
Unless the causes of the virus are ascertained or unless some vaccine is produced to protect individuals against the virus, they are likely to continue to pursue a life of isolation. This means that most people are not going to risk their life and start using the newly pumped money to boost their spending.
It seems that whenever a crisis emerges, central banks are of the view that first of all they must push plenty of money to “cushion” the side effects of the crisis. The central bankers following the idea that if in doubt “grease” the problem with a lot of money.
It did not occur to all the advocates of the aggressive loose monetary policy that this is going to transform a given economic crisis into a much larger one.
Most advocates would respond that it is the central bank’s duty to defend individuals against various bad side effects. The only way they can defend individuals is by not adding more damage.
If loose monetary policy could counter the bad side effects of the coronavirus then we should agree that money pumping is an effective remedy to eradicate side effects of viruses. In this sense, central bankers should be nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine.
Most experts still don’t get it that money is just the medium of exchange. It produces nothing and it can only provide the services of the medium of exchange. If we begin to consider money as something magical that can fix everything, including eradicating the economic side effects of the coronavirus, this opens the gate for nasty economic surprises.
What’s the first thing a Democratic presidential candidate should do after suffering a monumental defeat in the first caucus of the season?
If you’re Joe Biden, call a woman who introduced herself as “Madison” a “lying dog-faced pony soldier” after she says she’s attended a caucus.
After a New Hampshire voter asks @JoeBiden why they should trust he can turn his campaign around, he asks if she’s ever been to a caucus before; when she says yes, Biden snaps: “No you haven’t. You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier.” pic.twitter.com/3uxOAu0Ues
According to Yahoo News‘ Sharon Weinberger, Biden has previously used the phrase – from a John Wayne movie – to disparage Republicans.
So, apparently Biden has used this “dog-faced pony soldier” phrase before, but about Republicans. It’s allegedly from a film where an Indian chief tells John Wayne: “This is a lying dog-faced pony soldier.”
However, haven’t been able to verify that line. Any John Wayne experts?
Sunday’s outburst is the latest in a string of Bidenisms – which have included calling a voter fat and challenging him to a push-up contest or an IQ test.
Joe Biden called Elizabeth Warren an elitist, but here he is insulting a man’s weight (“sedentary” and “look, fat”) and challenging him to an IQ test. Who’s the real elitist here? There’s no way the media would let Liz get away with something like this (she also wouldn’t do it!) pic.twitter.com/QxvP643Cjt
Morgan Stanley: "Bulls Are Still In Charge… But Is it Time To Think About The Other Side Of The Story"
Authored by Michael Wilson, chief US equity strategist at Morgan Stanley
Heading into 2020, sentiment was at a high. In fact, based on data we track, investors hadn’t collectively been that bullish since January 2018, right after the biggest tax cut for US corporations and individuals in over 30 years.
In my view, the drivers of bullishness at the end of 2019 were more about fears dissipating and extraordinary liquidity than general excitement about growth acceleration like there was two years ago. Specifically, concerns about an extended trade dispute with China, unresolved Brexit negotiations and slowing global growth all abated. These fears peaked in the summer/fall and by the end of 2019 equity markets were overbought and fearless once more.
While it’s often impossible to identify the catalyst for an overbought market to correct in advance, it’s easy in hindsight. In this case, the coronavirus provided a big enough scare for the markets to experience their largest correction since early October. However, looking at a chart of the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq, one could say, “What correction?” The fact that we only sold off a paltry 3.5% on valid growth concerns suggests that the buy-the-dip mentality and the liquidity-driven bull market are very much in charge. This impressive resilience makes our 1H20 bull case target of 3500 look more likely while 3100 provides support.
Besides liquidity, the other reason why the pullback may have been so shallow is that, under the surface, the correction was much more substantial, with many stocks and assets off more than 10%. Anything sensitive to the global economy, especially China, corrected sharply, while defensively oriented assets and safe havens soared. This makes sense, but we’re coming off several years when cyclicals have already underperformed defensives by a wide margin, so cyclical assets are now discounting a pretty bad outcome. What’s more, with volatility recently touching record lows, this move felt bigger than it was simply because we hadn’t see one in a while. In short, the correction was significant in the hardest-hit assets, leaving sentiment about the growth acceleration quite modest and pushing investors even further into large-cap, high-quality, defensive growth assets like the S&P 500.
At this point, the low growth, low interest rate environment we’ve been in has created tremendous dispersion in the markets between the winners and losers. Three trades in particular have received the most attention:
large over small,
defensives over cyclicals, and
growth over value.
Most investors have figured this out, which is why these trades have worked, but now they’re crowded, and the latest growth scare has taken these trends to new extremes. Is it time to think about the other side of the story?
Our economics team believes that the coronavirus will delay the global recovery but won’t derail it. If that’s right, these unloved parts of the market may finally be ready to outperform in a more sustainable fashion. After the recent correction, such stocks initially traded very strongly, with one of the largest factor reversal days on Wednesday toward cyclical value and small caps, but that quickly faded later in the week. Over the past few years, there have been numerous false starts toward a pro-cyclical, small-cap rotation. Since June 2018, we have fought the urge to trade these short-lived rallies and recommend cyclicals or small-caps, but we have to admit we’re intrigued by this latest correction and the evidence suggesting that the global economy could snap back quickly once the economic headwinds from the coronavirus fade.
Interest rates, commodity prices and USD have been our beacons for cyclicals and small-caps, and each of them still appears unconvinced that growth is going to turn up, at least immediately. While the recovery may not be derailed, the delay is probably enough to keep the three trends in place for now while high-quality indices like the S&P 500 continue to be supported by liquidity and near record-low interest rates along with the view that global growth is good enough to weather this latest threat.
Bottom line, the liquidity-driven bull market is intact but it’s too early to bet big on new trends in cyclical value or small-caps.
Trump Supporters Attacked After Van Plows Through GOP Voter Registration Tent In Florida
Approximately six Trump supporters were attacked in the parking lot of a Jacksonville, Florida Walmart Saturday afternoon at around 3:50 p.m. when a man in his 20s plowed through a voter registration tent, according to the local Sheriff’s Office.
JSO: White man, 20’s, drives through voter registration tent for local GOP, endangering people & damaging tent, tables. No injuries. When asked if this was politically motivated: “At this point we don’t know the motivation of the suspect but the investigation is just starting.” pic.twitter.com/1qMQHnnS9t
“It happened so quickly,” said volunteer Nina Williams, one of five women who were working the tent. “I just barely got out of the way.”
After driving through the tent, the man stopped, took a video, and flipped off the Republicans before driving off.
“Kind of out of the blue, a man approached us in a van, was waving at us, kind of a friendly demeanor, thought he was coming up to talk to us, instead he accelerated his vehicle and plowed right into our tent, our tables,” said Volunteer Mike Alfiere, the sixth volunteer, adding “After he ran over everything, he backed up, took out a cell phone, kind of recorded the damage, made some obscene gestures at us and then proceeded to leave the complex.”
Responding to the incident, the Duval Country Democratic Party issued a statement condemning the act, saying “No one’s life should be placed in danger for exercising their first amendment rights.”
.@DuvalDEC condemns this incident & says it looks forward to suspect’s arrest. Again, motivation of suspect not known, per JSO. @ActionNewsJax will have a live report at 10. pic.twitter.com/XT1KDsyGi6
“The hate is toxic and dangerous,” tweeted Jacksonville Mayor, Lenny Curry. “Thankfully no one was injured but certainly they are shaken after being targeted because they were registering voters.”
Sadly, this happened. I spoke to the GOP chair. This is outrageous. The hate is toxic and dangerous. Thankfully no one was injured but certainly they are shaken after being targeted because they were registering voters. I’ve spoken to the Sheriff & of course his team is on this https://t.co/dRENZi0Bxq
JPO detectives will be looking into this as a case of aggravated assault, and have withheld comment on the driver’s motivation.
“We are outraged by this senseless act of violence toward our great volunteers,” said Duval GOP Chairman Dean Black, according to CBS 47. “The Republican Party of Duval County will not be intimidated by these cowards and we will not be silenced. I call on every Republican in our great city to stand up, get involved, and show these radicals that we will not be intimidated from exercising our Constitutional rights.”
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), the target of a violent 2017 shooting at the hands of a Bernie Sanders supporter, tweeted “@realDonaldTrump supporters shouldn’t have to fear for their lives while registering people to vote,” adding “This can’t be the new normal. Democrats need to join me in condemning this behavior.”
Enough.@realDonaldTrump supporters shouldn’t have to fear for their lives while registering people to vote.
There’s no place for violence in politics. We settle differences at the ballot box.
This can’t be the new normal. Democrats need to join me in condemning this behavior. https://t.co/vV87snuY0s
Lastly, former Florida governor Sen. Rick Scott tweeted “@DuvalGOP will not be silenced or intimidated. They will redouble their efforts to support strong Republicans in NE Florida and around the state!”
This appears to be a politically-motivated attack on hard-working volunteers in Duval County. Thankful that no one was hurt. @DuvalGOP will not be silenced or intimidated. They will redouble their efforts to support strong Republicans in NE Florida and around the state! https://t.co/F4Qi7hk7CR
The Pentagon confirmed this week that it has, for the first time, armed some of its submarines with long-range nuclear missiles which have a lower destructive power compared with existing warheads. These so-called “mini-nukes” represent – despite the diminutive-sounding name – an increased risk of nuclear war.
The newly deployed W76-2 warhead fitted to the Trident missile system is reported to have an explosive yield of five kilotons, or about 1 per cent of the existing W76-1 weapon. The supposed lower-yield weapon is nevertheless an instrument of immense mass destruction, equivalent to approximately a third of the power of the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945 which killed tens of thousands of people. That puts in perspective the seemingly more usable “mini-nuke” missile.
However, with Dr Strangelove-type logic, Pentagon official John Rood, claimed
…the new device “would make Americans safer because it would deter the danger of nuclear war happening.”
He also reportedly cited the weapon as a deterrent against alleged Russian aggression. (It is lamentable, if not absurd, how American officials incorrigibly portray Russia as a bogeyman. When will they ever evolve?)
The official US reassurance is not the view of the US-based Bulletin of Atomic Scientists who said the deployment of such weapons actually increases the risk of an eventual nuclear war. This is because the lower-yield W76-2 launched from US Ohio-class submarines will be indistinguishable from the existing Trident warheads. Therefore the danger of escalation to all-out nuclear war is increased.
Russia also condemned the US move. Sergei Ryabkov, Deputy Foreign Minister, said:
“The US is actually lowering the nuclear threshold and conceding the possibility of waging a limited nuclear war and winning this war… this is extremely alarming.”
What is doubly perplexing is the wider context in which the Trump administration has abnegated arms controls treaties. Last year, the administration walked away from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, governing the use of short-range, or tactical, nuclear missiles. So far, Washington has shown every indication that it has no intention to extend the New START accord with Russia governing long-range strategic weapons, which is due to expire next year.
The deployment of low-yield nuclear weapons as part of the strategic arsenal is bound to destabilize the global strategic balance. Moscow has repeatedly warned that Washington is trying to incite a new arms race. It points to the undoing of arms controls treaties and the US weaponization of outer-space as evidence of such an agenda of provoking global insecurity.
It is tempting to speculate that the US is reacting to Russia’s development of hypersonic non-nuclear weapons which are said to be able to evade any anti-missile defense system. Moscow maintains that its arsenal is predicated on a doctrine of self-defense and not a first-strike objective. In any case, it seems that the US having realized that it has lost out to Russia in development of hypersonic non-nuclear weapons has taken the tack of expanding its nuclear options. That move overturns decades of declared non-proliferation commitments.
It should also be noted that this week the Kremlin disclosed that an urgent call issued by Russian President Vladimir Putin for the five permanent members of the UN Security Council to convene a summit in order to address international peace has so far been ignored by Washington. Last month, at a Holocaust memorial in Israel, Putin repeated a proposal for the UN founding powers – the US, Britain, France, Russia and China – to consolidate efforts for strengthening global security, non-proliferation and arms controls. This week, the Kremlin said this call has not received any response from the US (or the UK) to participate in such a forum.
Furthermore, next month sees one of the biggest-ever NATO war maneuvers in Europe, including a massive trans-Atlantic deployment of US forces. Russia’s Ministry of Defense has deprecated the huge mobilization as being akin to a rehearsal for an invasion of Russia.
President Donald Trump has previously stated his abhorrence of nuclear war and has called for negotiation of a new comprehensive arms control treaty between the US, Russia and China.
All empirical evidence shows that American rhetoric is completely and contemptibly detached from the reality of its threatening practices. The world is moving towards more insecurity and risk of catastrophic war. And the fault of that damnable dynamic lies entirely with Washington.
This new interest rate climate has many observers wondering where the bottom truly lies.
Today’s graphic from Paul Schmelzing, visiting scholar at the Bank of England (BOE), shows how global real interest rates have experienced an average annual decline of -0.0196% (-1.96 basis points) throughout the past eight centuries.
Collecting data from across 78% of total advanced economy GDP over the time frame, Schmelzing shows that real rates* have witnessed a negative historical slope spanning back to the 1300s.
Displayed across the graph is a series of personal nominal loans made to sovereign establishments, along with their nominal loan rates. Some from the 14th century, for example, had nominal rates of 35%. By contrast, key nominal loan rates had fallen to 6% by the mid 1800s.
Starting in 1311, data from the report shows how average real rates moved from 5.1% in the 1300s down to an average of 2% in the 1900s.
The average real rate between 2000-2018 stands at 1.3%.
Current Theories
Why have interest rates been trending downward for so long?
Here are the three prevailing theories as to why they’re dropping:
1. Productivity Growth
Since 1970, productivity growth has slowed. A nation’s productive capacity is determined by a number of factors, including labor force participation and economic output.
If total economic output shrinks, real rates will decline too, theory suggests. Lower productivity growth leads to lower wage growth expectations.
In addition, lower productivity growth means less business investment, therefore a lower demand for capital. This in turn causes the lower interest rates.
2. Demographics
Demographics impact interest rates on a number of levels. The aging population—paired with declining fertility levels—result in higher savings rates, longer life expectancies, and lower labor force participation rates.
In the U.S., baby boomers are retiring at a pace of 10,000 people per day, and other advanced economies are also seeing comparable growth in retirees. Theory suggests that this creates downward pressure on real interest rates, as the number of people in the workforce declines.
3. Economic Growth
Dampened economic growth can also have a negative impact on future earnings, pushing down the real interest rate in the process. Since 1961, GDP growth among OECD countries has dropped from 4.3% to 3% in 2018.
Larry Summers referred to this sloping trend since the 1970s as “secular stagnation” during an International Monetary Fund conference in 2013.
Secular stagnation occurs when the economy is faced with persistently lagging economic health. One possible way to address a declining interest rate conundrum, Summers has suggested, is through expansionary government spending.
Bond Yields Declining
According to the report, another trend has coincided with falling interest rates: declining bond yields.
Since the 1300s, global nominal bonds yields have dropped from over 14% to around 2%.
The graph illustrates how real interest rates and bond yields appear to slope across a similar trend line. While it may seem remarkable that interest rates keep falling, this phenomenon shows that a broader trend may be occurring—across centuries, asset classes, and fiscal regimes.
In fact, the historical record would imply that we will see ever new record lows in real rates in future business cycles in the 2020s/30s
-Paul Schmelzing
Although this may be fortunate for debt-seekers, it can create challenges for fixed income investors—who may seek alternatives strategies with higher yield potential instead.
One patient, admitted to a hospital in Wuhan, China, infected at least 10 health care workers and four other patients [actual suspect total is 57 see study below].
The patient who infected so many health workers had been placed in a surgical ward because of abdominal symptoms, and the coronavirus was not initially suspected. Four other patients in that ward also contracted the disease, presumably from the first patient.
The incident was a chilling reminder of the “super-spreaders” in outbreaks of other coronavirus diseases, SARS and MERS — patients who infected huge numbers of other people, sometimes dozens. The phenomenon is poorly understood and unpredictable, an epidemiologist’s nightmare. Super-spreaders led to considerable transmission of MERS and SARS inside hospitals.
Super-Spreader Infects 40 Health Care Workers
The JAMA Report, published on Friday, is among the most comprehensive articles to date about people infected with the newly identified virus.
Of the 138 patients, 57 (41.3%) were presumed to have been infected in hospital, including 17 patients (12.3%) who were already hospitalized for other reasons and 40 health care workers (29%). Of the hospitalized patients, 7 patients were from the surgical department, 5 were from internal medicine, and 5 were from the oncology department. Of the infected health care workers, 31 (77.5%) worked on general wards, 7 (17.5%) in the emergency department, and 2 (5%) in the ICU. One patient in the current study presented with abdominal symptoms and was admitted to the surgical department. More than 10 health care workers in this department were presumed to have been infected by this patient. Patient-to-patient transmission also was presumed to have occurred, and at least 4 hospitalized patients in the same ward were infected, and all presented with atypical abdominal symptoms. One of the 4 patients had fever and was diagnosed as having nCoV infection during hospitalization. Then, the patient was isolated. Subsequently, the other 3 patients in the same ward had fever, presented with abdominal symptoms, and were diagnosed as having nCoV infection.
The data in this study suggest rapid person-to-person transmission of 2019-nCoV may have occurred. The main reason is derived from the estimation of the basic reproductive number (R0) based on a previous study.
In this single-center case series of 138 hospitalized patients with confirmed NCIP in Wuhan, China, presumed hospital-related transmission of 2019-nCoV was suspected in 41% of patients, 26% of patients received ICU care, and mortality was 4.3%.
JAMA Video
“Fatality rate in a normal Flu is about 0.1%. When you get into the pandemics, of 1957 and 1968, it goes up to 0.8% to 1.2%. The 1918 pandemic, the famous Spanish Flu, you go up to as much as 2.0%…
I think I can say we don’t know everything about this virus, but it is evolving in a way that it looks like it is adapting itself to infecting much better but we are going to start seeing a diminution in the overall death rate…
The r0 of this one is supposedly somewhere around 2.0, 2.5, 3.0 depending upon how you model it. Which means that it is a virus that is quite good at transmitting from one person to another.“
The numbers of new #coronavirus cases out of China remain relatively linear, varying from day to day within a narrow band. Tonight’s update is no different. It suggests that testing capacity may be influencing the reported cases more than epidemiology.
Downtown of Shanghai, a city with 24 million people and it is totally empty!
China ignores offers of help from the C.D.C. and W.H.O.
China probably wants and needs US assistance, but it absolutely does not want US reporting or any investigation into the alleged number of deaths.
The streets in Shanghai, population 24 million, are empty.
60 million people are quarantined not even able to leave their houses. That is equivalent to no one in California, Illinois, and Wisconsin being locked in, unable to go to work. The economic hit will be enormous.
I just cannot believe this would happen over the reported 700 dead.
Syria & Russia Publish Evidence Of US Weapons Recovered In Idlib ‘Terrorist Enclave’
The Syrian Army is making major gains inside Idlib in a military offensive condemned by Turkey and the United States, over the weekend capturing the key town of Saraqib from al-Qaeda linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
Amid the military advance, the Syrian and Russian governments say they’ve recovered proof of US support for the anti-Assad al-Qaeda insurgent terrorists, publishing photographs of crates of weapons and supplies to state-run SANA:
Syrian Arab Army units have found US-made weapons and ammunition, and medicines made in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait at the positions and caches of terrorist organizations in the towns of Mardikh and Kafr Amim in Idleb southeastern countryside after crushing terrorism in them.
Syrian reporters say they were recovered in newly liberated areas of southeastern Idlib province, where army units “found weapons, ammunition and US-made shells and Grad missiles left behind by terrorists at their positions in the town of Kafr Amim after they fled from the area after the advancement of the army.”
The Russian Embassy in Syria also circulated the photos on Saturday, saying there were some “interesting findings” in areas that were controlled by terrorists:
For years since nearly the start of the war in 2011 and 2012, Damascus and Moscow have repeatedly offered proof of US weaponry in the hands of jihadist terrorist groups, including ISIS.
Meanwhile, in the past days the US State Department has issued repeat warnings to Damascus that it must halt its joint offensive with Russia – going so far as to release a new video framing the operation as an attack on civilians.
The US State Dept has issued a propaganda video that warns against any assaults on #Idlib & promises to “use all its power to oppose normalization of the Assad regime into the int’l community”. This is the US playing a part in supporting Al-Qaeda’s war effort in #Syria. pic.twitter.com/jyb8zHPzBZ
The US has charged that Damascus is harming “peace” in Idlib despite the fact that as of 2017 the US Treasury had quietly designated the main anti-Assad group in control of Idlib, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, as a terrorist organization.
At the same time, top Turkish and Russian officials held high level talks in Ankara on Saturday over the worsening humanitarian crisis in Idlib.
Turkey fears the fallout and strain of the hundreds of thousands of refugees now fleeing Idlib toward the Turkish border, while Russia has charged that Erdogan has failed in his promises to bring neutralize terrorist groups, who have even begun attacking civilians deep inside of neighboring Aleppo province.
A total of 21 were killed, while another 33 were wounded, including several law enforcement officers. The shooter took civilians hostage at the mall, leading to a bloody shootout with police.
* * *
A Thai soldier has killed at least 17 people in a mass shooting and has taken hostages inside a shopping mall, all while broadcasting part of the assault on social media, according to the Bangkok Post and RT.
Local officials and media reports claimed the man broadcast the violence and ‘took selfies’ during the assault. In the video below, gunshots can be heard outside the mall.
The shooting unfolded inside a mall in Korat, also known as Nakhon Ratchasima, in northeastern Thailand. There were “17 deaths and 14 wounded” according to an unnamed official from the Bangkok-based Erawan Center, the nationwide emergency services dispatch center.
The violence started when the attacker stole weapons and ammunition from his commander, then shot his commander and two others at the Surathampithak army camp before fleeing in a stolen Humvee.
He fired at civilians along the route to the Terminal 21 shopping mall in Muang district, and then kept shooting once he got inside the mall.
“The gunman used a machine gun and shot innocent victims resulting in many injured and dead,” said Col. Krissana Pattanacharoen, a spokesman for the police. Local media played footage of the soldier getting out of a vehicle in front of the mall around 6 pm local time before firing toward a crowd and sending people scrambling for cover.
The attacker then fired at a cooking gas cylinder, setting off an explosion and fire. Video clips showed people running away and cowering behind cars as thunderous shots rang out.
What’s believed to be a photo of the attacker is circulating on social media. In the photo, he is identified as a cop.
Photo shared earlier believed to be the alleged shooter has been identified as a police officer on the scene. This tweet says, “stop sharing, this is my friend who is a police officer” #กราดยิงโคราช#Thailandpic.twitter.com/iCA0fgkYjX
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsThe army has asked media outlets to stop live coverage of the attack in order to avoid giving the suspect information about official activities.
At some point, the shooter started a livestream. According to reports, the gunman has taken hostages on the fourth floor of the mall, and Thai special forces are preparing to storm the building, but nothing has been done yet. It’s unclear whether they’re negotiating with the shooter.
Local media have reported that the shooter took selfies and livestreamed during the attack. One of the purported photos shows the suspect wearing a combat helmet and a face mask as he holds up an assault rifle.
The suspect is reportedly an Army sergeant, though other reports have identified him as a police officer. He used an assault rifle to carry out the attack.
Of course, this isn’t the first mass shooting to be broadcast on social media. Footage of the Christchurch attack’s violent assault on a New Zealand mosque can still be found in some dark corners of the internet, even though New Zealand has made it highly illegal to even look at.
Chengdu On Lockdown As Coronavirus Deaths Hit 813, Surpassing Total From 2003 SARS Outbreak
Summary:
Hubei officials reported an additional 81 deaths in Hubei on Saturday, bringing the death toll to 806: more than the total from the entire 2002-2003 SARS outbreak.
Lockdown spreads to Chengdu, China’s sixth largest city (14.4. million)
A little later, China’s National Health commission reported that there were a total of 811 deaths across China, an increase of 89 overnight – the biggest one-day increase yet – while 2,649 discharged patients were cured
China also reported that on Feb 8, the total number of confirmed new cases rose to 37,198, an increase of 2,652 overnight with 3,916 suspected new cases, bringing the total to 28,942 suspected cases.
A total of 188,183 people were receiving medical attention, down 1,477 from 189,660 the day before
First American citizen has died
First Japanese citizen suspected of succumbing to virus
France elevates travel advisory to orange after 5 Britons fall ill in ski resort
Roundup of suspected infected in Wuhan continues
Beijing appoints Xi protege to help lead virus response
Vigil held for the dead coronavirus whistleblower, Dr. Li, in Hong Kong
China blocks Foxconn plan to reopen factories
* * *
Update (2130ET): Rumors on American social media claim the quarantine that is already affected 400m+ people, 60+ cities, and 3 provinces has been expanded to Chengdu, China’s sixth-largest city, with a total population of 14.4 million.
Thread. Reports Chengdu now on lockdown.
Curbs on mobility of citizens throughout city.
Checkpoints at entrances to all residential communities/workplaces, including police presence. Mandatory temperature checks. Currently set to last 10 days. https://t.co/23zuFUOOXZ
Twitter’s @CarlMinzner retweeted a thread from yesterday exploring whether the government is drawing on its experiencing interning more than 1 million Muslims in Xinjiang to carry out its quarantine.
(1/x) Many Chinese cities adopting aggressive lockdown policies to combat coronavirus. Include: tough controls on mobility & collection of personal information. In Wuhan, mass shelters too.
Definitely worth seeing if Party specifically drawing on recent policies in Xinjiang…
(3/x) And I also have the sense that virus lockdown policies have:
a) gotten much tougher within just the last few days, and
b) are spreading to a much wider number of provinces and cities
(4/x) All of that would be explained by coordinated national pivot to treating virus as comprehensive security threat (my guess – the Feb. 3 Politburo Standing Committee meeting) at which virus # made pre-eminent target for Party cadres, even at expense of economic consequences.
(5/x) My guess is:
a) that happened in some form, and
b) that has now pushed Party authorities in province after province to pivot heavily to the public security/social stability apparatus in responding to virus outbreak.
Here’s one: in their zeal to hit “no more virus” target, local authorities might start preemptively detaining anyone w/symptoms (say, fever) – and not in medically-approved, carefully planned manner, but in hasty mass roundups that amplify virus spread.
(7/x) Naturally, I hope that I’m totally off-base with all of that.
But my gut tells me all that is consistent w/the internal logic of how the Party’s bureaucracy would rumble forward if Beijing has decided (as is likely) to treat this as a major social stability challenge.
The news comes just hours after health officials in Hubei confirmed the grim reality that China’s (probably doctored) death figures have surpassed the total death toll from the SARS outbreak.
* * *
Update (2000ET): According to China’s National Health Commission, the total number of confirmed cases has jumped to 37,198 overnight, an increase of 2,652, with another 28,942 cases suspended. The total number of deaths across the mainland surged by 89, the biggest one day increase yet, and bringing the total to 811.
There was good and bad news here. The good news is that ever since China shifted from an exponential to a quadratic equation to goalseek the spread of the pandemic, today was the smallest increase in new cases in a week:
However, before stocks rip higher on hopes that this time the pandemic is finally contained, there may be a far less upehoric reason why the number of new cases has topped out at around 3,000. As Dr Scott Gottlieb notes, Hubei’s “actual testing capacity on a per patient basis may be closer to 3,000”, which means the province may have far more new daily cases, it just can confirm them all.
That 6,000 case testing capacity is per specimen. Assuming for each patient, there are multiple specimens sent, the actual testing capacity on a per patient basis may be closer to 3,000.
Meanwhile, the bad news is that even with this unexpected drop in new cases, the cumulative total is still well above JPMorgan’s base case forecast of 35,760 for Feb 8 (and certainly above the optimistic case of 30,957), and just shy of the pessimistic scenario of 39,018.
And to further discount any good news, it remains debatable whether one can even trust any Chinese data. As a reminder, 4 days ago the number of people receiving medical attention in China suddenly and unexpectedly plateaued after increase by 15-20K a day, a very suspicious development, and overnight we say the biggest drop in number of people receiving medical attention, which dropped by 1,477. Needless to say this number is suspect…
… as is the actual mortality rate, which virtually every single day since the pandemic broke out has been reported to be right around 2.1% of all reported cases, a number that is not as artificially stable as China’s GDP, but is orders of magnitude below what some reputable scientists have said is the true mortality rate, which may be as high as 15-20% for cases in Wuhan.
In any case, to repeat what we said earlier, it only took 3 weeks for coronavirus to surpass the death from the 2003 SARS outbreak, which had an R0 of 2-5. Something tells us that the R0 of the novel coronavirus – which according to most scientists is lower than that of SARS – will end up being far, far higher, as will its mortality rate when the true numbers are finally released.
* * *
Update (1745ET): The coronavirus outbreak has just reached another grim milestone: The death toll has eclipsed that of the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak.
China’s Hubei province has also reported 2,147 additional cases as of Feb. 8 (early Sunday in Beijing), lifting the total of cases in Hubei alone to 27,100, though the number of new cases being reported out of Hubei continued to slow. Reported cases in China alone exceed 36,693 less than two months after surfacing in late December in Wuhan. SARS sickened just 8,100.
We noticed over the past few days that the ‘anti-alarmists’ who claimed that the outbreak wasn’t even as deadly as the seasonal flu have gradually gone quiet. Everybody who played down the seriousness of this outbreak is been unequivocally proven wrong.
If you’re looking for a visual, here’s a useful one (though this chart is slightly out-of-date):
Within the next 24 hours the number of people killed by novel coronavirus in 6 weeks will exceed the number killed during the 9-month SARS outbreak. Pausing to mourn and commemorate the lives of those lost and re-dedicate to reducing future losses as effectively as possible. pic.twitter.com/okM2ZpXiPR
The confirmed cases have climbed by more than 2,000 daily since Feb. 2, peaking at 3,156 two days later. Confirmed cases also fell in the city of Wuhan, Bloomberg reports. The final evacuation flight taking more than 200 British citizens (and others) out of China has reportedly left Wuhan. Those passengers will be quarantined for two weeks upon arriving back in the UK.
* * *
Update (1500ET): The NYT just published its latest critical piece about the Chinese government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak. This one centers on President Xi’s decision to stay out of the limelight over the past two weeks, instead leaving the crisis to his No. 2, Premier Li Keqiang, who has been charged with leading the committee of senior officials tasked with overseeing the government response to the outbreak.
One academic quoted in the article explains that the government’s botched handling of the outbreak could be the biggest threat to Xi’s rule during his tenure so far, and that the changes he’s imposed on the Chinese constitution could make it difficult for Xi to avoid blame.
“It’s a big shock to the legitimacy of the ruling party. I think it could be only second to the June 4 incident of 1989. It’s that big,” said Rong Jian, a writer about politics in Beijing, referring to the armed crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters that year.
“There’s no doubt about his control over power,” he added, “but the manner of control and its consequences have hurt his legitimacy and reputation.”
Meanwhile, three more cases of nCoV have been confirmed aboard the ‘Diamond Princess’, the Carnival-owned cruise ship currently under quarantine in Yokohama. Three more individuals have tested positive, bringing the number aboard to 64, the government said Saturday. All passengers are facing a two-week quarantine.
In China, much of the population has ordered to stay home, with only limited runs for essential supplies allowed. Factories will remain closed for at least another week or so, and airlines have cut service. JPM recently warned that the economic impact could drive China’s economy to a standstill. Here’s the latest update on how China’s tourism industry is dealing with the fallout.
In other economic news, the government in Beijing just blocked Apple supplier Foxconn’s plan to reopen factories in the southern city of Shenzen on Monday. According to Nikkei, health inspectors visited the factories and determined there was a “high risk” of infection.
But most unusually about this crisis is the fact that the Communist Party’s immense propaganda machine is struggling to regain control of the narrative. After cracking down too hard on people like Dr. Li and others who warned of the outbreak before it became a national – then international – issue, the government dialed down its censorship machine, only to ramp it back up a few days later. Now, the party and its cadres are struggling to reassert control. Citizen journalists covering the outbreak in Wuhan have been harassed and arrested.
Though it wasn’t mentioned in the NYT report, Beijing bolstered its response to the crisis by appointing a protégé of President Xi to the committee overseeing the response to the outbreak, the latest effort by the government to rebuild confidence after the death of Dr. Li. Chen Yixin, secretary general of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the Communist Party’s top law enforcement body, was appointed to Li’s committee, according to Taoran Notes, a social media account affiliated with state-owned Economic Daily, which was cited by SCMP.
Canada’s National Post has documented some more of the outrage growing on social media, which the Communist Party is scrambling to suppress.
“Good people don’t live long, but evil lives for a thousand years,” read one post mourning Li’s death.
A hashtag referencing the message that Dr. Li was forced to sign by police in Wuhan after he was punished for speaking out is spreading on Weibo and other Chinese social media sites.
Now, many users are using the hashtag “Can you manage, do you understand?” — a reference to the letter Dr. Li was forced to sign when authorities accused him of disrupting “social order,” according the BBC.
Though the comments hold back from outright naming Li, they demonstrate the escalating anger towards the government.
“Do not forget how you feel now. Do not forget this anger. We must not let this happen again,” one commenter wrote on Weibo.
“The truth will always be treated as a rumour. How long are you going to lie? What else do you have to hide?” another wrote.
“If you are angry with what you see, stand up.”
In one of the most unlikely outbreaks so far, the coronavirus has arrived in the Haute Savois in the French Alps according to Bloomberg and Vanity Fair. As we mentioned earlier, five Britons have been diagnosed with the holidays just a week before the resort is set to be packed with vacationers from the UK.
Beijing has also sent members of a powerful anti-corruption committee to investigate the circumstances surrounding Dr. Li’s death, a sign that Beijing will likely find some poor local official to scapegoat.
The virus has been tracked back to a contaminated chalet in Les Contamines-Montjoie. Family members from two apartments within the chalet have been infected, including a 9-year-old girl. The virus is believed to have traveled to the resort after another Briton traveled to Singapore.
So far, only a handful of new cases have been reported Saturday afternoon in the US, though it’s the middle of the night in Beijing right now. Here’s the latest count courtesy of SCMP.
Update (1200ET): More surprisingly frank reports from the Chinese press have been circulating on Saturday courtesy of Caixin, a Beijing-based financial and business news organization.
Among other things, TV reports claimed shortages of essential medical supplies have persisted into Saturday, stoking public anger over the death of Dr. Li, the first bonafide martyr of the 2019-2020 nCoV outbreak.
Caixin -Shortages Persist, Aerosol Transmission Fuels Jitters https://t.co/GL7XmHjF3d public health experts said commonly used coronavirus tests were returning worrying numbers of false negatives, fueling concerns that the virus may have spread far further than reported.
The station offered more grim updates on the rounding up of all infected patients in Wuhan.
sat cctv eve news on central group overseeing the epidemic- 中央赴湖北指导组：应收尽收，刻不容缓 – in wuhan – “round up everyone who needs to be rounded up, no delay tolerated” in effort to quarantine anyone infected or suspected to be infected w the virus https://t.co/Ox7RZ6JIYR
As one twitter sleuth asks: Would they be going to all this trouble for less than 800 dead across a country of 1.4 billion? So far, reports of these violent roundups have been confined to Wuhan. How long until they start rounding up party members in Shanghai, or Beijing?
Would this be happening if the actual numbers of the infected and the dead were as low as what is being told? China is in panic. pic.twitter.com/bGJj3f9PGs
China’s death toll soars as Wuhan plans roundup of infected. A senior Chinese official has ordered the authorities in the city of Wuhan to immediately roundup all infected #coronavirus patients for new “mass quarantine camps”. (CNN) pic.twitter.com/ZGhDkSTr53
Mandatory home and temperature checks were only the beginning. How long until millions are forcibly confined?
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With roughly a dozen cases confirmed in the US, all of which are reportedly expected to pull through, news of the first American death from the coronavirus outbreak initially sounded like a mistake. But it’s now been confirmed by both the New York Times and WSJ: One of the Americans who decided to stay behind in Wuhan has died.
Few details about the woman were immediately available, other than her age – 60 – and the location where she died. Though the NYT reported, citing two sources, that she had underlying health issues.
Few details about the American, who died on Thursday, were immediately available. According to the United States Embassy in Beijing, the person was 60 years old and died at Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, the inland metropolis at the center of the epidemic. Two people familiar with the matter said the person was a woman and had underlying health conditions.
It’s unclear whether the woman who died made any attempt to leave the city on one of the evacuation flights that has ferried Americans to safety.
News of the American woman’s death come as the world grows increasingly skeptical about the numbers being released by the Chinese government, with some suggesting that the number of new cases reported every day reflects China’s limited screening abilities, not the actual number of new infections. And as we pointed out last night, over the past two weeks, what was initially an exponential curve in the number of new cases has quietly shifted into a quadratic one, where the number of new cases is largely unchanged day after day.
We also noted that the number of confirmed deaths (all except for 3 have been recorded inside China) has topped 700 (the most recent total is 724), and is now closing in on the 800 number – aka the total number of cases from the SARS outbreak.
Washington is especially frustrated with Beijing right now because, for the last month, the CDC has been offering to send a team of experts to help China combat the outbreak (remember when President Trump promised whatever help would be necessary?). But the Chinese have refused to accept them (though they have accepted shipments of facemasks and other supplies). A similar offer from the WHO has also been refused (though its top officials – who know the deal with Beijing – have met with the Chinese leadership).
Alex Azar, the United States secretary of health and human services, said at a news briefing on Friday that he had recently reiterated the C.D.C. offer to his Chinese counterpart, Dr. Ma Xiaowei.
Asked about the holdup, Mr. Azar said: “It’s up to the Chinese. We continue to expect fully that President Xi will accept our offer. We’re ready and willing and able to go.”
Hmm….we wonder why?
Interestingly, Japan also claimed that one of its citizens may have succumbed to the virus in Wuhan, though they can’t be sure because Chinese officials never confirmed whether the patient had contracted nCoV.
Japan also said on Saturday that one of its citizens had died in a Wuhan hospital from a suspected case of the coronavirus. But the Japanese Foreign Ministry said that based on information it received from the Chinese authorities, it could not confirm whether the man, who was in his 60s, had been infected with the new virus. The ministry called the cause of death viral pneumonia.
Per WSJ, Chinese officials said the man died of “viral pneumonia” in Wuhan, meaning it was almost certainly nCoV.
China’s Foreign Ministry said this past week that as of noon on Thursday, 19 foreign nationals in the country had been confirmed to be infected with the coronavirus, and only two have been discharged from the hospital.
In other disturbing news, 5 British nationals have reportedly been diagnosed with the virus in a French ski town, according to the Telegraph. The group was reportedly infected when one of its members came into contact with an individual who had been infected in Singapore.
Think about that: Five Britons have been infected with the virus (which can cause life-threatening pneumonia) after contracting it via aerosol exposure from a traveler who had recently been to Singapore, and was (presumably) infected there. The French government has raised its travel restriction to orange.
Does that sound like a ‘China’ problem? All the while, China is growing more isolated as the US and dozens of other countries either close their borders to Chinese citizens, or implement strict controls. Meanwhile, across the mainland, millions are mourning the death of Dr. Li, a doctor who succumbed to the virus in Wuhan after being punished for trying to warn the public about it. According to the SCMP, his death could inspire demands for free speech to coalesce into a movement, similar to what just transpired in Hong Kong.
For the hundreds of Americans who were rescued and are now being quarantined on American military bases, news of the death, though said, likely helped put things in perspective: Yes, they’re stuck in this military camp for two weeks. But at least one of them must be thinking: ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’
This article on Grist (h/t to James Taylor, The Heartland Institute) tries to point out how “terrible” the last decade was due to “climate change”. They write:
As this hottest-on-record, godforsaken decade draws to a close, it’s clear that global warming is no longer a problem for future generations but one that’s already displacing communities, costing billions, and driving mass extinctions. And it’s worth asking: Where did the past 10 years get us?
The seven charts below begin to hint at an answer to that question. Some of the changes they document, like the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the number of billion dollar disasters that occur each year, illustrate how little we did to reduce emissions and how unprepared the world is to deal with the warming we’ve already locked in.
What they say:1. Atmospheric carbon dioxide rose by about 25 parts per million.
There’s no disputing that ambient CO2 has gone up in the atmosphere, however, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. NASA, for example has this to say about the effects of that increased CO2 in study about CO2 and greening derived from satellite data.
From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25 2016
“We were able to tie the greening largely to the fertilizing effect of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration by tasking several computer models to mimic plant growth observed in the satellite data,” says co-author Prof. Ranga Myneni of the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University.
“The greening over the past 33 years reported in this study is equivalent to adding a green continent about two-times the size of mainland USA (18 million km2)…”
One of the best-established consequences of global warming is that it makes natural disasters, like fires and floods, more frequent and severe. In the 2010s, the costs of this consequence came into sharp focus as billion-dollar disasters struck the United States again and again.
But, that’s not true when you look at normalized weather disaster costs:
It appears that 2019, is on track to continue the record of good news. Robert Muir-Wood of RMS, a leading catastrophe modeling firm, wrote a month ago “Almost three months ago we passed a remarkable record in catastrophe loss. And yet no one seems to want to celebrate it. No banner headlines in the newspapers. . . The first half of 2019 generated the lowest catastrophe insurance loss for more than a decade.” Muir-Wood labelled 2019 “the year of the kitten.” With two months left, cross your fingers.
What they say:3. More people accept the basic premises that it’s getting hot and that it’s our fault.
Well, you might think that if you believe the highly adjusted temperature data published by NASA GISS and [University of East Anglia’s Climate Research unit] on climate (ground zero for the embarrassing and revealing Climategate affair in 2009).
But when you look at unadjusted data, such as is produced by the state-of- the-art United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN) operated by NOAA, you get a wholly different idea about temperature over the last decade:
That’s right, in the contiguous US, the temperature for 2019 was actually lower than for the start of the decade at 2010. The two peaks in 2012 and 2016 were from naturally caused El Nino events in the Pacific ocean. Granted, the USA isn’t the world, but the USA routinely gets blamed for all of the climate woes of the world, so the comparison seems a fair one. But really, where’s the climate crisis?
What they say:4. But there’s a widening partisan divide when it comes to worrying about the environment.
Well that’s true, Conservatives generally think things through and look at fact based evidence compared to the liberal side, which seems to “feel” issues far more than they critically examine them.
But when people of all stripes worldwide are polled about it, such as the United Nations does, it comes in dead last as a concern:
It seems people worldwide would rather have education, food, honest government, better roads, and reliable energy than they would some climate action.
What they say:5. Coal continued its death spiral.
Citing a Grist produced graph of data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) that they say depicts a “death spiral” for coal use, they say coal is on the way out.
What is really going on here is that natural gas is replacing coal because it is more efficient, less expensive to maintain, and has a smaller footprint. It’s really a market driven business decision rather than a nod to environmental concerns.
What they say:6. Solar skyrocketed, but fossil fuels still dominate.
Once again they cite a graph they produced from EIA data, and once again, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
While renewables, including solar, have made gains, they still lag behind fossil fuels such as natural gas, crude oil, and coal in energy production in the USA. Without baseload (grid) generation by coal and natural gas, solar wouldn’t even work, since almost all solar installations are grid-tied – meaning that if the grid doesn’t have electricity, solar power can’t feed to it.
What they say:7. While coal flatlined, the price of renewables dropped precipitously.
I wonder what the price of renewables would be if they weren’t propped up by your tax dollars? According to EIA data, fossil fuels are still far less expensive:
The EIA estimates the two largest federal tax credit programs benefiting wind and solar paid out a combined $2.8 billion in 2016. These funds came through a tax credit worth 2.4 cents per kilowatt hour of power produced, as well as a deduction equal to 30 percent of a facility’s installation costs.
These two tax credits are set to expire at the end of 2021, though a permanent 10 percent investment tax credit for solar and geothermal installations would remain.
Global Air Freight Just Suffered Worst Year Since 2009
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) published a new report on Wednesday that showed global air freight markets declined in 2019, suggesting the global economy continues to decelerate.
Global air freight measured in freight tonne kilometers (FTKs), plunged 3.3% in 2019 over the prior year while available freight tonne-kilometers (AFTK) rose 2.1%.
IATA warned this was the first year of contracting freight volumes since 2012, and the slowest growth in the industry since 2009.
Cargo volumes dropped in December by 2.7 Y/Y, while capacity rose 2.8%.
The performance of air cargo is a reflection of a global synchronized slowdown that continues to deepen. Slowing GDP growth across major manufacturing-intensive economies has dented consumer confidence, led to falling export orders, and, in return, has hurt the air freight industry.
IATA said there are some signs that orders could bounce in 2020. It warned that a slowing global economy and coronavirus outbreak in Asia could lead to turbulence in 1H20.
“Trade tensions are at the root of the worst year for air cargo since the end of the Global Financial Crisis in 2009. While these are easing, there is little relief in that good news as we are in unknown territory with respect to the eventual impact of the coronavirus on the global economy. With all the restrictions being put in place, it will certainly be a drag on economic growth. And, for sure, 2020 will be another challenging year for the air cargo business,” said Alexandre de Juniac, IATA’s Director General and CEO.
Here’s IATA’s Regional Performance Report:
All markets except Africa suffered volume declines in 2019. Asia-Pacific retained the largest share of FTKs, at 34.6 percent. The share of freight traffic increased modestly for both North America and Europe, to 24.2 percent and 23.7 percent, respectively. Middle East carriers’ traffic share held steady at 13 percent. Africa and Latin America saw their shares lift marginally, to 1.8 percent and 2.8 percent.
Asia-Pacific carriers in December posted a decrease in demand of 3.5 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. Capacity increased by 2.8 percent. The full-year 2019 saw volumes decline 5.7 percent, the largest decrease of any region, while capacity increased by 1.1 percent. As the world’s main manufacturing region, international trade tensions and the global growth slowdown weighed heavily on regional air freight volumes in 2019. Within-Asia FTKs were particularly affected (down 8 percent compared to a year ago).
North American airlines saw volumes fall by 3.4 percent in December, while capacity grew by 2.1 percent. For 2019 in total, the region’s cargo volumes declined by 1.5 percent, compared to a capacity increase of 1.6 percent. Trade tensions and cooling US economic activity in the latter part of the year have been factors in the decline. The 5.6 percent fall in international year-on-year volumes in December was the weakest monthly growth outcome for the region since early 2016.
European airlines experienced a 1.1 percent year-on-year decrease in freight demand in December, with a capacity rise of 4.9 percent. The fall in December was typical of the performance for 2019 as a whole, where volumes fell 1.8 percent, but capacity increased by 3.4 percent. Softer activity, including in the manufacturing-intensive German economy, combined with ongoing Brexit uncertainty, contributed to the 2019 result, which in international freight volume terms was the weakest since 2012.
Middle Eastern carriers’ freight volumes decreased 3.4 percent year-on-year in December and capacity increased by just 1.9 percent, the lowest of any region. This contributed to an annual result of a decline in demand of 4.8 percent in 2019 – the second greatest decline in growth rate of all the regions. Annual capacity increased just 0.7 percent. Disruption to global supply chains and weak global trade, together with airline restructuring in the region, were the chief drivers of the weaker freight outcome.
Latin Americanairlines suffered the sharpest fall in demand of any region in December, of 5.3 percent. The region was also the only one to see a reduction in capacity (-3.1 percent). Although the region was the second strongest performer across 2019 as a whole, limiting its decline in volumes to just 0.4 percent, social unrest and economic difficulties in several key countries led to the weakest international FTK outcome since 2015. Annual capacity increased 4.7 percent.
African carriers’ saw freight demand increase by 10.3 percent in December 2019, compared to the same month in 2018. This was reflected in the strong 2019 full-year performance, which saw Africa freight volumes expand 7.4 percent. Capacity in December grew by 10 percent and for 2019 in total, increased by 13.3 percent. Over the year, air cargo volumes have been supported by strong capacity growth and investment linkages with Asia.
There is great concern (rightly) about the current Coronavirus and potential for a regional or global pandemic. The loss of life and associated deceleration of economic activity have a fair number of folks pretty concerned and market riggers working overtime to avoid an asset “panic” (aka, free market price discovery). However, how bad and widespread this may get is unknowable and speculative.
What is known before any pandemic is that the four regions of the world that make-up just 36% of global population but nearly 80% of global GDP (plus 80% of commodity / energy consumption) including East Asia (Japan, China, Taiwan, S/N Korea), Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and North America (US, Canada) all have declining under-60-year-old populations as of 2019.
As the chart below shows, all four regions are now in decline and the under 60 year-old declines are projected to continue and worsen through 2040 in all but North America. As for the US, the projections of a return to high rates of immigration and significant increases in fertility and births are unlikely to play out. North America’s under 60 year-old population is much more likely to hug the zero growth line through 2040 than return to growth.
Below is what this looks like on an annual change basis in millions of persons. Noteworthy is 2009 was the gateway from centuries of secular growth to what is now decades or perhaps centuries of secular decline. 2020 is really the jumping off point, as a period of minor under 60yr/old population declines ends, and the downside speed accelerates in these four regions (particularly China in East Asia). In 2020, the global population of consumers will decline by 5 million. By 2030, the decline will be “at least” 17 million annually. Why “at least”?
This data from the UN assumes birth rates and total births in these four regions far above what was observed in 2018 and 2019 and these UN assumptions of rising fertility and births is projected through 2040. Since 2007, birth rates and total births are significantly breaking to the downside, particularly in 2019… and the difference in these four regions was over 2 million fewer births in 2019 alone and the delta is only growing over time.
The actual declines in the under-60 population will likely be in excess of 20 million a year by 2030. Simply put, in 2020, we are looking at a 0.2% to 0.3% annual decline in consumers with the jobs, income, savings, and/or access to credit to consume. By 2030, the annual decline will be up to 0.7% to 0.8%. It is very hard to grow when you are shrinking…and all the poor and third world nations are dependent on the demand growth among these four consumer regions for their growth. You can see the problem (unless you are paid quite handsomely not to see it).
Strangely, the Federal Reserve and like central banks, in conjunction with federal governments, are making money ever cheaper with the aim of a continuation in global productive capacity…in the face of fast declining populations that do all the consuming.
We are officially in a period of fiscal lunacy in the face of depopulation among the global consumer base.
‘Bullets, Not Hugs’: Mexico Deploys Elite Marines To Fight Drug Cartels In Response To Pressure From Trump Admin
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has deployed Mexico’s largely sidelined elite marine force to fight drug cartels, following pressure from the Trump administration to beef up its fight against illicit substances, according to the Wall Street Journal – which notes that the move marks a shift from a “counternarcotics strategy that largely ended the pursuit of high-profile arrests and focused almost exclusively on poverty alleviation.”
“We are operating again,” said one senior Mexican navy officer, adding “The targets we need to go after have been defined.”
Marines presented Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán to the media in Mexico City after his capture in 2014. He later escaped, and was recaptured in 2016. (Photo: ronaldo schemidt/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
The new strategy comes amid growing alarm in Washington that Mexico has failed to control the drug trade – highlighted by the November murder of nine US citizens by suspected cartel hit men. According to preliminary numbers, 2019 murders in Mexico are on track to exceed 2018’s record of 36,685, according to the report.
Spearheading the Trump administration’s push is US Attorney General William Barr, who has visited Mexico twice to encourage AMLO to bring the marines back to counternarcotics enforcement, as well as beefing up extraditions of suspects who have fled the US while wanted for crimes. In January, Barr urged the Mexican government to target fentanyl labs, as well as crack down on seaports used to deliver precursor chemicals used in the labs.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, right, met with U.S. Attorney General William Barr at the National Palace in Mexico City in December.
In exchange for the enhanced crackdown, the US has agreed to step up efforts to prevent guns from being smuggled into Mexico, according to the Journal‘s sources.
The marines, the Mexican security force that U.S. officials say they trust the most, were behind most high-profile arrests and killings of cartel leaders in the past two decades, including twice capturing drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
The elite navy force was largely sidelined by Mr. López Obrador soon after he took office in late 2018, part of a strategy by the new government to halt the pursuit of top cartel figures and focus instead on attacking poverty—an approach it dubbed “hugs, not bullets.”
Last year, the marines took part in few counternarcotics operations. But in recent weeks, marine units have been involved in a flurry of high-profile arrests, including of the head of a Mexico City cartel and close relatives of two major drug lords. –Wall Street Journal
Mexico-city based security consultant Eduardo Guerrero told the Journal that the “Hugs, not bullets” approach is changing, and that he expects Americans ” to take a very proactive role in pushing Mexico to confront the most powerful groups, especially the Sinaloa and the Jalisco New Generation cartels.”
The Trump administration began increasing pressure on Mexico in November following the murders of three mothers and six of their children in a fundamentalist Mormon compound in the northern state of Sonora. Cartel gunmen reportedly ambushed the families while fighting for control of the area where the victims lived.
After the massacre, Mr. Trump said the U.S. would designate Mexico’s drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move that Mexico strongly opposed. Mr. Trump suspended the decision after Mr. Barr met with senior officials during a trip to Mexico in December. –Wall Street Journal
Barr’s visits have shown measurable results thus far, with Mexico stepping up the pace of extraditions (37 since December out of 58 in all of 2019) according to the Mexican Attorney General’s office.
Those awful white people and their…trying to save the planet!
“The climate movement is overwhelmingly white. So I walked away,” explains Karin Louise Hermes, accusing her fellow tree huggers of exploiting her for ‘woke’ token diversity points.
“After a while I realized I would only be called upon when climate organizations needed an inspiring story or a “diverse” voice, contacts for a campaign, or to participate in a workshop for “fun” when everyone else on the (all-white) project was getting paid,” she complains.
Hermes’ main bone of contention appears to be that her white comrades didn’t adequately embrace the notion of intersectionality, which basically means using climate change alarmism as a vehicle to push all your other demented far-left political demands.
“Anti-racism and anti-capitalism need to be made part of organizing,” claims Hermes.
“If “Green” policies fail to consider anti-racism and migrant rights, how is any person of colour supposed to feel voting for them or organizing in the same spaces?”
Hermes apparently made activist leaders uncomfortable by drawing attention to their lack of diversity.
“Whenever I would question the whiteness of these spaces and how strategies didn’t take race into account, I would be met with uncomfortable silences,” she writes, asserting that the mostly white activist leaders were not paying enough attention to what “whiteness, capitalism, and inequality have to do with climate change.”
In what was actually a fairly good point, Hermes also highlights how eco-warriors push veganism as a solution yet refuse to acknowledge “how people have been killed after protesting against the sourcing of plant-based foods like palm oil on Indigenous lands.”
In summary, Hermes accurately nails how climate activists use non-white people as human shields for their arguments, but her own inherent racism towards white people also shines through given the fact that most of this took place in Berlin, which is still 71 per cent ethnic German.
Respondents on Twitter also had some fun on the thread.
As a cis gendered hetero white man, I’m doing my part by not joining the climate movement.
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It’s Time To Ask Again What Really Happened To Ukraine’s Missing Gold
Now that the Trump impeachment farce is finally over, vindicating the president and in the process for the first time boosting the president’s approval rating higher than where Obama was at this time in his first term much to the embarrassment of Nancy Pelosi, whose impeachment gambit has backfired spectacularly (just as Nancy knew it would, and is why she delayed triggering it until a critical mass of ultra left-wing demands in Congress made it impossible for her to ignore any longer)…
… the Democrats’ great diversion from Trump’s core question – did the Bidens willfully engage in, and benefit from corruption in the Ukraine, corruption which may have been enabled and facilitated by billions in taxpayer funds originating from the Obama administration no less – is over.
However, while Trump has finally moved on beyond what in retrospect was a remarkable, if failed presidential coup attempt, orchestrated by the Ukraine lobby in the US, backed by the Atlantic Council and various other “deep-state” institutions and apparatchiks, and implemented by Congressional democrats who are now watching the chances of the Democratic party winning the 2020 presidential election melt before their eyes, some long overdue questions surrounding the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine – one of the world’s most corrupt nations according to the World Economic Forum – especially around the time of the 2014 presidential coup and the months immediately following, are about to be asked, and haunt Joe Biden and his son like a very angry and vengeful ghost, only this time there will be no Trump impeachment to distract from revealing the shocking answers.
Needless to say, we are delighted by this outcome because as regular readers will recall, there are many unanswered questions that emerged back in 2014, some from following the money both in and out of Ukraine, and some from following the country’s gold, much of which was put on board a plane headed to the US in one cold, wintry night in March 2014, never to come back again.
But before we get there, first we need to a rather lengthy detour into the history of Ukraine corruption since the February 2014 Euromadian revolution, for the background on why Trump had to be stopped at all costs from asking either Ukraine, or anyone else, questions that may expose corruption involving Joe Biden in particular, and the Obama administration in general. To do that, we need to follow some $1.8 billion in US taxpayer funds that quietly went missing back in 2014, and most likely ended up in the offshore bank account of some Ukrainian oligarch; conveniently PJ Media’s senior editor Tyler O’Neill did just that almost two years ago, in March 2018. Here’s what he said back then, together with some additions from ZH:
In the last days of the Obama administration, then-Vice President Joe Biden took a “swan song” trip to Ukraine, a notoriously corrupt country where he had been the administration’s “point person.” On the eve of this trip, the country announced it would end a criminal investigation into an infamous company connected to the loss of $1.8 billion in aid funding — a company whose board of directors included Biden’s son Hunter.
The Biden family’s dealings with this Ukrainian company involved getting one of the country’s most notorious mob bankers, Ihor Kolomoiski, off the U.S. government visa ban list. Under Biden’s leadership, $3 billion in aid went to Ukraine, and his son’s company was implicated in the disappearance of $1.8 billion of that money. Peter Schweizer revealed the former vice president’s role in his new book “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.”
Secretary of State John Kerry announced the U.S. support for Ukraine’s nationalist government in March 2014, a month after a mass uprising pushed pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych out of office and inspired a corresponding pro-Russian uprising in the east. It was also at this time that a leaked recording between US assistant secretary of state Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland and the US envoy to the Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, emerged, a clip which as the FT said then “could also bolster [claims] that the protests that erupted against Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovich last November are being funded and orchestrated by the US.” In other words, the clip confirmed that the US was masterminding the entire “Euromaidan” process all along and deciding who should be in Ukraine’s next government. In short: what happened in Ukraine in February 2014 was another CIA-staged presidential coup. Finally, it was also the time that Biden became the Obama administration’s “point person” for the country.
On April 16, 2014, shortly after the February 2014 Ukrainian revolution which culminated with the overthrow of democratically-elected president Yanukovich, Biden met with Devon Archer, a former star fundraiser for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential run and business partner in Rosemont Capital with Biden’s son Hunter. (Federal agents would later arrest Archer in May 2016 for defrauding a Native American tribe.)
Less than a week later (April 22) came an announcement that Archer had joined the board of Burisma, a secretive Ukrainian natural gas company. On May 13, Hunter Biden would also join the company’s board.
On the day before Archer’s hiring, April 21, the vice president landed in Kiev for high-level meetings with Ukrainian officials. He spearheaded the effort to invest $1 billion from the U.S. and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) into Ukraine.
The vice president’s presence helps explain a conundrum. Burisma hired his son and Archer despite the fact that neither of them had any experience in the energy sector. Schweizer notes, “The choice of Hunter Biden to handle transparency and corporate governance of Burisma is curious, because Biden had little if any experience in Ukrainian law, or professional legal counsel, period.”
Furthermore, Hunter Biden “seemed undeterred by the fact that as he was joining the Burisma board the British government’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) was seizing $23 million from [founder Mykola] Zlochevsky’s bank accounts.” Furthermore, a year after Biden joined the firm, “experienced industry observers warned investors that Burisma was still a company to be avoided.”
On the other hand, Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Out of 148 nations studied by the World Economic Forum, Ukraine ranks 143 for property rights, 130 for “irregular payments and bribes,” 133 for “favoritism in decisions of government officials,” and 146 for “protection of minority shareholders’ interests.”
Two major figures in this corruption feature prominently in Biden’s Ukraine investment.
Zlochevsky founded Burisma in Cyprus in 2006. He served as natural resources minister under Yanukovych, and gave himself the licenses to develop the country’s abundant gas fields. He also had a flare for lavishness, running a super-exclusive fashion boutique named after himself.
Burisma’s major subsidiaries ended up sharing the same business address as the natural gas firm controlled by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. He controlled the country’s largest financial institution, PrivatBank, through which the Ukrainian military and government workers got paid. He also owned media companies and airlines. In violation of Ukraine law, he maintained Ukrainian, Israeli, and Cypriot passports.
Kolomoisky gained a reputation for violence and brutality, along with lawlessness. Rival oligarchs have sued him for alleged involvement in “murders and beheadings” related to a business deal. He also allegedly used “hired rowdies armed with baseball bats, iron bars, gas and rubber bullet pistols and chainsaws” to take over a steel plant in 2006. He built his multibillion-dollar empire by “raiding” other companies, forcing them to merge with his own using brute force.
For these and other reasons, the U.S. government placed Kolomoisky on its visa ban list, prohibiting him from entering the country legally. In 2015, however, after Hunter Biden and Devon Archer had joined Burisma’s board, Kolomoisky was given admittance back into the U.S. According to a follow-up report in 2016, “today, the oligarch mainly resides in Switzerland. He spends much time in the United States and is getting less and less involved in the Ukrainian affairs.”
Archer and the younger Biden brought other benefits to Burisma, however. Archer represented the company at the Louisiana Gulf Coast Oil Exposition in 2015. Biden addressed the Energy Security for the Future conference in Monaco. The vice president’s son brought much-needed legitimacy to the shoddy gas company. Less than a month after Archer joined Burisma’s board, the company hired another Kerry lackey, David Leiter, as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. He successfully lobbied for more aid to the country.
And Both Biden and Kerry championed $1.8 billion in taxpayer-backed loans given to Ukraine in September 2014 courtesy of the IMF. That money would go directly through Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank, and then it would disappear. According to the Ukrainian anti-corruption watchdog Nashi Groshi, “This transaction of $1.8 billion … with the help of fake contracts was simply an asset siphoning operation.”
What is even more fascinating, is that in the chaos following the February 2014 revolution, Ukraine appears to have embezzled money from none other than the IMF (whose biggest source of funds is the US). As German newspaper Deutsche Wirtshafts Nachrichten reported in August 2015, a huge chunk of the $17 billion in bailout money the IMF granted to Ukraine in April 2014 was discovered in a bank account in Cyprus controlled by, who else, Ukrainian oligarch Kolomoisky. As the German publication went on to add, in April 2014, $3.2 billion was immediately disbursed to Ukraine, and over the following five months, another $4.5 billion was disbursed to the Ukrainian Central Bank in order to stabilize the country’s financial system. “The money should have been used to stabilize the country’s ailing banks, but $1.8 billion disappeared down murky channels,” DWN wrote.
DWN also reported that according to the IMF, in January 2015 the equity ratio of Ukraine’s banking system had dropped to 13.8 percent, from 15.9 percent in late June 2014. By February 2015 even PrivatBank had to be saved from bankruptcy, and was given a 62 million Euro two-year loan from the Central Bank. “So where have the IMF’s billions gone?”
The racket executed by Kolomoiski’s PrivatBank was first uncovered by the Ukrainian anti-corruption initiative ‘Nashi Groshi,’ meaning ‘our money’ in Ukrainian.
According to Nashi Groshi’s investigations, PrivatBank has connections to 42 Ukrainian companies, which are owned by another 54 offshore companies based in the Caribbean, USA and Cyprus. These companies took out loans from PrivatBank totaling $1.8 billion.
These Ukrainian companies ordered investment products from six foreign suppliers based in the UK, the Virgin Islands and the Caribbean, and then transferred money to a branch of PrivatBank in Cyprus, ostensibly to pay for the products.The products were then used as collateral for the loans taken out from PrivatBank – however, the overseas suppliers never delivered the goods, and the 42 companies took legal action in court in Dnipropetrovsk, demanding reimbursement for payments made for the goods, and the termination of the loans from Privatbank. The court’s ruling was the same for all 42 companies; the foreign suppliers should return the money, but the credit agreement with Privatbank remains in place.
“Basically, this was a transaction of $1.8 billion abroad, with the help of fake contracts, the siphoning off of assets and violation of existing laws,” explained journalist Lesya Ivanovna of Nashi Groshi.
Then in March 2015, Kolomoiski, whom some have described as the Tony Soprano of Ukraine, and increasingly a pariah in the country that made him a billionaire was dismissed from his position as governor of Dnipropetrovsk after a power struggle with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; the fraud was carried out while he was governor of the region in East-Central Ukraine.
“The whole story with the court case was only necessary to make it look like the bank itself was not involved in the fraud scheme. Officially it now looks like as if the bank has the products, but in reality they were never delivered,” said Ivanovna.
Such business practices, which earned Kolomoskyi a fortune estimated by Forbes in March 2012 to be $3 billion, were known to investigators beyond Ukraine’s borders; Kolomoiski was once banned from entering the US due to suspicions of connections with international organized crime but then Biden’s involvement quietly lifted the visa ban.
Despite these suspicions, Kolomoiski is unlikely to face justice, as he is currently living in exile in Switzerland , Israel and the US, after he fled Ukraine in early 2015. Not long after Kolomoiski fled Ukraine, in December 2016, Ukraine’s government nationalize his Privatbank in order to shore up Ukrainians’ savings. A Ukrainian lawmaker called it the “greatest robbery of Ukraine’s state budget of the millennium.” A few months earlier, in February 2016, the government seized Burisma founder Zlochevsky’s assets and placed him on Ukraine’s wanted list. The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office seized Burisma’s gas wells.
Which brings us to January 2017, and when Joe Biden infamous arrived for his “swan song” visit and demanded, before the entire world, that the criminal investigation into Burisma was dropped.
Devon Archer left the scandal-plagued company at the end of 2016, although a clueless Hunter Biden remained on the board through October 2019 – well after his presence there sparked the biggest political scandal since the Bill Clinton impeachment – providing “legal assistance” in exchange for millions of dollars received from the gas giant. Archer and Biden have not been required to disclose their compensation from Burisma, but Bowling Green State University professorOliver Boyd-Barrett wrote, “Potentially, the Biden family could become billionaires.”
So did Joe Biden get Burisma off the hook for $1.8 billion in lost aid funding? Did he or his son get Kolomoisky off the visa ban list? To be sure, many questions still remain and were all conveniently swept under the rug over the “faux outrage” over the Trump impeachment farce. But now that the great impeachment diversion is over, these all too pressing questions can and finally should be asked.
Incidentally, anyone who is confused by the narrative above, and how $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars “disappeared” in Ukraine starting in September 2014 when the money was deposited in PrivatBank, is encouraged to watch the following video by Glenn Beck who does a surprisingly good job at connecting the confusing dots behind what may be one of the greatest sovereign corruption and money heist stories in history.
The good news is that there are so many loose threads in this narrative, that any real probe will have little difficulty in getting to the bottom of where and how the $1.8 billion in US taxpayer funding to Ukraine “disappeared” and whether Biden, both father and son, are indeed involved.
And just to help them out, one place where any serious probe can start is with a story we wrote in March 2014, when citing a local media report, we shone light on a mysterious operation in which a substantial portion of Ukraine’s gold reserves were loaded onboard an unmarked plane, and flown to the US, just weeks after the February 2014 revolution.From the source, March 7, 2014:
Tonight, around at 2:00 am, an unregistered transport plane took off took off from Boryspil airport.
According to Boryspil staff, prior to the plane’s appearance, four trucks and two cargo minibuses arrived at the airport all with their license plates missing. Fifteen people in black uniforms, masks and body armor stepped out, some armed with machine guns. These people loaded the plane with more than forty heavy boxes.
After this, several mysterious men arrived and also entered the plane. The loading was carried out in a hurry. After unloading, the plateless cars immediately left the runway, and the plane took off on an emergency basis.
Airport officials who saw this mysterious “special operation” immediately notified the administration of the airport, which however strongly advised them “not to meddle in other people’s business.”
Later, the editors were called by one of the senior officials of the former Ministry of Income and Fees, who reported that, according to him, tonight on the orders of one of the “new leaders” of Ukraine, all the gold reserves of the Ukraine were taken to the United States.
Needless to say there was no official confirmation of any of this taking place, and in fact our report, in which we mused if the “price of Ukraine’s liberation” was the handover of Ukraine’s gold to the Fed at a time when Germany was actively seeking to repatriate its own physical gold located at the bedrock of the NY Fed, led to the usual mainstream media mockery.
But then everything changed in November 2014, when in an interview on Ukraine TV, none other than the then-head of the Ukraine Central Bank, Valeriya Gontareva (who, became head of the Ukraine central bank in June 2014 when she replaced Stepan Kubiv and also presided over the nationalization of Kolomoiski’s PrivateBank in December 2016), made the stunning admission that “in the vaults of the central bank there is almost no gold left. There is a small amount of gold bullion left, but it’s just 1% of reserves.”
As Ukrainareported at the time, this stunning revelation means that not only has Ukraine been quietly depleting its gold throughout the year, but that the latest official number, according to which Ukraine gold was 8 times greater than the reported 1%, was fabricated, and that the real number is about 90% lower.
According to official statistics the NBU, the amount of gold in the vaults should be eight times more than is actually in stock. At the beginning of this month, the volume of gold was about $ 1 billion, or 8% of the total gold reserves. Now this is just one percent.
Assuming Gonaterva’s admission was true, it would imply that the official reserve data at the Central Bank was clearly fabricated, prompting questions about just how long ago the actual gold “displacement” took place. Could it have been during a cold night in March when “more than 40 heavy boxes” full of gold were loaded up on the plane and flown off to an unknown destination in the US?
To help out in this puzzle, we got some additional information from Rusila, which in Nov 2014 reported that “Ukraine’s gold reserves disappeared.”
According to recent data, the value of Ukraine gold should be $988.7 million. That is the value of gold proportion of gold in gold reserves is 8%. If you believe Gontareva, it turns out there is a mere $123.6 million in gold remaining. The figure is fantastic, considering that the amount of gold at the end of February (when the new authorities have already taken key positions) was $1.8 billion or 12% of the reserves.
In other words, since the beginning of the year gold reserves dropped almost 16 times. Gold stock in February were approximately 21 tons of gold, the presence of which was once proudly reported by Sergei Arbuzov, who led the NBU in 2010-2012. So what happened to 20.8 tons of gold?
Explaining the dramatic reduction in the context of the hryvnia devaluation through gold sales is impossible. After all, 92% of the reserves of the National Bank is in the form of a foreign currency that is much easier to use to maintain hryvnia levels and cover current liabilities. Besides since March the international price of gold has plummeted. Selling gold under such circumstances is a crime. In fact it would be more expedient to increase gold reserves through currency conversion in precious metals.
But apparently the result is not due to someone’s negligence or carelessness. The gold reserve has been actively carted out of the country, as a result of the very vague economic and political prospects of Ukraine. Something similar happened to the gold reserves of the USSR – when the Gorbachev elite realized that perestroika is leading the country to the abyss, gold simply disappeared in an unknown direction.
Oddly enough there was no official gold reduction just prior to the time when Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland was planning Yanukovich’s ouster, and as shown above, quite the contrary: Ukraine’s gold pile was increasing with every passing year… until it collapsed in early 2014. It is a little more odd that it was during the period when Ukraine was “supported” by its western allies that several billion dollars worth of physical gold – the people’s gold – just “vaporized.”
Which brings us to the $1.8 billion question: what happened to Ukraine’s gold, because if the now former central banker’s story is accurate, that’s roughly the amount of gold that quietly left the country just days after the US-backed presidential coup. And, it is also roughly how much taxpayer-funded Ukraine aid, procured by Joe Biden while his son was working at Burisma, is now missing.
At this point, there are certainly many pressing questions but one stands out: was the real “quid pro quo” not one of Trump holding up payments to Kiev in exchange for a probe of Biden – which after reading all of the above is more than warranted – but if the quo, namely US support for regime change in Ukraine and almost two billion in now missing taxpayer funds which ended up in an oligarch’s bank and mysteriously “vaporized” but not before said oligarch hired the son of the US vice president, wasn’t the quid to some 40 tons of Ukraine leaving forever to an unknown destination in the US.
We hope that Trump’s second term will provide ample time and opportunity to answer this critical question, and just to set off investigators on the right track, we believe that any investigation should begin with the former central bank head, Gontareva, who he also fled to London where she now lives in self-appointed exile and where she now “fears for her life” after one of her homes near Kiev was badly damaged in an arson attack, and was also injured in August when she was knocked down by a car in London. Failing that, one can always check the flight manifests and the cargo contents of all planes that left the Ukraine and arrived in the US on March 7, 2014 with a cargo consisting of billions of dollars in gold…
Monday, February 3rd, just before 9 p.m., the airport Holiday Inn, Des Moines. A crowd of supporters and volunteers for Senator Bernie Sanders is buzzing. After four years of being shat upon by party officials and media allies alike (CNN and MSNBC are seen in Sanders crowds as Goebbelsian arms of the Democratic National Committee), Vermont’s anti-corporate crusader has defied odds and soared in polls. All that remains is the Schadenfreude orgasm of a victory speech.
A young animal rights lawyer named Colin Grace is explaining how he got turned on to Bernie. “Honestly, it started by looking into some of the causes of 2008,” he laughs. “Well, then I found weed and became a libertarian.”
A nearby supporter with long hair under a standard issue Spin Doctors wool weed-smoking hat perks up.
“Dude, should we all smoke right now?” smiles at a fortysomething named David, patting his chest pockets.
“I’ve got the most enormous J.”
Everyone laughs. David and his wool-and-fleece costume looks nothing like the younger Grace in a blue blazer and collar — Grace was a caucus precinct captain tonight — but their stories sound the same. Two elements are near-constants in Sanders crowds: life experience with a broken system (Grace told a story of corporate-captured regulators killing an animal rights bill he worked on), and feelings of sympathy for a Senator also seen as getting the short stick from establishment cheats.
“I was third party in 2016. I supported Gary Johnson,” says Grace.
“But then, even from the sideline, I thought, ‘Man, the DNC is rigging this against Sanders.”
“They’re dirty, man,” David agrees.
“They don’t even try to hide it.”
Nods all around. The group breaks up to hunt for a TV. The results are about to come in. A young woman in a blue Bernie shirt mutters as she walks toward the conference room: “I can’t wait to see Wolf’s face.”
There was so much scummery to avenge: from Chris Matthews on MSNBC suggesting Sanders wouldn’t stop his car to help someone injured on the side of the road, to CNN running a late-breaking story that the DNC was employing “troll fighters” to combat a Russian “disinformation” campaign (presumably to help Sanders), to the DNC changing debate rules to allow billionaire ex-Republican Michael Bloomberg to buy his way in, to an $800,000 attack ad campaign from former Democratic strategist Mark Mellman, to reports that at least some DNC members were contemplating a return of superdelegates to stop Bernie.
It was all out war, between what one Andrew Yang supporter described as being between “the screwers and screwees.” It felt like the same kind of below-the-belt mudslinging progressives used to associate with Republican hitman Lee Atwater.
Sanders supporters felt sure they’d overcome. With a win, all that invective was just another indication of righteousness.
“It just tells me he pisses off the right people,” Grace quipped. Then he walked off to catch the victory speech, and all hell broke loose.
* * *
Yesterday’s really gone.
In 1993, liberal America sang along at the Bill Clinton inaugural ball with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks (and Michael Jackson, whoops). “Don’t Stop” was “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” for the smart set. The New Democrats ushered in a new reign for youth and modernity against Reagan-Bush reaction.
That’s done. After a vote in Iowa that reeked of third-world treachery — from monolithic TV propaganda against the challenger to rumors of foreign intrusion to, finally, a “botched” vote count that felt as legitimate as a Supreme Soviet election — the Democrats have become the reactionaries they once replaced.
