- Former Assistant City Attorney And Police Officer In Atlanta Charged In $7 Million PPP Fraud Scheme
Former Assistant City Attorney And Police Officer In Atlanta Charged In $7 Million PPP Fraud Scheme
Authored by Matt McGregor via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A former assistant city attorney and police officer in Atlanta has been charged with defrauding the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) out of $7 million.
DOJ Media PPP Fraud Chart. (Courtesy of the DOJ) The indictment alleges that Shelitha Robertson, 60, and other co-conspirators submitted fraudulent PPP loan applications for several companies they owned, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Robertson allegedly siphoned over $7 million in PPP loan funds and used them to purchase luxury items such as a Rolls-Royce, a motorcycle, and jewelry, as well as to transfer funds to her co-conspirators and family members.
On Dec. 6, Robertson was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.
If convicted, she will face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each wire fraud charge and a maximum of 10 years for the charge of money laundering.
“Robertson allegedly stole millions of dollars in taxpayer money intended to help small businesses stay afloat during the pandemic,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan Buchanan. “CARES Act loans were designed to help sustain small businesses during the pandemic, not to serve as a source of personal enrichment. We will continue to vigorously investigate and prosecute anyone who fraudulently obtains these critical funds.”
In 2020, Congress passed the largest financial support package in U.S. history: the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, which authorized $349 billion in PPP loans.
The program provided small businesses with funds to cover up to eight weeks of payroll costs so the businesses could fill in the financial gaps created by the lockdowns.
It was implemented by the Small Business Administration (SBA) through the Treasury Department, and it provided forgivable loans to small businesses for job retention and other expenses.
Since its implementation, the program has been open season for multiple fraud schemes.
The DOJ’s Fraud Section leads its Criminal Division’s prosecution of schemes that target the PPP.
The Fraud Section has prosecuted more than 192 defendants in over 121 criminal cases and has seized more than $78 million in cash proceeds derived from fraudulently obtained PPP funds, as well as several real estate properties and luxury items purchased with those proceeds.
In December, the DOJ indicted defendants in more than 10 cases.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 21:40 - 9 Million Millennials Moved Back In With Their Parents This Year
9 Million Millennials Moved Back In With Their Parents This Year
The good news is that they still have jobs (if one believes the goalseeked propaganda spewed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics). The bad news is taht soaring rents have forced millions of young Americans to move back in with their parents this year, according to a new survey.
As Bloomberg’s Alex Tanzi writes, about one in four millennials are living with their parents, according to the survey of 1,200 people by Pollfish for the website PropertyManagement.com. That’s equivalent to about 18 million people between the ages of 26 and 41. More than half said they moved back in with family in the past year.
Among those who slunk back to their parents’ basement, the surge in rental costs was the main reason given for the move. About 15% of millennial renters say that they’re spending more than half their after-tax income on rent.
The disruptions of the pandemic, which triggered massive job losses as well as a spike in housing costs, have driven an unprecedented shakeup in living arrangements. In September of 2020, a survey by Pew found that for the first time since the Great Depression, a majority of Americans aged between 18 and 29 were living with their parents.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 21:20 - The Debate Between Gold & Bitcoin In 2023
The Debate Between Gold & Bitcoin In 2023
Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,
The FTX scandal has thrown the future of cryptocurrencies into doubt. Supporters of bitcoin, which has proved to be remarkably robust at a time when the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem is threatened by scandal and a systemic collapse, are still asserting that it is the future money.
This article addresses a number of issues that next year will make or break bitcoin’s claim over gold. Besides the interest of governments to prevent it having any monetary role, hodlers ignore the legal status of gold as money, and the different treatment likely to be accorded to bitcoin in criminal law. Furthermore, bulls of bitcoin are mainly only that: speculators hoping for a profit measured in their fiat currencies.
This is not to deny bitcoin’s virtues: only to question its monetary future relative to gold at a time when the period of declining interest rates, which played a large part in fuelling the cryptocurrency phenomenon, appears to have ended. Furthermore, the financial considerations in the geopolitical context centre on the dollar’s relationship with gold, leaving cryptocurrencies as wallflowers in the financial conflict between east and west.
Introduction
If there is one uncontroversial fact in the science of economics, it is that the central issue is the inflation of currency and credit and has been increasingly so since the First World War. The debasement of the circulating medium has always been western governments’ principal monetary policy. The last British attempt to stand in the way of the inflation steamroller ended in 1931, when economists, such as Keynes, pointed out that a gradual and automatic lowering of real wages that results from a reduction of the currency’s purchasing power would be less strongly resisted “than attempts to revise monetary wages downwards”.
