- The Project For A New American Century & The Age Of Bioweapons: 20 Years Of Psychological Terror
The Project For A New American Century & The Age Of Bioweapons: 20 Years Of Psychological Terror
Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
A little over 20 years ago, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) conducted a military exercise that involved a “hypothetical scenario” of hijacked planes flying into both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
One year later, on October 24-26, 2000, another “hypothetical” military exercise was played out featuring an airline crashing into the Pentagon killing 341 people followed by yet another May 2001 Department of Defense “hypothetical scenario” which saw hundreds of medical personnel training for a “guided missile in the form of a hijacked 757 airliner” crashing into the Pentagon.
What arose from the smoke and debris of September 11, 2001 was unlike anything the sleeping masses or international community expected.
The shock effect so traumatized the masses that quite suddenly, citizens found themselves willing to give up their liberties at home while acquiescing to any retaliatory action desired by their government abroad.
The scale of horror was so great that the international community banded together and showed their love and solidarity towards America in the wake of the tragedy with candlelight vigils across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and South America. Humanity’s natural tendency to embrace and aid our fellow man in times of crisis expressed itself like a bright light in a world of confused darkness and a hope for a durable peace awoke in the hearts of many.
Alas, as the world came soon to discover, that hope was short lived.
The Neocon Takeover of America
Police State measures grew swiftly with the Patriot Act and mass internal surveillance under the “crisis management” run by the neocon cabal in the White House. While a new type of regime change war was created abroad, Dangerous protocols for Cheney’s “Continuity of Government” were set into motion and with these procedures, new mandates for Martial Law were created amplifying the powers, financing and deployment of U.S. Military capabilities both within the USA “under crisis conditions” and around the world.
Governments that had no connection to 9/11 were swiftly targeted for destruction using false evidence of “yellowcake” produced in the bowels of MI6, and a broader unipolar military encirclement of both Russia and China was set into motion which President Putin called out brilliantly in his famous 2007 Munich Security Conference Speech.
Of course this should not have been a surprise for anyone who took the time to read the Project for a New American Century manifesto published in October 2000 entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ (RAD).
Under the Chairmanship of William Kristol (a neocon agent today leading the charge to impeach President Trump) and co-authored by John Bolton, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Donald Rumsfeld, RAD stated that to “further the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one-absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event- like a new Pearl Harbor”. Going further to describe its Hobbesian agenda, the cabal stated that “the Cold War was a bipolar world; the 21st century world is- for the moment at least- decidedly unipolar with America as the world’s sole superpower”.
While much has been said about the “inside job” of 9/11, a lesser appreciated terrorist act occurred over several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001 killing five and infective 17 in the form of envelopes laced with bio-weaponized anthrax.
The Age of Bioweapons and PNAC
This anthrax attack led quickly into the 2004 Bioshield Act with a $5 billion budget and mandate to “pre-empt and defend further bioweapon attacks”. This new chapter of the revolution in military affairs was to be coordinated from leading bioweapons facility at the Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. Since 2002, over $50 billion has been spent on Bioweapons research and defense to date.
The earlier October 2000 RAD document emphasized the importance which the neocon cabal placed on bioweapons (and other next generation war tech) stating:
“Combat will likely take place in new dimensions: In space, cyber-space and perhaps the world of microbes… advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool”.
Lawyer and bioweapons expert Francis Boyle stated in 2007 that Fort Detrick’s mandate includes “acquiring, growing, modifying, storing, packing, and dispersing classical, emerging and genetically engineered pathogens for offensive weapon programs.” These new post-9/11 practices fully trashed the 1975 UN Convention Against Biological Weapons ratified by the USA by establishing a vast international network of bioweapons labs coordinated from Fort Detrick which would be assigned the role of doing much of the dirty work that the U.S. was “officially” prevented from doing on its own soil.
Where Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag to justify his enabling Acts, the neocons had their 9/11. The difference in the case of America was that Cheney failed to achieve the same level of absolute control over his nation as Hitler captured by 1934 (evidenced by pushback from patriotic American military intelligence circles against Cheney’s Iran war agenda). With this neocon failure, the republic lurched on.
The Rot Continues Under Obama
Obama’s rise was seen as a hopeful light to many naïve Democrats who still had not realized how a “false left” vs “false right” clash had been slowly constructed over the post WWII years. Either camp increasingly found itself converging towards the same world government agenda through using somewhat dissimilar paths and flavors.
It didn’t take long for many of Obama’s more critically-minded supporters to realize that the mass surveillance/police state measures, regime change wars, and military confrontation of Russia and China begun under Cheney not only failed to stop, but even expanded at faster rates than ever.
In the months before Obama left office in July 2016, the classified Directive 40: National Continuity Policy was enacted creating a line of “Devolution authority” for all branches of the government to a “duplicate chain of individuals secreted outside Washington available in a catastrophic emergency”. Days prior to Trump’s inauguration, Federal Continuity Directive 1 was issued to transfer authority to military forces who could be used to suppress “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy.”
The Importance of Knowing This History
There are very clearly two diametrically opposing methods of analyzing, and solving the existential crisis threatening our world currently: Multipolar or Unipolar.
While Russia and China represent a multipolar/pro-nation state vision driven by large scale development projects that benefit all- rich and poor alike exemplified by the New Silk Road, Polar Silk Road, Space Silk Road and now Health Silk Road, something much darker is being promoted by the same financial oligarchy that owns both right and left sides of the deep state coin. These later forces have provably positioned themselves to take control of western governments under crisis conditions and are not afraid to use every weapon in their arsenal to destroy their perceived enemies… including bioweaponry. This latter uncomfortable reality was asserted quite candidly by leading officials of Iran and even the Chinese Foreign Ministry just weeks ago.
Admittedly, whether or not the current coronavirus pandemic is a bioweapon is not yet fully proven (although growing body of evidence asserts that it is, as seen here and here and here and here). What we know for certain are the following facts:
Numbers are being systematically misrepresented to convey much greater rates of death vs infections as dozens of leading medical experts have proven.
Contaminated test kits have started showing up in the UK on March 30 and countless false results are showing up since covid test kits are often not differentiating between covid-19 and the typical coronavirus strains of the flu that average between 7-14% of flu cases every year. This doesn’t mean that COVID-19 should not be taken seriously, but only that the reported numbers are being artificially falsified to generate heightened panic.
The COVID-19 Task Force at London’s Imperial College has been found to be the singular source of the false “left” vs “right” debate poisoning the west’s response to the pandemic. Teams working out of this British Intelligence nexus have generated BOTH the “do-nothing-and-wait-until-natural-resistance-evolves” herd immunity theory while simultaneously creating the “shut everything down one-size-fits-all” doomsday models being used by the WHO, UN, and leading Deep State assets like Michael Bloomberg, Steve Bannon, Bill Gates and George Soros. In case you doubt the influence of the Imperial College on world policy, a March 17 New York Times article described them in the following terms: “With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.”
Investigative Journalist Whitney Webb’s February 2020 research demonstrated conclusively that DARPA had received funding in tandem with Fort Detrick since 2017 on genetic modification of novel coronaviruses (with a focus on bats) as well as the development of never before used DNA and mRNA vaccines which change the structure of DNA both for an individual and potentially for a whole race.
Lastly, and most importantly, the pre-9/11 military exercises were not merely hypothetical scenarios but exercises which led directly into a new “Pearl Harbor” that modified the behaviour of Americans under terror, panic and misinformation like nothing ever seen before.
The parallels to today’s coronavirus outbreak cannot be missed for anyone who has taken a serious look at the strange case of the Event 201 Global Pandemic Exercise on October 19, 2019 in New York.
Event 201 was sponsored by the Michael Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and World Economic Forum which ran simulations under the “hypothetical” scenario of a novel coronavirus pandemic killing 60 million people. Reviewing just one of Event 201’s many recordings openly available on their official site features some very disturbing parallels to the events unfolding today:
Unipolar Martial Law or Multipolar Marshall Plan?
As I outlined in my previous paper, the mass-panic generated by COVID-19 has created a 9/11-situation with the expected police state laws being passed under the radar of many people who would normally be paying attention to such things. One of the most dangerous measures enacted involved a classified bill in February which formally mandates the head of NORTHCOM (who is also the head of NORAD) to become acting President of the United States under conditions of Martial Law, un-governability of the executive branch or general chaos in America. This later scenario is not terribly unlikely considering the danger of a financial blowout of the banking system combined with economic lockdowns of the west.
China and Russia both understand the nature of the game and both nations have acted responsibly in dealing with the outbreak of Coronavirus with China’s successful containment having won seven consecutive days of no new cases. It is important that unlike the remedies promoted by London’s Imperial College, neither Russia or China have totally shut down their nations, but have rather kept their economies alive which selecting methods for selective quarantines and lockdowns (China only locked down 15 nations plus Wuhan while the remaining 95% of their economy continued to produces and support the recovering component).
We know that President Trump has resisted the pressure by Deep State Experts to shut down America and has stated so repeatedly, but up until his recent conversations with Xi Jinping and Putin, there were very few options available to him beyond those proposed by Dr. Fauci, the Green New Dealing Dems or “bailout everything” monetarists around Mnuchin and Kudlow.
Now that China and Russia have begun sending cargo ships of vital medical equipment to America as part of the Health Silk Road (over the screams of neocons and neoliberal technocrats like), a new possibility for a cure has presented itself.
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If Trump acts decisively with courage and intelligence, there is still a chance that sovereign nation states may yet stay in the drivers’ seat and use this crisis as an opportunity to force through a debt jubilee, banking reform and new Bretton Woods emergency conference to establish a foundation for a new just economic system.
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If Trump is unsuccessful in this task, it is more than a little scary to think about what hell will beset the world in the coming months and years.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/10/2020 – 00:00 -
- San Francisco City Officials Don't Want People Buying Guns During Pandemic
San Francisco City Officials Don’t Want People Buying Guns During Pandemic
San Francisco supervisors have filed a resolution urging health officials from six Bay Area counties to assess the ‘public health threat’ of ‘panic buying weapons’ during the a time of crisis.
In other words, if you feel that the country is about to fall into a crime-ridden depression where thugs might kick down your door for what’s in your fridge, you shouldn’t be able to defend yourself or your family.
The resolution calls on the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara to conduct surveys on the health threat posed by the surge in weapons purchases – using completely unsupported claims in the text, according to Breitbart.
For example:
WHEREAS, The NRA has induced such panic buying by engaging in reckless fear-mongering, using this national crisis as an excuse to grow corporate profits and scare more people into buying guns.
WHEREAS, More guns do not keep Americans safe because in reality, nearly 400 million civilian-owned guns in America have not stopped 40,000 annual gun deaths and thousands of gun injuries.
WHEREAS, Multiple studies have concluded that where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths and more guns do not stop crimes
(Funny, Wyoming has the most guns per capita in the country and one of the lowest murder rates, while Illinois 38th in the nation in per capita ownership, yet has a sky-high murder rate).
WHEREAS, More guns in homes during these precarious times compounds the risks of death and serious injury likely to further increase our hospital loads.
You can read the rest here.
The NRA-ILA responded to the resolution with the following statement:
As the old saying goes, never let a crisis go to waste, and that’s exactly how this resolution begins. By citing the COVID-19 crisis as creating the rush to purchase firearms and ammunition, and then blaming the NRA for inducing panic buying to increase corporate profits, the resolution denies the basic truth the current crisis illustrates: Americans believe in their right to defend themselves and will seek the available means to do so. The resolution shows how incredibly out of touch the San Francisco Board of Supervisors remain in a city that has been grossly mismanaged for decades.
“Instead of focusing on real issues, [San Francisco supervisors] would rather waste taxpayer time and money to once again blame guns for their problems,” the NRA added.
In short, San Francisco only wants bad guys to own guns during a crisis – while law-abiding citizens shouldn’t be able to match force and defend themselves.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 23:40 - 9/11 Truth: Under Lockdown For Nearly Two Decades
9/11 Truth: Under Lockdown For Nearly Two Decades
Authored by Max Parry via The Unz Review,
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary”
– H.L. Mencken
As the global pandemic grips world attention, completely unnoticed by mainstream media was the release of a final report of an academic study pertaining to another previously calamitous event of international significance.
On March 25th, the conclusion of a four year investigation by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks was published which determined that the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11th, 2001 was not caused by fire. The peer-reviewed inquiry was funded by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a nonprofit organization composed of more than 3,000 building architects and engineers who are a signatory to the group’s formal appeal calling for a new investigation into the three — not two — WTC skyscrapers destroyed on 9/11. The researchers infer that the collapse of Building 7 was actually the result of a controlled demolition:
“The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”
With or without a pandemic, it is likely corporate media would have ignored the study anyway, just as they have anything that contradicts the official story of 9/11. However, it is notable that many have drawn parallels between the COVID-19 outbreak and the 9/11 attacks based on the widespread changes to daily life as a result of the crisis going forward. Already there is talk of nationwide lockdowns as a “new normal” with many rightly expressing concerns over civil liberties, press freedoms, the surveillance state, and other issues just as there were following 9/11. By the same measure, a false dichotomy is being established by political gatekeepers in order to silence those who dare challenge the official account as to how the coronavirus began. It is a stigmatization that is all too familiar to those who have never believed the conventional narrative that 19 Arab hijackers loyal to Osama bin Laden armed only with box-cutters were solely responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that fateful day.
There is a common misconception that to believe in so-called “conspiracy theories” is to somehow lose sight of the bigger picture or systemic problems. Behind this phenomenon is a mistakenly presumed conflict between understanding the broader, overarching system versus the sinister motives of those in power who administer it — when they are inextricably linked. Political scientist Michael Parenti, who drew the ire of many of his fellow left-wing colleagues for his work on the Kennedy assassination, refers to it in his lecture “Understanding Deep Politics” as a perceived incompatibility between “the structural and the functional.” The anti-conspiracists wrongly assume that the more impersonal or wider the lens, the more profound an analysis. By this logic, the elite are absolved of conscious intent and deliberate pursuit of nefarious self-interest, as if everything is done by incidental chance or out of incompetence. Not to say efficacy applies without exception, but it has become a required gesture to disassociate oneself from “conspiracies” to maintain credibility — ironically even by those who are often the target of such smears themselves.
This applies not only to mainstream media and academics, but even leading progressive figures who have a mechanical, unthinking resistance to assigning intent or recognizing the existence of hidden agendas. As a result, it disappears the class interests of the ruling elite and ultimately assists them in providing cover for their crimes. With the exception of the Kennedy assassination — coincidentally the subject of a new epic chart-topping song by Bob Dylan — nowhere has there been more hostility to ‘conspiracism’ than regarding the events of 9/11. Just as they assailed Parenti, David Talbot and others for challenging the Warren Commission’s ‘lone gunman’ theory, leading figures on the left such as Noam Chomsky and the late Alexander Cockburn railed against the 9/11 Truth movement and today it is often wrongly equated with right-wing politics, an unlikely trajectory given it occurred under an arch-conservative administration but an inevitable result of the pseudo-left’s aversion to “conspiracies.” If polls are any indication, the average American certainly disagrees with such elitist misleaders as to the believability of the sham 9/11 Commission findings, yet another example of how out-of-touch the faux-left is with ordinary people.
A more recent example was an article by left-wing journalist Ben Norton proclaiming that to call 9/11 a false flag or an “inside job” is “fundamentally a right-wing conspiracy”, in complete disregard of the many dedicated truther activists on the left since its inception. Norton insists the 9/11 attacks were simply “blowback”, or an unintended consequence of previous U.S. foreign policy support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets during the 1980s which later gave birth to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Norton argues “Al-Qaeda’s unofficial strategic alliance with the US eventually broke down” resulting in 9/11 as retaliation, completely overlooking that Washington was still supporting jihadist factions during the 1990s in Bosnia (two of which would be alleged 9/11 hijackers) and Kosovo in the Yugoslav wars against Serbia, even while the U.S. was ostensibly pursuing bin Laden for the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000.