Coinciding with the flatulent end of the party’s impeachment gambit, and the related news that Donald Trump is enjoying climbing approval ratings, the Blue Party was exposed as an incompetent lobby for doomed elites, dumb crooks with nothing left to offer but their exit.
Waukee, Iowa, Thursday, January 30th. Activist Tracye Redd, a Waterloo native who’d repped Black Lives Matter and Greenpeace in the past and was currently “bird-dogging” candidates for the Center for Biological Diversity, approached former Vice President Joe Biden after a speech. He asked if Biden would agree to work toward phasing out fossil fuels.
Before he knew it, Biden was sticking a finger in his chest and angrily reading off credentials. “Go back. 1986. I was the first one ever to introduce a climate change bill,” he snapped.
“I thought to myself, ‘Great, you did that in 1986, but if we’ve got a million species facing extinction, so it’s clearly still a problem,’” Redd remembers.
Biden pushed again. “Politifact said it’s a game changer,” Biden jabbed, adding: “I’ve been working my whole life.” He poked Redd in the sternum on fact, work, whole, and life, then walked away like he’d dropped a mic.
The scene was so bizarre that Redd says he could only respond by instinct, drawing on post-Trayvon Martin strategies for black men to keep safe in charged situations. “You know, ‘Yessir, no sir,’ don’t talk back, keep your hands visible…”
Biden in this race has, on multiple occasions, looked close to grabbing prospective voters by the ears and speed-eating their faces off to thwart questions. A few days before the exchange with Redd, he grabbed a former state representative named Ed Fallon by the jacket lapel and asked, “You believe Bernie can do something, and by 2030? Only relaxing when Rollins gasped he was for Tom Steyer. Often he looks around like he expects a thumbs-up for giving in to his rage-response.
In Cedar Rapids on February 1st, Jaimee Warbasse, a mother, hairstylist, and onetime caucaser for Hillary Clinton, was feeling anxious. Just days were left before the vote, and unusually, she was undecided. Her husband Matt called her with good news: Joe Biden was going to appear at the Roosevelt Middle School, just down the street.
“I was glad,” Warbasse recalls. “When he was Vice President, I thought he’d make a good president… I was hoping to meet him, so I could feel more comfortable voting for him.”
Iowans take presidential politics seriously. Perhaps only New Hampshire residents could comprehend. When deciding whom to stand for, Iowans expect to physically meet their candidate. This is seen as a two-way obligation: Voters should make an effort to meet the hopefuls, but candidates also have to make themselves available.
Warbasse was slightly put out that she had not met Biden. “There were more opportunities to see the other candidates,” she said. She went to his speech, then got in a greeting line, shouting, “Undecided voter over here, Joe!”
She invited him to make his case. “I haven’t seen much of you,” she said. Why should she vote for him?
Biden moved inches from her face, gripped her hand (throughout: “we’re talking minutes,” she said) and gave a political clip-art answer, about how he’s a guy who says what he means and means what he says, etc.
When Warbasse didn’t respond with enthusiasm, his mood turned. “If I haven’t swayed you today, then I can’t sway you,” he snapped.
Warbasse was shocked.
“It was like he was waiting for people to tell him what a wonderful person he was,” she says. “It was super bizarre.”
These scenes have been laughed off as irrelevant dementia, but Biden’s outbursts are in keeping with a long pattern of establishment Democrats being outraged at having to explain their shit records.
The Biden jab came from the same place as the counter-accusatory finger Bill Clinton thrust at Black Lives Matter protesters in Philadelphia in 2016, for questioning the Crime Bill and talking about “super predators” (“Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn’t!” Clinton shouted). It was the same impatience that got Nancy Pelosi huffing over progressives and “the Green Dream or whatever.”
Democratic campaign events have long been more pep rally than discussion, more about the terribleness of Republicans than substance. “They’re so used to events where everyone is rooting for them,” says Redd. “It’s like, ‘No, we’re actually here to challenge you on issues that matter.’”
Biden performed surprisingly well all year in polls, but he headed into Iowa like a passenger jet trying to land with one burning engine, hitting trees, cows, cars, sides of mountains, everything. The poking incidents were bad, but then one of his chief surrogates, John Kerry, was overheard by NBC talking about the possibility of jumping in to keep Bernie from “taking down” the party.
“Maybe I’m fucking deluding myself here,” Kerry reportedly said — mainstream Democrats may not have changed their policies or strategies much since Trump, but they sure are swearing more — then noted he would have to raise a “couple of million” from people like venture capitalist Doug Hickey.
Kerry later said he was enumerating the reasons he wouldn’t run, though those notably did not include humility about his own reputation as a comical national electoral failure, or because there’s already a candidate in the race (Biden) he’d been crisscrossing Iowa urging people to vote for, but instead because he’d have to step down from the board of Bank of America and give up paid speeches. French aristocrats who shouted “Vive le Roi!” on the way to the razor did a better job advertising themselves.
With days, hours left before the caucuses, there were signs everywhere that the party establishment was scrambling to find someone among the remaining cast members to stop what Kerry called the “reality of Bernie.”
But who? Yang said smart things about inequality, so he was out. Tulsi Gabbard was Russian Bernie spawn. Tom Steyer was Dennis Kucinich with money. Voters had already rejected potential Trump WWE opponents like the “progressive prosecutor” (Kamala Harris), the “pragmatic progressive” (John Delaney), “the next Bobby Kennedy” (Beto O’Rourke), “Courageous Empathy” (Cory Booker), Medicare for All can bite me (John Hickenlooper), and over a dozen others.
Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg seemed perfect, a man who defended the principle of wine-based fundraisers with military effrontery. New York magazine made his case in a cover story the magazine’s Twitter account summarized as:
“Perhaps all the Democrats need to win the presidency is a Rust Belt millennial who’s gay and speaks Norwegian.”
(The “Here’s something random the Democrats need to beat Trump” story became an important literary genre in 2019-2020, the high point being Politico’s “Can the “F-bomb save Beto?”).
Buttigieg had momentum. The flameout of Biden was expected to help the ex-McKinsey consultant with “moderates.” Reporters dug Pete; he’s been willing to be photographed holding a beer and wearing a bomber jacket, and in Iowa demonstrated what pundits call a “killer instinct,” i.e. a willingness to do anything to win.
Days before the caucus, a Buttigieg supporter claimed Pete’s name had not been read out in a Des Moines Register poll, leading to the pulling of what NBC called the “gold standard” survey. The irony of such a relatively minor potential error holding up a headline would soon be laid bare.
However, Pete’s numbers with black voters (he polls at zero in many states) led to multiple news stories in the last weekend before the caucus about “concern” that Buttigieg would not be able to win.
Who, then? Elizabeth Warren was cratering in polls and seemed to be shifting strategy on a daily basis. In Iowa, she attacked “billionaires” in one stop, emphasized “unity” in the next, and stressed identity at other times (she came onstage variously that weekend to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” or to chants of “It’s time for a woman in the White House”). Was she an outsider or an insider? A screwer, or a screwee? Whose side was she on?
A late controversy involving a story that Sanders had told Warren a woman couldn’t win didn’t help. Jaimee Warbasse planned to caucus with Warren, but the Warren/Sanders “hot mic” story of the two candidates arguing after a January debate was a bridge too far. She spoke of being frustrated, along with friends, at the inability to find anyone she could to trust to take on Trump.
“It’s like we all have PTSD from 2016,” she said. “There has to be somebody.”
* * *
Just after sundown, February 2nd, Jethro’s BBQ n’ Pork Chop Grill, Johnston, Iowa. The Niners are up on the Chiefs 3-0 and this gymnasium-sized sports bar is packed. Most everyone in seats is a supporter of Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Everyone else in the massive crowd seems to be a reporter or cameraperson. You can’t step two feet in the Des Moines area on caucus weekend without hitting press. It’s like an angry God shook a box of us through the clouds.
When the candidate herself shows up, media engulf her with a three-level swarm. Klobuchar ends up inside a row of cameras inside a row of hacks carrying notebooks, inside a row of taller hacks on tippy-toes.
“I’m asking you to run for me,” she cries, to the scattered real people somewhere beyond the press.
“Just like those guys are running on the field. I’m asking you to take this over the goalposts for me. I’m asking you to score a touchdown for — okay, enough!”
Guffaws! Reporters love “Amy,” who goes by one name behind press ropelines, like Shakira, or Sinbad. She’s their take on a star. “Amy” in the last week surged in polls, having overtaken Warren in some surveys, hitting as much as 10, 12, and 13 percent.
Klobuchar is a pure distillation of “electability,” i.e. a Washington reporter’s idea of what a Midwesterner finds charming. She isn’t funny, but her tireless marketing of her funniness matches the reportorial concept of what a “sense of humor” is in politics.
Her ability to speak at length without revealing deep ideological belief is also prized by our kind. This is what Washington for decades told people they wanted, instead of health care, peace, job security, etc.
Scott Thompson, the former mayor of a downstate Illinois town called Rushville, sees it differently. The congenial labor economist dressed in a big green “Amy” t-shirt has a long-standing ritual, asking every reporter who approaches him to sign a clipboard.
“Five today,” he says, chuckling. He holds it up: He’s running out of space.
Thompson’s experience in government disinclines him to politicians who offer facile solutions. He wrestles with the Bernie phenomenon, saying he understands it more now than he used to, as he sympathizes with those who are so mad, they’ve lost faith in the system.
“But at some point,” he says, “you have to stop being pissed off and start working.” He pauses. “If you want to fight just to fight, go into boxing, you know?”
That Sunday night, a 36-year-old Minnesotan named Chris Storey called a number he’d been given, for a woman who was chair of the Waukee 4 district. Thanks to a new rule allowing out-of-state volunteers to be precinct captains, he was set to represent the Sanders campaign there.
“We got along, it was great,” he recalls.
“She told me she was looking forward to seeing me the next day.”
The next day, caucus day, Storey showed up at Shuler Elementary School in Clive, Iowa. The same official he’d spoken with the night before met him at the door.
“It was like two different people,” he recalls.
“I was told there was a written directive from the county chair that nonresidents could not be precinct captains.”
Sanders had to get a last-minute replacement captain in Waukee 4, someone not formally aligned with the campaign. He fell short of viability there by five votes. County chair Bryce Smith, who made the decision, said he was responding to a late directive from the Iowa Democratic Party that said they would allow one nonresident captain per campaign, per precinct, but “the discretion of the chair is what goes,” i.e. this ultimately was a judgment call for county chairs. Smith said he didn’t like the change to the longstanding rule — “What’s stopping a campaign from hiring professional persuaders and high profile people?” he asked — and decided to bar nonresident captains. The IDP has not yet commented.
As a result, some would-be captains in Dallas County from multiple different campaigns were pulled off the job (Smith said he got “five, six, eight” calls to complain). Meanwhile, in other districts, nonresident captains were common.
Caucus participants later in the week would offer an eyebrow-raising number of other issues: bad head counts, misreported results, misreads of rules, wrong numbers, telecommunications errors, and other problems.
The basics of the caucus aren’t hard. You enter a building that is poorly ventilated, too small, and surrounded by mud puddles — usually a school gym. You join other people who plan on voting your way, gathering around the “precinct captain” for your candidate. If your pile of people comprises 15% of the room or more on the first count, your candidate is deemed “viable” and you must stay in that group. If your group doesn’t reach 15%, you must move to a new group or declare yourself undecided. There is a second count, and it should be done.
When historians pore over the Great Iowa Catastrophe of 2020, much of the blame will be focused on Acronym and Shadow, the two firms associated with the balky app that was supposed to count caucus results. For the conspiratorial-minded, the various political connections will be key: Acronym co-founder Tara McGowan is married to Buttigieg strategist Michael Halle, while former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe sits on Acronym’s board. Shadow had also been a client of both the Buttigieg and Biden campaigns in 2019.
But garden variety disorganization and stupidity were the major storylines underneath the terrible optics. From the first moment the caucus proceedings were delayed Monday night due to what the Iowa Democratic Party called “inconsistencies in the reporting,” Sanders supporters in particular felt in déjà vu territory. Orlando native Patty Duffy, an out-of-stater who captained for Sanders in the small town of Milo, had flashbacks to the run-up to the Hillary-Bernie convention.
“It was like we were back in 2016,” Duffy said. “Except this was worse.”
* * *
What happened over the five days after the caucus was a mind-boggling display of fecklessness and ineptitude. Delay after inexplicable delay halted the process, to the point where it began to feel like the caucus had not really taken place. Results were released in chunks, turning what should have been a single news story into many, often with Buttigieg “in the lead.”
The delays and errors cut in many directions, not just against Sanders. Buttigieg, objectively, performed above poll expectations, and might have gotten more momentum even with a close, clear loss, but because of the fiasco he ended up hashtagged as #MayorCheat and lumped in headlines tied to what the Daily Beast called a “Clusterfuck.”
Though Sanders won the popular vote by a fair margin, both in terms of initial preference (6,000 votes) and final preference (2,000), Mayor Pete’s lead for most of the week with “state delegate equivalents” — the number used to calculate how many national delegates are sent to the Democratic convention — made him the technical winner in the eyes of most. By the end of the week, however, Sanders had regained so much ground, to within 1.5 state delegate equivalents, that news organizations like the AP were despairing at calling a winner.
This wasn’t necessarily incorrect. The awarding of delegates in a state like Iowa is inherently somewhat random. If there’s a tie in votes in a district awarding five delegates, a preposterous system of coin flips is used to break the odd number. The geographical calculation for state delegate equivalents is also uneven, weighted toward the rural. A wide popular-vote winner can surely lose.
But the storylines of caucus week sure looked terrible for the people who ran the vote. The results released early favored Buttigieg, while Sanders-heavy districts came out later. There were massive, obvious errors. Over 2,000 votes that should have gone to Sanders and Warren went to Deval Patrick and Tom Steyer in one case the Iowa Democrats termed a “minor error.” In multiple other districts (Des Moines 14 for example), the “delegate equivalents” appeared to be calculated incorrectly, in ways that punished all the candidates, not just Sanders. By the end of the week, even the New York Times was saying the caucus was plagued with “inconsistencies and errors.”
Emily Connor, a Sanders precinct captain in Boone County, spent much of the week checking results, waiting for her Bernie-heavy district to be recorded. It took a while. By the end of the week, she was fatalistic.
“If you’re a millennial, you basically grew up in an era where popular votes are stolen,” she said.
“The system is riddled with loopholes.”
Others felt the party was in denial about how bad the caucus night looked.
“They’re kind of brainwashed,” said Joe Grabinski, who caucused in West Des Moines.
“They think they’re on the side of the right… they’ll do anything to save their careers.
An example of how screwed up the process was from the start involved a new twist on the process, the so-called “Presidential Preference Cards.”
In 2020, caucus-goers were handed index cards that seemed simple enough. On side one, marked with a big “1,” caucus-goers were asked to write in their initial preference. Side 2, with a “2,” was meant to be where you wrote in who you ended up supporting, if your first choice was not viable.
The “PPCs” were supposedly there to “ensure a recount is possible,” as the Polk County Democrats put it. But caucus-goers didn’t understand the cards.
Morgan Baethke, who volunteered at Indianola 4, watched as older caucus-goers struggled. Some began filling out both sides as soon as they were given them.
Therefore, Baethke says, if they do a recount, “the first preference should be accurate.” However, “the second preference will be impossible to recreate with any certainty.”
This is a problem, because by the end of the week, DNC chair Tom Perez — a triple-talking neurotic who is fast becoming the poster child for everything progressives hate about modern Dems — called for an “immediate recanvass.” He changed his mind after ten hours and said he only wanted “surgical” reanalysis of problematic districts.
No matter what result emerges, it’s likely many individual voters will not trust it. Between comical videos of apparently gamed coin-flips and the pooh-poohing reaction of party officials and pundits (a common theme was that “toxic conspiracy theories” about Iowa were the work of the Trumpian right and/or Russian bots), the overall impression was a clown show performance by a political establishment too bored to worry about the appearance of impartiality.
“Is it incompetence or corruption? That’s the big question,” asked Storey.
“I’m not sure it matters. It could be both.”
* * *
Iowa was the real “beginning of the end,” to a story that began in the Eighties.
Following the wipeout 49-state, 512 electoral vote loss of Walter Mondale in 1984, demoralized Democratic Party leaders felt marooned, between the awesome fundraising power of Ronald Reagan Republicans and the irritant liberalism of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.
To get out, they sold out. A vanguard of wonks like Al From and Senator Sam Nunn at the Democratic Leadership Council devised a marketing plan: two middle fingers, one in each direction.
They would steal financial support for Republicans by out-whoring them on economic policy. The left would be kneecapped via “triangulation,” i.e. the public reveling in the lack of choices for poor, minority, and liberal voters.
Young pols like Bill Clinton learned they could screw constituents and still collect from them. What would they do, vote Republican? Better, the parental scolding of disobedient minorities like Sister Souljah combined with the occasional act of mindless sadism (like the execution of mentally ill Ricky Ray Rector) impressed white “swing” voters, making “triangulation” a huge win-win — more traction in red states, less whining from lefty malcontents.
Democrats went on to systematically rat-fuck every group in their tent: labor, the poor, minorities, soldiers, criminal defendants, students, homeowners, media consumers, environmentalists, civil libertarians, pensioners – everyone but donors.
They didn’t just fail to defend groups, but built monuments to their betrayal. They broke labor’s back with NAFTA, embraced mass incarceration with the 1994 Crime Bill, and ushered in the Clear Channel era with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Welfare Reform in 1996 was a sellout of the Great Society (but hey, at least Clinton kept the White House that year!). The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act gave us Too Big to Fail. Shock Therapy was the Peace Corps in reverse. They sold out on Iraq, expanded Dick Cheney’s secret regime of surveillance and assassination, gave Wall Street a walk after 2008, then lost an unlosable election, which they blamed on a conspiracy of leftist intellectuals and Russians.
Still, if you were black, female, gay, an immigrant, a union member, college-educated, had been to Europe, owned a Paul Klee print or knew Miller’s Crossing was a good movie, you owed Democrats your vote. Why? Because they “got things done.”
Now they’re not getting much done, except a lost reputation. That feat at least, they earned.
To paraphrase the Joker:
What do you get when you cross a political party that’s sold out for decades, with an electorate that’s been abandoned and treated like trash?
“End That Son Of A Bitch”: Duterte Moves To Terminate Philippines’ Military Pact With US
President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte is moving to terminate the shaky US-allied country’s military pact with the United States after Washingtonrevoked former police chief and now Senator Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa’s US visa last month. The close Duterte ally stands accused of widespread of widespread war crimes, including ordering extrajudicial killings of thousands during the Southeast Asian Pacific nation’s brutal ongoing ‘war on drugs’ — raging since 2016.
An enraged Duterte had threatened last month: “I’m warning you… if you won’t do the correction on this, I will terminate the… Visiting Forces Agreement,” and declared provocatively “I’ll end that son of a bitch”— in reference to the pact which provides legal immunity to US military drills.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, via Getty/NYT
Filipino Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin testified before the country’s senate this past week that termination of the agreement will “negatively impact” defense and economic ties between Washington and Manila.
“The president said he is terminating the VFA,”Defense Secretary of the Philippines, Maj. Gen. Delfin Lorenzana told ABS-CBN News on Friday. “I asked for clarification and he said he is not changing his decision.”
President Duterte previously gave Washington a month to fix its “mistake” related to punitive action against Dela Rosa and said he wasn’t bluffing. The AP described the history of the key military pact as follows:
The security accord, which took effect in 1999, provides the legal cover for American troops to enter the Philippines for joint training with Filipino troops.
A separate defense pact subsequently signed by the treaty allies in 2014, the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, allowed the extended stay of U.S. forces and authorized them to build and maintain barracks and other facilities in designated Philippine military camps.
Perhaps more significantly Duterte went so far as to declare in late January that he will ban some US senators from visiting the Philippines unless Washington backs down. He’d also told members of his cabinet not to visit the US.
Former Philippines national police chief Roland Dela Rosa (now senator) in 2017, via the AFP.
Since Manila initiated its aggressive militarized crackdown on illegal drugs starting in 2016, thousands of civilian drug suspects have been left dead across the country, mostly in deeply impoverished areas, resulting in condemnations from the United Nations and human rights groups. Most of these killings also took place outside of any courtroom or judicial setting.
Dela Rosa was tasked as President Duterte’s top enforcer, gaining him popularity among right-wingers and the military in the country, but infamy among others.
The OPCW has released a briefing note summarising the recent “independent investigation” into their recent Titanic-sized leaks.(You can read the summary at the link above, or the full “independent” report here).
It’s a fairly narrow statement, focusing entirely on the two unnamed inspectors (Inspector A and Inspector B) who worked with the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media to leak the censored reports. (There is not a word about the e-mails later released by WikiLeaks).
You won’t be surprised to know that the report finds the two leakers, Ian Henderson and “Alex”, were wrong to leak the confidential information.
In that sense, it’s entirely self-contradictory. Attempting to tell us the information is at once “sensitive”, and also incomplete, incorrect and easily refuted.
Of course, none of that refutation is present here, because that wasn’t the remit of this report. This is just an investigation into the “Possible Breaches of Confidentiality” and not the veracity of the leaks, or the pertinence of the information therein.
Sometimes an incredibly narrow purview is a sound defence against an undesirable reality.
There’s really no new information here, just six pages of waffle telling us very little we didn’t already know. It’s not a report that really means anything at all. It’s just something that the OPCW literally had to say. Institutions have immune responses, they simply must attack their critics. It’s automatic.
If a CIA whistleblower were to announce the sky was blue, the CIA would release a memo claiming to have no official records concerning the visual appearance of our atmosphere and detailing the leaker’s history of alcohol abuse.
Attacking whistleblowers is just a reflex of self-defence, the most base instinct of every lifeform.
In its content and tone, this report is a clear example of that behaviour. Far more a smear and hit piece than a refutation or investigation (at one point it even straight-up lies about Ian Henderson’s career at the OPCW).
Essentially, it’s just a series of attacks on the competence and motivations of the whistleblowers, even to the point of attempting to deny them that status:
Inspectors A and B are not whistle-blowers.”
The head of OPCW bafflingly declares, before going on to explain:
They are individuals who could not accept that their views were not backed by evidence. When their views could not gain traction, they took matters into their own hands and breached their obligations to the Organisation. Their behaviour is even more egregious as they had manifestly incomplete information about the Douma investigation.”
See – they’re not “whistleblowers”, they’re just individuals who believed that some documents being kept secret should be made public, and “took matters into their own hands”.
Apparently, that’s different from being a whistleblower. Somehow.
As with so much else in the current political sphere, it’s not so much an argument as an exercise in semantics.
Just as Julian Assange’s arrest became a debate over whether or not he was “really a journalist”, and “antisemitism” is redefined to increasingly ludicrous vagueness, here we are confronted by a memo essentially saying “ignore these leaks, these people are not real whistleblowers”.
It’s really not a report designed to make a case or prove a point. It won’t convert anybody or change a single mind. It’s just there to be at the other end of a link. To supply gate-keeping “journalists” with soundbites to bounce back and forth across twitter and blockquote in their articles.
A final redoubt to provide mainstream attack-dogs like Chris York or Scott Lucas some cover as they make a hasty retreat.
In that sense, it’s already doing its job:
NEW – @OPCW statement demolishes the #Douma CW conspiracy theory pushed, amongst others by @ClarkeMicah.
Damming putdown of the supposed OPCW whistleblowers championed by various British academics who claim Syria wasn’t behind Douma chemical attack. This comes from the OPCW itself: pic.twitter.com/EFsGrSzULz
Hawkish Senators Demand Twitter ‘Obey Sanctions’ By Banning Iran’s Leaders
At this rate all Iranian media sources and official accounts could soon be banned in the West, leaving journalists without a clue of what Tehran’s leaders actually think, and without official statements. The semi-official Fars news English website was knocked offline two weeks ago by US Treasury order (the international server host conformed, making Fars transfer its site hosting to within Iran), but the latest in a growing list of “purges” whether on YouTube or other platforms.
And now US senators are leading the charge to get Iran’s leaders banned from Twitter, as The Hill reports:
A group of Republican senators lead by Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) sent a letter to Twitter on Thursday asking the platform to suspend the accounts of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to comply with U.S. sanction law.
The letter to CEO Jack Dorsey argues that an executive order from last summer imposing sanctions on Khamenei and those acting on his behalf prohibits Twitter from providing services to the two Iranian officials.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Image source: AP.
Ironically, Twitter itself is blocked inside Iran on order of Tehran authorities, notwithstanding Iranian residents often easily getting around these restraints.
Foreign Minister Zarif is actually verified on Twitter despite being personally sanctioned by the US Treasury, and regularly uses it to issue statements to the world in reaction to White House policies or in response to President Trump’s words on Iran.
The hawkish group of Republican senators including Cruz, Tom Cotton (Ark.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.) wrote in the letter to Twitter: “While the First Amendment protects the free speech rights of Americans — and Twitter should not be censoring the political speech of Americans — the Ayatollah enjoys zero protection from the United States Bill of Rights.”
“And, as the leader of the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism — directly responsible for the murder of hundreds of U.S. citizens — the Ayatollah and any American companies providing him assistance are entirely subject to U.S. sanctions laws,” they added.
Iran’s top diplomat often directly engages President Trump on Twitter:
.@realdonaldtrump is better advised to base his foreign policy comments & decisions on facts, rather than @FoxNews headlines or his Farsi translators
It was also sent to the White House, as well as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin – who previously enforced bans on Iranian media entities – and top administration officials.
The letter was first reported Friday, and Twitter did not immediately issue a response. But the US company is not expected to take action, given it announced in 2018 it would not suspend accounts of world leaders, given it “would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” according to a prior official company statement.
AFPreports that the resolution, which is non-binding, comes after a number of high-profile child sex-abuse cases have scandalized the South Asian nation in recent years, leading to major outbreaks of unrest and riots.
Parliamentary affairs minister Ali Muhammad Khan, who presented the resolution in the lower house of the legislature, said that child killers and rapists “should not only be given the death penalty by hanging, but they should be hanged publicly.”
“The Quran commands us that a murderer should be hanged,” the minister added.
While the resolution was swiftly passed by a majority of lawmakers, human rights minister Shireen Mazari has emphatically stated that it does not enjoy the backing of the government.
“The resolution passed in [the National Assembly] today on public hangings was across party lines and not a govt-sponsored resolution but an individual act. Many of us oppose it – our [Ministry of Human Rights] strongly opposes this. Unfortunately I was in a mtg and wasn’t able to go to NA.”
Federal Minister for Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry also condemned the passage of the resolution.
“Strongly condemn this resolution. This is just another grave act in line with brutal civilisation practices [sic]. Societies [should] act in a balanced way, [barbarity] is not an answer to crimes. This is another expression of extremism.”
However, Pakistan has struggled to come to grips with rampant crimes of child sexual abuse.
A child rapist was hanged in October 2018 after his crime in Kasur, near Lahore, sparked days of nationwide protests and unrest.
Six-year-old victim Zainab Fatima Ameen was attacked by a 24-year-old man who later confessed to raping and murdering the young girl.
In 2015, authorities busted a huge paedophilia ring in Kasur. In the massive scandal, it was found that at least 280 children were being sexually abused by a gang who blackmailed parents with threats to publicly release the videos.
In March 2016, Pakistan criminalized sexual assault against minors, child pornography and trafficking. Only acts of rape and sodomy had previously been punishable by law.
Human rights NGO Amnesty International also condemned the recent passage of the bill by the lower house of parliament, with AI Deputy South Asia Director Omar Waraich noting that “public hangings are acts of unconscionable cruelty” with no place in a society that respects people’s rights.
Continuing, the advocate said:
“Executions, whether public or private, do not deliver justice. They are acts of vengeance and there is no evidence that they serve as a uniquely effective deterrent.”
A number of human rights groups have demanded that the country reinstate a moratorium on the death penalty. Capital punishment was reintroduced following the 2015 Army Public School massacre that claimed the lives of 151 people.
Sarah Belal, the executive director of anti-death penalty group Justice Project Pakistan, told AFP:
“There is no empirical evidence to show that public hangings are a deterrent to crime or in protecting the psycho-social well-being of children.”
“Moments Of Triggering”: Rashida Tlaib Explains Why She And Ilhan Omar Held Hands During The State Of The Union
Tuesday night’s State of the Union was a triumphant moment for President Trump, a time where he celebrated his cresting popularity at the beginning of a critical election year. Despite seizing control of the House a little more than a year ago, the Dems appear despondent and scattered – an impression not helped by the embarrassment in Iowa (how can you convince the country you’re ready to rule when you can’t even rig a goddamn caucus without the whole world finding out?).
Yet, just as we suspected, some of the most memorable moments from Tuesday’s speech happened off the podium (and we’re not talking about Nancy Pelosi dramatically ripping up Trump’s speech because the president didn’t shake her hand).
One of those moments was just shared with the public by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who said during a discussion on Friday that she and fellow Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar huddled together in the audience during President Trump’s speech, as the president praised American strength, industry and ingenuity – qualities that the two radical Democratic lawmakers loath.
According to Tlaib, she and Omar sat together during the speech because they fully expected to be ‘triggered’ by Trump’s words. And just as they expected, there were “moments of triggering”.
“There were moments of triggering…I kept holding your hand…we intentionally sat next to each other to support each other.”
Here’s the clip:
Rep. Rashida Tlaib says that during the State of the Union, she had to hold hands with Ilhan Omar during “moments of triggering.” pic.twitter.com/jCgrYkRG32
We have a question for ‘the triggered’. What about people who are really in danger of being triggered? What about drug addicts whose lives could literally be placed in jeopardy if they’re triggered by something that makes them want to use? What do the intersectional feminists have to say about that?
Academic historians reject anything smacking of inevitably. Instead they emphasize the contingency of events as manifested through the inherent agency of human beings and the countless decisions they make. On the merits, such scholars are basically correct. That said, there was something – if not inevitable – highly probable, almost (forgive me) deterministic about the two cataclysmic world wars of the 20th century. Both, in retrospect, were driven, in large part, by collective – particularly Western – nations’ adherence to a series of geopolitical philosophies.
The first war – which killed perhaps nine million soldiers in the sodden trench lines (among other long forgotten places) of Europe – began, in part, due to the continental, and especially maritime, competition between Imperial Great Britain, and a new, rising, and highly populous, land power, Imperial Germany. Both had pretensions to global leadership; Britain’s old and long-standing, Germany’s recent and aspirational – tinged with a sense of long-denied deservedness. Political and military leaders on both sides – along with other European (and the Japanese) nations – then pledged philosophical fealty to the theories of an American Navy man, Alfred Thayer Mahan. To simplify, Mahan’s core postulation – published from a series of lectures as The Influence of Sea Power Upon History – was that geopolitical power in the next (20th) century would be inherently maritime. The countries that maintained large, modern navies, held strategic coaling stations, and expanded their coastal, formal empires, would dominate trade, develop the strongest economies, and, hence, were apt to global paramountcy. Conversely, traditional land power – mass armies prepared to march across vast land masses – would become increasingly irrelevant.
Mahan’s inherently flawed, or at least exaggerated, conclusions – and his own clear institutional (U.S. Navy) bias – aside, key players in two of the major powers of Europe seemed to buy the philosophy hook-line-and-sinker. So, when Wilhelmine Germany took the strategic decision to rapidly expand its own colonial fiefdoms (before the last patches of brown-people-inhabited land were swallowed up) and, thereby necessarily embarked on a crash naval buildup to challenge the British Empire’s maritime supremacy, the stage was set for a massive war. And, with most major European rivals – hopelessly hypnotized by nationalism – locked in a wildly byzantine, bipolar alliance system, all that was needed to turn the conflict global was a spark: enter the assassin Gavrilo Princip, a pistol, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and it was game on.
The Second World War – which caused between 50-60 million deaths – was, of course, an outgrowth of the first. It’s causes were multifaceted and complicated. Nonetheless, particularly in its European theater, it, too, was driven by a geopolitical theorist and his hypotheses. This time the culprit was a Briton, Halford John Mackinder. In contrast with Mahan, Mackinder postulated a land-based, continental power theory. As such, he argued that the “pivot” of global preeminence lay in the control of Eurasia – the “World Island” – specifically Central Asia and Eastern Europe. These resource rich lands held veritable buried treasure for the hegemon, and, since they lay on historical trade routes, were strategically positioned.
Should an emergent, ambitious, and increasingly populated, power – say, Nazi Germany – need additional territory (what Hitler called “Lebensraum“) for its race, and resources (especially oil) for its budding war machine, then it needed to seize the strategic “heartland” of the World Island. In practice, that meant the Nazis theoretically should, and did, shift their gaze (and planned invasion) from their outmoded Mahanian rival across the English Channel, eastward to the Ukraine, Caucasus (with its ample oil reserves), and Central Asia. Seeing as all three regions were then – and to lesser extent, still – dominated by Russia, the then Soviet Union, the unprecedentedly bloody existential war on Europe’s Eastern Front appears ever more certain and explainable.
Germany lost both those wars: the first badly, the second, disastrously. Then, in a sense, the proceeding 45-year Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union – the only two big winners in the Second World War – may be seen as an extension or sequel to Mackinder-driven rivalry. The problem is that after the end of – at least the first – Cold War, Western, especially American, strategists severely miscalculated. In their misguided triumphalism, US geopolitical theorists both provoked a weak (but not forever so) Russia by expanding the NATO alliance far eastward, but posited premature (and naive) theories that assumed global finance, free (American-skewed) trade, and digital dominance were all that mattered in a “Post” Cold War world.
No one better defined this magical thinking more than the still – after having been wrong about just about every US foreign policy decision of the last two decades – prominent New York Timescolumnist, Thomas Friedman. In article after article, and books with such catchy titles as The World is Flat, and The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman argued, essentially, that old realist geopolitics were dead, and all that really mattered for US hegemony was the proliferation of McDonald’s franchises worldwide.
Friedman was wrong; he always is (Exhibit A: the 2003 Iraq War). Today, with a surprisingly – at least with his prominent base – popular president, Donald J. Trump, impeached in the House and just acquitted by the Senate for alleged crimes misleadingly summed up as “Ukraine-gate,” a look at the real issues at hand in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, demonstrate that, for better or (probably) worse, the ghost of Mackinder still haunts the scene. For today, I’d argue, the proxy battle over Ukraine between the U.S. and its allied-coup-empowered government – which includes some neo-nazi political and military elements – and Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east, reflects a return to the battle for Eurasian resource and geographic predominance.
Neither Russia nor the United States is wholly innocent in fueling and escalating the ongoing Ukrainian Civil War. The difference is, that in post-Russiagate farce, chronically (especially among mainstream Democrat) alleged Russia-threat-obsessed America, reports of Moscow’s ostensible guilt literally saturate the media space. The reporting from Washington? Not so much.
The truth is that a generation of prominent “liberal” American, born-again Russia-hawks – Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the whole DNC apparatus, and the MSNBC corporate media crowd – wielded State Department, NGO, and economic pressure to help catalyze a pro-Western coup in Ukraine during and after 2014. Their opportunism seemed, to them, simple, and relatively cost-free, at the time, but has turned implacably messy in the ensuing years.
In the process, the Democrats haven’t done themselves any political favors, further sullying what’s left of their reputation by – in some cases – colluding with Ukrainians to undermine key Trump officials; and consorting with nefarious far-right nationalist local bigots (who may have conspired to kill protesters in the Maidan “massacre,” as a means to instigate further Western support for the coup). What’s more, while much of the conspiratorial Trump-team spin on direct, or illegal, Biden family criminality has proven false, neither Joe nor son Hunter, are exactly “clean.” The Democratic establishment, Biden specifically, may, according to an excellent recent Guardian editorial, have a serious “corruption problem” – no least of which involves explaining exactly why a then sitting vice president’s son, who had no serious diplomatic or energy sector experience, was paid $50,000 a month to serve on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
Fear not, the “Never-Trump” Republicans, and establishment Democrats seemingly intent on drumming up a new – presumably politically profitable – Cold War have already explanation. They’ve dug up the long ago discredited, but still publicly palatable, justification that the US must be prepared to fight Russia “over there,” before it has no choice but to battle them “over here” (though its long been unclear where “here” is, or how, exactly, that fantasy comes to pass). First, there’s the distance factor: though several thousands of miles away from the East Coast of North America, Ukraine is in Russia’s near-abroad. After all, it was long – across many different generational political/imperial structures – part of the Soviet Union or other Russian empires. A large subsection of the populace, especially in the East, speaks, and considers itself, in part, culturally, Russian.
Furthermore, the Russian threat, in 2020, is highly exaggerated. Putin is not Stalin. The Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union; and, hell, even the Soviet (non-nuclear) military threat and geopolitical ambitions were embellished throughout Cold War “Classic.” A simple comparative “tale-of-the-tape” illustrates as much. Economically and demographically, Russia is demonstrably an empirically declining power – its economy, in fact, about the size of Spain’s.
Nor is the defense of an imposed, pro-Western, Ukrainian proxy state a vital American national security interest worth bleeding, or risking nuclear war, over. As MIT’s Barry Posen has argued, “Vital interests affect the safety, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and power position of the United States,” and, “If, in the worst case, all Ukraine were to ‘fall’ to Russia, it would have little impact on the security of the United States.” Furthermore, as retired US Army colonel, and president of the restraint-based Quincy Institute, Andrew Bacevich, has advised, the best policy, if discomfiting, is to “tacitly acknowledge[e] the existence of a Russian sphere of influence.” After all, Washington would expect, actually demand, the same acquiescence of Moscow in Mexico, Canada, or, for that matter, the entire Americas.
Unfortunately, no such restrained prudence is likely, so long as the bipartisan American national security state continues to subscribe to some vague version of the Mackinder theory. Quietly, except among wonky regional experts and investigative reporters on the scene, the US has, before, but especially since the “opportunity” of the 9/11 attacks, entered full-tilt into a competition with Russia and China for physical, economic, and resource dominance from Central Asia to the borderlands of Eastern Europe. That’s why, as a student at the Army’s Command and General Staff College in 2016-17, all us officers focused almost exclusively on planning fictitious, but highly realistic, combat missions in the Caucasus region. It also partly explains why the US military, after 18+ years, remains ensconced in potentially $3 trillion resource-rich Afghanistan, which, not coincidentally, is America’s one serious physical foothold in land-locked Central Asia.
Anecdotally, but instructively, I remember well my four brief stops at the once ubiquitous US Air Force way-station into Afghanistan – Manas Airbase – in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Off-base “liberty” – even for permanent party airmen – was rare, in part, because the Russian military had a mirror base just across the city. What’s more, the previous, earlier stopover spot for Afghanistan – Uzbekistan – kicked out the US military in 2005, in part, due to Russian political and economic pressure to do so.
Central Asia and East Europe are also contested spaces regarding the control of competing – Western vs. Russian vs. Chinese – oil and natural gas pipeline routes and trade corridors. Remember, that China’s massive “One Belt – One Road” infrastructure investment program is mostly self-serving, if sometimes mutually beneficial. The plan means to link Chinese manufacturing to the vast consumerist European market mainly through transportation, pipeline, diplomatic, and military connections running through where? You guessed it: Central Asia, the Caucasus, and on through Eastern Europe.
Like it or not, America isn’t poised to win this battle, and its feeble efforts to do so in these remarkably distant locales smacks of global hegemonic ambitions and foolhardy, mostly risk, nearly no reward, behavior. Russia has a solid army in close proximity, a hefty nuclear arsenal, as well as physical and historical connections to the Eurasian Heartland; China has an even better, more balanced, military, enough nukes, and boasts a far more powerful, spendthrift-capable, economy. As for the US, though still militarily and (for now) economically powerful, it lacks proximity, faces difficult logistical / expeditionary challenges, and has lost much legitimacy and squandered oodles of good will with the regional countries being vied for. Odds are, that while war may not be inevitable, Washington’s weak hand and probable failure, nearly is.
Let us table, for the purposes of this article, questions regarding any environmental effects of the great powers’ quest for, extraction, and use of many of these regional resources. My central points are two-fold:
first, that Ukraine – which represents an early stage in Washington’s rededication to chauvinist, Mackinder geostrategy – as a proxy state for war with Russia is not an advisable or vital interest;
second, that Uncle Sam’s larger quest to compete with the big two (Eur)Asian powers is likely to fail and symptomatic of imperial confusion and desperation.
As the U.S. enters an increasingly bipolar phase of world affairs, powerful national security leaders fear its diminishing power. Washington’s is, like it or not, an empire in decline; and, as we know from history, such entities behave badly on the downslope of hegemony. Call me cynical, but I’m apt to believe that the United States, as perhaps the most powerful imperial body of all time, is apt, and set, to act poorest of all.
The proxy fight in Ukraine, battle for Central Asia in general – to say nothing of related American aggression and provocations in Iran and the Persian Gulf – could be the World War III catalyst that the Evangelical militarist nuts, Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, unwilling to wait on Jesus Christ’s eschatological timeline, have long waited for. These characters seemingly possess the heretical temerity to believe man – white American men, to be exact – can and should incite or stimulate Armageddon and the Rapture.
If they’re proved “right” or have their way – and the Mikes just might – then nuclear cataclysm will have defied the Vegas odds and beat the house on the expected human extinction timeline. Only contra to the bloody prophecy set forth in the New Testament book of Revelations, it won’t be Jesus wielding his vengeful sword on the back of a white horse, but – tragic and absurdly – the perfect Antichrist stooge, pressing the red button, who does the apocalyptic deed.
* * *
Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. His forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, is available for preorder on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet. Check out his professional website for contact info, scheduling speeches, and/or access to the full corpus of his writing and media appearances.
Truth in Accounting has released its 2020 Financial State of Cities report, highlighting the fiscal health of America’s 75 most populous cities. Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that the study found that this year, 63 cities do not have enough money to pay their bills and total municipal debt now stands at $323 billion.
It ranked the cities according to their taxpayer burden or surplus which is the amount each taxpayer would have to pay to clear municipal debt with nothing, such as benefits and services, in exchange.
New York has $62.7 billion available to pay $249.4 billion worth of bills which breaks down to a burden of $63,100 per taxpayer.
In Chicago, each taxpayer would have to pay $63,100 in future taxes without anything in return while Hononulu has the third-highest burden at $26,400.
Some cities are run better than others with Irvine, California and Washington D.C. notable examples. The former has a surplus of $4,100 per taxpayer while D.C. has a surplus of $3,500.
The rest of the world is laughing at us. After what just took place in Iowa, we certainly do not have any right to lecture other nations about how to run their elections. It was a dumpster fire of epic proportions, and the entire globe is talking about it. Apparently the Democrats have decided to run their elections the same way that they run their cities. The Iowa Democratic Party had just one job to do, and they failed in spectacular fashion.
Collecting voting results and reporting them to the public shouldn’t be complicated, but these days incompetence has become the norm. From one end of the country to the other it seems like people are competing to see who can be the most incompetent, and our population is becoming more “dumbed down” with each passing day.
The debacle in Iowa is being blamed on a faulty app, and I suppose that we shouldn’t be surprised.
After all, just about everything that we put on our phones and computers these days must be constantly “fixed” or “patched” due to endless errors.
This app that the Democrats were using did not have to be complicated. It simply needed to accurately relay data from the precincts to the Iowa Democratic Party, but thanks to “a coding error” that did not happen…
Due to a coding error, the app, created by a company called Shadow Inc., wasn’t reporting the correct data, according to the Iowa Democratic Party. The error resulted in the Democrats delaying all public reporting of the results of Monday’s caucuses, and has sown chaos and confusion in a hotly contested and deeply important primary.
After all of the hot air that the Democrats have been blowing around about “the integrity of our elections”, you would think that they would have their act together for the 2020 election.
But instead they just showed the rest of the world what not to do.
And it isn’t as if this was a complete surprise. According to CNN, it was clear well in advance that the app “was not working properly”…
Precinct captains from across Iowa began realizing days before the caucuses that the app was not working properly. Some complained to their county party leadership, others said nothing and hoped it would work at the needed moment and some just planned to call in their results, as has been done in the past. And most county party chairs openly worried about the lack of training on the reporting system.
Only a quarter of nearly 1,700 precinct chairs even successfully downloaded the app, according to a Democrat familiar with the matter.
“I couldn’t get it to work,” said Jane Podgorniak, the Worth County party chair. “I tried and tried.”
There never was any training for the precinct chairs, and there was mass confusion among local party officials. In Polk County, the chairman of the Democratic Party told his precinct chairs to simply call in the results, but that didn’t work either. The following comes from the New York Times…
So last Thursday Mr. Bagniewski, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Iowa’s most populous county, Polk, instructed his precinct chairs to simply call in the caucus results as they had always done. But during Monday night’s caucuses, those precinct chairs could not connect with party leaders via phone. Hold times stretched past 90 minutes. And when Mr. Bagniewski had his executive director to take pictures of the results with her smartphone and drive over to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters to deliver them in person she was turned away without explanation.
Some precinct chairs were on hold with headquarters for two or three hours on Monday night, and it is still not clear why Iowa Democratic Party officials were not more responsive.
Needless to say, this was a complete and utter embarrassment for the national Democratic Party, and DNC Chair Tom Perez is pledging that such a debacle will never happen again…
“What happened last night should never happen again,” Perez wrote in the statement. “We have staff working around the clock to assist the Iowa Democratic Party to ensure that all votes are counted. It is clear that the app in question did not function adequately. It will not be used in Nevada or anywhere else during the primary election process. The technology vendor must provide absolute transparent accounting of what went wrong.”
Hopefully they can get their issues ironed out, but the truth is that the Democratic Party has a long history of complete and utter incompetence.
Of course the Republican Party is not much better. In fact, I could tell you stories about Republicans in my area that would make your hair stand on end.
Sadly, the truth is that we have become a raging “idiocracy” where people can’t seem to do much of anything right. At one time we were a shining example to the rest of the world, but today we are a horde of entertainment-addicted zombies that never learned what it means to grow up and act like adults. For example, just consider what is happening at one of our most prestigious universities…
Students at Yale University are being encouraged to participate in a variety of programs offered by the Chaplain’s Office, including a weekly “Cookies and Coloring” hour and a campus “Bouncy Castle” during nice weather.
The children’s activities are promoted as opportunities for adult students to relieve anxiety and disconnect from technology at the Ivy League institution.
The more mindless our entertainment, the more we like it. The number of alcohol-related deaths has doubled over the past 20 years, the suicide rate has soared to a record high, and we are taking more legal and illegal drugs than ever before. And in just about every category of immorality that you can possibly imagine we are either leading the world or we are in very close contention for the top spot. We are a complete and utter mess, and we on a road that inevitably leads to national ruin.
Of course if anyone dares to offend our snowflake sensibilities by confronting us with the truth, many of us instantly melt down and start throwing a temper tantrum.
Needless to say, what I have just said does not apply to everyone. But overall our society is rapidly degenerating all around us, and our nation has no future if we stay on this path.
Netflix Reveals It Removed These 9 Films At Foreign Government Requests
The world’s top streaming service Netflix revealed in a new internal report it calls Environment Social Governance that it has taken down nine pieces of content around the world in response to written complaints and demands from governments.
The 23-year old company began conforming to such controversial censorship requests after 2015, in order to better conform to various countries’ laws and societal norms, according to Axios. It’s the first such revelation of active censorship admitted by the company.
The majority of government requests for removal came from the religiously diverse but staunchly morally conservative island city-state of Singapore. Other movies or series were taken down at the request of New Zealand, Vietnam, Germany, Brazil and Saudi Arabia— the latter instance for politically embarrassing and sensitive jokes about crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
“Full Metal Jacket”. Warner Bros. Taken off Netflix in Vietnam.
Netflix conformed, for example, to a Saudi government request last year for the 2019 removal of comedian Hasan Minhaj “Patriot Act” standup special, related to references to the state-sponsored murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings had defended the controversial move by saying, “We’re not in the truth to power business, we’re in the entertainment business.”
In another instance, a Brazilian court ordered Netflix to remove the comedy special “The First Temptation of Christ,” after complaints from conservative Catholic groups over it’s portraying Jesus as gay and other issues seen as sacrilegious. But the ruling was recently overturned by Brazil’s Supreme Court. Singapore has, however, removed the film for its viewers.
Also of note is that in 2017 Netflix complied with the removal of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket at the request of the government of Vietnam.
“In 2015, we complied with a written demand from the New Zealand Film and Video Labeling Body to remove The Bridge from the service in New Zealand only. The film is classified as ‘objectionable’ in the country.”
2) “Full Metal Jacked” – removed by Vietnam in 2017
“In 2017, we complied with a written demand from the Vietnamese Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information (ABEI) to remove ‘Full Metal Jacket’ from the service in Vietnam only.”
3) “Night of the Living Dead” – removed by Germany in 2017
“In 2017, we complied with a written demand from the German Commission for Youth Protection (KJM) to remove ‘Night of the Living Dead’ from the service in Germany only. A version of the film is banned in the country.”
4, 5, & 6) “Cooking on High,” “The Legend of 420,” and “Disjointed” – removed by Singapore in 2018
“In 2018, we complied with a written demand from the Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) to remove ‘Cooking on High,’ ‘The Legend of 420,’ and ‘Disjointed’ from the service in Singapore only.”
7) “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj” episode titled “Saudi Arabia” – removed by Saudi government request in 2019
“In 2019, we complied with a written demand from the Saudi Communication and Information Technology Commission to remove one episode—’Saudi Arabia’—from the series ‘Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj’ from the service in Saudi Arabia only.”
8) “The Last Temptation of Christ” – removed by Singapore in 2019
“In 2019, we received a written demand from the Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) to remove ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ from the service in Singapore only. The film is banned in the country.”
9) “The Last Hangover” – removed by Singapore in 2020
“In 2020, we complied with a written demand from the Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) to remove ‘The Last Hangover’ from the service in Singapore only.”
One of the more interesting aspects of the nauseating impeachment trial in the Senate was the repeated vilification of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin.
To hate Russia has become dogma on both sides of the political aisle, in part because no politician has really wanted to confront the lesson of the 2016 election, which was that most Americans think that the federal government is basically incompetent and staffed by career politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell who should return back home and get real jobs.
Worse still, it is useless, and much like the one trick pony the only thing it can do is steal money from the taxpayers and waste it on various types of self-gratification that only politicians can appreciate. That means that the United States is engaged is fighting multiple wars against make-believe enemies while the country’s infrastructure rots and a host of officially certified grievance groups control the public space.
It sure doesn’t look like Kansas anymore.
The fact that opinion polls in Europe suggest that many Europeans would rather have Vladimir Putin than their own hopelessly corrupt leaders is suggestive. One can buy a whole range of favorable t-shirts featuring Vladimir Putin on Ebay, also suggesting that most Americans find the official Russophobia narrative both mysterious and faintly amusing. They may not really be into the expressed desire of the huddled masses in D.C. to go to war to bring true U.S. style democracy to the un-enlightened.
One also must wonder if the Democrats are reading the tea leaves correctly. If they think that a slogan like “Honest Joe Biden will keep us safe from Moscow” will be a winner in 2020 they might again be missing the bigger picture. Since the focus on Trump’s decidedly erratic behavior will inevitably die down after the impeachment trial is completed, the Democrats will have to come up with something compelling if they really want to win the presidency and it sure won’t be the largely fictionalized Russian threat.
Nevertheless, someone should tell Congressman Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, to shut up as he is becoming an international embarrassment. His “closing arguments” speeches last week were respectively two-and-a-half hours and ninety minutes long and were inevitably praised by the mainstream media as “magisterial,” “powerful,” and “impressive.” The Washington Post’s resident Zionist extremist Jennifer Rubin labeled it “a grand slam” while legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called it “dazzling.” Gail Collins of the New York Timesdubbed it “a great job” and added that Schiff is now “a rock star.” Daily Beast enthused that the remarks “will go down in history” and progressive activist Ryan Knight called it “a closing statement for the ages.” Hollywood was also on board with actress Debra Messing tweeting “I am in tears. Thank you Chairman Schiff for fighting for our country.”
Actually, a better adjective would have been “scary” and not merely due to its elaboration of the alleged high crimes and misdemeanors committed by President Trump, much of which was undeniably true even if not necessarily impeachable.
It was scary because it was a warmongers speech, full of allusions to Russia, to Moscow’s “interference” in 2016, and to the ridiculous proposition that if Trump were to be defeated in 2020 he might not concede and Russia could even intervene militarily in the United States in support of its puppet.
Schiff insisted that Trump must be removed now to “assure the integrity” of the 2020 election. He elaborated somewhat ambiguously that “The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”
Schiff also unleashed one of the most time honored but completely lame excuses for going to war, claiming that military assistance to Ukraine that had been delayed by Trump was essential for U.S. national security. He said “As one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”
Schiff, a lawyer who has never had to put his life on the line for anything and whose son sports a MOSSAD t-shirt, is one of those sunshine soldiers who finds it quite acceptable if someone else does the dying. Journalist Max Blumenthal observed that “Liberals used to mock Bush supporters when they used this jingoistic line during the war on Iraq. Now they deploy it to justify an imperialist proxy war against a nuclear power.” Aaron Mate at The Nationadded that “For all the talk about Russia undermining faith in U.S. elections, how about Russiagaters like Schiff fear-mongering w/ hysterics like this? Let’s assume Ukraine did what Trump wanted: announce a probe of Burisma. Would that delegitimize a 2020 U.S. election? This is a joke.”
Over at Antiwar Daniel Lazare explains how the Wednesday speech was “a fear-mongering, sword-rattling harangue that will not only raise tensions with Russia for no good reason, but sends a chilling message to [Democratic Party] dissidents at home that if they deviate from Russiagate orthodoxy by one iota, they’ll be driven from the fold.”
The orthodoxy that Lazare was writing about includes the established Nancy Pelosi/Chuck Schumer narrative that Russia invaded “poor innocent Ukraine” in 2014, that it interfered in the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Clinton, and that it is currently trying to smear Joe Biden. One might add to that the growing consensus that Russia can and will interfere again in 2020 to help Trump. Absent from the narrative is the part how the U.S. intervened in Ukraine first to remove its government and the fact that there is something very unsavory about Joe Biden’s son taking a high-paying sinecure board position from a notably corrupt Ukrainian oligarch while his father was Vice President and allegedly directing U.S. assistance to a Ukrainian anti-corruption effort.
On Wednesday, Schiff maintained that “Russia is not a threat … to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again.” Not surprisingly, if one substitutes the “United States” for “Russia” and “Kremlin” and changes “Ukraine” to Iran or Venezuela, the Schiff comment actually becomes much more credible.
The compulsion on the part of the Democrats to bring down Trump to avoid having to deal with their own failings has brought about a shift in their established foreign policy, placing the neocons and their friends back in charge. For Schiff, who has enthusiastically supported every failed American military effort since 9/11, today’s Russia is the Soviet Union reborn, and don’t you forget it pardner! Newsweek is meanwhile reporting that the U.S. military is reading the tea leaves and is gearing up to fight the Russians. Per Schiff, Trump must be stopped as he is part of a grand Russian conspiracy to overthrow everything the United States stands for. If the Kremlin is not stopped now, it’s first major step, per Schiff, will be to “remake the map of Europe by dint of military force.”
Donald Trump’s erratic rule has certainly dismayed many of his former supporters, but the Democratic Party is offering nothing but another helping of George W. Bush/Barack Obama establishment war against the world. We Americans have had enough of that for the past nineteen years. Trump may indeed deserve to be removed based on his actions, but the argument that it is essential to do so because of Russia lurking is complete nonsense. Pretty scary that the apparent chief promoter of that point of view is someone who actually has power in the government, one Adam Schiff, head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.
We Are Wall-E – Cali Gov. Newsom Wants To Halt School Physical Education Tests
California’s Governor Gavin Newsom wants to turn a generation of kids into obese adults, that by the time 2050 rolls around, these hopeless folks will be wheeled around in self-balancing strollers, first popularized in the animated film Wall-E.
Newsom plans to cancel physical education tests for students for three years over new concerns of bullying and discrimination against disabled and non-binary students.
The move to cancel physical education tests comes as annual test results suggest California’s youth is becoming obese.
H.D. Palmer, the spokesman for the Department of Finance, told Bay Area KPIX 5 that the current measurement of body mass index (BMI) is discriminatory to some students, most notably to non-binary students, as BMI screenings require students to select “male” or “female,” he said.
AP News noted that annual state physical education reports show that around the 2014/15 period, health scores of students started to decline.
Students’ scores in “aerobic capacity,” which can be described in layman’s terms as the one-mile run, have dropped over the years. Tests for push-ups and sit-ups have also declined.
“In the last five years, the percentage of fifth-graders scoring healthy in the aerobic category has dropped by 3.3 percentage points. In seventh and ninth grades, the drops are 4.4 percentage points and 3.8 percentage points, respectively. Meanwhile, the percentage of students identified as “needing improvement” and having a “health risk” went up: by 3.3 percentage points among fifth-graders, 4.4 for seventh graders and 3.8 among ninth-graders,” KPIX 5 said.
During the three-year suspension of tests, Newsom and school officials will review whether to modify or completely withdraw the health exam.
Physical education classes will continue for the duration of the suspension, though the government won’t be able to track the health of kids.
Palmer told KPIX 5, “the issue of BMI screening plays a role in the issues of both body shaming and bullying.”
Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s spokesman Daniel Ketchell said, “whether the state uses fitness tests or not, Governor Schwarzenegger believes that the most important thing is that our students have access to daily physical education classes to promote a healthy and fit lifestyle.”
With a staggering 75% of Americans already overweight or obese – California’s suspension of the obese test could lead to a continuation of deteriorating health trends for youth in the state, eventually lead to unhealthy lifestyles, that by the time this future generation hits retirement, they might be rolling around in self-driving chairs.
Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman funded the creation of ACRONYM, the group that sabotaged the Iowa caucus results, after bankrolling voter manipulation campaigns including the notorious online “false flag operation” in Alabama’s 2017 senate race.
At the time of publication, February 6, the winner of the Iowa’s Democratic Party caucus is still unknown. Senator Bernie Sanders, the clear winner in virtually every exit poll, is currently ahead in votes. Yet somehow Pete Buttigieg, a favorite of the party establishment who was unknown to most voters until last year, has claimed victory.
The force accused of sowing the confusion and disarray surrounding the first Democratic Party contest of the 2020 election season is a dark money nonprofit called Acronym. It was Acronym that launched Shadow Inc, the mysterious company behind the now-infamous, unsecured, completely unworkable voter app which prevented precinct chairs from reporting vote totals on caucus night.
The exceptionally opaque Acronym was itself created with seed money from a Silicon Valley billionaire named Reid Hoffman who has financed a series of highly manipulative social media campaigns.
The billionaire founder of LinkedIn, Hoffman is a top funder of novel Democratic Party social media campaigns accused of manipulating voters through social media. He is assisted by Dmitri Mehlhorn, a corporate consultant who pushed school privatization before joining Hoffman’s political empire.
One of the most consequential beneficiaries of Hoffman’s wealth is Acronym CEO Tara McGowan, a 33-year-old former journalist and Obama for America veteran.
Acronym CEO Tara McGowan with Barack Obama, her former boss
Once touted as “a weapon of a woman whose innovative tactics make her critically important to the Democratic Party,” McGowan’s name is now synonymous with the fiasco in Iowa. She also happens to be married to a senior advisor to Pete Buttieg’s presidential campaign.
Back in December 2018, McGowan personally credited Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s “Investing in US” initiative for the birth of her dark money pressure group, Acronym.
“I’m personally grateful and proud to be included in this group of incredible political founders + startups @reidhoffman and his team, led by Dmitri [Mehlhorn], have supported and helped to fund over the past two years,” she declared on Twitter in December 2018.
I’m personally grateful and proud to be included in this group of incredible political founders + startups who @reidhoffman and his team, led by Dmitri, have supported and helped to fund over the past two years. https://t.co/o0QApPbHWY
Hoffman and Mehlhorn have also faced scrutiny for their alleged operation of a series of deceptive pages which attempted to manipulate center-right users into voting for Democrats. Today, Acronym’s McGowan oversees a massive Facebook media operation that employs similarly deceptive techniques to sway voters.
Through youthful, tech-centric operatives like McGowan, Hoffman and Mehlhorn are constructing a massive new infrastructure that could supplant the party’s apparatus.
As Vanity Fair reported, “Hoffman and Mehlhorn, after all, are not just building a power base that could supplement traditional Democratic organizations, they are, potentially, laying the groundwork to usurp the D.N.C. entirely.”
‘Laying the groundwork to usurp the D.N.C. entirely’
Having fostered friendships with nationally known Silicon Valley oligarchs like right-wing libertarian Trump supporter Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, is now making his name as a top sugardaddy of the Democratic anti-Trump resistance.
Following Trump’s election in 2016, Hoffman plowed his money into an array of new Democrat-aligned social media groups through a funding hub he founded called Investing in US.
To run Investing in US on a day-to-day basis, Hoffman tapped Dmitri Mehlhorn, a venture capitalist and political strategist accustomed to walking the line between the corporate world and Democratic Party.
“There was no risk-capital or growth-capital arm of the resistance, and so that is what we’ve tried to build,” Mehlhorn told Vanity Fair.
“Now, in terms of what that implies, that implies that we are backing founders, so people who we think have big, potentially game-changing ideas.”
Mehlhorn’s career path tracked closely with neoliberal party favorites like Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker. He studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, launched his career at McKinsey Associates, and became a leading advocate for school privatization as the chief operating officer of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst.
According to Mehlhorn’s bio, he sits on the board of American Prison Data Systems, a company that claims to reduce recidivism by giving prisoners tablets to study coding for five hours a day.
In a 2018 Medium post, announcing the “founders” that Investing in US planned to back, Mehlhorn resorted to distinctly neoconservative talking points to emphasize the mission of his organization.
After quoting Ronald Reagan, he declared, “Trump and his movement, borrowing heavily from other authoritarian criminals such as Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin, promised to hollow out America’s principles in favor of his own personal enrichment.”
Pledging to “inoculate our politics and our economy against corruption, white nationalism, and mass deceit,” Mehlhorn announced major donations to “diverse groups” with names like Woke Vote, PushBlack, and an “anti-Nazi” organization known as Integrity for America.
Among the top recipients of support from Investing in US was McGowan’s Acronym, which Mehlhorn described merely as a “media group.”
As The Grayzone reported, Acronym has ballooned since its founding into a massive dark money operation, even launching a Super PAC dubbed Pacronym that has raked in money from hedge fund billionaires like Seth Klarman and Donald Sussman.
What Mehlhorn and Hoffman never disclosed to the public, however, was their support for a Democrat-aligned group that waged a covert online disinformation campaign which aimed to influence the outcome of the 2017 special senate election in Alabama.
Project Birmingham: From New Knowledge to no knowledge
The 2017 senate election in Alabama was one of the most dramatic races of President Donald Trump’s first term in office. Treated by national media as a referendum on Trump in a red state, it pitted a far-right Republican, Roy Moore, against Doug Jones, a moderate Republican who ran as a Democrat. In the end, Jones won an upset victory in a deep red state, thrilling Democrats across the country.
As Dan Cohen wrote in a series of reports for The Grayzone, the outcome of the 2017 Alabama race was heavily influenced by an online disinformation operation. The campaign, which was unknown to voters at the time, was called Project Birmingham.
Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman provided $100,000 to the architects of this black ops campaign. His money was pipelined through American Engagement Technologies (AET), a company run by Obama administration veteran and Democrat tech operative Mikey Dickerson. Through AET, another firm comprised of Obama campaign veterans and national security state operatives called New Knowledge was contracted to carry out the secretive voter manipulation project.
In internal documents first covered by the New York Times, Project Birmingham’s architects described the scheme as an “elaborate false flag operation” which aimed to convince voters that the Kremlin was supporting Moore through thousands of fake Russian bots.
Project Birmingham went to absurd lengths to drive voters away from Moore. Its architects deployed a phony Facebook page encouraging Alabamians to vote for an obscure write-in Republican candidate, arranged interviews for the candidate in major newspapers, and even sought to arrange SuperPAC funding for his dark horse campaign.
The deeply un-democratic campaign was overseen by a cast of characters remarkably similar to those who bungled the 2020 Iowa caucus count. Like the staff of Acronym and Shadow Inc., the New Knowledge operatives who carried out Project Birmingham were 30- and 40-something techies who had worked in the Obama administration and on various Democratic campaigns. (New Knowledge was rebranded as Yonder after the scandal was exposed in national media.)
The devious tactics they waged in Alabama likely influenced the outcome of the election. A leaked “Project Birmingham Debrief” claimed that New Knowledge’s black operations “moved enough votes to ensure a Doug Jones victory.”
After the scheme was exposed, Hoffman issued a public apology and claimed he had no knowledge of the New Knowledge disinformation project. He said nothing about the Investing in US employee who worked directly on Project Birmingham, however.
This was hardly the first time Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s finger prints were discovered on a deceptive voter manipulation campaign.
Aiming to ‘mirror’ the tactics of Russia’s Internet Research Agency
Following the 2018 midterm congressional election, Reid Hoffman and his henchman Dmitri Mehlhorn faced further scrutiny in national media, this time for operating a fake news-style organization called News for Democracy.
This shady outfit managed an array of community Facebook pages initially focusing on sports, Christianity, patriotism, and other topics that were likely to generate interest from right-wing voters in swing states.
Yet the seemingly locally-branded cultural pages took a decisively political turn as election night approached. After racking up millions of likes, News for Democracy slipped in ads for Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke on a Facebook page targeting evangelical Christians, and attacked a Republican candidate, Senator Marsha Blackburn, on a page focused on local Tennessee sports.
While Hoffman’s right-hand man, Mehlhorn, claimed to reject the spread of misinformation, he told the Washington Post that through projects like News for Democracy, he aimed to “mirror” the tactics of the notorious Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm.
Tech billionaire Reed Hoffman funded the @NewKnowledgeAI Alabama black op. His advisor, Dmitri Mehlhorn, has called for efforts to “mirror” the tactics of the Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm. This IRA Facebook ad is clearly worth emulating. https://t.co/rh90K8WND7pic.twitter.com/yq7cuOLPWQ
Facebook eventually launched an investigation into the insidious manipulation ploys of Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s News for Democracy.
The very tactics that landed the two in hot water are remarkably similar to those that Tara McGowan, the Acronym founder who disrupted the Iowa caucuses, has put on display.
McGowan recently founded Courier Newsroom, a seemingly journalistic initiative that appeared to take on a more overtly partisan role with time. Like News for Democracy, Courier Newsroom has opened local news pages on Facebook with unassuming names like “The Virginia Dogwood” or “Arizona’s Copper Courier.” After seeding the pages with folksy local stories, Courier Newsroom bombards users with pro-Democrat political messaging.
As Bloomberg reported, McGowan used “her sizable war chest and digital advertising savvy to pay to have her articles placed into the Facebook feeds of swing-state users.” McGowan then used “that feedback to find more people like them.”
One of McGowan’s dubious news pages, the Virginia Dogwood, spent a whopping $275,000 on Facebook ads during the 2018 midterm elections.
“We’ll try it, see if we can make it work, and hopefully become a permanent piece of the new infrastructure,” McGowan told Bloomberg.
Tara McGowan’s shenanigans in Iowa could be seen in the light of a wider string of manipulations by the Silicon Valley-backed neoliberal network behind her. While Democratic Party elites blame incompetence for the fiasco in Iowa, the history of Acronym and its billionaire backers casts a disturbing shadow over the whole episode.
Smaller Restaurants Forced Into Bankruptcy As Foot Traffic Collapses
While the big names in eating out – McDonald’s, Popeye’s, Chick-Fil-A and Olive Garden, to name a few – are all working diligently to get customers through the door at a time when the American eater is staying home more, lesser known restaurants are bearing the brunt of not being able to find new customers.
Names like Bar Louie and American Blue Ribbon Holdings, which owns Village Inn and Bakers Square, both filed for bankruptcy earlier this week, according to Bloomberg. Both cited lower foot traffic in the U.S. as the reason for their downfall.
Michael Halen a senior restaurant analyst at Bloomberg, said: “The business is just over-built, especially casual dining and full-service dining. There are too many restaurants.”
American Blue Ribbon also said that competition, rising labor costs and unprofitable restaurants were all reasons for facilitating its bankruptcy. The company owns and operates 97 restaurants after closing 33 stores prior to filing Chapter 11.
The company’s majority owner, Cannae Holdings, Inc., has agreed to provide a $20 million loan to maintain the company during bankruptcy. Cannae generates about 30% of its revenue from various restaurant companies it is invested in and has said that American Blue Ribbon will focus on strategic options in bankruptcy.
Bar Louie has been opening new locations over the last few years which has grown its top line, but the increase in debt necessary to open new stores has suffocated the company.
Chief Restructuring Officer Howard Meitiner said: “This inconsistent brand experience, coupled with increased competition and the general decline in customer traffic visiting traditional shopping locations and malls, resulted in less traffic at the company’s locations proximate to shopping locations and malls.”
Bar Louie has 110 locations, 38 of which have “seen their sales and profits decline at an accelerating pace” since the company began a strategic review in 2018. Those locations expected a staggering same store sales drop of 10.9% in 2019 and were closed prior to the company filing for bankruptcy. Lenders are providing a loan of as much as $22 million to keep the company operating during the proceedings.
Other restaurant names like The Krystal Co., Houlihan’s Restaurants Inc., Kona Grill Inc. and Perkins & Marie Callender’s all filed for bankruptcy last year as well.
Halen concluded: “We need to see a correction in the restaurant industry. We’ve seen a lot in the last few months, and I think this is just the beginning. Once the economy softens, you’ll see this getting worse.”
The pro-gun demonstration drew twenty-two thousand people, who peacefully protested several gun control measures that Virginia governor Ralph Northam was proposing for the 2020 session of the Virginia General Assembly. The conclusion of this rally now has Virginia gun owners pondering where to go from there. The path to bringing about pro-gun policy at the state level appears to be at a dead end, at least in the short term, after Democrats secured control over all branches of government in the 2019 general elections.
Although there was tremendous euphoria right after Lobby Day concluded, Virginia Democrats did not waste time in showcasing their newly held political power, quickly passing a red flag gun-confiscation bill. Red flag laws are in vogue with gun control boosters, and Virginia is looking to be the eighteenth state that will implement it. In all likelihood, gun owners will have a rough time during the 2020 session of the Virginia General Assembly based on this political reality. There are tons of doomsday predictions of a demographic shift taking place in Virginia and the possibility that Republicans may never be able to take control of all branches of the state government again.
Virginia Could be Sailing in Uncharted Waters
Nonetheless, the highly publicized Second Amendment “sanctuary” movement has created a new set of opportunities for gun owners in Virginia to exploit. Recent developments indicate that gun politics could create a political realignment in Virginia.
First off, the president of Liberty University Jerry Falwell Jr. boldly called for Virginians to exercise civil disobedience in the case that the Virginia state government passes gun control this year. Falwell took it a step further, even suggesting that the limits of the District of Columbia be extended to include the entire DC metro region, which has effectively sprawled out into northern Virginia. “That’s what the founders intended, was for the federal district to be separate from any state because they have a conflict of interest and they never anticipated it would sprawl out as far as it has,” Falwell argued.
A similar jurisdictional shake-up could possibly take place, thanks to several West Virginia house delegates putting a resolution forward, HCR 8, which would allow Virginia sanctuary counties to join the state. These delegates believe that Virginia sanctuary counties’ rights would be better protected under West Virginia’s jurisdiction. West Virginia governor Jim Justice is also on record as being in support of these counties joining his state: “If you’re not truly happy where you are,” Justice said, “we stand with open arms to take you from Virginia.” The lawmakers do raise a good point about West Virginia’s pro-gun environment.
In 2016, West Virginia became a constitutional carry state—where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry a firearm without having to obtain a permit. This, along with other pro-gun policies it has implemented during the last few years, has allowed West Virginia to build a solid reputation as a gun-friendly state. In 2019, Guns and Ammoranked West Virginia the fifteenth best state for gun owners, whereas Virginia occupied a mediocre thirty-first place—a ranking that will likely fall steeply if anti-gun Democrats have their way during the 2020 session of the Virginia General Assembly.
But it doesn’t have to end this way.
Are Sanctuary Counties the Way to Go?
Michael Boldin of the Tenth Amendment Center brought up some valid concerns about how so-called Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions employ a misleading term given that they don’t have legal force behind them. On the other hand, sanctuary cities dealing with immigration enforcement—where local law enforcement does not cooperate with federal immigration enforcers—involve a more decisive political action that is not symbolic in nature. We may need to cut the Second Amendment movement some slack, however. This is relatively new territory for Second Amendment proponents, who have traditionally operated under the premise that federal lobbying or petitioning of the courts will save them. There will be learning curves through this process, but gun owners will have to start somewhere.
Even politicians at the federal level, such as Kentucky senator Rand Paul and Congressman Thomas Massie, are throwing their support behind Second Amendment sanctuaries. They recognize that there is only so much they can do politically in DC. Should any type of roll call vote come up on pro-gun legislation, they would almost assuredly be in the minority. That’s the political reality on Capitol Hill, and gradually more and more constitutionalists are starting to recognize where the winds are blowing. Hence their forays into more local and state-level forms of activism.
Second Amendment Activists Would Be Wise Not to Fall for the Federal Court Trap
Based on personal experience working within the gun lobby, I have noticed a tendency among activists to think that conventional methods of politics will bring constitutionalism back to America. Many envision repealing numerous infringements at the federal level, such as the National Firearms Act of 1934, as a first step in reversing decades of government overreach. Although well intentioned, this kind of mindset is outdated and ignores how detached both political parties at the federal level have become from upholding traditional American civil liberties. Further, it disregards how unreliable the Supreme Court has been, both in upholding Second Amendment rights and striking down unconstitutional measures that have been established through federal law or bureaucratic mandates.
Sure, DC v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago expanded the Second Amendment to state and local policy. The result was an expansion of legal protections for gun owners, for now. But it would behoove us to look at the bigger picture. The same federal courts that might “restore” positive freedoms on occasion are just as capable of reverting to their managerial tendencies by legislating from the bench and nullifying gun rights. These court cases make for great fundraising opportunities and public relations stunts, showing how a gun organization is sticking it to the gun control crowd, but they don’t do much to curb state growth. Litigation consumes time, talent, and treasure that could otherwise be allocated to more grassroots activities such as full-fledged nullification measures or even bolder efforts involving plebiscites in which certain jurisdictions break away from their oppressive state governments.
As the days go by, the School House Rock version of politics that Americans have been accustomed to has increasingly become a distant memory, thanks to DC’s thorough embrace of managerial politics. So, no matter who’s in charge, politics is business as usual, which means more government growth at the expense of local jurisdictions and civil society. However, politics is the art of the possible, especially when people appreciate the value of American federalism and all of its implications. The opportunities are endless, provided that people break free from the conventional wisdom they’ve been fed about political action and start acting locally. Gun rights issues could be the catalyst that kicks off a decentralization revolution America desperately needs.
Mike Bloomberg’s Campaign Is Paying ‘Micro-Influencers’ To Make Him Look Cool
It’s almost ironic because they basically represent the alpha and the omega of the political spectrum within the modern Democratic Party, but there’s no question that the Iowa Democrats massive fuck-up during the caucus hurt Bernie Sanders more than any other candidate, and helped Michael Bloomberg (and Biden, and Buttigieg) more than any other candidate.
That’s because Bloomberg wasn’t even on the ballot in Iowa, and has bet the farm on an unusual campaign strategy focused on winning a string of primaries in March. No candidate has ever clinched the nomination without bagging either Iowa or New Hampshire, but then again, no candidate has ever had an 11-figure fortune to throw around, either.