This statement was economical with the reality. The error was found in the difference between pre-war and post-war gold standards. It should be remembered that the UK’s 1925—1931 gold standard was a bullion standard, as opposed to the sovereign coin standard which existed prior to 1914. From 1925 when the new standard was introduced, the issue of sovereign coin was no longer at the option of banknote holders, but at the Bank of England’s. The Bank was not interested in redeeming its own notes for coin. Therefore, only the very wealthy would be able to redeem currency and credit sufficient to obtain 400-ounce bars, which valued in today’s sterling is about £586,000 ($714,000). The ordinary person was disenfranchised by this arrangement, compared with the pre-war coin standard when a single sovereign could be obtained for a single paper pound. The result was that abandoning the bullion standard in 1931 was the political option of least resistance.
Instead of a bullion standard, if the British government had resurrected the pre-war coin standard, public opposition to inflationism would have most probably ruled against monetary debasement; and crucially, the government’s room for economic intervention would be severely restricted. But so entrenched is the ideology of interventionism that no British economist today would agree with this analysis.
Not only can inflationism not be easily refuted today, it is lionised as being an essential policy. Nearly a century of inflationism has conditioned establishment economists to reject the restrictions of gold as money and as the sheet anchor for the valuation of credit. But the few of us conscious of the true cost of monetary debasement are increasingly aware that the commitment to inflation of fiat currencies and credit is rushing us all towards a final crisis. It is this awareness that has also fuelled speculation in cryptocurrency alternatives to gold. But as interest rates began to rise thereby expected to stabilise fiat currencies, the cryptocurrency bubble has deflated.
An interesting debate is whether cryptocurrencies, particularly bitcoin, can secure advantage over government currencies if their purchasing power continues to diminish at an accelerated rate. Bitcoin and those of its stablemates claiming a currency role will have to overcome the consequences of a reversal of falling interest rate trends towards higher levels in future. The debate will almost certainly intensify between parties for and against, none of which have a life experience of sound money, of its role as a stabiliser of credit values, and how this might be achieved under a cryptocurrency regime.
Assuming the reader of this article is aware that after a near four-decade decline to the lower bound, interest rates may have entered a new phase of rising rates, we should address the gold versus cryptocurrencies debate first, before looking at the consequences of rising interest rates for currencies, and therefore gold and bitcoin in 2023.
The problem with bitcoin as money
The supreme cryptocurrency standard is widely acknowledged to be bitcoin. It is bitcoin which is currently promoted as the private sector replacement for government currencies. But even to talk of bitcoin as a currency is to mislabel it. A currency is a form of credit, where there is a counterparty risk. This risk is absent when a bitcoin is both owned and possessed by a person or business. It is therefore a competing form of money, which legally is physical gold and silver coin, the international legal position for which is laid out in the Appendix to this article. If it is anything, then bitcoin is not currency but a competing form of money.
Theoretically, as opposed to the legal position, it is not up to an economist to choose what is money. Ultimately, it is the public that decides. Undoubtedly, for some enthusiasts, bitcoin might be money to be hoarded, and spent as a last resort. This is precisely the established role which gold coin fulfils. But there is good reason to believe that the majority of devotees are in it for speculative profits. In other words, they do not intend to ever spend bitcoin, but to sell it for national currency. Now that interest rates have risen from the zero bound, the test will be whether bitcoin turns out to be no more than a speculative counter, aping the performance of high-flying technology stocks, and correlating more with the Nasdaq index instead of discounting the inflation of state currencies and associated bank credit.
To its credit, through all the cryptocurrency scams and collapses, bitcoin has retained its integrity. There is no doubt that in its construction bitcoin is remarkably robust. And for the international traveller it retains the advantage of not yet being subject to extensive regulations and restrictions on capital transfers. But the belief that it is a realistic form of money must be based on either the ability of bitcoin to work alongside the fiat currency system or in the event of a total breakdown of the monetary system that it will be replaced by bitcoin. And supporters seem to think that the established international legal definitions of money can be ignored.
Where this is a particular problem is in the different property rights accorded to money and currency from other forms of property. In criminal law, if, say, a painting is stollen from you and you manage to trace it to a new owner, you can reclaim it as your property, even if the current possessor acquired it in good faith. This is what allows Jewish families to recover artwork stolen from them in the Second World War.