A 1997 Congressional document by the Republican Policy Committee (RPC) throws light on how Washington never discontinued its practice in Afghanistan of using jihadist proxies to achieve its foreign policy goals in the Balkans. Although it was a partisan GOP attack meant to discredit then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, nevertheless the memo accurately presents how the U.S. had “turned Bosnia into a Militant Islamic Base”:
“In short, the Clinton administration’s policy of facilitating the delivery of arms to the Bosnian Muslims made it the de facto partner of an international network of governments and organizations pursuing their own agenda in Bosnia: the promotion of Islamic revolution in Europe. That network not only involves Iran but Brunei, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan (a key ally of Iran), and Turkey, together with front groups supposedly pursuing humanitarian and cultural activities. For example, one such group about which details have come to light is the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), a Sudan-based, phoney humanitarian organization which has been a major link in the arms pipeline to Bosnia. TWRA is believed to be connected with such fixtures of the Islamic terror network as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the convicted mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) and Osama Bin Laden , a wealthy Saudi émigré believed to bankroll numerous militant groups…”
It was also in Bosnia where a raid was conducted in 2002 by local police at the Sarajevo branch of a Saudi-based purported charitable organization, Benevolence International Foundation, which was discovered to be a front for Al-Qaeda. Seized on the premises was a document, dubbed the “Golden Chain”, which listed the major financial sponsors of the terrorist organization to be numerous Saudi business and government figures, including some of Osama bin Laden’s own brothers. By the 9/11 Commission Report’s own admission, this same fake Islamic charity “supported the Bosnian Muslims in their conflict with Serbia” at the same time as the CIA.
It cannot go without mentioning that the common link between Al-Qaeda and subsequent extremist groups like ISIS/Daesh and Boko Haram is the doctrine of Wahhabism, the puritanical sect of Sunni Islam practiced in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and founded in the 18th century by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the religious leader who formed an alliance with the founder of the first Saudi state, Muhammad bin Saud, whose descendants make up the House of Saud royal family. The ultra-orthodox teachings of Wahhabism were initially rejected in the Middle East but reestablished by British colonialism which aligned with the Saud family in order to use their intolerant strain of Islam to undermine the Ottoman empire in a divide-and-conquer strategy. In a speech to the House of Commons in 1921, Winston Churchill admitted the Saudis to be “intolerant, well-armed and bloodthirsty.”
This did not stop the British from supporting the House of Saud so long as it was in the interest of Western imperialism, an unholy alliance which continues to this day. However, U.S.-Saudi relations did come under scrutiny when the infamous 28 redacted pages of the December 2002 report of the “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” conducted by the Senate and House Select Committees on Intelligence were finally disclosed in 2016. The section revealed not only the numerous U.S. intelligence failures in the lead-up to the attacks but the long suspected culpability of Saudi Arabia, whose nationals were not the focus of counterterrorism because of Riyadh’s status as a U.S. ally. The declassified pages show that some of the hijackers, 15 of them Saudi citizens, received financial and logistical support from individuals linked to the Saudi government, which FBI sources believed at least two of which to be Saudi intelligence officers. One of those Saudi agents received large payments from Princess Haifa, the wife of Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a stipend from the latter’s bank account which inevitably went from the go-betweens to the sleeper cell.
President George W. Bush and Prince Bandar bin Sultan at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas in 2002
A key member of the House of Saud and then-Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar has such a long and close relationship to the Bush family he was given the nickname “Bandar Bush.” For obvious reasons, when the congressional joint inquiry report was first published in 2003, the 28-page portion on the Saudi ties to the attacks was completely censored at the insistence of the Bush administration. Yet the Bush family’s connection to the Gulf state kingdom is not limited to the ruling monarchy but includes one of the petrodollar theocracy’s other wealthiest families— the bin Laden family itself. While Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 mostly whitewashed the real conspiracy of 9/11 , it did reveal that numerous unquestioned members of the bin Laden family were given special treatment and suspiciously evacuated on secret flights out of the U.S. shortly after the attacks in coordination with the Saudi government.
The Bush-bin Laden connection goes all the way back to the beginning of George W. Bush’s business career prior to his political involvement in 1976 with the founding of an oil drilling company, Arbusto Energy, whose earliest investors included a Texas businessman and fellow reservist in the Texas Air National Guard, James R. Bath, who oddly enough was the American liaison for Salem bin Laden, Osama’s half brother. To put it differently, the bin Laden family and its construction fortune helped finance Bush’s start in the oil industry, a relationship that would continue through the 1990s with Harken Energy, later the recipient of an offshore oil contract in Iraq’s reconstruction alongside Dick Cheney’s Halliburton. The Bush dynasty’s financial ties to both the Saudi royals and bin Laden family went on as co-investors in the Carlyle Group private equity firm where the elder Bush’s previous government service contacts were exploited for financial gain. In fact, on the morning of 9/11, Bush Sr. just happened to be attending a Carlyle business conference where another bin Laden sibling was the guest of honor in what we are supposed to believe is another astounding coincidence. Just days later, Shafiq bin Laden would be spirited off on a chartered flight back to Saudi Arabia in an exodus overseen by Prince Bandar himself.
Osama bin Laden himself also got an evacuation of sorts when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001. It was legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh who first reported that bin Laden and thousands of other Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters were suspiciously allowed to escape to Pakistan in an evacuation dubbed the ‘airlift of evil.’ This was corroborated in a leaked 2009 Hillary Clinton State Department email published by WikiLeaks regarding a Senate report on the Battle of Tora Bora and bin Laden’s escape where Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal is shown discussing the controversial airlift as having been requested by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney — but don’t dare call it a conspiracy:
“Gary Berntsen, the head of the CIA armed operation in eastern Afghanistan, is a major source for the report. I am in contact with him and have heard his entire story at length, key parts of which are not in his book, Jawbreaker, or in the Senate report. In particular , the story of the Kunduz airlift of the bulk of key AQ and Taliban leaders, at the request of Musharaff and per order Cheney/Rumsfeld, is absent.”
Could it have anything to do with just a few years earlier the Taliban visiting Texaswhen Bush was Governor to discuss with the Unocal Corporation the construction of a gas pipeline through Afghanistan into Pakistan? It is also well known that the Pakistani government and its Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) had supported the Taliban for decades and during the 1980s had been the CIA’s main conduit for supplying arms to the Afghan mujahideen, including bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Maktab al-Khidamat, the organizational precursor to Al-Qaeda. As shown in the documentary 9/11: Press for Truth, little in their relations changed in the years between the Afghan-Soviet war and 9/11, as ISI director Mahmud Ahmed was reportedly busted wiring $100,000 to alleged hijacker ringleader Mohamed Atta not long before the WTC attacks. Throughout 2001 both before and after 9/11, General Ahmed had repeatedly visited the U.S. and met with top Pentagon and Bush administration officials, including CIA Director George Tenet, making Prince Bandar not the only figure to have been caught financing the operation and where a direct line can be drawn between the White House and the hijackers.
While Bandar has thus far eluded justice, one year after the release of the 28 pages a lawsuit was filed on behalf of the families of the victims against the government of Saudi Arabia which presented new evidence that two years prior to the attacks in 1999, the Saudi Embassy paid for the flights of two Saudi agents living undercover in the U.S. to fly from Phoenix to Washington “in a dry run for the 9/11 attacks” where they attempted to breach the cockpit and test flight security. This means the Saudi government was likely involved in planning the attacks from the very beginning, in addition to providing the subsidies and patsy hijacker personnel for the smokescreen of blaming Al-Qaeda and making bin Laden the fall guy, whose links to 9/11 are tenuous at best. After all, the “confession” from supposed planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was extracted only after his being water-boarded 183 times while bin Laden himself initially denied any role in the attacks before questionable videos were released of his admittance.
The Saudi nationals who participated in the hijacking rehearsal were posing as students. However, the Sunni dictatorship was not the only country conducting a mass espionage operation in the U.S. prior to 9/11 under such a front. In the first half of 2001, several U.S. federal law enforcement agencies documented more than 130 different instances of young Israelis impersonating “art students” while aggressively trying to penetrate the security of various government and military facilities as part of a Mossad spy ring. Several of the Israelis were found to be living in locations within the near vicinity of the hijackers as if they were eavesdropping on them. The discovery of the Israeli operation raised many questions, namely whether Mossad had advanced knowledge or involvement in 9/11. Ironically, Fox News of all places was one of the few outlets to cover the story in a four-part series which never re-aired and was eventually scrubbed from the network website.
The Israeli “art student” mystery never gained traction in the rest of the media, much like another suspicious case in the “Dancing Israelis”, a smaller group of Mossad spies posing as furnishing movers who were arrested in New Jersey on the morning of 9/11 taking celebratory pictures with the twin towers burning in the background of the Manhattan skyline. The five men were not only physically present at the waterfront prior to the first plane impact but found with thousands of dollars in cash, box-cutters, fake passports, and Arab clothing after they were reported for suspicious behavior and intercepted at the Lincoln tunnel heading into Manhattan. Initially misreported as Arabs by the media, the men were connected to Mossad by an FBI database and held for five months before their deportation to Israel while the owner of the front moving company fled to Jerusalem before further questioning. It should be noted that if Israel were to have participated in a ‘false flag’ attack on the U.S., it would not have been the first time. During the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israeli Air Force and Navy launched an unprovoked attack on the USS Liberty, a U.S. Navy spy ship that was surveilling the Arab-Israeli conflict from international waters in the Mediterranean, an “accidental” assault which killed 34 Americans in an attempt to blame Egypt and provoke U.S. intervention.
If Israel turned out to be co-conspirators with the Saudis, it too is not as unlikely a scenario as it may seem. Wrongly assumed to be sworn enemies, it is an open secret that the two British-created states have maintained a historical covert alliance since the end of World War I when the first monarch of the modern Saudi state, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, defeated his rival the Sharif of Mecca who opposed the Balfour Declaration. Authored by British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour and presented to Zionist leader Baron Rothschild, the 1917 letter guaranteed a Jewish homeland in Palestine by colonization with European Jews. Once Sharif was out the way, the Zionist movement had the green light to move forward with its colonial project. Although Ibn Saud publicly opposed Zionism, behind the scenes he negotiated with them through an intermediary in his advisor, British agent St. John Philby, who proposed a £20 million compensation to the Saudi king for delivering Palestine to the Jews.
Ibn Saud communicated his willingness to compromise in a 1940 letter from Philby to Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization and later the first Israeli president. However, Philby himself was an anti-Zionist and sabotaged the plan by leaking it to other Arab leaders who voiced their vehement opposition and it was only after this exposure that the Saudi king claimed to have turned down the bribe, something the Zionists would only solicit if they thought he would accept. Ever since, the ideologies of Saudi Wahhabism and Israeli Zionism have been center to the West’s destabilization of the Middle East which contrary to misperceptions was not uniquely plagued by conflict historically more than the Occident until the West nurtured Salafism and Zionism. Predictably, discussing either the Saudi or Israeli role in 9/11 has been strictly forbidden in corporate media, since both are among Washington’s geo-strategic allies and each hold immense lobbying power over large media institutions.
Less than five months after 9/11, Bush notoriously declared the nations of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as comprising an “axis of evil” in his 2002 state of the union address. In reality, the phrase is better suited to describe the tripartite of Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the U.S. government itself who are likely the real trio of conspirators behind 9/11. The infamous choice of words were attributed to neoconservative pundit and Bush speechwriter, David Frum, who claimed to have taken inspiration from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “a date that will live infamy” speech given the day after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It was a continuation of a theme present in the manifesto of the neoconservative cabal authored one year prior to 9/11 — “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) think tank, whose members included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush. The strategic military blueprint called for a massive increase in U.S. defense spending in order to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars”before ominously predicting:
“The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Ten members of PNAC would be subsequently appointed to positions in the Bush White House where their vision of a “new Pearl Harbor” conveniently materialized. Then again, there is plenty of evidence that Pearl Harbor itself was a ‘false flag’, or that U.S. intelligence and President Franklin D. Roosevelt had foreknowledge of an impending Japanese attack on the naval base in Oahu, Hawaii, on December 7th, 1941. As pointed out by the film Loose Change, it is probable that Roosevelt allowed it to happen on purpose in order to win public support for a U.S. entry into the European theatre of World War II, a move opposed by a majority of Americans prior to the ‘surprise’ Japanese attack. Given what is known about Pearl Harbor and the abandoned Operation Northwoods, which proposed both fabricating and committing terrorist attacks on civilian aircraft to be pinned on Fidel Castro in order to justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba in 1962, there are no grounds to assume that such false flag operations were ever phased out of military procedure before 9/11 or since.
Loose Change also made a useful historical analogy between 9/11 and the Reichstag fire, the 1933 arson attack on the German parliament building that occurred a month after Adolf Hitler was inaugurated as Chancellor and pinned on a 24-year old half-blind Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe. While there is no denying the incident was used a pretext by the Nazi regime to consolidate power and suspend law and order, there is still a heated debate between historians as to whether van der Lubbe was the real culprit. However, it was coincidentally in 2001 when a group of historians uncovered evidence that a Nazi stormtrooper who died under mysterious circumstances in 1933 had previously confessed to prosecutors that members of Hitler’s Storm Detachment had set fire to the edifice under orders from paramilitary leader Karl Ernst, lending credence to the widely held suspicion that it was a Nazi-engineered ‘false flag’ all along.
Most Americans are unaware that a similar coup d’etat nearly took place during the same year in the United States in an attempt to remove President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install an authoritarian government modeled on Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as part of a scheme hatched by an inner circle of right-wing bankers otherwise known as the the ‘Business Plot.’ It was a conspiracy that only became public after it was heroically thwarted by a whistleblower in decorated Marine Corps veteran turned anti-imperialist, Major General Smedley Butler, after he was recruited to form the junta. Incredibly, one of the prominent business figures implicated in the putsch was none other than future Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush, George H.W. Bush’s father and George W. Bush’s grandfather, who at the time was the director and shareholder of a bank owned by German industrialist and prominent Nazi financier Fritz Thyssen seized by the U.S. government under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
After his transformation, in 1935 Smedley Butler famously penned War is a Racketand there is perhaps no better phrase that would sum up the so-called ‘War on Terror’ today. Not only did the American Reichstag fire of 9/11 trigger a domestic police state transformation that overrode the U.S. constitution in an American equivalent of the 1933 Enabling Act and the Heimatschutz (“homeland protection”) defense forces with the passing of the USA-Patriot Act and founding of the Department of Homeland Security, but it fulfilled the prophecy of political scientist Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations in a face-off between Islam and Christianity abroad. The prediction that religion and culture would be the primary source of geopolitical conflict in the post-Cold War world was an apocalyptic paradigm envisioned by right-wing orientalist philosophers like Huntington and Bernard Lewis which the PNAC neocon ideologues put into practice. Today, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis appears likely to have similar broad and long-term political, social and economic consequences and those who have doubts about the official explanation for the pandemic can hardly be blamed for their distrust given this history unless the lessons of 9/11 have gone unlearned.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 23:20 - Vice, Vice, Baby! Americans (Ab)Use Porn, Booze, & Chocolate To Cope With Lockdown
Vice, Vice, Baby! Americans (Ab)Use Porn, Booze, & Chocolate To Cope With Lockdown
To cope with lockdown stress, job loss, and or just being housebound and bored over the last month, millions of Americans have resorted to watching porn, drinking beer, smoking pot, and or devouring chocolate amid coronavirus lockdowns that covers at least 90% of the country, reported Reuters.
From February 24 to March 17, Pornhub recorded a 12% increase in global traffic. We noted in mid-March, the porn site offered free premium accounts to anyone in Italy as the virus crisis intensified. By the end of March, Americans were given free access to Pornhub Premium as a way to “Help Flatten the Curve.” During the month, a huge influx of coronavirus themed porn videos hit the site, as it appears amateur porn stars in quarantine had nothing else better to do.
The love lockdown, as some are calling it, also saw people panic buying sex toys. Lingerie chain Ann Summers reported that dildos sales surged 27% in the last week of March over the same period the previous year.