Aside from spending $10 million for an almost unbelievably brief Superbowl spot, what has Bloomberg’s coterie of overpaid advisors recommended? How about ’embracing a strategy that’s worked for hundreds of shady ‘fit tea’ hawkers’, Bloomberg is giving money to social media influencers in the hopes that they’ll make him look ‘cool’.
According to the Daily Beast, Bloomberg’s team are utilizing “Tribe”, a “branded content marketplace” that helps politicians and brands coordinate influencer-based ad campaigns, and they’re optimistic about its prospects to really help their astronomically wealthy boss punch through the clutter (we thought that’s what his media behemoth was supposed to do?).
Specifically, the campaign is focusing on “micro-influencers”, that is, people with between 10k and 100k followers. That means the campaign is spending up to $15 million on this endeavor (that’s a lot of memes). They are offering $150 for these influencers to create original pieces of content’ that explain why Bloomberg is the best candidate to lead the USA.
The Bloomberg campaign has quietly begun a campaign on Tribe, a “branded content marketplace” that connects social-media influencers with the brands that want to advertise to their followers, to pitch influencers on creating content highlighting why they love the former New York City mayor—for a price.
For a fixed $150 fee, the Bloomberg campaign is pitching micro-influencers—someone who has from 1,000 to 100,000 followers, in industry parlance—to create original content “that tells us why Mike Bloomberg is the electable candidate who can rise above the fray, work across the aisle so ALL Americans feel heard & respected.”
“Are you sick of the chaos & infighting overshadowing the issues that matter most to us? Please express your thoughts verbally or for still image posts please overlay text about why you support Mike,” the campaign copy tells would-be Bloomberg stans under the heading “Content We’d Love From You,” asking influencers to “Show+Tell why Mike is the candidate who can change our country for the better, state why YOU think he’s a great candidate.”
Content creators have been asked to highlight Bloomberg’s credentials as a “middle-class kid who worked his way through college”, they’ve also been asked to avoid profanity and anything “overtly negative.”
The campaign post, reviewed by The Daily Beast, encourages submissions to be well lit, mention why the influencer thinks “we need a change in Government,” and for the creator to “be honest, passionate and be yourself!”
Influencers are asked not to use profanity, nudity, or “overtly negative content,” as well as be U.S. residents to participate.
The DB definitely has an agenda (like Buzzfeed and Deadspin, it roughly translates to ‘capitalism bad!’), but, credit where credit is due, at least the reporter highlighted the fact that this is a novel strategy that isn’t being used by any of the top-polling candidates, suggesting that Bloomberg’s unorthodox candidacy is generating some appropriately outside-the-box ideas.
The campaign also asked that influencers avoid topics like stop and frisk and Hizzoner’s failed campaign against oversized soft drinks. We suspect readers can do the math on that.
But at this rate, if Bloomberg keeps cranking out gaffes like ‘shaking a dog’s snout’ – gaffes that make him appear like an alien from the billionaire planet – he’ll manage to keep his name near the top of TikTok’s list of trending topics.
Optimism Fades As Virus Deaths Jump To 724; 190K Under Observation; Drop In New Cases Reverses Higher
Summary:
Confirmed cases rise to just shy of 35K in China and 24 other countries, deaths surge by 86 to 722, set to surpass SARS total in hours; total number of people under observation jumps to an all time high of 189,660.
Suspected cases rose to 27,657 from 26,359 the day before, with 6,107 people in in serious/critical condition. Patients who have recovered jumped to 2,050,
6,107 people are in serious/critical condition
Reporter says ‘real’ death toll could be closer to 20k
German scientists say coronavirus can survive for 9 days on surfaces
Chinese quarantine expanded to Guangzhou; 400 million now on lockdown
Singapore raises response level to Orange
Hong Kong confirms case No. 25
Death of Dr. Li stokes demands for more free speech in China
* * *
Update (2000 ET): After two days of declines in the number of “new cases” reported by China’s National Health Commission, and the latest number of total infected in China coming in below JPMorgan’s daily estimate – no really, to JPM the number of daily new infections is just like the jobs report: it either beats or misses…
… Saturday, Feb 8 saw an unexpected reversal in the downward slope in new cases, and as the NHC reported moments ago, as of Feb 7, China has a total of 34,546 cases, (higher than JPMorgan’s base case forecast of 34,224, shown below)…
… and an increase of 3,385 overnight, which ominously was the first rise in reported new cases in three days, suggesting any hopes that the pandemic had already peaked were just crushed.
Adding the 365 international cases, means that as of Saturday, there were a total of 34,911 global cases, resulting in 724 deaths – an increase of 86 on the day, the biggest one day rises since the pandemic started – and a mortality rate of 2.1%, which is where it has been stuck for the past ten days. At this rate of increase in officially reported (which is vastly different from the actual true number) cases, the coronavirus pandemic will claim more lives than SARS in under 24 hours.
Here one surprising observation: in the past two weeks what was initially an exponential curve in the number of new cases, has quietly shifted into a quadratic one, where the number of new cases is largely unchanged day after day, almost as if China wants to represent a higher number to preserve some credibility, but nowhere near as high as what it really is if the disease followed the traditional exponential progression.
Some other observations: the number of suspected cases rose to 27,657 from 26,359 the day before, with 6,107 people in in serious/critical condition. And while a record 722 have died – just 50 shy of the SARS record in 2003 – the number of those who have recovered from the diseases is now 2,050, with 25 total countries reporting cases.
And speaking of reversals, there was another notable one in the number of people receiving medical attention in China, because after sliding dramatically and even shrinking today, on Saturday the number of people under observation once again jumped, rising to 3,615 after a drop of 309 the day before.
One final point about all of the above: China is notorious about manipulating all of its economic data, why on earth would it publish accurate pandemic data, especially when it has repeatedly refused the presence of foreign observes in its fight to contain the deadly virus. As such, readers can simply ignore all of the above Chinese “goalseeks” and even Bloomberg notes that “total deaths may be far higher, given reports of an overwhelmed health system in Hubei, central China.”
Looking ahead, JPMorgan predicts that the epidemic will peak in 1.5 months, i.e., by mid-March, at which point the total infected people will grow to 85K.
Update: (1500ET): When the dust has settled and the novel coronavirus has finally died out, we can’t imagine how the World Health Organization will manage to revive its reputation.
After repeatedly defending China as a beacon of “transparency” and model for other emerging economies, the death of Dr. Li stands as a rebuke to WHO head Dr. Tedros, who has kowtowed to China at every turn.
Reuters reports that a cruise line has banned Chinese travelers. And Apple said it’s hoping to open its offices in China on Feb. 10, while it has extended the closure of its retail stores to Feb. 13.
With markets closing in the red, Larry Kudlow took to Fox News to remind traders that the coronavirus outbreak is really China’s problem, saying that the outbreak will likely hurt China’s economy – bad.
The outpouring of rage of Dr. Li’s death continued into the early hours of Saturday on the mainland, with the SCMP now reporting that it’s fueling demands for free speech. For many, his death symbolized Beijing’s missteps and repressive tendencies when dealing with the outbreak, as he was punished for being one of the first to warn about the outbreak.
“It is a very big crisis. China’s public opinion was divided, but this time a consensus has been formed. The public share the same attitude and harbour the sentiments of sympathy, suppression and grieving anger,” Wuhan University law professor Qin Qianhong said.
“I am worried that the situation could explode, or become like when [former Communist Party general secretary] Hu Yaobang died or even more serious.”
Amnesty International weighed in on Dr. Li’s death, calling it a “tragic reminder” of how Beijing’s “preoccupation with stability” inspired it to suppress vital information.
As Beijing cracks down on dissident speech, cities appear to be ramping up stuff like this – spraying disinfectant on every public surface.
Over the last two days, Beijing has made a big show of opening two new hospitals in Wuhan that were built in under two weeks. We’ve already reported how the hospitals look more like prisons with medical equipment. But come to find out that most of the hospitals are actually being run by their patients. Dr. Feigl-Ding, the Harvard epidemiologist who is one of many academics slammed as an alarmist for telling the truth, tweeted that nearly one-third of the patients in one hospital in Wuhan are also medical staff. There’s a common trope to describe this: something about a lunatic and an asylum.
29% — that’s the % of the 138 #coronavirus infected patients who are actually infected medical staff in one Wuhan hospital. Almost 1 in 3 patients being hospital healthcare workers is just insane. New case series report in JAMA: https://t.co/j7HPV8j8dppic.twitter.com/3Hmu3MaE7m
2) In addition to 29% medical staff, 12% of patients had gotten #coronavirus as hospital-acquired🦠. Quote: “Hospital-associated transmission was suspected as the presumed mechanism of infection for affected health professionals (40 [29%]) and hospitalized patients (17 [12.3%]).”
3) Astute readers added 29%+12% and asked if it means 41% of the 138 patients got 🦠 as a hospital-acquired infection… yes but maybe not one’s personal risk walking into a hospital. 12% maybe weak/susceptible, and 29% medical staff have much closer contact than normal patients.
We wonder how many more doctors will need to die before the mainland really does ‘import Hong Kong’s sickness’?
* * *
Update (1215ET): Here’s the latest sign that the public outrage over China;’ handling of the coronavirus outbreak might lead to a genuine ‘crisis of confidence’ in the regime.
SCMP reports that the death of Dr. Li is threatening to turn into a public confidence crisis for Beijing as it expands quarantine measures to more than 400 million Chinese, 3 provinces and 60+ cities.
Many are treating the doctor as a martyr. Across the country, mourners are paying tribute for his death. On Friday, dozens of mourners placed flowers and black-and-white photos of Li at the entrance to Wuhan Central Hospital where he worked and died.
“We have just been discharged but our boy didn’t make it,” she said.
Li’s wife – who is expecting the couple’s second child in June – was staying with her own mother and the couple’s five-year-old son, the doctor’s mother said.
“[Li] is a brilliant person and he would always do his duties and never tell lies,” she said.
Some have demanded that the Wuhan government apologize to his family.
Beijing’s “unusual decision” to send a team from the country’s top anti-corruption agency to Wuhan just hours after the death suggests the central government is desperately searching for a local scapegoat upon whom they can blame the doctor’s death. The “issues of public concern relating to Li Wenliang” shows how seriously the government is taking the venting of public anger.
Yesterday, Beijing reportedly started rounding up all of the infected patients in Wuhan to move them into quarantine, with officials claiming that the public is now living in “war like” conditions.
“It is a very big crisis. China’s public opinion was divided, but this time a consensus has been formed. The public share the same attitude and harbour the sentiments of sympathy, suppression and grieving anger,” Wuhan University law professor Qin Qianhong said.
“I am worried that the situation could explode, or become like when [former Communist Party general secretary] Hu Yaobang died or even more serious.”
Meanwhile, the number of confirmed cases has climbed above 31k.
Following initial ‘confusion’ about the circumstances surrounding Li’s death, by 6 am on Saturday morning in Beijing, hashtags “Dr Li Wenliang has passed away” had 670 million views on Chinese social media. “Li Wenliang has passed away” had 230 million views, and “I want freedom of speech” had 2.86 million views on Weibo. Though these hashtags were quickly censored.
Li, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist, was one of the eight whistleblowers who were “disciplined” by the police in early January for spreading dangerous “rumors” after he posted a message in a closed online WeChat group about a number of “SARS-like” cases at his hospital. He was soon infected from his patients.
As one reporter who has been assiduously sharing videos from the epicenter of the crisis in Wuhan reported, many in Wuhan have taken to shouting Dr. Li’s name to other apartments as millions remain on lockdown.
People in #Wuhan shouting together from their apartments last night. Some say they shouted to pay tribute to Li Wenliang, who first exposed #CoronaVirus Outbreak, and who died yesterday. What they shouted though, is “Wuhan, Add oil”, meaning keep fighting, pump up, or cheer up pic.twitter.com/3eYG9lKuIV
Jennifer Zeng also shared a video showing 30,000 dead ducks who died as a result of neglect during the outbreak. We reported yesterday that millions of Chinese have been struggling to care for pets and animals who have been abandoned by the quarantine.
She also reported that a more realistic death toll is closer to 20k.
No idea. One leaked Chinese source says over 20 K, but got deleted soon. A Chinese billionaire, Guo Wengui says over 30K. No way to verify, as the #CCP doesn’t tell you the truth. But definitely much, much more than the official number. https://t.co/cHzc63kwmm
As we’ve reported, dozens of airlines have suspended flights to and from China – much to Beijing’s chagrin. But FlightRadar24 showed that while air traffic has fallen off significantly, there are still some flights leaving parts of the country where the virus is very active.
Traffic in China over the past six weeks—Tuesdays at 9am local time.
Meanwhile, as we reported earlier, the White House has asked American researchers to study the origins of the White House, the latest sign that the ‘conspiracy theory’ about the virus being a bioengineered weapon unwittingly unleashed on an unsuspecting population may have bred a handful of skeptics in high places.
* * *
Update (1100ET): This is bad news for airlines, casinos and virtually every business (restaurants, bars any other business) in the nightlife or entertainment fields. A team of German scientists have determined that the coronavirus can survive for up to 9 days on a surface.
The researchers also commented on research from Chinese scientists who said the virus may have spread from bats to humans via the illegal trafficking of pangolins, one of the most heavily poached animals in the world (the species is beloved for its scales).
Though other scientists have questioned these connections, according to Reuters, the researchers, from Greifswald and Bochum, have published findings from their coronavirus research earlier than planned and said the pangolin poaching theory was plausible.
They also added that certain disinfectants help particularly well to make the viruses on surfaces harmless.
Now that another case has been confirmed, the total number of infected people in Germany rose to 13, almost all of those infected had never been to China, indicating that most were infected via human to human transmission.
As of Friday morning there were more than 31,000 registered diseases. The death toll rose to 636, Der Tagesspiegel reported. By comparison, the flu virus can barely survive for 24 hours, HIV can survive for six days.
* * *
Guangzhou, the capital of China’s southwestern Guangdong Province and the country’s fifth largest city with nearly 15 million residents, has just joined the ranks of cities imposing a mandatory lockdown on all citizens, effectively trapping residents inside their homes, with only limited permission to venture into the outside world to buy essential supplies.
The decision means 3 provinces, 60 cities and 400 million people are now facing China’s most-strict level of lockdown as Beijing struggles to contain the coronavirus outbreak as the virus has already spread to more than 2 dozen countries.
That’s more than 400 million people forcibly locked inside their homes for 638 deaths? Just think about that: If there was ever a reason to believe that Beijing is lying about the numbers (and not just because Tencent accidentally leaked the real data), this is it.
Meanwhile, in the US, the Trump Administration has directed researchers to investigate the ‘true origins’ of the virus, as ‘conspiracy theories’ and misinformation spreads online. We can’t help but wonder: What if the scientists discover something that the regime in Beijing doesn’t want them to see?
Elsewhere, Singapore raised its national disease response level to Orange, the second-highest level and the same level from the SARS epidemic, according to the city-state’s health ministry. It also confirmed three new coronavirus cases. While investigations are ongoing, none of the three appear to have a history of recent travel to China, suggesting they picked up the virus in Singapore.
‘Orange’ means the outbreak “is severe and spreads easily from person to person” but “has not spread widely in Singapore and is being contained,” according to the Disease Outbreak Response System Condition color-coded framework. Singapore has never invoked its highest level, red, per BBG.
Foreigners are complaining that the new hospitals in Wuhan are merely ‘quarantine centers’ without any medical resources.
Dear Gov’t of Uganda,
The famous makeshift “hospitalsh the Chinese Gov’t is bragging about are not hospitals, they are quarantine areas where patients are not receiving any treatment at all. Is this the place you’re saying is safer for us ? #EvacuateUgandansInWuhanpic.twitter.com/sLzdUHA24P
Yesterday, Beijing argued that the virus outbreak had ‘peaked’ as they cited a drop in the rate of new infections. However, others have suggested that the rate of new confirmed cases has more to do with Beijing’s limited resources.
It’s been said by others but I’ll say it too:
The way China is reporting almost an identical number of new coronavirus cases each day (approximately 3000) MUST be a reflection of its diagnosis capacity rather than the true caseload, which is likely much worse.
The WHO said during a press conference on Thursday that it’s too early to claim that the outbreak has peaked, even as the outlook for the global economy falls off a cliff.
LNG prices have already plunged to their lowest levels in a decade in Asia as the ramp up of supply in 2019 came at a time when demand has slowed. That was true before the outbreak of the coronavirus. But the quarantine of around 50 million people and the shutdown of huge swathes of the Chinese economy has sent shockwaves through commodity markets.
Shipments of oil and gas are backing up at Chinese ports, which is creating ripple effects across the world. Now, Chinese state-owned CNOOC is considering declaring force majeure on its LNG import commitments, according to the FT. Sinopec and CNPC are also apparently considering the move.
Prices were already in the dumps. JKM prices recently fell to 10-year lows. But they have continued to decline, approaching $3/MMBtu for the first time in history. Just a few weeks ago, JKM prices were trading at around $5/MMBtu, itself an incredibly low price for this time of year.
LNG exports from the U.S. are uneconomical at these price levels. Many exporters have contracts at fixed, higher prices. But shipments can be cancelled for a fee. And any spot trade would be hit hard. The question now is whether shipments will come to halt. “Forward prices for summer are now at levels where U.S. LNG shut-ins begin to seem viable,” Edmund Siau, a Singapore-based analyst with energy consultant FGE, told Bloomberg. “There is usually a lead time before a cargo can be canceled, and we expect actual supply curtailments to start happening in summer.”
But if buyers start cancelling their purchases, LNG exporters have to ramp down production. That could then ripple back to the shale gas fields in the U.S., where prices are already below $2/MMBtu and drillers can’t make any money. The CEO of Marcellus shale gas giant EQT said in December that “a lot of this development doesn’t work as well at $2.50 gas.” Henry Hub prices are now below $1.85/MMBtu.
There is little relief in sight.
“Even with our projected increase in power sector natural gas demand due to the current low price environment, we estimate natural gas stocks to end this summer with 3.85 tcf in the ground,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch said in a recent note.
“Such inventory level would be more than 100 bcf higher YoY, and does not leave much room for bearish errors from mild weather, high renewable generation, or reduced LNG exports.”
Europe too is sitting on abnormally high inventories.
“LNG exporters desperately need cold weather in Europe to draw down inventories and provide more breathing room this summer,” Bank of America warned.
But that is not happening. Europe just saw its warmest January on record, depressing gas demand. Fossil fuels are driving climate change, so it’s rather ironic that higher temperatures are now battering gas markets.
It’s all combining to create a “gasmaggedon,” according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
“We are now more than halfway through the winter, and thus far Mother Nature has not been kind to natural gas prices,” analysts at the bank wrote.
The investment bank calls the U.S. Midwest power sector is the “true market of last resort,” which means that U.S. gas prices have to fall to such low depths that coal-fired power plants are forced offline in their last redoubt – the Midwest.
“We believe the US cannot sustain reduced LNG exports this summer,” Bank of America warned.
“Therefore, US natural gas prices might have to go low enough to stimulate sufficient Midwest power sector natural gas demand to balance the entire global gas market.”
While increasing life expectancy and declining birth rates are considered major achievements in modern science and healthcare, they will have a significant impact on future generations.
Today’s graphic relies on OECD data to demonstrate how the old-age to working-age ratio will change by 2060, highlighting some of the world’s fastest aging countries.
By 2050, there will be 10 billion people on earth, compared to 7.7 billion today—and many of them will be living longer. As a result, the number of elderly people per 100 working-age people will nearly triple—from 20 in 1980, to 58 in 2060.
Populations are getting older in all OECD countries, yet there are clear differences in the pace of aging. For instance, Japan holds the title for having the oldest population, with ⅓ of its citizens already over the age of 65. By 2030, the country’s workforce is expected to fall by 8 million—leading to a major potential labor shortage.
In another example, while South Korea currently boasts a younger than average population, it will age rapidly and end up with the highest old-to-young ratio among developed countries.
A Declining Workforce
Globally, the working-age population will see a 10% decrease by 2060. It will fall the most drastically by 35% or more in Greece, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. On the other end of the scale, it will increase by more than 20% in Australia, Mexico, and Israel.
Israel’s notably higher increase of 67% is due to the country’s high fertility rate, which is comparable to “baby boom” numbers seen in the U.S. following the second World War.
As countries prepare for the coming decades, workforce shortages are just one of the impacts of aging populations already being felt.
Managing the Risks
There are many other social and economic risks that we can come to expect as the global population continues to age:
The Squeezed Middle: With more people claiming pension benefits but less people paying income taxes, the shrinking workforce may be forced to pay higher taxes.
Rising Healthcare Costs: Longer lives do not necessarily mean healthier lives, with those over 65 more likely to have at least one chronic disease and require expensive, long-term care.
Economic Slowdown: Changing workforces may lead capital to flow away from rapidly aging countries to younger countries, shifting the global distribution of economic power.
The strain on pension systems is perhaps the most evident sign of a drastically aging population. Although the average retirement age is gradually increasing in many countries, people are saving insufficiently for their increased life span—resulting in an estimated $400 trillion deficit by 2050.
Pensions Under Pressure
A pension is promised, but not necessarily guaranteed. Any changes made to existing government programs can alter the lives of future retirees entirely—but effective pension reforms that lessen the growing deficit are required urgently.
Towards a Better System
Certain countries are making great strides towards more sustainable pension systems, and the Global Pension Index suggests initiatives that governments can take into consideration, such as:
Continuing to increase the age of retirement
Increasing the level of savings—both inside and outside pension funds
Increasing the coverage of private pensions across the labor force, including self-employed and contract employees, to provide improved integration between various pillars
Preserving retirement funds by limiting the access to benefits before the retirement age
Increasing the trust and confidence of all stakeholders by improving transparency of pension plans
Although 59% of employees are expecting to continue earning well into their retirement years, providing people with better incentives and options to make working at an older age easier could be crucial for ensuring continued economic growth.
Live Long and Prosper
As 2020 marks the beginning of the Decade of Healthy Ageing, the world is undoubtedly entering a pivotal period.
Countries all over the world face tremendous pressure to effectively manage their aging populations, but preparing for this demographic shift early will contribute to the economic advancement of countries, and allow populations—both young and old—to live long and prosper.
Ahead of this year’s Academy Awards, Campus Reform Digital Reporter Eduardo Neret went to American University to ask students to react to claims that the nominees are “too white” and not diverse enough.
Iraq & Russia Look To Boost Military Ties While US Threatens Sanctions
In more continuing fallout over the Jan.3 assassination by drone of the IRGC’s Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iraq and Russia are preparing for deepening military coordination, reports the AP.
Iraq’s Defense Ministry announced Thursday that increased “cooperation and coordination” is being discussed with Moscow amid worsened relations with Washington, which even last month included President Trump issuing brazen threats of “very big” sanctions on Baghdad if American troops are kicked out of the country.
This week Iraqi army chief of staff Lt. Gen. Othman Al-Ghanimi and Russian Ambassador Maksim Maksimov met to discuss future military cooperation. Crucially, Gen. Ghanimi highlighted Russia’s successful anti-ISIS operations over the past years, especially in Syria where the Russian military has supported Assad since being invited there in 2015.
On Russia’s role in Iraq, Ghanimi said Moscow had provided “our armed forces with advanced and effective equipment and weapons that had a major role in resolving many battles,” according to the ministry statement.
It’s been long rumored that since late summer Baghdad and Moscow have been in talks to deliver either Russia’s advanced S-400 or S-300 anti-air missile defense systems – a prospect which US officials have condemned.
Like other areas of the Middle East, as US adventurism heightens pressure for a US withdrawal, Russia appears to be seizing the opportunity to move in. This much was affirmed in AP’s reporting, via at least one anonymous senior official:
A senior Iraqi military intelligence official told The Associated Press that Russia, among other countries, has come forward to offer military support in the wake of fraught US.-Iraq relations following Soleimani’s killing.
“Iraq still needs aerial reconnaissance planes. There are countries that have given signals to Iraq to support us or equip us with reconnaissance planes such as Russia and Iran,” said the official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.
Many military analysts have of late noted that the “blowback” from the incredibly risky operation which killed Soleimani will be a hastening of American forces’ exit from the region.
It could also actually serve to increase Baghdad’s dependency on Iran – something which appears to be already in the works. And now we have confirmation that Moscow will seek to benefit as well from the worsened US-Iraq relations, certainly now at the lowest point since the 2003 invasion and US attempt to build a new government.
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances, and your prosperity.
And the Federation’s President recently took to Twitter to declare:
“Heterosexual couple relationships are really violent. In addition, the vast majority are relationships based on religion. It may be time to have a conversation about their ban and abolition.” (Translated from French.)
After a backlash, she walked back her statement and apologized.
She explained that her Tweets were an emotional reaction to the news that a man who had murdered his girlfriend was released on parole and killed another 22 year old woman.
So rather than blame a justice system which let a killer walk free, she blamed all straight men.
It’s illegal for Chinese to criticize their government’s pitiful Coronavirus response
China recently sent out an “Announcement on the Special Control of Rumors Related to New Coronavirus Pneumonia.”
The announcement reminds citizens that it is illegal to spread false information or induce panic online. And the government considers anything about the Coronavirus that doesn’t come directly from government sources “false information”.
Anyone who violates this ban and shares what the government considers rumors about the outbreak could face up to seven years in prison.
China has also made clear that the government considers criticizing their response to the Coronavirus outbreak a violation of the law.
Already China arrested dozens of social media users for spreading “false information without verification.”
This is all made even more absurd by China’s terrible response to the outbreak. Instead of tackling the issue head-on, they tried to hide it for over a month. Hundreds of people have now died, and more than 20,000 have been infected.
Yet China’s government is still more concerned about keeping information from spreading rather than keeping the disease from spreading.
And that’s what this bill ignores. Not voting IS voting. It is making a statement that there is no one WORTH voting for.
The timing of the bill looks kind of silly too… I mean politicians can’t even design an app that functions properly to count votes. It’s been nearly a week and the Iowa votes haven’t been fully counted yet.
And at the same time, they want to force everyone into this flawed system.
Dems Triggered After Trump Tweets ‘Misleading’ Montage Of Pelosi Insulting SOTU Honorees
Democrats have caught the vapors after President Trump tweeted a montage of Nancy Pelosi tearing up a copy of his State of the Union speech after various honorees received accolades.
While Pelosi actually tore up the speech after Trump was finished giving it, the clip tweeted by Trump encapsulates a widely-shared sentiment among conservatives; that Pelosi’s theatrics were deeply insulting to those honored during the speech – including a former Tuskegee Airman, a low income family who received a scholarship, and several others.
Perhaps most triggered of all was top Pelosi aide Drew Hammill, who got in a Twitter argument with Facebook spox Andy Stone.
“The American people know that the President has no qualms about lying to them – but it is a shame to see Twitter and Facebook, sources of news for millions, do the same,” said Hammill, adding “The latest fake video of Speaker Pelosi is deliberately designed to mislead and lie to the American people…” to which Sovern replied “Sorry, are you suggesting the President didn’t make those remarks and the Speaker didn’t rip the speech?”
Facebook spox tussling with top Pelosi aide over an edited video tweeted by Trump of Pelosi ripping up his SOTU speech pic.twitter.com/5lKtQrhQ68
As the 2020 presidential election approaches, Facebook and Twitter have published their own policies on deepfakes and edited videos like this Pelosi clip. Facebook’s policy only affects videos that were created by artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms that would “likely mislead” someone. Twitter announced its own rules this week that don’t take effect until March. But its rules state that manipulated media that is “likely to impact public safety or cause serious harm” could be labeled or removed. –The Verge
Other triggered leftists include Reps. David Cicilline (D-RI) and Ro Khanna (D-CA), according to The Verge. Khanna notably included Trump’s tweet in his own, exposing an entirely different demographic to the clip.
As has been the case since Monday’s sell-off, there is an attempt to try to look on the bright side of the virus headlines. Chinese officials are spreading the word globally that things are under control and that other countries should not be closing their borders to China, in line with the WHO recommendations that says that free-flows of people during a potential epidemic is completely fine. Of course, at home China is still under draconian lockdown, with tens of millions of people not allowed to leave their homes, and hundreds of millions more voluntarily following the same advice. Moreover, as a former Mexican ambassador to China publicly notes, when Mexico briefly suffered from H1N1 bird ‘flu back in 2009 China’s response was to ignore the WHO’s recommendations and: place all Mexican nationals in China under quarantine; cancel all direct flights to Mexico; stop issuing visas to Mexicans; and closed all its consulates in Mexico.
After having extended its Lunar New Year break, and yet with more cities and firms still shutting down than doing any re-opening, Beijing is starting to become cognizant of just how deep and serious the economic damage is going to be if this goes on much longer. We are, after all, talking about 80% of the economy, and 90% of exporters, simply not functioning. This is already seeing supply-chain knock-on effects for a swathe of global firms and this, very much like the virus itself, will snowball as time passes if nothing changes. For a country that was already seeing foreign firms talk about shifting production to other locations this is a problem. Thus, perhaps, some of the urgency in trying to stress that everything is returning to normal soon, and that the WHO advice is worth following – this time.
S&P, for example, are suggesting the virus might knock 0.8ppts off of 2020 GDP growth in China. That sounds a lot, doesn’t it? Until we realise that 80% of China’s GDP is probably shrinking by 10-20% y/y right now, a slump that makes the peak of 2008-09 look like a picnic by comparison and which frankly defies traditional economic statistical analysis of the S&P variety, where outliers like this get “winsorized” away and the underlying equilibrium GDP model kicks in and drags us back to a trend rate of growth again by magic. (Very much like an apparatchik, as I was saying yesterday.)
During The Great Recession did *everybody* stay at home and almost all business shut down? I don’t recall that being the case. If this virus *is* all over in days then one can make the case that Q2, Q3, and Q4 will see a huge bounce in GDP into double digits as everyone restarts work and eats out more, etc. Yet if this drags on through Q1 and into Q2–and I have not seen any serious virologists, merely not-at-all-serious economists, suggest such a rapid return to normal is possible–then the negative effects in the first third of the year are going to be so bad that the rest of the year is never realistically going to get us back close to 6% y/y GDP growth again, or 5.2%, regardless of empty new skyscrapers and shiny subways and high-speed trains. Surely the whole year will be flat at best? Obviously, 2021 GDP will then be gangbusters in Q1 and Q2 (“so buy stocks!”) – but there will also be lasting damage if this drags on as SMEs shut down and don’t reopen, and as already capital-constrained banks are forced to bail everyone out, and as the PBOC is then forced to bail banks out. Market calm that does not make for.
Yes, are we seeing a slowdown in new virus cases reported this morning. We now have 31,481, which does show a day-to-day decline away from an exponential rate of growth *if accurate*. Yet for those market participants merrily saying this is “just a flu” (there are some) we also have 4,824, 15% of the total, in critical condition, and 638 deaths. Further, one arguably cannot measure the death-rate of any virus against the number of *currently* sick people: you surely measure it against those who eventually recover vs. those who don’t. Given we have 1,563 who have recovered vs. 638 dead (and 4,824 critical) that is a worrying ratio of 29% dead as an end-outcome, which is right up there with the MERS virus from a few years ago – although, yes, there is real reason for us all to hope that number will decline sharply as milder cases will be fully curable. But a simple flu this is not.
The quandary for China between releasing the quarantine straitjacket in days to stop its economy from getting truly sick, and allowing a virus like this to spread further as people start to mingle again is truly awful. There are no good options. For a world with a serious lack of final end-demand, and which has been relying on China, along with increasingly “Chinese” central banks, this is going to be a nasty shock either way that Mr Market is treating like he is Mr Magoo. (Oh, and Donald Trump was apparently “apoplectic” with PM Boris Johnson over his recent Huawei decision in a recent call, with suggestions that the UK might now be trying to backtrack; the US is allegedly also floating the idea of buying shares in firms like Nokia and Ericsson to help build a Western 5G alterative. Something else for China to be worrying about, of course.)
For example, Bloomberg is this morning trying to sell the fact that Chinese government bond yields are dropping (-33bp this year) as a good news story. It isn’t, even if that single trade is one I have long supported if one simply has to be in Chinese markets. If China is seeing its yields plummet, what does that say about global growth prospects? What does that say about global reflation? It’s a long bonds story – full stop. Of course, lower yields mathematically means higher P/E ratios for equities too (“so buy stocks!”). Until yields have gone as low as they ever can, real activity has ground to a halt, and we have a world where bonds can’t go any higher, equities can’t go any higher, central banks and governments can’t afford to let either collapse, and only FX markets have any pricing function.
Talking of pricing functions, the RBA have hilariously used their Statement on Monetary Policy this morning to make clear that rates are on hold right now, and that further rate cuts could do more harm than good with only two left in the can before QE has to start. I always guessed these guys spent all day on the Domain.com property website, but the timing is pure black comedy, as is their call that the unemployment rate will be going down and not up just as Chinese tourism collapses. On which note, today has already seen Japanese household spending collapse -4.8% y/y in December before anyone even sneezed and real labour earnings -0.9% y/y. Gambatte, ne?
Also talking of pricing functions, this time political, and of black comedy the US Iowa Democratic caucus moved into even more surreal areas yesterday, with a press report that up to 30% of the votes might have been tabulated wrong due to bad math skills; then a very slow final count; then populist Bernie Sanders taking the lead and publicly claiming victory; and at the same instant the Democratic National Congress chairman Tom Perez saying an “immediate recanvas” was needed instead. In the UK they called that a “People’s Vote” – perhaps he could use that terminology? Meanwhile, previous Iowa ‘winner’ Mayor Pete is busy appointing ex-Goldman Sachs staff to his campaign team. Hope and Change, people.
US Attorney Who Declined To Charge Cops For Killing Innocent Man Is Nominated For Treasury Role
Op-Ed authored by attorney and journalist Techno Fog
In November of 2019, Jessie Liu, the former United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, declined to press charges against two U.S. Park Police officers who fatally shot a harmless and unarmed driver four times in the head.
Next week, on February 13, 2020, Liu – who was rejected last year by the Senate Judiciary Committee for the #3 spot at the DOJ – will attend a hearing for her nomination to be the Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Crimes at the Department of the Treasury.
If this makes you angry, it should. Only in D.C. does cowardice get you a promotion.
The driver was Bijan Ghaisar, a 25 year-old young man who fled the scene of a minor car accident. (He was the one who had been hit.) Officers Lucas Vinyard and Alejandro Amaya followed him and eventually blocked his Jeep’s path at an intersection. Ghaisar turned his car from the officers and tried to get away at a low speed. The officers weren’t threatened – Ghaisar didn’t have a gun and they weren’t in the path of a speeding car. They responded by firing nine shots into his Jeep at close range. He was hit four times in the head and once in the wrist. He later died at the hospital.
This video shows the fatal shots and the moments leading up to the killing.
It’s clear from the video that the officers – who claimed self defense – weren’t in danger. The Jeep wasn’t speeding in their direction; rather, it was moving ever so slowly to the side. Making matters worse – if that’s possible – the final few shots were put on Ghaisar after the Jeep started rolling into a ditch. By that point he was apparently incapacitated. The officers just finished the job.
Despite the video evidence, Liu declined to press charges. Her office defended her decision, stating that “there is insufficient evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the officers willfully committed a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 242. Specifically, the Department is unable to disprove a claim of self-defense or defense of others by the officers.”
“Insufficient evidence.”
“Unable to disprove a claim of self-defense.”
What’s more, Liu’s office declined to issue a written report on the case, as is standard practice in high-profile police shootings. And according to the Washington Post, she stymied a Fairfax prosecutor’s request for FBI agents to appear before a grand jury about the shooting.
Making matters worse – Liu was a roadblock to the local prosecution as well.
Virginia prosecutors’ request for FBI agents to appear before a grand jury “were stymied by Liu herself” pic.twitter.com/HvW0VlBk2g
“Today’s decision was a cowardly act by a Department of Justice that is afraid to hold law enforcement, especially federal law enforcement, accountable when it commits murder.”
They’re right. Jessie Liu denied a murder victim justice. She refused to hold federal officers accountable – which Fairfax County Prosecutors decided to pursue last December after Lieu gave them a pass. She trivialized the grief of the family by disputing what they and the rest of the world saw with their own eyes – an unjustified execution.
Liu is the manifestation of everything wrong with DC: the powerful protecting the institutions from those it victimized. If she gets the job at Treasury, it would show that not only does crime pay, but the cover-up pays better.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has vowed to toughen sentencing guidelines for convicted terrorists after a newly-released prisoner carried out a jihadist attack in London.
On February 2, Sudesh Amman, a 20-year-old jihadist from Harrow in north-west London, stabbed two people in a knife rampage on Streatham High Road before he was shot dead by police. He had been released from prison just days earlier after serving less than half of his sentence for terrorism offenses.
Amman, who was carrying a 10-inch kitchen knife, wearing a fake suicide bomber vest, and shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the Greatest”), had been under active police surveillance at the time of the attack, which London police described as an “Islamist-related terrorist incident.”
In December 2018, Amman was sentenced to three years and four months in prison after pleading guilty to 13 counts of expressing support for Islamist terrorism and possessing and sharing Islamic State and al-Qaeda propaganda. He was 18 years old at the time.
Amman was arrested in May 2018 after posting Islamist propaganda online. At the time, police said that he had expressed support for the Islamic State, sent beheading videos to his girlfriend, and asked her to kill her “kuffar” (non-Muslim) parents. He also wrote about carrying out a jihadist attack:
“If you can’t make a bomb because family, friends or spies are watching or suspecting you, take a knife, Molotov [cocktail], sound bombs or a car at night and attack the crusaders, police and soldiers of taghut [idolatry], or western embassies in every country you are in this planet.”
In a search of Amman’s computer, police found documents titled, “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom”, “U.S. Army Knife Fighting Manual Techniques” and “Bloody Brazilian Knife Fighting Techniques.”
During Amman’s trial, police noted that he had a “fierce interest in violence and martyrdom.” Acting Commander Alexis Boon, then head of the Metropolitan police counter terrorism command, explained:
“His fascination with dying in the name of terrorism was clear in a notepad we recovered from his home. Amman had scrawled his ‘life goals’ in the notepad and top of the list, above family activities, was dying a martyr and going to ‘Jannah‘ — the afterlife.”
“It’s not clear how Amman became radicalized, but it is apparent from his messages that it had been at least a year in development. Whatever the circumstances, this case is a reminder of the need to be vigilant to signs of radicalization and report it.”
Amman’s attack is the second one in the British capital in the past three months. On November 29, 2019, Usman Khan, a 28-year-old jihadist from Stoke-on-Trent, stabbed and killed two people in a knife rampage near London Bridge. Like Amman, Khan had also been released early from prison.
A day after Khan’s attack, Boris Johnson announced a review into the license (parole) conditions of 74 terrorists who had been released from prison early. He also vowed to end the practice of automatically releasing serious offenders from prison before the end of their terms:
“The terrorist who attacked yesterday was sentenced 11 years ago under laws passed in 2008 which established automatic early release.
“This system has got to end. I repeat, this has got to end…. If you are convicted of a serious terrorist offense, there should be a mandatory minimum sentence of 14 years — and some should never be released.
“Further, for all terrorism and extremist offenses, the sentence announced by the judge must be the time actually served — these criminals must serve every day of their sentence, with no exceptions.”
A Sentencing Bill included in the Queen’s Speech in October 2019 would have changed the automatic release point from halfway to two-thirds for adult offenders serving sentences of four years or more for serious violence or sexual offenses. The bill, however, stalled due to a hung parliament, and was shelved later that month when new elections were called.
The latest attack sparked considerable anger. In an interview with Sky News, the editor of Spiked magazine, Brendan O’Neill, spoke for many when he said:
“The Streatham terror stabbing is a scandal. This man was an Islamist maniac. He was devoted to ISIS and he had planned to kill non-believers. And yet he was let out of jail after just 18 months. We’ve got to start taking Islamic terrorism more seriously.”
Paul Stott, a terrorism researcher with the London-based Henry Jackson Society, added:
“We need an immediate moratorium on the release of terrorist prisoners, whilst the government reviews each individual case.”
In an interview with the Daily Mail, an unidentified government source said that according to British law, Amman had to be released from prison early, despite the threat he posed to society:
“There had been concerns when he [Amman] was in prison but there were no powers for any authority to keep him behind bars.
“There was nothing that could be done to keep him behind bars under existing laws, hence why he was under surveillance and strict licensing conditions.
“He had served half of his sentence, which was more than three years, so he had to be released despite concerns over his conduct.
“The public will look at this case and say why was this individual not kept behind bars and the Prime Minister shares that view.”
After the latest attack, Johnson promised “fundamental changes” to the system for dealing with convicted terrorists. He said that terrorists currently in prison will lose their right to automatic early release halfway through their sentences. Johnson stressed that the legal concept of automatic early release for people “who obviously continue to pose a threat to the public has come to the end of its useful life.”
On February 3, Secretary of State for Justice Robert Buckland announced that the government would introduce emergency legislation — The Counterterrorism Bill — to end the automatic early release from prison of terror offenders:
“We cannot have the situation, as we saw tragically in yesterday’s case, where an offender — a known risk to innocent members of the public — is released early by automatic process of law without any oversight by the Parole Board.
“We will, therefore, introduce emergency legislation to ensure an end to terrorist offenders getting released automatically having served half of their sentence with no check or review.”
Buckland added that the changes would be retroactive and apply to jihadists currently in prison:
“We face an unprecedented situation of severe gravity and, as such, it demands that the government responds immediately and that this legislation will therefore also apply to serving prisoners.
“The earliest point at which the offenders will now be considered for release will be once they have served two-thirds of their sentence and, crucially, we will introduce a requirement that no terrorist offender will be released before the end of their full custodial term unless the Parole Board agrees.”
A total of 353 convicted and suspected Islamist terrorists were released from prison between June 2012 and June 2019, according to Home Office statistics cited by the Daily Mail.
In October 2018, the Islamist firebrand preacher Anjem Choudary, described as Britain’s “most dangerous extremist,” was released from prison after serving only half of the five-and-a-half-year sentence he received in 2016 for pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.
Prison authorities could not prevent his release: under British sentencing guidelines, prisoners — even those who are still a risk to the public — automatically become eligible for release under license (parole) after serving half their terms.
In an essay published by the Daily Mail, Philip Flower, a former chief superintendent with the Metropolitan Police, warned that the fight against violent Islamism in Britain was being hampered by political correctness:
“As a retired senior police officer involved in containing terrorist and other threats during a 40-year career, I want to tell you of the intense frustrations that will be felt today across British policing. They will feel utterly let down by the judicial system.
“When I was a constable, I could arrest and process a suspect in an hour, maximum. Today, it takes a day or more.
“The police are mired in bureaucracy, while the judicial system has become an institutional cloud-cuckoo land.
“As a society, we have to decide how to deal with terrorist suspects. It takes around 32 police officers to maintain around-the-clock surveillance of a single terror suspect.
“It is insane to attempt to maintain this level of supervision of the thousands of individuals known to be of interest to the security services and counter-terrorism police. It seems as though the Streatham perpetrator was being watched by armed police, yet still he managed to stab shoppers….
“If we are to release convicted terrorists from jail early, then we would have to recruit thousands and thousands more police to oversee them, which of course will never happen because there is not enough money and we would find that level of intrusion unacceptable in a free society.
“There is a wider problem of maintaining the morale of the officers charged with keeping the public safe from fanatics.
“Bluntly, how would you feel if you were told to keep track of known terrorists who have been released from prison to satisfy the politically correct assumptions of our justice system?”
Ian Acheson, a veteran prison officer who in 2015 led an independent review of Islamist extremism in British prisons, told the BBC’s Today program that the UK’s risk-management system is fundamentally broken:
“We are going to have to accept that we have to be much more skeptical and robust about dealing with the risk of harm.
“We may need to accept that there are certain people who are so dangerous they must be kept in prison indefinitely….
“I am still unconvinced that the prison service itself has the aptitude or the attitude to assertively manage terrorist offenders.”
For better or worse, social media is the new public square. Of adults, 68% use Facebook, 73% use YouTube, and a quarter use Twitter. The numbers are much higher for adults under 50. Two-thirds of adults and roughly 4 in 5 under 50 use social media to consume news. Three-quarters of Facebook users are on the site every day, and Twitter users have a disproportionate influence on the media because so many journalists are on the service.
The size and scale of social media companies exploded primarily because they presented themselves as open platforms — blank slates. Google, Facebook, and Twitter all characterized their products as engines for social improvement. “We think of Twitter as the global town hall,” said former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. “We are the free speech wing of the free speech party.”
Costolo was Twitter’s chief executive from 2010 until 2015 and the immediate predecessor of current CEO Jack Dorsey. Twitter’s general manager in the United Kingdom, Andy Yang, likewise described Twitter as the “free speech wing of the free speech party” in March 2012. Google became a multibillion-dollar company by offering a portal for free, unrestricted information to anyone with access to the internet; famously, its original motto was “Don’t be evil.” An internal Facebook memo circulated in June 2016 stated that at Facebook, “we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.”
The public has given these three tech companies (and others) enormous power to select the information we read, share, and discuss with our neighbors and friends. We’ve gotten so accustomed to the role they play in our lives that we fail to notice that Big Tech is sifting through the available information and narrowing, and prioritizing, our choices. Although Facebook, Google, and Twitter once touted themselves as bastions of democracy and free speech, they are now openly moving toward direct censorship and media manipulation – and specifically targeting conservative ideas and personalities.
They have already acquiesced to their new censorship fetish. In March 2018, Google circulated an internal memo that instructed employees on the benefits of censorship. In the memo, which was titled “The Good Censor,” Google conceded that while the internet was “founded upon utopian principles of free speech,” free speech is no longer en vogue. “Tech companies are adapting their stance towards censorship” in direct response to “the anxiety of users and governments.” The memo said that “tech firms have gradually shifted away from unmediated free speech and towards censorship and moderation” but framed that shift as a positive development. One major way that tech companies are “stepping into the role of moderator” is by “significantly amping up the number of moderators they employ — in YouTube’s case increasing the number of people on the lookout for inappropriate content to more than 10,000.” It argued that censorship was necessary partly because of users “behaving badly.”
The most alarming part of the missive, however, was that it spoke approvingly of foreign governments that were censoring online speech. Google framed the acts as “taking steps to make online spaces safer, more regulated, and more similar to their offline laws. Protected from hate speech on the street? Now you are on the net too …” Twitter has completely and publicly abandoned its brand as the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” with Dorsey claiming the whole “free speech wing” thing was one giant “joke.” His company, once seemingly devoted to the free expression of its users, now says it is prioritizing making users feel safe from others’ speech. Facebook, too, is openly rebranding itself as a benevolent censor. Here’s what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees in April 2018 (emphasis added):
Overall, I would say that we’re going through a broader philosophical shift in how we approach our responsibility as a company. For the first 10 or 12 years of the company, I viewed our responsibility as primarily building tools that, if we could put those tools in people’s hands, then that would empower people to do good things. What I think we’ve learned now across a number of issues, not just data privacy, but also fake news and foreign interference in elections, is that we need to take a more proactive role and a broader view of our responsibility. It’s not enough to just build tools. We need to make sure that they’re used for good. And that means that we need to now take a more active view in policing the ecosystem and in watching and kind of looking out and making sure that all of the members in our community are using these tools in a way that’s going to be good and healthy.
Three forces are driving Big Tech’s online censorship.
Two are external and related: market pressures and de-platforming campaigns by liberal activists and journalists.
The third pressure is internal: Silicon Valley is staggeringly one-sided politically.
Profit margins and market pressures are crucial levers that left-wing ideologues use to pull tech giants and other corporations in the direction of censorship. Companies want to avoid controversy, and, in the era of outrage mobs, that means avoiding offending the Left, which controls most of the cultural institutions in America. That’s part of the reason why massive companies are embracing left-wing politics in advertising, such as what Gillette did with its “toxic masculinity” ad. Left-wing activists amplify those pressures with smear campaigns and boycotts intended to rattle advertisers and investors, forcing the hands of tech companies. If you convince corporate marketing agencies that advertising on Facebook is risky, you can be certain that Facebook will take some form of action to shed controversy and reassure investors.
The external pressures of left-wing activists are compounded by the internal pressures of the companies’ employees, who want Big Tech to embrace censorship against nonliberal opinions as a moral and political necessity. The internal office cultures at Facebook, Google, and Twitter have always been overwhelmingly left-leaning, but the election of Donald Trump as president has made them far more radical. I told one Silicon Valley insider that I thought tech culture now resembled the left-wing, activist culture on college campuses. He replied, “They’re the exact same people.” Their political opinions are certainly monochromatic. Of the $8.1 million that tech industry workers donated to presidential candidates during the 2016 campaign, 95% of it went to Hillary Clinton. Among donations from the Silicon Valley area specifically, 99% went to Clinton.
So, maybe it’s not surprising that Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all become vehicles for left-wing activism. The companies encourage employees to bring their “authentic selves” to work. One Silicon Valley executive told me, “We want people to … bring their entire perspective and all their values to work, and in the positive sense, that means getting rid of a huge distinction between my professional life and my personal life.” For left-wing activists in Silicon Valley, their professional, personal, and political lives are all one. That’s why Twitter launched an “intersectionality” initiative for its employees and Google gives millions to left-wing causes — to signal its allegiance to the tribe.
In 2017, the nonprofit Lincoln Network conducted a survey of tech workers in Silicon Valley, including those employed at Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. The political leanings of those surveyed were more politically diverse than Silicon Valley’s overall population: 29% were liberal, 24% were libertarian, 22% were conservative, and 16% were centrist. But on one thing, they agreed: 75% of the liberals and 70% of the conservatives characterized their workplace as either “liberal” or “very liberal” and fewer than 2% of the survey-takers said their places of work were conservative.
Even some of the liberal respondents thought that left-wing intolerance had gone too far. One liberal tech worker said, “I witnessed repeated calls from managers and nonmanagers alike for people to be fired for the political views they expressed.” Another liberal employee said, “There are people who are looking for a reason to be offended, and any sort of disagreement would make them wonder if I’m a secret Trump supporter. The idea of ‘I agree with you 90%’ is not enough.” One self-identified libertarian said, “I have lost multiple talented colleagues who resigned rather than continue in the face of an increasingly extreme, narrow-minded, and regressive environment here at Google. It’s terrifying here. A real horror show. Every day could be my last.”
Eighty-nine percent of respondents who identified as “very conservative” said they didn’t feel comfortable expressing their opinions at work. “It’s a postmodern, secularist Silicon Valley viewpoint. Highly liberal. It’s motivated by changing the world masquerading as intellectualism,” said one conservative tech employee. A libertarian said “there were many groups devoted to identity politics” in his company, and every one of them was leftist. “If you’re not part of the liberal Democrat crowd, you’re an outsider. Talks are often politicized, whether overtly or not. The entire executive team leans in a certain direction, and you don’t want to be the odd one out for fear of being ostracized … Nobody who didn’t fit the company’s mold talked about their political views. The company was very homogenous in that sense.” One conservative employee said, “There is overwhelming internal support for leftist political candidates, policies, and ideas, and they are frequently expressed … There are zero to very few senior people who dare to speak up or represent an alternative (more conservative) point of view in company debates or policy decisions.”
This groupthink affects everything that Big Tech does, every decision it makes, every program it releases. As a former Google engineer noted, Google’s algorithms reflect the assumptions and biases of their creators. The discussion about tech platforms and political bias often (and understandably) centers on what is or isn’t allowed on Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, but the other half of the picture is what is and isn’t prioritized on a platform. Broadly speaking, tech companies censor users and content in two ways.
The first, which we’ll call “hard censorship,” is pretty straightforward: deleting content or suspending users.
The second method, which we’ll call “soft censorship,” involves tech companies making content harder to find.
Hard censorship is tearing down a roadside billboard; soft censorship is making the billboard difficult to see by erecting other billboards in front of it. Soft censorship by tech companies can be just as effective as hard censorship. Studies show that people rarely click past the first page of Google or YouTube results. Even fewer click past the second or third page. So, pushing a link off the first page (or two or three) of Google is nearly the same as removing it from Google results altogether. The same is true with your Facebook and Twitter feeds: Companies don’t have to delete content to make sure you don’t see it.
Since 2016, every major tech company, including Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter, has been busy retooling algorithms or news feeds or monetization standards in ways that benefit liberals and sideline conservatives. Big Tech also partners with left-wing groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center to “flag” supposedly problematic content. The group falsely labels individual conservatives as “extremists” and conservative organizations as “hate groups” and then promotes more restrictive content policies against alleged “hate speech.”
To give you some idea of the advocacy group’s standards, it once accused Ben Carson of being an “extremist” for stating his belief that marriage is between a man and a woman. Immersed in scandals of its own, the organization has been widely discredited. But it still works closely with Google engineers who design the digital tools and algorithms to police hate speech on YouTube as part of Google’s “Trusted Flaggers” program. Google kept its collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center a secret, hidden behind a confidentiality agreement, and the group only admitted the partnership after I broke the story. All of these partnerships are occurring while the advocacy group publicly keeps pressure on Facebook, Google, and Twitter, calling for them to do more to combat “hate speech” on their platforms, which invariably means giving the organization more power in its private dealings with the companies. The Southern Poverty Law Center led five other left-wing groups in forming a coalition called “Change the Terms” that aims to pressure all major technology service providers into setting speech codes governing what their clients say both on and off their platforms.
The coalition demands that each company agree to implement a specific set of policies already drafted by the activists. Among the required changes: empowering third-party organizations (such as, say, the Southern Poverty Law Center) to flag “hateful” actors. The activists’ targets aren’t limited to Facebook, Google, and Twitter (although those companies are certainly on the list) but also include credit card companies and crowdfunding sites. Once a company caves to the pressure and agrees to adopt the left-wing contract, it has essentially deputized the coalition to decide who can stay on its platform or use its services and who must leave. Once the contract is official, the activists immediately shift gears to identify the users or customers the company is now required to ban from its platform. Left-wingers’ plan for weaponizing tech platforms bears a resemblance to the “social credit score” system adopted by the Chinese government. Only instead of the government monitoring your private behavior and limiting your access to society as a result, it’s a collective of left-wing advocacy groups partnered with multinational corporations.
First Amendment rights do not protect you from private organizations’ limitations on speech. It’s a devious strategy, and it’s working. Media Matters is a left-wing political group devoted to silencing conservative viewpoints in the media. For much of its history, it focused on attacking Fox News, but in recent years, it targeted conservative voices online as well. Media Matters presented a 44-page memo to liberal donors at a January 2017 summit that bragged about its plans to work with Facebook and Google to destroy nonliberal media outlets. The memo argued that enlisting Big Tech in the left-wing campaign to eliminate conservative media is essential if liberals hope to defeat Trump in 2020. Media Matters promised to accomplish exactly that. “Key right-wing targets will see their influence diminished as a result of our work,” it promised.
Leftists don’t need to banish every conservative from social media; they only need to dominate social media the way they dominate the mainstream media. They’re OK with discussion that takes place within boundaries they set (as on MSNBC) and so long as they win the elections that matter to them (such as the White House). Since Nov. 8, 2016, they have shifted the digital landscape against conservative voices. By Nov. 3, 2020, they will have transformed (or rigged) social media in ways that will have far-reaching implications for America.
NYT: ‘Iran-Backed Militia’ Attack That Provoked Soleimani Killing Was Possible ISIS False Flag
The initial major rationale and justification the US administration offered for the drone assassination of IRGC Gen. Qassem Soleimani and commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was the Dec.27 rocket attack on K1 camp in Kirkuk, which houses coalition forces.
That attack involving surface-to-surface missile strikes killed an American contractor and reportedly wounded several US troops. Washington immediately blamed the Iran-backed Iraqi paramilitary group Khataib Hezbollah, with Mike Pompeo saying of the attack: “We will not stand for the Islamic Republic of Iran to take actions that put American men and women in jeopardy,”after he briefed President Trump. But top Iraqi military and intelligence officials are now calling this entire narrative into question.
A new lengthy New York Times investigative report cites multiple top Iraqi officials who go on record to say of their analysis of the Dec.27 Kirkuk incident: “These facts all point to the Islamic State, Iraqi officials say.”
The Pentagon says it has evidence decisively pinning it on Khataib Hezbollah, known for its closeness to Tehran; however, the paramilitary group itself has denied that it was behind the operation. US officials have from the start been scant on details and have not made public any evidence or intelligence.
This led some analysts in the days after the attack to question whether ISIS cells, still known to be active in the area, might have been behind it — given also it would be to the Sunni terrorist group’s benefit to sow a major rift between US and local Iraqi Shia forces, which is precisely what happened (Trump has recently gone so far as to threaten “very big sanctions” on Baghdad if US forces are kicked out). Alternately the White House perhaps appearedready to manufacture a justification to take out Soleimani.
Further, as detailed in the Times report, the white Kia pick-up from which the rockets were launched was found near a known ISIS execution site, in a heavily Sunni area not known to have had a Shia paramilitary presence since 2014:
But Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started the spiral of events, saying they believe it is unlikely that the militia the United States blamed for the attack, Khataib Hezbollah, carried it out.
…Iraqi officials say their doubts are based on circumstantial evidence and long experience in the area where the attack took place.
The rockets were launched from a Sunni Muslim part of Kirkuk Province notorious for attacks by the Islamic State, a Sunni terrorist group, which would have made the area hostile territory for a Shiite militia like Khataib Hezbollah.
Khataib Hezbollah has not had a presence in Kirkuk Province since 2014.
The Islamic State, however, had carried out three attacks relatively close to the base in the 10 days before the attack on K-1. Iraqi intelligence officials sent reports to the Americans in November and December warning that ISIS intended to target K-1, an Iraqi air base in Kirkuk Province that is also used by American forces.
And the abandoned Kia pickup was found was less than 1,000 feet from the site of an ISIS execution in September of five Shiite buffalo herders.
The NYT further says this single event set off “a chain of events that brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war” which President Trump confided at a private luncheon this week was “closer than you thought”.
The attack that provoked the Soleimani killing may have been an ISIS false flag. It wouldn’t be the first time unfortunately that the US has been manipulated by Sunnis Islamists to do their bidding. Also can’t rule out US intelligence itself having known. https://t.co/ryJg3dW5Nbpic.twitter.com/3QRb779ivL
Brig. General Ahmed Adnan, the Iraqi chief of intelligence for the federal police at K-1, told the NYT: “All the indications are that it was Daesh.” He said further: “I told you about the three incidents in the days just before in the area — we know Daesh’s movements.”
“We as Iraqi forces cannot even come to this area unless we have a large force because it is not secure. How could it be that someone who doesn’t know the area could come here and find that firing position and launch an attack?” he questioned.
Anonymous US officials, however, claim that evidence from within the Kia pickup points to Khataib Hezbollah, and also cited “multiple strains of intelligence” though without making it known.
Interestingly, amid a general breakdown in trust between Baghdad and Washington, a top Iraqi general has said the US side hasn’t even shared its claimed evidence that Khataib Hezbollah was behind the Kirkuk attack:
“We have requested the American side to share with us any information, any evidence, but they have not sent us any information,” Lt. Gen. Muhammad al-Bayati, the chief of staff for former Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, said in an interview.
The director general of Iraqi Intelligence and Counterterrorism, Abu Ali al-Basri, said the United States did not consult Iraq before carrying out the Dec. 29 counterattacks on Khataib Hezbollah.
“They did not ask for my analysis of what happened in Kirkuk and neither did they share any of their information,” he said. “Usually, they would do both.”
The bombshell NYT report further collects eyewitness accounts and other Iraqi official statements, all of which strongly suggests the chain of events which led to Soleimani’s Jan.3 killing, which in turn led to an Iranian ‘revenge’ attack with ballistic missiles on Ain al-Asad Air Base, wounding scores of troops (we later found out as part of an ever growing number of solders with ‘Traumatic Brain Injury’ from the blasts), was a possible ‘false flag’ event undertaken by ISIS meant to be pinned on the Islamic State’s Shia enemies backed by Iran.
As Northeastern University counter-terrorism expert Max Abrahms observes: “Let’s recap. Pompeo said Soleimani was killed because he was an imminent threat, a claim he couldn’t substantiate even in private settings.”
Abrahms said further on Twitter: “The escalation began with a Shia militia attack in which the best evidence indicates the perpetrators were actually ISIS, Soleimani’s enemy.”
The White House wanted to kill Soleimani. So, they manufactured a narrative to justify the decision. https://t.co/sMiOVA0b9H
Ultimately, the United States stood on the brink of major war with Iran which could have spiraled into a World War 3 scenario— all of which was potentially initiated by an ISIS false flag event designed to unleash more regional chaos.
There are obviously some serious linguistic issues and disagreements between the West and the rest of the world. Essential terms like “freedom”, “democracy”, “liberation”, even “terrorism”, are all mixed up and confused; they mean something absolutely different in New York, London, Berlin, and in the rest of the world.
Before we begin analyzing, let us recall that countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the United States, as well as other Western nations, have been spreading colonialist terror to basically all corners of the world.
And in the process, they developed effective terminology and propaganda, which has been justifying, even glorifying acts such as looting, torture, rape and genocides. Basically, first Europe, and later North America literally “got away with everything, including mass murder”.
The native people of Americas, Africa and Asia have been massacred, their voices silenced. Slaves were imported from Africa. Great Asian nations, such as China, what is now “India” and Indonesia, got occupied, divided and thoroughly plundered.
And all was done in the name of spreading religion, “liberating” people from themselves, as well as “civilizing them”.
To date, people of great nations with thousands of years of culture, are treated like infants; humiliated, and as if they were still in kindergarten, told how to behave, and how to think.
Sometimes if they “misbehave”, they get slapped. Periodically they get slapped so hard, that it takes them decades, even centuries, to get back to their feet. It took China decades to recover from the period of “humiliation”. India and Indonesia are presently trying to recuperate, from the colonial barbarity, and from, in the case of Indonesia, the 1965 U.S.-administered fascist coup.
But if you go back to the archives in London, Brussels or Berlin, all the monstrous acts of colonialism, are justified by lofty terms. Western powers are always “fighting for justice”; they are “enlightening” and “liberating”. No regrets, no shame and no second thoughts. They are always correct!
Like now; precisely as it is these days.
Presently, the West is trying to overthrow governments in several independent countries, on different continents. From Bolivia (the country has been already destroyed) to Venezuela, from Iraq to Iran, to China and Russia. The more successful these countries get, the better they serve their people, the more vicious the attacks from abroad are, the tougher the embargos and sanctions imposed on them are. The happier the citizens are, the more grotesque the propaganda disseminated from the West gets.
In Hong Kong, some young people, out of financial interest, or out of ignorance, keep shouting: “President Trump, Please Liberate Us!” Or similar, but equally treasonous slogans. They are waving U.S., U.K. and German flags. They beat up people who try to argue with them, including their own Police Force.
So, let us see, how the United States really “liberates” countries, in various pockets of the world.
Let us visit Iran, a country which (you’d never guess it if consuming only Western mass media) is, despite the vicious embargos and sanctions, on the verge of the “highest human development index bracket” (UNDP). How is it possible? Simple. Because Iran is a socialist country (socialism with the Iranian characteristics). It is also an internationalist nation which is fighting against Western imperialism. It helps many occupied and attacked states on our planet, including Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia (before), Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq, to name just a few.
So, what is the West doing? It is trying to ruin it, by all means; ruin all good will and progress. It is starving Iran through sanctions, it finances and encourages its “opposition”, as it does in China, Russia and Latin America. It is trying to destroy it.
Then, it just bombs their convoy in neighboring Iraq, killing its brave commander, General Soleimani. And, as if it was not horrid enough, it turns the tables around, and starts threatening Teheran with more sanctions, more attacks, and even with the destruction of its cultural sites.
Iran, under attack, confused, shot down, by mistake, a Ukrainian passenger jet. It immediately apologized, in horror, offering compensation. The U.S. straightway began digging into the wound. It started to provoke (like in Hong Kong) young people. The British ambassador, too, got involved!
As if Iran and the rest of the world should suddenly forget that during its attack on Iraq, more than 3 decades ago, Washington actually shot down an Iranian wide-body passenger plane (Iran Air flight 655, an Airbus-300), on a routine flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. In an “accident”, 290 people, among them 66 children, lost their lives. That was considered “war collateral”.
Iranian leaders then did not demand “regime change” in Washington. They were not paying for riots in New York or Chicago.
As China is not doing anything of that nature, now.
The “Liberation” of Iraq (in fact, brutal sanctions, bombing, invasion and occupation) took more than a million Iraqi lives, most of them, those of women and children. Presently, Iraq has been plundered, broken into pieces, and on its knees.
Is this the kind of “liberation” that some of the Hong Kong youngsters really want?
No? But if not, is there any other performed by the West, in modern history?
Washington is getting more and more aggressive, in all parts of the world.
It also pays more and more for collaboration.
And it is not shy to inject terrorist tactics into allied troops, organizations and non-governmental organizations. Hong Kong is no exception.
Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia, China, Venezuela, but also many other countries, should be carefully watching and analyzing each and every move made by the United States. The West is perfecting tactics on how to liquidate all opposition to its dictates.
It is not called a “war”, yet. But it is. People are dying. The lives of millions are being ruined.
Supply Chain Shock – Here’s The Most Exposed S&P500 Industries To China
We noted on Wednesday night, two-thirds of the Chinese economy has effectively shut down much of its production capacity, crippling supply chains critical to keep not only the second-largest economy in the world humming, but the entire world.
Former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman Stephen Roach warned last week that the global economy could already be in a period of vulnerability, where an exogenous shock, such as the coronavirus, could be the trigger for the next worldwide recession.
Goldman Sachs has warned that virus outbreak could reduce Chinese GDP growth in 1Q by 1.6% in year-over-year terms, or 6.4% in quarter-on-quarter annual rate terms, resulting in a sub-5% GDP 1Q print. A growth shock in China will be felt across the world as the virus has severed supply chains.
As growth expectations for China and the world come down, stocks are due for a repricing event.
S&P 500 companies generate 60.5% of their revenue from the US and the rest international.
Refinitiv data shows S&P 500 firms derive 6.2% of revenue from China and Hong Kong.
The semiconductors and semiconductor equipment industry group have about 30% of revenue exposure to China and Hong Kong, which is the most exposed industry.
A great deal of Apple’s supply chain is based in China. We noted earlier this week that much of its iPhone manufacturing plants are closed but expected to open next week. But if the plants remain closed after Monday/Tuesday, then Apple could experience iPhone shortages in the month ahead.
Dozens of companies have already announced factory shutdowns and retail shuttering in the last several weeks. The expectation is to bring everything online next week, but as per a new Nikkei report on Thursday, it seems that companies, like Honda, are already starting to postpone plant openings.
The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote Thursday that the scale of supply chain disruptions in China and aboard is absolutely “staggering.”
We noted on Tuesday that Hyundai Motor Co. and its sister Kia Motors Corp. suspended production lines in South Korea after it was hit with a parts shortage from China.
Volkswagen, Toyota, General Motors, and Tesla have all closed their Chinese plants, as has Foxconn closed all plants making iPhones in the country.
The supply chain chaos is pushing out from China now could soon be realized in Europe.
Fiat-Chrysler might be forced to halt production at one of its European plants if the virus doesn’t clear up within the next week or two. The company is already struggling to source parts from China.
Evans-Pritchard also warned that the collapse in Chinese oil consumption is “the biggest shock to oil markets since the Lehman crisis.”
Two-thirds of China’s economy was shut down overnight and has led to a collapse in energy demand, which now poses a significant threat to corporate bond markets across the world.
Coronavirus isn’t just infecting people and killing them, it’s also creating havoc and disrupting complex supply chains that will lead many companies to revise their earnings down in 1H20.
Mohamed El-Erian, the chief economic adviser to the insurance company Allianz, said the economic damage caused by coronavirus would play this year.
El-Erian said the economic shock to Wuhan and the surrounding manufacturing hubs is happening at a time when the global economy is slowing and interest rates among central banks are near zero.
As the deadline for the U.S. to renew its waiver on Iraq importing gas and electricity from Iran approaches later this month, the three key players in this ongoing geopolitical saga have been preparing for all possible outcomes. As always in the global hydrocarbons markets, particularly in the Middle East, nothing is what it seems on first sight, with each of the main countries involved looking at outcomes that go way beyond mere gas sales.
The positioning began in earnest last week with a virtue-signalling comment from the Trade Bank of Iraq’s chairman, Faisal al-Haimus, that the bank – the main vehicle through which Iraq pays for these Iranian imports – would stop processing payments if the U.S. does not renew the relevant waiver at this end of this month. This would affect the payments for the entire 1,400 megawatts (MW) of electricity and 28 million cubic metres (mcm) of gas from Iran that Iraq requires to keep its key infrastructure in power, for some of the time at least.
In this context, peak summer power demand in Iraq perennially exceeds domestic generation capabilities, made worse by its capacity to cause major civilian unrest in the country. The relatively recent widespread protests across Iraq – including in the major oil hub of Basra – were widely seen as being prompted in part by chronic electricity outages. The situation also promises to become much worse as, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), Iraq’s population is growing at a rate of over one million per year, with electricity demand set to double by 2030, reaching about 17.5 gigawatts (GW) average throughout the year.
Ahead of the waiver renewal point this month, then, Iraq has been playing both the U.S. and Iran, as part of the ongoing tightrope act in which it has been engaged since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. On the one hand, a senior oil and gas industry figure who works closely with Iran’s Petroleum Ministry exclusively told OilPrice.com last week, Iraq has repeatedly stressed to the U.S. that it cannot effectively function – including at its oil fields – without Iranian gas and electricity supplies until a realistic alternative is up and running.
This is aimed, said the source, at extracting more investment from the U.S. both directly and indirectly, including expediting deals tentatively and firmly agreed with the U.S. before the attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq occurred. The key deal remains an integral part of Iraq’s longstanding rhetoric about reducing the epic squandering of its enormous gas natural resources through flaring. This deal, involving the signing of a memorandum of understanding with a U.S. consortium led by Honeywell, would reduce Iraq’s current level of gas flaring by nearly 20%.
Specifically, Honeywell, partnering with another U.S. heavyweight, Bechtel, and Iraq’s state-owned South Gas, would build the Ratawi gas hub. This, in its first stage would process up to 300 million standard cubic feet per day (scf/d) of ‘associated gas’ (generated as a by-product of crude oil production) at five southern Iraqi oil fields: Majnoon, Gharib al-Qurna, al-lhiss, al-Tubba, and al-Siba. “Moqtada al-Sadr [the effective leader of Iraq] knows that every time there is a hint that Iraq will continue with its historically close relationship with Iran, the U.S. comes in to offer the services of its companies at beneficial terms to Iraq,” the Iran source said.
In addition to this, Iraq has two natural hedge positions against the U.S. not extending its next waiver, and leaving Iraq supposedly without Iranian gas and electricity in the very short-term before U.S. investment and deals can actually put power on the ground in Iraq.
The first of these hedges is that Iraq will just keep the money that it already owes Iran for previous supplies. According to a comment last week from Hamid Hosseini, a spokesman for the Iranian Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Association, up to US$5 billion in payments from Iraq to Iran for past gas and electricity supplies is sitting in an escrow account at the Central Bank of Iraq, but Iran cannot touch it because of the U.S. sanctions. In fact, according to the Iran source spoken to by OilPrice.com last week, the figure is US$6.1 billion, which, if the U.S. does not extend the waiver later this month, Iraq will just keep.
The second of Iraq’s hedges against the U.S. not extending the waiver on these imports from Iran at the end of this month is just to keep importing them anyway. Iraq has a very long porous border with Iran and an even longer history of using it – and shared facilities – to circumvent oil and gas sanctions, and there is no reason to assume that this will suddenly cease.
The question then naturally arises as to why Iran would agree to continue to supply Iraq with gas and other commodities if it cannot draw out money owed to it from the Iraq escrow account.
The answer is twofold:
First, Iran is working in a number of areas on essentially a barter-based business methodology, according to the Iran source. “It offers oil and gas resources to China and Russia and others which, in turn, offer Iran items it needs, such as technology items, chemicals, agricultural sector goods, and finance facilities, for example, so there are ways in which Iraq could pay Iran in currency of one sort or another,” he said.
The second option for Iran, and an idea of the assassinated Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander, Major General Qassem Soleimani, is that Iraq assigns leases and ownership to Iran through a wide range of IRGC-related entities to commercial real estate and businesses in the Shia-dominated areas of Iraq. This transfer of ownership on a limited scale has been taking place on an intermittent basis for a number of years, especially around Karbala, Najaf, and Nasiriyah, according to the source.
“It suits the Iranians well enough, as it is a way of cementing Iranian control across the Shia population of Iran, and it suits Iraq as well as it means it doesn’t have to part with any money, which is always a strain on the already strained budget, and it means that it can leave it to Iran to control the radical Shia elements in and around those regions,” he added.
Finally, the U.S. cannot lose either way. If it extends the waiver, it keeps the door open to Iran coming back to the table to renegotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal whilst also keeping Iraq on side for future U.S. energy projects and keeping it from fully defecting to the Iran-Russia-China sphere of influence. If it does not extend the waiver then a relatively large non-Shia section of Iraq will keep the government in the state of flux that it has been since the fall of Hussein, which also benefits the U.S.
This strategy was previously known as the ‘Kissinger Doctrine’ of foreign policy – analysed in depth in my new book on the global oil market – in which the U.S. attempts to keep power in balance across a broad region through individual states fighting amongst each other, usually based on exploiting factional and or tribal and/or religious differences between groups.
January Payrolls Preview: Mind The Half A Million Downward Revision
Following a blockbuster ADP private payrolls print of 291K, the highest in nearly 5 years, analysts expect the pace of official, BLS payroll growth to pick up (160k expected, up from 145K in January), though remain beneath recent trend rates; yet despite the ADP strength, which in the past has been a loud contrarian indicator, analysts offer the usual caveats: business surveys continue to point to payrolls growth, though the pace of growth cooled in the non-manufacturing survey. Weekly jobless claims data has stabilized near lows. Meanwhile, consumer confidence surveys bode well, with consumers expecting to see more jobs in the months ahead, though their view on wage gains pared very slightly.
Also of note, tomorrow’s report will be accompanied by the annual benchmark revision to the establishment survey, as well as the annual introduction of new population controls in the household survey. The BLS’s preliminary estimate of the establishment survey revision suggested a large downward adjustment of 501k to the level of March 2019 employment. This would imply a 42k slower pace of monthly job growth on average from April 2018 to March 2019 (+168k vs. +210k as currently reported). Revisions in the preliminary report were fairly evenly split between retail (-146k), professional services (-163k), and leisure (-175k), and focus on the BLS’ erroneous birth-death adjustments.
Courtesy of RanSquawk, here is what Wall Street expects:
Non-farm Payrolls: Exp. 160k, Prev. 145k.
Unemployment Rate: Exp. 3.5%, Prev. 3.5%. (FOMC currently projects 3.5% at end-2019, and 4.1% in the long run).
Avg. Earnings M/M: Exp. 0.3%, Prev. 0.1%.
Avg. Earnings Y/Y: Exp. 3.0%, Prev. 2.9%.
Avg. Work Week Hours: Exp. 34.3hrs, Prev. 34.3hrs.
Private Payrolls: Exp. 150k, Prev. 139k.
Manufacturing Payrolls: Exp. -5k, Prev. -12k.
Government Payrolls: Prev. 6.0k.
U6 Unemployment Rate: Prev. 6.7%.
Labour Force Participation: Exp. 63.1%, Prev. 63.2%.