If, however, someone steals money, currency, or access to your bank account and transfers your property in them to another party, so long as that party was not acting in concert with the criminals, you cannot reclaim this form of property. But when we consider the case of bitcoin, it does not appear to fall into the categories of money and credit for the purpose of the law. Through the blockchain, the trail of previous owners is recorded pseudonymously, so property rights can be established.
This means that the authorities can also trace the ownership of bitcoin. If you have left them on an exchange wallet, they can be identified as having come into your possession. Even if you have moved them into your own wallet (pseudonymous ownership) the know-your-client and anti-money laundering regulations which would have been completed by you before you opened an account on an exchange would trace possession to you.
If the authorities know or suspect that at an earlier stage of its ownership, your bitcoin were the proceeds of crime, then they can be confiscated. This means that unlike the possession of money, cash, or bank credit you cannot be certain that you do indeed own your bitcoin acquired in all innocence.It might not be beyond the bounds of possibility for the state to use this criminal law to attack bitcoin as a rival to its own currency. So far, this form of attack has not been deployed, but the threat remains.
In addition to ignoring its legal status, bitcoin enthusiasts do not appear understand the implications of entire economies operating on credit, being central bank credit in the form of banknotes and bank deposits in the commercial banking system. If bitcoin is to act as money, it must support the existence of related credit, and in doing so it will have to provide price stability to goods and services over the long term. But bitcoin’s hard limit of issue makes it more likely that its purchasing power would increase significantly if commonly adopted as money. Furthermore, so far it has proved to be extremely volatile valued in fiat currencies. Both the hard limit to its quantity and its volatility makes it unsuited as a reference point for credit, which is the lifeblood of every economy. It would be impossible for businesses to calculate financial returns for commercial investment, a problem made more acute by today’s borrowers used to their miscalculations being rescued by continual credit debasement and suppressed interest rates.
Even if they were permitted to do so — which is difficult to envisage ¬– banks will almost certainly not wish to extend credit based on bitcoin. A bitcoin anarchist might respond that the entire banking system should fail with the end of fiat currencies. But this assumes that in this extreme event, the state will not come up with a solution which allows it to maintain control over credit. The best we can hope for in these extreme circumstances is that central banks and the political class learn the painful lessons of inflationism and vow to return to a credit system based on sound money — which is legally, and always has been gold.
Gold and rising interest rates
It has been pointed out above that bitcoin’s value has declined along with rising interest rates. In derivative markets, rising interest rates are also seen as being disadvantageous to gold and favourable to fiat. Indeed, for most of 2022 rising dollar interest rates have seen gold decline, at least until recently, when expectations for higher interest rates softened. It has been that way for gold because the dominant players in derivative markets believe it to be so, and they account for their financing costs in fiat currencies. But while admitting to the accounting issue, the belief in the relationship between interest rates, gold, and currencies is based on a common misconception.
Both Keynesians and monetarists claim that interest rates are the price of credit, so if interest rates are raised, they say that demand for credit will be reduced. It is on this understanding that central bank interest rate policies are based. But empirical evidence shows that this relationship is incorrect. The explanation is simple. As a reflection of time preference, interest rates compensate creditors for loss of possession of currency or credit in the form of bank deposits. To the loss of use value and a risk that the borrower might default must be added the expectation of any changes in the currency’s purchasing power.
Unless this last factor is recognised by rate-setters who lean towards suppressing rates, a currency will suffer on the foreign exchanges accordingly. And if policy makers for other fiat currencies are similarly supressing interest rates below their time preference values, then it will be reflected in higher gold prices rather than exchange rate adjustments. With respect to gold, it is not the fact that gold yields a low interest rate on loan: that is a function of gold’s stability relative to that of a fiat currency. Therefore, what matters in the relationship between gold and a fiat currency is the degree to which the interest rate demanded in the market for the currency reflects the prospects for its purchasing power.
However, traders account in fiat currencies. So understandably, they are more interested in maximising nominal interest rates and view the lower rate on gold as a cost. But as we can see from the chart below, in the 1970s official rates (in this case the Fed funds rate) rose and at the same time the gold price rose as well.