For the four weeks ending March 22, dollar sales for top beer companies jumped over last year’s figures. With restaurants and bars closed, Americans panic hoarded beer, according to Brewbound. Over the period, beer sales from top brands erupted: Anheuser-Busch InBev recorded +11.6%, Molson Coors +10.6%, Constellation Brands +24%, Mark Anthony Brands +124%, Heineken USA +7.5%, Boston Beer +55.1%, Diageo +13.3, and Pabst +11.1%.
Top hard seltzer brands, Mark Anthony’s White Claw and Boston Beer’s Truly saw triple-digit growth trends, up 363.5% and 226.1%, respectively, over the period.
If porn watching and boozing weren’t enough, Americans were self-medicating with marijuana, melting in their couches as they “Netflix and quarantined.” Flowhub said California, Colorado, Oregon, and Alaska reported a 50% increase in pot sales from Mach 16-22.
As a result of the pandemic, many Americans have resorted to comfort food, such as chocolate and pizza:
“I think as you look across all of the categories, we are seeing really big increases,” Nestle USA Chairman and CEO Steve Presley recently told Yahoo Finance’s The First Trade.
Nestle not only makes chocolate products. “We have such a broad portfolio in the U.S. we see spikes across all of our businesses really with the exception being the out of home business obviously,” Presley said.
The risk many Americans have in quarantine is that they’re not exercising and living healthy lifestyles. Instead, they’re resorting to life’s vices to numb the pain of a pandemic.
And the question everyone is asking, how much longer are Americans going to be confined to their homes.
Well, the so-called Wall Street virologists at JPMorgan believe the US could be in the late accumulation phase with a possible inflection point in the coming weeks.
But as Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health recently noted in a study titled “Social distancing strategies for curbing the COVID-19 epidemic,” some form of social distancing could remain in place through 2022, which would suggest American better get used to extended lockdowns while enjoying life’s vices…
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 23:00 - In Late Thriller, OPEC Production Cut Deal Collapses After Mexico Gives Crown Prince The Finger
In Late Thriller, OPEC Production Cut Deal Collapses After Mexico Gives Crown Prince The Finger
Earlier today we reported that following a dramatic objection to the OPEC+ production cut which was agreed upon by Russia and Saudi Arabia (but few other OPEC members), Mexico had initially threatened to quit OPEC as it refused to comply with the imposed 23% cut forced on all members, but less than an hour later the southern US neighbor reportedly had changed its mind as Reuters reported that Mexico had in fact agreed to the OPEC+ production cut deal after all.
Well, scratch all that because it appears the Reuters “news” was fake, sourced from some conflicted Saudi minister who wanted to put Mexico in a position where it had no choice but to accept the reality that had been imposed upon it. Unfortunately for the Saudis, this “plan” was laughable and late on Thursday, Mexico logged off the OPEC+ alliance’s videoconference emergency meeting after nine hours of talks Thursday, without agreeing to the landmark 10 million b/d production cut accord that members were hoping could stem a bruising rout in oil prices caused by the coronavirus pandemic and send the price of oil surging, S&P Global Platts reported, whose sources we can now confirm are far more credible than those of Reuters.
The rest of the coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, were in discussions over how to proceed, with many ministers angry over the potential blow-up of the deal. The coalition will likely try to convince Mexico again Friday at a G20 energy ministerial that was originally scheduled to seek the participation of the US, Canada, Brazil and other key producers outside of OPEC+ to join its efforts.
But while the participation of G-20 non-OPEC members in the production cut deal is optional, Mexico’s isn’t and in fact has veto power, with Bloomberg reporting that unless Mexico agrees to be bound by the deal (something about a cartel and what not), the rest of OPEC+ wont’ cut oil production, threatening to send the price of oil crashing on Friday if oil exporters fail to agree on removing 10MM b/d from the market, an outcome that would result in storage spaces running out as soon as May and sending landlocked oil prices negative.
So what does Mexico want?
Well, it wants to have its cake, and eat almost all of it too: Mexico proposed an oil production cut of just 100k b/d over the next 2 months to help stabilize oil prices, Energy Secretary Rocio Nahle Garcia said in a statement on Twitter.
México en el consenso para estabilizar el precio del petróleo en la reunión de la @OPECSecretariat ha propuesto una reducción de 100 mil barriles por día en los próximos 2 meses. De 1.781 mbd de producción que reportamos en marzo del 2020 disminuiremos a 1.681 mbd. @GobiernoMX
— Rocío Nahle (@rocionahle) April 10, 2020
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This is a problem because it means that while all OPEC+ members are equal – all those who are cutting production by roughly 23% – some are more equal than others, namely Mexico, whose production would have dropped to 1.681m b/d from 1.781m b/d in March, while under the OPEC plan, Mexico was required to cut production by 400,000 barrels a day, from a starting point of 1,753 million barrels a day to 1,353m barrels a day.
And if Mexico is granted a loophole, then all other OPEC members – at least the non-Saudi ones – would demand similar treatment, forcing Saudi Arabia to should all of the production cuts, which would then nearly double from 4MMb/d to 8MMb/d. Needless to say that is a nonstarter, and explains why OPEC was quick to balk and warn that unless Mexico also agrees to cut by 23%, then the entire deal is off, and Brent, which was last trading at $32 would plunge 30%, maybe 40% overnight as the massive oversupply into a world which has 35MMb/d less oil demand, would continue indefinitely.
As we reported earlier, under the proposed deal, the 10 million b/d OPEC+ cuts would cover the months of May and June, and then be rolled back to 8 million b/d for the rest of 2020, and then down to 6 million b/d for all of 2021 through April 22.
Each member would lower its output 23% from its October 2018 levels, except for Saudi Arabia and Russia, who would make their cuts from a baseline of 11 million b/d. That means both countries would limit their production to 8.5 million b/d for the initial two months of the deal.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude exporter, said it had ramped up its crude output to a record 12 million b/d this month. Russia, meanwhile, pumped 10.5 million b/d of crude in March, according to S&P Global Platts Analytics.
But Mexico balked at its new quota of 1.353 million b/d, as the country plans to unveil a $13.5 billion energy investment package to help state oil company Pemex raise its production to 2 million b/d by the end of the year, according to Platts. In other words, the country’s entire budget depends on pumping as much oil as possible. Furthermore, with Mexico’s industrial production now imploding even as domestic coronavirus cases rise exponentially, the last thing AMLO will do is accept a world in which the country’s much needed dollar-denominated revenues are cut by almost a quarter.
In the end it was AMLO who killed the deal: Mexico initially agreed to the cut and the coalition was on the verge of finalizing the deal, before its delegation asked for time to consult with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, sources said. Those consultations and continued haggling over its cut went on for almost four hours, but Mexico stayed firm.
As the impasse lingered, US President Donald Trump, who had convinced Saudi Arabia and Russia to set aside their oil price war and come to the negotiating table, made a phone call with Saudi King Salman and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Dan Scavino Jr., a White House aide.
After speaking with the leaders for 90 minutes, he told reporters that he believed the OPEC+ coalition was close to a deal but did not reveal any details.
“We had a really good talk, but we’ll see what happens,” Trump said. “As you know, OPEC met today and I would say they are getting close to a deal and we will soon find out.”
Little did he know that his southern neighbor president had different plans, and now the entire deal is on the verge of collapse.
Today’s OPEC webcast came after a week of furious petrodiplomacy and back channel pressure by Trump for a deal that could rescue ailing US shale producers, even as Trump is reluctant to commit US companies to participating in any OPEC+ pact, despite urging by Saudi Arabia and Russia, and antitrust laws make any collective action legally impossible.
Instead, US Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette is expected to tell the G20 ministerial meeting Friday that some 2 million b/d of US production is forecast to be shut in over the next year, according to a person briefed on his plans; this was a non-starter for Russia and the Saudis until yesterday, but then the two nations quietly conceded to the US position.
And then, Mexico’s unexpected objection could make it all moot.
Meanwhile, the price of oil is one flashing red headline from cratering. The OPEC secretariat has forecast a 6.8 million b/d contraction in global oil demand for the whole of 2020, including close to 12 million b/d “and expanding” for the second quarter, Barkindo told the ministers who earlier toldthe group that the market outlook was “horrifying” and explained that at current rates of supply and demand, global crude oil storage capacity will fill up in the month of May, he said.
“These are staggering numbers,” he said, adding that the coronavirus outbreak had “upended market supply and demand fundamentals.”
Sources said Saudi Arabia had sought an even bigger OPEC+ cut of 15 million b/d but could not get Russia to agree. The two countries had feuded at the last OPEC+ meeting on March 6, when the impact of the coronavirus was already forcing analysts to downgrade their demand forecasts, with Russia balking at a Saudi-led proposal for cuts totaling 3.2 million b/d.
Back at the table again this time, they first agreed a deal between themselves, then spent most of Thursday’s meeting trying to convince smaller producers and tweaking the numbers.
Mexico was the last holdout, and with the deal requiring unanimous agreement, the relatively small oil producer suddenly had infinite leverage to demand its own deal. The problem is that unless AMLO concedes to the terms of the deal, it is about to get exponentially worse for Mexico and the rest of the cartel.
One last point: even a 10mmb/d production cut – the best the world can expect at this point – is nothing considering the 35mmb/d plunge in oil demand. According to Goldman, even with a 10mmb/d cut – the biggest in history – shut ins will still be required until June to balance the market. We doubt anyone will volunteer…
Which means it all depends on tomorrow’s Friday’s G20 meeting which will be chaired by Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman and is scheduled to begin at 1400 GMT: either Mexico agrees to the cut, or oil is about to crater (even more), while the Mexican peso will plunge to new all time lows. Finally, as Platts reports, with Mexico not the only country needing convincing, the G20 summit promises to be another test of geopolitical wills.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 22:55 - Escobar: Who Profits From The Pandemic?
Escobar: Who Profits From The Pandemic?
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
You don’t need to read Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics to understand that neoliberalism – in deep crisis since at least 2008 – is a control/governing technique in which surveillance capitalism is deeply embedded.
But now, with the world-system collapsing at breathtaking speed, neoliberalism is at a loss to deal with the next stage of dystopia, ever present in our hyper-connected angst: global mass unemployment.
Henry Kissinger, anointed oracle/gatekeeper of the ruling class, is predictably scared. He claims that, “sustaining the public trust is crucial to social solidarity.” He’s convinced the Hegemon should “safeguard the principles of the liberal world order.” Otherwise, “failure could set the world on fire.”
That’s so quaint. Public trust is dead across the spectrum. The liberal world “order” is now social Darwinist chaos. Just wait for the fire to rage.
The numbers are staggering. The Japan-based Asian Development Bank (ADB), in its annual economic report, may not have been exactly original. But it did note that the impact of the “worst pandemic in a century” will be as high as $4.1 trillion, or 4.8 percent of global GDP.
This an underestimation, as “supply disruptions, interrupted remittances, possible social and financial crises, and long-term effects on health care and education are excluded from the analysis.”
We cannot even start to imagine the cataclysmic social consequences of the crash. Entire sub-sectors of the global economy may not be recomposed at all.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) forecasts global unemployment at a conservative, additonal 24.7 million people – especially in aviation, tourism and hospitality.
The global aviation industry is a humongous $2.7 trillion business. That’s 3.6 percent of global GDP. It employs 2.7 million people. When you add air transport and tourism —everything from hotels and restaurants to theme parks and museums — it accounts for a minimum of 65.5 million jobs around the world.
According to the ILO, income losses for workers may range from $860 billion to an astonishing $3.4 trillion. “Working poverty” will be the new normal – especially across the Global South.
“Working poor,” in ILO terminology, means employed people living in households with a per capita income below the poverty line of $2 a day. As many as an additional 35 million people worldwide will become working poor in 2020.
Switching to feasible perspectives for global trade, it’s enlightening to examine that this report about how the economy may rebound is centered on the notorious hyperactive merchants and traders of Yiwu in eastern China – the world’s busiest small-commodity, business hub.
Their experience spells out a long and difficult recovery. As the rest of the world is in a coma, Lu Ting, chief China economist at Nomura in Hong Kong stresses that China faces a 30 percent decline in external demand at least until next Fall.
Neoliberalism in Reverse?
In the next stage, the strategic competition between the U.S. and China will be no-holds-barred, as emerging narratives of China’s new, multifaceted global role – on trade, technology, cyberspace, climate change – will set in, even more far-reaching than the New Silk Roads. That will also be the case in global public health policies. Get ready for an accelerated Hybrid War between the “Chinese virus” narrative and the Health Silk Road.
San Miguel, Bulacan, Philippines, 2016. (Judgefloro, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)
The latest report by the China Institute of International Studies would be quite helpful for the West — hubris permitting — to understand how Beijing adopted key measures putting the health and safety of the general population first.
Now, as the Chinese economy slowly picks up, hordes of fund managers from across Asia are tracking everything from trips on the metro to noodle consumption to preview what kind of economy may emerge post-lockdown.
In contrast, across the West, the prevailing doom and gloom elicited a priceless editorial from The Financial Times. Like James Brown in the 1980s Blues Brothers pop epic, the City of London seems to have seen the light, or at least giving the impression it really means it. Neoliberalism in reverse. New social contract. “Secure” labor markets. Redistribution.
Cynics won’t be fooled. The cryogenic state of the global economy spells out a vicious Great Depression 2.0 and an unemployment tsunami. The plebs eventually reaching for the pitchforks and the AR-15s en masse is now a distinct possibility. Might as well start throwing a few breadcrumbs to the beggars’ banquet.
That may apply to European latitudes. But the American story is in a class by itself.
Mural, Seattle, February 2017. (Mitchell Haindfield, Flickr)
For decades, we were led to believe that the world-system put in place after WWII provided the U.S. with unrivalled structural power. Now, all that’s left is structural fragility, grotesque inequalities, unpayable Himalayas of debt, and a rolling crisis.
No one is fooled anymore by the Fed’s magic quantitative easing powers, or the acronym salad – TALF, ESF, SPV – built into the Fed/U.S. Treasury exclusive obsession with big banks, corporations and the Goddess of the Market, to the detriment of the average American.
It was only a few months ago that a serious discussion evolved around the $2.5 quadrillion derivatives market imploding and collapsing the global economy, based on the price of oil skyrocketing, in case the Strait of Hormuz – for whatever reason – was shut down.
Now it’s about Great Depression 2.0: the whole system crashing as a result of the shutdown of the global economy. The questions are absolutely legitimate: is the political and social cataclysm of the global economic crisis arguably a larger catastrophe than Covid-19 itself? And will it provide an opportunity to end neoliberalism and usher in a more equitable system, or something even worse?
‘Transparent’ BlackRock
Wall Street, of course, lives in an alternative universe. In a nutshell, Wall Street turned the Fed into a hedge fund. The Fed is going to own at least two thirds of all U.S. Treasury bills in the market before the end of 2020.
The U.S. Treasury will be buying every security and loan in sight while the Fed will be the banker – financing the whole scheme.
So essentially this is a Fed/Treasury merger. A behemoth dispensing loads of helicopter money.
And the winner is BlackRock—the biggest money manager on the planet, with tentacles everywhere, managing the assets of over 170 pension funds, banks, foundations, insurance companies, in fact a great deal of the money in private equity and hedge funds. BlackRock — promising to be fully “transparent” — will buy these securities and manage those dodgy SPVs on behalf of the Treasury.
BlackRock, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink, may not be as big as Vanguard, but it’s the top investor in Goldman Sachs, along with Vanguard and State Street, and with $6.5 trillion in assets, bigger than Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank combined.
Now, BlackRock is the new operating system (OS) of the Fed and the Treasury. The world’s biggest shadow bank – and no, it’s not Chinese.
Compared to this high-stakes game, mini-scandals such as the one around Georgia Senator Kelly Loffler are peanuts. Loffler allegedly profited from inside information on Covid-19 by the CDC to make a stock market killing. Loffler is married to Jeffrey Sprecher – who happens to be the chairman of the NYSE, installed by Goldman Sachs.
While corporate media followed this story like headless chickens, post-Covid-19 plans, in Pentagon parlance, “move forward” by stealth.