TREND RATES:
The pace of payroll additions has eased, after the sub-trend 145k added in December. Currently, the 3-month average is 184k, running a touch beneath the 6-month pace at 189k, though both still remain above the 12-month average at 176k. Goldman estimates payrolls increased 190k in January, higher than consensus, and does not expect a significant impact
from Census employment in tomorrow’s report. Wells Fargo’s analysts argue that slower growth in the labor supply during this expansion has reduced the ‘breakeven’ number for job growth (the amount of new jobs needed to reduce the jobless rate from trend). Wells says that the weaker pace of job growth in 2019 generated little cause for concern that fundamentals in the labor market were deteriorating meaningfully. It estimates that a pace of around 85-130k monthly job additions would be required to put downward pressure on the unemployment rate, due primarily to strong labor participation trends. Trump, in his State of the Union address Tuesday, highlighted numbers such as 7 million jobs created since his election and the lowest recorded unemployment levels for African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans.
INITIAL JOBLESS CLAIMS:
Weekly data for the payroll survey period came in at 223k (four-week average was 216.25k) compared to the 235k in the December reference period (four-week average then was 225.75k), auguring well for January’s report. After the data’s release, Pantheon Macroeconomics suggested that the underlying trend in claims was not rising, and might, perhaps, be falling again. “All the slowdown in payroll growth from the 2018 peak has been due to slower gross hiring, not rising layoffs. The spike in late December, which triggered a degree of consternation among some investors, has now reversed.”
REVISIONS:
Revisions may show “the past wasn’t as rosy as we thought,” said Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at Jefferies LLC. “That’s again another reason to think that the deceleration in payroll growth is something we’re going to be living with going forward.” Yet even a big downward revision to payrolls won’t change the overall picture of labor-market tightness. The participation rate for prime-age workers, or those ages 25 to 54, is the highest in a decade according to Bloomberg. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has reiterated his desire to sustain the expansion “so that the strong job market reaches more of those left behind.” Companies complain about finding qualified workers, and job openings, though declining, still outnumber the unemployed. “You can’t change that story at all with revisions,” said Jennifer Lee, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets. “Just perhaps the pace.”
ADP PAYROLLS:
The ADP’s gauge of payrolls surprised to the upside in January, printing 291k against an expected 156k. Analysts provided the usual caveats about how, although the better-than-expected data will bolster expectations of a beat in the official NFP data on Friday, the accuracy and exact correlation of the two data sets gives reasons to be cautious. Capital Economics explains that this scepticism is doubled every January, because firms tend to purge names from the payroll at the start of the year – even though those people may not have done any paid work for that firm for several months. “That distortion occasionally used to generate very weak readings at the start of the year but, in this case, it looks like the ADP could have over-compensated with an adjustment,” CapEco says. Meanwhile, the ADP itself suggested that mild winter weather provided a significant boost to the January employment gain, and adds that underlying job growth is close to +125k monthly pace, which is consistent with low and stable unemployment.
BUSINESS SURVEYS:
The manufacturing ISM report in January noted that labour was reported to be in short supply, and panellist comments were generally positive regarding future employment potential. The manufacturing employment sub-index, however, rose to 46.6 from December’s 45.2. Meanwhile, the non-manufacturing ISM report saw the employment sub-component fall a touch to 53.1 from a revised down 54.8; the non-manufacturing gauge also noted that respondents continued to have difficulty with labour resources, and was impacting capacity and pushing up costs.
CONSUMER CONFIDENCE:
The Street expects the jobless rate to remain at 3.5%, a rate which the Fed’s January projections had penciled in for the end of 2020. In terms of wage growth, the Street looks for a pick-up to 0.3% M/M in January from a pace of 0.1% in December, while the Y/Y rate is seen rising to 3.0% in January after falling to 2.9% (from 3.1%) in December. Within the Conference Board’s consumer confidence report, the differential between jobs ‘plentiful’ and jobs ‘hard to get’ rose sharply to 37.4 in Jan (prev. 33.9 in December, and 31.6 in November), which bodes well for the jobless rate. Additionally, consumers’ outlook for the labour market was also more upbeat, with the proportion expecting more jobs in the months ahead increased from 15.5 to 17.2, while those anticipating fewer jobs declined from 13.9 to 13.4. And regarding their short-term income prospects, there was a small decline in consumers expectations, from 22.7 to 22.0 percent, while the proportion expecting a decrease was virtually unchanged at 7.7.
JOB CUTS:
January Challenger job cuts jumped to 67,735, the highest monthly total since February 2019, and rising from 32,843 in the previous report. Challenger said that technology companies led in announced job cuts last month as they pivot to new products or services. But Tech was not the only industry embarking on this kind of restructuring. Companies across all industries are re-examining their hierarchies, particularly in Automotive and Retail, where innovations in technology are changing the landscape
ARGUING FOR A STRONGER REPORT:
Jobless claims. Initial jobless claims decreased in the five weeks between the payroll reference periods, averaging 218k (vs. 226k in the December payroll month). Continuing claims declined 20k from survey week to survey week, this likely understates the improvement given the winter seasonal bias: Goldman’s model predicted a ~100k rebound in continuing claims this winter, even if underlying labor market conditions remain stable. Overall, jobless claims data remain consistent with a subdued pace of layoff activity.
Winter weather. Unseasonably dry weather in the Northeast and Ohio Valley likely boosted job growth in tomorrow’s report. While a population-weighted snowfall dataset was slightly above average over the survey week as a whole, this reflected snowstorms on Saturday that were probably too late to significantly affect the report (workers are counted as employed as long as they work at least one hour during the reference period). As shown in Exhibit 1, snowfall in the Northeast and Midwest was negligible (on average) from Monday to Friday of the survey week and was also quite modest in the prior week. Previous such instances coincided with strong or very strong January job growth (+355k in 2012, +195k in 2013, and +312k in 2019). While the impact is uncertain, a weather boost of 20k-30k in the January report is possible. <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>
Labor market slack. With the labor market somewhat beyond full employment, the dwindling availability of workers is a factor weighing on job growth this year. However, as shown in Exhibit 2, first-print January job growth tends to be strong when the labor market is tight—for example in 1989, 1997-2000, 2006, and in two of the last three years. Labor supply constraints likely led firms to implement fewer end-of-year layoffs in these instances (anticipating a shortage of applicants in the coming year). <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>
ADP. The payroll-processing firm ADP reported a 291k increase in January private employment, 134k above consensus and also 134k above the +157k average pace of the previous three months. While the inputs to the ADP model argued for a solid reading, the strength was larger than expected, consistent with a solid underlying pace of employment growth and a strong reading tomorrow.
ARGUING FOR A WEAKER REPORT:
Employer surveys. Business activity surveys were firm on net in January, and while the employment components exhibited similar patterns, with improvement in the manufacturing sector (tracker +0.9pt to 52.9) there was a slight decline in the much larger nonmanufacturing sector (tracker -0.3pt to 52.7, see composite in Exhibit 3). Service-sector job growth was +140k in December and averaged 164k over the last six months, while manufacturing payroll employment declined by 12k in December and has averaged +2k over the last six months. <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>
Job cuts. Announced layoffs reported by Challenger, Gray & Christmas increased by 15k in January to 53k (SA by GS), and were 12k above their January 2019 level. The month-over-month rise was driven by increases in announced layoffs in the technology sector (+11k) industry
“The only element in the universe more common than hydrogen is stupidity.”
– Einstein
I’m not a fortune teller. In fact, the only things anybody knows about predicting – even if you gussy the concept up by calling it “forecasting” – are 1.) Predict often and 2.) Never give both the time and the event.
The worst offenders are those who pretend they know where the economy’s headed.
Statistics – so often the basis of conjecture with regard to the economy – are so subject to interpretation, and so easy to take out of context, that most of the time they’re best used as fodder for cocktail party conversations.
Still, as potentially wrong-headed and tendentious as the subject is, “the economy” is occasionally worth talking about simply to establish a clear point of view.
In fact, I place the phrase “the economy” in quotes because I don’t even accept the validity of the concept, nor that of “the GDP”; they’re both chimeras.
The idea of GDP gives the impression that it is not individuals that produce goods and services, but rather a machine called “the economy.” This leaves the door open to all manner of nonsense, like the assertion that what may be good for individuals may not be good for the economy, and vice-versa.
For instance, an advance in the GDP doesn’t necessarily mean increased prosperity: What if the government embarked on a massive pyramid building program, an archetypical example of public works? GDP might rise, but it would add absolutely nothing to the well-being of individuals. To the contrary, the building of the pyramid would only divert capital from wealth-generating activities.
On the other hand, if a scientific breakthrough was made which cut energy consumption by 80% for the same net output, or magically eliminated all disease, the GDP would collapse because it would bankrupt the energy and health industries.
But people would be vastly better off.
Entirely apart from that, the whole idea of GDP gives the impression that there actually is such a thing as the national output.
In the real world, however, wealth is produced by someone and belongs to somebody. We’re not ants or bees working for the hive. The whole idea of a GDP just allows the “authorities” to bamboozle people into believing they can actually control “the economy,” as if it were some giant machine.
The officials pretend to be the Wizard of Oz, and Boobus americanus is trained to think they’re omniscient. Thus whenever the rate of growth slips “too low,” officials are expected to give “the economy” a suitable push. Conversely, whenever “the economy” is growing too fast, the officials are supposed to step in to “cool” it.
It’s all an embarrassing and destructive charade.
Nonetheless…
I remain of the opinion that we’re headed into the biggest economic smashup in history.
That’s an outrageous statement, and it’s always dangerous to say something like that. After all, the longest trend in motion is the Ascent of Man, and that trend is unlikely to change; indeed, it’s likely to accelerate. And it’s usually a mistake to bet against an established trend.
Furthermore, science and technology will continue advancing, people will continue working and saving, entrepreneurs will continue to create. And downturns in the economy have always been brief. There’s a good case for staying bullish.
Even most of those who talk of a recession tend to write it off as either a simple reversal of recent “irrational exuberance,” or a passing change in people’s psychology, or a temporary shock. Unfortunately, it goes much deeper than that. Those things have very little to do with what recessions are all about.
A recession, according to the conventional parlance, is a period when economic activity declines for two or more quarters. That’s a description of what happens, but it’s really not very helpful, much like saying a fever is a period during which your temperature is above 98.6 F. A better definition of a fever might be a period when the body’s temperature is elevated as a consequence of fighting an infection, in that it gives you some insight into the cause as well as the effect.
That’s why I prefer to say a recession is “a period of time when distortions and misallocations of capital caused by the business cycle are liquidated.”
What causes the business cycle? Excess creation of credit by a central bank (e.g., the Fed). The injection of artificially created money and credit into a country’s economy gives both producers and consumers false signals, causing them to do things which they otherwise would not do. The longer the upswing of a business cycle continues, the longer and more severe the down cycle will be.
A depression is just a really bad recession.
One thing that – contrary to popular opinion – can help get an economy out of a recession is a large pool of savings; savings give people the money to invest in new production, as well as the money to buy that production.
That’s why it’s the height of idiocy for pundits to talk about how patriotic it is to go out and shop. It can only deplete the capital that will be needed in the future, and deepen the bottom with more bankruptcies, stealing consumption from the future.
That’s why the Fed’s artificially low interest rates is such a bad idea; it encourages people to save less and borrow more. This engineered decline may well, after a certain lag time, cause a cyclical upturn – but it will only aggravate the underlying problem, guaranteeing yet a bigger bust.
This isn’t just an American problem, because the U.S. is truly the engine of the world’s economy. But a lot of the drive behind the engine is the gigantic trade deficit. The hundreds of billions the U.S. sent abroad in the last year alone, after over a decade of increasing deficits, has caused a lot of capital investment that will become uneconomic, and created a lot of economic activity that will come to a screeching halt when that deficit inevitably reverses.
The whole world is levered on what happens in the U.S.
The effect in economies around the world will be devastating. The Smoot Hawley tariff of 1930, which acted to collapse world trade, greatly exacerbated the last depression. It could be that economic conditions in the U.S. alone could do it this time, without the overt “assistance” of the government.
I don’t believe we’re looking at just another cyclical downturn this time. We could be – but I don’t think so.
Of course, since the dollar is by far the biggest market in the world, constituting the reserves of almost every government on the planet, the de facto currency of probably 50 countries, and the savings of hundreds of millions of people around the world, when it collapses, it will cause a financial earthquake, Magnitude 10.
Use any rallies as selling opportunities. Diversify your assets out of the U.S. Build a good position in gold. Buy gold stocks with speculative capital. Get your debt, if any, down to comfortable levels.
* * *
Unfortunately there’s little any individual can practically do to change the trajectory of this trend in motion. The best you can and should do is to stay informed so that you can protect yourself in the best way possible, and even profit from the situation. That’s exactly why New York Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent new report titled Doug Casey’s Top 7 Predictions for the Raging 2020s.
Trump Announces Leader Of Al-Qaeda In Yemen Killed By US Drone Strike
Thursday evening President Trump announced the death of al-Qaeda’s chief in Yemen by a US drone strike. The New York Times first reported last week the likely death of Qasim al-Rimi, the founder and leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in a US airstrike, which the president has now confirmed. Days ago Saudi media also began reporting his death.
“Under Rimi, AQAP committed unconscionable violence against civilians in Yemen and sought to conduct and inspire numerous attacks against the United States and our forces,” Trump said in a White House official statement. “His death further degrades AQAP and the global al-Qa’ida movement, and it brings us closer to eliminating the threats these groups pose to our national security.”
The successful counter-terror operation also reportedly killed an unspecified deputy of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. This other top al-Qaeda operative’s name was not immediately given.
The State Department had issued a $10 million reward for information leading to Rimi’s capture. Interestingly, he’s alleged to have directly threatened attack on President Trump.
On February 5, 2017, al-Rimi released an audiotape in which he threatened U.S. President Donald Trump. In a May 7, 2017 video, he urged supporters living in Western countries to conduct “easy and simple” attacks and praised Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in a June 2016 mass shooting at a nightclub in Orlando Florida.
US intelligence had also linked him to a 2008 attack on the US Embassy in Yemen, and to the 2009 “underwear bomber” plot to blow up a US-bound airliner.
The State Department’s brief bio information indicates Rimi was active in Sunni jihadist activities and leadership going back to the 1990’s:
Qasim al-Rimi was named emir of AQAP in June 2015, immediately after he swore allegiance to al-Qa’ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and called for renewed attacks against the United States. Al-Rimi trained terrorists at an al-Qa’ida camp in Afghanistan in the 1990’s, and subsequently returned to Yemen and became an AQAP military commander.
His death marks the third designated terrorist killed by the US in recent months, following IRGC Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani and more significantly ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
According to CNN, Rimi had long been at the top of Trump’s list of desired kills or captures: “Rimi was a target of a January 2017 raid on an al Qaeda compound in Yemen that led to the first US military combat death under the President, a senior US military official told CNN at the time.”
Recently the prominent investment bank Goldman Sachs announced that they would no longer work with companies whose Boards of Directors consisted exclusively of white males.
Specifically the bank will immediately require prospective clients to have at least one female or one non-white individual, on the Board of Directors. And by 2021, a company would need at least two ‘diverse’ directors, otherwise Goldman Sachs will refuse to underwrite that company’s Initial Public Offering.
(Obviously this doesn’t apply to Chinese or Middle Eastern companies; Goldman Sachs is happy to continue selling its soul to non-diverse companies in those parts of the world.)
But Goldman is just the latest bank to make this announcement.
BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors, two of the largest asset managers in the world, also recently stated that they would vote against directors at the companies in which they are shareholders, unless those Boards have at least one female member.
Everything about this is remarkably stupid.
In the case of BlackRock and State Street, there are literally ZERO companies in the S&P 500 anymore that have all-male boards. None. And a recent Harvard study showed that 80% of large-cap companies have at least two female directors, if not more.
So their supposedly bold proclamation is completely pointless, except to demonstrate their ‘wokeness’ to Millennials.
More importantly, though, it highlights a major revolution in capitalism itself.
Business and capitalism should be the ultimate meritocracy. Talent rises to the top. Mediocrity stagnates. And poor performance washes out.
But talent has no gender. It has no ethnicity. It has no sexual orientation.
Talent is measured by how well you can accomplish the mission and lead an organization to greater achievements.
This is what’s supposed to matter. And the shareholders (i.e. the OWNERS) of a business are supposed to elect their representatives to the Board of Directors based on this critical factor.
It shouldn’t matter if the entire board is white males, trans women of color, benevolent space aliens, or people who identify as seedless watermelons. Those shouldn’t even be factors.
I serve on a number of boards– including large companies that I’ve started, non-profits, and one company that’s traded on a major stock exchange.
Some of the best directors I’ve ever served with are women. And good thing, because I picked them myself.
But I didn’t pick them because they’re women. That would be a horrible insult to them. I picked them because they’re seriously freaking talented… which is the only reason that matters.
The common refrain among social justice warriors is that ‘diverse boards make better decisions because they come from different backgrounds, and the companies are better off for it.’
This is such a dumb thing to say. It presupposes that all white males are robotic automatons who think in exactly the same way. What a bunch of bullshit.
Moreover, Stanford University published an analysis last year of 11 different academic studies concluding that “evidence on board diversity and corporate outcomes is highly mixed.”
In other words, there is no conclusive evidence that diverse boards create better companies.
But these social justice warriors, and the companies like Goldman, State Street, and Black Rock that bow to the pressure, are happy to ignore facts and data.
And even if it were true that diversity somehow makes better Boards, why stop at gender and race?
If you believe that it’s better to have people with different perspectives, then why not demand that every board also include someone who is physically disabled? Or someone who served in a combat zone? Or someone of a smaller religion or political affiliation?
I imagine that a blind gay vegan veteran Wiccan probably has a unique perspective. So why not demand one of those on every Board?
Because that would be ridiculous, right? Of course. But that’s what this entire movement is– ridiculous.
Capitalism is responsible for the greatest and widest level of prosperity in the history of the world. Without the free market we would still be Medieval serfs. Capitalism is not perfect, but it works. And it has a hell of a track record.
But these whacktivists are trying to replace the critical fundamentals of capitalism which drive prosperity (like talent) with a ridiculous value system that has no factual basis whatsoever.
Coronavirus Triggers “Biggest Shock” To Oil Markets Since Lehman Crisis
Update: The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard warned that the collapse in Chinese oil consumption is “the biggest shock to oil markets since the Lehman crisis.”
Evans-Pritchard said the plunge in consumption could be between three to four million barrels per day, adding that this amount is twice UK’s North Sea oil output.
We noted earlier (see below), OPEC+ couldn’t come to an agreement on Thursday about future production cuts ahead of the big meeting next month.
“It’s now clear that coronavirus is a serious event risk to the entire world and that financial conditions are tightening very quickly,” said Edward Harrison from Credit Writedowns.
Harrison said financial contagion has spread from commodity prices, as we pointed out Sunday, the start of the bear market for crude, and stretched into US junk bonds. “High yield is where the rubber hits the road,” he said.
Evans-Pritchard said two-thirds of China’s economy is offline, which is the main reason for the consumption plunge, as the country shuts down industrial hubs to contain the virus outbreak.
Corporate bonds are one financial crisis away from wreaking havoc on the global financial system. The ratio of junk bonds with debt-to-earnings ratios above six has approached 30%, above levels right before the 2008 financial crash.
Investment-grade securities rated BBB or lower have increased by at least fivefold from the depths of the last recession. It will only take one accident to trigger a cascade of downgrades pushing hundreds of billions of investment-grade bonds into junk, setting off a fire-sale that would make the 2008 financial crisis look like child’s play.
Plunging commodities, such as crude and copper, are suggesting that China’s economy has created a global shock that has first severed complex chains and could tilt the world into recession.
* * *
Oil futures remain in a bear market following the collapse in oil demand from China amid two-thirds of its economy shutdown following the coronavirus outbreak.
Crude rallied Wednesday on inventory builds, mostly on the hope that the OPEC+ meeting would lead to cuts. However, any gains that were seen are being quickly erased as of Thursday morning.
This forced the OPEC+ technical committee to meet in Vienna, Austria, for a third day this week, to discuss the importance of slashing oil output by at least 500,000 barrels per day (bpd), reported Reuters.
The Joint Technical Committee (JTC) is an advising body of OPEC and Russia, known as OPEC+.
As of Thursday, there’s no firm decision by the technical committee to cut oil production. This is because Russia has opposed to cuts and said it would be willing to agree on an extension of current cuts.
Ransquawk reports that the meeting has officially ended without a planned resolution of production cuts.
The technical committee meeting comes ahead of a planned OPEC+ conference on March 5-6.
OPEC+ has already agreed in December to remove 1.7 million bpd from markets in response to a slowing global economy. Now the deadly virus outbreak has created a “shock” in the global economy as China’s economy grinds to a halt. The country is the largest importer of crude in the world, suggesting that demand has collapsed, and oil prices will plunge deeper if supply isn’t curbed.
Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said on Tuesday that he wasn’t sure if it was time to tighten output further.
BP CFO Brian Gilvary warned Tuesday that the virus outbreak has reduced 2020 global demand growth by 300,000-500,000 bpd, or about 0.5%.
Energy to industrial metal futures contracts have plunged in the last several weeks, as commodity traders sell first and ask questions later.
“The magnitude of the demand shock that we’re seeing is on par with 2008 to 2009” financial crisis, Jeffrey Currie, global head of commodities at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., said in a Bloomberg television interview. During that slump, prices fell from above $140 a barrel down into the $30s.
Commodity supply chains in China and across the world have already been disrupted. China told Chile on Wednesday to defer cargoes of copper. Crude oil and liquefied natural gas to China slumped this week to near zero.
The virus outbreak in China has led to the creeping economic paralysis that risks a hard landing. Industrial activity has collapsed, and the proposed opening of factories early next week is being pushed out even further. This would certainly create supply chain shocks that will be felt around the world.
The Iowa caucus scandal has continued to get more egregious by the hour, with new revelations routinely pouring in about extremely suspicious manipulations taking place which all just so happen to disadvantage the campaign of Bernie Sanders in the first Democratic electoral contest of 2020. By the time you read this article, there will likely have been more.
Uhhhhhhhh the IDP is now reporting vote totals from Black Hawk County that are at odds with what Black Hawk County themselves have reported pic.twitter.com/nbLa6mSuvO
It’s probable that this only happened as a result of one Black Hawk County supervisor taking to social media to report the vote tallies for this one particular county. What about all the Iowa locations where this did not happen and local Democratic Party officials didn’t report their numbers on social media? Does anyone actually believe that the one instance where the IDP got caught is the one instance in which such vote tampering occurred?
That would be a very silly belief to hold, in my opinion. It would be like a store clerk discovering that a can of beans is completely rotten, then going ahead and putting the rest of the pallet on the shelf under the assumption that the other cans are fine.
Another of the countless revelations hemorrhaging from this fustercluck is a report from CNN and The New York Post that the DNC, not the IDP, is “running the show” in managing the Iowa caucus scandal. This means that this Democratic presidential primary scandal is being managed by the same committee which orchestrated the last Democratic presidential primary scandal, and that the campaign being victimized by this scandal, that of Bernie Sanders, is the same in both cases.
This would be the same DNC whose chairperson, Tom Perez, recently stacked its nominating committee with dozens of odious alt-centrist establishment insiders who are ideologically opposed to Sanders in every meaningful way.
“Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez has nominated dozens of lobbyists, corporate consultants, think tank board members, and former officials linked to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton to serve on the Democratic National Convention (DNC) nominating committee this July,” Kevin Gosztola reported for Grayzone last month. “Many of Perez’s nominees are vocal opponents of Senator Bernie Sanders and spoke out against his campaign when he challenged Hillary Clinton for the nomination in 2016.”
THERE YOU HAVE IT….@cnn just reported the @DNC is “running the show” on the release and handling of the #IowaCaucus results.
It now makes perfect sense why results have been released this way…which just so happened to make @PeteButtigieg look like the winner for 2 days https://t.co/wbU3MoGQbu
As these scandalous revelations continue to emerge I don’t see anyone online expressing surprise that the Democratic establishment is once again stacking the deck against Sanders, but I do see some people expressing surprise that they are being so brazen about it. Which is perfectly understandable; if this party wants to screw over progressive voters, you’d expect that they’d at least try to hide it a little bit so they don’t alienate their progressive base before November.
The flaw in this expectation is its premise that Democratic Party elites care if their party wins in November. They do not.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of the leading movers and shakers within the Democratic Party for a minute. Pretend you’re getting a nice paycheck, pretend you’re getting great healthcare benefits, pretend you get plenty of prestige and exclusive access and invitations to classy parties. And pretend you’re the type of person who’s willing to manipulate and deceive and kiss up and kick down and do whatever it takes to get to the top of such a structure.
Now ask yourself, if you were such a person in such a situation, would you care if voters pick Donald Trump or Pete Buttigeig in November? Would it affect your cushy lifestyle in any way whatsoever? Would you lose your job, your prestige or your influence? No party elites lost those things in 2016. Why would you expect this time to be any different?
But you might be at risk of losing your cushy lifestyle if a forcefully anti-elitist progressive movement gets off the ground and takes control of your party. So you’d stand everything to gain by doing everything you can to prevent that from happening, and, because you don’t care if Trump gets re-elected, you’d stand absolutely nothing to lose.
These people do not care if Trump gets re-elected, because they lose nothing if he does. The only people who stand anything to lose are the ordinary citizens who are suffering under a corrupt status quo of soul-crushing neoliberalism and increasing authoritarianism, many of whom currently support Sanders. Democratic Party elites are perfectly happy to keep shrieking about Russia for another four years while making sure that the status quo which rewards their manipulative behavior remains intact, and ensuring that they never wind up like those poor suckers out there who are suffering from poverty and lack of healthcare.
And everything I just said is equally true of the media class who are currently working in conjunction with the DNC’s shenanigans to spin Pete Buttigeig as the clear winner of the party’s first presidential electoral contest. They enjoy all the same perks, and move in many of the same circles, as Democratic Party elites, and it’s all conditioned on their protection of the status quo.
I keep seeing the word “incompetence” thrown around. “Gosh these Democratic Party leaders are so incompetent!”, they say. “How can anyone be so bad at their job?”
Well, they are not bad at their job. They are very, very good at their job. It’s just that their job isn’t what most people assume it is.
Their job is not to win elections and garner public support, their job is to ensure the perpetuation of the status quo which rewards them so handsomely for their malignant behavior. Toward this end they are not incompetent at all. They know exactly what they’re doing, and they’re doing it well.
They are extremely competent. Depraved, certainly. Sociopathic, possibly. But not incompetent.
They’re happy to make their nefariousness look like incompetence though, whenever they can get away with it. Any manipulator worth their salt always will be. If they can make their planned, deliberate acts of sabotage look like innocent little oopsies, they’ll gladly do so. But you learn in life that whenever you see someone making a lot of “mistakes” which just so happen to benefit them every time, you’re dealing with manipulation, not incompetence.
What do the bad guys say in the movies when they order someone’s murder? They say “Make it look like an accident.” If it’s an accident you’ve got no trouble. You won’t be seen for what you are.
But of course it’s no accident, and anyone with clear eyes and good intentions sees this. If you see someone working hard to make you believe that it’s incompetence, you are dealing with someone who is invested in maintaining the status quo in some way. You are being manipulated.
The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly the way it’s intended to work. It ain’t a bug, it’s a feature. And that feature will remain in operation until the entire sick system is torn down and replaced with something healthy.
FBI Director Christopher Wray on Thursday said that Chinese technology theft is rampant, and that “no country poses a greater threat than Communist China” right now, according to Reuters.
“As I stand here talking with you today, the FBI has about 1,000 investigations involving China’s attempted theft of U.S.-based technology in all 56 of our field offices and spanning just about every industry sector,” Wray told conference attendees at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Wray noted China’s aggressive push to exploit US academic openness to use “campus proxies” for the theft of technology, as well as establishing “institutes on our campuses.”
Attorney General William Barr also spoke at the conference, saying that China is now America’s “top geopolitical adversary,” pointing to Beijing’s emerging dominance in next-generation 5g telecommunications technology.
“China has stolen a march and is now leading in 5G,” said Barr, adding “They have already captured 40 percent of the market and are now aggressively pursuing the balance.”
The FBI data shows an aggressively stepped-up campaign by U.S. authorities to root out Chinese espionage operations pursuing American secrets. This has snared a growing group of Chinese government officials, business people, and academics.
In 2019 alone, public records show U.S. authorities arrested and expelled two Chinese diplomats who allegedly drove onto a military base in Virginia. They also caught and jailed former CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency officials on espionage charges linked to China.
China’s efforts to steal unclassified American technology, ranging from military secrets to medical research, have long been thought to be extensive and aggressive. But U.S. officials launched a broad effort to stop alleged Chinese espionage in the United States only in 2018. –Reuters
China rejects the accusations, with their Washington embassy calling them “entirely baseless.”
“The people-to-people exchange between China and the US is conducive to stronger understanding between the two peoples and serves the fundamental interests of our two countries,” it told Reuters in an emailed statement.
That said, CSIS has noted 137 publicly-reported cases of Chinese-linked espionage against the USA since 2000, of which 73% took place in the last decade. The data shows that military and commercial technologies are the most common targets of theft.
Another heavily targeted industry is medical research.
In the area of medical research, of 180 investigations of misuse of National Institutes of Health funds, diversion of research intellectual property and inappropriate sharing of confidential information, more than 90% of the cases have links to China, according to an NIH spokeswoman. –Reuters
According to CSIS expert James Lewis, “China depends on Western technology and as licit avenues are closed, they turn to espionage to get access.”
Reuters notes that in January alone, “federal prosecutors in Boston announced three criminal cases involving industrial spying or stealing, including charges against a Harvard department chair.”
Prosecutors said Harvard’s Charles Lieber lied to the Pentagon and the NIH about his involvement in the Thousand Talents Plan: a Chinese government program that offers mainly Chinese scientists working overseas lavish financial incentives to bring their expertise and knowledge back to China. They said he also lied about his affiliation with China’s Wuhan University of Technology.
During at least part of the time he had ties to the Chinese university, Lieber was also a “principal investigator” working on at least six research projects funded by U.S. Defense Department agencies, court documents show.
Given the WHO’s praise of China and condemnation of other countries I thought it might be interesting to take a look historically at the WHO.
WHO Controversies
West Nile Experiments: A field experiment in the West Nile district allowed researchers to take blood from children 3 times a day, in order to allegedly study an local disease causing mononucleosis. It has been alleged they were actually being infected with contaminated polio vaccines and their antibodies were being studied. Around 45,000 were tested from 1960-1973.
Ebola and HIV Experimentation: It has been alleged that the WHO was aware of a Dr. Hilary Koprowski, a doctor allegedly performing research on AIDS and Ebola by deceiving and infecting Africans with a faux polio vaccine. It was estimated that over a million Africans were infected from 1954-1957. However, his work having been the cause of any disease has been refuted.
2013–2016 Ebola outbreak: Following the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the organization was heavily criticized for its bureaucracy, insufficient financing, regional structure, and staffing profile.
International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) controversies: The World Health Organization sub-department, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), has been criticized for the way it analyses the tendency of certain substances and activities to cause cancer and for having a politically motivated bias when it selects studies for its analysis. Ed Yong, a British science journalist, has criticized the agency and its “confusing” category system for misleading the public. Marcel Kuntz, a French director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, criticized the agency for its classification of potentially carcinogenic substances. He claimed that this classification did not take into account the extent of exposure: for example, red meat is qualified as probably carcinogenic, but the quantity of consumed red meat at which it could become dangerous is not specified.[147]
IARC Cell Phones: Controversies have erupted multiple times when the IARC has classified many things as Class 2a (probable carcinogens) or 2b (possible carcinogen), including cell phone signals, glyphosate, drinking hot beverages, and working as a barber.
Robert Mugabe’s role as a goodwill ambassador: On 21 October 2017, the Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus appointed former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe as a WHO Goodwill Ambassador to help promote the fight against non-communicable diseases. The appointment address praised Mugabe for his commitment to public health in Zimbabwe. The appointment attracted widespread condemnation and criticism in WHO member states and international organizations due to Robert Mugabe’s poor record on human rights and presiding over a decline in Zimbabwe’s public health. Due to the outcry, the following day the appointment was revoked.
I compiled the above list from Wikipedia. There were more, but those looked like the most serious charges.
Moreover, the WHO has praised China’s strong quarantine approach and allegedly honest reporting while condemning the US and other countries for banning flights.
The WHO is a SPOS. The first “S” stands for sorry. You can work out the rest.
Futures, Yuan Tumble After Japan Finds Another 42 Virus Cases On Quarantine Cruise Ship
Just when you thought it was safe to buy the f**king record high melt-up, TBS News reports that Japanese authorities have found another 42 people on the Diamond Princess cruise ship anchored in Yokohama have tested positive for Coronavirus.
Japan says 273 people on the cruise ship were tested and 61 were found positive, and the 41 new patients have been sent to hospitals in 5 separate prefectures.
Dow futures are down around 100 points on the headline…
Here It Is: One Bank Finally Explains How The Fed’s Balance Sheet Expansion Pushes Stocks Higher
One month ago, in a bizarre attempt to mock “QE Conspiracists” such as his current colleague and former Goldman co-worker Robert Kaplan, Trump’s chief economist Larry Kudlow and Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman – Minneapolis Fed president and 2020 FOMC voter Neel Kashkari, also known as “Chump” for his role in arranging a bailout of his former employer Goldman Sachs alongside all US commercial banks and sticking the US taxpayers with the bill, asked “someone” to explain to him “how swapping one short term risk free instrument (reserves) for another short term risk free instrument (t-bills) leads to equity repricing.”
QE conspiracists can say this is all about balance sheet growth. Someone explain how swapping one short term risk free instrument (reserves) for another short term risk free instrument (t-bills) leads to equity repricing. I don’t see it. /end
To help the confused Kashkari, we did just that using examples from none other than his own regulator, the Bank of International Settlements, although he appears not to have understood anything we said, because just a few days later, his former Fed and Goldman colleague, Bill Dudley, echoed Kashkari and confirmed he has no clue how monetary policy actually operates, when he wrote that the Fed’s balance sheet expansion has no effect on the stock market (we wonder if a prerequisite for working at Goldman Sachs is the complete inability to grasp how financial and monetary plumbing actually operates).
In any case, just because a couple of Fed hacks and their assorted croneys fail to grasp how monetary policy works, or are unable to comprehend what we wrote in “The Fed Was Suddenly Facing Multiple LTCMs”: BIS Offers A Stunning Explanation Of What Really Happened On Repocalypse Day“, doesn’t mean that all financial professionals are in the same boat. And sure enough, overnight SMBC Nikko’s Masao Muraki, formerly one of Deutsche Bank’s most respected strategists, has written the definitive report paraphrasing everything we have said over the past ten years on this topic in easy to comprehend – even for career economists, twitter “finance professionals” and, yes, central bankers – report, titled “Fed & Investment Bank Balance Sheet Expansion: Lifeline for Leveraged Funds” in which Muraki writes “we have no doubt there exists a mechanism by which the impact of Fed money market liquidity supply operations is transmitted to long-term rates and risk premia. First, the Fed’s balance sheet expansion likely helped reassure equity and credit market investors, indirectly impacting prices in those markets. Second, without the Fed’s liquidity injection, there was a risk Japanese financial institutions and leveraged funds, which undertake massive dollar fundraising in money markets, could have sold off long-term bonds and credit product holdings.”
Since have written on this topic over and over and over, and frankly are now tired of addressing an audience that is either mentally handicapped, or its paycheck depends on simply being unable to grasp what is actually going on, we will pull the main highlights from Muraki’s report which we urge anyone who has an even passing interest in how the Fed really manipulates markets, to read.
Today’s content is about the mechanism the markets haven’t quite recognized yet. I have been monitoring entities that undertake massive dollar fundraising through repos and derivatives in money markets and invest in long-term bonds and risk assets, such as leveraged funds and banks and lifers.
Excessive risk-taking activities of those players could have possibly been one of the causes of the interest rate spike in money markets. This suggests once the Fed decreases the liquidity injection, their leverage level would no longer be maintained and therefore they could sell off long-term bonds and risk asset holdings
We have no doubt there exists a mechanism by which the impact of Fed money market liquidity supply operations is transmitted to long-term rates and risk premia. First, the Fed’s balance sheet expansion likely helped reassure equity and credit market investors, indirectly impacting prices in those markets. Second, without the Fed’s liquidity injection, there was a risk that leveraged funds and Japanese financial institutions, which undertake massive dollar fundraising in money markets, could have sold off long-term bonds and credit product holdings.
Key indicators for gauging Fed balance sheet policy
The Fed likely faces a difficult choice when weighing the costs and benefits of liquidity supply operations (and the associated balance sheet expansion). We will monitor the following three factors, which we think the Fed looks to in determining policy. The outlook for liquidity (especially non-reserve liability; Figure 6)…
Apart from seasonality (timing of tax payments, etc), we think the surge in repo rates reflected the following structural changes.
1) Decrease in liquidity owing to monetary policy (Fed balance sheet tapering), 2) decrease in liquidity owing to financial regulations like liquidity regulations (LCR), liquidity stress tests (CLAR), recovery & resolution plans (RRP), and money market fund (MMF) reforms, 3) increased demand for liquidity owing to the stepped-up hunt for yield.
Risk-taking by leveraged funds and Japanese financial institutions
Regarding point 3 above, amid the climate of falling interest rates and credit spreads, the hunt for yield has spurred activity in the “carry trade” (Note 2), ie investing short-term money in long-term bonds in order to make money on long-short interest rate differentials (incl non-liquidity premium/term spread). The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has highlighted the role of leveraged funds in that regard (comments in Figure 2).
In our view, massive dollar fundraising in money markets by A) US-based leveraged funds and B) Japanese financial institutions has heightened demand for short-term money.
A) US-based leveraged funds take on high amounts of leverage by repeating the following: use equity sales proceeds to buy long-term bonds and use them as collateral to raise money in repo markets to fund purchases of other long-term bonds, which are re-collateralized for more long-term bond purchases, and so on (Figure 19).
B) Japanese financial institutions, specifically life insurers and non-GSIB banks, have few stable sources of dollar funding. For these entities to invest in dollar-denominated bonds, they often first raise dollars in swap/forward/repo markets (forex hedged; mostly 3-month maturities). This money is then invested in 5-10y bonds (Treasuries, munis, mortgage bonds, corporate bonds, etc).
Note 2: In general, liquidity is high for short-duration funding and low for longer-duration investments like long-term bonds (liquidity and maturity transformation).
Risk of “negative carry” and asset selloffs
Leverage is being used to amplify yields, and so is trending higher (Figure 13).
The above described trades are subject to uncertainty (risk) in that future liability funding costs are unknown. There is risk of “negative carry” when rolling over liabilities, ie funding costs exceed yield (returns) on assets. If the kind of repo market volatility seen in Sep 2019 and rising costs continue, there is a real risk some investors could be forced to sell off long-term bond holdings.
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REITs with 10% yields: Ultra-leveraged vehicles
Spread: 1% x leverage 10x
Figures 16 and 17 show total assets and leverage (total assets / capital) for Annaly Capital and AGNC, listed agency mortgage REITs (Note 3) that are typical examples of leverage funds. Both have extremely high dividend yields at around 10% and are popular funds with individual investors. Spreads (ROA) are around 1%, but leverage is roughly 10x equity procured from the market, which has boosted dividend yield on equity to approx 10% (Figure 19).
Around 90% of liabilities are from short-term (within 6 months) repo funding (70-80% within 3 months). 80-90% of assets consist of 30-year MBS (residential mortgage-backed securities). They have worked to control interest risks (asset & liabilities duration mismatch risk) mainly using swaps, but mismatch risk tends to rise rapidly when MBS convexity risk prompts sharp interest rate fluctuations.
Leverage absorbs major dollar liquidity
These REITs operated at leverage of around 9x through 2012 but incurred damage to capital after an interest rate jump from the “Bernanke shock” caused a fall in asset holdings in 2013. Providers of repo funding became cautious about extending credit to these REITs, which subsequently operated at a leverage of around 7x for some time.
From 2H 2018, however, these REITs rapidly hiked leverage (Figure 17), and we think they and other types of leveraged funds absorbed a large amount of dollar funding in money markets, reflecting surging repo rates on 17 Sep 2019.
Note 3: Agency mortgage REITs are a type of mortgage REIT (mREIT) that invests in mortgage securities and are called this since they invest mainly in agency MBS. In recent years, they have expanded their investments to credit products (mainly BB rating or below), including RMBS, CMBS, and leveraged loans (total assets: from several % to approx 10%). Being classified as REITs, over 90% of agency mortgage REIT profits are distributed but are also tax exempt.
Minutes from 10-11 Dec 2019 FOMC, released on 3 Jan 2020: “A few participants raised the concern that keeping interest rates low over a long period might encourage excessive risk-taking, which could exacerbate imbalances in the financial sector. These participants offered various perspectives on the relationship between financial stability and policies that keep interest rates persistently low. They remarked that such policies could be inconsistent with sustaining maximum employment, could make the next recession more severe than otherwise, or could strengthen the case for the active use of macroprudential tools to guard against emerging imbalances.”
15 Jan 2020, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Robert Kaplan: “Many market participants believe that growth in the Fed balance sheet is supportive of higher valuations and risk assets.” “The Fed balance sheet is not free and growing the balance sheet has costs.” “All three of those actions are contributing to elevated risk-asset valuations,” “And I think we ought to be sensitive to that.” “It’s a derivative of QE when we buy bills and we inject more liquidity; it affects risk assets. This is why I say growth in the balance sheet is not free. There is a cost to it.” “I think we’ve done what we need to do up until now. But I think it’s very important that we come up with a plan and communicate a plan for winding this down and tempering balance sheet growth.” “It would be healthy to get to a point where, certainly, we don’t need to do these daily and term [repo] operations. But I also want to do that in a way that has a structure and mechanisms in place that will again temper, limit, restrain the growth in the balance sheet overall.”
8 Dec 2019, BIS “September stress in dollar repo markets: passing or structural?” “Yet none of these temporary factors can fully explain the exceptional jump in repo rates.” “The four largest US banks specifically turned into key players: their net lending position (reverse repo assets minus repo liabilities) increased quickly, reaching about $300 billion at end-June 2019.” ”The big four banks appear to have turned into the marginal lender, possibly as other banks do not have the scale and non-bank cash suppliers such as money market funds (MMFs) hit exposure limits. “At the same time, increased demand for funding from leveraged financial institutions (eg hedge funds) via Treasury repos appears to have compounded the strains of the temporary factors.” “Shifts in repo borrowing and lending by non-bank participants may have also played a role in the repo rate spike. Market commentary suggests that, in preceding quarters, leveraged players (eg hedge funds) were increasing their demand for Treasury repos to fund arbitrage trades between cash bonds and derivatives. Since 2017, MMFs have been lending to a broader range of repo counterparties, including hedge funds, potentially obtaining higher returns. These transactions are cleared by the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC), with a dealer sponsor (usually a bank or broker-dealer) taking on the credit risk. The resulting remarkable rise in FICC-cleared repos indirectly connected these players. During September, however, quantities dropped and rates rose, suggesting a reluctance, also on the part of MMFs, to lend into these markets. Market intelligence suggests MMFs were concerned by potential large redemptions given strong prior inflows. Counterparty exposure limits may have contributed to the drop in quantities, as these repos now account for almost 20% of the total provided by MMFs. ”
“Some asset managers use derivatives to manage their risk or replicate a portfolio. For instance, ETFs may use derivatives to help their return track a particular target. Funds which invest in fixed income securities may naturally have use for IRD products. Such funds have also been expanding in terms of AUM, with an increasing share of them in the form of ETFs. Gross derivatives positions for asset managers and leveraged funds are increasing faster than those of dealers. They were 37% larger from April 2016 to April 2019 for three-month eurodollar contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, as compared with 18% for dealers.”
Sources: FRB, BIS, Teleconferences, Company materials, SMBC NIKKO
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If after all this Neel Kashkari and his band of fintwit halfwits still needs “QE Conspiracists” to explain to him “how swapping one short term risk free instrument (reserves) for another short term risk free instrument (t-bills) leads to equity repricing” it’s clear that the inventor of TARP is either an idiot, along with everyone else who claims the Fed’s massive balance sheet expansion has no impact on stock prices, or simply has no interest in actually understanding the process he has helped create.
Nightmare At Sea – Japan Discovers 42 Additional Coronavirus Cases On Quarentined Cruise Ship
Update (1945ET): In somewhat shocking news as Japanese markets open, TBS News reports 42 additional cases of coronavirus have been discovered on the Diamond Princess cruise ship which is anchored in Yokohama, Japan.
Japan says 273 people on the cruise ship were tested and 61 were found positive, and the 41 new patients have been sent to hospitals in 5 separate prefectures.
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Update (1600ET): Japan has reportedly forced a second cruise ship to submit all of its passengers and crew to testing for the coronavirus after several dozen crew members exhibited symptom.
Japanese PM Shinzo Abe said no foreigners on board the MS Westerdam, run by Holland America Liner, would be allowed to disembark in Japan. The ship is capable of carrying 3,000, but it’s unclear how many are on board. Passengers on the Westerdam say the ship has already been refused entry to the Philippines and Taiwan over the virus fears.
Stephen Hansen, one tourist onboard the ship, has express concerns that the ship could be quarantined for two weeks.
In its most recent update, the cruise operator said passengers would now be disembarking in Yokohama rather than in Shanghai as originally planned/ But Japan appears to have wrecked those plans today by announcing that it wouldn’t allow any passengers to enter the country.
Holland America has been “closely monitoring” the “coronavirus situation” as more travel and leisure-related companies are being impacted by the drop in travel and leisure spending.
“Our medical experts are coordinating closely with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to implement recommended screening, prevention and control measures for our ships,” said an earlier statement. Guests visiting our onboard medical centers for respiratory illness will be evaluated for coronavirus. Robust environmental disinfection onboard will be performed in addition to our regular stringent cleaning and sanitation protocols.”
A total of four cruise ships have now been held up because of sick passengers.
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Thousands of people are trapped on two cruise ships where coronavirus is quickly spreading. Already, tests are coming back positive, with more expected in the coming days.
More than 7,300 people have been quarantined on two cruise liners, one off Japan and another off Hong Kong, for fears that the deadly virus has infected passengers and crew.
20 coronavirus infections have been confirmed on a cruise ship in Japan as thousands remain under quarantine on the vessel. pic.twitter.com/gHAKwlF5OE
A total of 3,700 passengers and workers are quarantined on Princess cruise ship, owned by Carnival Corporation & plc., which is moored off Yokohama, Japan.
Twenty passengers have already tested positive for coronavirus, with more expected to test positive in the coming days.
Infected passengers include three Americans, two Australians, seven Japanese, one from Taiwan, two Canadians, one New Zealander, and three Hong Kong citizens. One Filipino crew member is also sick, Carnival said in a statement.
Japan’s Health Ministry said a total of 20 had been infected with the deadly virus on the vessel. It said the rest of the passengers would remain in quarantine for two weeks.
The second ship is the World Dream, a cruise ship operated by Dream Cruises, currently moored in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor as a precautionary measure. All 4,000 passengers are undergoing testing after three former passengers tested positive for coronavirus.
Cruise ship under quarantine in #HongKong, tests for #coronavirus conducted as 30 crew members have fever
Edith Poon, a spokesperson for Genting Hong Kong Limited, the holding company that owns Dream Cruises, confirmed that 30 crew members had symptoms of the virus.
“We are currently waiting for the results to come in,” Poon told USA TODAY. “Upon availability of the results, we shall comply with the Department of Health’s instruction on the next step forward. Until then, as advised by the Department of Health, all passengers of the cruise ship are to remain on board.”
Last week, there was a false alarm aboard the Costa Smeralda, when a female Chinese passenger displayed symptoms of the deadly virus. The ship was in quarantine off the coast of Italy, while health officials conducted tests. It was later discovered she had the “common flu,” and the ship was allowed to embark on the rest of its journey.
Virus Cases Explode On Quarantined Cruise Ship In Japan As China Claims Slowdown In Number Of New Cases
Summary:
Total cases stand at 31,439 as death toll climbs to 639
China claims the growth in people under medical observation has peaked, and is now slowing.
Japan reports 41 additional cases, for a total of 61 aboard the quarantined cruise ship
Senior CCP official orders Wuhan to round up infected residents for mass quarantine camps
Beijing completes second coronavirus hospital in Wuhan
Wuhan hospital confirms that doctor who was one of first to warn about virus died on Thursday
Economists warn China faces difficult dilemma in deciding when workers should return to work
Taiwan halts visas for citizens of Macau and Hong Kong
Germany confirms 13th case
2 suspected cases found in South Africa
Dubai reports 3rd death outside China
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Update (1955ET): Just when you thought it was safe to buy the f**king record high melt-up, TBS News reports that Japanese authorities have found another 42 people on the Diamond Princess cruise ship anchored in Yokohama have tested positive for Coronavirus.
Japan says 273 people on the cruise ship were tested and 61 were found positive, and the 41 new patients have been sent to hospitals in 5 separate prefectures.
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Update (1925ET): China has just released its latest “official” data on the coronavirus, and just as we had suspected (given the precipitous slowdown from exponential growth yesterday), the acceleration has now ‘officially’ ended with 185,555 people under medical observation today, DOWN 309 from the 186,354 the prior day.
Even here China appears to be manipulating the data and instead of using an exponential growth rate as is the case for epidemics, is applying a quadratic equation to goalseek the numbers.
That said, according to the official data, the number of new confirmed and suspected cases appears to be slowing:
We wonder if the almost nationwide lockdown and policy shift to remaining in your home unless “severely” ill was the factor behind the slowdown in people receiving medical attention? Or whether it is a miracle that no ‘expert’ saw coming… apart from The WHO who all along claimed the “extreme measures” by China were “breathtaking.”
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Update (1615ET): A senior Chinese official has ordered Wuhan authorities to immediately round up all residents infected with the novel coronavirus and place them in isolation, quarantine camps, or designated hospitals, according to the New York Times.
Inside the exhibition center in Wuhan that now serves as a hospital.Credit…Chinatopix, via Associated Press
City investigators have also been ordered to go to each home and check the temperature of every resident, as well as conduct interviews with infected patients’ close contacts.
“Set up a 24-hour duty system. During these wartime conditions, there must be no deserters, or they will be nailed to the pillar of historical shame forever,” said Sun Chunlan, a vice premier in charge of leading the CCP’s response to the outbreak.
The city’s authorities have raced to meet these instructions by setting up makeshift mass quarantine shelters this week. But concerns are growing about whether the centers, which will house thousands of people in large spaces, will be able to provide even basic care to patients and protect against the risk of further infection. –NYT
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Update (1440ET): Dubai just reported that a woman from the Philippines has died in the UAE. In response, the UAE has suspended flights to China except to Beijing. The Manila Times reported the death, citing the Philippines’ labor secretary.
The victim was identified as Amalia Collado Dapronoza, 58. Her death comes as 178 other patients remain under observation in the tiny Gulf kingdom. The Philippines is one of several countries planning to rescue its citizens from Wuhan, and a group of 45 filipinos from Wuhan are set to return to the Philippines on Feb. 9.
In Hong Kong, 3,600 people were preparing to spend a second night confined aboard the World Dream as authorities test everyone aboard after eight passengers caught the virus. Health officials in the financial hub said they were also asking some 5,000 Hong Kongers who had traveled on the ship since mid-January to contact them.
We mentioned earlier that Beijing had finished building the second of two coronavirus hospitals built in Wuhan over the past week and a half. Well, here’s a cool time-lapsed video of its construction:
Update (1230ET): Beijing has finished construction on the second coronavirus hospital in Wuhan – so hopefully more of the desperate patients stuck dying in their homes might soon have a bed at a public facility where their treatment can be overseen by doctors.
Chinese state media said the Leishenshan hospital, which will join the Huoshenshan hospital that opened Monday, will provide 1,600 beds and be staffed by 2,000 medical personnel. The project took roughly ten days.
As we reminded readers earlier, the WHO appears to have gladly taken up the task of backing up Beijing’s propaganda. But on Thursday, it confirmed a bit of bad news, saying that the doctor who was punished for his early warnings about the outbreak had succumbed to the virus. Now, Wuhan Central Hospital is denying that Li Wenliang, one of eight doctors who was punished by local police for his warnings, has died.
Instead, they said he was alive, but in critical condition, according to SCMP.
“In the fight against the pneumonia epidemic of the new coronavirus infection, our hospital’s ophthalmologist Li Wenliang was unfortunately infected. He is currently in critical condition and we are trying our best to resuscitate him,” it said in its official Weibo account.
Li, 34, an ophthalmologist at the Wuhan Central Hospital, was found to be infected with coronavirus on Saturday.
“We are very sorry to hear the loss of any frontline worker who is committed to care for patients…we should celebrate his life and mourn his death with his colleagues,” said Michael Ryan, director of the World Health Organisation’s health emergencies programme, said during a briefing on Thursday.
With Citadel’s Ken Griffin becoming the latest to warn about supply chain disruptions related to the virus, Beijing is facing a difficult choice when it comes to deciding when workers should return to their desks or assembly lines.
In a separate SCMP story, economist Lu Zhengwei said allowing the workforce to return to their jobs was crucial both for supporting the economy and ultimately ending the epidemic.
“It’s obviously desirable for employers who are now paying rent, salaries and social welfare for their employees, for nothing in return,” he said, adding that most small and medium enterprises in China could only last about a month in the current situation.
Meanwhile, a handful of new deaths have been confirmed by the SCMP:
As the death toll climbs, doctors told the NYT that the number of deaths and cases are likely being undercounted.
Many doctors believe that the number of deaths and infections are undercounted because hospitals and laboratories are under severe strain to test for the virus. Local officials in Hubei, the center of the outbreak, have called on health care workers to speed up the process.
As we reported below, there have been many anecdotal reports about sick people being turned away by hospitals in Wuhan.
Advisory firm Oxford Economics has lowered its growth outlook for China to 5.4% in 2020, down from 6%, and Goldman analysts believe the outbreak will ultimately shave 2 percentage points off global GDP by the time it’s all said and done.
Earlier, Taiwan halted visas for citizens of Hong Kong and Macau, saying on Thursday that it would suspend its online and landing visa services indefinitely for Hong Kong and Macau citizens, while non-citizens of Hong Kong and Macau with a history of travel to mainland China, Hong Kong or Macau would also be barred from visiting Taiwan. These measures will no doubt further infuriate Beijing, which has lashed out against “fearmongering” abroad.
“Beginning [midnight Thursday], we will suspend online and landing visa application services” until further notice, announced Chiu Chui-cheng, vice-chairman of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, which sets the island’s policies towards mainland China.
They’re also temporarily banning cruise ships from docking – can’t say we blame them.
More suspected cases of the virus have been discovered in Africa, though none have been confirmed yet. Still, African health officials have been scrambling to brace for outbreaks; they’re hoping to suppress the virus before the outbreaks can overwhelm their fragile health systems, according to News24.
Two suspected coronavirus cases have been reported in KwaZulu-Natal although there was not yet any laboratory confirmation, the provincial health department said on Thursday.
Spokesperson Noluthando Nkosi said one case was being handled by a departmental facility, while the other was at a private facility in Durban.
“The department is monitoring the treatment and management of these patients quite closely.”
Nkosi said the public would be notified should there be any new developments, urging people to “remain calm and avoid being misled by false statements which are peddled on social media platforms.”
On Wednesday, a patient in Limpopo was cleared after being held in isolation at Ellisras Hospital in Lephalale.
In other news, Germany has confirmed its 13th coronavirus case, a case we imagine will also be found to be a human-to-human infection.
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Update (1100ET): Is this the WHO’s “Mission Accomplished?”
During a press conference in Switzerland Thursday evening, Dr. Tedros, the WHO’s director-general, thanked the Gates Foundation (which committed $100 million) and Japan (which contributed $10 million) for answering the organization’s call for more funding to help suppress the coronavirus outbreak that has now claimed more than 560 lives, mostly in China. He also claimed that the number of new and suspected cases is finally starting to slow, a sign that the outbreak could be subsiding, and that the China-led response has been a success.
Though researchers have already mapped the virus’s DNA and are already working on a remedy, there is still a lot we don’t know about the virus, Dr. Tedros said. We don’t know where it came from (though there are theories) and we don’t 100% understand how it spreads. There are also many tools we don’t have, like a vaccine, that will hopefully soon be developed. In effect, “we’re shadow-boxing with the virus,” Dr. Tedros said. “We need to bring it into the light.”
The organization continued to sidestep questions about China’s censorship and its initial reluctance to share information about the outbreak with the international community.
Responding to a reporter’s question, the WHO rep confirmed that the doctor who was one of the first to detect the virus before being ignored and eventually sickened has now died.
Thousands of athletes around the world breathed a sigh of relief on Thursday when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe confirmed that the Summer Olympics in Tokyo won’t be delayed. Then again, if the outbreak continues to worsen in Japan and the broader region, who is going to want to come if they don’t feel safe?
As the second week of global pandemic panic comes to a close, China, increasingly frustrated that their ruse with the WHO didn’t manage to calm the international community, again registered its “strong objections” to the growing number of travel bans directed at its citizens.
The warning followed a decision by Taiwan’s health authority to ban all international cruise ships from docking at the island from Thursday as the number of suspected outbreaks aboard cruise ships grows.
The global death toll has ticked higher, reaching 566 overnight, while the total number of confirmed cases has broken above 28,000 to 28,384.
More than a dozen countries have imposed some kind of restriction on foreigners who have recently visited China. Within China, images of police clad in hazmat suites and touting infrared thermometers have become frighteningly common. Many airlines cancelled passenger routes to China, and some are extending those cancellations out to March or April.
“China is strongly concerned and dissatisfied,” said a spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry. “We hope relevant countries will bear in mind overall relations and people’s interests and resume normal operation of flights to guarantee normal people-to-people exchange and cooperation.”
“I must stress that certain countries’ ill-advised decisions to suspend flights to and from China are neither cool-headed nor rational,” she added.
But while Beijing tries to spin the narrative to accuse other countries of racism, some brave journalists have shared the stories of families brave – or foolish – enough to speak out against the regime.
One resident of Wuhan who has been stuck in the city since the quarantine told the BBC that his uncle died in a quarantine because of supply shortages.
The image of life in Wuhan is every bit as bad as the most chilling conspiracies would have you believe.
“My uncle actually died in one of the quarantine points because there are no medical facilities for people with severe symptoms. I really hope my father can get some proper treatment but no-one is in contact with us or helping us at the moment.”
“I got in touch with community workers several times, but the response I got was, ‘there’s no chance of us getting a bed in the hospital.'”
Beijing, which just announced a spate of new treatment-related projects in Wuhan and the surrounding area, seemingly can’t get beds online fast enough. Because the government is literally condemns some elderly patients to die in their homes.
But for people like us, we can’t even get a bed now, let alone get one in the new hospitals.
If we follow the government’s guidelines, the only place we can go now is to those quarantine points. But if we went, what happened to my uncle would then happen to dad.
So we’d rather die at home.
Many are saying that if they knew authorities would lock down Wuhan last week, they would have left for the holiday earlier.
What I want to say is, if I knew they were going to lock down the city on 23 January, I would have definitely taken my whole family out, because there’s no help here.
If we were somewhere else, there might be hope. I don’t know whether people like us, who listened to the government and stayed in Wuhan, made the right decision or not.
In news from outside China, Indonesia is reportedly planning to build a quarantine center on an uninhabited island to isolate coronavirus victims, even though Indonesia has yet to record a single case of the virus, though 243 have been quarantined on the island of Natuna.
Across the globe, health officials are racing to develop treatments and testing methods for the virus. Wuhan, ground zero of the outbreak, opened an emergency test laboratory on Wednesday to begin human trials.
Over in Hong Kong, a top public health official has declared a community outbreak, according to the SCMP.
A day after the city government revealed that it would impose a mandatory 14-day quarantine on anybody crossing into Hong Kong from China, the city government has provided some more details on how it will combat the crisis. Most of the new cases in the city are being caused by human-to-human transmission. Six people have been diagnosed with the coronavirus over the past few days, five of whom had not left the city recently. Of the 21 cases in total, eight are believed to have no travel history relevant to the coronavirus.
Circling back to the mainland, local authorities in the city of Tianjin announced on Thursday that it would ban the exit and entry of its villages and compounds, becoming the latest city to essentially quarantine its entire population. Over in Wuhan, authorities are now demanding that all residents report their temperatures at least once per day.
So, that’s 60+ million people under quarantine in China. And though the pace of new cases in the country has slowed slightly, the virus is accelerating, especially in Asia.
They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, however, that might not be the case when it comes to catching the coronavirus. Scientists are now warning the public that you can actually “relapse” and get the virus more than one time.
While most of the patients who have contracted the coronavirus 2019-nCoV eventually make a full recovery, they don’t walk away from the encounter immunized against the disease, as one might expect after a viral infection. Rather, Business Insider reports, you can theoretically catch the coronavirus multiple times, creating an unusual challenge for health officials trying to contain the outbreak.
“For those patients who have been cured, there is a likelihood of a relapse,” Zhan Qingyuan, the director of pneumonia prevention and treatment at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, said during a Friday press conference.
The underlying idea behind a vaccination — or even “chicken pox parties” — is that exposure to a virus will trigger the immune system to generate antibodies that will shield that person from that virus in the future. But according to Chinese health officials, the antibodies created after a 2019-nCoV infection aren’t always strong enough to keep patients from getting sick again. –Futurism
“However, in certain individuals, the antibody cannot last that long.”
The best way to fight this virus is to simply prevent contraction. Because health officials and scientists still don’t know exactly how this virus spreads, it’s best to wear a face mask if you can, especially in a place with a lot of people in close contact (like an airport or airplane) and take on good handwashing measures.
On Friday November 29, 2019, an Islamist terror attack took place in London. Two young people, both recent Cambridge University graduates, Jack Merritt (25) and Saskia Jones (23), were stabbed and killed by a single attacker. It was a terrible and unnecessary loss of life.
The special irony about Jack and Saskia’s deaths is that they (and a colleague) had been involved with Cambridge University’s Learning Together prison-rehabilitation program, similar to the US version known as Inside-Out, both of which bring prison inmates together with students to learn together. The British programme is run by Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology, from which both Merritt and Jones had received M.Phils in criminology.
On that Friday, the fifth anniversary of the program, they were attending a conference on offender rehabilitation. The event, dedicated to work on reintegrating prisoners after their release, took place in the stately Fishmongers’ Hall at the north end of London Bridge. It was attended by a mix of academics, students, graduates and former prisoners, some with tags.
Just after lunch, at 12.58 p.m., the conference erupted into chaos when one of the participants threatened to blow it up. A man, later identified as Usman Khan, revealed that he was wearing what appeared to be a suicide vest. It is not clear what he planned to do, given that the vest was a fake and could not have served in any attack. However, he did have two knives taped to his wrists. When he left the Hall and went down to the bridge, it was indeed with these weapons that he killed Merritt and Jones and injured several others, some badly.
Remarkably, instead of running for their lives, many of the conference participants, including some prisoners, tackled Khan. One was a convicted murderer on day release. Two of these heroes were Merritt and Jones, who paid for their bravery with their own lives.
That Khan was there at all almost beggars belief. He was out on licence from prison, where he had served just half of a 16-year prison sentence for engaging with others in plans for what could have led to a major terrorist atrocity. He was at the conference because it was believed he was working towards his own deradicalization. Quite obviously, he had not been deradicalized.
Nine years earlier, when he was 19, Khan had been a leading member of a terrorist outfit inspired by al-Qa’ida.The members were arrested and put on trial in 2012, when Khan and two others were handed undetermined sentences; Khan was classified as never to be released. They had never carried out an attack, but they had ambitious plans, distributing letter bombs in the post, and setting off pipe bombs in toilets and pubs. There was also a handwritten target list belonging to the group which listed the names and addresses of the then London mayor, Boris Johnson, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, two rabbis, the US embassy in London and the stock exchange.
There were nine accused in all, but Khan and two others were described by the judge who sentenced them, Justice Alan Wilkie, to have been “more serious jihadis than the others.” Wilkie had also warned that Khan should not be released from prison early:
In my judgment, these offenders would remain, even after a lengthy term of imprisonment, of such a significant risk that the public could not be adequately protected by their being managed on licence in the community, subject to conditions, by reference to a preordained release date.
That warning was not heeded when it came to a reconsideration of Khan’s situation.
At an appeal hearing in 2013, Khan was given a determinate sentence of 16 years in gaol. He had served about five years of this when he was released on licence while wearing a GPS ankle bracelet.According to a BBC investigation:
During his time in prison, Khan completed a course for people convicted of extremism offences and after his release went on a scheme to address the root causes of terrorism.
The first course Khan went on, the Healthy Identity Intervention Programme, was piloted from 2010 and is now the main rehabilitation scheme for prisoners convicted of offences linked to extremism.
There was, however, a flaw in these schemes: they had not been fully tested or evaluated. The BBC’s home affairs correspondent, Danny Shaw, remarked:
Last year, the Ministry of Justice published the findings of research into the pilot project which found it was “viewed positively” by a sample of those who attended and ran the course.
However, the department has not completed any work to test whether the scheme prevents reoffending or successfully tackles extremist behaviour.
There has also been no evaluation of the impact of the Desistance and Disengagement Programme, which Khan took part in after his release last year.
It need hardly be said that Khan’s attack is evidence that such schemes are inherently unstable and, in a certain percentage of cases, likely to fail.
Actually, the failure rate had already been predicted by Ian Acheson, a British expert on prisons who is currently a senior advisor to the US-based Counter Extremism Project. In 2015, Britain’s Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, appointed Acheson, aided by a small expert team, to conduct an independent review of Islamist extremism in the prisons and probation system in England and Wales. A summary of the main findings of Acheson’s final report has been made available online by the UK government.
On December 1, however, Acheson himself wrote an article for the London Times entitled “London Bridge attack: I told ministers we were treating terrorist prisoners with jaw-dropping naivety. Did they listen?”
In it, he revealed that his survey was originally opposed by the CEO of Britain’s Prison and Probation Service, who had to be overruled by Gove. He goes on to write that “What we found was so shockingly bad that I had to agree to the language in the original report being toned down. With hindsight, I’m not sure that was the right decision.” He continues with a deeply worrying account of what he and his team found:
There were serious deficiencies in almost every aspect of the management of terrorist offenders through the system that are relevant to Usman Khan. Frontline prison staff were vulnerable to attack and were ill-equipped to counter hateful extremism on prison landings for fear of being accused of racism. Prison imams did not possess the tools, and sometimes the will, to combat Islamist ideology. The prison service’s intelligence-gathering system was hopelessly fractured and ineffectual.
The rest of the article should be read in full, for it is a damning indictment of the way Islamic extremism and deradicalization of terrorists are handled within the UK’s prison network. At one point, he writes:
What has this got to do with Khan? Many of the recommendations I made related to what I saw as serious gaps in the management of terrorist offenders into custody and “through the gate”. There was a lack of expertise and appropriateness in the arrangements for probation supervision of these most potentially lethal offenders.
The questions Acheson proceeds to ask are detailed and well informed. Perhaps the government agencies responsible for incarceration and deradicalization of terrorists and would-be jihadists will listen to him and others who are deeply informed about the problem and will introduce some at least of the many reforms he calls for.
Tragically, that may not happen. As he himself admits, he is likely to be persona non grata within the service and perhaps the Ministry of Justice:
Moreover, there are legitimate questions to ask about the qualifications of the key people in this highly sensitive role and how they were appointed. HM Prison and Probation Service, where I spent nearly a decade working, is a notoriously closed shop when it comes to the advancement of its senior leadership, whatever the public relations person says.
To make life even harder for prison officials at every level, a study published by the Ministry of Justice in May 2019, has revealed that radical Muslims in gaol in the UK are almost out of control to the point where they rule prisons. Entitled “Exploring the Nature of Muslim Groups and Related Gang Activity in Three High Security Prisons: Findings from Qualitative Research”, the study paints a disturbing picture that could have been a script for a violent TV drama.
There is a useful summary of the UK situation by Patrick Dunleavy, a former Inspector General for the New York State Department of Corrections. Dunleavy has testified as an expert witness before the House Committee on Homeland Security about the threat of Islamic Radicalization in the U.S. prison system.
In his summary dated June 19, 2019, Dunleavy identifies a group of radicalized Muslims who function as a gang in UK prisons, taking control of territory and exercising influence over existing and new Muslim prisoners, even where the latter do not enter gaol as extremists or terrorist supporters. Dunleavy sums up the influence of this broad “gang”:
Obedience is achieved by violence and intimidation carried out by members of the group known as enforcers. “Those who had committed terrorist crimes often held more senior roles in the gang,” the study found, “facilitated by the respect some younger prisoners gave them.”
Leadership gives the orders for all acts of violence. No member acts on his own. If he does, one inmate said, he is taken aside by a leader….
The study described the leaders as manipulative, dominating, and outspoken and yet found they were able to portray themselves to prison staff as compliant and polite. In other words, “jail wise.”
A similar situation exists in the United States, where Muslim radicals also form gang-like structures of mutual reinforcement and coercion. Dunleavy draws on his own direct experience of US prisons:
I was assigned to “Operation Hades” at the time, a multifaceted investigative group of federal, state, and local agents, analysts, and law enforcement officers tasked with exploring the level of radical Islamic recruitment in the prison system.
The study found that terrorist groups such as al-Qaida did not see prison as an obstacle. Quite the opposite, they viewed it as an opportunity to organize and expand.
In prison, terrorists designed an organizational structure providing specific roles for each member, roles identical to what was just found in the UK; leaders, recruiters, enforcers, foot soldiers. The intelligence report also said that terrorists would operate their group in prison like a “brotherhood,” and that recruitment would thrive because they had a large “pool of vulnerable people” from which to draw.
However, in Dunleavy’s opinion, American prison and counter-terrorism authorities have handled these matters better than their counterparts in the UK:
The United States seems to have fared better curbing radical Islamic groups organizing in the prison system than our UK and EU counterparts. This may be due in part to the Correctional Intelligence Initiative program operated by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), which continues to build on the recommendations of the 2002 report.
If there is one shortcoming, it is in the area of post-release supervision of convicted terrorists.
As we have previously reported, more terrorists are being released from custody with no viable de-radicalization program or monitoring system in place.
Where they live or work, as well as any social media involvement after their release, needs to be strictly monitored. Any important intelligence gleaned from this should be shared across the board with participating agencies. International travel should also be restricted.
Usman Khan’s trajectory confirms Dunleavy’s uneasy concern about the “post-release supervision of convicted terrorists”. Is any form of deradicalization possible at all? It is no secret that hundreds of former Islamic State/Da’esh fighters may have returned or hope yet to return to their countries of origin in Europe:
Jürgen Stock, Interpol’s chief, who is also a criminologist and law enforcement officer from Germany, said: “We could soon be facing a second wave of other Islamic State linked or radicalised individuals that you might call Isis 2.0.”
“A lot of these are suspected terrorists or those who are linked to terrorist groups as supporters who are facing maybe two to five years in jail. Because they were not convicted of a concrete terrorist attack but only support for terrorist activities, their sentences are perhaps not so heavy.”
Many such fighters are already in custody under Turkish control. A recent report from Ankara indicates that the Islamist Turkish government is threatening to release them and send them into Europe. If that happens, handling such an influx could become an intense and possibly irresoluble headache for the prison, security, and counter-terrorism authorities everywhere.
In Part II, we shall examine what the Western states will have to do and should already be doing to quash this menace.
* * *
Postscript. Just as this article finished editing, a grim event, once more in London, took place in an eerie replica of Usman Khan’s November terrorist attack on London Bridge. On February 2, a young Muslim, Sudesh Amman, stabbed two passers-by in Streatham, a London district. Ten days earlier, he had, like Khan, been released from prison halfway through his sentence for terror offences in 2018. He too was shot dead by armed police, and in his case neither of his victims died.
Amman was one of the top five terrorist risk people in the country and was known still to possess extremist views, yet his parole board did not assess him before setting him free to go onto the street, take a knife from a shop, and attack two innocent people. This, despite the fact, as we shall see in part two, that the government had earlier announced plans to tighten up sentencing and end halfway release for terrorist prisoners.
Just A Little Sloppy Record-Keeping? The Pentagon’s $35 Trillion ‘Accounting Black Hole’
Over the past two weeks of coronavirus headlines and heightened global anxiety, along with impeachment coverage and after over the Super Bowl weekend Americans huddled in living rooms in blissful oblivion, a story which in more normal times would be front and center has gone largely unnoticed. To be sure, the Pentagon couldn’t be happier that this bombshell has taken a back burner in global headlines:
The Pentagon made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments last year alone— a total that’s larger than the entire U.S. economy and underscores the Defense Department’s continuing difficulty in balancing its books.
The latest estimate is up from $30.7 trillion in 2018 and $29 trillion in 2017, the first year adjustments were tracked in a concerted way, according to Pentagon figures and a lawmaker who’s pursued the accounting morass.
It sounds more appropriately news out of The Onion or Babylon Bee given this is *Trillions* and not just billions — though that itself would have been remarkable enough. Naturally, the first and only question we should start with is: how is this even possible?
After all, $35 trillion is about one-and-a-half times the size of the entire US economy. Not to mention that the figure easily dwarfs the GDP of the entire combined nations of the European continent. Consider too that the current actual US budge for defense-related funding is $738 billion.
“Within that $30 trillion is a lot of double, triple, and quadruple counting of the same money as it got moved between accounts,” Todd Harrison, a Pentagon budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Bloomberg in a recent report.
But are we really to believe that mere “combined errors, shorthand, and sloppy record-keeping by DoD accountants” — as another analyst was quoted as saying — can explain a $35 Trillion accounting black hole?
The Defense Department acknowledged that it failed its first-ever audit in 2018 and then again last year, when it reviewed $2.7 trillion in assets and $2.6 trillion in liabilities. While auditors found no evidence of fraud in the review of finances that Congress required, they flagged a laundry list of problems, including accounting adjustments.
With tax season now fast approaching, it’s not too comforting to know the Pentagon enjoys over half of all discretionary domestic spending for its global war machine in maintenance of our humble Republic Empire .
Bloomberg attempted to get a handle on it further in explaining, “The military services make adjustments, some automatic and some manual, on a monthly and quarterly basis, and those actions are consolidated by the Pentagon’s primary finance and accounting service and submitted to the Treasury.”
“There were 546,433 adjustments in fiscal 2017 and 562,568 in 2018, according to figures provided by Representative Jackie Speier, who asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate,” the report added.
Spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s inspector general, Dwrena Allen, downplayed what to most Americans will sound like the makings of an explosive scandal. “In layman’s terms, this means that the DoD made adjustments to accounting records without having documentation to support the need or amount for the adjustment,” she said.
“It means money that DoD moved from one part of the budget to another,” Clark explained to Task & Purpose. “So, like in your household budget: It would be like moving money from checking, to savings, to your 401K, to your credit card, and then back.”
However, $35 trillion is close to 50-times the size of the Pentagon’s 2019 budget, so that means every dollar the Defense Department received from Congress was moved up to 50 times before it was actually spent, Clark said.
“Trillions” explained away by a little benign neglect of simple documentation?
Of course, in the real world outside the halls of government and of largely unchecked power, a mere single trillion would be enough send people to jail. Here we’re talking $30+ trillion and it appears this gaping accounting black hole bigger that most of the world’s past and future economies will itself be memory holed and explained away as being but the minor errors of some DoD pencil-pushers, apparently.
“The brutal reality is that a predator doesn’t have to be in the same room, building, or even country to abuse a child. And that’s what they’re doing – subjecting children to psychological and sexual abuse.”
What can we do to protect America’s young people from sexual predators?