The day the Bretton Woods gold peg was finally abandoned in 1971, the dollar price of gold was $43. Between 1971—1972, the Fed funds rate had varied between 3.3% and 5.5%. By the end of the decade, on 21 January 1980 at the PM fix gold was priced at $850, an increase of nearly nineteen times. At that time, the Fed funds rate was at 14%, clearly forced higher by the markets in accordance with time preference theory. Chairman Volcker subsequently increased the funds rate to 17.5% by April, and then to 19% in January 1981 to slay the inflation dragon. At that rate, the Fed’s dollar was yielding more than warranted by time preference, which in effect was Volcker’s policy objective.
For derivative speculators, the condition which breaks the accounting relationship between gold and dollar interest rates is when markets begin to take the inflation threat seriously. Today, that does not yet appear to be the case. We can say this because derivative markets impose a relationship between fiat currency interest rates and that of gold which denies the existence of time preference. It is an important conclusion which begs the question: will 2023 see a return to time preference considerations for the relationship between gold and fiat currency values, and how will bitcoin’s price behave in these circumstances?
To affirm its status as money, bitcoin will have to obey the laws of time preference. In other words, its current relationship with interest rates must change, so that rising interest rates reflecting fiat currencies’ loss of their purchasing power should become reflected in rising values for bitcoin. We will not try to guess this future. But we can say confidently that if the debasement of currencies accelerates, gold’s relative value will increase accordingly while that of bitcoin might not.
The geopolitical wildcard
To the extent that there is a financial war between the American-led western alliance and the Russian Chinese nexus, gold plays a far greater role than any cryptocurrency. Since the early 1980s, China has embarked on a policy of secretly acquiring unknown quantities of bullion none of which has been permitted to leave the nation’s territory. It has financed gold mining, so that for over a decade it has become the largest national producer in the world. And when it was decided that the State in various accounts had accumulated sufficient bullion, it set up the Shanghai Gold Exchange and encouraged its own citizens, previously banned from gold ownership, to accumulate large quantities —so far, totalling over 20,000 tonnes.
And Russia, implementing gold accumulation policies more recently, has declared that between reserves and holdings in other state accounts it has about 12,000 tonnes. Legislation has been passed in the Dumas which will allow some or all of this gold to be transferred into official reserves, when they could easily exceed the reserves declared at the US Treasury. Moscow is setting up a new bullion exchange. Other Asian central banks have been accumulating gold as well. And tellingly, European central banks refuse to admit to any reduction in their reserve positions.
The battlefield in this financial tussle is over the US dollar. Russia and China, with the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Eurasian Economic Union, and BRICS (shortly to be joined by Saudi Arabia) either want to dispose of the dollar for the purpose of trade settlement entirely or want to become less dependent upon it. How is that to be achieved? The actions of Asian powers and their central banks are signalling to us that they will do so with gold.
This could become increasingly relevant in the months ahead. With Europe entering a continental winter, fuel and food shortages risk splitting the western alliance. The ascendency of gold-backed Eurasia over a divided western alliance can be expected to lead to further dollar weakness, reflected in the value of true money, which legally is only gold.
Appendix — The legal position of gold
As a medium of exchange, the function of money is to adjust the ratios of goods and services, one to another. Thus, the price expressed is always for the goods, money being entirely neutral in transactions. It is therefore an error to think of money as having a price, but it has a value relative to exchangeable items. This should be borne in mind when considering the relationship between legal money, which is habitually given a price nowadays in fiat currencies, and the fiat currencies themselves which, given the status of legal tender, are erroneously assumed to have the status of money. The magnitude of this error becomes clear with understanding what legally is money, and what is currency. And this understanding starts with Roman law.
Roman law became the basis for legal systems throughout Europe, and by extension those of European settled regions, from North America, Latin America through Spanish and Portuguese influence, and the entire British Empire. In common with the Athenians, Rome held that laws were the means whereby individuals would protect themselves from each other and the state. But it was Rome which codified law into a practical and accessible body of reference.
The first records of Roman statutes and case law were the Twelve Tables of 450BC. These became the basis upon which individual jurors expounded, developed, and evolved their rulings over the next thousand years. The whole legal system was then consolidated into the Emperor Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis, otherwise known as the Pandects. When the empire relocated to Constantinople, the Corpus was translated into Greek and eventually reissued in the Basilica, at the time of the Basilian dynasty in the tenth century. It was that version which became the foundation for European law in the Middle Ages, except for England. As an eminent nineteenth century lawyer specialising in banking put it, the reason common law differed in England was that:
“The Romans abandoned Britain at the end of the fifth century and the common law of England on the subject of credit was exactly as it stood in Gaius which was the textbook of Roman law throughout the empire at the time when the Romans gave up Britain. But on the 1st of November 1875, the common law of England relating to credit was superseded by equity which is simply the law of the Pandects of Justinian.”[i]
In all, two thousand years of legal development had elapsed between the Twelve Tables and the reaffirmation of Justinian’s Pandects in Dionysius Gottfried’s version in Geneva of the Corpus Juris Civilis, translated back into Latin in 1583AD from the Greek Basilica.