The price? A meager $1,200 check per person for a month. Anyone knows that, based on median salary income, a typical American family would need $12,000 to survive for two months. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in an act of supreme effrontry, allows them a mere 10 percent of that. So American taxpayers will be left with a tsunami of debt while selected Wall Street players grab the whole loot, part of an unparalleled transfer of wealth upwards, complete with bankruptcies en masse of small and medium businesses.
Fink’s letter to his shareholders almost gives the game away: “I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.”
And right on cue, he forecasted that, “in the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant reallocation of capital.”
He was referring, then, to climate change. Now that refers to Covid-19.
Implant Our Nanochip, Or Else?
The game ahead for the elites, taking advantage of the crisis, might well contain these four elements:
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a social credit system,
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mandatory vaccination,
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a digital currency,
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and a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
This is what used to be called, according to the decades-old, time-tested CIA playbook, a “conspiracy theory.” Well, it might actually happen.
West Virginia National Guard members reporting to a Charleston nursing home to assist with Covid-19 testing. April 6, 2020. (U.S. Army National Guard, Edwin L. Wriston)
A social credit system is something that China set up already in 2014. Before the end of 2020, every Chinese citizen will be assigned his/her own credit score – a de facto “dynamic profile”, elaborated with extensive use of AI and the internet of things (IoT), including ubiquitous facial recognition technology. This implies, of course, 24/7 surveillance, complete with Blade Runner-style roving robotic birds.
The U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Canada, Russia and India may not be far behind. Germany, for instance, is tweaking its universal credit rating system, SCHUFA. France has an ID app very similar to the Chinese model, verified by facial recognition.
Mandatory vaccination is Bill Gates’s dream, working in conjunction with the WHO, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Big Pharma. He wants “billions of doses” to be enforced over the Global South. And it could be a cover to everyone getting a digital implant.
Here it is, in his own words. At 34:15:
“Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person…Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around.”
Then comes the last sentence which was erased from the official TED video. This was noted by Rosemary Frei, who has a master on molecular biology and is an independent investigative journalist in Canada. Gates says: “So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”
This “digital immunity proof” is crucial to keep in mind, something that could be misused by the state for nefarious purposes.
The three top candidates to produce a coronavirus vaccine are American biotech firm Moderna, as well as Germans CureVac and BioNTech.
Digital cash might then become an offspring of blockchain. Not only the U.S., but China and Russia are also interested in a national crypto-currency. A global currency – of course controlled by central bankers – may soon be adopted in the form of a basket of currencies, and would circulate virtually. Endless permutations of the toxic cocktail of IoT, blockchain technology and the social credit system could loom ahead.
Already Spain has announced that it is introducing UBI, and wants it to be permanent. It’s a form insurance for the elite against social uprisings, especially if millions of jobs never come back.
So the key working hypothesis is that Covid-19 could be used as cover for the usual suspects to bring in a new digital financial system and a mandatory vaccine with a “digital identity” nanochip with dissent not tolerated: what Slavoj Zizek calls the “erotic dream” of every totalitarian government.
Yet underneath it all, amid so much anxiety, a pent-up rage seems to be gathering strength, to eventually explode in unforeseeable ways. As much as the system may be changing at breakneck speed, there’s no guarantee even the 0.1 percent will be safe.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 22:40 -
- Sailor From Virus-Stricken Carrier Found Unresponsive As Over 400 Crew Infected
Sailor From Virus-Stricken Carrier Found Unresponsive As Over 400 Crew Infected
The nuclear carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt coronavirus disaster has gotten worse, as on Thursday more than 400 sailors tested positive for COVID-19. Alarmingly, one sailor was found unresponsive as the ship was docked at a naval base in Guam and immediately transported to a military intensive care unit at the base.
“The sailor tested positive for coronavirus on March 30 and was found unconscious Thursday, he has been admitted to the intensive care unit of the US Navy Hospital on Guam,” a Navy statement said, according to CNN.
It’s being described as the first hospitalization after the crisis aboard the ship caused the USS Roosevelt to divert its mission from the Western Pacific two weeks ago.
USS Theodore Roosevelt in Guam. Image via US Navy The Navy says at this point 97% of the ship’s some 4,000+ crew members have been tested. “We’ve tested almost the whole crew now. We still have about 1,000 tests to report out,” the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten said during a Pentagon briefing Thursday. “But 3,170 tested negative, 416 tested positive, 187 of those were symptomatic, 229 were asymptomatic. We still have 1,164 pending results.”
This means nearly ten percent of the crew is infected with COVID-19. “Sadly this morning we had our first hospitalization of the one sailor,” Hyten added. “We’re hoping that that sailor recovers, we are praying for him and his family and his shipmates.”
“I think it’s not a good idea to think the Teddy Roosevelt is a one-of-a-kind issue. We have too many ships at sea, we have too many deployed capabilities. There’s 5,000 sailors on a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. To think it will never happen again is not a good way to plan. What we have to do is figure out how to plan in these kind of Covid environments,” Hyten said of the unprecedented crisis aboard the vessel, which has taken the multi-billion dollar nuclear carrier essentially out of commission for the time being.
Via AP: Navy Secretary Thomas Modly, right, said the ship’s commander, Capt. Brett Crozier, left, “demonstrated extremely poor judgement” in the middle of a crisis. The crisis led to an embarrassing public controversy over the Navy’s handling the outbreak. After the ship’s captain penned a fiery letter demanding greater action from top brass, subsequently leaked to the media, the captain was relieved of command of the ship.
Capt. Brett Crozier, wrote an impassioned memo emailed to superiors on March 30 – which leaked to the press – describing an “accelerating” crisis as coronavirus swept through the ship. Crozier – who himself has contracted the virus – received a round of applause from crewmembers as he departed the ship.
Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly later resigned early this week over comments he made the ship’s crew calling Crozier’s actions “too stupid”.
But here’s the kicker: “Modly’s trip to Guam cost the Defense Department an estimated $243,000, according to a Navy official,” reports CNN.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 22:20 - Israel Continues Building Massive Wall Along Lebanese Border Despite COVID-19 Lockdown
Israel Continues Building Massive Wall Along Lebanese Border Despite COVID-19 Lockdown
The Hebrew-language Channel 12 reported that despite the coronavirus outbreak, work is continuing and ongoing these days to complete the cement barrier on the Israeli-Lebanese border to prevent any infiltration or attacks by Hezbollah.
Channel 12 reported that the Israeli move is related to building a cement wall with a fence, and it has advanced monitoring methods, as Israel has completed the construction of a section of the wall – 15 km long – along the border of Israel and Lebanon, which reaches about 140 km.
Border wall progressing along southern Lebanon. Times of Israel via AFP The channel noted on its website that the Secretary-General of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, had previously threatened Israel to penetrate the borders and take over parts of the Upper Galilee region.
The Israeli Defense Ministry has been concentrating their efforts on the Lebanese border for over a year now, following an operation to destroy a number of tunnels stretching between the two countries.
Work on the security barrier began at the start of last year [in 2018], with the joint IDF-Defense Ministry Borders and Security Fence Directorate having been cleared and received funding to build 13 kilometers (8 miles) of concrete walling along the approximately 130-kilometer (80-mile) border in order to protect the 22 adjacent Israeli villages.
Eventually the plan is to construct a barrier along the entire border — a project that would cost NIS 1.7 billion ($470 million).
The concrete barrier is designed to serve two main functions: protect Israeli civilians and soldiers from sniper attacks, and prevent infiltration into Israel by Hezbollah operatives. — The Times of Israel
N12 – המכשול בגבול לבנון – תמונת מצב https://t.co/uza682Cjt3 pic.twitter.com/FzdFL5FOGu
— מוקד החדשות של ישראל (@mokednewsil) April 8, 2020
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In turn, Lebanon has issued a letter to the United Nations about Israel’s repeated airspace violations over the last few months.
The Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab said in a statement released on the National News Agency (NNA) that Lebanon will not allow Israel to continue to violate their airspace.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 22:00 - Japan To Spend Billions Relocating Production Out Of China
Japan To Spend Billions Relocating Production Out Of China
Japan has allocated $2.2 billion (US) of its $993 billion emergency stimulus package to help manufacturers relocate production out of China amid the COVID-19 pandemic which began in the communist nation.
According to SCMP, $2 billion (US) will be set aside for companies shifting production back to Japan, while roughly $223.5 million will be spent on helping companies move production to other countries, according to SCMP.
Under normal circumstances, China is Japan’s largest trading partner – however imports from China plummeted nearly 50% in February as the coronavirus pandemic resulted in closed factories and unfilled orders. Meanwhile, a planned visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Japan early this month – the first such trip in a decade – was postponed with no date rescheduled.
It remains to be seen how the policy will affect Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s years-long effort to restore relations with China.
“We are doing our best to resume economic development,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a briefing Wednesday in Beijing, when asked about the move. “In this process, we hope other countries will act like China and take proper measures to ensure the world economy will be impacted as little as possible and to ensure that supply chains are impacted as little as possible.” –SCMP
China’s production trainwreck has revived discussion among Japanese firms over reducing their reliance on China as a manufacturing base – while the government’s panel on future investment recommended last month that manufacturing of high-value products should shift back to Japan – while other goods should be diversified across Southeast Asia.
“There will be something of a shift,” according to Japan Research Institute economist Shinichi Seki, who noted that Japanese companies were already considering moving out of China. “Having this in the budget will definitely provide an impetus.” That said, certain industries such as automotive will likely stay put.
Japan exports a far larger share of parts and partially finished goods to China than other major industrial nations, according to data compiled for the panel. A February survey by Tokyo Shoko Research found 37 per cent of the more than 2,600 companies that responded were diversifying procurement to places other than China amid the coronavirus crisis. –SCMP
In an early sign of mended fences, Japan provided masks and protective gear to China at the beginning of the outbreak – with one shipment even accompanied by a fragment of ancient Chinese poetry. Beijing praised the gesture, and later declared an antiviral produced by Japan’s Fujufilm Holdings to be an effective treatment against the coronavirus despite its lack of approval by Japanese authorities.
Still, Japanese citizens have largely blamed China for fumbling the ball during the early stages of the outbreak, while Prime Minister Abe has been blamed for not restricting inbound travel from hina sooner.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 21:40 - How To Protect Yourself From Long Term Pandemic Lockdown
How To Protect Yourself From Long Term Pandemic Lockdown
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
It has been only two weeks since widespread pandemic lockdowns were implemented in the US and as expected the public is not handling the idea very well. Within one week there were already frantic demands for the economy to reopen by Easter (spurred on by Donald Trump), and mass delusions have developed that this is still going to happen despite the fact that lockdown guidelines have been extended to at least April 30th. People desperately want to believe that this will all be over in a matter of weeks.
Many governments continue to perpetuate this fantasy by using very carefully worded terminology. For example, the phrase “two weeks of hell” is being consistently repeated by the media after Trump uttered the notion a few days ago. In Italy, a Milan official sees lockdowns now continuing for 2-3 more weeks. In Spain, the public was left with the impression that two solid weeks of quarantine and lockdowns would help stave off infections, yet the government extended the restrictions for…yes, you guessed it…another two weeks.
Why are these announcements always in two week intervals? I suspect it is because this the maximum amount of days before the average person begins to register the passage of time in their minds in a new situation. After two to three weeks of going without certain comforts and habits, people tend to adapt and find different ways of doing things. And, after two to three weeks of crisis, they might wake up and recognize the situation is not going to get better.
Governments and establishment elites are seeking to keep the public as passive and docile as possible by continually feeding them the notion that the worst of the pandemic will be over in a matter of weeks. And, every two weeks they will reassure us that we are “only two weeks away” from salvation.
Of course, with lockdowns in place the spread of infections is bound to decrease eventually, but I think the average person has no concept of how long the economic collapse will last even after the virus is “under control”. Understand that there is NO coming back from this event in terms of the economy. Our 70% service based system has been destroyed already, most people just don’t realize it yet. The majority of small businesses in the service sector will be wiped out in the next two months if they are not wiped out already.
As during the Great Depression, major corporations (most of them) will be allowed to survive while small businesses are bankrupted and absorbed, further centralizing management of economic activity into the hands of a select few. In the meantime, a majority of people will be completely dependent on government aid in one form or another just to survive.
The pandemic threat will continue for many months to come, perhaps with intermittent periods of loosened restrictions and lifted lockdowns. The public is being conditioned with a “wave model” of crisis and release, as I outlined with evidence in my last article ‘Waves Of Mutilation: Medical Tyranny And The Cashless Society’. This means that the economy is never coming back as it was, and tens of millions of people will remain jobless for a prolonged period of time.
I predict that the establishment will support the populace with a form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) for a little while (2-3 months), and then, as the economy continues to crash, they will start cutting off these benefits to some people while adding requirements restrictions to receive benefits for others.
When government becomes your sugar daddy, there are always strings attached. In some states they are already telling the public what they are allowed to spend their money on. In Vermont, for example, the state has declared numerous items in stores “non-essential”, which means you are not allowed to buy them. The claim is that you are allowed to buy them online, but in many cases people are blocked from doing this as well. Even garden seeds have been labeled “non-essential”.
Proponents of these restrictions offer two reasons:
One, it will supposedly reduce the amount of people going to stores thereby reducing the risk of infection.
And two, our spending needs to be controlled so that we do not waste money on “frivolous things” during the economic downturn.
Neither of these explanations is logical or acceptable. People generally go to stores to buy essentials along with “non-essentials” and so they will be “risking infection” regardless. Isn’t the whole point of social distancing and precautions like gloves and face masks supposed to allow the public to function while avoiding infection? Yet, the state is telling us this is not enough. We also have to be told when and how we can spend our money.
And what about the government enforcing responsible spending? Since when has the government EVER been an expert on spending money responsibly? It is massive government debt along with massive corporate debt that has debased our economy from the very beginning. They are the reason we are in an economic crisis, not the coronavirus. Yet, they now think they should be allowed to give us orders on being frugal? They can go to hell.
Imagine how numerous the rules and restrictions on the people will be once we are trapped into dependence on UBI and government aid. How much freedom will we have to give up just to get that monthly check? It is one thing to take the pandemic situation seriously and self-isolate for a while; it is another to sit back and allow the establishment to erase all our civil liberties in a matter of months in the name of “the greater good of the greater number”.
Beyond that, the pandemic crisis concerns me much less than an economic collapse, which was an inevitability even before the coronavirus went mainstream. How do we reconcile the government’s extreme response to the pandemic with the public’s need to function economically? Are we just supposed to sit back and become slaves, dependent and clamoring for a meager UBI check every month? I think not.
So, the question is, what can we do about it? As I have been saying for well over a decade, the solution is to decouple from the system and build our own. But what does this mean specifically?
Step 1: Start Providing Your Own Essentials
Essentials include water, food, shelter and security. Without these four things no human can live for very long. If a person can provide these things for himself, then he will never be beholden to anyone, including a domineering government.
I suggest starting small and expanding. Build a water collection source, or drill a well if you own property. Turn your yard into a garden, even if you live in the suburbs. In fact, your entire neighborhood should be growing gardens right now, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise should be dissuaded from their attempts to control what you do on your own property. This means establishing neighborhood security and no longer relying on local law enforcement.
It’s one thing to store essentials in case of emergency, it’s another to become a producer and ensure your survival for the long term.
Step 2: Organize For Mutual Aid And Defense
Each neighborhood or town should be working together for security as the system continues to collapse, which means establishing radio communications and small patrols to ward off looters. In New York alone, major crimes are up 12% as the lockdowns ramped up. In many municipalities in the US, law enforcement is not responding to most calls involving assaults, break-ins and robberies. Organization at this time is paramount; the more organized you are the more of a deterrent you represent to people who would seek to take what you have. Most predators are cowards; when given the choice between a strong target and a weak target, they will invariably choose the weak target.
The common argument against organization is that the “nail that sticks up will be hammered down”. I would remind people that the nails that are willingly hammered down will be stepped on forever. Nobody wants to step on a nail that sticks up. That hurts.
Predators, including predatory and totalitarian governments are, at bottom, weaklings. And their weakness will become apparent the moment they face an opponent that actually refuses to back down due to fear.