That’s the question I keep getting asked by people who, having read my article on the growing danger of young boys and girls (some as young as 9 years old) being bought and sold for sex, want to do something proactive to stop these monsters in their tracks.
It is estimated that the number of children who are at risk of being trafficked or have already been sold into the sex trade would fill 1300 school buses.
While those who seek to buy young children for sex come from all backgrounds, races, ages and work forces, they do have one thing in common: 99% of them are men.
This is not a problem with an easy fix.
That so many children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.
Sure, there are things that can be done to catch those who trade in young flesh: police need to do a better job of training, identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of traffickers, and educating parents and young people about the dangers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms and cover for their dirty deeds.
However, these are reactive responses to a menace that grows more sophisticated by the day.
We need to be preemptive and proactive in our understanding of the threats and smarter and more sophisticated in our responses, as well.
What we are dealing with is a culture that is grooming these young children, especially young girls, to be preyed upon by men.
There are usually six stages to grooming by a sexual predator:friendship (targeting and gaining trust); relationship (filling the child’s needs); gauging the level of protection surrounding the child; exclusivity (isolating the child from others); sexualization (desensitizing the child to sex talk and activities); and abuse.
All of those screen devices being passed along to children at ever-younger ages? They have become the sexual predator’s primary means of gaining access to young people, and it’s primarily happening online. As The New York Times reports:
Indeed, video games such as Minecraft and Fortnite, social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram, and online chat forums have become “hunting grounds” for sexual predators.
One Bark investigator, Sloane Ryan, a 37-year-old woman who poses as an 11-year-old girl online in order to better understand predation and help those who are fighting it, wrote a chilling account of the kinds of solicitations she received after merely uploading a generic photo (of her 11-year-old self) to Instagram.
“By the end of two-and-a-half hours, I’ve had seven video calls, ignored another two dozen of them, text-chatted with 17 men (some who had messaged her before, gearing back up in hopes for more interaction), and seen the genitalia of 11 of those,” notes Ryan.
This is the new face of how predators are grooming young girls (and boys) to be trafficked, molested and raped. However, it starts much earlier, with a culture that has brainwashed itself into believing that sexual freedom amounts to a Super Bowl half-time show in which barely-clad women spend 20 minutes twerking, gyrating (some of it on a stripper pole) and showing off sexually provocative dance moves.
This is part and parcel of the pornification of American culture.
As commentator Dixie Laite writes for Bust magazine:
Sex sells. Madonna knew it when she crawled the VMA stage very much not “Like a Virgin”. Rihanna, Beyonce, Britney and countless others have climbed that ladder to fame… Last time I looked, we as a nation absolutely adored this so-called slutty behavior. I see people voting with their dollars and their attention to Playboy’s Bunnies, Victoria’s Secrets, strippers, people who dress like strippers, and girls who’ve gone wild.
This foray into porn culture—the increasing acceptability and pervasiveness of sexualized imagery in mainstream media—is where pop culture takes a dark turn. “Visual images and narratives of music videos clearly have more potential to form attitudes, values, or perceptions of social reality than does the music alone,” notes author Douglas A. Gentile in his book Media Violence and Children. In fact, music videos are among the worst culprits constantly bombarding young people today with sexual images and references.
Screen time has become the primary culprit for the oversexualization of young people.
As Jessica Bennett notes in “The Pornification of a Generation” for Newsweek:
“In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives. Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms… All it takes is one look at [social media] photos of teens to see examples—if they aren’t imitating porn they’ve actually seen, they’re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they’ve absorbed elsewhere. Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school… Celebrities, too, have become amateur porn stars. They show up in sex tapes (Colin Farrell, Kim Kardashian), hire porn producers to shoot their videos (Britney Spears) or produce porn outright (Snoop Dogg). Actual porn stars and call girls, meanwhile, have become celebs. Ron Jeremy regularly takes cameos in movies and on TV, while adult star Jenna Jameson is a best-selling author.”
How we got to this place in time, where children are sexualized at an early age and trotted out as easy targets for all manner of predators is not really all that hard to decipher, but it requires a certain amount of candor.
First, there is nothing sexually liberating about young women—young girls—reducing themselves to little more than sex objects and prancing about like prostitutes.
Second, this is a dangerous game that can only end in tragic consequences: there are sexual predators out there only too eager to take advantage of any innuendo-laced sexual “invitations” being put out there, intentional or not.
Third, if it looks like porn, sounds like porn and imitates porn, it is porn, and it is devastating on every front, turning women into objects for male aggression.
Fourth, no matter what its champions might say about the First Amendment and women’s liberation, pornography in all its forms—whether overtly packaged as skin flicks and mags or more subtly disguised by pop culture as trendy music videos and precocious clothing—is about one thing only: money.
Fifth, parents: turn off your cell phones for a change and tune into what your kids are watching, reading, listening to, and whom they are emulating.
And finally, remember that the sexualization of young children is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from sexualized entertainment, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture, and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc., and ends with these same young people being bought and sold for sex. It is estimated that the porn industry brings in more money than Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.
That this issue continues to be treated with a shrug, especially by those who claim to care about the state of our freedoms, is not only surprising and unnerving but also dangerously oblivious.
Like so many of the evils in our midst, sex trafficking (and the sexualization of young people) is a cultural disease that is rooted in the American police state’s heart of darkness. It speaks to a sordid, far-reaching corruption that stretches from the highest seats of power (governmental and corporate) down to the most hidden corners and relies on our silence and our complicity to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing.
You don’t have to be a parent to care about what’s happening to our young people. Likewise, you shouldn’t have to subscribe to any particular political viewpoint to recognize and be alarmed by the authoritarian trajectory of the nation.
Those concerned about the emerging police state in America, which I detail in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, should be equally concerned about the sex trafficking of young girls (and boys) and the pornification of America: they are two sides of the same coin.
As Aldous Huxley explains in his introduction to Brave New World:
As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.
States That Tax The Most Are Getting The Worst Results Per Dollar
Today in “more definitive proof that the government can’t spend your capital as well as you can” news, it should come as no surprise that states who spend less in taxes are getting better results, per dollar, than similarly sized states who collect far more in tax revenue.
At least that was the result of looking at the country’s four largest states: California, Texas, Florida and New York.
Aside from being the same size, the states differ greatly in politics and governance, the NY Post notes. California and New York are liberal hot beds dominated by Democrats who have put the nation’s highest and sixth highest marginal income tax rates.
Texas and Florida are the opposite: both states have been run by conservatives for years and offer the benefits of no income tax on workers while keeping spending on social programs much lower.
An analysis of these states reveals some stark differences, but mainly tells the tale that lower taxed states have excelled, on a per dollar basis, past those with heavy tax burdens in a number of areas.
Blue states show little ability to improve academic outcomes of their kids, while red states have been able to “foster more upward mobility and trust in government,” the Post writes.
New York spends about $23,000 per pupil on education – about twice the national average of $12,000. Florida and Texas spend about $9,000 per pupil. And the difference in outputs has been almost unnoticeable.
In 2017, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that students in New York and Texas both scored around the national average in fourth and eighth grades, as did Floridians in eighth. Florida students in fourth grade scored above the national average, while California students in both grades scored below the national average.
In addition, minority students in Florida scored highest in the nation across the board. Black students scored 240 out of 500 on an average of the four tests used, which bests a 234 score average nationally. In New York, minority students scored above or around the national average of 236 for black students and 237 for hispanic students.
California and New York spend tons more on their anti-poverty programs than Texas and Florida. For instance, inclusive of Medicaid, California spent about $19,000 per person under the poverty line in 2017. New York spent over $21,000. Florida spent just $9,000 and Texas spent under $8,000.
But there’s no evidence that the extra spending is helping. The poverty rate fell 3% in California and 1.3% in New York from 2010 to 2018, while it fell 3% in Texas and 2.8% in Florida.
New York spends the most out of the four states on transportation, at $538 per capita. The national average is $476 while Florida, Texas and California spend $427, $399 and $339, respectively.
Per highway mile, Florida spends $241,000 and New York spends $215,000. This compares to $125,000 in California and $73,000 in Texas.
But the numbers find that there’s “no evidence” New York’s extra spending provides value to the people living there. Road quality in the state is ranked at 26th in the nation by the Federal Highway Administration, bridge quality is 37th and overall value of highways was 45th.
Florida is getting the better value for its dollar, yet again. Its roads rank 7th in the nation and its bridges rank 3rd. The Reason foundation has reported that overall, Texas taxpayers get the better value for their highways than the three other states.
Matt Gaetz Files Ethics Complaint, Criminal Referral Request Against Nancy Pelosi For Tearing Up SOTU Speech
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has written a letter to the House Ethics Committee requesting an investigation into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to tear up a copy of President Trump’s State of the Union address, arguing that “Her unseemly behavior certainly warrants censure.”
Gaetz has also requested a criminal referral for Pelosi’s potential violation of 18 U.S. Code § 2071 (Concealment, removal, or mutilation of documents).
Pelosi, still steaming after House Democrats’ impeachment gambit only drove President Trump’s approval ratings to all time highs, sat through Trump’s Tuesday night address staring daggers into the back of Trump’s head and mumbling to herself – only to test, pre-rip, and then tear up her copy of Trump’s SOTU speech.
Here’s Pelosi testing to see if she could rip the speech before the speech even started. She was planning to do it from the start. pic.twitter.com/1gEMlYrNB7
According to Gaetz, President Trump delivered remarks “which received overwhelming (and frequently bipartisan) support,” that were an “uplifting celebration of the diversity of the American experience and the triumph of the American Spirit.”
Pelosi’s theatrics were “utterly dismissive of the President’s achievements, and, more importantly, the achievements of the American People.”
Gaetz argues that Pelosi’s actions appear to violate clauses 1 and 2 of House Rule XXIII, and does not “reflect creditably on the House,” or follow “the spirit and the letter of the Rules of the House.”
BREAKING: I’m filing an ethics complaint against @SpeakerPelosi for destroying @realDonaldTrump‘s State of the Union speech.
Her conduct was beneath the dignity of the House, and a potential violation of law (18 USC 2071).
US Army Developing Uniforms That Destroy Bioweapons In Minutes
Chemists working with the US Army are developing new uniforms that can quickly break down toxic substances, protecting troops from bioweapons, according to Wired.
Omar Farha’s lab at Northwestern University is testing a fabric that can neutralize nerve agents.
The new fabric is part of a collaborative effort between the college and the Army, which might take upwards of a decade to test and then commissioned as the next-generation battle uniform.
The fabric can destroy nerve agents VX, soman, and sarin. These dangerous chemicals can be made in a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory (BSL-4), like the one found in Wuhan, China.
The Wired noted, the Army already has uniforms to protect troops from nerve agents, but there are no uniforms that can also destroy the toxins.
Jared DeCoste, a researcher with the Army who isn’t involved in the project, said the military has been searching for uniforms that can shield troops from bioweapons and, at the same time, destroy the chemicals.
According to Farha, the important ingredient in the new fabric is a crumpled crystalline molecule called MOF-808:
“This molecule essentially harvests water from ambient air. Water vapor likes to condense onto MOF-808 molecules because of their shape and chemical properties. When MOF-808 makes contact with a nerve agent, the water attached to the molecule breaks down the toxin, while zirconium atoms that recur throughout MOF-808’s crystal serve as the catalyst, accelerating the nerve agent’s breakdown. As long as the fabric is worn in a place where the humidity level is at least 30 percent, it can collect enough water to break down nerve agents in minutes.”
Dr. Francis Boyle, the man who drafted the Biological Weapons Act, recently said in an explosive interview that the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan likely came from a BSL-4 in the city.
He believes the virus is potentially lethal and an offensive biological warfare weapon or dual-use biowarfare weapons agent genetically modified with a gain of function properties.
The threats of biological warfare in the 2020s is undoubtedly a concerning matter for the Army, perhaps that’s why next-generational suits to repel and neutralize toxins will be standard issue by the end of the decade.
The investor George Soros objects that Facebook is doing what the U.S. Government allows it to do, but he doesn’t object to the U.S. Government’s allowing it. Yet, he claims to be opposing the Republican Government of Donald Trump, while he demands that the leadership of Facebook be replaced — supposedly for violating a law that the Trump Administration maybe isn’t enforcing. Is Soros really that incoherent? Or is there an ulterior motive here?
“I repeat and reaffirm my accusation against Facebook under the leadership of Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg. They follow only one guiding principle: maximize profits irrespective of the consequences. One way or another, they should not be left in control of Facebook.”
He cited, for blame in this, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows passive online media – media that exercise no editorial control over what their users post online – to be not responsible for, and not subject to lawsuits for, whatever is posted to their sites.*
Soros noted that Facebook is not censoring posts to its site in a way that will help Democratic candidates, but instead in a way that will help Republican candidates. He apparently wants censorship, but it must be his type of censorship, not theirs.
He is clear about his support for some sort of censorship. But is he proposing that the Government will somehow force this change from a Republican Facebook to a Democratic Facebook, or instead that Facebook’s stockholders will, somehow, do this — get rid of their founder and two top leaders? Soros doesn’t respect his readers enough to so much as even just touch on that basic question in his presentation — is the Government to get rid of Zuckerberg and Sandberg, or are the stockholders supposed to do it?
Soros is addressing his commentary only to fools who don’t care about what case he’s trying to persuade them to believe. If his article were, at all, serious, it would have been less holier-than-thou against businesses that supposedly adhere to “only one guiding principle: maximize profits irrespective of the consequences,” and it would have outlined a proposal — and not just asserted “One way or another, they should not be left in control of Facebook.” But why shouldn’t they? He really doesn’t say. He doesn’t cite even a single concrete example. He presents no case, at all.
He didn’t object that by Facebook’s doing any censorship at all, Facebook doesn’t actually fit into Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and Facebook is instead serving as an online publisher (a member of the press) and therefore is supposed to be legally responsible for what is being posted to their site — responsible for it in just the same way that the New York Times and Washington Post and NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, are responsible for what they publish (responsible, that is, to civil suits, but not to any criminal laws). Soros isn’t hiring lawyers to present such a case against Facebook, which would be a serious case to present, holding Facebook liable for any libels that it has published; he is instead trying to smear the leaders of Facebook, without supplying facts, or, really, any case, at all.
He is not objecting to the Trump Administration’s prejudicially granting this non-enforcement to Facebook, the publisher — the Trump Administration’s treating them as if they weren’t being publishers, but just passive information-providers; treating them as if Facebook weren’t selecting what to transmit and what not to transmit on their networks, to their audience.
(Facebook, and other online media such as Twitter, don’t even hide the fact that they exercise censorship, while they claim to be only “passive” media and thus protected by Section 230. Like I said: this case against Facebook would be serious, if it were brought, because these online platforms really do censor-out whatever they wish to censor-out.)
Why did Soros object to Facebook’s controllers, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, instead of object to Donald Trump — who is granting this prejudicial treatment, to that publisher (allowing it to be treated in accord with the Section 230 exemption)? Is it because Soros is too stupid to know better, or to understand the difference?
Soros knows enough to be expressing his viewpoint in a partisan manner, as a Democrat who spends tens of millions of dollars each election-cycle in order to support conservative Democrats against progressive Democrats.
And, then, in the general election, Soros supports conservative Democrats (such as that same conservative liberal Clinton) against sometimes even more conservative Republican Party nominees, for the given federal office. (The idea that Soros pumps about himself, that he’s progressive, is one big fat lie: he’s nothing of the sort.)
Why would he not be objecting to Trump here — the Republican who will soon be running against whomever the Democratic Party chooses to be its nominee?
The reason is that Trump isn’t really his target here: this is not the season during which the President will be chosen, but is instead the season in which each Party is to be selecting its nominee to then run against the other Parties’ nominees. And, since Soros is addressing, really (and only), fellow Democrats, his agenda could reasonably be viewed as being to affect whom they will be voting for in the present primaries.
In other words, George Soros wants as free a hand as possible, as a Democratic Party mega-donor, in order to determine whom the Democratic Party’s nominee will be. He wants Facebook to be censoring his way, not their way. Then, later, if that nominee suits his purposes, Soros will donate funds proportionately, to that Democratic Party nominee, against Donald Trump. Perhaps right now Soros is using the opinion-page of the Democratic Party’s New York Times in order to warn Facebook to avoid using its censorship so as to favor and oppose ‘the wrong’ Democratic Party candidates. And, maybe, that newspaper favors and opposes the same candidates that Soros does, and so perhaps that’s why they published his tripe here, rather than higher-quality submissions they could have chosen instead to publish.
Google, during the 2016 election-cycle, was slanting its ‘news’ to favor conservative Democrats against progressive Democrats, and then to favor the Democratic Party nominees against the Republican Party’s nominees, whereas Facebook was slanting its ‘news’ to favor Republican Party nominees against Democratic Party nominees. Twitter censors-out whatever neither Party wants the public to know,such as that Julian Assange is being tortured awaiting his extradition to the U.S. — for a trial that will likely never happen — all of these years of his imprisonment, lately in solitary confinement moreover, and never once being tried in a court of law, for anything, at all.
Since George Soros is a Democratic Party billionaire, he is objecting against Facebook instead of against Google. Similarly, Republican Party billionaires (and the ‘news’-media that they control) attack Google and other pro-Democratic-Party media.
Thus, Soros says:
“Facebook can post deliberately misleading or false statements by candidates for public office and others, and take no responsibility for them”
instead of:
“President Trump is not enforcing federal laws that hold publishers liable for lies they publish.”
So, Soros knows, and understands, a thing or two about propaganda. And, of course, he knows that Julian Assange is his enemy, just as much as Assange is, say, an enemy of Google’s Eric Schmidt, and of Cambridge Analytica’s Peter Thiel (who supported Trump).
This is just a game that virtually all of the billionaires play, against democracy itself. They want to control the country. Ever since around 1980, they have been accustomed to doing so.
* * *
* The U.S. Constitution, in its First Amendment, prohibited any type of governmentally imposed censorship but allowed censorship by members of the privately owned “press.” Section 230 was written to exclude passive online providers from being referred to as being “press” or a “publisher,” but it was poorly written, by lobbyists for corporations in the same category as Facebook and Google, and has yet to be revised by lobbyists for their print and broadcast competitors, who might define more precisely Section 230’s key phrase “interactive computer service” so as to state explicitly that only passive ones are being referred to by that phrase. Right now, even the New York Times online could conceivably qualify as being not a “publisher” and therefore not liable as publishers have been in the past. A corrupt government writes laws corruptly (such as Section 230 is) so that the laws reflect little else than the contending mega-corporate interests; and Section 230 is an example of this (as are most of our laws). With a big enough budget for its lawyering, any mega-corporation or association of large corporations can get the laws, in a corrupt country, written so as to serve its interests. Of course, such a country is no democracy. (But a corrupt country will have a corrupt press so that the public will think it’s a democracy.) Under such circumstances, judges make the final decision in particular cases. There already do exist some legal precedents for interpreting “interactive computer service” to apply only to passive ones. However, most billionaires are probably similar to Soros in wanting the internet to continue being used so as to propagandize the public — shape people’s attitudes and beliefs — instead of to inform the public (which entails no censorship whatsoever and is therefore overwhelmingly disfavored by billionaires and their corporations and their PACs and their lobbyists). Julian Assange is an example of the way a billionaires-controlled world treats leading anti-censorship activists. America is becoming a bastion of censorship, as one would expect of any dictatorship. This is certainly not what the people who wrote the U.S. Constitution had intended or even expected. After 9/11, it has become a seemingly permanent police-state. It’s what one would expect from a country that’s controlled by its billionaires. The 2020 U.S. elections should be about this problem, but, of course, are not.
The footage is haunting – like something out of an apocalyptic horror movie.
Roughly 80% of virus-related deaths have occurred in Wuhan since the outbreak began. But there’s reason to believe the death toll – particularly in Wuhan – might be much higher.
Solar power is cheaper than ever, it’s ultra-abundant, and it emits zero greenhouse gases. But it’s far from perfect–for now. One of the biggest limitations of solar energy (which applies to wind power as well) is that it is variable and is not dispatchable. Variability refers to the fact that solar power is dependent on a completely unreliable factor: the weather. Solar panels don’t generate energy if the sun isn’t shining, meaning that they don’t function for an entire half of every day and function far under capacity during overcast daylight hours. They also can’t be turned on and off according to the grid’s needs, known as dispatchability. Instead of being able to respond to the energy needs of the grid, the grid has to work around the productivity of the solar panels.
Researchers have been hard at work for years to address these two shortcomings with all different kinds of approaches.
The most predominant strategy, and the one that is furthest along in development and implementation, is energy storage. When solar panels create excess energy, that is, more than the grid can absorb, the energy will be stored for later use when the sun isn’t shining. Energy storage is extremely promising, but currently is simply too expensive to be applied across the industry at a scale large enough to compete with fossil fuels. In order to reach 100 percent renewable energy in the United States, energy storage needs to be cheaper–a lot cheaper.
“The answer is $20 per kilowatt hour in energy capacity costs. That’s how cheap storage would have to get for renewables to get to 100 percent,” reported Vox late last year based on findings from an MIT study.
“That’s around a 90 percent drop from today’s costs. While that is entirely within the realm of the possible, there is wide disagreement over when it might happen; few expect it by 2030.”
In the meantime, there are a few teams of scientists taking a very different approach: developing a solar panel that can derive energy from the night sky. Oilprice reported on one of these projects last year. While the article proclaimed that “this ‘Anti-Solar Panel’ Could Generate Power From Darkness,” however, calling it a solar panel is a bit of a misnomer. The process does not use photovoltaic cells but operates entirely based on changes in temperature. The study from Stanford, poetically called “Generating Light from Darkness” explains:
“We use a passive cooling mechanism known as radiative sky cooling to maintain the cold side of a thermoelectric generator several degrees below ambient. The surrounding air heats the warm side of the thermoelectric generator, with the ensuing temperature difference converted into usable electricity. We highlight pathways to improving performance from a demonstrated 25 mW/m2 to 0.5 W/m2. Finally, we demonstrate that even with the low-cost implementation demonstration here, enough power is produced to light a LED: generating light from darkness.”
Now, there is another new study that touts its own anti-solar panel technology. Not too far from the team in Palo Alto, another team of researchers from the University of California, Davis have published their own, even more poetically titled paper: “Nighttime Photovoltaic Cells: Electrical Power Generation by Optically Coupling with Deep Space.” A report from Popular Mechanics explains the study in layman’s terms.
“To turn even low-level heat into energy, scientists have to use a thermal cell instead of a photo cell. The materials must be able to absorb the lowest wavelengths of energy.”
The report continues, “In a thermal radiation cell, we reset the parameters so Earth is the new sun, and its even minimal accumulated heat dwarfs the cold, midnight black of outer space. Letting heat seep out of thermal cells at night, drawn out by the cold night sky, could let scientists capture the energy as it goes out the same way we capture the sun’s energy as it comes in.” This is known as a heat sink.
While these studies are promising and innovative solutions to making renewable energy competitive and reliable on a large scale, they’re still in their initial stages, and commercialization can’t come fast enough. With catastrophic climate change right around the corner and the UN begging for investment in renewables, it’s a race against the clock, and right now it’s not certain if we will win.
Twitter Says It’ll Censor Deepfakes And Basically Anything Else It Wants To Ahead Of 2020 Election
Just days after banning Zero Hedge, Twitter has announced it’ll also be implementing new rules to address deepfakes and “other forms of synthetic and manipulated media” as we head closer to the 2020 election.
Because we can’t have a repeat of 2016, right?
The company said it is going to not allow users to “deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm,” according to CNBC. The rules go into effect after March 5 this year, where the company will now label some Tweets containing synthetic or manipulated media.
Social media can, and will, have a profound effect on the state of the election heading into November this year. Altered media often shows up, with candidates words sometimes parroted or mocked in certain ads that seek to undermine them. Lawmakers have been trying to figure out a way to hold social media companies accountable for the spread of misinformation.
According to CNBC, last month the “House Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce held a hearing where experts shared warnings of both deepfakes and potential over-regulation of tech platforms that host them.”
Twitter is now going to test media in three different ways to see if it meets parameters that violate its policy.
Is the media synthetic or manipulated?
Was it shared in a deceptive manner?
Is it likely the content will cause serious harm?
The article notes that if all three of these come back “yes”, that Twitter said it would be likely to remove the content.
But we’re willing to bet – and we know from experience – that Twitter is just going to remove the content it wants to, regardless.
In fact, the new policy is broad enough that it’ll allow the company to even take action against “cheapfakes”, which are low-tech edits meant to deceive other users. And what example is immediately brought up in CNBC’s article? One video where a Twitter user simply slowed down a video of Nancy Pelosi:
The doctored video of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that circulated on social media last year, for example, would be an example of such amateur editing, since the video was simply slowed down to give the effect that her speech was slow and slurred. More sophisticated deepfakes can involve transposing a person’s face on a video of another person, for example, which could give false impressions of a person’s words or actions.
So we guess we won’t be seeing any videos of her tearing up the State of the Union Speech in slow motion.
🚨 NEW LOW FOR NANCY PELOSI: She ripped up @realDonaldTrump’s #SOTU speech for the cameras on national TV.
This speech was about American heroes and American workers. She decided THAT was worth literally tearing apart.
Twitter also said that some world leaders would be exempt from some of its policy standards. They company said it’s because “it’s important for users to see and be able to debate their messages.” But we know it’s likely because Twitter doesn’t want to lose the traffic they drive and popularity they bring to the site.
Again it seems like a case of Twitter enabling itself for purely arbitrary and discretionary bans of whomeever it wants, whenever it wants.
Recall, we wrote about Facebook implementing similar censorship policies, alongside of YouTube, heading into the 2020 election. We wonder if these social media sites realize that, instead of helping the public make informed decisions, they are giving them an excuse to vote for the party with the least government outreach.
Americans’ views on their personal financial situation have been climbing since 2018 and are now at or near record highs in Gallup’s trends. Nearly six in 10 Americans (59%) now say they are better off financially than they were a year ago, up from 50% last year.
These data come from Gallup’s annual Mood of the Nation survey, conducted Jan. 2-15. The survey was completed after months of historically low levels of unemployment and as the Dow Jones Industrial Average neared the 30,000 mark for the first time.
The current 59% of Americans who say they are better off financially than they were a year ago is essentially tied for the all-time high of 58% in January 1999. That was recorded during the dot-com boom, with conditions similar to the current state of the economy — a stock market rocketing to then-record highs and unemployment at multidecade lows — though GDP growth was higher at that time.
From 1998 to 2000, at least half of Americans rated their financial situation better than that of a year ago. However, in most surveys from 2001 to 2018, the percentage saying their personal finances were better off than the previous year was under 50% — with a low of 23% in May 2009, during the Great Recession.
Record-High Level of Optimism About Financial Future
In addition to U.S. adults’ highly positive report on their current financial situation, Americans are also expressing peak optimism about their future personal financial situation. About three in four U.S. adults (74%) predict they will be better off financially a year from now, the highest in Gallup’s trend since 1977.
Since Gallup began asking this question in 1977, Americans have consistently been more optimistic than pessimistic about where their personal financial situation is headed, with more saying their finances will be better in a year than they are now. The previous record high, 71%, was seen in 1998 during the dot-com boom.
Partisan Divide in Optimism
Given today’s highly politically polarized environment, it is perhaps not surprising that Republicans and Democrats see their personal finances differently. There is a 33-percentage-point gap between Republicans’ (76%) and Democrats’ (43%) reports of being financially better off today than they were a year ago.
There is also a partisan gap when it comes to optimism about one’s future finances, though it is smaller than the difference seen in attitudes toward current conditions. Among Republicans, 83% say their personal financial situation will be better in a year, compared with 60% of Democrats.
Independents fall in between on both measures, with 58% saying they are better off now than a year ago and 76% reporting they will be better off next year.
Bottom Line
Americans’ levels of optimism about both their current financial situation and where it will be a year from now are at or near record highs. These views align with President Donald Trump’s contention that Americans are doing better under his presidency, and with his use of the economy and job growth as key selling points for his reelection. Republicans’ positive views on their finances are something of a given for a GOP president, at least during good economic times.
The majority levels of optimism among political independents are more significant for Trump’s reelection prospects — and something Trump will want to maintain in 2020 to stay competitive.
US Launches Criminal Probe Into JPMorgan For Gold Price Manipulation
There was a time when the merest mention of gold manipulation in “reputable” media was enough to have one branded a perpetual conspiracy theorist with a tinfoil farm out back… and immediately banned from social media.
That was roughly coincident with a time when Libor, FX, mortgage, and bond market manipulation was also considered unthinkable, when High Frequency Traders were believed to “provide liquidity”, or when the stock market was said to not be manipulated by the Fed, and when the ever-confused media, always eager to take “complicated” financial concepts at the face value set by a self-serving establishment, never dared to question anything.
In November 2018, a former JPMorgan precious-metals trader admitted he engaged in a six-year spoofing scheme that defrauded investors in gold, silver, platinum, and palladium futures contracts.
John Edmonds, 36, of Brooklyn, New York, pleaded guilty under seal on Oct. 9 in the District of Connecticut to commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, commodities price manipulation, and spoofing. As Justice notes in a statement:
“From approximately 2009 through 2015 John Edmonds engaged in a sophisticated scheme to manipulate the market for precious metals futures contracts for his own gain by placing orders that were never intended to be executed,” said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski.
“The Criminal Division is committed to prosecuting those who undermine the investing public’s trust in the integrity of our commodities markets through spoofing or any other illegal conduct.”
That was followed, a year later, by the DOJ charging the entire precious-metals trading desk at JPMorgan of being deeply involved in what prosecutors described as a “massive, multiyear scheme to manipulate the market for precious metals futures contracts and defraud market participants.”
The DoJ charged Michael Nowak, a JPMorgan veteran and former head of its precious metals trading desk and Gregg Smith, another trader on JPM’s metals desk, in the probe. (Blythe Masters was somehow omitted).
“Based on the fact that it was conduct that was widespread on the desk, it was engaged in in thousands of episodes over an eight-year period — that it is precisely the kind of conduct that the RICO statute is meant to punish,” Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski told reporters.
Here’s where it gets extra interesting: according to Bloomberg, the unusually aggressive language language embraced by prosecutors reminds legal experts of indictments utilizing the RICO Act – a law allowing prosecutors to take down ‘criminal enterprises’ like the mafia by charging all members of the organization for any crimes committed by an individual on behalf of the organization.
Prosecutors charged the head of JP Morgan’s global metals trading operation and two other traders with “conspiracy to conduct the affairs of an enterprise involved in interstate or foreign commerce through a pattern of racketeering activity” – language that is typically used to describe a RICO charge.
And now, 5 months later, Bloomberg reports that things have escalated even further.
According to two people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports that U.S. authorities that accused six JPMorgan Chase & Co. employees of rigging precious-metals futures are building a criminal case against the bank itself.
So more than 11 years after the farce began, this previously unreported investigation of the global bank’s parent company – part of a wide-ranging federal clampdown on market manipulation – raises the prospect of criminal charges and significant fines against America’s largest bank.
Additionally, Bloomberg notes that, according to a third person familiar with the matter, authorities are conducting a similar racketeering investigation of a second financial firm involving spoofing.
And all of this is occurring as more and more investors realize the value of gold as a hedge against the idiocy of politicians and policy-makers… in other words, just as manipulating precious-metals prices lower would be at its most use to the banking elites.
Conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact… and we wonder whether any of this would be public had Twitter’s newly-minted “censor anything we don’t like” policies been in place?
Two top Republican Senators are expanding their probe into potential conflicts of interest “posed by the business activities of Hunter Biden” as the Senate investigative committees continue to probe former Vice President Joe Biden’s son’s business activities overseas during his father’s tenure in the Obama Administration.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, Chairman of the Finance Committee, and Sen. Ron Johnson, who already have an ongoing investigation into numerous White House meetings during the Obama Administration with senior Ukrainian officials, sent a letter Wednesday to Secret Service Director James M. Murray requesting information “about whether Hunter Biden used government-sponsored travel to help conduct private business, to include his work for Rosemont Seneca and related entities in China and Ukraine.”
Grassley and Johnson say they want the information no later than February 19, according to the letter sent to Murray.
“The Committee on Finance and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (“the committees”) are reviewing potential conflicts of interest posed by the business activities of Hunter Biden and his associates during the Obama administration, particularly with respect to his business activities in Ukraine and China,” the letter states.
The two powerful GOP chairmen want “Hunter Biden’s travel arrangements to conduct business related to his dealings in Ukraine and China, among other countries, while he received a protective detail.”
Please describe the protective detail that Hunter Biden received while his father was Vice President.
Please provide a list of all dates and locations of travel, international and domestic, for Hunter Biden while he received a protective detail.
Please provide a list o f all dates and locations o f travel, international and domestic, for Hunter Biden while he received a protective detail. In your response, please note whether his travel was on Air Force One or Two, or other government aircraft, as applicable and whether additional family members were present for each trip.
The Senators also stated in the letter that they have sent other letters to other government agencies questioning ‘potential conflicts of interest’ regarding the deal during the Obama Administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approval to sell off 20 percent of U.S. uranium from the Canadian company that had assets in the U.S. to to the Russian energy giant Rosatom.
The transaction required the the approval of CFIUS, the multi-agency approval committee. At the time Hillary Clinton was head of the State Department, which was a voting member of the CFIUS board.
“In addition to several letters that the committees have sent to other agencies as part of that inquiry, the Committee on Finance also has written to the Department of Treasury regarding potential conflicts of interest in the Obama-era CFIUS- approved transaction which gave control of Henniges, an American maker of anti-vibration technologies with military applications, to a Chinese government-owned aviation company and China-based investment firm with established ties to the Chinese government.
That transaction included Rosemont Seneca Partners, a company formed in 2009 by Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz, and others.”
The letter goes on to state that “in December of 2013, one month after Rosemont Seneca’s joint venture with Bohai Capital to form BHR, Hunter Biden reportedly flew aboard Air Force Two with then-Vice President Biden to China. While in China, he helped arrange for Jonathan Li, CEO of Bohai Capital, to “shake hands” with Vice President Biden.
Afterward, Hunter Biden, met with Li for reportedly a “social meeting.” After the China trip, BHR’s business license was approved.6 Then, in 2015, BHR joined with Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) to acquire Henniges, which was the “biggest Chinese investment into US automotive manufacturing assets to date,” Johnson and Grassley’s letter revealed.
Read full letter:
As Robert Wenzel concluded earlier,it really made no sense for Democrats to go after Trump if they didn’t have an open and shut case that would cause the entire public into wanting him removed from the White House. A big mistake.
A wounded enemy is a very dangerous enemy. Now, it’s Trump’s turn.
Coronavirus Will Whack 2% From Global GDP Growth In Q1: Goldman
While the market today soared to just shy of new all time high amid a return of the “coronavirus is contained” euphoria following unconfirmed speculation overnight that drugs are in the pipeline, the reality is that China, and the world, are at best months away from a lab setting and actual human usage. But while a vaccine will eventually emerge, the more important question for markets is what is the impact on the Chinese and global economy from the coronavirus pandemic which has effectively shut down much of China’s production capacity, crippling supply chains critical to keep not only the second largest economy in the world humming, but the world itself.
In this vein, last week Goldman estimated that the coronavirus outbreak is set to reduce Chinese GDP growth in the first quarter of 2020 by 1.6% in year-over-year terms, or 6.4% in quarter-on-quarter annual rate terms, resulting in a sub-5% GDP Q1 print. However, with Goldman expecting the outbreak to be contained by Q2, it then sees GDP surging and making up for almost all of the Q1 shortfall. Whether or not this is an optimistic take remains to be seen.
What does that Chinese GDP “shock” mean for the rest of the world?
In a follow-up note published this week, Goldman also provides its first preliminary estimate of the impact of this shock on global GDP growth.
According to Goldman’s chief economist Jan Hatzius, the assumed hit to Chinese growth will directly subtract about 1% from global GDP growth in Q1. In addition, spillover effects to the rest of the world will take just under 1% off global growth, for a total hit of nearly 2% in the first quarter. The spillover effects consist of reduced exports to China (worth about 0.3%) and reduced spending by Chinese tourists abroad (worth about 0.6%).
As shown in the next chart, both channels of transmission to the rest of the world have increased greatly in importance since the 2003 SARS epidemic because of the breathtaking growth of the Chinese economy over the past two decades. Exhibit 3 shows that several Asian countries are now particularly exposed to China. As a result, our Asia team has cut its growth forecast in Thailand due to its tourism exposure and has signaled downside risk in Korea and Taiwan due to their trade exposure.
Using these two transmission channels, Goldman then calculates the overall impact on global growth. The next chart shows a hit of about 2% in Q1. Roughly half of that impact reflects the direct effect of weaker growth in China while the other half reflects spillover effects, with effects of about 0.3% from reduced Chinese goods imports and 0.6% from reduced tourist flows.
Why is the hit confined to just the first quarter? Because as Goldman explains, its baseline assumption is that the “aggressive response from the authorities in China and elsewhere will bring the rate of new infections down sharply by the end of Q1.” If so, global economic activity should normalize in subsequent quarters, with positive GDP growth effects of about 1½% in Q2 and ½% in Q3. For the year as a whole, Goldman concludes this would imply a modest hit to annual-average global GDP growth of 0.1-0.2pp but still allow for a slight reacceleration from 3.1% in 2019 to 3¼% in 2020.
What if Goldman’s baseline assumption is too optimistic? Well, in a more severe scenario, the bank’s Asia Economics team assumes that it would take until “sometime in the second quarter for the rate of new infections to peak.” If so, the predicted Q2 recovery would obviously be delayed and the hit to global GDP growth in 2020 would likely rise to about 0.3%, which while modest, would likely be the best case outcome for markets as it would prompt global central banks to engage in more aggressive easing, boosting risk assets around the globe. It also means that the reacceleration of full-year global growth that Goldman now expects to take place in 2020 would likely be delayed until 2021.
Of course, if the epidemic can’t be contained by the end Q2, then the world will have a far bigger problem than what GDP will be in the second half of the year, or any other time in the future for that matter.
With all that said, Hatzius is adamant that the coronavirus outbreak “does not change our baseline view that underlying global growth has bottomed and the next leg is likely to be higher, driven by a reduced drag from the trade war and the past easing in financial conditions.” For this reason, the Goldman economist thinks monetary policy easing in the largest advanced economies is probably behind us, and rate cuts in 2020 will be largely confined to a minority of EM central banks.
That said, with every passing day that China fails to contain the pandemic, the less confident Goldman is, with Hatzius saying that at least “the near-term risks to both our growth and monetary policy views are clearly on the downside until the outbreak is contained.”
As for Goldman’s forecast that there will be no more rate cuts, just remember that in December 2018 Goldman predicted 4 rate hikes in 2019. Instead the Fed went on to cut 3 times, and it didn’t need a global viral pandemic for justification.
Finally, we are curious why Goldman did not account for the crunch that global supply chains are already sustaining: while Chinese tourism and exports are certainly important economic pathways, we wonder what will happen to both vendors and customers of intermediate goods that rely on Chinese factory tolling for output and for downstream products. Or perhaps that will be the topic of a subsequent Goldman report looking at how badly corporate earnings will be hit as the GDP hit impacts the corporate top and bottom line. We eagerly await such a report not only from Goldman but the other banks who have been oddly mute on the topic. Perhaps they are just waiting for the wave of guidance cuts that will inevitably be unleashed in the coming weeks by S&P500 member companies.
What they showed is that the total number of deaths jumped by the biggest daily total since the start of the epidemic, rising by 73 to 563, while the total number of cases on the mainland rose by 3,694, surprisingly a welcome modest decline from the 3,890 increase reported yesterday, which nonetheless brought the total Chinese cases to the highest yet, or 28,018.
And while the slowdown in cases will likely be cheered by the market, we wanted to make two observations.
First, one can’t help but wonder if China is goalseeking either the number of deaths or the number of news cases, because every single day, the death rate has been steady at 2.1% +/- 0.1%. a surprisingly stable relationship.
However what is far more curious is that a secondary data series which is far less popular yet is just as important, the number of people under medical observations, was surprisingly low. In fact, one almost wonders if this number wasn’t fudged. What we mean is that after rising between 15,000 and 22,500 every single day since Jan 27, the number of people under observation rose to just 186,354, which is just 799 cases higher than the day before, which the China National Health Commission represented was 185,555.
Why is this bizarre? The following chart will make it clear. The highlighted box shows that paltry increase in today’s official numbers of people under observation. Needless to say, unless somehow China overnight stopped observing any new cases, this makes no sense.
And just so we are not accused of making up the numbers, here is a screengrab of the official, google translated, National Health Commission website as of Feb 4, 2020…
Which begs the question: did China suddenly succeed in conquering the epidemic, even as virtually every official admits there is no vaccine or drug that can cure the novel Coronavirus, or did someone in China once again get sloppy with the data release, as they did over the weekend via Tencent, and were caught by the Taiwan Times.
Last night’s State of the Union was particularly noteworthy for its showmanship. Scholarships were given away, medals were awarded, families reunited. At a time when national politics is bad theater, President Trump is clearly its most gifted star.
Trump also knows what sells. As a political figure, he’s motivated not by any consistent ideology but rather transactional legislation. Following the performance, an MSNBC pundit noted that the speech was a “microtargeted ad” to various demographics aimed at expanding his base before next year’s election.
Combined with his Super Bowl ads highlighting criminal justice reform, his focus on charter schools and honoring 100-year-old Tuskegee Airman are aimed at eroding away the Democrat’s 90% control of black voters. His cameo by Venezuela opposition leader Juan Guaidó was an appeal to Hispanic families who fled communist regimes – a perhaps a poke at Bernie Sanders. Paid family leave, a policy focus of his daughter, is intended to help him with suburban women.
What doesn’t sell? Fiscal responsibility.
The political equivalent of Crystal Pepsi, the Republican Party has given up its long-standing façade of budgetary restraint. As Donald Trump told donors earlier this year, “Who the hell cares about the budget?”
Of course some people do care, particularly those that understand the real costs of runaway spending. Unfortunately, politics isn’t about the economic literacy of the few, but the prevailing ideology of the masses. As Jeff Deist noted in 2016, the implicit ideology of the American population is much closer to Bernie Sanders than it is than Ludwig von Mises. As such, it should be no surprise that the policies of the country align closer to the “deficits don’t matter” vision of Modern Monetary Theorists than sober analysis of Austrians economists.
Of course, the popularity of political positions cannot shield a society from the consequences of their actions.
A recent CBO forecast now has America on track for a 98% debt-to-GDP ratio by the end of the decade, and that’s with a built in assumption that spending trends won’t significantly increase – a bet I wouldn’t feel comfortable making.
Left out of this measure, of course, are the true costs of the current American government – including unfunded liabilities built into to America’s entitlement system. For example, social security has a projected long-term deficit of over $13 trillion. Medicare adds another $37 trillion. Factor in federal pensions and veterans benefits and the number gets to $122 trillion.
Working in DC’s benefit is that American debt is still treated globally as one of the world’s most secure assets. Global demand for US Treasuries remains strong, and directly subsidizes our leviathan state, even as we simultaneously weaponize it against the rest of the world. While it’s impossible to predict exactly how long this status will continue, history informs us that it would be foolish to assume it will go on forever.
To his credit, Donald Trump seemed to instinctually understand this as a candidate. While running, he was remarkably honest when he talked about the need for American creditors to eventually take haircuts. The self-dubbed “king of debt,” he compared it to his own approach in business:
I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts. And I’ve done very well with debt. Now of course I was swashbuckling, and it did well for me, and it was good for me and all of that. And you know debt was always sort of interesting to me. Now we’re in a different situation with a country, but I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed you could make a deal. And if the economy was good it was good so therefore you can’t lose. It’s like you make a deal before you go into a poker game. And your odds are much better.
While his comments shocked (shocked!) the Very Serious pundits at the time, they reflected a refreshingly honest look at America’s future. As is often the case with Trump, he was attacked by the press for saying aloud the things you are supposed to keep quiet – like his reportedly saying “yeah, but I won’t be here,” when given a briefing on America’s growing debt crisis in 2017.
Of course, while any sort of default from the American government would be a major chaotic event for the global financial system, it’s something we should embrace and prepare for.Peter Klein has noted, “the US can never restructure or even repudiate the national debt — that US Treasuries must always be treated as a unique and magical “risk-free” investment — is wildly speculative at best, preposterous at worst.” Murray Rothbard advocated for the repudiation of the national debt, which he viewed as a “part of the American tradition.”
At the end of the day, however, whether one agrees with the idea of debt default is inconsequential. The political system today is inherently unprepared to tackle this issue. The incentive structures of democracy actively work against restraint and responsibility. So long as the economic profession is dominated by bad economists, and our education system is dedicated towards government indoctrination rather than economic literacy, we will continue to lack the political will to make the difficult choices necessary to get our fiscal house in order.
Luckily, America’s political disorder doesn’t mean American citizens have to unprepared. Awareness of the real problems we face doesn’t require taking the blackpill, it simply means being aware of practical steps we can take as individuals to best prepare for the future.
Just as we can arm ourselves to protect ourselves against inept law enforcement, we can safeguard our wealth outside of the American financial system to protect ourselves against inept fiscal management. Be it gold, silver, Bitcoin, or whatever, the future may very well belong to those who refuse to leave their destiny in the hands of politicians, bureaucrats, and central bankers.
Iran War Was “Closer Than You Thought”, Trump Admits
In what the administration has described as an “off-the-record lunch” on Tuesday, President Trump told television anchors hosted at the White House that war with Iran was “closer than you thought,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
It’s an annual tradition for the president to host television anchors from major networks just ahead of the State of the Union address, which was delivered last night.
The private luncheon marks the first time the president gave candid remarks confirming the US stood very close to entering another major war in the Middle East, which was on the heels of the Jan.3 assassination of IRGC Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani and subsequent Iranian ‘retaliatory strike’ on Jan.8 against a US base in Iraq.
During that time in early January the hashtag WWIII was trending on Twitter, along with countless social media viral memes warning the US stood on the brink of major war with Iran.
In apparent confirmation that the public’s fears were justified, the WSJ describes further of the president’s off-the-cuff comments:
The president’s comment on Iran came after one attendee asked him how close the U.S. came to going to war with Iran earlier this year, after the U.S. killed a top Iranian military commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Iran responded with a missile barrage on Iraqi bases housing U.S. and allied military forces. The Iranian strikes didn’t result in any U.S. deaths.
And further, the report notes:
Mr. Trump didn’t elaborate on why war with Iran was “closer than you thought,” the people said.
During the lunch, the president spoke mostly about conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, who later in the evening received the Presidential Medal of Freedom award during the State of the Union address itself.
He also briefly addressed the controversy over the belatedly rising troop injuries from the Iranian ballistic missile attack on Ain al Asad Air Base, telling anchors he’d seen “worse injuries”.
This is consistent with his previously dismissing reports of scores of US troops suffering from Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) as a result of the missiles’ impact and blasts as but a few mere “headaches”.
Lies are a powerful form of magic; they can mislead large groups of people into making terrible errors, as well as cause them to be blind to the obvious. Lies make people hurt themselves while thinking they are helping themselves. It is a truly dark and horrific act of sorcery.
As the world stands at the edge of a global pandemic event, the people who are immune to the effects of lies have an opportunity to take action should the virus continue to expand beyond the borders of China. We have a small window of time, perhaps a couple of months, in which we can prepare ourselves for the fallout and ensure we are as protected as we can be. This means taking precautions to prevent viral transmission, increasing the strength of our own immune systems, prepping for the loss of supply lines and freight shipments to retailers, organizing family, friends and neighbors for mutual aid and security, as well as preparing for the inevitable government attempts at martial law.
Of course, a person cannot or will not take any of these measures as long as they believe that the virus is not a threat, or they think that the pandemic will have little effect on their daily lives. I have recently seen a discomforting level of propaganda and disinformation agents invading the media and discussion boards related to this issue. Whenever I see such an intense disinformation campaign surrounding an event, this tells me a couple of things:
1) If they are trying to overtly downplay the seriousness of the event while lying about the facts involved, it tells me that the event is a legitimate threat and it will probably get worse as time passes.
2) If they all push the same false narrative and talking points it tells me that this is an organized effort paid for by a larger party with extensive resources.
If the narrative glosses over or hides recently revealed evidence by claiming that the event is “all hype”, then it is designed to create inaction in the public – It is designed to make us apathetic, which means there is a concerted conspiracy to harm us. It is not just an attempt to hide the guilt of the people involved in creating the crisis.
So what are some of the most insidious lies being spread right now on the virus threat? Lets go through a quick list of those I’ve identified so far:
Lie #1: Deaths Caused By The Coronavirus Are Nothing Compared To The Death Rate Of The Average Flu…
This lie seems to be the most common being used to plant seeds of apathy in the public consciousness right now. I have even heard people on the street regurgitate it verbatim as they try to convince themselves that all is well. But even using official numbers, which are likely false and greatly reduced, the argument is simply wrong on every level.
There is a big difference between “number of deaths” and the actual “death rate” of a virus. The flu infects tens of millions of people annually around the world with deaths in the US numbering usually under 10,000. In the US in the 2019-2020 season so far, the flu infected over 9 million people resulting in 4800 deaths; meaning the death rate of the flu is minor compared to the number of sick. Flu deaths are usually collated over the course of a year, yet people are already trying to compare death rates to the coronavirus, which has only been active for a few weeks.
Keep in mind also that the CDC has been called out for greatly inflating influenza death rates in order to push vaccine propaganda. They consistently attach flu death numbers with pneumonia deaths; which I would point is is the exact OPPOSITE of what the Chinese are doing with the coronavirus numbers.
The coronavirus has been active for about a month in China, it has a hibernation of around two weeks, and, China has been lying extensively about the number of deaths associated with the disease by labeling most deaths due to pneumonia. We truly have no idea what the potential death rate of this illness is. What we do know is that it behaves much like SARS, which had a death rate of around 11%. According to official numbers the coronavirus transmits faster and has already killed more people in a few weeks than SARS did in over a year.
The notion that the virus only kills the elderly is also incorrect. The two deaths now confirmed outside of China were both men in their 30’s and 40’s.
When considering the issue of viral death rate, we have to take into account the capacity of local medical facilities in handling patient load. If hospitals are only handling a few cases at a time, then the patients will get better overall treatment and less deaths will occur. But, if hospitals are overwhelmed with thousands of cases at a time, as is happening in China, then treatment quality will go down and many more people will die. A minimal death rate outside of China today does not mean a minimal death rate tomorrow should the virus spread beyond hospital capacity.
With the flu, people can usually treat themselves with ease at home; the coronavirus is obviously much more dangerous. No country in modern times has EVER quarantined over 50 million people in 16 cities because of the average flu. The comparison between the coronavirus and the flu is patently ridiculous. There is no comparison. The coronavirus is on another level entirely.
Lie #2: The Coronavirus Came From An Animal Market And The Claim It Is Engineered Is A “Conspiracy Theory”…
The phrase “conspiracy theory” is usually exploited as a way to dismiss facts and evidence without consideration on the basis that the official story is the only story that has any validity. In other words, the official story requires no justification because the authorities are infallible and always have our best interests at heart.
The problem is, governments and the mainstream media have been caught lying over and over again about issues far less important than a global pandemic, so I’m not sure why we should trust ANYTHING they say ever. There is considerable evidence that China has been lying incessantly about the number of sick and dead due to the coronavirus, including leaked accounts from medics and other people at ground zero in Wuhan. These people are now being silenced by the Chinese government. In fact, the Chinese government was suppressing coverage and information on the coronavirus from the very beginning of the contagion, which helped allow it to spread unchecked.
Now, social media companies are taking action to remove people who try to document the facts of the virus and its potential source in the name of “stopping fake news”. Anyone who questions the official narrative is not only a “conspiracy theorist” but also a “danger” to the public. This narrative is supported by US government officials:
“These lies can cause immediate and tangible harm to people, and the platforms must act to stop them from spreading,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) said in a statement to The Hill. “It’s critical that Americans receive verified, trustworthy information about the coronavirus and heed the advice of our country’s public health officials as we learn more about its potential impact here at home…”
The facts are the facts, and if the facts suggest a conspiracy, then so be it. Only 20 miles away from the market in question stands the LARGEST Level 4 Biohazard Lab in Asia, which studies directly into the world’s deadliest pathogens including SARS and coronavirus. In 2017, experts warned that a virus could escape the labs in Wuhan because of lax containment standards. To put this in perspective, it would be like an Ebola outbreak striking the city of Atlanta and then blamed on a food market only 20 miles from the CDC. It looks suspicious…
Last year, Chinese researchers were dismissed from a Level 4 lab in Winnipeg, Canada without public explanation, but the same lab was exposed last year for sharing deadly virus samples with China, including Ebola and henipavirus. One of the Chinese researchers work focus was the SARS virus. Media and government attention in Canada at the time of the scandal was on concerns that the lab in Winnipeg was supplying viral samples that would be used in China’s biowarfare programs.
According to a paper published by virologists in India, the coronavirus genetic code also contains proteins that are exactly like those found in HIV. Interestingly, coronavirus patients have been shown to respond positively to drugs that are meant to treat HIV and AIDS carriers. Through official pressure the paper has now been retracted and the authors have said they will “revise it”. But, the whole point of peer review is for the data to be examined by others in the field and then proven or disproven. If the data can be reproduced, then it needs to be taken seriously.
This is not what the CDC and other official institutions on disease study want. They seem intent on dismissing any information outright that suggests the coronavirus might have been made in a lab rather than in nature.
If true, the chances of coronavirus containing protein combinations identical to HIV in nature are astronomical, meaning, the virus was engineered. If the virus is proven to be engineered, then this makes future narratives and propaganda harder to implement. For example, it will be much harder to blame the pandemic on “global warming” if the virus was created by a bunch of guys in lab coats rather than in nature.
To repeat the facts, Wuhan is a hub for China’s largest biohazard labs and these labs are suspected by biological warfare experts of being involved in bioweapons testing. Until there is more independent examination of the virus (the original strain before mutation), no one knows for certain what the source is.
The mainstream media has been very aggressive in denying any links to bioweaponry, claiming that there “is no evidence” linking Wuhan’s labs to the virus; yet, there is FAR MORE evidence of the involvement of the biohazard labs than there is evidence proving that the virus originated an animal market. They have simply decided that the animal market story is the tale they prefer, and so it has become the official story.
Lie #3: The Virus Won’t Have Any Effect On America
The general thrust of the mainstream view of the coronavirus has been to assert that the US will not be affected and that concerns are “overblown”. The UN’s World Health Organization continues to refuse to take the event very seriously, and even Larry Kudlow, Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council, claims the damage to the US economy will be ‘minimal’.
Now, firstly I have to say I would take the economic analysis of a long time cocaine addict with a grain of salt. This is the same guy who was wildly incorrect in all his calls on the housing bubble in 2005-2006, and yet he is now advising the White House on financial crisis events? But lets set the incompetence of Kudlow aside for a moment and consider that perhaps he is just reading from a script prepared for him by others. Certainly, there are a lot of people out there that would like to keep the public ignorant of the depth of the situation, and they will give all sorts of half-assed rationales as to why they lie.
For the Chinese authorities, the pandemic is an undeniable fact of life, but they will say their economy and global image required the truth to be “tempered” to prevent civil unrest and to stop investors pulling from their money out of Chinese markets en masse.
For US authorities who waited far too long to start shutting down flights from China carrying multiple infected, the claim will be that they had to lie to prevent general panic and market panic.
For the UN’s World Health Organization that lied about China “containment” and actually downplayed the danger of travel to China for a time while the virus was raging and human-to-human transmission was confirmed, I see no excuse really. Their behavior, and the behavior of the US and Chinese governments makes me suspect that they WANT the pandemic to spread.
As I write this the 11th confirmed case of coronavirus has been identified in the US with many more suspected cases still under observation. Obviously, the virus is here already, but the issue of how much it will affect Americans is being diminished or buried in an endless stream of propaganda.
Given enough time, a viral outbreak that spreads as fast as the coronavirus with a death rate of 5% or more is going to cause negative effects in every facet of the US economy. But in our current window of the progression of the pandemic, I think it’s important to point out that even if the death rate is low in the US, there is no escaping the economic consequences attached to this event.
The US economy is interdependent with multiple nations, and is tightly connected to China. The greatest danger of globalism in terms of economics is that it forces national economies into losing the redundancies that protect them from systemic collapse. When one major economy goes down, it brings down all other economies with it.
Not only that, but the US financial structure is precariously unstable anyway, with record levels of national debt, consumer debt and corporate debt, not to mention steep declines in manufacturing and demand. The US sits atop one of the most massive economic bubbles of all time – The Everything Bubble, created by the Federal Reserve over ten years of stimulus measures, barely keeping the system alive in a state of zombification.
The bubble was always going to collapse. In fact, recent events in Fed repo markets suggest it was already collapsing. The coronavirus outbreak is a perfect cover event for this implosion. To understand why a collapse event might be preferred by a certain minority of people within the elitist establishment, read my last article ‘How Viral Pandemic Benefits The Globalist Agenda’.
As I have argued for the past couple of years, all that is needed to bring down the US economy is one major trigger event. The idea that a global pandemic would not damage the American system already teetering on the edge of the abyss is simply absurd. This event has the capacity to cause crisis around the world, not just in China.
Lie #4: The Virus Is Contained
You are going to hear this lie often in the next month or two. I’ve heard it several times already from Chinese and US authorities in the past few weeks, and clearly their definition of the word “contained” must be different from mine.
China’s official sickness count and death toll rises exponentially by the day, and this is not accounting for the number of sick and dead they are hiding. Over 50 million people are now in forced quarantine and martial law measures have been implemented. Hong Kong’s hopes of containment have been dashed and officials now expect the outbreak to grow worse in the region.
Japan just announced that a man carrying the virus boarded a cruise liner and then departed, infecting at least ten people in the process and forcing the ship into quarantine for the next two weeks.
A woman in Santa Clara, California carrying the virus came back from China and had been in the US for around 10 DAYS before the illness was identified. Meaning, every single person she came in contact with in that time is now a potential carrier, and for the next two weeks they won’t know they are contagious. These are just a few examples of why it is foolish to write off this situation as “contained”; you cannot contain what you cannot identify.
The disinformation campaign seems designed to hide the true source of the virus, but also to keep the masses lethargic and inactive. We are meant to sit and wait while the virus and the potential economic catastrophe runs us over. Do not fall for the con; prepare accordingly, and never accept what lying governments and mainstream media outlets tell you as the whole truth. It is better to take precautions you might not need than to be found very stupid and desperate down the road because the “experts” told you it was all hype.
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Anyone familiar with the Bible is familiar with the Mark of the Beast: Without this mark, no man may buy or sell.
Regardless of one’s religious faith or lack thereof, there is an illustrative case in this biblical story: When one cannot buy or sell, one is metaphorically up the creek. Short of producing everything one needs oneself, buying and selling are necessary parts of virtually every modern person’s life.
In our modern world, we can begin to see a sort of Mark of the Beast: While ideas and even objects aren’t banned, they are increasingly difficult to come by, not due to government fiat, but due to the machinations of corporations hostile to the American values of freedom.
One can be in favor of the free market while recognizing a simple truth: There is no way that America’s Founding Fathers would have sat on their hands while five corporations dominated American discourse and commerce. It is hard to imagine, for example, the Founders suffering a single private bank processing most of the payments in the United States and refusing to do business with gun merchants. Alternately, one can scarcely imagine that the Founders would have sat still for three companies – all of them hostile toward American values and the Constitution – dominating political discourse and deplatforming anyone who opposed them.
This is the situation in which we find ourselves as a nation today: Guns are not illegal, but private companies will make it increasingly difficult to buy, sell or own them – up to and including pulling your bank account. You have all the freedom of speech you like, but prepare to be deplatformed or have your voice buried by large tech corporations with their thumb on the scale of American discourse.
As the American economy has become more corporatist – such that the market is controlled by the interrelation between monolithic mega-corporations, Wall Street and the state – and less capitalistic and dynamic, the American press and economy are now being dominated by forces hostile toward the American public and American values.
No less an authority than James Madison warned Americans that the First Amendment alone was not enough to protect free speech. In Federalist No. 47 and Federalist No. 51, he argued that the separation of powers was necessary to protect free speech by preventing one branch of government from accumulating too much power at the expense of the others and, indeed, the rest of society at large.
This is an important point to remember when considering the First Amendment implications of Big Tech and its war on free speech and gun freedom. The Founding Fathers did not live in a world where a few large corporations had more power than the (incredibly limited and power impoverished) government had, either at the federal or the state level. It’s doubtful that they could have conceived of such a thing.
But they did carefully consider the problem of centralized power as it pertained to the rights enshrined in the Constitution. At the end of the day, the Constitution is just a piece of paper with no ability to enforce itself. What’s more, if the Founders did not address the notion that the private sector could meaningfully and substantially circumvent rights for all Americans, it was simply
Corporate Big Brother: Banks as Gun Control
Who needs to pass gun control laws anymore? The left can simply appeal to payment systems, banks and processors as a method of non-state gun control.
Case in point: Andrew Ross Sorkin’s December 2018 article decrying credit card companies for “financing” mass shootings. As with many arguments from the left, the premise is flawed, but very simple: Because eight out of 13 shootings that killed more than 10 people in the 2010s involved a credit card purchase (though, as always, it is worth asking what counts as a mass shooting and what is being left out of the tally – more on this here), credit card companies have a responsibility to step up and stop allowing their customers to make purchases for firearms using credit cards.
This effectively amounts to a request for banks to begin surveilling the legal economic activity of their customers.
It’s not far-fetched to consider that some mass shootings have been facilitated by credit card purchases. The Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen as well as Aurora theater shooter James Holmes used credit cards to purchase the weapons and ammunition they ultimately used to commit mass murder.
But mass shootings, particularly those not part of urban gang warfare, are incredibly rare, despite the overwhelming amount of media attention paid to them. What’s more, while statistics for such would be difficult to formulate, the vast, overwhelming majority of firearms and ammunition purchases made with credit cards are made by law-abiding citizens for entirely legal purposes. For most Americans, firearms purchases can be a spike in their normal spending for the month. And what of it? The call for credit card companies and other payment processors to monitor the economic activity of law-abiding citizens would cause an outrage if the government were to do it, so why is the American public supposed to sit still for an invasion of their privacy simply because a private company is performing the surveillance?
Anyone who has ever made a firearms purchase knows that the bill can add up quickly. The oft-demonized AR-15 can easily top $4,000 when the price of a scope, rifle case and a decent cache of ammunition are added to the bill. Even a humble handgun purchase can quickly hit over $1,000 when a good holster and ammo are tacked on. This means that millions of Americans purchasing firearms for no reason other than recreation or self defense are going to have their personal finances investigated by a corporate Big Brother, with all the lack of transparency one can expect from a massive bank whose starting premise is “guilty until proven innocent.”
The attempt by the left to get banks to snoop on legal purchases amounts to nothing more than the stigmatization of the exercise of one of the rights enshrined in our Constitution. And while some would argue that the Constitution only limits the government’s actions, it must constantly be asked why we should allow for such an intrusion into our private lives simply because a private company is doing it.
“If you don’t like it, just make your own credit card company.”
Hardly.
Corporate Gun Control and the Mark of the Beast
After the Parkland Shooting, the American media entered into another round of its “something must be done” (read as: your guns must be taken away) propaganda. One result of this was some of the biggest banks in the United States dropping or scaling back their relations with gun manufacturers.
Bank of America stopped short at stigmatizing the retailers who sell such weapons. Citigroup, however, took the step of requiring any of its business partners to restrict firearms sales to those over the age of 21, as well as those who have not passed a background check. They also barred their partners from selling so-called “high capacity magazines” and bump stocks, which were later banned.
Amalgamated Bank went perhaps the furthest of all, refusing to invest any of its assets in companies involved in the manufacture of “firearms, weaponry and ammunition.”
This leads into another aspect of corporate gun control: Not only is the left demanding that big banks snoop around in your legal purchases, the banks are also starting to make it more difficult for gun manufacturers to obtain the financial services banks would never dare to deny to any other law-abiding company simply on the basis of what they sell.
There is, of course, consumer push-back. For example, the somewhat successful boycott of Dick’s Sporting Goods after it ceased selling so-called “assault weapons.” But Dick’s is still in business and still not selling scary black rifles. And while you can do your business with a competitor, it still doesn’t change the fact that the message has been sent: Companies can remove legal items from their shelves in a politicized fashion with virtually no meaningful consequences.
There is also the growing specter of private companies banning customers from carrying in their stores. Huffington Post compiled a list of seven companies who do not want legal firearms being carried in their businesses. Outback Steakhouse was at the center of a story where a law enforcement officer was asked to leave because he was carrying, something that he is required to do when he is in uniform. Salesforce, a popular software platform for online retailers, will no longer do business with companies who sell virtually all forms of semi-automatic weapons.
Microsoft has put language in its Code of Conduct that prevents users from using them “in any way that promotes or facilitates the sale of ammunition and firearms.” This is another sweeping example of corporate attempts to infringe upon America’s Second Amendment rights. There is nothing illegal or immoral about owning, selling or promoting firearms. Indeed, the right to keep and bear arms is enshrined in the Second Amendment.
This is a form of corporate coercion that shows the limitations of simply relying upon the Constitution and the free market to ensure one’s rights are respected. It’s hard to imagine that the Founders would simply have thrown up their hands and accepted that corporations were making it impossible for them to exercise their rights simply because there was nothing “unconstitutional” about it.
Beyond this, however, there are two rather frightening developments.
The first is several liberal state governments skinning the cat from the other end. Rather than making it difficult or impossible to purchase firearms, they are going after the National Rifle Association. While many well-meaning people in the Second Amendment movement consider the NRA to be weak tea (and not without good reason), the fact remains that the NRA is the most public and prominent opponent of gun grabbers. The fall of the NRA at the hands of gun grabbers (as opposed to more principled pro-Second Amendment groups) would spell disaster for gun rights in America, setting a precedent that would be used against other organizations protecting gun freedom.
The State of New York, led by Andrew Cuomo, has started attacking insurance programs offered by the NRA to its members. He has also attempted to threaten every insurer and bank in the state to not do business with the NRA. It is important to remember that the banking industry is largely centered in New York, meaning that the governor of that state has an outsized influence on how banking is done across the nation.
Another chilling example of corporate coercion goes beyond the Second Amendment and into the First: Popular veteran rights and gun blog “No Lawyers, Only Guns and Money” was removed from Blogger, a blogging platform owned by Google, on the grounds that it “promoted or sold regulated items.” The website was later restored with the explanation that it was removed by an automated system.
PayPal, the biggest payment processing system on the Internet, cannot be used for any exercise of your Second Amendment rights, nor to pay for dissident thinkers’ services such as Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones or even Wikileaks. One is not obligated to support or defend the beliefs of any of these people or groups to see that a dangerous precedent is being set.
However, these are neither the first nor the only times that Big Tech has attempted to censor conservatives, libertarians, pro-gun freedom forces and others with opinions to the right of John McCain. Some have argued, not without solid evidence, that Big Tech is involved in a full-throttle war against conservatives and free speech on the Internet. We’re inclined to agree.
Big Tech’s War on Free Speech
There is a war against free speech and Big Tech is the one waging it. Congress has looked into this, with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas leading the charge, not allowing Facebook and other Big Tech companies to weasel out of answering hard questions that the public has about censorship on the Internet.
It’s less true to say that Facebook, Google and other Big Tech platforms “lean left” than it is to say that they push a globalist, neoliberal, corporatist line that eschews any sort of values or ethics other than growth. Edward Abbey has said that the philosophy of growth for the sake of growth is also the philosophy of the cancer cell.
The Big Tech war against free speech is nothing new and there have been canaries in the coal mine for years. Everyone remembers MILO being shown the door on Twitter for a dubious accusation that he led a mob against actress Leslie Jones. But the real test case was not him, it was hacker and troll Andrew Auernheimer, commonly known by his handle “weev.”
weev (always lowercase) is difficult to defend because he has unpopular viewpoints. To wit, he has a large swastika tattooed on his chest. However, proponents of the First Amendment and free speech shouldn’t be concerned with what weev thinks or says, because what he thinks or says is irrelevant to whether or not he has the right to think it and say it. But Twitter and other Big Tech platforms were smart in choosing such an ideological pariah to test the waters.
There is a direct line to be drawn from the deplatforming of weev on Twitter to the unpersoning of Alex Jones to the shadow banning and outright deplatforming of conservative voices all across the web. Mainstream, establishment conservatives have done themselves a disservice by attempting to defend themselves against deplatforming on the basis that “I’m not a Nazi” for two reasons.
First, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Nazi or not. All legal speech should be allowed on social media, or else Big Tech is an editorial content curator, which makes it liable for anything that is posted on there. This means that your ex-spouse lying about how you missed Little Timmy’s baseball game on Facebook can be construed as defamation, for which Facebook is liable because they didn’t remove the status update. Facebook’s pretense that it is a content-neutral platform, a claim that is patently false, is what protects it from being sued every time someone lies about someone else on the platform or from being hauled into court every time that ISIS uses WhatsApp to coordinate an attack.
But the other reason is that for many on the left, there is not a tangible difference between weev, MILO, Alex Jones, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Wayne LaPierre, Ted Cruz, Ben Sharpiro or the President of the United States. Anyone to the right of John McCain is seen as either a literal fascist, a fascist apologist, or a gatekeeper who opens the door to fascist ideology.
Big Tech will not stop at deplatforming actual, self-avowed fascists, nor will it stop at conspiracy theorists, edgy conservatives, or even “respectable” centrist types like Dave Rubin. To throw the far right under the bus in the hopes of satisfying Big Tech’s blood lust is a strategic mistake – it legitimizes the entire process of deplatforming, which will eventually swallow up anyone who believes in the Constitution and the rule of law. Big Tech and the left either see no difference between you and a Nazi, or pretend not to because it’s politically expedient.
This is doubly important because of how many Big Tech companies are actively spying on their users. The EFF maintains an annual detailed list of who is telling the government about its users and their data, who informs users that the government is sniffing around about them, and who even bothers to disclose their data retention policies.
What this means is that if and when the federal government begins compiling a list of “potential right-wing terrorists” or “right-wing extremists” (to the extent that they do not already maintain such lists), they will have a ready-made mine of data from Big Tech, who have shown themselves to be more than willing to cooperate with the federal government, with minimal or no arm-twisting on the part of the feds. Take, for example, the Philadelphia synagogue shooter. Self-proclaimed “free speech” platform Gab was more than willing to hand over all the data they had about his account to the feds without even being asked.
Sure, no one wants to be in the position of defending a synagogue shooter. But the point is that these platforms, even the ones who allegedly have your back, have shown themselves willing to roll on their users provided enough of a fever is whipped up in the press.
Conservatives Censored on Social Media
It’s worth showing just how many mainstream, run-of-the-mill conservatives have been censored by Big Tech – it’s not just the MILOs and the weevs of the world who are being shown the door. Indeed, we believe that these types are censored not out of any actual desire to suppress so-called “hate speech,” but instead to act as a test case for setting the precedent for suppressing legal speech. Here are some examples that are worth considering:
Pastor Rich Penkoski: This pastor runs a popular Facebook page, “Warriors for Christ.” He was suspended mid-sermon for criticizing the rainbow flag. He was previously banned for calling an atheist a liar and sharing verses from the Quran that called for the killing of non-Muslims.
Over Two Dozen Catholic Pages: In July 2017, Facebook banned several Catholic pages with millions of followers. Most were based in Brazil. Facebook removed the pages without explanation.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn: Not even elected officials are immune from social media deplatforming. Facebook removed an ad for Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn’s campaign that attacked pro-abortion group Planned Parenthood.
Alveda King: Facebook removed paid ads from Martin Luther King’s niece Alveda King for her documentary on Roe v. Wade.
Ryan T. Anderson: Twitter refused to run several ads from Christian radio stations for an upcoming interview with Ryan T. Anderson. Anderson is a critic of transgenderism and radical gender ideology.
Robert Spencer: The head of JihadWatch.org, a website covering radical Islam, was removed from social media and even had his credit cards canceled. He also claims that Google buries him in results for searches about “jihad.”
Brian Fisher: The President of the Human Coalition notes that this anti-abortion group has had prayer apps removed from the Apple store and has had its content repeatedly removed from Twitter despite taking pains to ensure that all of it is within Twitter’s narrow, anti-First Amendment guidelines.
PragerU: PragerU is very much the picture of mainstream, run-of-the-mill, completely non-edgy conservatism on the Internet. Despite this, they repeatedly have their content removed from YouTube. Dennis Prager, head of PragerU, is suing YouTube. He notes that Delta Air Lines couldn’t say “conservatives can’t fly with us,” but YouTube, ostensibly a neutral platform, is effectively allowed to say that conservatives can’t use their services.
David Kyle Foster: David Kyle Foster is a leader in the “ex-gay” movement, a group of Christians who claim that their religion has “cured” their homosexuality. His Vimeo channel, featuring over 700 personal testimonials, was pulled from Vimeo for being “hateful.”
Even the Declaration of Independence has been removed from Facebook as “hate speech” due to their “filtering program.” Yes, really. Nor is it only conservative groups who have been targeted. Moderates and leftists who don’t toe the party line – like Andy Ngo, Tim Pool and Michael Tracey – have likewise been targeted by deplatforming and shadowbanning.
Deplatforming is not limited to social media.Chase Bank has been accused of depriving conservative voices of banking services. This returns us to the Mark of the Beast notion: What good is free speech if banks – banks – can keep you from receiving payments. And how far off are we from seeing conservative voices deprived of their ability to pay?
Imagine showing up at the grocery store and finding out that your money’s no good because you have a concealed carry permit. Sound far-fetched? So would have having your bank account closed for being a conservative activist.
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? i.e., Who Watches the Watchers?
Of course, it’s important to ask for a list of left-wing groups who have been banned from social media. But somehow, left-wing groups – even those who violate the terms of service, such as several accounts dedicated to doxing right-wing accounts and inciting violence against conservatives, libertarians and others on the right – are allowed to operate with impunity.
Indeed, it is worth asking who decides what is against the rules at Facebook, Twitter, etc. There is an answer to this question:
For Twitter, it’s a “Trust and Safety Council” comprised of 12 left-wing groups and one conservative group you’ve probably never heard of: The Network of Enlightened Women. The 12 left-wing groups include the Anti-Defamation League and GLAAD, both of whom have labeled mainstream conservative groups as “hate groups.”
For Facebook, they rely upon a “fact-checking” process that leverages Snopes and PolitiFact as impartial “fact checkers.”
YouTube uses the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, both left-wing groups known for their attacks on mainstream conservative organizations. Facebook, for its part, deleted 57 of over 200 “hate groups” demanded by the SPLC in August 2017.
What Is To Be Done?
The question after reading this becomes: What should be done, if anything?
It’s difficult to imagine a situation where government interference in Big Tech is going to have the desired outcome. The result might be more and greater censorship than existed before. However, it is worth noting that Sen. Ted Cruz, not exactly known as a proponent of Big Government, has been at the forefront of attempts to hold Big Tech accountable for its censorship of conservative voices on the Internet.
But it’s quite possible that new laws and regulations are not required. What is instead required is a more rigorous enforcement of the laws and regulations that are already on the books. To wit: Are Facebook, Twitter and YouTube content-neutral platforms or are they editorial platforms? If the former, then it would seem that their case for being able to censor legal speech on their platforms is legally flimsy. If the latter, then they are responsible for everything posted on their platforms by every user. Similarly, if Google is intentionally manipulating its results to yield a politicized result, that is likely in violation of existing telecommunications statutes.
The American shift from capitalism to corporatism has had dire unintended consequences: Power has coalesced in both Washington, D.C. and many tech and media companies, such that the latter can undermine American rights and manipulate American political opinion with impunity, while the former abdicates its oath to defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.