It is the Digest section of the Corpus which is relevant to our topic. The Digest is an encyclopaedia of over nine thousand references of eminent jurors collected over time. Prominent in these references are those of Ulpian, who died in 228AD and was the juror who did most to cement the legal position of money and credit. The Digest defined property, contracts, and crimes. Our interest in money and credit is covered by rulings on property and contracts.
The regular deposit contract is defined by Ulpian in a section entitled Deposita vel contra (on depositing and withdrawing). He defined a regular deposit as follows:
“A deposit is something given another for safekeeping. It is so called because a good is posited (or placed). The preposition de intensifies the meaning, which reflects that all obligations corresponding to the custody of the good belongs to that person.”[ii]
Another jurist commonly cited in the Digest, Paul of Alfenus Varus, differentiated between the regular deposit contract defined by Ulpian above and an irregular deposit or mutuum. In this latter case, Paul held that:
“If a person deposits a certain amount of loose money, which he counts and does not hand over sealed or enclosed in something, then the only duty of the person receiving it is to return the same amount.”[iii]
So, a mutuum is taken into the possession of the receiver and in return for a right of action in favour of the depositor to be exercised by him at any time with the receiver having a matching duty to return the same amount, it becomes the receiver’s property to do with as he wishes. This is the legal foundation of modern banking.
Clearly, the precedent in the Digest is that money is always metallic. While anything can be deposited into another’s custody, it is the treatment of fungible goods, particularly money, which is the subject of these legal rulings. It is only through an irregular deposit that the depositor becomes a creditor. By laying down the difference between a regular and irregular deposit, the distinction is made between what has always been regarded as money from ancient times and a promise to repay the same amount, which we know today as credit and debt.
There is one issue to clarify, and that is to do with credit rather than money. As noted above, Justinian’s Pandects were compiled a century after the Romans had abandoned Britain. From what was subsequently unified as England and Wales out of diverse kingdoms, common law differed in that debts were not freely transferable as property. The transferee of a debt could only sue as attorney for the transferor. This placed debt as property in a different position from other forms of transferable property. Justinian took away this anomaly as a relic of old Roman law (the laws of Gaius, referred to above), allowing the transferee to sue the debtor in his own name.
The anomaly in English law was only regularised when the Court of Chancery merged with common law by Act of Parliament in November 1875. Since then, the status of money and credit in English law has conformed in every respect with Justinian’s Pandects.
While the legal position of money is clear, the economic position is technically different. Jean-Baptiste Say pointed out that money facilitates the division of labour. Technically, money is unspent labour, and is therefore a credit yet to be used. Various other classical economists made the same point. Adam Smith wrote that a guinea might be considered as a bill for a certain quantity of necessaries and conveniences upon all the tradesmen in the neighbourhood. Henry Thornton said that money of every kind [including credit] is an order for goods. Bastiat and Mill opined similarly.[iv]
But it is the legal difference which is of overriding importance because it was founded on the principal that there is a clear distinction between metallic money and a duty to pay. Money is permanent while credit is not. Money has no counterparty risk, whereas credit does. By way of contrast with money, we can define credit: credit is anything which is of no direct use but is taken in exchange for something else in the belief or confidence in the right to exchange it away again.[v]
So far, in this article we have established that gold has a legal status as money, which bitcoin lacks. We can also rule out legislation to raise bitcoin to a legal monetary status, even if law makers are prepared to consider doing so — which is unlikely. From the rulings in the Roman Pandects, we can see that a regular deposit differs from an irregular deposit because it is identified as the depositor’s property. Identity is the key to property’s recovery, and in bitcoin’s case the blockchain provides this identity. Attempts to classify a blockchain based cryptocurrency as money fall foul of the established legal position.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 21:00 - SpaceX's First Moon Mission Will Include Japanese Billionaire And DJ Steve Aoki
SpaceX’s First Moon Mission Will Include Japanese Billionaire And DJ Steve Aoki
SpaceX revealed that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa had selected an unorthodox crew of artists, athletes, and entertainers for an upcoming privately funded lunar mission called “dearMoon.” Starship, SpaceX’s most powerful next-generation launch vehicle, will propel the crew around the moon, orbit for several days, and return to Earth.