Step 3: Establish Barter Markets And Black Markets
As noted in previous articles, the primary goal behind this pandemic is to use it as a rationale for controlling all commerce. If you do not have the proper “green code” from the government indicating you are “free from infection”, then you are not allowed to participate in the economy. No job, no grocery stores, no public gatherings, etc. This is happening right now in places like China and South Korea and according to elitists like Bill Gates and others it is coming to the US soon, make no mistake.
The only way to counter such control is to not need the mainstream system at all. Localized barter markets need to be established, and if they outlaw those, then you need to set up black markets. Trade and production must continue or humanity as we know it will die. It will be replaced with a centralized socialist hive system that will crush all liberty, and this is unacceptable. Localization is the key to our survival.
This means that the public must make and active effort to save themselves through their own innovation instead of waiting around for government to save the day.
Step 4: Accept The Reality That Political Leaders Are Not Going to Save You – They Are Only Going To Make Things Worse
It’s funny, but if any of these lockdown measures were being implemented under a Democrat in the White House, conservatives would be enraged. But, since Trump is president, a large number of conservatives have gone limp and docile; proclaiming that he is going to save the day and “cure the virus”. It’s not going to happen, folks. This is the same guy that was telling us in January that he trusted the data out of China and that everything was under control. Trump is not your savior, he is a long time puppet of the banking elites, as I have outlined and evidenced on numerous occasions.
Trump’s job is to oversee the collapse of the US while playing the role of a bumbling “nationalist” and “conservative” villain. To be sure, he’s not the only politician in office that is part of this agenda, and the UN and WHO are just as guilty of misleading people about the extent of the pandemic threat, but Trump is the one that conservatives blindly trust the most, and this is a problem. If violations of the constitution continue to escalate, a war is coming, and Trump will NOT be on the side of liberty. Conservatives will eventually have to decide which side of the fight they stand as the lockdowns drag on with only minor periods of relaxed restrictions.
Ultimately, you cannot support economic socialization and big government tyranny just because Trump is president and still call yourself a conservative.
Step 5: Be Ready To Fight And Die For What You Believe In
People always talk about fighting for freedom, but the question is will they actually do it when faced with overwhelming odds? I can only speak for myself, and I will fight, but I do believe that many others out there are ready and willing to do the same. That said, it really does not matter. It’s not for us to defend ourselves only if we think we have backup. Be ready to fight alone if you have to; be ready to take risks, otherwise, you have no chance of winning, and thus the people collectively have no chance of winning. If others follow your lead, then so be it, but don’t rely on it.
There are many transgressions about to be foisted on the American people well beyond what we have already witnessed. You will know when the line in the sand has been crossed. Do not be surprised if in the next 3-6 months you hear the words “shots fired”. It is not enough to be prepped for the future. It is not enough to simply survive. The world as we know it is being sabotaged for the sake of power. Not money, but POWER. The elites will not be satisfied with anything less than total control. We cannot let them have it.
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Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 21:20 - "We Can't Give Our Product Away" – Farmers Toss Thousands Of Acres Of Fruits, Veggies As Sales Plummet
“We Can’t Give Our Product Away” – Farmers Toss Thousands Of Acres Of Fruits, Veggies As Sales Plummet
As some misguided liberals complain about fruits “left rotting on the trees” because Trump’s immigration crackdown has left no undocumented migrants to pick the vegetables (a demonstrably false assumption), the Associated Press has offered an explanation for this phenomenon that also illustrates how disruptions in the businesses like the hospitality and food-service industry work their way through the supply chain, ultimately sticking farmers in the American Farm Belt with fields of vegetables that they can’t sell, or even donate as local food pantries are now full-up with donations from restaurants.
The AP started its story in Palmetto, Fla. a city in Manatee County on the Gulf Coast, where a farmer had dumped piles of zucchini and other fresh vegetables to rot.
As the AP reported, thousands of acres of fruits and vegetables grown in Florida are being plowed over or left to rot because farmers who had grown the crops to sell to restaurants or other hospitality-industry buyers like theme parks and schools have been left on the hook for the crops.
As the economy shuts down across the country, injecting what the Fed described as massive levels of uncertainty, farmers in the state are now begging Ag Secretary Sonny Purdue to get some of that farm bailout money. Without some kind of industry-specific bailout, these farmers might go out of business.
The problem – in a nutshell – is that these farmers have longstanding sales relationships, but suddenly, those customers have disappeared. And many other companies in the US that are still buying produce already have contracts with foreign suppliers.
It would be great if Trump could come in with agricultural tariffs that would effectively cut off foreign competition, but such a move would likely be widely panned by the establishment, who would sooner watch every small farmer commit hari-kari than see continued pullback in globalization and more limits on free trade.
“We gave 400,000 pounds of tomatoes to our local food banks,” DiMare said. “A million more pounds will have to be donated if we can get the food banks to take it.”
Farmers are scrambling to sell to grocery stores, but it’s not easy. Large chains already have contracts with farmers who grow for retail — many from outside the U.S.
“We can’t even give our product away, and we’re allowing imports to come in here,” DiMare said.
He said 80 percent of the tomatoes grown in Florida are meant for now-shuttered restaurants and theme parks.
And the problem isn’t unique to farmers in Florida. Other states are having similar issues. Agricultural officials said leafy greens grown in California have no buyers, and dairy farmers in states like Vermont have been hit especially hard. Dairy farmers in VT and Wisconsin told the AP they’ve had to dump surplus loads of milk.
An association for farmers in Florida asked the administration if their veggies could be donated to food-stamp or other federal welfare programs, but reportedly, they never heard back.
Among states that harvest in the winter, California has a lot of leafy green veggies that are about to come out of the ground.
“The tail end of the winter vegetable season in Yuma, Arizona, was devastating for farmers who rely on food service buyers,” said Cory Lunde, spokesman for Western Growers, a group representing family farmers in California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. “And now, as the production shifts back to Salinas, California, there are many farmers who have crops in the ground that will be left unharvested,” particularly leafy greens.
He said a spike in demand for produce at the beginning of the outbreak has now subsided.
“People are staying home and not visiting the grocery stores as often,” Lunde said. “So the dominoes are continuing to fall.”
Some farmers have experimented with selling crops directly to customers, with one Florida farmer in Palmetto selling boxes of roma tomatoes for just $5 a box, an amazing bargain in a time of tremendous need. But the sales are well short of what he needs and likely won’t do more than put a dent in his losses. But at least it’s something.
“This is a catastrophe,” said tomato grower Tony DiMare, who owns farms in south Florida and the Tampa Bay area. “We haven’t even started to calculate it. It’s going to be in the millions of dollars. Losses mount every day.”
Florida leads the US in harvesting tomatoes, green beans and cabbage. Can you imagine what life would be like if tomatoes and tomato sauce prices soared because all of these medium-sized and small farmers around the country have gone out of business? Or if you walked into the grocery store a year from now and there simply weren’t any tomatoes.
It could happen much more easily than you might believe – that is, if not enough is done.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 21:00 - Consider The Possibility That Trump Is Right About China
Consider The Possibility That Trump Is Right About China
Authored by Nadia Schadlow via The Atlantic,
Critics are letting their disdain for the president blind them to geopolitical realities…
When a new coronavirus emerged in China and began spreading around the world, including in the United States, President Donald Trump’s many critics in the American foreign-policy establishment were quick to identify him as part of the problem. Trump had campaigned on an “America first” foreign policy, which after his victory was enshrined in the official National Security Strategy that his administration published in 2017. At the time, I served in the administration and orchestrated the writing of that document. In the years since, Trump has been criticized for supposedly overturning the post–World War II order and rejecting the role the United States has long played in the world. Amid a global pandemic, he’s being accused—on this site and elsewhere—of alienating allies, undercutting multinational cooperation, and causing America to fight the coronavirus alone.
And yet even as the current emergency has proved him right in fundamental ways—about China specifically and foreign policy more generally—many respectable people in the United States are letting their disdain for the president blind them to what is really going on in the world.
Far from discrediting Trump’s point of view, the COVID-19 crisis reveals what his strategy asserted: that the world is a competitive arena in which great power rivals like China seek advantage, that the state remains the irreplaceable agent of international power and effective action, that international institutions have limited capacity to transform the behavior and preferences of states.
China, America’s most powerful rival, has played a particularly harmful role in the current crisis, which began on its soil. Initially, that country’s lack of transparency prevented prompt action that might have contained the virus. In Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, Chinese officials initially punished citizens for “spreading rumors” about the disease. The lab in Shanghai that first published the genome of the virus on open platforms was shut down the next day for “rectification,” as the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported in February.
Apparently at the behest of officials at the Wuhan health commission, news reports indicate, visiting teams of experts from elsewhere in China were prevented from speaking freely to doctors in the infectious-disease wards.
Some experts had suspected human-to-human transmission, but their inquiries were rebuffed.
“They didn’t tell us the truth,” one team member said of the local authorities, “and from what we now know of the real situation then, they were lying” to us.
Now China’s propagandists are competing to create a narrative that obscures the origins of the crisis and that blames the United States for the virus. This irresponsible behavior and lack of transparency revealed what Trump’s National Security Strategy had identified early on: that “contrary to our hopes, China expanded its power at the expense of others.” Instead of becoming a “responsible stakeholder”—a term George W. Bush’s administration used to describe the role it hoped Beijing would play following China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001—the Chinese Communist Party used the advantages of WTO membership to advance a political and economic system at odds with America’s free and open society. Previous National Security Strategy documents had tiptoed around China’s adversarial conduct, as if calling out that country as a competitor—as the 2017 document unequivocally did—was somehow impolite.
But at some point, an American administration needed to shift the conversation away from hopes for an imagined future China to the realities of the Communist Party’s conduct—which is hardly a secret. For the decade and a half prior to 2017, Republican and Democratic leaders publicly worried about China’s unwillingness to play by the rules, but were reluctant to deal head on with China’s authoritarian government and statist economy. The bipartisan U.S.-China Economic Security Commission has consistently called out China’s unfair practices. In 2010, President Barack Obama lambasted China before the G-20 for its currency manipulation. The need to compete effectively with the policies of the Chinese Communist Party is one of the few points of agreement between Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Even as he seeks to find ways to conclude reciprocal trade agreements, his administration has not lost sight of China’s aggressive rise.
At least as controversial as Trump’s critique of China is his emphasis on the importance of sovereignty and his insistence that strong sovereign states are the main agents of change. But states are the foundation of democratic governance and, fundamentally, of security. It is the citizens of states who vote and hold leaders accountable. And it is states that are the foundation of military, political, and economic power in alliances such as NATO, or organizations like the United Nations.
Trump’s emphasis on protecting U.S. sovereignty brought to a boil a simmering national debate about the overlooked costs of globalization. A blind adherence to what the economist Dani Rodrik has called “hyper-globalization”—the idea that the interests of big corporations and the principle of market integration took precedence over widely shared prosperity and economic security—had come at the expense of domestic industries. For years, people who complained about these consequences were dismissed as isolationists or as being on “the wrong side of history.”
The coronavirus experience demonstrates that economic interaction does not occur in a vacuum of geopolitical competition. Dependence on China for crucial medical equipment throughout the pandemic has illuminated the dangers of a hyper-globalized economy. Experts had warned of American dependence on key drug ingredients from China. The Wall Street Journal has reported that China is the only maker of key ingredients for certain classes of drugs, including established antibiotics that treat a range of bacterial infections such as pneumonia. American reliance on Chinese suppliers for other pharmaceuticals and medical supplies is also worrisome. Americans should not depend on an authoritarian rival state for its citizens’ health—any more than the United States and other free and open societies should give Chinese companies, and by extension the Chinese Communist Party, control over communications infrastructure and sensitive personal data.
Many of President Trump’s critics in the foreign-policy community put great stock in the ability of multilateral and international organizations to constrain the misbehavior of China and other states. These organizations, at their best, promote concerted action against commonly recognized problems. But Trump’s critics tend to view them mainly in their idealized form and as the central instruments to solve global problems and advance values shared by all. In practice, though, how international organizations perform is profoundly influenced by power relationships among member states.
China’s leaders have become quite skillful at using these bodies to pursue their own interests. President Xi Jinping has made it a priority—as he put it in a 2018 speech—to “reform” and lead in the “global governance system,” viewing such efforts as integral to “building a modern, strong socialist country.” Despite its record of stealing patented technologies, China tried to lead the World Intellectual Property Organization, an effort thwarted by Washington. Chinese tech companies have also sought to induce the United Nations to adopt their facial-recognition and surveillance standards, to clear the way for the deployment of their technologies around the world.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy challenged the assumption that international organizations are always driven by a common global good. China’s undue influence in key international organizations was evident most recently, when the World Health Organization hesitated to declare COVID-19 a public-health emergency of international concern.
WHO officials amplified Chinese officials’ early claims that the virus posed no danger of human-to-human transmission. The head of the organization even congratulated China’s top leadership for its “openness to sharing information.” Apparently seeking to avoid Beijing’s wrath, the WHO refused to respond to Taiwan’s early concerns about human-to-human transmission of the virus outbreak in Wuhan.
The COVID-19 experience, although far from over, has generated strong evidence that, while the WHO and other international organizations are of course important for information sharing and coordination, nations continue to do the heavy lifting. The United States remains the largest contributor to the WHO, paying about 15 percent of the organization’s budget—compared with China’s 0.21 percent. In early March, Trump signed a supplemental appropriations act that included $1.3 billion in additional U.S. foreign assistance for pandemic response. Most recently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced an additional $274 million in emergency funding for at-risk countries. This aid does not come with the strings that China attaches to its aid.
Contrary to what critics argue, “America first” does not mean “America alone.” That Trump might be introducing needed correctives to the hyper-globalization pursued by earlier administrations is generating serious cognitive dissonance in some quarters. And the reality is that only one organization in the entire world has as its sole responsibility the American people’s safety. That institution is the U.S. government. Whether led by Republicans or Democrats—or by Donald Trump or anyone else—it should always put the American people first.
* * *
Nadia Schadlow, a former deputy national security adviser for strategy, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 20:40 - CDC Extends Cruise Ship "No Sail" Order, Trump Approves Disaster Declarations In Idaho, Alaska: Live Updates
CDC Extends Cruise Ship “No Sail” Order, Trump Approves Disaster Declarations In Idaho, Alaska: Live Updates
Summary:
- Italian PM says “EU could fail” if bailout package isn’t handled
- Russia, Tokyo report record jumps
- Russian case total passes 10k
- Over the past 24 hours, the US reported 32,176 new cases
- US moves to try and stop the IMF from approving Iran’s request for a $5 billion bailout
- Some Americans could see stimulus checks as soon as Thursday
- Italy reports sudden jump in deaths, cases overnight
- South Korea warns risk of virus “reactivating” in cured patients
- Trump approves disaster declarations for Idaho, Alaska
- Penn., Mo. join growing list of states to cancel school for the rest of the academic year
- Sweden reports jump in deaths for second day in a row
- France reports more than 1,300 deaths in a single day
- Germany weighing plan to financially reward doctors and nurses for work during outbreak
- NJ deaths near 2k as total cases top 50k
- NY reports another record jump in deaths
- 332,000 people have recovered globally so far
- Number of patients who have recovered from the virus passes 350k
- India reports 809 new cases, 46 new deaths
- Dr. Fauci says US deaths might be “closer to 60k”
- South Africa extends lockdown as State Department prepares to evacuate Americans
- Oxfam warns outbreak could push 500M ppl into poverty
- UK-US trade talks suspended indefinitely
- Boris Johnson released from ICU
- Merkel opposes coronabonds
- White House floats dubious rumor about “second” coronavirus task force to focus on the economy
- 19 Syrians have tested positive as health orgs alarmed by outbreak
- President Trump says US could reopen in phases “ahead of schedule”
- Spain has confirmed 153,222 cases of the virus
- EU pressures Netherlands to drop opposition to bailout plan
- Support for ‘Unity Government’ surges in the UK
- Italian PM says lockdown might start to lift at end of April
- Spain government celebrates lockdown achievements as opposition suspects cases are undercounted
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Update (1945ET): Now that a handful of passengers have died aboard – or died after being infected aboard – cruises amid outbreaks of COVID-19, the CDC has extended a “no sail” order that will stop cruises from departing in the US.