Trump Ups Nuclear Ante With ‘Mini-Nukes’ Deployed On Subs To “Deter Russia”
The United States has added a ‘low yield’ nuclear weapon to its submarine arsenal in a controversial first in decades, after the Trump administration called for its deployment as part of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review in order to “deter Russia”.
“Moscow, the argument goes, might have miscalculated that the United States was unwilling to use its nuclear weapons in response to a Russian low-yield nuclear strike because the existing U.S. weapons were too powerful,” The Hill reports.
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood acknowledged in a statement that “The U.S. Navy has fielded the W76-2 low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) warhead.”
“This supplemental capability strengthens deterrence and provides the United States a prompt, more survivable low-yield strategic weapon; supports our commitment to extended deterrence; and demonstrates to potential adversaries that there is no advantage to limited nuclear employment because the United States can credibly and decisively respond to any threat scenario,” he added.
Some Congressional Democrats have argued that the warhead, which is less powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, alarmingly lowers the threshold whereby the US would be willing the deploy a nuclear warhead against an enemy. Critics also see that the W76-2 is redundant given the current arsenal of lower-yield air-launched nuclear weapons.
The Pentagon, however, says such a deterrent which is not as powerful as America’s standard nukes but still has major destructive capability nonetheless, is crucial for dissuading enemies like Russia from engaging in limited nuclear conflict. US officials have underscored that such weapons will only be used in “extraordinary circumstances”. Advocates in the administration have also said the W76-2 launched from a submarine can more reliably penetrate air defenses compared to the more usual airplane launch.
Rood explained further in his statement: “In the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, the department identified the requirement to ‘modify a small number of submarine-launched ballistic missile warheads’ to address the conclusion that potential adversaries, like Russia, believe that employment of low-yield nuclear weapons will give them an advantage over the United States and its allies and partners,” according to The Hill.
Ohio-class submarine file image, via the National Review.
Experts generally cited in multiple media reports suggest the ‘low-yield’ nukes’ destructive power may be about 5-kilotons, which is about one-third the power of the bomb dropped in Hiroshima, Japan at the end of WWII.
The Federation of American Scientists first reported last week they believe the W76-2 to currently be on the USS Tennessee Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, which has been patrolling the Atlantic Ocean since the close of 2019. It’s believed to have been fitted atop Trident ballistic missiles on other among the Navy’s Ohio-class submarines as well.
A years-long push by activists has also sought to prevent broader deployment of low yield nukes in America’s arsenal. They see it as a dramatic step which makes nuclear escalation more likely and rapid.
Co-founder of a nuclear arms reduction group named Global Zero, Bruce Blair, himself a former Air Force nuclear weapons officer, said, “But we must not delude ourselves into thinking lower-yield nukes are more usable in a conflict,” because it remains that “Any use of this sea-based weapon – either first or second – will risk stoking the flames of conflict and escalating to all-out nuclear war.”
“A wiser response to an enemy’s use of one or two low-yield nukes would be to refrain from nuclear escalation while unleashing America’s ferocious and decisive conventional juggernaut,” Blair added.
Following one of the most childish tantrums of denial ever recorded, Democrats set about destroying the Trump presidency in its crib; a WaPo headline from January 20, 2017 – Inauguration Day itself – exclaimed “The Campaign to Impeach President Trump has Begun.” The opening gambit was going to be Emoluments, including rent paid by the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China for its space in Trump Tower in New York.
After three years, it looks like that attempt finally reached its end game, failure, one gray afternoon. On Friday the Senate brought impeachment proceedings to their effective conclusion, declaring the witnesses already called before the House were to be the last. The formal vote to acquit Trump is scheduled as an anti-climax for Wednesday.
It has been ugly and mean. Using the entire apparatus of the American intelligence community, operating fully outside the law, Democrats declared the President of the United States a Russian spy. They forced gentlemen to explain to their elderly mothers what a pee tape was. We had to hear over dinner about Trump’s sexual peccadilloes and look deeper into Stormy Daniel’s cleavage than our own political souls. They made expedient heroes out of small, dishonest men like Michael Avenatti, John Brennan, and James Comey for perceived political gain.
Shame on you, Democrats.
When Russiagate collapsed they plunged deeper, with a setup “crime” driven by a faux whistleblower, supported by State Department gossips and not much more. Look at the series of plays attempted within this Hail Mary of a Hail Mary. Back in August the manufactured worry was that Trump—by messing with Ukrainian aid—was a threat to national security that would send the Red Army rolling west. Then there was the continued attempt to link up two created memes—Trump’s help from the Russians in 2016 and Trump’s help from the Ukrainians in 2020 as part of some whole to damage democracy. At the end it was to be about how not allowing additional witnesses chosen by leaks to the NYT would distort the 2020 election. One reporter called acquittal “the worst day for America since the Civil War.” We had to listen to another round of democracy dying, existential threats, end of the Republic, as repetitive as summer Top 40.
The House chose not to wait out a special prosecutor, or even subpoena witnesses back in the fall. The cries today about no witnesses in fact ignores how the House called 17 witnesses in their own impeachment, not a single one of which had first-hand knowledge of the events unless we were willing to believe some State Department Obama fan-boy magically overheard both sides of a cell phone conversation. If they had a real case a special prosecutor could have sorted through Parnas and Hunter and Bolton, with subpoenas if necessary, and warrants could have shown us exactly what was said in those calls. But that would have come up weaker than Mueller and the Democrats knew it.
You don’t think voters see they were played — again? As with Brett Kavanaugh, when things seemed darkest, the Democrats produced a witness that appeared to turn everything around. Back then Christine Blasey Ford was the deus ex machina. Same with John Bolton and his “manuscript” (shall we call it a dossier?) and instead of dealing with it months ago in a calm fashion, The New York Times drops the leak right into the middle of the impeachment punch bowl so it could create its own sense of urgency saying we can’t wait for thoughtful deliberation or even a court ruling, we must do something right away.
So really, in the end this game-changer was supposed to be lifelong conservative John Bolton ratting out a Republican administration? That was how you were going to get Trump? Only a week earlier it was going to be Ukrainian grifter Lev Parnas. Before him was it “fixer” Michael Cohen, or Paul “Fredo” Manafort, who was going to flip? Was it taxes or the 25th Amendment which was once upon a time going to be the final blow?
Do you think voters won’t remember it was Adam Schiff who failed in Russiagate, issuing his infamous Schiff Memo defending as legal the FISA court surveillance of Carter Page now shown to be unconstitutional? The same Schiff who worked with the “whistleblower” to shape the impeachment narrative and then buried the whistleblower from scrutiny? History will remember Schiff poorly, and judge those who put their party’s future in his dirty hands, Nancy, equally poorly.
As it will Elizabeth Warren, who submitted a “question” at the impeachment proceedings which asked if the proceedings themselves “contribute to the loss of legitimacy of the chief justice, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution?” Nancy Pelosi picked up the theme saying the president will not be exonerated after the Senate acquits because “You cannot be acquitted if you don’t have a trial. And you don’t have a trial if you don’t have witnesses and documentation,” echoing the insanity of saying a victory in the Electoral College isn’t really being elected president. Do Democrats think the Super Bowl victory went to the team with the most yards rushing, or the one with the most points scored?
Impeachment failed in the Senate, ultimately, because it was phony. Senators are politicians, with their noses always in the wind. They sniffed not a modicum of support for this impeachment, and saw nothing akin to the evidence that would encourage them to return to their constituents and explain their contrary votes as they did confronted, overwhelmingly, with Nixon’s wrongdoings.
It’s really over now. Our democracy, which you regularly declare so in peril, will be forced to hold an election of all things to determine its next president.
Democrats, you led your supporters off a cliff. While you create false excuses for losing in 2016, they watched Republicans confirm judge after judge. As they listened in their sleep to you bark about diversity, they woke up to see mostly a handful of old, white men to lead the party into the election.
You lied to them repeatedly about Russia and Ukraine and what a danger Trump is. You continue to try to convince people a strong economy is an illusion and cheer on a recession. You continue to paint an inaccurate picture of a society with gun nuts, Nazis, and white supremacists on the march. You convinced a generation of young voters they are fundamentally unhappy, awash in racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and when they just can’t see it the way you do, you corrupted movies and TV with dorm room level political piety to insist that is how it is out there.
Now, instead of respecting one another at work and school, they tip-toe around as wanna-be defendants looking for targets to sue or complain to HR about. Describe yourself in one word? Offended.
Would you trust the nation to the people the Democratic party has become? Because that is the question Democrats have thrust into the minds of voters. As they have said many times, this was always more about America than it was about Trump.
Another legendary financier (and ex-con) Michael Milken, who has reinvented himself as a major philanthropist over the last three decades, took to the commentary pages of the Wall Street Journal on Monday (ironically, the paper with which Dalio is feuding) to rail against America’s ertswhile paper of record, the New York Times.
During the editorial, Milken asserts that the New York Times essentially libeled him in a story published late last year, rendering him collateral damage in the Grey Lady’s war on President Trump’s ‘opportunity zones’ initiative that was passed as part of the 2017 tax reform plan.
The NYT newsroom, as Milken correctly asserts in his editorial, has adopted a stance that’s clearly hostile to the policy, which offers incentives for private capital to invest in economically-adverse communities (instead of the direct government assistance often favored by liberals like the editors of the NYT).
At some point, the paper figured out that it could “conjure a news story virtually out of thin air” if it could link Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin with investors in a tract of land impacted by the ‘opportunity zones’ program.
Basically, investors in property within an opportunity zone can receive valuable tax benefits for development that might have already been in the works, or at least that’s how the NYT has chosen to spin it.
The policy is obviously intended to incentivize developers to build things like affordable housing by making it easier for them to do so profitably (typically, by offering the tax breaks mentioned above). But the NYT claims the program is essentially a giveaway to big developers and friends of the administration, despite not having any evidence linking boogeymen like Milken to insiders like Mnuchin.
Basically, the only fact in this story is that Milken is an investor in a tract of land covered by an opportunity zone in California. As Milken notes, many other much more high-profile investors are also involved (many of them tech giants like Microsoft). These companies spend billions on lobbying every year. Yet, Milken gets the blame for influencing the legislation to his benefit, via a tenuous connection to Mnuchin. The only vaguely incriminating detail is that Mnuchin intervened in the process of shaping the policy at all. And he could have had a million reasons for doing so.
Despite deploying a team of six reporters to work on the story for months, they couldn’t find anything definitively linking Milken to Mnuchin and the opportunity zone legislation. So they went with the slightly attenuated angle crystalized in the story’s headline: Yes, Milken may have stood to profit from this investment (which represents just a sliver of his overall portfolio). But as far as we know, it’s not illegal to make money in America – at least not yet.
Apparently I fit the bill, and the paper deployed six reporters and researchers for several months looking for dirt. They didn’t find any—I did none of the things they hinted at. But the editors weren’t about to let an absence of facts kill a breathless front-page exposé about how I and other investors stood to “Profit From Trump Tax Break for Poor Areas.” The Times claimed, wrongly, that the Treasury secretary directed regulatory changes for my benefit. Not only did he not make the changes for my benefit, the changes didn’t benefit me. The article reached false conclusions by claiming that mere coincidences proved intent, or by conflating events that occurred months apart in a dizzying feat of obfuscation. This ignored the public record of what really happened.
This is irresponsible journalism. The Times, which sometimes seems to exist in an alternate universe, knew before publication that important conclusions and implications in the article about me were wrong because we and the U.S. Treasury gave them every relevant fact. I’ve never spoken to Mr. Mnuchin, any other government official or anyone else about putting TRIC in an opportunity zone; I have never authorized anyone to act for me on that matter and no one has ever asked me to take any action related to it; I had no knowledge of any lobbying to put TRIC in an opportunity zone.
We gave the Times these and many other facts. They, and anyone with an internet connection, could have easily found the truth. I asked my lawyers to do just that by retaining someone to go online and figure out the real story from the public record. In three days this person found a deep trove of facts that the Times’s six reporters had apparently chosen to ignore. Anyone who wants to know the truth can find an article telling the real story plus a fact sheet and timeline at www.mikemilken.com. These documents provide a sobering antidote to the errors, omissions, deceptions and bias in the Times article.
The Times has now sent my office new questions that suggest another article is in the works. I will vigorously counter any further journalistic mendacity with hard facts and, where appropriate, other actions. But the greater risk is that no one is safe when a previously respected news organization deploys its considerable resources to twist the truth. Keep that in mind as you read future articles attacking opportunities for upward mobility through job creation.
Milken referred to an earlier screed against the NYT written by FedEx founder Fred Smith to help articulate exactly what the paper did that was so dishonest.
As Fred Smith, founder and CEO of FedEx, wrote in these pages in November, the Times attacked his company by “printing selected facts, connecting unrelated events, and implying nefarious activities when there were none whatever.” That’s exactly what the Times did to me last fall in a long article about Nevada real estate investments. Mr. Smith’s complaint centered on provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and its benefits to FedEx that the Times asserted were unfair.
Now, Milken says the Times is gearing up to write another story exposing imagined skullduggery. He’s decided to fight back, by publishing his side of the story online.
We’re curious to see how the paper and its editors will react to Milken’s decision to try and ‘correct the record’ on his own.
Pelosi Tears Up Trump’s State Of The Union Speech After Handshake Snub
Update: And here is Pelosi’s response. Stay classy San Francisco.
WATCH: At the end of President Trump’s State of the Union address, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tears up her copy of the speech. #SOTUpic.twitter.com/sDEkNBD0DW
Pelosi, as expected, snubbed Trump right back, introducing him only as “The President of the United States”, whereas traditionally the speaker has used the language: “I have the high privilege and distinct honor of presenting to you the President of the United States.”
Still, Trump will have the final laugh: in less than 24 hours the Senate will vote to acquit Trump of the impeachment farce passed by Pelosi’s House a few weeks ago, a process Pelosi herself did not want to pursue afraid that it would backfire and cripple the chances of the establishment’s favorite candidate, Joe Biden, but was ultimately was forced to concede by the radical left-wing in the Democratic party.
“The Federal Reserve is running the risk of fomenting an eventual financial crisis by easing banking regulations at the same time that it’s cut interest rates…say some former Fed officials, including ex-Vice Chairman Alan Blinder and financial stability experts Daniel Tarullo and Nellie Liang.”
Ignoring problems rarely solves them. You need to deal with them—not just the effects, but the underlying causes, or else they usually get worse. The older you get, the more you know that is true in almost every area of life.
In the developed world and especially the US, and even in China, our economic challenges are rapidly approaching that point. Things that would have been easily fixed a decade ago, or even five years ago, will soon be unsolvable by conventional means.
There is almost no willingness to face our top problems, specifically our rising debt. The economic challenges we face can’t continue, which is why I expect the Great Reset, a kind of worldwide do-over. It’s not the best choice but we are slowly ruling out all others.
Last week I talked about the political side of this. Our embrace of either crony capitalism or welfare statism is going to end very badly. Ideological positions have hardened to the point that compromise seems impossible.
Central bankers are politicians, in a sense, and in some ways far more powerful and dangerous than the elected ones. Some recent events provide a glimpse of where they’re taking us.
Hint: It’s nowhere good. And when you combine it with the fiscal shenanigans, it’s far worse.
Simple Conceit
Central banks weren’t always as responsibly irresponsible, as my friend Paul McCulley would say, as they are today. Walter Bagehot, one of the early editors of The Economist, wrote what came to be called Bagehot’s Dictum for central banks: As the lender of last resort, during a financial or liquidity crisis, the central bank should lend freely, at a high interest rate, on good securities.
The Federal Reserve came about as a theoretical antidote to even-worse occasional panics and bank failures. Clearly, it had a spotty record through 1945, as there were many mistakes made in the ‘20s and especially the ‘30s. The loose monetary policy coupled with fiscal incontinence of the ‘70s gave us an inflationary crisis. Paul Volcker’s recent passing (RIP) reminds us of perhaps the Fed’s finest hour, stamping out the inflation that threatened the livelihood of millions. However, Volcker had to do that only because of past mistakes.
Recently, reader Mourad Rahmanov, who has thought-provoking (and sometimes lengthy) reactions to almost every letter, kindly sent me some of his personal favorite John Mauldin quotes. One was this passage which succinctly captures my feelings about the Fed. (Context: This was part of my response to Ray Dalio’s comments on Modern Monetary Theory.)
Beginning with Greenspan, we have now had 30+ years of ever-looser monetary policy accompanied by lower rates. This created a series of asset bubbles whose demises wreaked economic havoc. Artificially low rates created the housing bubble, exacerbated by regulatory failure and reinforced by a morally bankrupt financial system.
And with the system completely aflame, we asked the arsonist to put out the fire, with very few observers acknowledging the irony. Yes, we did indeed need the Federal Reserve to provide liquidity during the initial crisis. But after that, the Fed kept rates too low for too long, reinforcing the wealth and income disparities and creating new bubbles we will have to deal with in the not-too-distant future.
This wasn’t a “beautiful deleveraging” as you call it. It was the ugly creation of bubbles and misallocation of capital. The Fed shouldn’t have blown these bubbles in the first place.
The simple conceit that 12 men and women sitting around the table can decide the most important price in the world (short-term interest rates) better than the market itself is beginning to wear thin. Keeping rates too low for too long in the current cycle brought massive capital misallocation. It resulted in the financialization of a significant part of the business world, in the US and elsewhere. The rules now reward management, not for generating revenue, but to drive up the price of the share price, thus making their options and stock grants more valuable.
Coordinated monetary policy is the problem, not the solution. And while I have little hope for change in that regard, I have no hope that monetary policy will rescue us from the next crisis.
Let me amplify that last line: Not only is there no hope monetary policy will save us from the next crisis, it will help cause the next crisis. The process has already begun.
Radical Actions
In September of 2019, something still unexplained (at least to my satisfaction, although I know many analysts who believe they know the reasons) happened in the “repo” short-term financing market. Liquidity dried up, interest rates spiked, and the Fed stepped in to save the day. I wrote about it at the time in Decoding the Fed.
Story over? No. The Fed has had to keep saving the day, every day, since then.
We hear different theories. The most frightening one is that the repo market itself is actually fine, but a bank is wobbly and the billions in daily liquidity are preventing its collapse. Who might it be? I have been told, by well-connected sources, that it could be a mid-sized Japanese bank. I was dubious because it would be hard to keep such a thing hidden for months. But then this week, Bloomberg reported some Japanese banks, badly hurt by the BOJ’s negative rate policy, have turned to riskier debt to survive. So, perhaps it’s fair to wonder.
Whatever the cause, the situation doesn’t seem to be improving. On Dec. 12 a New York Fed statement said its trading desk would increase its repo operations around year-end “to ensure that the supply of reserves remains ample and to mitigate the risk of money market pressures.”
Notice at the link how the NY Fed describes its plans. The desk will offer “at least” $150 billion here and “at least” $75 billion there. That’s not how debt normally works. Lenders give borrowers a credit limit, not a credit guarantee plus an implied promise of more. The US doesn’t (yet) have negative rates but the Fed is giving banks negative credit limits. In a very precise violation of Bagehot’s Dictum.
We have also just finished a decade of the loosest monetary policy in American history, the partial tightening cycle notwithstanding. Something is very wrong if banks still don’t have enough reserves to keep markets liquid. Part of it may be that regulations outside the Fed’s control prevent banks from using their reserves as needed. But that doesn’t explain why it suddenly became a problem in September, necessitating radical action that continues today.
Here’s the official line, from minutes of the unscheduled Oct. 4 meeting at which the FOMC approved the operation.
Staff analysis and market commentary suggested that many factors contributed to the funding stresses that emerged in mid-September. In particular, financial institutions’ internal risk limits and balance sheet costs may have slowed the distribution of liquidity across the system at a time when reserves had dropped sharply and Treasury issuance was elevated.
So the Fed blames “internal risk limits and balance sheet costs” at banks. What are these risks and costs they were unwilling to accept, and why? We still don’t know. There are lots of theories. Some even make sense. Whatever the reason, it was severe enough to make the committee agree to both repo operations and the purchase of $20 billion a month in Treasury securities and another $20 billion in agencies. They insist the latter isn’t QE but it sure walks and quacks like a QE duck. So, I and many others call it QE4.
As we learned with previous QE rounds, exiting is hard. Remember that 2013 “Taper Tantrum?” Ben Bernanke’s mild hint that asset purchases might not continue forever infuriated a liquidity-addicted Wall Street. The Fed needed a couple more years to start draining the pool, and then did so in the stupidest possible way by both raising rates and selling assets at the same time. (I don’t feel good saying I told you so but, well, I did.)
Having said that, I have to note the Fed has few good choices. As mistakes compound over time, it must pick the least-bad alternative. But with each such decision, the future options grow even worse. So eventually instead of picking the least-bad, they will have to pick the least-disastrous one. That point is drawing closer.
Ballooning Balance Sheet
Underlying all this is an elephant in the room: the rapidly expanding federal debt. Each annual deficit raises the total debt and forces the Treasury to issue more debt, in hopes someone will buy it.
The US government ran a $343 billion deficit in the first two months of fiscal 2020 (October and November) and the 12-month budget deficit again surpassed $1 trillion. Federal spending rose 7% from a year earlier while tax receipts grew only 3%.
No problem, some say, we owe it to ourselves, and anyway people will always buy Uncle Sam’s debt. That is unfortunately not true. The foreign buyers on whom we have long depended are turning away, as Peter Boockvar noted this week.
Foreign selling of US notes and bonds continued in October by a net $16.7b. This brings the year-to-date selling to $99b with much driven by liquidations from the Chinese and Japanese. It was back in 2011 and 2012 when in each year foreigners bought over $400b worth. Thus, it is domestically where we are now financing our ever-increasing budget deficits.
The Fed now has also become a big part of the monetization process via its purchases of T-bills which also drives banks into buying notes. The Fed’s balance sheet is now $335b higher than it was in September at $4.095 trillion. Again, however the Fed wants to define what it’s doing, market participants view this as QE4 with all the asset price inflation that comes along with QE programs.
It will be real interesting to see what happens in 2020 to the repo market when the Fed tries to end its injections and how markets respond when its balance sheet stops increasing in size. It’s so easy to get involved and so difficult to leave.
Declining foreign purchases are, in part, a consequence of the trade war. The dollars China and Japan use to buy our T-bills are the same dollars we pay them for our imported goods. But interest and exchange rates also matter. With rates negative or lower than ours in most of the developed world, the US had been the best parking place.
But in the last year, other central banks started looking for a NIRP (Evergreen note: Negative Interest Rate Policy) exit. Higher rate expectations elsewhere combined with stable or falling US rates give foreign buyers—who must also pay for currency hedges—less incentive to buy US debt. If you live in a foreign country and have a particular need for its local currency, an extra 1% in yield isn’t worth the risk of losing even more in the exchange rate.
I know some think China or other countries are opting out of the US Treasury market for political reasons, but it’s simply business. The math just doesn’t work. Especially given the fact that President Trump is explicitly saying he wants the dollar to weaken and interest rates go even lower. If you are in country X, why would you do that trade? You might if you’re in a country like Argentina or Venezuela where the currency is toast anyway. But Europe? Japan? China? The rest of the developed world? It’s a coin toss.
The Fed began cutting rates in July. Funding pressures emerged weeks later. Coincidence? I suspect not. Many factors are at work here, but it sure looks like, through QE4 and other activities, the Fed is taking the first steps toward monetizing our debt. If so, many more steps are ahead because the debt is only going to get worse.
As you can see from the Gavekal chart below, the Fed is well on its way to reversing that 2018 “quantitative tightening.”
Louis Gave wrote a brilliant essay recently (behind their pay wall, but perhaps he will make it more public) considering four possible reasons for the present valuation dichotomies. I’ll quote the first one because I believe it is right on target:
The Fed’s balance sheet expansion is only temporary.
The argument: The Fed’s current liquidity injection program is not a genuine effort at quantitative easing by the US central bank. Instead, it is merely a short-term liquidity program to ensure that markets—and especially the repo markets—continue to operate smoothly. In about 15 weeks’ time, the Fed will stop injecting liquidity into the system. As a result, the market is already looking through the current liquidity injections to the time when the Fed goes “cold turkey” once again. This explains why bond yields are not rising more, why the US dollar isn’t falling faster, and so on.
My take: This is a distinct possibility. But then, as Milton Friedman used to say: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” The question here is: Why did the repo markets freeze in mid- to late September? Was it just a technical glitch? Or did the spike in short rates reflect the fact that the appetite of the US private sector and foreign investors for short-dated US government debt has reached its limit? In short, did the repo market reach its “wafer-thin mint” moment?
If it was a technical glitch, then the Fed will indeed be able to “back off” come the spring. However, if, as I believe, the repo market was not the trouble, but merely a symptom of a bigger problem—excessive growth in US budget deficits—then it is hard to see how, six months before a US election, the Fed will be able to climb back out of the full-on US government monetization rabbit hole in which it is now fully immersed.
In this scenario, the markets will come to an interesting crossroads around the Ides of March. At that point, the Fed will have to take one of two paths:
The Fed does indeed stop its “non-QE QE” program. In this scenario, US and global equities are likely to take a nasty spill. In an election year, that will trigger a Twitterstorm of epic proportions from the US president.
The Fed confirms that the six-month “temporary” liquidity injection program is to be extended for another “temporary” six months. At this point bond yields everywhere around the world will shoot up, the US dollar will likely take a nasty spill, global equities will outperform US equities, and value will outperform growth, etc.
Looking at the US government’s debt dynamics, I believe the second option is much more likely. And it is all the more probable since triggering a significant equity pull-back a few months before the US presidential election could threaten the Fed’s independence. Still, the first option does remain a possibility, which may well help to explain the market’s cautious positioning despite today’s coordinated fiscal and monetary policies (ex-China).
Just this week Congress passed, and President Trump signed, massive spending bills to avoid a government shutdown. There was a silver lining; both parties made concessions in areas each considers important. Republicans got a lot more to spend on defense and Democrats got all sorts of social spending. That kind of compromise once happened all the time but has been rare lately. Maybe this is a sign the gridlock is breaking. But if so, their cooperation still led to higher spending and more debt.
As long as this continues—as it almost certainly will, for a long time—the Fed will find it near-impossible to return to normal policy. The balance sheet will keep ballooning as they throw manufactured money at the problem, because it is all they know how to do and/or it’s all Congress will let them do.
Nor will there be any refuge overseas. The NIRP countries will remain stuck in their own traps, unable to raise rates and unable to collect enough tax revenue to cover the promises made to their citizens. It won’t be pretty, anywhere on the globe.
Luke Gromen of Forest for the Trees is one of my favorite macro thinkers. Like Louis Gave, he thinks the monetization plan will get more obvious in early 2020.
Those that believe that the Fed will begin undoing what it has done since September after the year-end “turn” are either going to be proven right or they are going to be proven wrong in Q1 2020. We strongly believe they will be proven wrong. If/when they are, the FFTT view that the Fed is “committed” to financing US deficits with its balance sheet may go from a fringe view to the mainstream.
Both parties in Congress are committed to more spending. No matter who is in the White House, they will encourage the Federal Reserve to engage in more quantitative easing so the deficit spending can continue and even grow.
As I have often noted, the next recession, whenever it happens, will bring a $2 trillion+ deficit, meaning a $40+ trillion dollar national debt by the end of the decade, at least $20 trillion of which will be on the Fed’s balance sheet. (My side bet is that in 2030 we will look back and see that I was an optimist.)
My 2020 forecast issue, which you’ll see after the holiday break, I’m planning to call “The Decade of Living Dangerously.” Sometime in the middle to late 2020s we will see a Great Reset that profoundly changes everything you know about money and investing.
Crisis isn’t simply coming. We are already in the early stages of it. I think we will look back at late 2019 as the beginning. This period will be rough but survivable if we prepare now. In fact, it will bring lots of exciting opportunities. More on that in coming letters.
Russian Evacuees From China To Be Quarantined In Remote Siberian Region
The Russian Air Force on orders from President Vladimir Putin is currently in the midst of evacuating some over 150 Russian nationals from China and sending them to be “monitored” for coronavirus symptoms in a region of Western Siberia.
“Russian citizens and people from other countries evacuated from China will be temporarily accommodated in the Tyumen Region where they will be placed under quarantine, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova told reporters on Tuesday,” official news agency TASS reports.
This also after the first two cases of coronavirus in Russia were confirmed last Friday. Two Chinese nationals have already been quarantined in Tyumen and the far eastern Zabaykalsky region, and are expected to recover.
Tyumen Region is in Western Siberia, and was among the first regions of the harsh and remote eastern areas of Russia to be settled starting in the 16th century.During pre-revolutionary Russia and into Soviet times, the region historically served as a place of exile, including as part of the gulag system of labor camps in the north.
Some 147 people will be flown by the Russian Air Force from Wuhan and Hubei Province to the Tyumen area where they are expected to be monitored by medical authorities for at least 14 days.
“We are preparing ourselves for a possible wide spread of the infection,” Deputy Health Minister Sergei Krayevoy said, according to the Interfax news agency.
…Two Russian military planes were due to help evacuate 130 Russians stranded at the epicentre of the outbreak in China’s Hubei province, officials said. — Reuters
Russian authorities over the weekend restricted direct flights to China and shut the massive land border with China, which extends for 2,600 miles, which will no doubt have significant economic impact for both countries, given China remains Russia’s largest and most important trading partner.
Makeshift testing and quarantine zone for the novel coronavirus at Myeongdong shopping district in Seoul, South Korea. Getty Images.
“Our citizens as well as citizens of the Eurasian Economic Union and Ukraine will be accommodated in the Tyumen Region as the best prepared region where they will be placed under quarantine,” Deputy Prime Minister Golikova said in her statement Tuesday.
She indicated further that an evacuee list is still being finalized between the foreign ministry, the Russian Embassy in China, and the Chinese government.
On Monday, Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Well-Being (Rospotrebnadzor) revealed that more than 4,000 total people who had contacts with suspected coronavirus infected individuals remain under medical supervision in Russia.
“Since December 31, Rospotrebnadzor examined 29,651 flights, and 1,627,142 people, discovered 379 people with diseases, who previously were in China for 14 days. Currently, more than 4,000 people who contacted with suspected coronavirus patients remain under medical supervision,” an official statement from the health agency said.
Through incredibly good fortune, I’ve been unable to watch the tedious impeachment trial. I’m traveling and my destinations don’t have television. I can’t report having the same luck, however, with the daily immigration news. Bulletins pour into my email inbox, and since immigration has been my journalism beat for more than 30 years, I’m professionally obligated to keep current. The news is relentlessly dreary, and reflects how far from the rule of law California has drifted.
In its story “This Immigration Lawyer Understands Her Clients; She’s Undocumented,” the Los Angeles Times was almost giddy over illegal alien Lizbeth Mateo and her representation before the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) of a fellow illegal alien. Let that sink in: an illegal alien lawyer defending an illegal alien in a U.S. Court. According to a former legacy Immigration and Naturalization employee, no one can serve as an attorney or be a member of the state bar if they are criminals – Mateo entered and reentered the United States illegally. Nor are they eligible to represent an alien before the EOIR since their immigration status conflicts with the laws at issue.
Instead of focusing its story on the absurdity and legal questionability of an illegal immigrant subject to immigration laws, including arrest and deportation, representing another illegal immigrant, the Times instead referred to Mateo as “polished, savvy” which may be true but is also incomplete.
Mateo is certainly savvy. Several years ago, she and eight other activists, known collectively as the The Dream 9, traveled to Mexico, then demanded and received reentry permission so they could protest what they perceived as President Obama’s harsh immigration policy.
That California would be the epicenter of such an outrageous immigration failure surprises no one.In 2013, as it began its slide into the depths of incomprehensible catering and entitlement-dole-out to unlawfully present migrants, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB 1024, legislation that allowed illegal aliens who passed the California bar to receive law licenses.
During the same week, Brown also approved state-issued drivers licenses for aliens. A boastful Brown said, “While Washington waffles on immigration, California’s forging ahead, I’m not waiting.” One year later, Brown signed more expansive legislation that ordered the 40 licensing boards which the California Department of Consumer Affairs recognizes to, by 2016, accept applications regardless of immigration status. To replace the previously required Social Security number on all professional license applications, aliens could substitute the easily acquired federal Individual Taxpayer Identification Number.
Brown was correct, but not in the way he imagined, when he called Washington an immigration waffler. In the nearly seven years that have passed since Brown signed AB 1024, Congress has done little to end the privileges like driving, sanctuary city protection, and access to lower in-state university education fees that states and counties have awarded to illegal immigrants. As a California native and long-time immigration analyst, the question I’m most often asked is: What happened to the Golden State? In recent memory, California was a conservative bastion under U.S. Sen. Richard Nixon, and Governors Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson.
But then, as president, Reagan went rogue and signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. During the ensuing years, tens of thousands of legal and illegal immigrants arrived.
The legal immigrants and their children who came of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s favor higher immigration levels, self-define as Democrats and vote accordingly.
Among the illegal alien contingent that came to California, many have remained, and some have received amnesty and therefore voting rights. They too support immigration expansion.
Today in California, as the EOIR example proves, federal immigration laws are meaningless. If they’re willing to objectively study California’s immigration history, other states could learn an important lesson. Too much identity politics accelerates great states’ declines and fall. In about a half-century, California went from being America’s most coveted destination to today’s societal mess from which residents with options can’t flee fast enough.
Huffington Post Investigation Exposes Rampant Sexism At The Washington Post
The fury of twitter blue checkmarks over the Washington Post’s decision to suspend female reporter Felicia Sonmez has manifested in a #MeToo-style hit piece directed at the Washington Post.
In a laughable piece by reporter Emily Peck, the Huffington Post relies on anonymously sourced quotes and evidence-free assertions from ‘staffers and contractors’ bashing the paper for unspecified indiscretions like valuing ‘male characteristics’ over ‘female characteristics’, without ever describing or explaining what they mean.
The piece begins by describing two recent scenarios where reporters received ‘death threats’. The backlash to Sonmez’s tasteless tweet about a nearly two-decade-old retracted rape allegation against Kobe Bryant in the wake of his untimely and extremely brutal passing, and an incident involving national security reporter Shane Harris.
Sonmez was suspended, and offered no protection. Harris received protection within 72 hours.
Now, were either of these reporters truly in danger? Probably not.
Both male and female journalists receive death threats and abuse constantly online, and there are zero reported incidents of reporters being murdered in the US by angry twitter followers. But from this one incident, Huffpo extrapolates an entire culture of misogyny, a culture that, according to many in the WaPo newsroom, doesn’t actually exist.
HuffPo cited data from the WaPo union suggesting that the pay gap between men and women at the Post has narrowed in recent years, though, thanks to a larger number of men in senior positions, the median pay for men is still skewed slightly higher than the median pay for women. But rather than explain what these numbers actually mean, HuffPo simply points to the discrepancy and asserts that it’s evidence of a ‘gender pay gap’ attributable solely to latent sexism.
The Washington Post doesn’t value women and men in the same way, these people said. This appears literally true when it comes to pay: Women in the newsroom are paid less than men, according to a report published last year by the union that represents employees. (The paper disputed the findings at the time.) One former Post contractor told HuffPost she was let go after asking for a raise.
The disparity courses through the culture and is borne out in the paper’s coverage, where stories of sexual harassment have sometimes been held to a higher standard than other coverage, some staffers said.
Crucially, the gender imbalance is clear in the masthead. Three of the four top editors at the Post are men. Only four of 17 department heads are women.
“The place is run by men and it creates a particular atmosphere and assigns a higher value to certain male characteristics,” said one female reporter. “I’ve been a victim of it in a broad way, as most women in the newsroom have.”
Is the paper really “run by men”? Not really. HuffPo dings WaPo for only having four women among 17 section heads without mentioning that this is much higher than the average for the industry, and most industries. Many of the top editors have female deputies – and, critically, more than half of WaPos newsroom consists of female reporters.
It’s not that The Washington Post doesn’t have high-profile women, staffers emphasized to HuffPost. There are star female reporters at the paper. Indeed, a majority of the newsroom staff — approximately 800 employees — is female, just like the U.S. workforce generally.
That’s actually not true. According to the Department of Labor, only 47% of the US workforce is comprised of women. Overall participation rates by gender are higher for men than for women. We suspect HuffPo got the labor force confused with the American academic landscape: As the Atlantic boldly declared a few years ago, “men are the new minority on college campuses”.
WaPo’s newsroom is actually disproportionately made up of women. If we were to adjust that for average participation rates per gender, it would suggest that management has actually discriminated against men in order to satisfy gender-warrior critics and present more solid optics.
Finally, HuffPo’s final example of misogyny involves a contractor who was allegedly ‘fired for asking for a raise’. But based solely off HuffPo’s account of the incident, it appears more likely that her position wasn’t renewed because of cutbacks at her bureau, and her strongly expressed dissatisfaction with her current position. A junior contract employee complaining to their boss’s boss about compensation isn’t really appropriate, and likely came across as ungrateful. We suspect her demeanor and conduct had something to do with her contract not being renewed – and that’s totally appropriate.
The situation can be worse for female contract reporters, who aren’t on staff yet but often put in full-time hours, particularly in foreign bureaus.
One former contractor, a woman assigned to an outpost overseas, told HuffPost that she had been fired after asking for a pay increase.
She first broached the subject in July at a breakfast meeting with her boss’s boss, foreign editor Doug Jehl, the woman told HuffPost, declining to be named for fear of career reprisals. She had just recently thrown her hat in the ring for a promotion to a staff position.
As a contractor, relative to her male counterparts, she was underpaid, she told Jehl, citing a conversation with the Post’s union. The subject set him off.
“It was like a red flag to a bull. He got angry. He raised his voice,” she said. He told her she’d have to leave the paper if she brought up the issue again, she recalled him saying.
The next morning, sitting at a Starbucks, Jehl said her contract would not be renewed after it expired at the end of the year. “‘You want more money and job security and we can’t give that to you,’” she recalled him saying.
She decided to take up matters with leadership a few months later in September, writing an email to Martin Baron, the executive editor of the paper. HuffPost reviewed the exchange. She described how much she liked working for the Post and how disappointed she was in the way her situation was handled.
Instead of accepting this, the contract reporter once again went around her boss’s boss’s head to complain to Marty Baron, the WaPo Executive Editor, directly. He assured her that the elimination of her position had nothing to do with her complaints, and that the paper would give her a glowing recommendation to any prospective employers. Yet this too was spun as an example of ‘sexism.’
She decided to take up matters with leadership a few months later in September, writing an email to Martin Baron, the executive editor of the paper. HuffPost reviewed the exchange. She described how much she liked working for the Post and how disappointed she was in the way her situation was handled.
“I don’t believe the way I’ve been treated reflects the values you espouse or aspire to for the Post,” she wrote.
She provided Baron with an outline of what happened:
When I asked him for a raise, he told me to look for a job in another company. Mine wasn’t a demand. It was a statement of my own perceived value to the company and as a reporter.
My sense is that you expect journalists to stand up for themselves and act professionally. I felt I did both. The next day, Doug told me my [job] application was not being considered, and my contract was not being renewed. I spoke to [managing editor] Tracy Grant about this on the same day, and she told me I could leave immediately and still get my salary through the end of the contract if I wished.
In his response, Baron said they were sticking to their decision to let her go, stating that it was part of a rethink of the entire bureau. He acknowledged the circumstances of her dismissal only slightly. “I’m disappointed to hear that you believe the changes in the bureau have not been handled properly,” he wrote. “We will have nothing other than positive things to say about you to any potential future employers.”
We look forward to watching WaPo, HuffPo, Buzzfeed, CNN and the rest of the #resistance media eat each other alive with accusations of imagined sexism.
In this essay, I introduce a slew of neologisms – new words – to capture the tone and substance of much discourse, rhetoric, dysfunction, and bias in academia and psychology. It’s partly inspired by an article entitled ‘Lexicon for Gender Bias in Academia and Medicine’ by Drs Choo and May in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), although that one was coming at this from a different perspective.
They argued that “mansplaining” was just the “tip of the iceberg” and so coined terms such as “Himpediment,” defined as a “man who stands in the way of progress of women.”
Adminomania: A delusion that increased administrative and bureaucratic intrusions into people’s lives will actually improve something, fueled primarily by a pervasive blindness to unintended negative side effects. See Title IX.
Athletic gynocide: The elimination from sports competitions of people identified at birth by doctors or other adults as female because they cannot successfully compete with people identified at birth by doctors or other adults as males but who identify as females.
Bias bias: A bias for seeing biases, often manifesting as either claiming bias when none exists, exaggerating biases that do exist, or overgeneralizing to large swaths of life from studies finding bias in some narrow or specific context.
Biomindophobia: Fear that biology influences the mind.
Blancofemophobia: Prejudice against white women, as exemplified by dismissing the beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors of white women with phrases such as, “White women white womening.” See here for a real-world example.
Brexistential fear: An irrational fear that Brexit will lead to the end of the world as we know it.
Brophobia: Fear of men having a conversation among themselves.
Chapeaurougeauphobia: Fear and loathing of Trump supporters.
Cisandrophobia: Fear of and prejudice against heterosexual men.
Decontextaphilia: An unhealthy attraction to quoting others out of context.
Emotional imperialism: The strange belief that your feelings should dictate someone else’s behavior.
Epistemological impugnment: A form of intellectual bullying that involves declaring or implying that a claim should not be believed, not on the basis of logic or evidence showing it to be false, but by tainting the source with real or imagined failings in some other area. This often manifests as unsubstantiated allegations and guilt-by-association.
Equalitarianism: A dogmatic, quasi-religious belief that all groups are equal on all traits that matter, usually accompanied by the belief that the only credible source of group differences is discrimination and outrage at anyone who suggests otherwise. Often accompanied by the belief that women and minorities are inherently or essentially more virtuous.
Europhobia: Fear of Europeans and prejudice against Europeans, their descendants, and practices and ideas that originated in Europe.
Evopsychophobia: Fear of evolutionary psychology, especially of the possibility that social groups (such as men and women) might have evolved different psychological traits and behavioral tendencies.
Genetophobia: Fear of genetic explanations for human behaviors, competencies, traits, and preferences. Often manifests as blank slatism and environmental determinism.
Heterophobia: Fear of and prejudice against heterosexual men and women.
Identity colonialism: The assumption that you have a better grasp of what’s harmful to a marginalized group than members of that group.
Implicit ESP delusions: People afflicted by these delusions believe they can read others’ minds. This belief is not explicitly articulated because it would sound silly if it was. How, then, can it be diagnosed? These delusions often manifest as accusations that someone else is “disingenuous,” or insincere; also, that the accuser knows someone’s “real” motivations.
IQaphobia: Fear of measuring intelligence because one believes that only Nazis and eugenicists do that.
Istaphobia: Fear of being called an “ist” (racist, sexist, fascist, etc.), usually followed by self-censorship.
Kafkatrap: A rhetorical move whereby protesting your innocence is interpreted as proving your guilt. Example: If you deny that you are a racist, you are a racist.
Marxism denialist: Someone who conveniently ignores or forgets that Marxism/communism has been a brutal disaster whenever it has achieved national hegemony, or argues “it was not real Marxism,” or dismisses the relevance of that brutal history. These symptoms are usually accompanied by camouflaging Marxist ideas/ideology in social science neologisms e.g., “system justification theory.”
Nazinoia: A delusional tendency to see Nazis as hiding behind ideas or practices one opposes, and by accusing anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders of being Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, or alt-right.
Occam’s shoehorn: What you use to fit the data to your narrative, no matter how difficult.
Occam’s trumpet: Ignoring all possible alternatives to “bias” as explanations for inequality and triumphantly proclaiming that bias is pervasive.
Phobophobia: Fear of being called a “phobe” (Islamaphobe, trans-phobe, etc.). Usually followed by self-censorship.
Phrenological Reflux Disease: This disease is characterized by an inability to digest scientific work on group differences, especially common with respect to intelligence without intermittent ejaculations of “phrenology!” or “phrenologist!”
Quackademic: A person in academia who should not be allowed around students.
Racebsion: An excessive, persistent, and disturbing assumption that race is at the center of everything. See theNew York Times’s 1619 Project.
Subjectiphilia: An infatuation with subjective experience as empirically triumphant, e.g., using “lived experience” as if it could end an argument.
Triggeritis inexplicablus: Outbursts and meltdowns in response to reading or hearing certain unwelcome words or ideas.
Trollusions: A pathological tendency to see those who bluntly disagree with you as trolls.
Trumpcession: An intellectually debilitating condition, common among academics, characterized by attributing all bad things to Trump and Trump supporters.
Twitterphobia deficientus: Not worrying quite enough about how other people might perceive what you tweet.
Twokademia: Academic grievance grandstanding on Twitter.
Undo Process: Reckless disregard for due process protections for those accused of demographic-related violations, e.g., harassment, bias, discrimination.
Wokademia: Academic grievance grandstanding.
Wokanniblism: A low-carb, high-protein diet consisting mainly of eating your own.
* * *
Lee Jussim is a professor of social psychology at Rutgers University and was a fellow and consulting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2013-15). He can be followed on Twitter @PsychRabble
Elizabeth Warren Tries Disappearing Act After Being Caught Exiting Private Jet
Native-American? Woman of the people? Billionaire-bludgeoner? Climate-change alarmist?
It would appear, by the looks of this latest clip catching Senator Elizabeth Warren exiting a private jet, that not everything she says is true (allegedly)!
By far the most entertaining part of the brief video is her camera-evasion techniques once she realizes she is being filmed, finding refuge behind one of her staff…
Well we know at least one person who is going to be very disappointed in you lizzy…
But the hypocrisy goes even deeper. As Fox News reports, Warren, who funds her trips with campaign cash, tweeted as recently as last Thursday about Trump administration officials using private aviation on the taxpayer’s dime. She specifically referenced former Trump Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who still owes the U.S. government over $300,000 in travel expenses, according to an Inspector General report.
Between June and September, Warren paid over $150,000 to “Advanced Aviation,” a private jet charter service, according to FEC filings. Last week the Washington Examiner reported she had spent over $700,000 total on private aviation.
Watch Live: Trump Delivers Third State Of The Union Address
With Democrats on the back-foot following the twin catastrophes of the Iowa Caucus and their unsuccessful push to call John Bolton as a witness in Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, which is expected to end Wednesday with a resounding acquittal and Trump’s approval rating at record highs.
With stocks near record highs and all of Trump’s geopolitical rivals on the back foot, this will be the first SOTU for Trump that won’t be overshadowed by government shutdown-related shenanigans or the Russia collusion narrative.
It’s also important because it’s the last SOTU of Trump’s first term. Trump never really stopped campaigning, though he officially launched the 2020 campaign with a major speech in Florida last year. With a second term hanging in the balance, expect Trump to luxuriate in his rivals’ many mistakes and unforced errors.
Tuesday night’s speech is only Trump’s third state of the union, since the big speech he delivered after inauguration day back in 2017 wasn’t technically a state of the union.
The address starts at 9 pm ET. Readers can watch it live below:
Since the gist of the speech is typically leaked to the press before Trump starts speaking, online betting markets are focused on the length of Trump’s speech, as well as the number of times he’ll say certain words, like “China” or “Democrat”.
Here’s a roundup of SOTU-related Over/Unders, courtesy of Sports Betting Dime.
A few years ago, researchers at the Constitution Center put together this ‘State of the Union’ bingo board the reflects topics reliably mentioned by both Republican and Democratic candidates.
While Democrats like to complain about President Trump’s frequent errors of grammar and spelling, the grade-reading level of the (typically) annual address has declined in recent decades, a trend that started long before President Trump rode that Trump Tower escalator to glory.
If you’re curious about what to expect, the Hill has a primer on five topics to watch, including China, impeachment, his message to Democrats and any big new legislative proposals (Trump will reportedly call on Congress to support previously announced policy plans, possibly including his long-awaited ‘bipartisan’ infrastructure bill, though White House advisors have been tight-lipped this year about what’s going into the speech).
Former Co-Head Of Investment Banking At Goldman Asia Banned For Life By The Fed
Former Goldman Sachs partner Andrea Vella has been barred from the industry over his involvement in the Malaysian investment fund scandal known as 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a press release from the Federal Reserve said Tuesday.
Vella, a former the Goldman Sachs’ co-head of investment banking for Asia Pacific, was placed on leave in 2018 after he neglected to tell compliance about illicit activity in 1MDB bond offerings conducted by the bank in 2012 and 2013.
“Goldman arranged bond offerings in 2012 and 2013 for 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), Malaysia’s state-owned development and investment company. The consent order states that Vella failed to escalate Low Taek Jho’s involvement in the bond offerings. Low was a person of known concern to Goldman, and his involvement indicated heightened potential underwriting risks.
Low and two former Goldman employees, Tim Leissner and Roger Ng, have been criminally charged by the Department of Justice for participating in a scheme to divert proceeds of the bond offerings from 1MDB for their personal benefit and bribing certain government officials in Malaysia and Abu Dhabi,” the press release stated.
Bloomberg noted that Vella was able to negotiate with the Fed to leave the industry without admitting or denying wrongdoing.
A Goldman spokesperson said Vella exited the firm several days ago.
The Fed’s release noted Vella was barred from the industry and “fined $1.42 million for his role in the scheme to divert bond proceeds.”
Goldman continues to negotiate with the Department of Justice on a settlement for its role in the 1MDB scheme, where Low had siphoned over $4.5 billion from the state-owned wealth fund from 2009 to 2015.
And what we have here is another example of how a top Goldman banker gets a slap on the wrist for one of the biggest frauds in history. Nevertheless, it also shows how these bankers were given mega deals thanks to kickbacks.
Hyundai, the world’s fifth-largest carmaker, announced Tuesday that it was suspending production lines at its car factories in South Korea, one of the first major manufacturers to face severe supply-chain issues because of the coronavirus.
Many auto plants in China have already shut down because of the virus, including factories run by Hyundai, Tesla, Ford and Nissan. Hyundai plants in South Korea would be the first to shut down lines outside of China, and comes as Hyundai has ramped up production in China over the past two decades.
More than 20,000 coronavirus cases have been confirmed worldwide—an eight-fold increase over the last week—and experts say hundreds of thousands may not yet have been diagnosed. Two dozen or so countries have reported cases, and many have restricted travel from China to limit the contagion. Companies are evacuating employees from China.
U.S. manufacturers such as Ford, Apple and Tesla have temporarily halted production. One-sixth of Apple sales and nearly half of chip-maker Qualcomm’s revenues come from China. So do 80% of active ingredients used by drug-makers to produce finished medicines. Because China is the world’s largest manufacturer and an enormous consumer market, the economic freeze will disrupt supply chains and reduce corporate earnings.
China’s GDP growth was already almost certainly lower than the official figure of 6%, and it is likely to fall by a third or more.
It’s probably too much to ask Mr. Trump to lift his tariffs on Chinese exports, though it would help. At the very least he could give Beijing more latitude to meet its promise to buy $200 billion more in U.S. products over the next two years. The last thing the President should want when campaigning for re-election is an economic pandemic.
Apple, Starbucks and Ikea have temporarily closed stores in China. Shopping malls are deserted, threatening sales of Nike sneakers, Under Armour clothing and McDonald’s hamburgers. Factories making cars for General Motors and Toyota are delaying production as they wait for workers to return from the Lunar New Year holiday, which has been extended by the government to halt the spread of the virus. International airlines, including American, Delta, United, Lufthansa and British Airways, have canceled flights to China.
Wynn Resorts Ltd. has among the highest China exposure, as the company derived about 75% of total revenue from Macau over the last 12 months, according to estimates based on FactSet’s proprietary algorithm.
Sony Corp. CFO Hiroki Totoki, said the fallout from the coronavirus slowdown on the company’s manufacturing, sales and supply chain operations could wipe out its revised guidance for 2019.
BP said current demand for the year is between 300,000 and 500,000 barrels a day, not the 1.2 million it had anticipated for the year. “There is no question coronavirus, I suspect, will impact demand this year,” a BP executive told investors.
Jewelry retailer Pandora said it’s already struggling in China in 2020 but the virus is presenting other threats. “China is currently also challenged by the coronavirus that have left streets empty and forced store closures,” Pandora CEO Alexander Laxik said. “China is the biggest jewelry market in the world and we’re not going to walk away from this.”
Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. estimated that cruise cancellations and itinerary modifications as a result of the coronavirus will have a 25-cents-per-share impact on earnings. The company has already canceled eight cruises out of China.
Known Disruptions
Major disruptions include Ford, Apple, Tesla, Qualcomm, Hyundai, Wynn resorts, Sony, BP, Pandora, Royal Caribbean, GM, Toyota, Nike, all the airlines, and many drug makers.
If it’s “Made in China” there will be an economic hit.
Macy’s To Cut 2,000 Jobs And Shutter 125 Stores Amid “Significant Structural Change”
Macy’s announced Tuesday that it had adopted a three-year plan designed to stabilize profits and continue company growth. The new plan calls for a radical $1.5 billion cost-cutting program that will axe upwards of 2,000 jobs and shutter 125 stores across the US.
The retailer, which operates 680 stores under the Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s brands, said the closure represents an 18% reduction in its brick and mortar footprint. The layoffs of about 2,000 corporate jobs will account for 9% of its workforce. There’s also a plan to close several offices.
Macy’s said the cost savings would generate about $600 million in 2020 and $1.5 billion annually by 2022.
“We are taking the organization through significant structural change to lower costs, bring teams closer together, and reduce duplicative work. This will be a tough week for our team as we say goodbye to great colleagues and good friends. The changes we are making are deep and impact every area of the business, but they are necessary. I know we will come out of this transition stronger, more agile, and better fit to compete in today’s retail environment,” Macy’s CEO Jeff Gennette said in a statement.
Gennette said the company’s “least productive” stores would be cut first. There are already 30 stores in the process of closing, he added.
Under the consolidation program, Macy’s NYC will become the company’s sole corporate headquarters. Offices in San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Lorain, Ohio, will be closed within the next three years.
“We will focus our resources on the healthy parts of our business, directly address the unhealthy parts of the business and explore new revenue streams,” Gennette said. “Over the past three years, we have shown we can grow the top-line; however, we have significant work to do to improve the bottom-line. We are confident the strategy we are announcing today will allow us to stabilize the margin in 2020 and set the foundation for sustainable, profitable growth.”
The retailer will be testing smaller storefronts called Market by Macy’s and concentrate more on e-commerce.
Amazon’s blowout Q4 earnings highlights how it has forever changed the retail industry, as legacy retailing giants have been reduced to nothing more than a fraction of their size in a decade.
Over 9,000 retail department stores closed their doors last year. With 2020 underway, Macy’s latest cost-saving ploy suggests the retail apocalypse will drag on.
The benefits of a deflation of prices brought about by a combination of sound money and markets free from government intervention have been demonstrated to be the best economic environment, the denial of which in favour of inflationary financing has led to repeated monetary and systemic failures.
This article explains how this has come about and puts the record on deflation straight. The development of macroeconomic theory had to deny the benefits of a deflation of prices, unbelievably telling us we need higher prices to stimulate our consumption.
Deflation and investment funded by savings is a far better, natural economic environment than the false gods of easy debt and money printing. There can be no return to the stability of gentle price deflation without seismic shifts in economic thinking and government responsibilities.
Talk to any macroeconomist and he will tell you his greatest fear is deflation. He or she may have read Irving Fisher’s account of how in the 1930s deflation forced banks to liquidate loans by selling collateral into falling markets, driving asset prices lower still, accelerating further selling, undermining collateral prices even more, forcing banks to liquidate yet more collateral, driving prices lower still…
Deflation cannot be permitted, for fear of it developing into a self-feeding maelstrom. And to just to make sure, we must have inflation running at a positive 2%, and any dip below is a cause for concern. But is this actually true?
The answer is to be found in the vested interests in a modern economy. Today, critics of deflation are believers in intervention as a means of preserving jobs, convinced that the cause of failure is irrational free markets. Before interventionism took hold, economic failures were associated with cycles of bank credit. In those times, roughly before the early 1920s, deflation was widely understood to be a natural cleansing of past excesses, since they were always preceded by undue optimism and overt speculation. In England, Overend Gurney moved from the staid discount market into mismatching short-term finance into longer maturities, lending into the rail boom before collapsing in 1866. The failure of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878, followed by Barings in 1890 established a twelve-year cycle of bank credit at that time. We may care to note that it is now twelve years since the Lehman crisis, giving a certain urgency to the current situation.
Banks have never been properly held to account for credit inflation and always resisted attempts to be so. Consequently, addressing the true cause of periodic deflationary slumps has always been ruled out. That left picking up the pieces after a credit-induced boom morphs into catastrophe as the only practical solution. And of course, this bailing out in the so-called public interest was what banks increasingly lobbied for, particularly in America.
The last cleansing deflation in the old-fashioned sense followed the First World War: in America it was brutal but short. It was the last time the US government refused to interfere, the gold standard at $20.67 to the ounce remained intact, and the roaring twenties ensued. But at the end of that decade, President Hoover had a different, hands-on approach.
Illustrating the difference of perspective, his predecessor President Coolidge said of Hoover, “That man has given me nothing but advice, all of it bad.” While Coolidge was unfortunately ignorant of what the Fed was doing with money, he was the last of the genuine free-trade presidents and Hoover the first interventionist. The change in policy was marked by the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and the subsequent years when the slump turned from being a short sharp correction into a prolonged depression.
A new breed of economists evolved with it. From a careerist’s point of view, there was no money nor influence to be gained in being a non-interventionist when your paymaster and the paymaster for your alma mater is an interventionist government. Classical economists who had argued for sound money and Say’s law were out in the cold. Rather like the climate change movement today, where objective, qualified meteorologists have been side-lined by a mixed bunch of science opportunists, an interventionist movement gained control of the economic agenda.
It was this movement that denounced deflation as the ultimate horror, supposedly brought about by a restrictive gold standard. Money now had to be flexible to manage the economy and avoid a repeat of the depression. Targeting prices, first implemented as a policy in the early 1920s by Benjamin Strong at the Fed, along with full employment have been written in stone as objectives for economic and monetary policies ever since. The consequence is debt has taken over from savings as the driving means of economic advancement. Today, the world has an estimated one quarter of a quadrillion dollars of debt, and we can now see this association of both money and debt creation accelerating both further and faster.
For practical purposes, debt is the other side of money-printing. With welfare-driven governments facing escalating commitments and static tax revenues, deflation appears to have been banished for ever.
Deflation and Humpty Dumpty
To think deflation is a danger at a time of accelerating monetary inflation appears to be preposterous. But Irving Fisher was right in one respect, and that is the cycle of bank credit ending in a tendency for credit to contract is always a problem, leading to regular systemic and banking crises in the manner he described. But today, this is counteracted by aggressive expansion of base money, with this cycle in anticipation of a bank credit crisis. So overall, deflation of aggregate money is simply a myth.
An additional problem is modern economists subscribe to the Humpty Dumpty school of definitions: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”. They apply deflation mostly to prices, though correctly applied it is of the quantity of money. Google it, and the former comes up.
The error here is to describe the symptom and not the cause. Prices can fall for a number of reasons, monetary deflation being only one. The other principal causes, which are discussed below, are changes in savings behaviour and the effect of technology and competition.
Sticking with the price definition of deflation raises a further problem due to the immeasurability of changes in the general price level. Econometricians have progressively banished price rises by various means, so little or no inflation is recorded. If the price of a good rises, it is assumed consumers will find cheaper alternatives, so the price rise can be ignored. Technological improvements are the excuse to modify prices to take account of them. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the twenty-two years from 1997 to 2019 the index value of a new vehicle rose by only 0.6%, while over the same period the average car price rose from $16,400 to $36,718, an increase of 124%. With tricks like this it is easy to see why independent analysts, such as Shadowstats.com and Chapwood Index estimate annual price inflation to have been running at roughly 10% in recent years while the official CPI rises by a goal-seeking 2%.
With statistical manipulation, official figures could even report price deflation when monetary or price inflation is significant. Unfortunately, it is the official CPI statistics that are accepted as the truth even though they are demonstrably incorrect. A narrative that condemns deflation and uses statistical manipulation permits the government and its licensed banks to use monetary expansion as an increasingly important means of funding and for the replenishment of bank reserves, despite consumers being progressively impoverished through higher prices without compensating increases in income.
Today, empirical evidence is ignored
Sound money, that is to say money which expands and contracts at the public’s bequest and not that of the state and its licensed banks, tends over time to lead to falling prices, not that the general level of prices can actually be measured and should remain no more than an economic concept. The clearest example is found in the extraordinary success of free markets in the nineteenth century, spearheaded by wise government in Britain.
Following the Napoleonic Wars the gold sovereign was introduced in 1817 and became the sheet anchor of Britain’s monetary system. Despite the disruption of cycles of bank credit, demand for them and the Bank of England’s gold substitutes in the form of its note issue was a matter for commerce and the public, crystallised in the 1844 Bank Charter Act. Sound money, with the state’s hands firmly bound by the gold standard, saw a small nation of some 27 million (1851) become the most prosperous and influential on earth by the end of the century in a price-deflationary environment.
Food prices fell. A four-pound loaf of bread, which was the food staple in 1810, cost over a shilling, falling to less than ten pence, or by over 20% by the late 1880s. Proceedings at the Old Bailey recorded that prices of manufactured goods fell significantly, particularly clothing. If hedonics had been applied to these prices, as is the custom today, they would have fallen even more due to the massive improvement in overall living standards and production processes from technological innovation.
The fall in prices was even more remarkable, given the gold discoveries at Sutter’s Mill in California in 1848, Australia in the 1850s and later, and in South Africa in the 1890s. Goldmoney estimates that above-ground gold stocks grew from 4,105 tonnes in 1816, when the Coinage Act declared the new sovereign as the sole standard of value and unlimited legal tender, to 23,685 tonnes at the outbreak of the First World War, an increase of 477%. The Californian gold rush produced a doubling of estimated annual mine output, which then remained generally steady until 1891, after which South African production doubled it again in the 1890s. While it would be an error to assume the only use for gold was monetary, there can be no doubt that the increased availability of gold represented significant potential for monetary inflation in the second half of the century.
Despite an inflation of gold stocks, the greatest economic progress ever recorded was in Britain during a period of continual price deflation. An important reason for this dichotomy was it was up to the public to determine the quantity of monetary gold, not the government, and the public only used what was actually needed for its circumstances.
For much of the time Britain was the only significant country on a gold standard, bimetallism with silver or silver standards predominating elsewhere until about 1870. At the outbreak of the First World War, over 80% of world shipping afloat had been constructed in Britain bearing testament of Britain’s economic prowess. And now we are told to believe deflation is bad for us.
Savings
There are a number of reasons the nineteenth century marked a significant improvement in economic conditions and living standards. Tax was low. The Income tax Act of 1842 reintroduced it at 2.9% on annual incomes over £150, equivalent today to about £50,000 measured by gold sovereigns. Ordinary people were permitted to accumulate wealth. But probably the most obvious consideration influencing future prices was an accumulation of savings.
Compared with today’s debt-driven economies, which are fuelled by monetary expansion and government intervention, the savings-driven economies of the nineteenth century required borrowers to bid up for investment capital from savers. Even if he managed to obtain loans for investment and working capital, a borrower with a poor business reputation would end up paying a high interest rate, putting himself at a competitive disadvantage.
Consequently, in a savings-driven culture a debtor’s behaviour of necessity becomes considerably more responsible towards savers’ funds than when debt is available through monetary inflation. Being funded through savings, industrial investment proceeded on the basis that borrowings must be repaid. A knowledge that the purchasing power of gold could rise over time was a further incentive to repay borrowed capital as quickly as possible. Mr Micawber’s Dickensian aphorism about spending within one’s means to avoid misery certainly applied.
Savings had two primary influences on prices. To the extent that they were immediate consumption withheld, in increase in savings lowered potential demand for consumer goods, thereby reducing the general level of prices compared with that at a lower savings rate. Furthermore, savings were the feedstock for industrial and business investment, which improved quality and reduced unit costs.
Despite the inflation of above-ground gold stocks and therefore the availability of gold sovereigns and gold substitutes, the fact that prices fell is testament to the power of an unfettered free market economy to deliver benefits to the general public. It required a benign government strictly limiting its own drain on free markets to appreciate their importance, and nineteenth-century Britain had this in spades.
Britain’s pro-competitive government
Rather than record the entire economic history of the nineteenth century, it is sufficient to focus briefly on the principal actions of two prime ministers, Lord Liverpool and Robert Peel.
Lord Liverpool (1770-1828) navigated Britain back onto the gold standard in 1821, following its suspension during the Napoleonic Wars. At the time of the decisive parliamentary debate in May 1819, money in circulation consisted of almost entirely paper, which before the war in 1792 (five years before the gold standard was suspended in 1797) consisted of £30 million in gold and £20 million in paper. In 1819, despite trade having almost quadrupled it was still £50 million. While more efficient settlement systems and an increased use of discounted bills allowed money to circulate with greater ease, gold had virtually disappeared as circulating money, because as well as its inconvenience for settling trade gold had developed a premium in its value, driving it from circulation.
As Prime Minister, Liverpool oversaw the return from this situation to the pre-war gold standard. He was motivated by three considerations. First, while monetary inflation had enabled the government to finance the war, it could not be a permanent part of the economic system, the need for inflationary financing having passed. Second, the management of the currency should remain with the Bank of England, because it was not a matter to be entrusted to Parliament. And third, with gold having fallen from a 30% premium to paper to only 3%, it appeared eminently possible, if gradually done.
It would require a deflation of paper notes relative to gold to get the old standard to stick. The return to gold having been agreed is attributed to a decline in prices between 1819 and 1821. A six-month recession was recorded in 1819, commencing at the time of the parliamentary debate. But it is a mistake to attribute these conditions entirely to a return to the pre-1797 gold standard when the preceding post-war euphoria is taken into account, which lead to a brief boom. Whether these events or Liverpool’s policies are the reason, the reintroduction of the pre-1797 gold standard provided a background of monetary stability that lasted over ninety years.
Robert Peel was important in two respects. He oversaw the introduction of the Bank Charter Act, which reformed the banking system so that the note issue became the preserve of the Bank of England, which would only be expanded with the full backing of physical gold. While the Act was designed to reinforce the gold standard, sadly it neglected to address the issue of unbacked bank credit.
His second act, the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 led by 1860 to the repeal of nearly all other tariffs, producing substantial economic benefits. It meant lower prices for food staples, giving factory workers, who previously had more or less only subsistence-level wages, free money to buy other things. In turn, this led to an expansion of manufacturing activity, lowering production costs even further. The abolition of tariffs was so successful that other countries, such as France, and the German-speaking states on the Continent followed suit.
The reintroduction of the gold standard in 1821 and the Bank Charter Act were designed to remove the temptation of inflationary financing from government, in accordance with Lord Liverpool’s policy. Peel’s removal of tariffs led to lower prices for goods. Together, they ensured a general deflation of prices that lasted until the First World War. It was a period of enormous success for Britain and her trading partners, not just in the Commonwealth and colonies, but it stimulated business in America and Europe as well. And all this from economic policies regarded today to be the greatest threat to the global economy.
Conclusion
The evidence from the past is that deflation of prices offers substantial benefits to consumers, businesses and savers. This article has very briefly shown why this is so by drawing on the experience of Britain in the nineteenth century, and there is no reason to believe that a similar deflationary situation would be any different today. Instead, one of the more obvious contemporary deceits which is paraded as a universal truth is that consumers benefit from higher prices because of the stimulant to business.
On every level this is plainly wrong. The inflationist argument has demolished both savings and personal wealth, leaving the average consumer worse off. It transfers wealth from producers to non-producers, notably the government, its licensed banks and speculators. The fact of the matter is inflationists seek to justify inflationism.
Today’s inflationism has its roots in the ebb and flow of bank credit, a problem unfortunately not addressed by the Bank Charter Act of 1844. More than any other error it led through successive credit cycles to the development of central banks and their attainment of the levers of monetary policy. It required the denial of classical economic theory and its replacement by a new breed of macroeconomist educated to justify the state’s increasing management of money and credit. In the process, reasoned economic theory was discarded in favour of the socialisation of money, and much else besides. Deflation had to be vilified to justify this new macroeconomic world.
It has led to our current situation, where without further monetary inflation governments would have to deliberately rescind most of the welfare provisions introduced since President Hoover became the first interventionist in 1929. Without further monetary inflation, the global banking system would face liquidity pressures likely to collapse it: in fact, these strains have already appeared in the US monetary system, forcing the Fed to inject large amounts of liquidity on a daily basis through repurchase agreements.
Without further monetary inflation, interest rates will immediately rise, bankrupting indebted businesses and consumers alike, who have become used to easy money never to be repaid.
All that further inflation achieves is to defer these outcomes, not stop them. There can only be one outcome from this macroeconomic fairyland, the collapse of unbacked fiat currencies. A return to sound money, free markets and prices set by the deployment of genuine savings will require shifts of seismic proportions.
A proper respect for the benefits of falling prices might have avoided the looming monetary and economic crisis.
CNN talking head Brian Stelter took first place in a “Liberal Hack” tournament that pitted the left’s most rabid media conspiracy theorists against each other in a ‘March Madness-style’ competition.
VOTING BEGINS NOW FOR THE CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH OF THE FIRST ANNUAL SMUG INDUSTRIES LIBERAL HACK TOURNAMENT
Announced on Jan 23. by Twitter influencer Shashank Tripathi – known as ‘Comfortably Smug‘ – the contest featured 64 liberal journalists from MSM outlets such as the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC.
Stelter ‘beat’ the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin – whose ‘hackiness’ can be appreciated in the below example.
The contest was in doubt on Monday, after Twitter temporarily suspended Tripathi for violating their rules on “abuse and harassment,” after tweeting “Where’s Hunter, fat???” right before the Iowa caucuses.
Smh the Biden campaign got Smug locked up until the Iowa caucuses start tonight pic.twitter.com/POjfjCdDfy
Japan Confirms 10 nCoV Cases Aboard Quarantined Cruise Ship; Hong Kong Warns Virus Could “Spread Widely” As Deaths Near 500: Virus Updates
Summary:
Global confirmed deaths: 492
Confirmed cases on mainland: 24,324; additional 172 in ROW
185,555 cases under medical observation
Chinese authorities have enforced full community lockdown in Nanjing Province
American Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Jetstar close routes to China
Taiwan tightens travel restrictions
WHO infectious hazard chief says outbreak ‘not a pandemic’
Japan confirms at least 10 cases of coronavirus aboard “Diamond Princess”
Kudlow says impact on US economy from outbreak will be ‘limited’
* * *
Update (1845ET): At least 10 cases of coronavirus have been discovered aboard the Carnival Japan cruise ship “the Diamond Princess”, which has been quarantined at Japan’s Yokohama port since yesterday after officials learned that a passenger who recently disembarked tested positive for the virus in Hong Kong.
JUST IN: More than 10 people aboard a Japanese cruise liner have tested positive for #coronavirus, Japan’s @tbs_news reported, after all 3,000+ passengers were quarantined earlier Tuesday pic.twitter.com/I6Z4iqIMEB
As we reported earlier, 3,000+ passengers aboard the cruise ship are under quarantine. It’s unclear when they’ll be allowed to leave the ship. All individuals who were found to be infected with the virus were taken to a local hospital for treatment.
Meanwhile, after unveiling the city’s first virus-related death, Hong Kong health officials warned Tuesday that the coronavirus outbreak could “spread widely through Hong Kong.” Three newly diagnosed cases raised the total number diagnosed in the city to 18, with at least four of those cases being confirmed human-to-human transmissions, according to SCMP.
“It is highly probable the four were infected locally, so there could be invisible chains of infection happening within communities,” Chuang said. “We are not ruling out a large spread [of the virus] in the future.”
In other news, South Korea just confirmed 2 more cases, raising the country’s total to 18 (the same as Hong Kong).
And for the second time in as many hours, health officials on the mainland updated the tally of confirmed cases.
NEWLY CONFIRMED CORONAVIRUS CASES ON MAINLAND AT 3,887 ON FEB 4
MAINLAND CHINA REPORTS 65 NEW CORONAVIRUS DEATHS ON FEB 4
CHINA’S TOTAL NUMBER OF CONFIRMED CORONAVIRUS CASES ON MAINLAND HITS 24,324 AS OF END-FEB 4
CHINA’S TOTAL NUMBER OF CORONAVIRUS DEATHS ON MAINLAND REACHES 490 AS OF END-FEB 4
Additionally, according to China’s NHC, 185,555 cases under medical observation, up from 171,329 yesterday. Meanwhile, 892 cases have been cured. After Tuesday’s rally in US stocks, will this number be all that bulls need to drive this massive short-squeeze even further?
Here’s the SCMP’s latest roundup of coronavirus cases (it has yet to be updated to reflect the new cases):
More than 5,000 health care workers walked off the job on Tuesday, worsening what’s becoming a serious public health crisis, as they pressure the city government to close all borders with the mainland. Health officials warned that newborns and the elderly are still at risk.
Back in Wuhan, the entire city remains on lockdown, with streets eerily empty aside from a handful of pedestrians. The New York Times just published a video of sweeping drone footage of the city, which is the epicenter of the virus and by far the hardest hit.
As for the cruise ship, it’s just the latest example of public officials underestimating the sheer infectious capacity of the coronavirus.
3156 new pneumonia cases of new coronavirus infection were added in Hubei Province (making a total of 16,678 in Hubei).
There were 65 new deaths in the province, making a total of 479.
At present, 12627 cases are still being treated in the hospital , of which 1809 cases are critically ill.
66,764 people are still undergoing medical observation.
The full China data will be available shortly.
* * *
Update (1145ET): In a stunning announcement by officials in Nanjing Province, authorities have unveiled what amounts to full martial law and furthermore, taking enforcement of reporting the sick extremely seriously:
“Nanjing issued a notice to further strengthen community management during epidemic prevention and control: fully implemented community closed management, all people entering and leaving the community must wear masks. Strict inspection and registration of vehicle personnel in the community.
Strengthen community environmental governance and management of rental housing. If an outbreak occurs in a rented house without a timely report, the leasing unit or individual of the house will be held accountable according to law.”
Nanjing is home to 8.35 million people – this has to be the largest enforcement of martial law in history.
* * *
Update (0900ET): After saying the viral outbreak would have ‘no impact’ on the US economy last week, White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow has now revised that view.
The coronavirus outbreak will likely have some impact on the supply chains of American companies, but the impact probably won’t be catastrophic, Kudlow told Maria Bartiromo during an interview with Fox Business Network.
“It’s not a catastrophe. It’s not a disaster,” Kudlow said, adding later: “We’ve been through this before and I just think the impact is minimal.”
However, Kudlow added that it might take longer for China to fulfill some of its promises from the ‘Phase One’ trade deal (specifically, their promise to buy an additional $200 billion in American-made goods).
Impact of #CoronavirusOutbreak from @larry_kudlow “prob it will be .2% in 1Q, another .2% later in the year. It’s not a disaster. Minimal impact”. @MorningsMaria@FoxBusiness “we are reducing inequality. Yes export boom will take longer but #USMCA will unlock gains”
No new coronavirus-related deaths were announced overnight, leaving the global fatality toll at 427, with all but two of those deaths occurring in China, according to the South China Morning Post. The total number of confirmed cases is closing in on 21,000, as nearly 200,000 are ‘under observation’ in China.
Yesterday, President Xi convened a second meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s highest governing body. The public meeting marked Xi’s second appearance before the Chinese people since the coronavirus outbreak. According to reports in Chinee state media, Xi declared the outbreak “a major test of China’s system and capacity for governance and we must sum up the experience and draw a lesson from it,” while declaring the outbreak a threat to societal stability. As we reported yesterday, Xi also warned local officials that they would be punished if they failed to suppress the virus, or if they slowed down the government’s efforts to fight the virus for the sake of “formalities” and “bureaucratism,” according to the New York Times.