The lunar mission has been in the works since 2018. Maezawa bought every seat and will now be joined by DJ Steve Aoki, K-pop star Choi Seung-hyun (known as TOP), choreographer Yemi AD, photographer Rhiannon Adam, YouTube creator Tim Dodd, photographer Karim Iliya, documentary filmmaker Brendan Hall, actor Dev Joshi, and snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington.
The lunar mission is expected to launch sometime in 2023, though Starship has yet to conduct its first orbital test flight. If early Starship tests are successful, then dearMoon could beat NASA’s Artemis II mission to fly astronauts around the moon by 2024.
Maezawa has already been to space. In 2021, he flew to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz rocket and spent two weeks living in zero gravity.
The six-day mission will spend three days orbiting the moon before returning to Earth.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 20:40 - Americans Dumbed Down On Russia
Americans Dumbed Down On Russia
Authored by Ray McGovern via Anti-War.com,
Five years ago today, Congress learned from sworn, horse’s-mouth testimony that there is no technical evidence that Russia (or anyone else) hacked the DNC emails showing how the DNC had stacked the deck against Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination.
I can almost hear readers new to this website cry out in disbelief: “That cannot be. Official Washington and the media assured us that the Russians hacked those emails in order to help Trump win. And didn’t Obama throw out 35 Russian diplomats in reaction? And what about those 12 Russian intelligence agents indicted for hacking?” Were U.S. officials and media mistaken?
No, not mistaken. They were lying.
“But … but, does this mean Special Counsel Robert Mueller knew there was no concrete evidence of Russian hacking just six months into his 22-month investigation into Trump-Russia collusion?”
Get Him Under Oath
On December 5, 2017, Shawn Henry, head of the cyber security firm CrowdStrike, testified to the House Intelligence Committee that there was no technical evidence that Russia hacked the DNC emails that WikiLeaks published in July 2016. CrowdStrike had been hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign (with the FBI’s blessing) to investigate “Russian hacking”.
Shawn Henry is a protégé of former FBI Director Robert Mueller (from 2001 to 2012), for whom Henry served as head of the Bureau’s cyber-crime investigations unit before he went to CrowdStrike. What are the chances that Shawn Henry did not keep his former mentor, the Special Counsel, informed of this critical factoid?
Why are some of you readers just now learning about this – five years after that testimony? Short answer: Adam Schiff (D, CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee was able to keep Henry’s unclassified testimony secret from Dec. 5, 2017 until May 7, 2020, when he was forced to release it. Schiff gave the silencer-baton to friends in the corporate media, who have now suppressed Shawn Henry’s testimony for longer than even Schiff could.
In sum, five years (and counting) after Henry’s testimony, the corporate media are still keeping viewers/listeners in the dark. Were we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) not banned from corporate media, those interested in the “hacking” hoax could have learned what was going on by reading our Memorandum “Allegations of Hacking are Baseless”, of December 12, 2016 – a year before Shawn Henry, under oath, came clean. Henry’s confession came as no surprise to us. (Updates are available here and here.)
Yet, the New York Times, for example, keeps up the drumbeat. Charlie Savage was careful last week to insert the following, in an article about Julian Assange (don’t miss what the New York Times itself embedded):
His [Assange’s] public image shifted significantly after WikiLeaks published Democratic emails that had been hacked by the Russian government as part of its covert operation to help Donald J. Trump win the 2016 presidential election.
Thus the words of Charlie Savage and the Gray Lady. There is always some clown who does not get the word – but Charlie is no clown. He knows what the narrative still has to be, and adheres to it (and, thus, to his job).
The reasoning behind suppressing Shawn Henry’s testimony appears to have gone something like this: The truth about “Russian hacking” cracks the centerpiece of Russia-gate; it pulls the rug from under what we corporate media have been saying about the evil Putin and what we label Trump’s “bromance” with him. Worse, the truth could deny the MICIMATT the image of the threatening “enemy” it needs to “justify” building and selling weapons. Besides, Americans probably can’t handle the truth. And what they don’t know won’t hurt them.