NEW: There have been numerous #COVID19 outbreaks on recent cruise ship voyages. @CDCDirector has extended the previous No Sail Order to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among crew onboard. https://t.co/OTWJgCN8wQ pic.twitter.com/sbHX4p907F
— CDC (@CDCgov) April 9, 2020
The order will stay in place until either the CDC rescinds it or HHS Secretary Alex Azar drops one of his public health warnings regarding COVID-19.
* * *
Update (1930ET): Pennsylvania and Missouri announced on Thursday that they would cancel school for the rest of the academic year, joining a growing list of states who have decided to keep students out of school despite a growing body of research showing school cancellations don’t help suppress the virus.
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf said closing schools was vital to fighting the coronavirus.
“We must continue our efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus during this national crisis,” Wolf said.
“This was not an easy decision but closing schools until the end of the academic year is in the best interest of our students, school employees and families.”
Closing schools saddles parents who are still working outside of the home (ie all ‘essential’ workers) with the added burden of arranging child care.
Still, Oregon, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Vermont, Virginia and Washington State have all ordered schools closed already, and most expect few students will return to classrooms before the end of the school year, not just in the US, but in Europe as well.
In other news, Trump has also approved national disaster orders for Alaska and Idaho, bringing the total who have seen their orders approved to 49 states.
* * *
Update (1620ET): On Thursday, Indian health officials reported 809 new cases of the virus and 46 new deaths, bringing the total confirmed cases to 6,725, and deaths to 227, as the country continues a strictly enforced lockdown.
Meanwhile, the number of patients who have recovered worldwide just surpassed 350k.
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Update (1520ET): Top Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow said during an interview on Fox Business Thursday afternoon that the economy will be reopened on a “rolling basis,” with the beginning coming in the next month or two.
“What we’re looking at here, I hope, will be a two month gap interference, if you will. March, end of April. The next month or two, we should be able to restart, at least on a rolling basis.”
But Kudlow added: “Everybody who wants one is going to be able to get one. That is our goal. That’s the essential message: we want to keep you in business, we know just how difficult this is. We know the hardships are enormous.”
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Update (1440ET): The UK just confirmed the numbers shared by Dominic Raab an hour ago: With 4,344 new cases and 881 new deaths, the UK reached a total of 65,077 cases and 7,978 deaths.
As of 9am 9 April, 298,169 tests have concluded, with 16,095 tests on 8 April.
243,421 people have been tested of which 65,077
tested positive.As of 5pm on 8 April, of those hospitalised in the UK who
tested positive for coronavirus, 7,978 have sadly died. pic.twitter.com/wMfUJKodOL— Department of Health and Social Care (@DHSCgovuk) April 9, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Both deaths and new cases declined slightly from yesterday, but not by much. And as deaths decelerate more slowly than cases, the mortality rate hit a new record high of 12.3%.
Back in New Jersey, Gov. Murphy said the state expects to reach its peak for the outbreak in 2 or 3 days. Notably, at its high point, the state expected 14,400 residents to be hospitalized and as many as 1,880 patients in the ICU, said Health Commissioner Judy Persichilli at a press briefing. NJ has about 7,363 residents hospitalized, and 1,523 in the ICU right now, Governor Phil Murphy reported. Last week, the number of new cases and deaths were doubling every 2-3 days in the state: fortunately, they’ve slowed from that pace.
As the US embassy in South Africa prepares to start evacuating 900 Americans, the South African government has extended its lockdown until the end of Germany. SA Reported 96 new cases and five new deaths on Thursday, bringing the country’s total to 1,845, along with 18 deaths. As we mentioned earlier, Spain has officially extended its lockdown until April 26.
* * *
Update (1440ET): UK PM Boris Johnson has been released from the ICU, though he still has a long road to recovery. His team said he’s in “good spirits”. Meamwhile, UK-US trade talks have reportedly been suspended indefinitely.
* * *
Update (1335ET): Rounding out what has been a mostly disappointing day for Europe and its new numbers of cases and deaths, France and the UK also reported accelerations in the pace of new cases and deaths.
France reported 1,341 new deaths over the last day, including deaths not only in hospitals but also in nursing homes and other group settings where the virus is known to spread like wildfire.
In the UK, Dominic Raab announced 881 new deaths, bringing the death toll to 7,978. Meanwhile, the total number of confirmed coronavirus cases has reached 65,077, an increase of 4,344.
Over the past three weeks Washington DC, 8 members of the United States Capitol Police have told superiors that they have tested positive, meanwhile in New York, nearly 20% of the NYPD is still out sick, many because of the virus. On Thursday, more than 7,000 officers were out sick.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who recently was given untrammeled power to direct the government during the response, which some have complained elevated him to the status of ‘dictator’, Orban announced that current restrictions on movement will be extended “indefinitely” a Hungary battles the virus.
“We will reconsider the restrictions on a weekly basis,” Orban said on Thursday.
In the US, 416 sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, roughly 10% of the ship’s crew, have ave now tested positive for COVID-19, and the numbers are rising daily.
Detroit health officials reported 249 new Covid-19 cases in the city Thursday, a slight decline from days prior, according to the city’s health website. There were 525 cases reported in the city on April 4, the highest for a single day there so far. Since then, daily reported cases have showed a steady but slow decline, Detroit’s health department curve shows.
Sweden has reported a rise in the daily death rate for the second day in a row, with the virus now killing at least 100 people for two days in a row, the country said, raising the total number of dead to 792. The total number of cases across the country has increased to 9,141 with 719 in intensive care. Stockholm, the capital, is the epicenter of the outbreak.
Circling back to the US, health officials in Detroit reported 249 new cases of the virus in the city Thursday, a slight decline from the last few days. Daily reported cases in the city have been declining since April 4, when it reported 525 cases in the city.
* * *
Update (1315ET): New Jersey just released another pretty dire report that suggests little deceleration in the spread of the virus, or the rate at which its killing the state’s residents.
Gov. Phil Murphy announced Thursday afternoon that the state reported 198 new deaths, bringing the state’s total to 1700, while the total number of new cases crossed over 50k. He added that social distancing measures appear to be slowing the rate of spread.
Sadly, we lost an additional 198 New Jerseyans yesterday, bringing our statewide total of losses to 1,700.
This number is the worst of all to report to you. It does not ever get any easier on us.
This aren’t numbers, these are people. They are our fellow New Jerseyans. pic.twitter.com/3LcVlJfpMV
— Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy) April 9, 2020
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Nearby PA also reported numbers of Thursday, with more than 2,000 more PA residents testing positive as of Thursday afternoon, bringing the statewide total past 18,000, the state Department of Health announced. Pennsylvania has counted 338 deaths and 18,228 cases statewide, while more than 87,000 patients have tested negative. PA also extended school closing for the rest of the academic year, one of the only states to have declared it already, though few believe students will be returning to classrooms any time soon.
And the latest indication over how flawed the rollout of the ‘PPP’ program for small businesses has been, the first lawsuit over the program was filed in federal court Wednesday by Strip Club in Michigan. It’s the first of what could end up being a series of protracted legal battles over which businesses qualify for the hastily-conceived $349 billion relief effort, according to NBC News.
The CDC on Wednesday published new guidelines detailing how essential employees can go back to work even if they have been exposed to people infected by the coronavirus, provided they do not feel sick and follow certain precautions.
In Germany, lawmakers are weighing a plan to financially reward doctors and nurses for their hard work during the crisis.
Across Europe, states from Poland to Portugal have institute strict prohibitions on movement as the Christian world prepares to celebrate Easter, the religion’s second-most important holiday, in isolation.
* * *
Update (1240ET): Italy’s Civil Protection Agency just announced that new cases and deaths jumped over the last day across Italy. The country reported 4,204 new cases of coronavirus and 610 new deaths over the last day, bringing countrywide totals to 143,626 cases and 18,279 deaths. Among the 18k+ dead, Italian officials said, includes 100 doctors, who have succumbed to the virus while fighting it on the front lines.
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Interestingly enough, after blaming the US for inventing the coronavirus, Beijing is now seeding conspiracy theories that Italy may be responsible.
The Chinese regime first accused the U.S., then Italy for the origin of the #CCPvirus, but “Patient Zero” in at least 19 countries, including the U.S., Italy, South Korea, France, Germany, were all found to have close ties to #Wuhan, China’s #CCPvirus epicenter. pic.twitter.com/VCenpaiD6y
— China in Focus – NTD (@ChinaInFocusNTD) April 9, 2020
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While those numbers out of Italy were lower than totals reported a week ago, they were up modestly from yesterday’s numbers. Yet, US investors don’t seem to care, and everybody in Europe is already bracing for what’s likely to be a lonely holiday.
Italy’s update:
– Number of new cases up by 10%
– Number of new deaths up by 13%
– Fatality rate at all-time high 12.7%
– Number of new people tested down
– Number of newly recovered people down— Norbert Elekes (@NorbertElekes) April 9, 2020
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Meanwhile, a senior trade unionist source has reportedly told Italian newspapers that the government is planning on extending the lockdown on May 3.
Outside of Italy, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman has recovered from COVID-19 after falling ill, and news about Boris Johnson sitting up in bed and feeling modestly better appears to have swamped headlines in the UK.
Earlier, the New York Times reported that it was mostly European travelers who brought COVID-19 to New York, not travelers from China and Asia, according to a study awaiting peer review.
“The majority is clearly European,” said Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-wrote a study awaiting peer review.
More importantly, the study found that the virus was likely circulating in New York by mid-February, weeks before the first case was confirmed. Another team of researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine across town arrived at similar conclusions, despite studying a different batch of patients.
In other words: Trump really should have barred flights from Europe when he barred flights from China.
* * *
Update (1150ET): Moving into the back-end of his daily briefing, Governor Cuomo said that the jump in deaths seen in recent days is to be expected, and that the key figure to focus on is the drop in ICU capacity, as the state remains moderately shy of its limits on hospital beds, ICU beds and ventilators. If this indeed is the worst of it as far as deaths and hospitalizations go, the state won’t need any more assistance or outside equipment.
Meanwhile, data shared by Cuomo on Thursday exposed what may have been the reason for failing to report ICU admissions yesterday.
With deaths soaring in NYC, Cuomo said he had to bring in outside funeral directors into the city to help families plan COVID-19 related burials. As the bodies pile up, Cuomo said that the outbreak is almost worse than 9/11 in certain ways. He added that 9/11 was supposed to be the city’s greatest challenge for a generation – but the outbreak is also a problem.
Looking ahead, as discussion about how to reopen the economy continues, Cuomo said that “rapid testing” would be critical to determine who can and can’t go back to work.
He also warned that even once this first wave is over, there could be more successive waves in the future, noting that the Spanish Flu of 1918 came in three waves.
“Remember, the 1918 Spanish flu came in three waves. Well [with Covid] we’re on the first wave,” Cuomo said.
* * *
Update (1110ET): New York State just reported a record number of deaths in a 24 hour period for the second day in a row, after reporting about 790 deaths state-wide yesterday, it reported more than 800 deaths on Thursday.
- NYC REPORTS RECORD 824 DEATHS FROM VIRUS IN LAST 24 HOURS
- NYC CONFIRMED VIRUS CASES RISE BY MORE THAN 6,400, TO 84,373
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has heralded the flat-ish growth in new cases in the state as a sign of a “plateau” in the state, while also touting the spike in hospital vacancies that has occurred as deaths have jumped (an unintended consequence).
* * *
Update (1100ET): As economists in the US warn that Thursday’s unemployment claims numbers suggest that the US unemployment rate is already around 13%, its highest level since the Great Depression, and worse than the depths of the financial crisis, the Nairobi-based charity Oxfam published a report on Thursday claiming 500 million people around the world would be pushed into poverty because of the virus, per Reuters.
This would cause global poverty rates to fall for the first time since the early 1990s, when the collapse of Communism and ensuing privatizations sowed chaos in formerly Communist society.
* * *
Update (1040ET): After returning to the Chancellory from isolation, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is being celebrated by the public for her government’s decisive steps to contain the outbreak. Germany is testing more than 50k a day, and its robust testing program has been said to be responsible for the country’s strikingly low mortality rate (under 1%).
But while her actions have helped unite Germans during this crisis, her decision to oppose the controversial “coronabonds” proposal has frustrated some of her European partners. Reuters reported Thursday that Merkel would oppose the bonds.
“I spoke today with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte for a long time and we agree that there is an urgent need for solidarity in Europe, which is going through one of its most difficult hours, if not the most difficult,” Merkel said.
“And Germany is ready for this solidarity and committed to it. Germany’s wellbeing depends on Europe being well. Now, which instruments are fit for this purpose, here there are different views. You know that I don’t believe we should have common debt because of the situation of our political union and that’s why we reject this,” she added during a news conference.
“But there are so many ways to show solidarity and I believe we will find a good solution.”
Merkel has already uncorked ‘limitless’ credit within Germany as part of Berlin’s $1 trillion-plus rescue package. Rome is going to need to figure this one out in a way that won’t force the Germans to dip their hands into their wallets again.
With markets set to clock one of their best weekly rallies since 2009, the White House is whipping the horse again with dubious BBG headlines, this time claiming that it will create a second task force focused on the economy with…the half of people on the main task force who are focusing on the economy. Core members would include Mnuchin and Kudlow. Of course, this isnt’ the first time we’ve seen this rumor.
* * *
Update (0800ET): Offering some more surprisingly optimistic comments, Dr. Fauci said in what have become routine morning comments in the press that he now expects US fatalities due to the virus to be “closer to 60k” than the 100k-200k previously anticipated. Trump once said that as many as 240k might die.
“The real data are telling us it is highly likely we are having a definite positive effect by the mitigation things that we’re doing, this physical separation,” said Dr. Fauci during a Thursday morning interview with NBC.
“I believe we are going to see a downturn in that, and it looks more like the 60,000, than the 100,000 to 200,000” projected fatalities, he said.
Futs have been somewhat volatile this morning, but as it stands, it looks like the Dow will open lower by less than 1%.
However, the trickle of optimistic headlines garners a lot of attention, even more concerning signs that recovered patients might still be vulnerable to the virus have emerged. The coronavirus may be “reactivating” in people who had appeared to be cured of the illness, according to Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Adding to the optimism, as of Thursday, more than 332,000 people have recovered from coronavirus, according to data from Johns Hopkins.
* * *
As Holy Week draws to a close and the long Holiday Weekend begins, the optimism that helped inspire the biggest bounce since the ‘rona rout appears to have faded, and Dow futs are back to being three figures in the red Thursday morning, pointing to a lower open as traders realize the ‘plateaus’ supposedly reached in Italy, Spain and New York didn’t really mean anything. And while the Germans truly do seem to be on top of things, other hotspots in Europe are already cropping up, as China tightens its borders as experts warn about a ‘second wave’.
Over the past 24 hours, the US reported 32,176 new cases of coronavirus and 1,901 new deaths, raising its totals to 432,727 cases and 14,768 dead, with the most widely followed projections suggesting that the US will pass half a million confirmed cases before Easter Sunday. Yesterday, NY reported its biggest one-day jump in deaths yet, and the pace of spread appeared to accelerate across Europe.
Now, we wake of Thursday morning to find that officials in Tokyo and Moscow have reported record numbers of new cases (that, and Russia recorded its biggest daily jump in deaths).
Meanwhile, as the US moves to try and stop the IMF from approving Iran’s request for a $5 billion bailout, the Ayatollah has once again chosen to retaliate in the only venue Trump truly understands: Twitter.
#CoronaVirus is a major problem for mankind. But we won’t forget that in Vietnam, Iraq, etc. hundreds of thousands of ppl were killed by the US. Even now, millions suffer from the tyranny of the US & its allies in Yemen, Palestine, etc.
Mankind has worse problems than Corona.— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) April 9, 2020
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Experts in Europe insist that the lockdowns, social distancing and other measures taken to combat the spread of the virus, and that may be true, but what about places like Iran, Afghanistan or other battered, broken countries that simply don’t have the resources to combat the virus. To be fair, Iran, despite the sanctions, still has money and resources, relative to places like Syria, which is struggling with an outbreak that has alarmed international aid agencies.