Already, more than 400 local officials have already officially punished for dereliction of duty, despite complaints from some (including the Mayor of Wuhan) that Beijing tied their hands.
China’s financial ‘support’ of the WHO continued to pay off on Tuesday as the head of WHO’s Global Infectious Hazard Preparedness division said that the nCoV outbreak doesn’t yet constitute a global “pandemic” – directly contradicting the organization’s declaration.
VIDEO: The head of WHO’s Global Infectious Hazard Preparedness division says that the outbreak of the deadly novel #coronavirus, which has spread from China to two dozen countries, does not yet constitute a “pandemic” pic.twitter.com/YKuEh5IEbN
As the world grows increasingly skeptical of the numbers and information coming out of China, Beijing’s NHC said Tuesday that the coronavirus mortality rate would drop further as soon as “suitable treatments” are implemented in Wuhan. What kind of treatments are they talking about? Well, as we’ve repeatedly pointed out, nCoV responds to a cocktail of AIDS drugs (sometimes augmented with typical flu treatments). Some scientists have highlighted certain similarities between HIV and nCoV.
NHC Deputy Director Jiao Yahui said the national fatality rate was just 2.1%, with the vast majority of deaths in Hubei province. Some scientists have projected that the real death rate might be closer to 11%.
Especially after Hong Kong suffered its first confirmed fatality due to the coronavirus, marking only the second death from the outbreak outside China. The dead man traveled by train to Wuhan on Jan. 21 before returning to Hong Kong two days later.
Macau, the only place in China where casino gambling is legal, shut down its casinos for at least the first half of February.
Though some other provinces are catching up, Hubei remains by far the hardest-hit of China’s 31 provinces. The central Chinese province has lost 414 people, or 97% of the mainland death toll and the mortality rate in Wuhan, the provincial capital, has reached 4.9%, with 313 deaths so far. The mortality rate for Hubei as a whole is 3.1%, the highest of any province in the country.
Outside China, 6 new cases were confirmed in Thailand overnight, along with 6 new cases in Singapore (4 human-to- human), a first case in Belgium and the revelation about 105 suspected cases in Philippines, up 25 since Monday. Anti-Chinese sentiment in the Philippines has crested since the outbreak reached its shores, with the president even threatening to deport Chinese travelers and residents en masse.
Since our last check-in, airlines have suspended more routes to China. At least two more Asian airlines – Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific and Japan’s Jetstar – suspended routes to China on Tuesday, joining dozens of other airlines, including almost all of the major American carriers, in suspending passenger travel as demand plummets. Domestic airlines, meanwhile, have been asked by the Party not to cut international flights. American Airlines suspended flights to Hong Kong from Dallas and Los Angeles through Feb. 20.
#China asks domestic airlines not to cut international flights, aviation authority says on social media. Requests when Chinese airlines cancel a portion of flights due to lower market demand they ensure they continue to operate to countries where flights are allowed. #Wuhanvirus
Taiwan will ban foreigners who have visited or have been living on the mainland over the past 14 days from entering the island, effective Friday. The ban won’t apply to foreigners living in Hong Kong or Macau. On Tuesday, Taiwan’s coastguard stepped up patrols around the resort island of Penghun to stop Chinese fishing boats from “intruding” into Taiwanese territory (and possibly carrying Chinese desperate to avoid quarantine), the SCMP reports.
The decision to tighten restrictions on travelers from the mainland comes after its government condemned Beijing for blocking Taipei from joining the WHO’s anti-epidemic network, which would have allowed Taiwan to access first-hand information about the virus and any suppression efforts that are actually working.
Australia is the latest country to evacuate citizens from Wuhan. Like Japan, the US and the UK, it has forced those rescued into a two-week quarantine.
Japan has quarantined around 3,700 people aboard a cruise ship off the port city of Yokohama after a passenger who departed the cruise at an earlier date tested positive for coronavirus. So far, officials say they haven’t detected any cases of the virus aboard the ship, but tests are ongoing.
VIDEO: 🇯🇵 Japan has quarantined a cruise ship carrying 3,711 people and was testing those on board for the new #coronavirus on Tuesday after a former passenger was diagnosed with the illness in Hong Kong #DiamondPrincesspic.twitter.com/1S1s8MRKd9
According to the Chinese press, a similar scenario is playing out at a mainland port (marking at least the third quarantine of a cruise ship since the beginning of the outbreak).
As we’ve repeatedly reported, signs are emerging that a combination therapy involving cocktails of drugs meant for different ailments may be effective in combating the coronavirus outbreak around the world, with different hospitals from Bangkok to Zhejiang reporting cases of patients recovering from the disease, according to SCMP.
In the name of protecting the children, U.S. lawmakers and the Department of Justice want to ban end-to-end encryption, opening Internet users to a host of attacks on their privacy by not only the government but also malicious hackers.
Attorney General William Barr is claiming he wants to protect the children but his former law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, protected Jeffrey Epstein—one of the most serial child sex traffickers. And it turns out Barr’s own father, Donald Barr, was the headmaster of an elite New York City school that hired college dropout Epstein to teach math and physics.
Last week, Barr expressed at the White House Summit on Human Trafficking that encryption was aiding human traffickers. He said:
“We live in a digital age, and like everyone else, human traffickers are relying increasingly on digital communication and the Internet … and more and more, the evidence we rely on to detect and to deal with these predators is digital evidence,” Barr said. “However, increasingly, this evidence is being encrypted.
We all recognize that encryption is important in the commercial world to protect consumers like us from cybercriminals, but now, we’re seeing military-grade encryption being marketed on consumer products like cellphones and social media platforms and messaging services, and that means that we cannot get access to this data.
We just can’t have chatrooms and websites that are involved in grooming children victims or selling trafficked women — sites that are impenetrable to law enforcement—and we have to do something about this.”
Barr has previously said that technology companies using end-to-end advanced encryption and other security measures are effectively turning devices into “law-free zones.”
“As we use encryption to improve cybersecurity, we must ensure that we retain society’s ability to gain lawful access to data and communications when needed to respond to criminal activity,” Barr said in his keynote address at the International Conference on Cybersecurity at Fordham University Law School in Manhattan.
“Encryption reliably protects consumers’ sensitive data,” Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff lawyer in the Center for Democracy at the American Civil Liberties Union said. He added,
“There is no way to give the F.B.I. access to encrypted communications without giving the same access to every government on the planet. Technology providers should continue to make their products as safe as possible and resist pressure from all governments to undermine the security of the tools they offer.”
Now Congress is seeking to ban companies from using end-to-end encryption and impose penalties for businesses that use it. Barr, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Sen. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) are targeting encryption with a new draft bill called the “Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (or EARN IT) Act.” The act would modify the Communications Decency Act’s Section 230 to make companies liable in state criminal cases and civil lawsuits over child abuse and exploitation if they don’t follow practices set by a national commission according toEngadget.
That commission would be known as the “National Commission on Online Child Exploitation Prevention,” would be comprised of 15 people, and led by the Attorney General who just so happens to be Barr himself. This new government organization would also include the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and 12 others handpicked by members of Congress. The Commission would be tasked with recommending “best practices for providers of interactive computer services regarding the prevention of online child exploitation conduct.”
Riana Pfefferkorn, a member of the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, wrote in a blog post that the bill threatens the constitutional rights of online communication platforms and their users in a solid evaluation of the bill. Pfefferkorn explained:
“While the EARN IT Act is ostensibly aimed at Section 230, it’s actually a sneaky way of affecting [encryption laws] without directly amending it. This bill has a number of extremely serious problems, too many to fit into one blog post. It is potentially unconstitutional under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, for one thing.”
If passed the law would also require companies like Telegram to allow backdoor government access to encrypted information which would also provide a “golden key” vulnerability for malicious hackers—something that Barr doesn’t appear to understand.
“Throughout his term as Attorney General, William Barr has frequently and vocally demanded “lawful access” to encrypted communications, ignoring the bedrock technical consensus that it is impossible to build a backdoor that is only available to law enforcement. Barr is far from the first administration official to make impossible demands of encryption providers: he joins a long history of government officials from both parties demanding that encryption providers compromise their users’ security.”
Even government officials in the FBI and DOJ aren’t convinced Barr is doing the right thing by seeking to ban encryption, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In 2018, the FBI lied and inflated the number of encrypted phones it said were connected to ongoing criminal investigations. The Bureau incorrectly stated time and time again that 7,800 phones were blocked from investigators. The Washington Post later reported that those figures were more like 1,000 to 2,000. The FBI blamed a “programming error” for the discrepancy.
Modern law provides enough legal means making EARN IT an unnecessary escalation on Section 230 which protects small companies more than the big giants. Currently, if an Internet company finds that an individual or group is using its platform to distribute child sexual abuse material, federal law already requires them to provide that information to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and to cooperate with law enforcement investigations.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to allow the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei access to Britain’s new 5G network has placed unnecessary strain on the transatlantic alliance at a time when it needs to show a united front against Beijing’s global ambitions.
Mr Johnson’s decision to allow Huawei to build parts of the 5G network has been taken in the face of fierce opposition from the Trump administration, which regards the Chinese company a security risk because of its historic links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Donald Trump personally called Mr Johnson to urge the British prime minister not to allow Huawei continued access to Britain’s 5G infrastructure, warning that to do so risked causing a split in transatlantic relations, and might raise questions about Britain’s continued involvement in the elite Five Eyes intelligence-gathering alliance that London has shared with the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand since the end of World War Two.
Instead, following a meeting of Britain’s National Security Council, Mr Johnson announced that Huawei would be allowed to continue working on the development of the 5G infrastructure, albeit with strict conditions being applied on the company’s ability to access those parts of the network linked to Britain’s military, nuclear and intelligence installations.
Mr Johnson has sought to reassure Washington by offering to work closely with the US to develop 5G technology that would “break the dominance” of Huawei, with the aim of ultimately squeezing the Chinese giant out of Britain’s infrastructure.
The depth of Washington’s disappointment with the British decision, however, was reflected in comments made by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who, prior to arriving in London for a two-day visit, said there was still time for Mr Johnson to “relook” at the decision.
American objections about allowing Huawei access to sensitive communications networks in the West stem from ongoing concerns about the company’s ties to the CCP, as well as China’s People’s Liberation Army.
Huawei has been accused of developing sophisticated surveillance technology that has been used in China’s Xinjiang province as part of Beijing’s crackdown against the country’s oppressed Uighur Muslim minority.
Hundreds of thousands of Uighurs are reported to have been detained in makeshift prison camps and subjected to “re-education” programmes by the Chinese government.
Concerns over Huawei’s activities have already persuaded a number of countries, such as India, New Zealand and Australia, to join the US in banning the Chinese firm from their 5G networks. Indeed, Washington’s concerns over Huawei mean the company’s mobile phones are not even allowed onto American military bases.
Mr Johnson’s decision, therefore, will be regarded as a victory for Beijing, and a vindication of its claims that Washington’s campaign against Huawei is driven more by commercial rivalry than genuine concerns about any security threat the firm might pose.
It is for this reason that Mr Johnson would be well-advised to heed Mr Pompeo’s advice and reconsider allowing Huawei access to Britain’s telecoms systems, irrespective of the restrictions the British authorities claim they will impose on the firm’s access to sensitive installations.
In an age when the foremost challenge of the Western democracies is to defend their interests against Beijing’s long-term goal of achieving global dominance, it is vital that they present a united front against the Chinese threat.
Mr Johnson needs to understand that Britain’s interests are best served by maintaining strong ties with Washington, rather than by indulging in dubious business deals with Beijing.
Controversy Erupts After Buttigieg Declares Victory; Sanders Challenges As Mayor Pete’s Links To App Company Emerge
Update (1:30 a.m. ET): Controversy has broken out after Pete Buttigieg declared victory in Monday’s Iowa caucus, despite a counting fiasco caused by a new app developed by a company called, literally, Shadow.
Buttigieg campaign official sharing some details of the internal counts they have so far pic.twitter.com/SL1MaGz93F
People have noted that the Buttigieg campaign has also contracted with Shadow, leading some to note the poor optics and imply that the Iowa caucus is once again being stolen from Bernie Sanders.
Three different sources say a firm called “Shadow” developed the Iowa Dem caucus app. They haven’t responded to comment, neither has Iowa Dem Party. The firm was paid by both Nevada & Iowa Democratic Party, disclosures show. Also by Mayor Pete’s campaign.
Pete Buttigieg managed to spike the most important poll which showed him in third the day before the caucus. He seems to have some ties to the company that developed the App that is supposed to count the vote totals. He is now declaring victory before ANY results are reported.
You have a duty to Democracy.
The results of your fair elections are being meddled with by bad actors.
Please tweet out your REAL caucus results ASAP & show the world what the DNC is trying to hide!
RT if you agree!#IACaucus#DNCRigging
The Sanders campaign, meanwhile, released their own internal figures indicating the Vermont Senator is in the lead.
Sanders camp releases top line numbers they say represent their internal results from nearly 40 percent of precincts in Iowa, showing Sanders leading Buttigieg. Senior adviser @AriRabinHavt said this release would reflect as much data as they had so far. pic.twitter.com/XhrK9KlAV5
Update (12:40 a.m. ET): While the results of the Iowa Caucus are still in limbo, the Biden campaign’s General Counsel, Dana Remus, fired off a terse letter to Iowa DNC officials with a list of demands after “considerable flaws” in the reporting system have led to ‘acute failures statewide.’
“We believe the campaigns deserve full explanations and relevant information regarding the methods of quality control you are employing, and an opportunity to respond, before any official results are released.“
JUST IN: Biden campaign general counsel Dana Remus sent a letter to top Iowa Democratic Party officials demanding “full explanations and relevant information” for the “failed” systems the IDP deployed for tonight’s caucuses.
The Iowa Democratic Party, meanwhile,said “We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results. In addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report. This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.
“… and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report. This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”
Before we start detailing the results of this evening’s Iowa caucuses, we have to get something off our chests…
I truly cannot believe, in the year 2020, part of the democratic process in the United States involves clustering people in corners and having them raise their hands while someone counts them.
As a reminder, a candidate wins the nomination if they can secure a majority of delegates – 2,376 or more. That includes a combined total of pledged delegates – those awarded based on election results – and unpledged superdelegates – party leaders who can vote for the candidate of their choosing.
As Bloomberg notes, Superdelegates, also known as “unpledged” or “automatic” delegates, are Democratic delegates who get a ticket to the convention based on their role in the party – 445 national committee members, 280 members of Congress, 24 governors and 22 other party leaders like former presidents and national chairmen. Their role has been controversial because they can vote their own conscience and could conceivably overturn the will of rank-and-file delegates in a contested convention. New rules this year ensure that won’t be the case – but only on the first ballot.
Here’s how it works:
If one candidate has enough delegates to win the convention outright—at least 2,376 delegates—superdelegates can vote because they won’t make a difference.
If one candidate has a majority of pledged delegates—at least 1,991—only those pledged delegates can vote on the first ballot and that candidate becomes the nominee.
If no candidate has a majority of pledged delegates on the first ballot—less than 1,991—the convention moves to a second ballot in which superdelegates can vote.
The Iowa rules are even more complex, but simply put, Iowa has 41 ‘pledged’ delegates and 8 ‘super-delegates’.
* * *
The results are notably delayed
Iowa’s State Democratic Party, seemingly terrified of blowback if something untoward occurs (note that they canceled the Des Moines poll due to irregularities), initially said it is doing “quality control” on results “out of an abundance of caution.”
Then they slowly started to admit there were real issues with a brand new app that had been created especially to ease transmission and transparency of the results.
One precinct chair in Polk County told Bloomberg News he still has not been able to report his results because the phone app was not working and he has been on hold with an alternative hotline for more than 30 minutes.
“We are experiencing some issues in terms of people being able to load and connect with the app for their precinct reporting,” said Bret Nilles, chairman of the Linn County Democratic Party.
ABC’s Rick Klein noted:
“What we can say confidently is there are massive technical issues that are delaying the vote count right now in Iowa and it is 100% better for this to be right rather than to be fast.”
State party Communications Director Mandy McClure said in a statement.
“The integrity of the results is paramount. We have experienced a delay in the results due to quality checks and the fact that the IDP is reporting out three data sets for the first time. What we know right now is that around 25% of precincts have reported, and early data indicates turnout is on pace for 2016.”
“A lot of us are going to be doing it on paper and calling it in,” said Kelcey Brackett, the chairman of the Muscatine County Democratic Party.
CNN just interviewed Shawn Sebastian, secretary from the Story Country Precinct 1-1, who said:
“I am the caucus secretary for Story County Precinct 1-1. I’ve been on hold for over an hour to report the results. We have 6 delegates”
One guest on Fox News has already raise the question “…it makes one wonder if the app was hacked… and by whom?”.
Was there some meddling? Did Rachel Maddow blame the Russians yet?
The state party has said it has no cybersecurity concerns over the app’s use.
As one wit noted”
“…and these are the people who want to run our healthcare system?”
* * *
Congrats to Cory Booker, who is no longer running for president, but appears to have actually won a state delegate equivalent, thanks to strategic voting from non-viable candidates.
Here a twist at Drake U: @CoryBooker, who has dropped out of the race, has won one of six delegates awarded at precinct 38.
Supporters of non-viable candidates (Yang, Biden, and Klobuchar) banded together to deny Sanders, Warren, or Buttigieg that extra delegate.
Finally, in an attempt at foreseeing the spin-fest that is bound to erupt after these results, we note that a lot has been said about Iowa and New Hampshire’s lack of racial diversity. Make no mistake, their status will be questioned, especially if the IA/NH Democratic winner(s) don’t win the nomination or the White House.
Oh, and one more thing, Trump won 97% of the vote in Republican caucuses.
China To Lower 2020 Economic Growth Expectations On Coronavirus Outbreak
It would be challenging for China to falsify 2020 GDP figures between 6% to 6.5% amid economic fallout from the coronavirus outbreak.
The Communist Party of China had come to grips of a decelerating economy, even before the deadly virus broke out. Officials blamed the slowdown on the trade war last year, and now they’re blaming it on the virus. Party leaders appear to scapegoat everyone but themselves for China’s downturn.
Bloomberg notes that government officials could lower the country’s annual growth target in March from the 6% to 6.5% range, to about 6%.
China has injected tens of billions of dollars into its financial markets and the real economy to prevent a hard landing. People familiar with increased stimulus measures told Bloomberg that deficit spending and issuance of government bonds would be the support tools to cushion the economy, expected to be announced on March 5, or thereabout.
We noted even before the virus outbreak, that China’s credit growth rapidly decelerated to the weakest pace since at least 2017, as a continued collapse in shadow banking, weak corporate demand for credit and seasonal effects all signaled that a massive rebound in China’s economy was unlikely in 1Q20.
Bloomberg Economics said China’s 1Q20 GDP figures could print around 4.5% Y/Y:
“That’s a drop from 6% in the final period of 2019 and the lowest since quarterly data that begins in 1992. Most of China’s provinces said before the virus became widespread, they’re expecting slower economic growth in 2020, with at least 22 out of 31 major cities, provinces and autonomous regions cutting their targets as of January 21, according to their work reports which layout plans for this year.”
The coronavirus shock from China has already sent commodities tumbling; for instance, copper futures are on the longest losing streak since 1986. Dr. Copper suggests China’s economy is headed for a hard landing, along with continued deceleration across the world.
What does this all mean? Well, China was responsible for more than 60% of all new credit created globally in the past decade.
With a slowdown in the country gaining momentum, creeping economic paralysis unleashed by the coronavirus epidemic, hopes for a rebound in the second-largest economy to rescue the global economy have faded. This could only suggest the world is headed for below-trend growth.
There have been many protests all over the world on a large scale since the beginning of the 24 hour news cycle/prevalence of the Internet and it has become obvious that some quickly gain favored status from the Mainstream Media while others are kept in the dark regardless of size or significance. This selective hyper focus on particular protests is a key component of the Color Revolution strategy. The protestors are positioned as the downtrodden masses yearning for their voices to be heard, and bad country of the month’s leadership is oppressive and needs to go. Sometimes this works (Ukraine twice and Georgia) and other times it fails (Russia and for now at least Venezuela) but the Second Amendment (2A) protest in Virginia presents a new tactic/opportunity that can be used to counteract any Color Revolution outside the West.
One thing that is key to understanding Color Revolutions (CR) is that as it stands today they are always orchestrated by the West to make regime change in the Non-West due to their financial and nearly total media domination. No matter how many people label the Mainstream Media as “Dinosaur” or quote their terrible ratings, the 24 hour news cycle still creates the dominant narrative for current events in the public’s mind internationally, and this is why the Color Revolution tactic only works one way.
The Western Mainstream Media can turn any nobody politician\public figure into the legitimate leader of Country X overnight. No one knew who Guaido was on Monday, but the West was sure he was the only true voice of the Venezuelan people on Tuesday. The same goes for the overwhelming support for anyone opposed to Putin like Alexei Navalny, who if given the chance to run for President would surely get a low end single digit percentage.
The Mainstream Media can make heroes and villains abroad but this does not work in the opposite direction. When Jill Stein (a figure with the same relative level of popularity as Navalny if not more so) was thrown out of the 2016 debate when she tried to crash the party, no non-Western media could spin this into the catalyst for some sort of Color Revolution. If this would have happened in say Iran then calls for the overthrow of the government would be heard from TV screens and Facebook memes around the world.
Although the Russians are accused of meddling in the Yellow-Vest protests, there is simply not enough Moscow Media might to convince the French public that the Yellow vesters are the new legitimate power, wag that dog, and get a full scale Color Revolution completed. The French situation is a perfect breeding ground for a Color Revolution if it was in bad guy Country X. The level of protests are massive, police brutality is rampant and documented, and they even have a Color/symbol – their vests. All the ingredients are there but without being able to push the media narrative no CR can or will happen in France.
What this means is that for the foreseeable future the Multipolar non-Western World (Russia, China, Iran etc.) is always going to be on the defensive from CR tactics. There is however another major disadvantage that the Multipolar World has – the type of people who do go out to street protests are the type who support the Monopolar World.
The working masses of families with kids, the heartlanders across the globe, who are really the backbone of society are far too tired/busy to engage in Color Revolutions or protests of any kind, and when they do they are one off and utter failures. The actual people who are most likely to protest with ribbons because of vague complaints like a lack of “Democracy” or “freedom” are those emotional types with time on their hands and probably decent resources too.
Naive bourgeois victimhood-lifestyle teenagers and some hardcore professional activists are generally who you are going to find at CRs. The amount of people who are actual ideologues that push political agendas in their country are generally less than 1% of the population combined with trendy kids who want to feel like they are accomplishing something by chanting do not represent the will of the working-class majority. But as stated before the Mainstream Media can convince even simple folk in Country X that they do. And probably what is most important, the trendy people with free time are always inherently pro-Western. It is exactly the cosmopolitan urbanites in any country who are going to be pro-Western, farmers and factory workers usually won’t. The type of people who come out to a Color Revolution are the types who believe the US/EU hype, and are the willful useful idiots that the media needs to create its narrative.
And here is where the Virginia 2A protests come in. They, like the Yellow Vest protestors were made up of those toiling masses also known as the Silent Majority. The same Silent Majority which the Multipolar world wants to woo with calls for tradition, populism and national sovereignty. Meaning, that ideologically the Second Amendment crowd’s instincts are anti-Color Revolution even if they don’t know what that term means. They are the kind of folks who cherish America as an idea and as part of their identity. They want their traditions and culture to remain intact, meaning that this is really the forces that the leadership of Country X (that is under threat of Color Revolution) should use. This is a demonstration of just how strong the Silent Majority really is when it awakes from its slumber of fatigue.
The local government was terrified and declared a state of emergency even before the protest began and obviously, the SJW rats didn’t dare show their faces against hundreds of armed old school Americans. This show of force that didn’t use any particular force is a shining example of how strong the people the Multipolar Order supposedly loves, and we can see how much they could halt some kind of anti-American CR.
To an extent this is what happened in Venezuela when Maduro was able to successfully rally thousands of supporters to march. If in Caracas the media had footage of massed government troops on the move, beating people with clubs, it would have fed into Maduro’s downfall, but since the actual force that took over the streets were just working class normies in bright T-shirts there was not only to juicy footage to twist, the images proved to support Maduro’s legitimacy. The real winner of this situation was Maduro’s usage of the Silent Majority directly against the Color Revolutionaries. He showed a faith in his people, which is not felt in places like Russia or China. Despite the fact that the Multipolar World stands on the side of tradition on populism, the big two dominant forces in this movement do not let their populaces take action like Maduro was wise enough to allow.
If hordes of armed commoners like those at the Virginia protests showed up to the Maidan it would have never have succeeded. Instead in Ukraine they stayed home as 40,000 protestors decided the destiny of 40 million people. Although China is accused of sending thugs from the Mainland, if they were to send waves of semi-armed hillbillies into Hong Kong the issue would be resolved in a day. The simple fact is that those who are on the Multipolar side of today’s New Cold War, if given the chance to fight on the streets, will win that fight every time. They are the side with the most to lose, the most anger to vent, the most testosterone, the most love for their own way of life, and who suffer the most from Color Revolutions.
Maduro demonstrated that organizing the peasantry even with just their fists and improvised weapons, was enough to defeat years of Color Revolution prep, especially since his masses did not look at like soldiers in disguise. He had the legit support of countless thousands of normal people. The Virginia 2A protest showed that the trendies who are the poster children of CR movements will go absolutely silent the second there is a threat of real violence. Antifa is happy to use their Black Block against one man in a MAGA hat but when it comes to actually dying for their beliefs they sit at home. Word warfare, Twitter terrorism and Media manipulation are the strengths of the Monopolar World, but ultimately the people that this system breeds are not willing to fight (in the direct literal sense) for their values and will lose through preemptive capitulation in the face of actual direct force.
If those who claim they are fighting for a Multipolar World Order do not have more faith in their populace then they will become Yanokoviches and not Maduros. Footage of government troops fighting protestors can spell doom for any leader, while the same direct action being taken by thousands of uniformless out-of-shape factory workers acting semi-independently feeds the Mainstream Media nothing and in fact strengthens one’s own legitimacy – it shows the people are on your side.
To be clear this is NOT a call for violence, in fact it is quite the opposite. Some of the most deadly events in human history have been Revolutions. Meaning, that if someone really cares about the lives of commoners they should not advocate for overthrowing governments, but for incremental change.
If the Maidan had been solved by rednecks smashing up the camps in Kiev, yes some people would have died, perhaps tens or hundreds at the most, but to date thousands have been killed and millions have suffered thanks to the successful Color Revolution of 2014. The war in the Donbass still continues many years on. Even if you loved the ideas the Yeltsin tried to push on Russia the fact is that the shattering of the Soviet Union caused millions of deaths, reform of the Soviet Union would have been far preferable from a humanitarian standpoint. If we think about the great revolutionary periods in human history, in France, Russia, China etc. they were all followed by grand scale violence and counter-revolutionary crackdown. Using the Silent Majority to block upcoming CR tactics is a far more humane solution than it may sound on the surface.
If the Multipolar World wants to survive it has to activate its Silent Majority to protect itself from Color Revolution tactics. It is ironically the populists who in many ways seem too terrified to allow their heartlanders to have the freedom to take action and fight for the motherland without a uniform and direct orders from on high.
Top US General On Ramped Up Gulf Presence: “We’re Preventing Iran From Starting A War”
The United States has been ramping up its force readiness in the Persian Gulf region following the killing of IRGC Gen. Qassem Soleimani and subsequent Iranian ballistic missile attack on US forces stationed in Iraq in early January.
Addressing the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman in the gulf, the top U.S. commander for the region, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, said while on a brief visit aboard the ship:
“You’re here because we are preventing Iran from starting a war.”
The top commander explained that US decisive action against the IRGC Quds force chief as well as the US force build-up which has included an additional thousands of troops in the region as well as a carrier presence and supporting warships, along with American jets roaring overhead, has sent a ‘deterrence’ message which has forced Iran’s own posture to recalibrate.
“You’re here because we don’t want a war with Iran and nothing makes a potential adversary think twice about war than the presence of an aircraft carrier and the strike group that comes with it,” Gen. McKenzie told the nearly 5,000 service members aboard the USS. “So, we achieve deterrence, which is preventing Iran from starting a war.”
The Truman was in the North Arabian Sea when McKenzie and his command staff landed on the carrier Saturday. He said that Iran had clearly received Washington’s “message” and appears to be standing down for the moment.
Commanding officer of the Trumpan, Navy Capt. Kavon Hakimzadeh, said additionally:
“When an aircraft carrier is in your neighborhood you know it,” according to Military Times.
Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie aboard the Truman carrier in the North Arabian Sea. Image source: AP/Military Times.
He further indicated the ship was deployed from Norfolk, Virginia, in mid-November and “almost made a beeline for the Suez Canal.”
This also after a summer of “tanker wars” between Iran in the West, which had included Iranian elite units capturing a British-flagged tanker after Gibraltar and the UK had held an Iranian tanker captive, which sent tensions between Tehran and the US soaring.
Aircraft carrier presence in Persian Gulf delivers message of deterrence to Iran, says top US Central Command leader
“You’re here because we are preventing Iran from starting a war,” says commander.
Thus far President Trump has essentially claimed “victory” after assassinating the Islamic Republic’s most popular and influential elite general, while also downplaying US troop injuries in the wake of the Jan.8 Iranian ‘retaliatory’ strike.
McKenzie’s message over the weekend appeared to underscore the administration’s message that the risky drone strike on the Iranian commander was necessary to prevent further Iranian aggression.
Most of you reading this will be aware that Zerohedge’s prolific and highly popular twitter account with over 670,000 followers was on the receiving end of a lifetime ban by the Twitter politburo. This post won’t focus on the details of this specific ban, but if you want to read more about it, see the following: Zerohedge Suspended On Twitter.
It’s imperative not to overly focus on the individual victims of tech giant bans, and instead zero in on the bigger picture. Rather than debating whether or not you like Zerohedge, or whether you think it crossed a line, I want to highlight the dangerous implications of dominant social media companies wielding permanent bans as a weapon against freedom of speech in practice.
This post will cover three main issues.
First, the fact that Twitter and other social media companies have essentially created a caste system when it comes to engagement on their platforms.
Second, the question of whether or not a lifetime ban from social media platforms is an ethical concept.
Third, the dangers of Twitter essentially throwing the entire timeline of a banished account into the memory hole.
For all intents and purposes, @Twitter has created a caste system on its platform. This goes against the entire spirit of why almost all of us joined social media. It’s a massive, dangerous problem and it must be addressed.
I’ll be touching on this and much more in a post later.
As the internet and social media started gaining traction, the idea of the “citizen journalist” grew increasingly popular and the public discovered how all sorts of previously unknown people can bring a great deal of hidden information and interesting perspectives to the table. This led to competing narratives on all sorts of topics, and we all basically agreed it’s best to treat people like adults and let them sort things out for themselves. That is, until Hillary Clinton lost an election.
At that point, a certain segment of the population went completely mental and started demanding social media companies fight and censor “fake news.” This anti-liberal perspective, largely promoted by self-proclaimed liberals, deeply affected how social media executives think about and treat platform content in the subsequent years. The result has been that Twitter and other tech giants have effectively created a caste system on their platforms. Though they won’t explicitly admit it, the executives at these companies now seem to believe certain people and organizations should be given priority to shape the national narrative, while others should be diminished. While they tolerate the latter group until they become too influential and disruptive, the former class exists at a level entirely above Twitter’s terms of service. Certain people and organizations are permitted to do whatever they like on the platform, while others are subject to increasingly arbitrary and subjective bans. It’s rapidly becoming an intentionally rigged system designed to reallocate narrative control in a certain direction.
Ask yourself, do you think there’s anything CNN could do to get banned from Twitter for life? I don’t. I genuinely think the news organization CNN can do absolutely anything it wants on or off Twitter and never be considered for a lifetime ban. Why? It’s a protected organization. CNN is above the Twitter law, and as such exists at the very top of the social media caste system. It’s not just CNN of course, there are many individuals and organizations simply not subject to Twitter’s terms of service in the way you or I are. A politician calling for mass government violence abroad (war) is another example. This sort of thing happens regularly without any consequences. Why? Twitter has determined advocating for preemptive government violence is considered reasonable. They’ve determined advocating for one form of violence (war) is fine, but advocating for other kinds of violence is not. Nobody asked for any of this, but here we are.
The next thing I want to discuss is the entire concept of a lifetime ban from a dominant social media company like Twitter. The more I think about it, the more ethically indefensible this practice appears to be. Just as we shouldn’t jail a person for life except under the most extreme circumstances, we shouldn’t be comfortable flippantly banning people forever on large social media platforms. Such action assumes people can’t and don’t change, but Twitter doesn’t seem to be looking at the enforcement of its terms of service from a fundamentally fair or ethical point of view. Executives are increasingly utilizing this most extreme form of punishment, the lifetime ban, at the drop of a hat for minor or misunderstood violations. There are many other ways Twitter could deal with what it deems to be serious violations. You can have three month, six month or even year long bans, but a lifetime banishment is an extreme and indefensible position in almost all cases I’ve observed in recent months.
As such, it’s become clear to me Twitter isn’t using this tool in order to enforce its terms of service, but rather its terms of service exist to provide an excuse to eliminate anyone or any account executives or professional bloggers in Brooklyn deem unpalatable.
I wonder if there’s a direct line from Buzzfeed blue checks to @jack to report thought crime.
1-800 protect me from opinions that conflict with yuppie Brooklyn
I know, I know “muh private company,” but let’s discuss reality. If I were to be personally banned from Twitter, my voice in the public sphere would be materially diminished.
This is when you’re supposed to instruct me to start my own Twitter or join an alternative, but the truth is Twitter dominates the very socially and politically important micro-blogging space in the U.S. It’s the preferred communications platform of President Trump for crying out loud. You end my existence there and you extinguish my voice in a very material way for the foreseeable future, yet Twitter can do this at any moment for whatever reason. If a social media company decides they want you gone, they can always come up with an excuse eventually. Is this a major problem? I think so.
If I were Trump I’d make social media bans central to my entire 2020 run.
But he isn’t doing that because he’s too focused on pumping the stock market and not finding Ghislaine Maxwell.
Finally, I want to end with another disturbing aspect of the lifetime Twitter ban. Even if you accept it as a justifiable concept, and I generally speaking do not, the way they handle it is particularly problematic. When an account like Zerohegde is banned, you lose the ability to easily search historical tweets, which is in this case means hundreds of thousands of comments made over a decade. If you go to the defunct @zerohedge handle this is what you’ll see:
This page is completely dead. You can’t go back and look at old tweets, 99% of which didn’t violate any terms of service and collectively make up an important part of post-financial crisis history. It becomes far more challenging for any of us, or future historians who want to research this period, to write about Zerohedge and the role it played over the past decade with this information now much harder to find. This is fundamentally unethical and feels like the modern equivalent of burning books. If the company’s going to ban accounts for life, it should at the very least leave the historical record up and easily searchable.
But Twitter doesn’t care. It doesn’t care because the lifetime ban functions as an intentionally arbitrary, cruel and vindictive tool of coercion. It’s intended to scare people and ultimately create a rigged playing field where different individuals and organizations play by distinct rules on the platform. That way the overall public narrative can be manipulated in a certain direction that tends to overlap with the dominant consensus opinions of San Francisco, New York and Washington D.C.
The beatings will continue until thought crimes are extinguished.
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In Latest Sign Of Imminent Market Collapse, Investors Dump Everything ‘China’
Fathom’s China Exposure Index (CEI), which monitors the relative stock market performance of US-listed firms with significant revenue exposure to China, has plunged after the signing of the phase one trade deal and coronavirus outbreak in the country. The downward move suggests a much broader stock market selloff could be ahead.
Fathom created CEI using the top 25 US-listed corporations that derive at least 15% of their revenues from China, and the weight of these firms is proportional to the share of their revenues that are derived in the country.
As shown in the chart below, CEI fell after the signing of the phase one trade deal between the US and China. It declined even more, as the coronavirus outbreak in the country led to the creeping economic paralysis that risks a hard landing. At least two-thirds of China’s economy has ground to a halt, many firms have already shuttered manufacturing plants and closed retail stores across the country.
And what does this all mean? Investors are now de-risking their portfolios of US-listed firms with the most significant revenue exposure to China. The reason: these companies will likely see depressed business activity in 1Q and lead to terrible earnings ahead.
A plunge in the CEI has usually been seen as a leading indicator, suggesting that a much broader stock market correction could be around the corner.
During recent increased US-Iran confrontation, so many people viewed the Selective Service website to find out about the draft that the website crashed. People were right to be concerned about a return of the draft.
With the ongoing military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan unlikely to end any time soon, and the possibly of the US being neoconned into war with Iran and possibly even Russia or China, the demand for troops is likely to rise. At the same time, soldiers return home with lifelong medical problems, including psychological problems, causing a horrifying number of veterans to commit suicide. All this can make it more difficult for the military to attract recruits. And it can leave a Congress unwilling to pursue nonintervention with a choice: increase spending on troops’ pay and benefits or bring back the draft. A Congress facing an over 25 trillion dollars debt may reinstate the draft instead of further increasing spending on the troops.
Any future draft will probably include women, thanks to judges, politicians, and feminists who think women should have the “opportunity” to be forced to join the military.
A military draft violates the principle that individuals have inalienable rights that no government should violate. A draft also puts all of our rights at risk. If we accept that the government has the legitimate authority to force individuals to fight, kill, and die in a war, then how can we argue that the government cannot force citizens to pay high taxes, purchase health insurance, or submit to TSA screenings? How can we argue against the government forbidding people from smoking marijuana or owning “assault” weapons? Many traditional conservatives, including Ronald Reagan, opposed the draft, pointing to its threat to individual rights.
Some antiwar individuals have endorsed the draft on the theory that a draft makes politicians less likely to support war. But the draft did not stop politicians from supporting unnecessary wars like World War One, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. While the draft helped galvanize opposition to the Vietnam War, it took almost a decade of American casualties for opposition to reach critical mass. More importantly, the draft violates the nonaggression principle, which is the moral heart of libertarianism. Advocating use of force to advance even as noble a goal as peace is itself immoral and sets back the cause of liberty.
Some antiwar progressives oppose a military draft but support forcing young people to participate in a “national service” program. Some conservatives join these progressives to say that national service is a way for young people to “pay back” government for the privilege of living in a free society, as if our rights and liberties are gifts from government. Mandatory national service will likely gain support when the next market meltdown occurs, as it would serve as a jobs programs for young people.
All those who support liberty must be prepared to fight any attempt to reinstate the military draft or to mandate any other type of national service. We must mobilize as many people as possible to tell the politicians it is unacceptable for the US government to enslave people in the military or otherwise. We must also support those who engage in civil disobedience. As Ronald Regan stated, the draft “rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state…. That assumption isn’t a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea.”
Discovery Of Coronavirus On Doorknob Of Infected Patient Sparks Transmission Concerns
Until now, the prevailing conventional wisdom was that China’s coronavirus epidemic, which has spread to over 20,600 people around the globe as of February 3, did so by air or, according to some recent and unconfirmed speculation, human feces. That may be about to change.
Worker disinfects the lobby of Beijing West Railway Station in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 2, 2020
According to the Global Times, new ways of transmitting the coronavirus have been reported, and virus nucleic acid has been detected outside human bodies, sparking public fears that the virus could be transmitted in unknown and undetected ways. Concerns emerged after scientists found coronavirus nucleic acid on the doorknob of a confirmed Guangzhou-based patient’s house, the first case of novel coronavirus detected outside the human body, Guangzhou Daily reported Monday. The finding was confirmed by China’s Health Commission, which said on Monday that the coronavirus can survive for five days maximum on smooth surfaces under suitable circumstances.
That would mean that mobile phone screens, computer keyboards, faucets and other household objects may indirectly transmit the virus, experts said.
A man from Northeast China’s Jilin Province, who was confirmed with coronavirus infection on Monday, shared his experience, saying he had used the same microphone with another confirmed patient during a meeting in January.
In another case, a 40-year-old man from North China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, who lives upstairs of a confirmed patient, was also diagnosed with coronavirus infection on Saturday. Aside from respiratory droplets and contact transmissions, the person has no clear contact histories with people from other cities, patients, or wild animals and has never been to a market, according to the local health authority on Sunday.
Chinese netizens were concerned the patient from Inner Mongolia might have been infected through toilet plumbing or ventilation devices.
Over the weekend, some experts warned that the novel coronavirus could be transmitted through the digestive system as they found 2019-nCoV nucleic acids in patients’ stool and rectal swabs, and health authorities had suggested the central air conditioning system be discontinued if coronavirus patients are found. The case drew attention to a case during the SARS outbreak in 2003 – In Amoy Gardens residential complex in Hong Kong, aerosolized feces spread from floor to floor through plumbing, infecting over 300 people with the virus, reports said.
There is a real danger for foreign policy advisors and analysts – and especially those they serve – when they are in a bubble, an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs. Needless to say it’s even worse when they believe they can create their own reality and invent outcomes out of whole cloth.
Things seldom go as planned in these circumstances.
President Trump was sold a bill of goods on the assassination of Iran’s revered military leader, Qassim Soleimani, likely by a cabal around Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the long-discredited neocon David Wurmser. A former Netanyahu advisor and Iraq war propagandist, Wurmser reportedly sent memos to his mentor, John Bolton, while Bolton was Trump’s National Security Advisor (now, of course, he’s the hero of the #resistance for having turned on his former boss) promising that killing Soleimani would be a cost-free operation that would catalyze the Iranian people against their government and bring about the long-awaited regime change in that country. The murder of Soleimani – the architect of the defeat of ISIS – would “rattle the delicate internal balance of forces and the control over them upon which the [Iranian] regime depends for stability and survival,” wrote Wurmser.
As is most often the case with neocons, he was dead wrong.
The operation was not cost-free. On the contrary. Assassinating Soleimani on Iraqi soil resulted in the Iraqi parliament – itself the product of our “bringing democracy” to the country – voting to expel US forces even as the vote by the people’s representatives was roundly rejected by the people who brought the people the people’s representatives. In a manner of speaking.
Trump’s move had an effect opposite to the one promised by neocons. It did not bring Iranians out to the street to overthrow their government – it catalyzed opposition across Iraq’s various political and religious factions to the continued US military presence and further tightened Iraq’s relationship with Iran. And short of what would be a catastrophic war initiated by the US (with little or no support from allies), there is not a thing Trump can do about it.
Iran’s retaliatory attack on two US bases in Iraq was initially sold by President Trump as merely a pin-prick. No harm, no foul, no injuries. This despite the fact that he must have known about US personnel injured in the attack. The reason for the lie was that Trump likely understands how devastating it would be to his presidency to escalate with Iran. So the truth began to trickle out slowly – 11 US military members were injured, but it was just “like a headache.” Now we know that 50 US troops were treated for traumatic brain injury after the attack. This may not be the last of it – but don’t count on the mainstream media to do any reporting.
The Iranian FARS news agency reported at the time of the attack that US personnel had been injured and the response by the US government was to completely take that media outlet off the Internet by order of the US Treasury!
Last week the US House voted to cancel the 2002 authorization for war on Iraq and to prohibit the use of funds for war on Iran without Congressional authorization. It is a significant, if largely symbolic, move to rein in the oft-used excuse of the Iraq war authorization for blatantly unrelated actions like the assassination of Soleimani and Obama’s thousands of airstrikes on Syria and Iraq.
President Trump has argued that prohibiting funds for military action against Iran actually makes war more likely, as he would be restricted from the kinds of military-strikes-short-of-war like his attack on Syria after the alleged chemical attack in Douma in 2018 (claims which have recently fallen apart). The logic is faulty and reflects again the danger of believing one’s own propaganda. As we have seen from the Iranian military response to the Soleimani assassination, Trump’s military-strikes-short-of-war are having a ratchet-like effect rather than a pressure-release or deterrent effect.
As the financial and current events analysis site ZeroHedge put it recently:
[S]ince last summer’s “tanker wars”, Trump has painted himself into a corner on Iran, jumping from escalation to escalation (to this latest “point of no return big one” in the form of the ordered Soleimani assassination) — yet all the while hoping to avoid a major direct war. The situation reached a climax where there were “no outs” (Trump was left with two ‘bad options’ of either back down or go to war).
The Iranians have little to lose at this point and America’s European allies are, even if impotent, fed up with the US obsession with Saudi Arabia and Israel as a basis for its Middle East policy.
So why open this essay with a photo of Trump celebrating his dead-on-arrival “Deal of The Century” for Israel and Palestine? Because this is once again a gullible and weak President Trump being led by the nose into the coming Middle East conflagration. Left without even a semblance of US sympathy for their plight, the Palestinians after the roll-out of this “peace” plan will again see that they have no friends outside Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. As Israel continues to flirt with the idea of simply annexing large parts of the West Bank, it is clear that the brakes are off of any Israeli reticence to push for maximum control over Palestinian territory. So what is there to lose?
Trump believes he’s advancing peace in the Middle East, while the excellent Mondoweiss website rightly observes that a main architect of the “peace plan,” Trump’s own son-in-law Jared Kushner, “taunts Palestinians because he wants them to reject his ‘peace plan.’” Rejection of the plan is a green light to a war of annihilation on the Palestinians.
It appears that the center may not hold, that the self-referential echo chamber that passes for Beltway “expert” analysis will again be caught off guard in the consequence-free profession that is neocon foreign policy analysis. “Gosh we didn’t see that coming!” But the next day they are back on the teevee stations as great experts.
Banks Tighten Credit Card, Auto Loan Standards As C&I Loan Demand Continues To Shrink
The latest senior loan officer survey, released earlier today by the Fed, showed that the benefits from last year’s rate cuts have mostly faded away even as banks tightened standards for several kinds of loans, while demand for all-important commercial and industrial loans, traditionally a leading indicator for any economic rebound, slumped for the sixth consecutive quarter.
The January SLOOS, which looked at lending standards for commercial and industrial loans in the fourth quarter of 2019, reported that standards for commercial and industrial loans were unchanged and that “demand weakened from firms of all sizes.” And while standards for commercial real estate loans were mostly unchanged, the only source of strength according to loan officers was demand for mortgages, which remained strong following the decline in interest rates in the second half of 2019. However, offsetting this, standards for credit card and auto loans tightened while demand remained unchanged for credit cards and weakened for auto loans.
Some more details starting with the broadest type of loans, Commercial & Industrial, which as the following Y/Y% growth chart shows, have seen their growth rate grind to a crawl in recent months, after rebounding sharply in late 2018 and early 2019 as the Fed hiked rates prompting urgency among corporations to raise new secured debt. Ironically, it is the renewed easing by the Fed that appears to be the culprit for rapid slowdown in C&I loans.
According to the Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey, lending standards for commercial and industrial (C&I) loans were basically unchanged in Q4 2019. A handful of banks eased some terms for C&I loans, as 21% of banks on net narrowed loan spreads over the cost of funds to large and medium-market firms and 10% on net narrowed loan spreads for small firms.
While lending standards were largely flat, demand for C&I loans from large- and medium-sized firms weakened for the sixth consecutive quarter, resulting in a sharp slowdown in the overall rate of growth of C&I loans, which have been virtually unchanged for the past year. The good news: after tumbling 20% in Q3 to the lowest level since the financial crisis, C&I loan demand stage a modest comeback in Q4, even if it still remains deep in negative territory.
In a concerning development, 11% of banks on net reported weaker demand for C&I loans for large and medium-market firms, compared to 22% in the previous survey, which suggests that any tailwinds for loan demand sparked by the Fed’s 2019 rate cuts are now long gone.
Shifting to commercial real estate loans, standards were mostly unchanged in the fourth quarter according to the Fed, except for construction and land development loans which tightened modestly (+7pp). Demand for CRE loans was similarly unchanged for CRE loans except for construction and land development loans, which like C&I loans, weakened (-6pp).
What is curious is that while the Fed’s rate cut appears to have resulted in lower demand for C&I loans, following the drop in interest rates in the second half of 2019, demand for residential mortgage loans remained strong, though a smaller share of banks reported stronger demand for mortgages in Q4 compared to in the previous survey. Banks reportedly left lending standards for most categories basically unchanged, echoing the previous survey.
Banks’ willingness to make consumer installment loans was again little changed in Q4. However, a moderate share of banks again tightened standards for credit card loans by tightening credit limits and increasing minimum credit scores. A modest share of banks also tightened standards for auto loans. Nonetheless, large banks with larger auto loan portfolios reported stronger demand. Demand for consumer loans was little changed since the previous survey.
On net, supply remained same or modestly tighter, even as demand for virtually all loan categories slumped or remained negative in Q4 after surging earlier in the year, when the Fed cut rates for the first time since the financial crisis.
Hong Kong Confirms 2nd Non-Mainland China Coronavirus Death As Hospital Workers Strike, Over 200,000 ‘Under Observation’
Summary:
Hong Kong reports that a 39-year-old man is the first death from coronavirus (2nd non-mainland China death)
Hong Kong closes more land borders with mainland
Virus death toll rises to 425 in China (427 if we count two deaths abroad)
Total number of confirmed cases tops 20,500, 171,329 cases under observation
2 more cases reported in Germany
President Xi threatens to punish local authorities if they fail to contain virus
Xi may delay visit to South Korea amid pressure to restrict travel from China
* * *
Update (0108ET): A woman was reportedly shot dead by police after attempting to breach a quarantine blockade in Wuzu Town approximately 50 miles from Wuhan.
Update (2120ET): According to Hong Kong State TV, officials just confirmed the first death from coronavirus: a 39-year-old patient has become the first to die in Hong Kong from an illness related to the deadly coronavirus. The man, who was being treated in Princess Margaret Hospital in Kwai Chung, died on Tuesday morning due to sudden heart failure, according to three medical sources.
According to the government, the deceased man had lived in Whampoa Garden with his mother. She was confirmed on February 2 as Hong Kong’s 15th case, but did not have a recent history of travel.
This is the second death outside of mainland China from the deadly virus.
To make matters worse, thousands of Hong Kong medical workers went on strike for a second day on Tuesday to demand that leader Carrie Lam immediately close the city’s border with the mainland to prevent the spread of a deadly coronavirus.
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Update (1850ET):In what is by far the largest dump of coronavirus cases so for, Beijing just announced more than 3,000 new confirmed cases.
Beijing is now reporting 3235 newly confirmed cases (2345 in Hubei Province) and 492 severe cases (442 in Hubei Province). And that’s not all. China is reporting 171,329 cases under observation, up 18,629 overnight, along with 23,214 suspected cases.
There are now 20,438 confirmed cases in China, and another 154 outside China, bringing the total global count to 20,592. Meanwhile, 632 have been cured and discharged.
As a reminder, we don’t know quite yet what the real mortality rate of nCoV-2019 is. It’s still early days and nobody is sure of the numbers out of China. But Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health told CNBC on Monday that a quarter of China’s coronavirus cases require intensive treatment.
“About 25% of them have very serious disease, requiring relatively intensive or really intensive care,” said Fauci, the director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci has participated in some of the CDC’s press conferences.
At 04:00 on February 3, 31 provinces (autonomous regions, municipalities) and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps reported 3235 newly confirmed cases (2345 in Hubei Province) and 492 severe cases (442 in Hubei Province). There were 64 death cases (64 cases in Hubei Province), 157 newly cured cases (101 cases in Hubei Province), and 5,072 suspected cases (3182 cases in Hubei Province).
As of 24:00 on February 3, the National Health and Health Commission has received a cumulative report of 20,438 confirmed cases (2 nuclear reductions in Heilongjiang Province) in 31 provinces (autonomous regions, municipalities) and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. There are currently 2788 severe cases with cumulative deaths.
There were 425 cases, 632 cases were cured and discharged, and there were 23214 suspected cases. At present, 221,015 close contacts have been tracked.
12,755 people were released from medical observation on the same day, and 171,329 people are currently receiving medical observation. A total of 33 confirmed cases were reported in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan: 15 in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, 8 in the Macao Special Administrative Region, and 10 in Taiwan.
Update (1840ET): A Korean newspaper just reported that President Xi may delay a planned visit to South Korea to focus on dealing with the coronavirus outbreak. Xi reportedly said during a Politburo meeting Monday that he would punish local officials for failing to successfully suppress the virus, a process of scapegoating that has already begun, as we noted earlier.
* * *
Update (1720ET): It’s early Tuesday morning and China, which means we’re getting another batch of statistics about the coronavirus outbreak – statistics that likely underplay the severity of the outbreak.
According to Chinese health authorities, 2,345 were confirmed on Monday, while another 64 died (including 48 in Wuhan alone).
Hubei Province is now reporting 13,522 cases of coronavirus infection (including 6384 in Wuhan), while 58,544 are under observation across China. 46 new deaths were reported overnight, bringing the death toll in China to at least 425.
For those who are keeping score at home, that’s a 18% rise in deaths overnight.
Another terrifying video shows a man collapsing in a virus-induced fit.
Terrifying. Surveillance video catching the moment of man collapsing maybe dying in less than a minute during #CoronavirusOutbreak . No wonder so many fell on streets. 不到一分鐘就過去了。怪不得那麼多倒地斃的。#武漢肺炎pic.twitter.com/5jjE1GnfT2
Meanwhile, President Xi is cracking the whip. According to the SCMP, at a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, President Xi Jinping said local cadres would be punished severely if they failed to heed Beijing’s orders to stop the virus from spreading.
“[We] must treat the fight of the outbreak as the most important task at hand,” Xi was quoted by state broadcaster CCTV as saying.
Punishments of local officials has already started; more than 400 have already been ‘penalized’, according to Nikkei. Meanwhile, the party has acknowledged that it shouldn’t have arrested a group of doctors in December for allegedly spreading ‘disinformation’ (they were trying to warn the world of the outbreak – yet the WHO has praised China for being ‘transparent’).
Update (1545ET): Germany reports 2 new cases of coronavirus, raising country’s total to 12. Nearly all of these cases have been linked to the same company.
Elsewhere, Princeton isolates 108 students as precaution after China trips. Remember, the US has it all under control.
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Update (1400ET): Stocks are still in the green, but the administration is taking zero chances. To wit, the USTR’s office reportedly told Fox that China hasn’t requested any changes to the ‘Phase 1’ trade deal struck last year just before the virus emerged as a global threat to the public.
USTR SAYS HAS NO CHINA REQUEST ON DEAL CHANGE DUE TO VIRUS: FOX
This follows reports from earlier claiming that China was seeking ‘flexibility’ regarding its trade deal commitments. Meanwhile, HHS is telling Congress that it might need another $136 million to fight the virus (this after the Pentagon requested quarantine space for 1,000 people).
A few hours ago, Hong Kong’s leader announced the closure of four more border crossings with mainland China on Monday, leaving just three checkpoints open, but stopped short of demands for the entire border to be closed to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
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Update (1250ET): The Pentagon confirmed that 198 people have been quarantined at March Air Base in California’s Riverside County. It’s believed that those under quarantine traveled on the evacuation flight out of Wuhan.
Meanwhile, Fox reports that China has accepted the US’s offer to incorporate a group of American experts into a contingent of WHO researchers focusing on studying and understanding the virus.
Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman blames US for not helping with #Coronavirus.. saying, “it was the first to withdraw its consulate staff from Wuhan, the first to suggest the partial withdrawal of embassy staff, the first to announce a ban on entry by Chinese citizens…” 1/2
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying Adding “…after the WHO made it clear that it doesn’t recommend and even opposes travel and trade restrictions against China. What the US has done could create and spread panic.” #coronavirus
The White House has responded to the Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson. Judd Deere says, “China has accepted the United States’ offer to incorporate a group of experts into a World Health Organization mission to China to learn more about and combat the virus.” #Coronavirus
Update (1140AM ET): The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the US is starting to increase at a concerning pace, and moments ago, the CDC confirmed in a telebriefing that there are 11 cases in the US.
U.S. CDC CONFIRMS 11 CONFIRMED CORONAVIRUS CASES IN UNITED STATES – TELEBRIEFING
More ominously, the CDC said that the new Coronavirus case is close contact of other California case, and was spread person-to-person.
And while traders were not happy with this latest confirmation that the disease is anything but contained, it is what the CDC aid said next that sent stocks and yields both sliding:
CDC: PREPARING AS IF CORONAVIRUS WERE THE NEXT PANDEMIC
Judging by the market reaction, it appears that algos are not fans of that word.
Finally, the CDC also said at its briefing that it has added four more airports for screening of Coronavirus.
* * *
Late last night, we reported that the death toll from the coronavirus outbreak had surpassed 360 as more suspected cases popped up in New York. Though no deaths have been reported overnight, Chinese officials warned yesterday that many more cases and deaths would be confirmed on Sunday/Monday.
But over in the US, investors ignored the latest news out of China and have seemingly bought into the WHO’s optimistic message and China’s accusations about an ‘alarmist’ Washington.
This is surprising, since anybody who has been paying close attention to the situation in China should know that this is far from the truth.
Late last night, while most of America was watching the Superbowl, the New York Times puablished a scathing story recounting what it’s like on the ground in Wuhan right now. The truth is that all of the warnings of alleged ‘conspiracy theorist’ have more or less turned out to be correct. Supply shortages are still making it impossible for China to diagnose every case of the virus.
Ms. An, 67, needed an official diagnosis from a hospital to qualify for treatment, but the one she and her son raced to last week had no space, even to test her. The next hospital they were referred to here in Wuhan, the city of 11 million people at the center of the outbreak, was full, too, they said. They finally got an intravenous drip for Ms. An’s fever, but that was all.
Since then, Ms. An has quarantined herself at home. She and her son eat separately, wear masks at home and are constantly disinfecting their apartment. Ms. An’s health is declining rapidly, and even keeping water down is a struggle.
“I can’t let my mom die at home,” said her son, He Jun. “Every day I want to cry, but when I cry there are no tears. There is no hope.”
Chilling stuff. And once again, doctors and health-care workers are leveraging their newfound immunity to shed a light on the government’s brutality.
Last month, the government put Wuhan in a virtual lockdown, sealing off the city and banning most public transportation and private cars from its streets in a desperate effort to contain the outbreak. Now, many residents say it is nearly impossible to get the health care they need to treat – or even diagnose – the coronavirus.
Expressing exasperation, doctors say there is a shortage of testing kits and other medical supplies, and it is not clear why more are not available. The ban on transportation means some residents have to walk for hours to get to hospitals – if they are well enough to make the journey. Layers of bureaucracy stand between residents and help. And the long lines outside hospitals for testing and treatment suggest that the outbreak is spreading far beyond the official count of cases.
For many sickened residents, their best hope is the new coronavirus hospital that has just been finished (a second hospital is also being built).
Those who do make it to the hospital say they are squeezed together for hours in waiting rooms, where infections are easily spread. But the shortages have meant that many are ultimately turned away and sent home to self-quarantine, potentially compounding the outbreak by exposing their families.
Many doctors and residents are putting their hopes on the two new coronavirus hospitals that China has been racing to build in Wuhan in just a matter of days. One of them spans about eight acres, has 1,000 beds and is scheduled to open on Monday. The government says 1,400 military medical workers will be deployed to work there, potentially helping with the shortage of health professionals on hand to combat the outbreak.
Ironically, the hospital, which was supposed to open on Monday, is still undergoing ‘finishing touches’, and when masses of sick patients showed up at the gates on Monday morning, construction workers were forced to turn them away.
More than a week into the quarantine/lockdown, millions of residents fear the virus has spread much further than the government realizes.
On Sunday, city officials announced plans to set up quarantine stations around Wuhan for people with symptoms of pneumonia and close contacts among coronavirus patients. But just over a week into the lockdown, many residents believe the virus has already spread much further than the official numbers suggest.
“The situation that we’ve seen is much worse than what has been officially reported,” Long Jian, 32, said outside a hospital where his elderly father was being treated. Mr. Long said his father had to go to six hospitals and wait seven days before he could even be tested for the coronavirus.
But after Monday’s market shellacking, we suspect Beijing will be diverting more resources away from meeting critical shortages of medical supplies to focus instead on arresting shortsellers and locking up ‘fearmongers’, like the doctors who were arrested by local authorities in December for trying to warn the public about the outbreak.
In just eight days, China has completed construction on one of two new hospitals in Wuhan, dedicated to treat #coronavirus patients.
Following reports OPEC is weighing another supply cut to ‘rebalance’ the global oil market and warnings from economists that the outbreak could wipe more than a percentage point off Chinese GDP growth, officials in Beijing have reportedly changed their economic growth forecasts for 2020 to below 5%, what would be the lowest rate of growth since the beginning of China’s modern era of state-directed capitalism.
To help the economy cope, Beijing is reportedly considering more stimulus measures to try and bolster growth.
Of course, the fallout won’t be limited to China, and in a report published Monday, WSJ explores how the outbreak is already disrupting global supply chains and placing “additional strain” on an increasingly fragile economic expansion.
As we’ve pointed out, the outbreak has stoked racism against Chinese around the world.
Corona Virus doesn’t have a nationality; it’s a pathogen threatening us all. Anti-Chinese sentiment is unconscionable. Let’s come together as a shared humanity to fight disease, inequity, discrim, & stigma.#coronavirus
On a slightly more positive tip, Chinese state media posted this video about an infected woman who gave birth to a healthy baby in the middle of the crisis.
A pregnant woman with novel #coronavirus pneumonia has delivered a healthy baby on Jan. 30. The baby is tested negative for the novel coronavirus on Jan. 31 and Feb. 2. The mother’s body temperature had returned to normal by Feb. 2. pic.twitter.com/vB1GfpDEDR
Finally, RT points out that the death toll from the coronavirus outbreak has already eclipsed the death toll from SARS, as the virus has spread to nearly two dozen countries and territories. The pandemic will eventually “circle the globe,” according to scientists from the NYT,.
Given the fear of the virus ravaging densely populated areas, the people of Hong Kong have succeeded in pressing the city’s government to tighten travel restrictions, joining the US, Vietnam, Japan, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and many others.
Hong Kong has shut crossings to the mainland. But even this is likely too little, too late, as the first cases have already been diagnosed in the city.
Members of the G-7 will hold an emergency call on Monday to discuss strategies for containing the outbreak.
Get ready for another week of virus-induced craziness as this doesn’t look ready to disappear from the headlines any time soon.
Could General Qassem Soleimani’s dramatic demise provide the shock therapy to persuade those who wield real power in Tehran to admit the failure of a strategy that has led Iran into an impasse? This was the question discussed in a zoom conference with a number of academics from one of Iran’s leading universities.
The fact itself that the issue could be debated must be regarded as significant. It indicates the readiness of more and more Iranians to defy the rules of silence imposed by the regime and raise taboo issues more or less openly.
In the course of the discussion one participant drew a parallel between Soleimani’s death and that of Marshal Lin Biao, the Chinese Communist defense minister whose demise in an air crash in 1971 opened the way for a radical change of course by Maoist China.
Lin’s elimination enabled Chinese reformists, then led by Prime Minister Chou En-lai, to isolate the so-called “Gang of Four” hardliners, led by Mao’s wife Jian Qing, and bring the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to a close as prelude to a historic change of course designed to transform the People’s Republic from a vehicle for a revolutionary cause into a normal nation-state. Within a few years, the People’s Republic under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership was building a capitalist economy with a totalitarian political frame, discarding dreams of “exporting revolution”.
Having lost its revolutionary legitimacy, the Chinese Communist regime started building a new source of legitimacy through economic success and the dramatic rise in living standards for hundreds of millions across the country. The Chinese found out that producing and exporting goods that people wanted across the globe was easier and more profitable than trying to export a revolution that no one, perhaps apart from a few students in London and Paris, thirsted for.
However, the parallel isn’t exact. Lin was accused of having secret ties with “Imperialism” and plotting a coup against Chairman Mao while Soleimani was regarded as “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei’s most faithful aide. Lin had a glittering biography, having led the People’s Liberation Army in numerous battles to victory with his conquest of Beijing as the final bouquet.
In contrast, even Soleimani’s most ardent admirers are unable to name a single battle which he fought, let alone won. Even now his adulators only claim political successes for him, including his supposed success in preventing the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and seizing control of the Lebanese state apparatus through surrogates.
Nevertheless, Soleimani’s demise does provide an opportunity for a serious review of Khamenei’s policy of “exporting revolution” which has cost Iran astronomical sums and countless lives with not a single country adopting the Khomeinist ideology and system of government.
The idea of imitating the Chinese model isn’t new in Iran. It was first raised in 1990 by then President Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who went as far as asserting, only half-jokingly, that he would even be prepared to discard the clerical garb to adapt to the modern world. The Shah had promised that he would turn Iran into “a second Japan”. Rafsanjani promised a “second China.”
The Shah could not fulfill his promise because he was hit by the Islamic Revolution on the road and had to go into exile. Rafsanjani’s “second China” also remained a dead dream with the would-be Iranian version of Deng Xiaoping just managing to stay alive and out of jail, barely tolerated by the real “deciders” as an embarrassing uncle.
Some of Rafsanjani’s close associates now tell me that he was “a bit of a coward” and lost his opportunity to do a Deng Xiaoping by being sucked into corrupt business deals. According to them, Rafsanjani didn’t realize that one starts making money for himself, his family and his entourage after one has done a Deng Xiaoping, and not before. Deng’s family, including his daughter, son-in-law and hangers-on made their millions after China had been de-Maoized. In Rafsanjani’s case, the millions were made without any attempt at de-Khomeinization.
At the time Rafsanjani played his “China” tune. I argued in several articles that the Deng model was not applicable to the Islamic Republic. In China, Maoism, is quirkiness notwithstanding, was a potent ideology, mixing nationalism, xenophobic resentment, and crude egalitarianism symbolized by the imposition of uniforms and collective production units. In contrast, the Khomeinist ideology was never developed into a coherent narrative while its open hostility to Iranian nationalism gave it an alien aura. Moreover, the Chinese revolution had triumphed after decades of struggle including a huge civil war involving tens of millions on opposite sides.
In contrast, the Khomeinist revolution succeeded in around four months because the Shah, unwilling to order mass repression, decided to abandon power and leave.
There are other differences between Iran today and China in the 1980s. The People’s Republic was firmly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party which had at least five million trained and disciplined cadres capable of passing its message to society as a whole and mobilizing support for any change of strategy. The Khomeinist republic has no such structure and its support base, mired in corruption, finds it increasingly hard to communicate with society at large. The mass gatherings that the regime organizes should deceive no one.
Today, the Tehran “deciders” constitute a small, increasingly isolated minority caught in an imagined past and fearful of the future. Worse still, many “deciders” have already put part of their money abroad, having sent their children to Europe and America. Going through a who-is-who of these “deciders” one is amazed by how many are behaving as carpetbaggers, treating Iran as a land to plunder, sending the proceeds to the West. They cannot produce an Iranian “Deng” because they don’t want to create a productive economy; all they are interested in is to get the money and run. Nor are they able to build the state institutions needed for a modern economy capable of seeking a credible place in the global market.
The machinery that Deng and his team inherited was certainly repressive and outmoded by the higher international standards. However, within its own paradigms, it worked. In contrast, the Khomeinist republic, though as outmoded and repressive as the Maoist regime, simply doesn’t work. Lacking any mechanism for self-reform it resembles the blindfolded horse in ancient mills going round and round, grinding the seeds of a bitter harvest.
UPenn Student Trapped In Wuhan Says Coronavirus Outbreak Is ‘Like A Zombie Apocalypse’
The Daily Pennsylvanian interviewed Zhexuan Huang, a college sophomore studying at the University of Pennsylvania, has been trapped in Wuhan, China, for the last several weeks.
Huang told the daily student newspaper at the college that he hasn’t left his home in weeks and has been forced to take a semester off.
He said the virus outbreak across the city limited his efforts in renewing his student visa in early January. The US consulate in Guangzhou, China said he would receive a passport next week.
With Wuhan on lockdown and all transportation networks at a standstill, Huang has been stranded with no word on when he can return to school.
“I still haven’t received my passport back, and Wuhan is still completely blocked – like all the public transportation is closed, including airports, even highways,” he said.
He described the shutdown as a “zombie apocalypse,” exactly like what you see in the movies. There are no vehicles on the street, everyone is hiding out in their homes, and businesses have all shuttered, in the city of 11 million people.
He said, “Some people fly their drones outside the city to see the view of the city right now. There are pretty much no cars on the street, like no people walking. The city is like a ghost city.”
Huang emailed all his UPenn professors about his inability to reach the US because of the virus. They all said he wasn’t able to take online classes, though he wouldn’t be charged by the university this semester for missing classes.
And to get a sense of what Huang means when he says, “zombie apocalypse,” we turn to Twitter:
This is what’s happening in Wenzhou, China. A Chinese military is now getting envolved in #coronavirus response, a clear indicator of situation getting out of control. pic.twitter.com/if2JeJdLuy
In Wuhan, many people infected and die for #coronavirus every day. #CCP’s still controlling media to keep people from knowing the severity of epidemic. Due to asymmetric information, many people still save by luck to go for run or shopping without mask.
US, China Stocks Surge Higher After PBOC Injects Another 400 Billion Yuan
After yesterday’s net CNY150billion liquidity injection didn’t work (in rescuing stocks), PBOC decided to more than double it tonight and the plunge-protectors injected a net CNY400 billion, sending yuan and US and Chinese equity markets soaring…
The PBOC injected CNY500b with reverse repo (380bn in 7-day repo and 120bn in 14-day repo) and accounting for CNY100bn in maturing repo, that nets to CNY400 billion liquidity injected.
“The coronavirus is different. It is big. It is going to paralyze China … we should try and resist our inclination to buy the dip,” says @elerianm. pic.twitter.com/a3dQNuqlzV
And every issue I touched on in that article has come to pass. For more than ten years Soros and his cohort Tom Steyer, (who is now somehow presidential material?) have worked diligently to end free speech on the internet, to regain control of The Wire and end our ability to out them in real time to stop their Brave New World.
All around you, if you look closely enough, you will see the spectre of George Soros lurking behind the headlines. The caravan, net neutrality, regulating Facebook, the de-platforming of independent media, color revolutions and election meddling, refugee creation and manipulation, the trolls on Twitter, your blog and YouTube, etc.
All of these things we see in the headlines today are a product of George Soros’ money and his singular obsession with re-creating the world in his image.
In 2018 and 2019 Facebook dealt with massive data scandals which revealed just how deeply the company had breached the public trust. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was hauled in front of Congress in a big Kabuki Theatre show to threaten him with removing the Facebook’s immunity as a platform under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act .
And we all laughed at Data trying to become a real boy, having to dealing with these pesky human emotions.
But the threat to Facebook was real and it wasn’t temporary. It’s costs of compliance are rising. Its bureaucracy growing.
Pressuring Facebook publicly, putting it a no-win situation with the public is just part of Soros’ strategy to regain control over information flow of the internet..
It has been a decade-long, multi-step process.
First, create a solution in search of a problem. Net Neutrality was a means to create bandwidth subsidization with the government enforcing access. This appeals to the leftards in the audience, worried about corporate control when it would never happen.
Second, create another problem by enticing social media platforms to use their power to curtail speech in an unbalanced way, breaching the firewall of Section 230 protection. This fires up the Q-tards, libertarians and conservatives.
All the while they were undermining the public’s trust in how their data is handled, and personifying the corruption — Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg — forcing them to publicly deal with the issues, well beyond their comfort zone.
That turns public frustration and anger over the unfairness into a call to action.
Well, that call to action finally arrived. Soros penned another of his outrageous opinion pieces in the New York Times on Friday (of course, not behind the paywall) to attack Mark Zuckerberg demanding his removal as CEO of Facebook. That’s the headline.
That’s the click bait.
But, here’s the real point of Soros’ attack. He builds a conspiracy between Facebook and Donald Trump to get him re-elected as prima facia evidence Facebook no longer deserves Section 230 immunity.
The responsible approach is self-evident. Facebook is a publisher not just a neutral moderator or “platform.” It should be held accountable for the content that appears on its site.
Speaking at a cocktail party in Davos on Jan. 22, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, repeated the worn Silicon Valley cliché that Facebook is trying to make the world a better place. But Facebook should be judged by what it does, not what it says.
I repeat and reaffirm my accusation against Facebook under the leadership of Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg. They follow only one guiding principle: maximize profits irrespective of the consequences. One way or another, they should not be left in control of Facebook.
This is truly another crazy moment where Soros, in his desperation, thinks he can make the credible case that Facebook, which has been nothing but hostile to conservatives and libertarians since its inception, is now actively working with Trump preferentially to enable his re-election.
This depth of this man’s evil is truly breathtaking. Ingenious, but evil.
I remind you that Soros isn’t a person. He’s not an entrepreneur. He’s a vampire, living off the accumulated wealth of a society grown complacent and lazy. He’s only ever made money by manipulating a zero-sum game — currency trading — which he himself has a hand in setting the stage for.
And that lack of true service to humanity is why he’s obsessed with his grand project of the Open Society, as he defines it. This is his where his megalomania stems from, that deep understanding that he’s a leech and a fraud.
It’s why he insists the media calls him a philanthropist and not a devourer of souls and agent of chaos.
But Soros is edging closer everyday to the villain in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Adrian Veidt. A man so obsessed with what he saw as humanity’s failures that he took it upon himself to save us from ourselves.
He just had to kill millions of people in order to do it.
Soros existed for years like Veidt, a man hiding behind proxies and a philanthropist’s image while quietly pulling the strings to change the direction of the world.
For more than two years I’ve been saying that Facebook is in trouble. There comes a point where growth simply isn’t possible if you already have 25% market share of the entire human race.
This quarter’s earnings report saw the stock get crushed into the monthly close as headcount and operations costs are rising quickly while the growth rate cannot sustain a P/E of 40 in a market finally looking to cut out the froth.
It’s not a deal-breaker. The company is wildly profitable but from here it can only slow down and the more Soros et.al. push for higher-level and more pervasive deplatforming the more high-value Facebook users will bolt.
It’s what will kill YouTube in the end.
Soros wants Facebook to be a glorified government Ministry of Information Filtering, because he understands the power of a mass platform. Facebook is The Wire now. He failed to control the ISPs with Net Neutrality.
And it looks like Facebook’s unwillingness to go full Palpatine vexes him further. That’s why he’s pushing a public feud, trying to appeal to conservatives who rightly don’t like Zuckerberg.
But, Zuckerberg is a pawn. He’s neither the problem nor the solution. Soros is the problem and we have to remember this at all times. While being banned from Twitter or Facebook for stupid reasons is unfair, so what.
Life isn’t fair, but it doesn’t mean we hand an already corrupt, incompetent and failing government more power to control the content we have access to.
There are other networks, other platforms. Good information is found. The truth sells itself.
Ultimately, Facebook is an intelligence operation for Wall St. and the government (or do I repeat myself) masquerading a social media platform. And the more it is exposed as such the less profitable it will become. I left the platform last year and haven’t looked back.
So have many others. Soros, in his zeal to control information flow, has weaponized it by pressuring failing governments into into treating criticism against his projects a crime against decency.
He may believe he’s winning the argument, but his op-ed, which by his standards is stunningly incompetent, betrays a hint of desperation there is a split between him and Wall St.
Wall St. is amoral. They aren’t ideologues like Soros. They go where the money is. And the money is still in a version of Facebook that allows the illusion of political debate.
Soros, on the other hand, is openly backing anti-Wall St. candidates like Elizabeth Warren. He’s partnered with Tom Steyer on internet control. Facebook is Wall St.’s darling, feeding them all the data, money and power they could ever want.