What Americans Don’t Know
Humorist Will Rogers had it right:
“The problem ain’t what people know. It’s what people know that ain’t so; that’s the problem.”
What Americans “know” is that President Vladimir Putin is evil and that Russia must be stopped in Ukraine. This comes of six straight years of indoctrination/brainwashing. Putin and his colleagues, of course, are aware of this. It must seem to them that people in the US an Europe are being steeled with the propaganda basis for wider war. This gets extremely dangerous. What people don’t know can really hurt them and lead them into another misbegotten war – this one far worse than other recent misadventures.
If the sophomores advising President Joe Biden refuse to acknowledge that Russia has escalation dominance in Ukraine, the likelihood of wider war in the coming months looms large. And despite recent optimistic projections by top intelligence officials, Ukraine and NATO are far more likely to run out of ammunition before Russia does.
* * *
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 20:20 - Rapper 'Nuke Bizzle' Who Bragged About Scamming Covid Relief Sentenced To Prison
Rapper ‘Nuke Bizzle’ Who Bragged About Scamming Covid Relief Sentenced To Prison
A 33-year-old Tennessee rap artist who bragged in a YouTube video about scamming a Covid unemployment insurance program was sentenced to more than six years in federal prison and ordered to return over $700,000 in ill-gotten gainz.
Fontrell Antonio Baines, aka “Nuke Bizzle,” was sentenced on Wednesday by a California federal judge after pleading guilty to mail fraud and two counts of unlawful possession of a firearm and ammunition by a felon. He also pleaded guilty to possession of oxycodone with intent to distribute, WaPo reports.
Mr. Bizzle filed 92 falsified Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) claims with the California Employment Development Department (EDD) between July and September of 2020, in a scheme which sought to extract around $1.2 million in federal funds for personal benefit. He was successful in obtaining $704,760 of that, according to court filings.
Baines used information from victims of identity theft and other third parties to fill out relief applications with false statements about applicants’ work histories and residencies.
In the video, which is believed by agents to have premiered on Sept. 11, 2020, Baines held up a stack of envelopes from California’s Employment Development Department, including one addressed to an individual identified by federal agents in court filings as a victim of Baines’s identity theft, saying he was getting rich by “go[ing] to the bank with a stack of these.”
The video also featured rapper Fat Wizza and opened with a recording that states: “Your card has now been activated and is ready for use,” according to court filings, before an image closely resembling the logo of California’s Employment Development Department appears in the shot. The lyrics include: “I got rich off E.D.D.,” “10 cards swiping 10k a day,” and “You got to sell cocaine, I can just file a claim.” -WaPo
Shortly after the video was published to YouTube, a special agent at the US Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General forwarded it to a branch of the office’s data science team, who identified the rapper.
In October 2020, the video’s description was edited to include the disclaimer: “***THIS VIDEO WAS CREATED WITH PROPS AND WAS MADE FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES***.”
In a filing submitted to the court, Baines admitted to defrauding the EDD and apologized for what he had done – blaming friends for orchestrating the scheme.
“They said they will give me money for letting mail come to the house. They would send the envelopes, and all I had to do was give them the mail when it arrived. When I found out how much money they were getting I felt played, and I started just taking the cards myself and telling them they never made it,” he told the judge.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 20:00 - THE TWITTER FILES: The Removal Of Donald Trump, Part 1
THE TWITTER FILES: The Removal Of Donald Trump, Part 1
The third installment of Elon Musk’s release of internal Twitter communications has been released, once again via veteran journalist Matt Taibbi.
In this episode, which is a 3-parter, we learn what happened behind the scenes which led to the banishment of former President Donald Trump from the platform.