Despite the continuing civil war, a war seemingly without end as it nears the 10-year mark, enough tests have been run on Syrian citizens that 19 have been confirmed, and two deaths have been confirmed. Testing, however, is “virtually non-existent” throughout the country, and many fear that the camps of impoverished, displaced peoples in the country will be rapid breeding grounds for the virus.
However, since the west and Iran have their hands full, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is going to need to rely on whatever he receives from Russia to combat the virus. And on Thursday, Russia reported 1,459 new cases of coronavirus and 13 new deaths, the biggest daily increase to date, bringing its total case load past 10k. In total, 76 Russians have died.
As the race for treatments continues, Pfizer reportedly expects to be able to test a new antiviral medication for coronavirus in humans by August or September, accelerating the clinical trial timeline as the US drug giant expands its work in the battle against the virus. On the political front, Oliver Dowden, the UK culture secretary, has suggested the public should prepare for an extension of the current three-week coronavirus lockdown that ends on Monday. Foreign secretary Dominic Raab, who is deputizing for Mr Johnson while the prime minister is in intensive care, will chair a virtual meeting of the government’s emergency planning committee (Cobra) on Thursday afternoon. Meanwhile, polls show support for a national unity government – as it gradually becomes clear that, after spending his third night in the ICU, the PM might need another week or two to recover.
As the numbers of new cases continue to fall, Spain’s government is hailing “encouraging” progress, a sign that the strict lockdown imposed by PM Pedro Sanchez last month, is working. However, members of the opposition have accused the government of deliberately undercounting cases, and since testing is uneven across the country, it’s extremely likely that the true number of cases is at least modestly higher than the total recorded.
According to official figures published on Thursday, so far 15,447 people with coronavirus have died, 655 of them in the last 24 hours, compared with 757 the previous day and a peak of 950 a week ago. Overall, Spain has now confirmed 153,222 cases of the virus as of Thursday morning, an increase of 4% over Wednesday’s count. This is roughly the same rate of increase that has been observed throughout this week, and is below the 25%-30% growth rates seen in the very recent past.
And apparently, even an unprecedented pandemic isn’t enough to inspire comity among the member states of the fractious EU. As we noted last night, the ECB’s Christine Lagarde urged them in a letter published in several European dailies to set their differences aside and agree on a multilateral plan that will be strong enough to help revive Europe’s recession-bound economy. EU governments ratcheted up the pressure on the Netherlands on Thursday to unblock half-a-trillion euros of economic support ahead of a meeting of finance ministers, as the country has emerged as a key antagonist to Italy in the negotiations to help support Europe’s most damaged economies. The Scandinavian countries like Netherlands have seen the virus spread, but mortality rates have remained low.
Still, the optimistic numbers seen this week are apparently inspiring the Italian government toward some dangerous thinking: Italy may start lifting some restrictions by the end of April provided that the slowing trend continues, PM Giuseppe Conte said during an interview with the BBC. That doesn’t seem like responsible talk for a country with roughly 20k deaths and a health-care system that was completely overwhelmed just weeks ago. Conte also warned that the “EU could fail” if members don’t step up and do what’s right. Using language that has been employed by Angela Merkel and others, Conte warned that the outbreak is the biggest challenge facing Europe since WWII. The BBC noted it was Conte’s first interview with the English-language press since the outbreak exploded in Italy 7 weeks ago.
As the first European countries start to plan their course back to normal, President Trump is doing the same in the US, critics be damned. He said last night that he had a plan to reopen the country in phases that might help get the economy back up and humming “ahead of schedule.”
Conte added that if member states don’t agree to an “adequate” fiscal package for the states hurt the worst by the outbreak (a group that includes Italy) the project could collapse.
But even as the outbreak finally appears to be heading down the back slope in Italy and Spain, other European nations, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, etc., are rising up to take their place.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 20:30 - "Let Them Fail" – Billionaire Explains To Gobsmacked CNBC Host How Capitalism Is Supposed To Work
“Let Them Fail” – Billionaire Explains To Gobsmacked CNBC Host How Capitalism Is Supposed To Work
With millions of Americans sitting at home working on their laptops, the passive viewership of cable news channels like CNBC must be waaaay up this month, as finance nerds welcome normies to the strange and often hilarious world of live markets news.
In terms of drama, CNBC is usually pretty staid. But every once in a while, there’s a fight, or a contentious interview, that really grabs people’s attention. On Thursday, such a confrontation occurred during “the Halftime Report” as Scott “The Judge” Wapner interviewed early Facebook investor and uber-wealthy VC investor Chamath Palihapitiya.
Wapner brought up the question of the bailouts for main street and corporate America that the Trump Administration has packaged as part of its $2.2 trillion plan. Palihapitiya raised an issue with the program, arguing that the administration would be using taxpayer money to prop up “zombie companies.”
Then Wapner asked: “Are you arguing to let airlines fail?
Palihapitiya, who was speaking on the phone, responded with a very assertive “Yes.”
Wapner seemed blown away by this. Struggling to process the answer he had just been given, he followed-up, incredulously: “But how does that make sense in the broader scheme of the economy.”
Then Palihapitiya went off.
“This is a lie that’s been propagated by Wall Street. When a company fails, it does not fire its employees…it goes through a packaged bankruptcy…if anything, what happens is the employees end up owning more of the company. The people who get wiped out are the people who own the unsecured debt and the equity…but the employees don’t get wiped out and the pensions don’t get wiped out.”
[…]
“And if a bunch of hedge funds get wiped out – what’s the big deal? Let them fail. So they don’t get the summer in the Hamptons – who cares.”
Out in the real world, people say mean things about the rich all the time. But it doesn’t happen quite as often on CNBC. In fact, sometimes CNBC’s hosts seem downright confused when people don’t seem to care about asset prices above all else – like that time Rick Santelli said we should all just go get infected and let grandma die to save the stock market. What’s more, Wapner seemed almost personally insulted by Palihapitiya’s response.
As to why, well, we can’t be certain.
Because after all, airlines as an industry are especially prone to bankruptcy (the president once owned an airline that went bankrupt), even under completely normal circumstances.
Hell, even if such a vitally important company as the aerospace and defense giant Boeing went bankrupt, its factories in Washington State wouldn’t stop running.
Remember when the CEO of Boeing demanded a taxpayer-funded bailout, but said he wouldn’t accept the money if the federal government demanded a stake in Boeing in return (note: exchange money for equity is standard practice for…literally every investor in the world)?
How is Boeing able to so blithely bite the hand that feeds? Because it has alternatives should the bailout not come through. If Boeing really needs the money, it’s free to sell stock and raise cash – the opposite of what it did for decades when it bought up shares, shrinking its float and helping maintain a buoyant valuation.
Say this isn’t enough, and Boeing fails: The company could file a prepackaged Chapter 11 where the creditors take over all the equity and the company emerges from bankruptcy debt-free in one day. Without a dollar of debt, Boeing should be able to weather any disruption no matter how long, and once the economy normalizes it should be able to rehire all the workers that had been laid off. In reality, the company could probably manage to get through it without firing so many employees…or offering “voluntary buyouts”.
Which brings us to our next point. After Palihapitiya explained the bankruptcy process, Wapner responded with a question that’s probably asked on his channel at least half a dozen times a day: “What about the 401(k)s?”
“But you don’t think the employees of these companies own stocks, own the company’s stocks?”
To which Palihapitiya had another point ready.
“These things are owned by these huge amorphous organizations…ultimately downstream the employees own a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars of shares.”
That’s right: After the world saw what happened to Enron employees who invested their entire retirement savings in Enron stock, there probably isn’t a single American who keeps literally all of their money in the shares of their employer. Even employee pension plans are typically managed by third parties and don’t consist of a larger percentage of the company’s stock.
As Palihapitiya explained, while people absolutely need jobs to come back to, not every business will fail during this shut down. Many small businesses, like a small cafe or a restaurant, if they can’t pay the rent, it’s over. There really is not “business”, it’s just a lease and the restaurant setup. You can have partial owners, but if that restaurant goes under, it’ll likely shut down immediately, firing all of its staff. If a company like, say a large chain of newspapers that’s publicly traded, goes bankrupt, it will continue to operate.
While the rich certainly didn’t cause the coronavirus, they typically aren’t also responsible for the many unanticipated risks that can make an investment or a business go south.
But on Main Street, it’s a different story. There’s not as much nuance: People are panicking and scrambling to apply for government benefits because they don’t know how they’re going to keep a roof over their heads.
“On main street today, people are getting wiped out, and right now rich CEOs are not, boards that had horrible governance are not, hedge funds are not…6 million people just this week along said ‘holy mackerel, I don’t know how I’m going to pay my rent.'”
“And what we’ve done is protect CEOs and boards…when you have to wash these people out.”
Just last year, millions of investors were forced to face up to the fact that not every new enterprise, including companies who grow to the point that they can raise money in an IPO, is profitable. In fact, thanks to various levels of government intervention in the free market, many of these ‘zombie’ companies exist in countries around the world, to varying degrees.
More recently, many more persistently loss-making companies have managed to struggle on for years, even when it’s become clear the enterprise is essentially doomed, because of all the investment capital bouncing around places like Silicon Valley.
We also found this handy guide from Investopedia offering a moderately detailed explainer on how corporate bankruptcies work, the various chapters, etc.
But right at the top of that post, the writers make clear that even the investors don’t always get wiped out:
If a company you’ve invested in files for bankruptcy, good luck getting any money back, the pessimists say – or if you do, chances are, you’ll get back pennies on the dollar. But is that true?
Alas, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer.
So maybe Wapner’s plan to simply fork over billion-dollar bailouts to every company or airline who asks needs a rethink.
And it’s fitting that this heated exchange, which attracted so much attention that the producers over at CNBC made room during “the Closing Bell” lineup to have one of their reporters interview Wapner…about his interview with Chamath, happened today.
Because earlier, the Fed unveiled a lending program aimed at saving ‘small businesses’ that is, in reality, just the latest assertion of dominance over a market where genuine price discovery has been suppressed for more than a decade now.
To quote Bob Rodriguez, as we did during Thursday’s market wrap:
With the initiation of the Fed’s complete takeover and control of the US financial economy, there is now absolutely no accurate pricing discovery in the capital markets and we have entered a period of total manipulation. In light of this, the only markets I have an interest in are those where the heavy hand of government is not involved or only minimally involved. This leads me to rare commodities and collectibles. The public equity and debt markets are now nothing more than greater fool markets that are led by the greatest fools of all, the Fed and the Congress. US capital markets, RIP!
When all market risk is essentially socialized, a return vs risk evaluation is essentially meaningless.
Over a period of time which I cannot estimate yet, I will continue my preparation for a far different economic and financial environment.
Capital deployment strategies will likely have to change from what has been the norm in the post WW2 environment. We are in a New World Order.
* * *
Simply put, the global business environment is being transformed: Like AOC and George W Bush, we are all socialists now.And Wapner’s incredulity at being confronted by an investor who doesn’t accept bailouts as nothing short of a moral imperative just shows how badly the public has been brainwashed to simply accept this dynamic, where the wealthiest business owners are always given priority.
Watch a clip from the interview below:
The U.S. shouldn’t bail out billionaires and hedge funds during the coronavirus pandemic, Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya says. “Who cares? Let them get wiped out.” https://t.co/dIbizumtqG pic.twitter.com/u8BSVvr0B1
— CNBC (@CNBC) April 9, 2020
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 20:20 - Why The Political Class Freaked Out
Why The Political Class Freaked Out
Authored by Robert Wright via The American Institute for Economic Research,
It’s unsurprising that governments around the world have reacted so strongly to COVID-19. I think the game-theoretic model below explains the first round nicely. It also provides insight into what round two might look like.
For game theory aficionados out there, I am not saying that this is the best way to model the world. I think, though, it is the way most politicians and their advisors think.
Round one is a game against nature with uncertainty (no known or even knowable probabilities) so it basically pits some outcome, “good” (few deaths) or “bad” (many deaths), against government “action” (doing something) or “inaction” (doing nothing). The dominant strategy for politicians is clearly “action” because the outcomes for them (yes, I’m assuming a public choice framework) are better than “inaction” in either state of the world, “good” or “bad.”
Specifically, if politicians do not act and the novel coronavirus burns out, like some epidemiologists argue it would anyway, the world is pretty much unchanged and a “serious crisis” is left unexploited.
If politicians remain inactive and the stench from the crematoria make the living long for death themselves, well, then, there will be hell to pay at the polls, or the poles.
If politicians act and the outcome is good, they can take credit and campaign on it for re-election, as many former military officers on both sides did by “waving the bloody shirt” of the Civil War for decades afterwards. A big win in other words.
If they act and the outcome is bad (i.e. if lots of people die) and again this is round one of the way politicians think, they can always portray it as a (comparatively) good come out with the refrain that “it’s a good thing we did something or this would have been much worse.” Some people will accept, while others reject, the validity of the statement—probably along party lines, so the expected outcome is better than in either of the two inaction squares.
Our political system selects for cunning sorts, so politicians, including the President, try to adjust expectations about what a “good” or “bad” outcome would look like. They had incentives to jump on the worst-case scenarios in those now infamous early epi models, which The Atlantic has kindly recently told us were never meant to be correct.
Thus ends round one, with most of the world in the lower left hand quadrant, under house arrest minus the ankle bracelets.
But now round two has started and it is confusing politicians because the actions taken in round one have created a new kind of bad outcome, output collapse so severe it itself will cause death.
The rather daft assumption that throwing bailout money at the economy would minimize the impact of widespread lockdowns was shattered immediately by overwhelming empirical evidence (see coverage by AIER’s own Robert Hughes). So shrewder politicians, like Andrew Cuomo began to backpedal, as have the more astute progressive news outlets like The New York Times.
Politicians will be hesitant, though, to sound the full retreat bugle because that sets them up to be blamed for the potential bad economic times ahead and for “doing nothing” about COVID-19. Look for rational politicians, instead, to retreat to places like South Dakota and Sweden that implemented sensible policies short of lockdown early on and that, so far, are working. Politicians in both places will be able to credibly blame any local economic problems on “the other guys” while basking in the warm glow of below-projected deaths and relatively well-protected civil liberties.
Look, also, for some “cover” to justify the move. Epidemiologists say that blood tests will soon be available to estimate “the denominator”: the number of people who have already been infected. That will quickly give them a much better idea of how deadly the novel coronavirus actually is and where America is along the curve towards herd immunity. With an effective antibody test in hand, we won’t have to solicit volunteers to return to work, we will know who can return to life as usual without fear of contracting COVID-19, or of spreading it to others. We can also potentially treat those who get sick with the blood of those who naturally fought off the virus. And with production of ventilators and PPE gearing up, this crisis will eventually abate.
At that point, the game will get really interesting because most voters will still see America in the bottom left quadrant with quite a few deaths but also a struggling economy. And in an election year no less! Oh, the spin machines will remain in high gear, noting that in per capita terms things were not that bad, that the death toll was due to the usual suspects of capitalism, socialism, Obamacare, stripped down Obamacare, etc.
But, to borrow a phrase James Carville made infamous in 1992, the 2020 election will be about the stupid economy, Stupid. If it rebounds strongly, incumbents may have a chance. If it doesn’t, well, look at the model again but in a new light. Now inaction on the economy means hell to pay if the economy doesn’t bounce back and the status quo if it does. Action could lead to a lifetime of victories because “Remember when I saved the economy after the COVID-19 catastrophe” while action that leads to a bad economy will lead to a better outcome for the politician than inaction because of the “Imagine how bad things would have gotten if I didn’t take action” copout.
There is a crucial difference, though, between the round one coronavirus game and the round two economic game. Nobody knew much of anything about the former but like a sunbeam history and comparative economics lights the way forward on the latter. With stimulus spent and people none-too-happy with government economic controls in practice, there is a chance that enough politicians will try to save their careers by pushing economic liberalization knowing that a “check mark” recovery (down but then sharply up, past the previous level) could result.