They really aren’t ready to slay the golden goose just because George is dead set against Trump. Given the field and the collapse of the impeachment, Trump is the best candidate Wall St. has in this election unless Hillary pantsuits up and pinch hits for the DNC.
Hillary is great at hitting softballs. But, as we all know, to make it in the majors you can’t have trouble with the curve. You need to be adaptive and flexible. Hillary is neither of those.
So, ultimately, Hillary’s quest to win back Wall St. for the globalists will fall short, even if Wall St. hedges their bets with her against Trump one more time.
Meanwhile, yesterday’s oligarchs like Soros have lost the ability to shape the narrative in their favor. It doesn’t work like it used to. People refused to be cowed into silence simply because they may lose their YouTube channel or Facebook page.
There is a profound up welling of change occurring all across the world.
And it comes from the decentralization of information and there’s little people like Soros can do to stop it. They can put up roadblocks. They can slow things down.
But the costs to do this are rising constantly as technology makes communications cheaper. The days of controlling the on-ramps to information through artificial barriers to entry are over.
China will find that out the hard way. Soros will too. He doesn’t understand that populism isn’t popular because dumb people get bad information from dishonest advertising.
Populism is popular because moldy old globalists like him suck the joy out of life and destroy their homes, families and communities. And no one actually wants to live in his brave new world of culture-free, soulless hyper-correctness.
There is no such thing as a happy police state. There’s just anxiety, neurosis and endless porn.
Any idea that cannot stand up to criticism, no matter how crude or ignorant, is worthy of our consideration. And that’s what Soros’ lame attempts at control ultimately are, a pathetic attempt to stifle criticism by creating a worldwide network of tattle-tales and gatekeepers.
In Watchmen, Veidt convinced the State (Dr. Manhattan) to do just that, killing Rorschach who refused to accept the lie and would expose the truth.
And that’s exactly what Soros is doing asking for Facebook’s platform immunity to be revoked. Continuing to use Facebook in ways it doesn’t approve of or leaving the platform is how we fight both Zuckerberg and Soros. Forcing them to adapt to our curve balls, remembering that without us they have no power, that’s how we win.
Not by using the very thing that wants us curtailed, caged, taxed and just mobile enough to think we’re free to protect us from each other, or worse, bad ideas.
* * *
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Head Of Iran’s IRGC Operations In Syria Killed Near Aleppo
Iranian state media sources have reported the death of Asghar Bashpour on the front lines of fighting in Aleppo province, which renewed days ago as Turkish-backed Syrian jihadists poured into the countryside around the major northern city. The Syrian Army has also been on a major offensive against al-Qaeda’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to retake neighboring Idlib province.
Crucially, Bashpour was an elite commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force who is said to have been close to its slain leader Qassem Soleimani. The news was announced by Tehran Radio and then circulated among various Middle East sources, including The Times of Israel on Monday. His death occurred Sunday while reportedly supporting military operations of pro-Assad forces.
Blurry photo circulating of Iran’s Quds Force senior commander Asghar Pashapour, far left., also with slain Gen. Qassem Soliemani (2nd from right), via IRIB/Al Arabiya.
Israel has long claimed that Iranian entrenchment inside Syria is ultimately aimed at harming Israeli security and interests. Over the past years the Israeli Air Force has conducted hundreds of incursions and strikes inside Syria, against what Tel Aviv describes as Iranian proxies and troops.
The Times of Israel describes the newly slain Asghar Bashpour and friend of Soleimani as follows:
He is said to have been at the forefront of the Quds Force’s operations against anti-regime rebels in Syria, where Iran has been a key backer of President Bashar Assad since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
Regional sources say he was senior commander in the Quds Force responsible for overseeing all Iran-backed special operations in Syria. State-run IRIB news agency describes that Pashapour was “one of the first to go to Syria with Qassem Soleimani.”
بسم رب الشهداء و الصدیقین
استشهاد القائد اصغر پاشاپور من قوات الحرس الثوري الایراني فی ریف حلب
Beirut-based Syrian war monitor al-Masdar News, among few outlets to have sources within the Syrian Army, described that the IRGC elite commander likely died fighting the terrorist group Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP):
The location of Bashpour’s death in Aleppo was not reported; however, it is likely that he was either killed at the IRGC base in Nayrab (southern Aleppo), which has been targeted by militant missiles, or the Khan Touman front, where the jihadist rebels of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) launched a counter-offensive against the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and Local Defense Forces (LDF).
As we detailed earlier, Turkish-backed Syrian rebels have in recent days and weeks mounted new insurgent attacks on the outskirts of the provincial capital city of Aleppo at a moment the Syrian Army has made huge gains into neighboring Idlib.
A key reason Damascus has vowed to retake every inch of Idlib is that for years al-Qaeda has launched terrorist attacks on suburbs of Aleppo from there as civilians and the government attempt to rebuild the largely destroyed urban center.
Asghar Pashapour, left, a top commander in Iran’s Quds Force.
This latest renewed fighting in Aleppo appears a concerted effort by Turkey to use its proxy forces to repel and distract the brunt of the Syrian Army offensive on Idlib, considering on Friday President Erdogan warned he’s ready to use military force if Assad doesn’t halt Idlib operations.
On Monday rare direct clashes broke out between the Syrian and Turkish armies which killed an estimated 50 people, including Turkish troops, though the numbers on each side are currently in dispute.
Below is my column in The Hill newspaper on the continued effort to ignore the obvious and catastrophic decision of the House leadership to rush the impeachment vote by Christmas rather than complete the record against President Donald Trump. This denial continues despite the fact that, after saying that they had no time to seek witnesses or favorable court orders, the House leadership then waited a month before released the articles of impeachment. Clearly, the record would have been stronger if the House waited and sought to compel witnesses. It also would have kept control of the record and the case. I encouraged them to vote in March or April, which would have given them plenty of time to secure additional testimony and certainly a number of favorable court orders. However, recognizing this obvious blunder would take away from the narrative that the case failed only because the Republicans were protecting Trump in the Senate.
NBC host Chuck Todd recently asked guests on his show if supporters of President Trump just want to be lied to. It is a question that many in the media would never ask about Democrats, even in the face of overtly false claims. This week is an example. After the Senate rejected witnesses and effectively ended the impeachment trial on Friday, the media ignored the primary reason for the defeat, which is the insistence of House leaders to impeach Trump by Christmas. Critics of the president simply do not want to hear that the blind rush to impeach guaranteed not only an acquittal but an easy case for acquittal. It is after all important for some members of the media to maintain that fools dwell only in Republican red states.
When I appeared before the House Judiciary Committee in November, I opposed four proposed articles of impeachment as legally flawed and explained that two would be legitimate if they were proven. The House Judiciary Committee rejected the challenged articles and accepted the two articles on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. That left one fundamental area of disagreement. I warned the panel that it was rushing to a failed impeachment by insisting on a vote by Christmas. This was the shortest impeachment investigation in American history. It was also the narrowest grounds and thinnest record for trial. I have previously noted that witnesses like former national security adviser John Bolton indicated that they were willing to testify if subpoenaed, and that a couple months would have likely secured more testimony and supportive court orders.
Indeed, in the impeachment case of President Nixon, it took only a few months to go all the way to the Supreme Court for the final decision. So absent such a delay, the impeachment of Trump was guaranteed to fail, due to an incomplete and insufficient record. Yet the House insisted this was a “crime in progress” and there was no time to delay a submission to the Senate. It then immediately contradicted its rationale by waiting more than a month to submit articles of impeachment to the Senate. The House simply could not have made it easier on the president and his legal team.
The media ignored the obvious catastrophic blunder by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership. The media instead suggested that it was all some grand and brilliant scheme. They even credited the strategy with Bolton eventually coming forward to say he would testify with a subpoena, even though the same offer was made during the House investigation. The media also ignored the unexplained decision by the House to withdraw a subpoena for top Bolton aide Charles Kupperman, who went to court as a prerequisite for testimony, the same position taken by Bolton. Before the courts could even rule, the House mooted the case by withdrawing the subpoena. That made no sense, and the court dismissed the case after concluding that the House appeared to have no interest in the witness.
No harm would have come from pursuing testimony by Kupperman. Yet lead House manager Adam Schiff offered a facially dubious explanation that Kupperman had said he would litigate the issue. If Kupperman truly wanted to drag out litigation, he could have refused to appear before the House and waited for it to seek to compel his testimony. Instead, he said he just wanted a court order in favor of testifying for his own protection. Moreover, House Democrats continued to seek to compel the testimony of former White House counsel Donald McGahn, despite his continued litigation. It won that case as the House was voting on impeachment.
As these blunders by the House became more and more obvious, all the efforts to excuse them became more and more absurd. One main defense heard in the media was that it did not matter, given the Senate Republican majority. Yet if the House was certain to lose on that record, why end the investigation prematurely with a case that would be so easy to defeat? By waiting only a few months, the record would have been stronger. Instead, House Democrats surrendered control of the record to the opposing party and adopted a ridiculous strategy of demanding concessions to end with this trial that Senate Republicans loathed. That strategy failed miserably.
This is not Monday morning quarterbacking. This very series of events was expressly laid out before the vote, and House Democrats made a decision to choose certain failure over completing their impeachment case. There was no reason to expect Senate Republicans to assist House managers in making their case, particularly in calling witnesses not subpoenaed by the House. Democrats had opposed any witnesses in the impeachment trial of President Clinton and voted as a bloc for a summary acquittal. There was no reason to expect Republicans to adopt an entirely different approach.
We will never know how this impeachment trial would have unfolded if the House had waited to secure additional testimony and court orders. One thing, however, is certain. The case against the president could only have become stronger. The vote for witnesses failed by one for a tie and by two for a majority. A more complete record could well have tipped the balance and certainly would have made the vote against witnesses more difficult for some senators. Instead, the House submitted an incomplete record and failed to subpoena important witnesses like Bolton, making it quite easy for the Senate to refuse to do what the House had never even tried.
None of the explanations offered by House Democrats make any logical sense. That, however, does not matter. As Todd said of supporters of the president, people “want to be lied to sometimes” and “do not always love being told hard truths.” The hard truth is that House Democrats lost this case the minute they rushed an impeachment vote, and they knew it. With the approaching Iowa caucuses, they chose a failed impeachment rather than taking a few more months to work on a more complete case against Trump, a case more difficult to summarily dismiss. That is the hard truth.
“That’s The Light Of A Missile!” Leaked Audio Proves Iran Knew Immediately Missile Hit Jetliner
A new leaked recording of an audio log between an Iranian air-traffic controller and an Iranian pilot who witnessed the nearby downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 proves that authorities in Tehran knew immediately after the Jan.8 disaster what had actually happened, despite initially announcing it was an accident based on a likely mechanical failure. It further took days of denials before the Islamic Republic finally admitted the IRGC mistakenly launched missiles which destroyed the civilian aircraft, killing all 176 people aboard.
“A series of lights like… yes, it is missile, is there something?” the pilot is heard calling out in Farsi to the controller after witnessing bright flashes in the distance. “No, how many miles? Where?” the controller asks, according to the stunning audio transcript.
Ukraine’s 1+1 TV channel published the leaked audio and transcript Monday, which President Volodymyr Zelenskiy subsequently acknowledged as authentic, according to the AP. The head of the Iranian investigation team into the tragedy also said the recording is authentic.
Publicly available radar tracking data shows that the pilot of a nearby medium-sized Iranian Aseman Airlines jet was close enough to see the downing unfold.
According to the transcript, the pilot insists to a confused controller: “It is the light of a missile.”
“Don’t you see anything anymore?” the controller asks.
“Dear engineer, it was an explosion. We saw a very big light there, I don’t really know what it was,” the pilot responds.
The controller then tries to no avail to establish contact with the Ukrainian Boeing 737.
Civilian officials within the Iranian government claimed they were initially unaware that an IRGC surface-to-air missile had shot the plane down, given the IRGC is only answerable to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The doomed aircraft had crashed a mere eight minutes after takeoff from Tehran en route to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.
Zelensky said of the new audio that it“proves that the Iranian side knew from the start that our plane was hit by a missile.”
He added: “He says that ‘it seems to me that a missile is flying’, he says it in both Persian and English, everything is fixed there.”
The Iranian investigative team which had handed the recording over the Ukrainians condemned it’s being published to the world as “unprofessional” — given it was handed over as part of a confidential report, but then was quickly leaked to Ukrainian media.
What the future will bring for the 2019nCoV novel Wuhan coronavirus is still unclear. An epidemic it already is, but is it also a pandemic? Some 20 countries have reported infections, but it still could all fizzle out; 305 deaths can be forgotten by next week. Nobody can tell you how this will play out, not even the most experienced and/or smartest virologists and other experts.
Because there’s no telling what viruses will do, not even for them, and because while they have some idea about the infinitesimal size and lifespan of viruses, “ordinary” people have no grasp of either, and that includes managers, planners and politicians. Whether in the rich west or in “up and coming” China.
The timeline is quite literally terribly obvious. In early December -and it could have been even earlier-, it was obvious to doctors and Communist Party (CCP) politicians in Wuhan that something was wrong. But their painfully predictable reaction was to hope this would pass. Never a bad word should be uttered about the Party, and nothing said that could embarrass it.
December passed, as news was getting worse and more obvious due to a large number of “pneumonia” patients. Chinese doctors published an article in the Lancet this week (this week, 6 weeks after the fact!) saying human-to-human transmission had been established by mid-December.
But the code of silence was not broken, even when a man died from the virus on January 9. It took until mid-January before word got out, a full week later. By then millions of people had left and/or entered Wuhan, a city of 11 million, potentially infecting millions of other Chinese and perhaps people abroad. 5 million later left the city for Lunar New Year.
On January 10, the virus was defined and the sequence was shared, but testing didn’t start for another week; patients were registered as pneumonia sufferers, including those that died (we have no idea how many there were).
Then, mid January, doctors starting testing for the virus. The first “exported” case was noted in Thailand on January 13, but it still took more time for the potential threat to be realized and reported. The Party boys were still hoping it would all pass. Can you blame them? They are civil servants, they don’t know anything about viruses, or their threat.
Ironically, over 300 civil servants (Party officials) and health care workers were sanctioned very recently for not doing enough. The Party makes sure the blame is put on individuals, not on itself. Even if all they’ve done is follow the party line. It’s very simply how the system works. And not just in China. If the virus might come to a town near you, check where the blame is placed. It won’t be the president or prime minister, health workers will be first in line, civil servants second.
It’s good to note how fast the novel virus has spread. If only to show what those who are determined to keep such a thing silent are up against. Can’t be easy. 291 cases on Jan 20, 14,562 cases 13 days later. Those are exponential numbers, even if the number of fatalities “only” rose by 46 overnight.
It’s also good to keep in mind that the main threat in viruses is their ability to mutate and become deadlier. This virus now has at least those 14,562 hosts which they can use to mutate in. Hong Kong University doctor and epidemiologist Gabriel Leung and his team said in a Jan 31 report: “In our baseline scenario, we estimated 75,185 infections as of Jan 25.” . And they were reporting on Wuhan alone. In other words, well over 5 times as many hosts and chances for the virus to mutate in just one city. In a city of 11 million people, numbers like that are perhaps not that extreme.
2 is damage control, and deflecting all blame from the Party.
We are now in phase 3.
The WHO, which was caught napping as much as the Party in phase 2, lavishes great praise on that same Party now for its “extraordinary safety measures”. Locking down entire cities (increasingly people are not even allowed to leave their homes), speed-building hospitals, you name it. And the WHO is not the only entity praising the Party.
The reason why there is so much emphasis on this is that the CCP is desperate to show everyone, at home and abroad, that it is in control. That there is no reason to worry, at least not due to actions by the Party. If other countries have problems, that is not the Party’s fault.
And also, the Party will take it from here, no need for foreign assistance. They’ll allow in some doctors, preferably WHO related, and they have asked both the US and EU for medical equipment and doctors’ uniforms, hazmat suits, that sort of thing, just so nobody asks any further questions: see, we do accept help! We’ll let you know if we need anything.
Other than that, the Party is in full control, thank you very much. And if Chinese people start protesting the failures of the Party so far, as they are, that is none of anyone else’s business. “We” have it under control”. Ask the WHO, they said so too.
If the Party is allowed to get away with this behavior aimed at self-preservation above anything else, including human lives of both Chinese and foreigners, something bad is sure to happen. Maybe not this time, maybe this one will fizzle out. But the next one, or the one after that, will not.
It is obvious how dangerous this is, putting the interests of the Party, or the economy, above the risk of spreading global pandemic. But is is also obvious why it happens. And it wouldn’t or couldn’t happen only in China. Though the country in its present state is a ideal breeding ground.
Flights are halted. Hundreds of millions will soon be in lockdown. Exports will plunge, because production will. Which will hit the west as much as China. Just so the Party can say it did what had to be done, and so it will stay in power. Xi Jinping knows his power depends on the economy, but he thinks he has what it takes to hold on to power even when the economy tanks.
He can simply declare force majeure, he can tell his people how much worse things would have been had he not decided to lock down everything.
We’ve been following the numbers of infections and fatalities now for 2 weeks or so, even as we know they don’t mean much, they’re just Party propaganda. The Party will release what it thinks it must, but no more. Perhaps we need other sources; these will come if and when things get out of hand. Not that we know they will.
Xi can claim today that he has control. He can say things are not too bad, but we don’t really know, he’s issuing the numbers. What we do know, and there’s the crux, is that he was 6 weeks late in starting to acknowledge the epidemic, in contacting the outside world, in acknowledging his mistakes, and in acknowledging that such mistakes are baked into the model that keeps him in power.
Phase 1 is complete denial, not a word.
Phase 2 is damage control, massaging the numbers downward.
Phase 3 is “close all the doors, not to worry, nothing to see here, we got this, no you can’t come in, too risky!”
But, yeah, praise him while you can. The only praise he cares about is from people just as clueless as he is anyway.
The Party is a highly effective vehicle for protecting its own interests and survival. For other things, perhaps not so much. Viruses can be quite deadly at times. Combine them with politics and the risk factor rises exponentially.
US Stealth Jets Can’t Shoot Straight, New Pentagon Report Warns
The Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter has suffered a long list of problems that we’ve frequently noted. Now a new report from Bloomberg, citing a Pentagon annual assessment, specifies how the stealth fighters can’t shoot straight.
The Pentagon has already spent upwards of $428 billion on the F-35 program, which will cost taxpayers $1.5 trillion over its 55-year lifespan.
Already, there have been a host of problems with the stealth fighters, including more than 800 software errors.
And the newest problem: A General Dynamics GAU-12/U Equalizer, a five-barrel 25 mm Gatling-type rotary cannon, mounted on some F-35s, has “unacceptable” accuracy of hitting ground targets.
The Pentagon’s new report said the Air Force’s cannon mounted inside the plane, has “unacceptable” accuracy due to “misalignments” in the gun’s mount that didn’t meet specifications.
The report also said mounts for the cannons are cracking, forcing the Air Force to limit the weapon’s use. The F-35 program office has “made progress with changes to the gun installation” to improve accuracy.
The report notes 873 software errors in the plane, as of 4Q19. The good news, it’s down from 917 in 3Q18.
“Although the program office is working to fix deficiencies, new discoveries are still being made, resulting in only a minor decrease in the overall number” and leaving “many significant,” the assessment said.
There was also mention that the planes could be susceptible to cybersecurity “vulnerabilities.”
Here are other unresolved glitches of the F-35 program that we mentioned last year (the partial list via Defense News):
When the F-35B vertically lands on very hot days, older engines may be unable to produce the required thrust to keep the jet airborne, resulting in a hard landing.
After doing certain maneuvers, F-35B and F-35C pilots are not always able to completely control the aircraft’s pitch, roll and yaw.
Supersonic flight in excess of Mach 1.2 can cause structural damage and blistering to the stealth coating of the F-35B and F-35C.
Cabin pressure spikes in the cockpit of the F-35 have been known to cause barotrauma, the word given to extreme ear and sinus pain.
The spare parts inventory shown by the F-35’s logistics system does not always reflect reality, causing occasional mission cancellations.
If the F-35A and F-35B blows a tire upon landing, the impact could also take out both hydraulic lines and pose a loss-of-aircraft risk.
Possible maneuvering issues when the aircraft is operating above a 20-degree angle of attack.
The F-35’s logistics system currently has no way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to the United States.
Despite the ongoing problems that many F-35s are not combat-ready and have many issues that are putting American pilots in severe disadvantages for a dogfight, Congress continues to order more planes.
As of 3Q19, the F-35 program has 490 planes, many of which could be suffering from computer errors and guns that don’t hit targets.
On Monday, forty organizations signed a letter calling on an independent government watchdog to recommend a ban on U.S. government use of facial recognition technology.
The letter was drafted by the digital privacy advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and signed by organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Color of Change, Fight for the Future, Popular Resistance, and the Consumer Federation of America. The letter calls on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) to “recommend to the President and the Secretary of Homeland Security the suspension of facial recognition systems, pending further review.“
The PCLOB was originally created in 2004, as an independent agency that advises the administration on privacy issues.
“The Congress specifically found that new surveillance powers ‘calls for an enhanced system of checks and balances to protect the precious liberties that are vital to our way of life and to ensure that the Government uses its powers for the purposes for which the powers were given’,” the letter states.
The organizations challenge the PCLOB to “examine the more significant public concerns about the use of facial recognition in public spaces.” They also call on the board to address concerns that facial recognition software can be used by “authoritarian governments to control minority populations and limit dissent could spread quickly to democratic societies.“
The letter from EPIC mentions a recent New York Times investigation of a facial recognition service used by more than 600 law enforcement agencies across the country. As the Mind Unleashedrecently reported, Manhattan-based Clearview AI is collecting data from unsuspecting social media users and the Chicago Police Department (CPD) is using the controversial facial recognition tool to pinpoint the identity of unknown suspects. The Times investigation shows that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are also using the controversial tool.
The MIT Technology Review believes EPIC’s letter is “one of the biggest efforts so far in the fight to stem the use of facial recognition technologies.“
And while these 40 organizations call on the PCLOB to make an official recommendation, there are already examples of push back against facial recognition. San Francisco and Somerville, Massachusetts recently became the first local governments to ban the use of facial recognition tools. The European Commission is also considering a ban on facial recognition in public for five years. In June 2019, the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology released a report titled “America Under Watch: Face Surveillance in the United States” which calls for a moratorium on facial recognition technology.
In June 2019, I also noted that “the editorial board of the Guardian also recently spoke out about the privacy threats, calling the technology ‘especially inaccurate and prone to bias.’ The editorial board also noted that a recent test of Amazon’s facial recognition software by the American Civil Liberties Union found that it falsely identified 28 members of Congress as known criminal.“
Whether or not the PCLOB or some other government agency chooses to take action on a moratorium on facial recognition, it is imperative that consumers begin educating themselves about the technology and take steps to protect their privacy. While we are limited in how often our faces are scanned in public, we can voluntarily opt-out of facial scanning at airports, grocery stores, and other locations.
We cannot depend on the government to protect our privacy and liberty. We must take action and guard what little privacy remains before it’s too late.
India Announces $40 Billion Emergency Fiscal Injection As Economy Plunges
India’s economy is rapidly decelerating and could be headed for a financial crisis.
As an emergency response to plunging growth rates and falling energy consumption, along with a manufacturing hub grinding to a halt, the government has just announced a massive $40 billion fiscal injection in its budget for 2020/21 to prevent a hard landing, reported Reuters.
Emergency fiscal measures by government are typically for an economy that is in a recession or certainly headed towards one.
However, India isn’t in a recession, but growth rates are rapidly decelerating and now being referred to as “great slowdown.”
“Look at electricity generation growth, it’s falling off the bottom, and it’s never been like this ever. So this is the sense in which I would say this is not just any slowdown, this is the great slowdown that India is experiencing and we should look at it with all seriousness …and the economy seems headed for the intensive care unit,” former Indian Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian warned last month.
Economic growth in the country is expected to fall under the 5-handle this year, will be the weakest since the global financial crisis in 2008-09.
Subramanian also warned that as the economy stalls, corporate debt and increasing non-performing assets could produce shocks in the country’s banking sector that may lead to slower growth rates in credit, thus slowing the economy even further.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced Saturday that 2.83 trillion Indian rupees ($39.82 billion) would be allocated for agriculture, farming, alternative energy, and infrastructure projects for the 2020/21 fiscal year.
Sitharaman also said the government would spend $50.65 billion on federal water projects that provide more freshwater access to the population.
She said the increased deficit spending could pressure public finances and lead to a deficit that would widen to 3.8% of GDP, up from 3.3% from earlier estimates for the current year.
As we noted Friday, January 31, 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi rode the wave of fake GDP data from 2014 through 2017, but growth has since collapsed; he has since been heavily criticized for a slumping economy by national media
“India’s 2020/21 budget highlights the challenges to fiscal consolidation from slower real and nominal growth, which may continue for longer than the government forecasts,” said Gene Fang, Associate Managing Director, Sovereign Risk, Moody’s Investors Service.
And what does this mean for Indian NIFTY 50 futures, well, possibly a correction from the 16.5% run-up from August.
This week, the measure passed The City Council of Santa Cruz with a unanimous vote to make the investigation and arrest a low priority for “the adult possession, use or cultivation of psychoactive plants and fungi.”
Councilmember Chris Krohn told ABC News that the new initiative is part of a broader plan to treat mental health in the community.
“This resolution ensures that only people 21 and over have access to these plants and the Council has given direction to our Police Department to make it a low priority infraction. Entheogenic plants offer many in our community a way out of the addictive pharmaceuticals known as opioids. People came forward at last night’s meeting telling of the beneficial effects of how these plants changed their lives,” Krohn said.
Drew Glover, another council member who voted in favor of decriminalization, pointed to the long history of ancient cultures around the world who have “respected entheogenic plants and fungi for providing healing, knowledge, creativity and spiritual connection with nature.”
“With the passing of this resolution Santa Cruz has taken an important step in acknowledging the impact that the war on drugs has had on communities while at the same time giving people the liberty to choose how to address their medical needs, providing a potent tool to address issues like PTSD, addiction, and depression,” Glover told ABC News.
Denver was the first municipality in the United States to decriminalize possession of psychedelic mushrooms, and the organizers of that successful initiative are working to implement the same strategy in other cities and states. Similar measures have already been passed in Oakland, California, as well.
Significant progress has also been made in opening up psychedelic compounds to scientific study.
As Truth Theory reported last year, a $17 million psychedelic research center will soon be opening at John’s Hopkins University. This research center is the first of its kind in the United States, and the largest of its kind in the entire world.
Researchers at the new Johns Hopkins facility will be studying psychedelic substances and their effect on the human brain. More specifically, they will be seeking possible treatments for mental health issues like addiction, depression, PTSD, Alzheimer’s disease, eating disorders and a variety of other conditions.
The science in this field has been so convincing, that large investors are now working to develop pharmaceutical drugs derived from these compounds.
Lonely Japanese Billionaire Abandons Search For Space Ho After 22,000 Women Apply
A Japanese billionaire who put out a casting call for single females to join him for a SpaceX voyage around the room has called off the search, citing “personal reasons.”
Yusaku Maezawa, 44, announced in January that he was looking for single females over the age of 20 to join him on the trip, which was set to be broadcast as part of a documentary on streaming channel, AbemaTV.
Alas, there will be no zero-G sex for Maezawa or a lucky lady.
Due to personal reasons, I have informed AbemaTV yesterday with my decision to no longer participate in the matchmaking documentary, hence requested for the cancellation of the show.
“To think that 27,722 women, with earnest intentions and courage, had used their precious time to apply makes me feel extremely remorseful to conclude and inform everyone with this selfish decision of mine,” he continued.
To think that 27,722 women, with earnest intentions and courage, had used their precious time to apply makes me feel extremely remorseful to conclude and inform everyone with this selfish decision of mine.
… China’s reopening from the long Lunar New Year holiday was set to be ugly, and sure enough with Chinese stocks resuming trade at 9am on Monday, a wave of selling was unleashed culminating in nothing short of a bloodbath with the Shanghai Composite crashing 9% at the open, down by the most since the bursting of China’s 2015 stock bubble, and wiping out 12 months worth of gains in a corona moment.
Not even the hilarious beat in China’s Manufacturing PMI (this time from Caixin), which somehow surpased expectations of a 51.0 print by the smallest amount possible at 51.1 (down from 51.5) despite a major portion of China’s population under quarantine and the economy hitting a brick wall, had any impact on stocks.
What is odd is that this is happening even as China earlier in the day barred short selling, which only means the central bank made a huge oversight and should have also banned all selling altogether.
As stocks collapse the flight to safety is predictably on with 10Y Chinese bond tumbling in yield to 3%, matching the lowest yield since late 2016…
The selloff wasn’t limited just to stocks, however, with China’s benchmark iron ore contract falling by its daily limit of 8%, with copper, crude and palm oil also plunging by the maximum allowed. As Bloomberg notes, regions accounting for about 90% of copper smelting, 60% of steel production, 65% of oil refining and 40% of coal output have told firms to delay restarting operations until at least Feb. 10.
This is bad news for anyone still holding on to dreams of a Chinese economic renaissance, as the following correlation between China’s macro surprise index and copper demonstrates.
China’s bloodbath is taking place even as the PBOC scrambled earlier in the day to inject a gross 1.2 trillion in liquidity which however as we explained, was woefully inadequate because when netting off the 1 trillion in short-term reverse repo funds scheduled to mature on Monday, the liquidity injection amounted to a far more modest 150BN yuan, or just over $27BN.
The lack of any notable impact from China’s reverse repo injection probably explains why shortly after the catastrophic open, the PBOC also cut rates on both its 7 day and 14 day-reverse repo from 2.5% to 2.4%, and from 2.65% to 2.55% respectively.
Then, as a result of the unexpected additional easing, the Yuan promptly slumped back under 7.00, potentially risking the framework of the US-China trade deal, and the reversal in the US Treasury’s designation of China as a currency manipulator.
Then again, in retrospect it’s probably not accurate to say China’s emergency intervention and rate cut has had no positive impact on stocks: after all US futures have surged since the open and are up 0.7%, or 21 points, to 3,245 from Friday’s 3,223 close.
… or else any additional selling will only beget even more selling, which is certainly on the mind of whoever is buying US futs even as China is crashing.
Media ‘impartiality’ on climate change is ethically misguided and downright dangerous
January 31, 2020 6.11am AEDT
Denis Muller
Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne
In September 2019, the editor of The Conversation, Misha Ketchell, declared The Conversation’s editorial team in Australia was henceforth taking what he called a “zero-tolerance” approach to climate change deniers and sceptics. Their comments would be blocked and their accounts locked.
His reasons were succinct:
Climate change deniers and those shamelessly peddling pseudoscience and misinformation are perpetuating ideas that will ultimately destroy the planet.
…
But in the era of climate change, this conventional approach is out of date. A more analytical approach is called for.
…
Harm is a long-established criterion for abridging free speech. John Stuart Mill, in his seminal work, On Liberty, published in 1859, was a robust advocate for free speech but he drew the line at harm:
… the only purpose for which power can be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
It follows that editors may exercise the power of refusing to publish climate-denialist material if doing so prevents harm to others, without violating fundamental free-speech principles.
Other harms too provide established grounds for limiting free speech. Some of these are enforceable at law – defamation, contempt of court, national security – but speech about climate change falls outside the law and so becomes a question of ethics.
The harms done by climate change, both at a planetary level and at the level of human health, are well-documented and supported by overwhelming scientific evidence.
…
External guidance is nonexistent. The ethical codes promulgated by the media accountability bodies – the Australian Press Council and the Australian Communications and Media Authority – make no mention of how impartiality should be achieved in the context of climate change. The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s code of ethics is similarly silent.
These bodies would serve the profession and the public interest by developing specific standards to deal with the issue of climate change, and guidance about how to meet them. It is not an issue like any other. It is existential on a scale surpassing even nuclear war.
The problem with comparing discussion of climate change to shouting “fire” in a burning theatre is one of immediacy.
Shouting “fire” to create a fake panic in a movie cinema is punishable, because it has been amply demonstrated through experience that creating a fake panic causes immediate, measurable harm; we know through observation of past events that people can be hurt or even killed during the resulting stampede.
But a public comment disputing alarmist climate claims; not so much.
The author’s comparison of climate change to an imminent nuclear war is absurd. Climate change is a gradual process, with significant changes taking decades or even centuries to manifest.
Even if climate skeptics were totally wrong, there is no justification for shutting down our right to be wrong. Unlike shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre, no single climate “shout”, no matter how wrong, has the potential to alter the trajectory of society to such an extent that measurable harm could be ascribed to it.
If society lowers the bar of censorship to such an extent that publicly supporting a position which might be wrong but which causes no immediate harm qualifies as a punishable offence, then we have lost more than our right to free speech.
NYC Apartment Sales Crash To Near Decade Low As Government Suffocates Market With New Regulations
There’s nothing like broad overreaching government regulation to absolutely suffocate any type of market.
This is a lesson that the New York City apartment market is learning first hand, as sales of apartment buildings in the city have crashed to near decade lows after new rent rules scared investors away from buying real estate as investment and/or rental properties, according to Bloomberg.
In 2019, the value of purchases across all boroughs fell an astounding 40% to $6.91 billion, the lowest total since 2011. There were 290 multifamily deals in the year, a 36% decline and the first year with less than 300 deals since 2010.
The market ground to a halt as a result of New York’s new rent law, which affects about 1 million apartments in the city. The law makes it almost impossible for landlords to raise rents, remove units from state regulation or recoup costs of capital improvements.
The message this sent to the market? Stop spending on renovations.
And so, landlords did. They stopped buying properties altogether, as well.
Shimon Shkury, president of Ariel Property Advisers, said: “The fact that there’s no correlation between the amount you put into a building and the amount of rent you can charge has completely shifted investment interest in rent-stabilized buildings.”
In Manhattan, south of 96th street and West 110th, investors turned specifically toward non-regulated units and paid higher prices for them. More than 60% of units that were bought and sold last year were market rate and buyers paid an average of $758,217 per apartment, up 14% from 2018.
Investors who bought rent-regulated properties, on the other hand, demanded discounts.
In Queens, where about 67% of apartments sold were under these regulations, prices fell 7.7% to $276,261 per apartment. In the Bronx, the average sale price per unit also fell, from $185,006 in 2018 to $171,855 in 2018.
BuzzFeed Journo Reportedly Blogged About Pedo Fantasies, Rape Jokes And Doxing
A BuzzFeed senior reporter who accused Zero Hedge of ‘doxing’ a Chinese scientist has reportedly left a disturbing internet footprint rife with pedophilia and rape jokes… oh, and doxing the owners of a restaurant.
Ryan Broderick, a boy-band aficionado who runs a personal tumblr blog, wrote in a Friday BuzzFeed article that Zero Hedge “has released the personal information of a scientist from Wuhan, China, falsely accusing them of creating the coronavirus as a bioweapon, in a plot it said is the real-life version of the video game Resident Evil.” (for what really happened read our response here).
After his ‘hit piece‘ was published – which included factual mistakes, no outreach to Zero Hedge, and an intentional ‘doxing’ of Zero Hedge (by their standards), the @zerohedge Twitter account was permanently suspended for violating their ‘abuse and harassment’ policy. Shortly thereafter, Broderick updated his article, writing “Zero Hedge’s Twitter account was suspended Friday, following the publication of the scientist’s name.”
Yet, while Zero Hedge republished publicly available, professional contact information for the Wuhan scientist – Broderick openly ‘doxed’ the owners of Amy’s Baking Company in 2013, tweeting a link to the private contact information of the husband and wife owners who made headlines for a controversial episode of Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares.” The information included their home address, phone numbers, email addresses, and a ‘dossier’ covering the couple’s marriage and financial history.
Do the right thing, @vijaya. This is nonsensical. Indefensible.
Somehow Broderick avoided a permanent Twitter suspension for ‘targeted harassment.’
Perhaps even more disturbing, however, are several posts uncovered on “Ryan Broderick’s Cool Time Fun Blog,” along with questionable tweets and other writings as documented by internet sleuths in the wake of our Twitter suspension. They include pedophilia, rape jokes, and more.
Does any of this matter? Of course not, and we are confident that Twitter will find all these outlandish public statements, doxes and tweets to be in perfectly good humor, confirming once again that when it comes to enforcing its Terms of Service, some have always been more equal than others.
Late Friday, the US officially declared coronavirus a “national health emergency”.
Some are starting to claim that it’s “too late” to do anything to stop the spread of coronavirus.
Is it?
Well, even if it’s too late to stop it, we may still be able to slow the spread substantially.
The latest numbers from China may be offering our first hope of that. At ~12,000, they are our first sign the virus may no longer be spreading at a geometric rate.
China’s quarantine efforts may be starting to pay off. (Or, we may just be getting bad data. It’s simply too early to tell.)
Yes, it’s important to prepare for coronavirus to arrive in your community. That’s just prudent given what we know right now.
But don’t lose hope. We all have a role to play in limiting the damage this outbreak can cause.
It now appears that this massive euphoria, which culminated in the biggest one-day selloff since August, may have been a tad excessive, hitting just as China was forced to admit it has a major viral epidemic on its hands (although in retrospect Ray Dalio’s Gartmanesque “cash is trash” declaration just days earlier in Davos, may have been just as powerful a catalyst for the derisking as the Coronavirus pandemic).
And nowhere was the investor euphoria more apparent than in the tech sector which, as the BofA chart below shoes, was the most overbought since dotcom bubble.
Then, on Friday, as we duly reported fears that China is losing the fight to contain the Coronavirus spread finally exploded, and sent the Dow red for the year, with the S&P 500 index now flat for 2020 as positive early results from 4Q 2019 earnings season offset the economic concerns of the coronavirus. In short, much of the euphoria that was unleashed by the Fed’s launch of QE4 in October to “fix” the repo market, coupled with central banks cutting rates as if “it’s a crisis” in the words of Bank of America…
… concerns that China’s economy may slump to a 5% or lower GDP as a result of the viral pandemic, have come at the worst possible time. And so, with the market finally cracking, suddenly panicked investors are asking if what has gone up in almost vertical fashion over the past year is about to come down.
Namely the handful of tech stocks that has been at the forefront of the S&P’s tremendous ascent: the FAAMGs.
As Goldman’s David Kostin write over the weekend, picking up where Morgan Stanley’s Michael Wilson left off two weeks ago, “today, the S&P 500 market cap is concentrated in the five largest stocks to a degree not witnessed since the peak of the Tech bubble. The five firms – FB, AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL – collectively account for 18% of S&P 500 market cap, the largest share since 2000“…
… even as earnings are slightly less concentrated, with the top five stocks represent 14% of profits, the highest level since 2015. During the past three months, aggregate FAAMG returns have been double the S&P 500 index (19% vs. 8%) and generated 37% of the gain for the entire index during that time. And with most of tech earnings roughly unchanged over the past year, the bulk of this price increase was the direct result of multiple expansion, which in turn was made possible by a record expansion in stock buybacks among tech companies.
So with everyone casting a fearful eye to the first tech bubble in 2000, investors are understandably curious what happened back then, and are we about to witness the second coming of the dot com bubble bursting.
Here, Kostin, which has a 3,400 year-end price target understandably does everything in its power to mitigate fears that the Nasdaq is about to experience a second catastrophic plunge. Here is what Kostin writes:
Twenty years ago, the US equity market was also dominated by five stocks: MSFT, CSCO, GE, INTC, and XOM. In March 2000, these stocks accounted for 18% of total S&P 500 market cap and were priced at a substantial premium to the index. Collectively, the firms traded at a forward P/E of 47x (vs. 24x for S&P 500) and 7.3x trailing EV/sales (vs. 2.7x). The elevated valuations reflected expectations for rapid growth in aggregate earnings and sales during 2000 and 2001.
In contrast, full-year 2001 results for the five largest stocks in March 2000 came in nowhere near the lofty initial expectations. In aggregate, sales fell by 7% (vs. expectations of +15%), net margins contracted by 150 bp (from 13% to 11% vs. the original forecast of 1100 bp of margin expansion) and net income fell by 18% (vs. forecast of +14%). Three of the five firms actually realized negative sales growth in 2001 (INTC: -21%, XOM: -10%, CSCO: -24%) and three reported negative EPS growth (CSCO: -72%, INTC: -68%, XOM: -6%).
In contrast to the devastating misses suffered by the “Big Five” in 2000, Goldman claims that “lower growth expectations, lower valuations, and a greater re-investment ratio suggest the current concentration may be more sustainable than it proved to be in 2000.” To underscore this point, Goldman shows the following chart according to which valuations of the five largest companies now are far more manageable compared to 2000.
But as even Goldman admits, “in order to avoid repeating the share price collapse experienced by their predecessors, today’s market cap leaders will need to at least meet – and preferably exceed – current consensus growth expectations,” which, however, “seem more achievable based on recent results and management guidance. In aggregate, consensus expects a 100 bp sales growth deceleration (from 15% in 2020 to 14% in 2021), a 20 bp margin expansion (19.5% to 19.7%), and a 600 bp EPS growth acceleration (10% to 16%).”
The good news is that at least for now, these market titans have not disappointed, as Bloomberg pointed out in “Like It or Not, Trillion-Dollar Titans Lived Up to Earnings Hype.” Indeed, four of the five FAAMG stocks reported 4Q 2019 results this week, which generally came in stronger than expected:
Apple reported a revenue and EPS beat, with quarterly revenues of $92 billion (+9% vs. the year-ago quarter) beating consensus by 4% as demand for iPhones and wearables better than expected. Subscriptions came in ahead of schedule, despite a deceleration in services revenue growth to 17% year/year.
Microsoft posted positive results across every segment. Sales grew by 14% year/year and executives affirmed guidance for continued double-digit growth in 2020. Consensus estimates currently forecast 12% sales growth and 11% EPS growth in 2020 and 12% and 14%, respectively, in 2021.
FB reported strong 4Q results across almost every financial metric. Overall revenues jumped by 25% to $21 billion. While ad revenue beat for the fifth consecutive quarter, slowing growth in mature markets led to some investor concern.
AMZN’s Thursday report was the best of the FAAMG lot. The company reported 4Q revenues of $87 billion (+21%), above consensus forecasts, and AMZN exceeded the high-end of its revenue guidance for the first time since 1Q 2018.
Yet while the market leaders did not disappoint in the last quarter of 2019 when stocks exploded higher with the blessing of the Fed’s QE4, what about the current quarter and the future? What happens to revenues and demand, to established supply chains, to profit margins, if the Coronavirus epidemic keep spreading and tens of millions of Chinese remain under quarantine? What happens to Apple’s iPhone sales in China if the Cupertino company is unable to reopen its store for a month, or two, or three? What happens to the already depressed global auto industry if Chinese part-makers can’t transport their parts to their core customers? What happens to China’s financial system if the local banking sector is suddenly paralyzed as the great unknown of how the pandemic will impact the Chinese economy spreads?
One thing is certain: with the tech sector priced to perfection, and with multiples of the IT sector at the highest level since the dot com bubble, and the tech setor the most overbought relative to the broader S&P500…
… anything less than perfection could lead to a violent selloff among the massively overbought handful of tech names that have led the market for much of the past year.
As such, it’s suddenly up to China to make sure the FAAMGs in particular, and the tech sector, and S&P500 in general, can sustain the lofty ascent that Donald Trump demands to ensure his reelection in November. That, however, may be a big ask as the NYT writes in “China Kept World in Dark as Outbreak Rippled” because, well, why would China have to keep the world in the dark if indeed the situation was contained, or containable? And one lack at the recent action in the NYSE FANG index…
In 1349, when Black Death was ravaging Europe, many of the day’s best and brightest banded together in pursuit of a common cure. They had little choice. Black Death was rapidly spreading across the continent. Nothing could stop it.
Boils were lanced with precision. Blood was let with vigor. But there was no escape from the plague’s instant death. It was efficient. It was relentless. People would go to bed at night perfectly healthy; by morning, they’d wake up perfectly dead.
Then, at the exact moment of maximum death and despair, flagellants came to the rescue. Processions marched to and fro, seeking relief through forcefully whipping themselves in public displays of self-mutilation. According to the History Channel:
“Some upper-class men joined processions of flagellants that traveled from town to town and engaged in public displays of penance and punishment: They would beat themselves and one another with heavy leather straps studded with sharp pieces of metal while the townspeople looked on.
“For 33 1/2 days, the flagellants repeated this ritual three times a day. Then they would move on to the next town and begin the process over again.”
This may seem strange, weird, and, quite frankly, a bit nuts. But something miraculous happened. The Black Death epidemic soon exhausted itself. The flagellants saved Europe from the mid-14th century onslaught of Black Death.
Or did they?
Probably Nothing, Possibly Everything
To be clear, flagellants had no influence on the eventual relenting of Black Death. Remember, correlation does not imply causation. Post hoc ergo propter hoc – “after this, therefore because of this” – or simply the post hoc fallacy, recognizes that just because one event happened to follow another, doesn’t mean the initial event caused the later event to occur.
The example of flagellants stopping the plague is absurd. Still, we present it to underscore several points:
(1) Humans are often irrational, especially during times of crisis, and
(2) Mis-assigning causation is a common appeal to ignorance, especially when it comes to modern day economics analysis.
One popular tactic of central planners, for example, is to point to an economic statistic – like low unemployment – and self-adulate for maneuvering it down. Does pumping fake money into credit markets somehow create jobs? Does pumping fake money into credit markets somehow create wealth and prosperity?
Similarly, when the yield curve inverts and the economy stalls, central planners always scratch for a convenient culprit. Last fall, when the economy slipped, the trade war with China was to blame. Now it’s the Chinese coronavirus. Jeffrey P. Snider, at Alhambra Investments, offers the following insight:
“The mainstream needs to blame something and given how convenient the timing between ‘protectionism’ and the ‘unexpected’ appearance of this globally synchronized downturn should the latter flame back up again, having never really been extinguished, China easily provides the next scapegoat (wouldn’t it be ironic if the virus was found to have jumped from goats to humans?)”
At this point, it’s still too early to tell. China’s coronavirus, like past outbreaks of the bird flu or SARS, is probably nothing. But it’s possibly everything.
How Xi Jinping will Save the World from Coronavirus
You see, every bubble eventually finds its pin. Perhaps coronavirus is the pin that the twin stock and bond market bubbles have elegantly eluded over the last decade. If not, it should be.
By this, coronavirus would not be the cause of a bear market and economic recession. It would merely mark a coincidental turning point. One that could have been marked by a whole host of potential triggers over the course of many years.
The experience of the last decade, however, is that the coronavirus is probably nothing. Certainly, if central banks are being called on to save us from melting glaciers, a determined central bank can paper over coronavirus, right?
Indeed, complacency still reigns. The question, at the moment, is not whether the stock market bubble is bursting. But, rather, should you buy the dip?
The repeat lessons of the past decade are that you should definitely buy the dip. The yield curve may be inverting for the first time since October. But if this is a signal the Fed will be pumping more fake money, maybe, once again, it’s bullish for the S&P 500.
In the meantime, one thing is crystal clear. China’s lunar new year holiday has been ruined. And Xi Jinping, China’s paramount leader, is mad. He also recently distilled the coronavirus challenge down to a bite sized nugget:
“The epidemic is a devil. We cannot let the devil hide.”
Should this escalate to full pandemic, Mr. Xi will be compelled to join a procession of flagellants in Beijing; he’ll flog himself silly to rid the world of the coronavirus.
The Wuhan coronavirus continues to wreak havoc across the globe. It caused a 600 point sell off in the Dow Jones on Friday, prompted the first U.S. quarantine in a half century and has resulted in various travel bans around the globe. Famously, even tourist “hot spot” Iraq doesn’t want Chinese citizens coming into the country.
In addition, it appears as though the numbers coming out of Hubei province are accelerating, with the area reporting 1,921 new cases and 45 new deaths as of Saturday night.
Yes, I already saw the numbers and put them in a graph!! This is MUCH higher than any previous report from the Province of Hubei, the epicenter of #Wuhan#Coronavirus. Very alarming! Starting to get out of control now! pic.twitter.com/C9bVMWc5f9
While I am not going to comment about various theories regarding the viruses origin that have been circulating the internet, I will say that these reactions to the virus have all been (mostly) to numbers provided to us by the Chinese government.
The skepticism around the Chinese government’s data comes as no surprise to me. I have spent more than a half decade researching U.S. listed China based companies and working daily and directly with Chinese nationals to uncover fraud being perpetuated on American capital markets.
The research of our firm and the story of our firm’s partner, Dan David, was featured in a documentary called The China Hustle that was produced by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney and backed by Mark Cuban’s film company, Magnolia Pictures. While not an expert, I consider myself to have a better understanding of the ethos coming out of the country than most people.
And in my opinion, I believe people should harbor a skeptical opinion of anything that comes out of the Chinese government.
So, what data am I looking at to try and verify or contradict China’s claims? I’m watching the fatality rate outside of China. As of right now, the fatality rate of about 2% (NY Times says “less than 3%”), according to China’s numbers, is often cited as reason not to worry about the virus. Let us first remember that the normal flu has a fatality rate of about 0.4%, which makes the Wuhan coronavirus far more lethal. It also spreads quicker.
For these reasons, I am frightened by the amount of people writing this outbreak off with direct comparisons to the normal flu. I am also alarmed by the consistent travel in and out of China that has been occurring while the U.S. government has dragged its feet in suspending flights.
“China has about four times as many train and air passengers as it did during the SARS outbreak,” the New York Times commented. The number of people affected has already skyrocketed past the SARS outbreak.
If the numbers coming out of China are being altered, the international fatality rate should tip us off to it. As the data set of infections outside of China continues to grow and inevitable fatalities are reported (even at a ~2% clip, it is inevitable), we should be able to gauge for ourselves whether the data we have been using from China has, in fact, been accurate.
The World Health Organization praised China during their press conference last Thursday for taking unprecedented measures to quarantine the country. In my opinion and based solely on action/reaction common sense, the measures being taken in China – quarantining 50 million people in over a dozen major cities – does not match up with the numbers that we have been given by the government.
Certainly, unconfirmed posts that continue to surface on Twitter and other social media sites paint a far more dire picture than the numbers appear to be showing.
Bilingual titles added. 8 bodies in 5 minutes! More are lying inside to be moved out. Somebody secretly shot this video from No. 3 Hopital in #Wuhan during #coronarovirus#武汉肺炎
字幕版
某網友秘訪武漢第三醫院，五分钟功夫就見到八具屍體拉走去火化場，而且里面还有。 pic.twitter.com/VBS6U7HIWW
The potential consequences of finding out that the numbers coming out of China are suppressed could be meaningful. It could put the story much deeper into the mainstream media and have a profound effect on capital markets and the behavioral psychology of people living outside of China.
As a reminder, despite the government saying that the risks of outbreak are low outside of China, I’ll remind readers that it costs nothing to take extra precautions by stocking simple items that you will eventually go through even if an outbreak outside of China doesn’t happen.
These items include extra laundry detergent, N95 or N100 facemasks, 30 days worth of food supplies, disinfectant wipes and sprays, cold medicine to mitigate potential symptoms, hand sanitizer (or some type of anti-septic), latex gloves and even goggles and tyvek suits. There are several checklists on the internet, like this one, that can be valuable for those looking to take some extra precautions.
Let’s see what the numbers continue to tell us in coming days.
Oil Crashes Into Bear Market As Chinese Oil Demand Said To Plummet 20% Due To Coronavirus “Demand Shock”
While the world awaits with bated breath the clobbering that awaits Chinese assets when they reopen in a few hours after the Lunar New Year with the PBOC set to injects billions to prop up stocks while banning short selling as reported earlier, moments ago we got a dismal advance look at just how dire the impact on both the Chinese, and global, economies will be as a result of the coronavirus.
According to Bloomberg, Chinese oil demand has dropped by about three million barrels a day, or 20% of total consumption, as a result of the creeping economic paralysis unleashed by the coronavirus epidemic. The drop is said to be the largest demand shock the oil market has suffered since the global financial crisis of 2008 to 2009, and the most sudden since the Sept. 11 attacks. More importantly, the plunge in Chinese demand will likely force the hand of the OPEC cartel, which is already considering an emergency meeting to cut production and staunch the decline in prices (and to which one can only say that Saudi Arabia picked its Aramco IPO window exquisitely).
Chinese and Western oil executives, speaking on condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said the decline was measured against normal levels for this time of year. It’s a measure of the current loss in demand, rather than the average loss since the crisis started, which would be smaller.
As a reminder, in 2016 China surpassed the US as the world’s largest oil importer (which in turn, has become energy independent in recent years, as a result of an explosion of shale oil production, at least until the day of reckoning for all those junk bonds keeping the US shale industry finally comes), and is the world’s marginal oil price setter, so any changes in consumption have an outsize impact on the global energy market.
The country consumes about 14 million barrels a day – equivalent to the combined needs of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K., Japan and South Korea. Or rather consumed, as that number is now about 2 million barrels per day less.
Predictably, the plunge in Chinese oil demand is already reverberate across the global energy market, with sales of some crudes slowing to a crawl, tanker rates crashing and benchmark prices in free-fall, with Friday closing price about 14% lower since Jan 20 when the world first started focusing on the China pandemic… a free fall which only accelerated after the Bloomberg report which sent Brent tumbling on Sunday night, and which has just entered bear market territory, plunging over 22% since its January 8 peak.
Sales of Latin American oil cargoes to China came to a halt last week, while sales of West African crude, a traditional source for Chinese refineries, are also slower than usual, traders said.
Meanwhile, as Bloomberg reports, Chinese refineries are storing unsold petroleum products such as gasoline and jet-fuel, but every day stockpiles are growing, and some refineries may soon reach their storage limits. If that were to happen, they would have to cut the amount of crude they process. One executive said that refinery runs were likely to be cut soon by 15-20%.
In response to the collapse in Chinese demand, OPEC and Russia are weighing options to respond to the crisis and there have been discussions about calling an emergency meeting. Saudi Arabia is pressing for a gathering sooner than the one scheduled for March 5-6, though it has run into resistance from Russia. As Bloomberg notes, the Saudi and Russian oil ministers spoke on the phone for an hour on Thursday and another 30 minutes on Friday, according to Russians officials. For now, OPEC has called a technical meeting this week to assess the situation, and the Joint Technical Committee will report back to ministers.
“Nothing concentrates a producer’s mind more than the prospect of a crude oil price bust,” said Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group, and a former White House oil official under President George W. Bush.
And judging by where Brent is trading now, having plunged into a bear market in just three weeks, the producers will be very, very concentrated.
“I Felt Like I Was In Hell” – NYT Exposes Rampant Sexism, Harassment & “Toxic Masculinity” At Victoria’s Secret
The reaction that L Brands shareholders displayed last week following reports that Les Wexner was planning to sell Victoria’s Secret and step down from leading the parent company is all readers really need to know when it comes to Wexner’s legacy.
As the founder and CEO of L Brands, Wexner took Victoria’s Secret, a brand he bought in 1980 for a million dollars and transformed it into a multibillion dollar juggernaut in women’s fashion. But years of tepid sales, combined with the cancellation of the VS fashion show and the canning of longtime marketing chief Ed Razek last August were harbingers of more change to come. And after Wexner’s name was once again dragged through the mud thanks to his status as a key enabler of former protege Jeffrey Epstein (with whispers that his conduct as Epstein’s biggest financial benefactor might even have verged on criminal), it seemed obvious that the man who once ruled the company from a position of untouchable strength had finally lost the confidence of the board, and – more importantly – of its investors.
When news of the pending sale of VS and Wexner’s plan for retirement hit the tape last week, some wondered about the timing, seeing as the company’s earnings report isn’t due for another three-and-a-half weeks.
Well, a report published Saturday by the New York Times might offer a few clues. After four Times reporters interviewed more than two dozen former models and employees, the paper put together a #MeToo-style expose revealing allegations of abusive behavior by top executives – behavior that Wexner was aware of, and which he openly condoned.
But rampant sexism and a culture that protected bullies and sex pests weren’t Wexner’s only shortcomings, according to NYT. He also rebuffed and punished executives who tried to steer Victoria’s Secret in a more progressive and contemporary direction – for example, executives who suggested selling underwear that could actually fit American women.
Six current and former executives said in interviews that when they tried to steer the company away from what one called its “porny” image, they were rebuffed. Three said they had been driven out of the company.
Criticism of Victoria’s Secret’s anachronistic marketing went viral in 2018 when Mr. Razek expressed no interest in casting plus-size and “transsexual” models in the fashion show.
When it came to depredations targeting models, Razek showed no qualms about flexing his power and leverage to try and push models to date him.
He also clearly allowed Epstein to portray himself as an executive at the company as a ruse to meet with models.
“I had spent all of my savings getting Victoria’s Secret lingerie to prepare for what I thought would be my audition,” a woman identified as Jane Doe said in a statement read aloud last summer in a federal court hearing in the Epstein case. “But instead it seemed like a casting call for prostitution. I felt like I was in hell.”
Razek left the company in August, just before the company cancelled the Victoria’s Secret fashion show. But the blame for his behavior ultimately falls on Wexner, an executive who clearly had no qualms about enabling abusers, especially when their victims were minors and/or women.
“With the exception of Les, I’ve been with L Brands longer than anyone,” Mr. Razek wrote to employees in August when he announced he was leaving the company he had joined in 1983.
Mr. Razek was instrumental in selecting the brand’s supermodels – known as “Angels” and bestowed with enormous, feathery wings – and in creating the company’s macho TV ads.
But his biggest legacy was the annual fashion show, which became a global cultural phenomenon.
“That’s really where he sunk his teeth into the business,” said Cynthia Fedus-Fields, the former chief executive of the Victoria’s Secret division responsible for its catalog. By 2000, she said, Mr. Razek had grown so powerful that “he spoke for Les.”
Wexner was also portrayed as behind the times, particularly where his views on the ‘body positive’ movement were concerned
In March, at a meeting at Victoria’s Secret headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, an employee asked Mr. Wexner what he thought about the retail industry’s embrace of different body types. He was dismissive.
“Nobody goes to a plastic surgeon and says, ‘Make me fat'” Mr. Wexner replied, according to two attendees.
Razek would sometimes directly remind models that he could make or break their careers.
Mr. Razek often reminded models that their careers were in his hands, according to models and current and former executives who heard his remarks.
Alyssa Miller, who had been an occasional Victoria’s Secret model, described Mr. Razek as someone who exuded “toxic masculinity.” She summed up his attitude as: “I am the holder of the power. I can make you or break you.”
He would sometimes pester models for their phone numbers while they were standing around in VS lingerie. He also showed a preference for young, typically barely legal models.
At castings, Mr. Razek sometimes asked models in their bras and underwear for their phone numbers, according to three people who witnessed his advances. He urged others to sit on his lap. Two models said he had asked them to have private dinners with him.
One was Ms. Muise. In 2007, after two years of wearing the coveted angel wings in the Victoria’s Secret runway show, the 19-year-old was invited to dinner with Mr. Razek. She was excited to cultivate a professional relationship with one of the fashion industry’s most powerful men, she said.
Mr. Razek picked her up in a chauffeured car. On the way to the restaurant, he tried to kiss her, she said. Ms. Muise rebuffed him; Mr. Razek persisted.
For months, he sent her intimate emails, which The Times reviewed. At one point he suggested they move in together in his house in Turks and Caicos. Another time, he urged Ms. Muise to help him find a home in the Dominican Republic for them to share.
“I need someplace sexy to take you!” he wrote.
Ms. Muise maintained a polite tone in her emails, trying to protect her career. When Mr. Razek asked her to come to his New York home for dinner, Ms. Muise said the prospect of dining alone with Mr. Razek made her uneasy; she skipped the dinner.
She soon learned that for the first time in four years, Victoria’s Secret had not picked her for its 2008 fashion show.
One incident reported by the NYT is particularly cringe-worthy: Razek allegedly made a lewd comment about supermodel Bella Hadid’s “titties”, and whether they would meet TV standards, right in front of the influential model and her team.
In 2018, at a fitting ahead of the fashion show, the supermodel Bella Hadid was being measured for underwear that would meet broadcast standards. Mr. Razek sat on a couch, watching.
“Forget the panties,” he declared, according to three people who were there and a fourth who was told about it. The bigger question, he said, was whether the TV network would let Ms. Hadid walk “down the runway with those perfect titties.” (One witness remembered Mr. Razek using the word “breasts,” not “titties.”)
At the same fitting, Mr. Razek placed his hand on another model’s underwear-clad crotch, three people said.
And with that, the same newspaper that helped launch the #MeToo movement has claimed another scalp in its crusade to rework American culture in accordance with its progressive, ‘body positive’ agenda. The age of Wexner and Razek at L Brands has ended. What’s next? Only time will tell.
Baby Boomers Paid A 6.6x PE For The S&P In 1982. Millennials Have To Pay 31x
Submitted by Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management
“Let’s start with what I’d tell a 25-year-old to not do with investment capital,” answered the CIO. He’d been asked how our youth should invest for 10-15yrs.
“I’d tell them to not blindly follow their parents and grandparents as they pay ever higher multiples for a shrinking pool of equity assets,” he continued.
In 1982 when Baby Boomers were coming of age, they paid a 6.6x Shiller price-to-earnings ratio for the S&P 500. By 1990 when the median Baby Boomer was 35-years-old, they had bid the Shiller PE to 16.5x. That same year, Baby Boomers owned 33% of all US real estate assets by value. Fast forward to 2020, the median Millennial is 31-years-old and they own just 4% of US real estate assets. If they scrape together a few bucks after paying down student loans, they must pay a 31.3x Shiller PE multiple to buy the S&P 500.
“To win a game, play to your strengths, exploit your opponent’s weakness,” said the CIO. “As people age their creativity slips away. Their imagination withers. Their risk appetite fades. Their ambition dwindles. Their drive slides. And this leaves them incapable of reimagining the world, let alone building that future,” he said.
“But as people age, they do accumulate capital. And recognizing that this is their only remaining competitive advantage, they unsurprisingly lobby for policies that enhance its value.”
Baby Boomers are the wealthiest cohort in all human history. They’ve shifted the game’s rules to entrench their interests. Which has both limited competition for their companies and artificially shrunk the pool of investable equity assets.
“There’s too much capital in the world today relative to too few equity assets. 25-year-olds should not pay a 31.3x Shiller PE to buy their grandparent’s equities. They should play to their strengths and fight to build new companies that unseat established ones. Creating new equity assets to ease the acute shortage.”
Kerry Denies ‘Fu*king False’ Report He May Run For President
Former Secretary of State John Kerry – who has been stumping for fellow ‘Burisma Dad’ Joe Biden, denied a NBC News report that he was overheard on Sunday at a Des Moines hotel explaining what he would have to do in order to run for president in 2020 amid “the possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party — down whole.“
“I am absolutely not running for President,” said Kerry on Sunday in a now-deleted tweet, adding “Any report otherwise is fucking (or categorically) false. I’ve been proud to campaign with my good friend Joe Biden, who is going to win the nomination, beat Trump, and make an outstanding president.”
According to NBC News, “Sitting in the lobby restaurant of the Renaissance Savery hotel, Kerry was overheard by an NBC News analyst saying “maybe I’m f—ing deluding myself here” and explaining that in order to run, he’d have to step down from the board of Bank of America and give up his ability to make paid speeches. Kerry said donors like venture capitalist Doug Hickey would have to “raise a couple of million,” adding that such donors “now have the reality of Bernie.”
Kerry, as he Tweeted, told NBC that he was “absolutely not” considering joining the Democratic primary race.
Of note, both Biden and Kerry’s sons are connected to the infamously corrupt Ukrainian company Burisma holdings – with Hunter Biden having sat on its board along with Devon Archer – the two of whom co-owned $2.4 billion private equity firm Rosemont Seneca with Kerry’s stepson Christopher Heinz. Heinz reportedly cut ties with Archer and Biden over poor optics.
Kerry was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, losing to President George W. Bush. He got 251 electoral votes, compared to Bush’s 286.
Kerry has served as one of the former vice president’s top surrogates in the 2020 race. Biden holds a less than 4-point lead over Sanders in the RealClearPolitics average of national Democratic primary polls but trails the Vermont senator in the Iowa and New Hampshire polling averages. –NBC News
“I’d be a liar if I didn’t say I don’t come out here and have fun and your juices don’t get going,” Kerry said, when asked in January about whether he regrets not joining the 2020 race. “But right now, they’re entirely focused on helping Joe Biden become president, and I’m very happy doing what I’m doing.”
Tehran John considering running😉🤣…
On a positive note if he’s busy running he won’t have time to do Iran’s bidding. https://t.co/4wpW7fBg9S
3rd Patient Tested For Coronavirus In New York As Pandemic Kills 362, With 17,388 Infected: Live Updates
Summary:
There are currently 17,388 confirmed cases worldwide according to the latest data out of China’s CDC, and 362 global fatalities
Two confirmed cases have been reported in San Benito County in Northern California
(including the first death outside of China, reported in the Philippines).
China’s central bank will pump 150 billion yuan ($21.7 billion) into markets, and has banned short selling on Monday to prevent a sell-off.
First death outside China recorded in the Philippines
24 countries reporting cases
Philippines, New Zealand join list of countries several restricting travelers from China
36 French citizens evacuated from Wuhan show coronavirus symptoms.
* * *
Update (2145ET): The potential coronavirus infection count in New York City has risen to three: that is how many people are currently being tested for coronavirus, according to the Health Department cited by ABC. The Health Department reports the patient has been hospitalized in New York Presbyterian-Queens, and is in stable condition.
As we reported yesterday, late on Saturday a person under 40 years old, who had spent time in mainland China, arrived in the city on Thursday and called 911 on Friday after feeling symptoms. Then, early on Sunday, a 60-year-old who displayed fever symptoms and shortness of breath was hospitalized at Flushing Hopsital Medical Center.
Officials say the patient being tested for coronavirus in New York City did everything right, and if that patient tests positive, the health department is ready to react.
“The symptoms were fever, cough and a runny nose. Like that simple. And they did the right thing for everybody else by coming in and getting care,” said NYC Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, who added that an ambulance brought the patient to Bellevue Hospital.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said the patient did “exactly as they should have” by following the guidelines that New York City put out.
“Our radar’s always set high, so we can screen these patients to stop it from affecting other people,” said Patricia Tennill of Bellevue Hospital.
Officials report the testing will take 36-48 hours and depends on CDC testing capacity. The patient is currently stable.
* * *
Update (1935ET): A second person is now under observation for coronavirus in New York City according to PIX11 News. The individual, hospitalized at Flushing Hospital Medical Center, is over 60 years old and is reportedly in stable condition.
This means they had recently been in mainland China and presented with fever and cough or shortness of breath without another common cause, like influenza and other cold viruses, identified on testing. @PIX11News
Meanwhile, two confirmed cases were reported in Northern San Benito County located in northern California, a husband and wife who are both 57 years old. The husband recently traveled to Wuhan, China while the wife has not. Neither have left their home since the husband returned.
Two confirmed cases of Coronavirus in San Benito County. The confirmed cases are related; husband and wife, and both are 57 years of age. The husband recently traveled from Wuhan, China the wife did not. Both patients have not left their home since returning from China. pic.twitter.com/MZlmX3rcwx
Update (1900ET): According to the latest daily update from the Chinese CDC, there are now 17,205 confirmed cases across China, a jump of 2,829 overnight – the biggest daily increase since the epidemic started – with another 181 cases abroad. Global fatalities increased to 362, with the daily increase of 58 also the biggest since the pandemic started, although as noted previously, China has been resorting to various measures to mask and hide the true number of corona casualties. The number of cured or discharged patients rose to 475.
Unfortunately, the disease does not appears to be slowing down, and the number of suspected cases increased by 2,004 to 21,558, while the number of people receiving medical observations surged to a record 152,700, an increase of 15,106 overnight.
* * *
Update (1700ET): Santa Clara County health officials on Sunday afternoon have confirmed a second coronavirus case, reported KRON 4 News. Officials said this is unrelated to the first case that was confirmed on Friday.
The confirmed case is a woman who recently traveled to Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak. Officials have so far said, she arrived in the U.S. on Jan. 23 to visit family during the Chinese New Year.
Officials are unclear on her exact movements and how many people she could have infected. Her family was also quarantined on concerns they have contracted the deadly virus. The first case was confirmed in Santa Clara County on Friday, was a man who recently traveled to Wuhan.
This is the ninth confirmed case in the U.S., with cases expected to rise in the days and or weeks ahead.
And earlier on Sunday, The New York Times sparked more fears when it said that the coronavirus “looks increasingly like a pandemic…“
“It’s very, very transmissible, and it almost certainly is going to be a pandemic,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. “But will it be catastrophic? I don’t know.”
* * *
Update (1500ET): According to AFP, 20 French citizens evacuated from Wuhan, China have symptoms of Coronavirus. Earlier in the day, officials said that when the flight left Wuhan, none of the passengers had symptoms of coronavirus. They include French, Belgians, Dutch, Danes, Czechs, Slovaks and some citizens of African countries, the Associated Press reported. The happens as around 500 people, including hospital staff, form a human chain in front of the Robert Debré Hospital in Paris to denounce a lack of resources in French public hospitals.
VIDEO: 🇫🇷 Around 500 people, including hospital staff, form a human chain in front of the Robert Debré Hospital in Paris to denounce a lack of resources in French public hospitals pic.twitter.com/r2IlukbvxL
Meanwhile, WBZ reports that two plans from Wuhan landed at Boston’s Logan airport just hours before the nationwide travel ban on flights landing from China is set to begin.
At the same time, half way across the world, Beijing has reported that between Feb 1 and Feb 2, at least 23 new coronavirus cases have been confirmed, the biggest increase to date, bringint the total number to 191.
In other news, according to an unconfirmed report citing TV Peru, a 72-year-old Peruvian woman died from coronavirus in Los Angeles, and his body was repatriated to Peru. According to the death certificate, the cause of his death is the deadly virus of Chinese origin that triggered pneumonia and other complications in his health.
According to the doctor Marco Almeri, the transfer of the body will not generate any type of epidemic. “When a body dies it changes the temperature and all the chemical conditions. Therefore, it is impossible for the virus to survive, ”he told TV Peru.
AS previously reported, US flights carrying citizens who visited China will be redirected to one of seven international airports to be screened for possible coronavirus symptoms, as part of new restrictions to stem the outbreak. Flights will only land in Atlanta, Chicago, Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle, the DHS said. Once on the ground, passengers will be subject to enhanced health screening.
Finally, according to Reuters, Russian railways has suspended passenger trains to China as the entire world gradually implement a Chinese quarantine.
* * *
Update (1100ET): In a report that has since been deleted from the Chinese Internet, Chinese media company Caijing reported that many deaths and suspected cases of the virus haven’t been counted due to intentional mislabeling, according to Bloomberg.
Many people suspected of being sick with the coronavirus in Wuhan aren’t being counted as having been infected, and some suspicious deaths haven’t been checked and included in the death toll due to a shortage of tests, according to Caijing, a Chinese media company. The Saturday report was deleted from the internet Sunday. The deaths were recorded as due to viral pneumonia and not pneumonia caused by the coronavirus, Caijing wrote.
An unidentified doctor from a Wuhan hospital designated for coronavirus treatment said that they have admitted about 600 severe cases, but none of these patients were confirmed as having coronavirus due to a lack of tests.
Hong Kong’s executive council has also reportedly hinted at tighter travel curbs.
A Hong Kong executive council member said that residents should avoid traveling to the mainland or risk having difficulties returning to the city, according to an RTHK report, a sign the government could ramp up border control restrictions. Lam Ching-choi said on Sunday that possible measures include shortening opening times for ports, limiting transportation and introducing laws to curb cross border traffic, the report said.
This after health-care workers threatened to strike if the city refused to shut down travel to Beijing.
* * *
Local officials in Hubei weren’t kidding when they warned that Saturday would be the worst day so far for confirmed cases/deaths related to the coronavirus outbreak. China’s body count climbed above 300, and the first death outside the mainland was recorded in the Philippines. Scientists predict that exponentially more cases are active in China, but the true number either haven’t yet been diagnosed, or the Chinese government is simply suppressing it for obvious PR purposes. Anecdotal reports also claim the death toll is higher than the 304+.
Even though the man who died in Manila was from Wuhan, now that the virus has proved lethal outside the confines of China’s deeply overburdened health-care system, even more countries have decided to defy the WHO and restrict entry for travelers from China. New Zealand, Iraq, Indonesia and the Philippines have joined the growing list of countries – including the US, Japan, Australia, Canada, Taiwan, etc. – who are imposing travel restrictions on people who have either recently been to China, or recently traveled to Hubei Province (or if they have a passport from Hubei).
“This is the first reported death outside China,” Rabindra Abeyasinghe, the World Health Organisation representative to the Philippines, said.
But that wasn’t all we heard from the WHO on Sunday. The organization, which just declared the outbreak a dangerous global pandemic, warned governments around the world to prepare for controlling domestic outbreaks.
“Countries need to get ready for possible importation in order to identify cases as early as possible and in order to be ready for a domestic outbreak control, if that happens,” WHO official Gauden Galea told The Associated Press in Bejing on Saturday.
Though the virus is the enemy, the people who carry it are also often treated with suspicion during outbreaks, and it appears this trend has finally peaked both inside and outside China. Two days ago, the New York Times published a story documenting what it described as ‘growing xenophobia’ in Japan, directed at Chinese whom locals feared might carry the virus. Inside China, videos have shown mobs surrounding families from Hubei. Government propaganda has directed a large swath of the country to stay inside until the outbreak subsides. It could be weeks before that happened. Businesses inside China have posted signs warning people from Hubei to stay away; in Japan and Hong Kong, signs are directed at all mainlanders.
Outside China, the WHO reports roughly 130 confirmed cases of the virus in more than 20 countries outside of China and Taiwan. The Philippines reported the first death attributable to the virus outside of China. Other tallies put the number of confirmed cases outside China higher. Late Saturday in the US, new cases were confirmed in South Korea and India.
Chinese doctors are now claiming that the virus can be spread via fecal matter, as well as droplets passed through the air.
Expecting a bloodbath when markets open tomorrow (late Sunday evening in the US), Chinese financial regulators have already announced a massive $173 billion (Rmb1.2 trillion) support package. According to the FT, China’s central bank said on Sunday that it would provide the lending facilities to money markets as stock markets reopen following the LNY extended holiday, during which western markets logged heavy selling. Hong Kong markets also took a beating when they reopened for the second half of the week. BBG noted that the sum will come to $21 billion on a net basis, practically nothing, after covering the roll of previous liquidity injections.
The Huoshenshan Hospital, one of two hospitals being rapidly constructed in Wuhan, has finished construction, according to Chinese state media. It will begin admitting coronavirus patients on Monday, hopefully relieving some of the overwhelming burden on the city’s existing medical infrastructure. The Global Times reported that the hospital will be run by Huawei’s “remote consultation platform” which will improve efficiency. Nearly 2,000 PLA personnel are reportedly being dispatched to run a hospital that reportedly has been outfitted with what appear to be jail cells.
Wuhan #Huoshenshan Hospital has finished construction and will admit #coronavirus patients on Monday. #Huawei‘s “remote consultation platform” will also put into use there, improving the efficiency of diagnosis and treatment. #2019CoVpic.twitter.com/4zUDXjts75
When it’s all said and done, economists inside and outside China have warned that the outbreak could shave a percentage point or more off of GDP, potentially pushing the rate of growth below 5% – not that many economists trust the Chinese data anyway.
Back in the US, the country is waiting with baited breath to see whether a suspected 9th case of the virus – this time, in NYC – will be confirmed. The Pentagon recently approved a request for quarantine housing for 1,000 people, according to Epoch Times.
Across the world, dozens of airlines have suspended flights to and from China, some as far out as April.
Does that sound like everything is under control to you?
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