Will politicians give up tariffs, occupational licensing, CONs and all the other regulatory detritus that weighs on the economy? My model says they will, if they know what is good for them. If they don’t, maybe voters will give us a fresh start this fall. This is the sort of stuff that leads to new parties, or massive realignments of old ones.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 20:00 - House GOP Demand Answers From WHO Over Relationship With China
House GOP Demand Answers From WHO Over Relationship With China
Republican members of the House Oversight Committee have demanded answers from the World Health Organization (WHO) over their relationship with China.
In a Thursday letter addressed to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, lawmakers expressed concerns over recent intelligence and media reports that the WHO has served China’s interests by helping the regime spread dangerous propaganda as the coronavirus pandemic unfolded.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping The letter to Ghebreyesus reads in part:
Throughout the crisis, the WHO has shied away from placing any blame on the Chinese government, which is in essence the Communist Party of China. You, as leader of the WHO, even went so far as to praise the Chinese government’s “transparency” during the crisis, when, in fact, the regime has consistently lied to the world by underreporting their actual infection and death statistics.
The letter continues: “On January 14, 2020, the WHO tweeted that “[p]reliminary investigations conducted by Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus.” These preliminary investigations included China jailing any doctor that disseminated any information about COVID-19 not first cleared through state-run media.”
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 14, 2020
House Republicans also note that the WHO received “17% of its total funding, or $513 million, from the United States” in 2017, adding that “It is essential that American taxpayers’ money is allocated to organizations that uniformly serve the interests of nations across the globe, not merely the interests of China’s authoritarian, communist regime.”
“The World Health Organization has become party to China’s coronavirus misinformation and propaganda campaign. Whether it’s deliberate or not, we don’t yet know,” said Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA), one of the co-signers of the letter, adding “This ‘apolitical’ organization praised the communist regime’s ‘transparency,’ spent weeks pushing the claim that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus, and even resisted President Trump’s early travel restrictions on China. The United States is the largest contributor of WHO funding, and as such, we have a responsibility to provide oversight and demand reforms when necessary – as it has now.”
Here’s what other cosigners had to say:
Rep. James Comer (R-KY): “In January, the World Health Organization publicly repeated the Chinese government’s lie that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” of COVID-19. This WHO-China cover-up, which included arresting doctors seeking to warn the world of the coronavirus, created a global outbreak that has frozen our economy and taken American lives. Without accountability for this crisis at the WHO, American taxpayers should no longer subsidize an organization that has acted as Communist China’s propaganda outlet at every turn.”
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI): “I think there is a global consensus that the wet markets of China, the genesis of this virus, are now causing a worldwide recession. The World Health Organization, perhaps because of the left-leaning proclivities found in many international organizations, has shown an inability to address sub-standard practices in China that they probably would have been addressing in other parts of the world.”
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ): “From the outset of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic the World Health Organization has carried water for Communist China, resulting in faulty data, incorrect health recommendations, and ultimately the death of many Americans. It’s time for the WHO to answer for why they continue to support China’s propaganda campaign.”
Rep. Mark Green (R-TN): “Why does the United States fund an organization that serves the interests of the Chinese Communist Party? From the get-go, the World Health Organization delayed declaring a health emergency, downplayed the danger of restricting travel to China, and disseminated Chinese propaganda despite China’s nefarious coverup of a virus that has unleashed untold suffering on the world. If the WHO wants to keep getting America’s money, it shouldn’t be carrying water for an authoritarian communist regime. We won’t get fooled again.”
Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND): “As we continue to address the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, we must also understand the extent of China’s propaganda campaign regarding this virus. American taxpayers provide hundreds of millions of dollars for the World Health Organization and deserve answers on why the WHO chose to validate China’s propaganda.”
Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL): “The WHO has let our country down every step of the way. We must clean house and investigate their corruption so that we can protect our country from their ignorant mishandling of future pandemics. We cannot continue to fund this crooked organization with American Taxpayer money!”
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC): “The conduct of the WHO during this pandemic is a disaster onto itself. In 2003, when the contagious coronavirus known as “SARS” spread from China, the WHO had the courage and the moral authority to criticize the regime’s cover-up. We need to know what has happened in the intervening years that transformed this organization from global health guardian, to the leading mouthpiece for Beijing.”
Rep. Fred Keller (R-PA): “With the American taxpayer being the single largest contributor to the World Health Organizations’ annual budget, it is imperative the House Oversight and Reform Committee exercise its critical role in finding out why the WHO used that money to further China’s propaganda campaign of disinformation that has caused a global pandemic, upended the world economy, and cost tens of thousands of American lives. The Chinese government must be held accountable for its role in exacerbating this virus. To that end, the WHO must end its silence and work with the international community to investigate Chinese disinformation and strive for accountability during this global emergency.”
Read the letter below:
FINAL Letter to WHO Re China Pressure by Zerohedge Janitor on Scribd
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 19:40 - Gold Knows "There Are No Temporary Measures, Just Permanent Lies"
Gold Knows “There Are No Temporary Measures, Just Permanent Lies”
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,
The Fed announced today that it will buy junk bonds. This exceeds its legal authority. Supposedly, it’s temporary…
Under guise of virus support, the Fed Will Buy Junk Bonds, Lend to States to the tune of an additional $2.3 trillion in additional aid.
Dear Jerome Powell, please tell the truth. This is not virus support, it’s stock market support.
“We will continue to use these powers forcefully, pro-actively, and aggressively until we are confident that we are solidly on the road to recovery,” said powell in a speech 90 minutes after the details of the measures were announced.
The key missing word is “legally“.
Hussman Blasts the Fed
On what authority? Neither Section 13-3 nor 14 allow it, and those are the only applicable portions of the Federal Reserve Act involved. There were no provisions in CARES for this. Intentionally. This would be a real-time violation of the law.@ChrisVanHollen @federalreserve https://t.co/hf4LVDnXsV
— John P. Hussman (@hussmanjp) April 9, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Part of a memo I just fired off to Congressional contacts.@FederalReserve pic.twitter.com/HxXBAk5LJn
— John P. Hussman (@hussmanjp) April 9, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Pushing the Boundaries
Please consider Powell Pushed to Edge of Fed’s Boundaries in Fight for Economy
By pushing the Federal Reserve into corners of financial markets it has mostly shunned in its 106-year history, Chairman Jerome Powell is running into some thorny questions.
Like, for instance, how to maintain independence from the U.S. Treasury when the economic-support package Congress passed says they should work together? Or whether the same guidelines for companies receiving federal aid, which range from compensation limits to off-shoring restrictions, apply to the Fed if it gets more money from Treasury? And how about which companies — and perhaps eventually, municipalities and states — are invited to borrow and at what cost?
“This is going to lead to a complete re-examination of the role of central banking and the Fed’s independence,” warns Karen Shaw Petrou, a managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics, a Washington research firm. The Fed’s steps into credit allocation are tantamount to “a complete redesign of central banking on the fly.”
Pole Vaulting the Boundaries
When you take illegal actions and enter numerous uncharted territories on balance sheet expansion, junk bonds, and bond ETFs you are not “pushing” the boundaries, you are pole vaulting over them.
Temporary Measures
Powell says these are temporary facilities.
Yeah, right. Just like the Fed’s announcement that its previous balance sheet expansion was “temporary”.
The Fed had 10 years to unwind its balance sheet after the last crisis, but never did. Now we have new balance sheet records every week.
And today the Fed upped the ante by another $2.3 trillion.
There is no reason to expect it will stop there.
Gold Soars
In response to the announcement stocks and junk bonds rose.
Gold jumped as high as $1752. As of 12:50 Central it’s up $55 to $1739.
Gold vs Faith in Central Banks
Gold’s New Breakout is Very Bullish: Here’s Why
On April 6, I wrote Gold’s New Breakout is Very Bullish: Here’s Why
If you believe as I do that the price of gold is reflective of faith in central banks, there is every reason to be bullish rather than pay heed to alleged 5-year cycles.
COT action is icing on the bullish case.
Moral Fraud and Panic
In case you missed it, please note the Small Business Guarantees Are a Bucket of Moral Fraud
The Fed is in panic mode as Unemployment Claims Jump by 16.78 Million in Last 3 Weeks.
Today’s Fed actions compound the moral fraud.
Panic and fraud inevitably run on the same track.
Today’s Message from Gold
There are no temporary measures, just permanent lies.
No matter what the closing price of gold today, that’s the key message.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 19:20 - 'Piracy' Or America First? US Customs To Seize All Exports Of Masks & Gloves
‘Piracy’ Or America First? US Customs To Seize All Exports Of Masks & Gloves
A policy that US allies in Europe have recently slammed as ‘piracy’ is set to continue, as Washington unabashedly and unapologetically continues blocking shipments from US soil of personal protective equipment (PPE) — such as gowns, gloves, and N95 face masks — which hospitals and health workers desperately need in the fight against COVID-19.
The Hill reports that “The federal government will begin seizing exports of personal protective equipment, or PPE, until it decides if the tools should be kept in the country to fight the coronavirus.”
The announcement was made Wednesday by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), formalizing an existing controversial practice under Defense Production Act (DPA) which has recently blocked millions of masks from being exported from Minnesota-based 3M to Canada. US customs will block all respirators, surgical masks and surgical gloves from going abroad.
Image source: Reuters Canadian leaders blasted the move as putting lives in danger, while Germany and France described the US policy, which has seen recent interventions against shipments from China bound for Europe, as ‘piracy’.
“FEMA and CBP are working together to prevent domestic brokers, distributors, and other intermediaries from diverting these critical medical resources overseas,” a joint statement indicated.
“Today’s order is another step in our ongoing fight to prevent hoarding, price gouging, and profiteering by preventing the harmful export of critically needed PPE,” the White House also said in a statement. “It will help ensure that needed PPE is kept in our country and gets to where it is needed to defeat the virus.”
It appears Trump’s ‘America First’ policy in action at a crucial time of crisis, as the US is the global epicenter for COVID-19, now with over 430,000 confirmed cases – most in New York state – which has witnessed hospitals running desperately low on supplies, including ventilators.
However, foreign governments have of late essentially warned ‘what goes around comes around’. Berlin Interior Minister Andreas Geisel at the start of the week stated bluntly of Washington’s brazen policy that it constitutes a Wild West tactic – essentially warning Europe can play dirty too.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 19:00 - The COVID-19 "Lockdowns" Are What Twenty-First-Century Mob Rule Looks Like
The COVID-19 “Lockdowns” Are What Twenty-First-Century Mob Rule Looks Like
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
As of April 6, forty-one states have statewide “stay-at-home” decrees in place. These orders vary widely from place to place. In some states, there are long lists of exempted industries including marijuana dispensaries, liquor stores, hardware stores, and of course, grocery stores. In some states with these edicts, public lands, state parks, and beaches remain open. In some states, city parks are more crowded than ever as local residents, with little else to do, attempt to recreate. In other places – such as California – one can be arrested for paddleboarding all alone in the ocean.
Yet in all of these places, the current regime of rule by decree will have—and already has had—a devastating effect on many small and medium-sized businesses and their employees. As governments have created new arbitrary definitions of what constitutes an “essential” business, some businesses find themselves forced to close. Employees have lost these jobs. The owners of these enterprises will likely lose far more as debts mount and business investments are destroyed. As unemployment and poverty increase, the usual pathologies will arise as well: suicides, child abuse, and stress-induced death.
Yet the politicians—mostly state governors, mayors, and unelected bureaucrats—remain popular. In New York State, where the lockdown orders are among the most draconian in the nation, it is now claimed that 87 percent of those polled approve of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the situation. As Donald Trump’s administration has recommended ever harsher government limits on the freedom of Americans, his poll numbers have only improved.
Meanwhile, among critics there appears to be a misconception of these lockdowns (which are very often only partially imposed or enforced) as being imposed over the howls of the local population, which is being silenced and cowed by jackbooted local police.
If only that were true. In most places, it appears clear that a great many residents approve of the lockdowns. We see this support in the form of all the local scolds who complain on Nextdoor.com about neighborhood children who don’t properly engage in “social distancing.” We see it in the people who call the police to report violators of stay-at-home orders. We see it in those who report local businesses for allowing too many people inside.
Viewed in this way, it may be more likely that state governors and other politicians are afraid of being seen as doing too little, rather than as overstepping their authority to impose public safety measures.
After all, given that the COVID-19 virus is far more deadly for the elderly than for younger groups, one might reasonably suppose that the elderly are most likely to become hysterical over the virus. For politicians, that’s one group you don’t want to cross. As the AARP notes:
For nearly 40 years, the turnout of voters over age 45 has significantly outpaced that of younger Americans. In the 2016 presidential election, for example, 71 percent of Americans over 65 voted, compared with 46 percent among 18- to 29-year-olds, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. While analysts point to increased energy among younger voters over the past couple of elections, people over 65 continue to show up at the polls far more than any other age group. At the same time, the number of voters who fall into the category of “older” keeps rising.
If a governor is receiving calls from local voters about the need to “do something”—especially if they’re in a demographic that’s more likely to vote—then it’s no surprise if that governor soon discovers that there is a “need” to impose a stay-at-home order post-haste.
Meanwhile, governors and other officials receive daily pressure from unelected bureaucrats who look to harness the benefits of public acquiescence. US News reports on a likely typical case in Iowa:
One of the most outspoken critics of Iowa’s approach to fighting the outbreak has been Eli Percenevich, an epidemiologist and physician who oversees a group of researchers studying infection prevention at the University of Iowa and Iowa City’s VA Hospital.
He has called on [Iowa governor Kim] Reynolds to issue a shelter-in-place order, saying many Iowans aren’t getting the message that they need to stay home.
The “solution” favored by these government employees is clear: more lockdowns, more business closures, harsher punishments for violators. Yes, some governors push back on these demands, but as time goes on they “waver,” “soften,” and eventually change their minds as panicky residents and government-employed “experts” demand action.
Of course, none of the politicians or bureaucrats who want to deprive people of their property and their employment will lose their jobs. Their taxpayer-funded salaries are quite safe. (At least until state and local tax revenues collapse.) But so far, I’ve heard of no governor willing to forego his own salary while millions are put out of work by government decrees.
At this point, many elected officials likely see being “asleep at the switch” as a more politically damaging charge than “being a tyrant.” It’s possible that this may change as the realities of mass unemployment and bankruptcy sink in. But for now most politicians, like the people who vote for them, are clinging to the idea that if the federal government prints enough money and bails out enough industries everything will soon return to normal.
The fact that business owners and entrepreneurs are being sacrificed is of little political import to elected officials or most voters. After all, only 10 percent of Americans actually make a full-time living from businesses they own. Only a small minority of the population understands firsthand how jobs are created and how payrolls are met. Much of the rest of the population thinks wages and wealth magically appear from the ether. If there is unemployment and low wages, it’s because business owners are “greedy” or unwilling to share the wealth. Thus, if businesses are temporarily shut down “for our own good,” then surely those business owners will just use their secret hidden wealth to start up those businesses again when the panic is over.
Thus, we’re not witnessing a usurper regime imposing unpopular measures on a resistant but helpless citizenry. We’re more likely witnessing widespread mob rule, the central characteristic of which is rule by the majority with no regard for the rights of dissenting minorities. The government may now be ruling by decree, but it is in many places doing so with the hearty approval of the majority. Politicians have calculated that they’re likely to remain popular so long as they cultivate an image of “decisive leadership” through strong decrees and demands for compliance in the name of safety. As Cuomo’s surging popularity suggests, this may be a safe political move.
Certainly there are those who resist. There are those for whom the rule of law, the Bill of Rights, and basic freedoms actually matter. But for others, principles such as these are quickly forgotten once fear and anxiety enter the picture. The rights of minority groups (such as business owners or old-fashioned Bill of Rights enthusiasts) mean little or nothing once the majority—conditioned by years of public schooling to demand a government solution to nearly everything—decides that such rights are an inconvenient obstacle to “doing something.”
The public demands action. Politicians are more than happy to oblige.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/09/2020 – 18:40
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