1. THREAD: The Twitter Files
THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP
Part One: October 2020-January 6th— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022
thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601352565836640257″ dir=”auto” id=”tweet_2″>2. The world knows much of the story of what happened between riots at the Capitol on January 6th, and the removal of President Donald Trump from Twitter on January 8th…thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601352565836640257″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601352946163544065″ dir=”auto” id=”tweet_3″>3. We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies.thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601352946163544065″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601353543390486528″ dir=”auto” id=”tweet_4″>4. This first installment covers the period before the election through January 6th. Tomorrow, @ShellenbergerMD will detail the chaos inside Twitter on January 7th. On Sunday, @bariweiss will reveal the secret internal communications from the key date of January 8th.thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601353543390486528″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto” id=”tweet_5″>5. Whatever your opinion on the decision to remove Trump that day, the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import. Even Twitter’s employees understood in the moment it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech.thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>
thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>6. As soon as they finished banning Trump, Twitter execs started processing new power. They prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses – perhaps even Joe Biden. The “new administration,” says one exec, “will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.”thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>
thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>7. Twitter executives removed Trump in part over what one executive called the “context surrounding”: actions by Trump and supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.” In the end, they looked at a broad picture. But that approach can cut both ways.thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>
thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>8. The bulk of the internal debate leading to Trump’s ban took place in those three January days. However, the intellectual framework was laid in the months preceding the Capitol riots.thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>9. Before J6, Twitter was a unique mix of automated, rules-based enforcement, and more subjective moderation by senior executives. As reported, the firm had a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility, most all of which were thrown at Trump (and others) pre-J6.thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>10. As the election approached, senior executives – perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed – increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of “vios” as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>11. After J6, internal Slacks show Twitter executives getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies. Here’s Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth, lamenting a lack of “generic enough” calendar descriptions to concealing his “very interesting” meeting partners.thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>
thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>12. These initial reports are based on searches for docs linked to prominent executives, whose names are already public. They include Roth, former trust and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, and recently plank-walked Deputy General Counsel (and former top FBI lawyer) Jim Baker.thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>13. One particular slack channel offers an unique window into the evolving thinking of top officials in late 2020 and early 2021.thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>14. On October 8th, 2020, executives opened a channel called “us2020_xfn_enforcement.” Through J6, this would be home for discussions about election-related removals, especially ones that involved “high-profile” accounts (often called “VITs” or “Very Important Tweeters”).thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>
thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>15. There was at least some tension between Safety Operations – a larger department whose staffers used a more rules-based process for addressing issues like porn, scams, and threats – and a smaller, more powerful cadre of senior policy execs like Roth and Gadde.16. The latter group were a high-speed Supreme Court of moderation, issuing content rulings on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President.
17. During this time, executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content. While we’re still at the start of reviewing the #TwitterFiles, we’re finding out more about these interactions every day.18. Policy Director Nick Pickles is asked if they should say Twitter detects “misinfo” through “ML, human review, and **partnerships with outside experts?*” The employee asks, “I know that’s been a slippery process… not sure if you want our public explanation to hang on that.”
19. Pickles quickly asks if they could “just say “partnerships.” After a pause, he says, “e.g. not sure we’d describe the FBI/DHS as experts.”
20. This post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI):
21. Roth’s report to FBI/DHS/DNI is almost farcical in its self-flagellating tone: “We blocked the NYP story, then unblocked it (but said the opposite)… comms is angry, reporters think we’re idiots… in short, FML” (fuck my life).
23. Some of Roth’s later Slacks indicate his weekly confabs with federal law enforcement involved separate meetings. Here, he ghosts the FBI and DHS, respectively, to go first to an “Aspen Institute thing,” then take a call with Apple.
24. Here, the FBI sends reports about a pair of tweets, the second of which involves a former Tippecanoe County, Indiana Councilor and Republican named
@JohnBasham claiming “Between 2% and 25% of Ballots by Mail are Being Rejected for Errors.”
25. The FBI-flagged tweet then got circulated in the enforcement Slack. Twitter cited Politifact to say the first story was “proven to be false,” then noted the second was already deemed “no vio on numerous occasions.”
26. The group then decides to apply a “Learn how voting is safe and secure” label because one commenter says, “it’s totally normal to have a 2% error rate.” Roth then gives the final go-ahead to the process initiated by the FBI:
27. Examining the entire election enforcement Slack, we didn’t see one reference to moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans generally. We looked. They may exist: we were told they do. However, they were absent here.
31. In one case, former Arizona governor Mike Huckabee joke-tweets about mailing in ballots for his “deceased parents and grandparents.”
32. This inspires a long Slack that reads like an @TitaniaMcGrath parody. “I agree it’s a joke,” concedes a Twitter employee, “but he’s also literally admitting in a tweet a crime.”
The group declares Huck’s an “edge case,” and though one notes, “we don’t make exceptions for jokes or satire,” they ultimately decide to leave him be, because “we’ve poked enough bears.”
33. “Could still mislead people… could still mislead people,” the humor-averse group declares, before moving on from Huckabee
33. Roth suggests moderation even in this absurd case could depend on whether or not the joke results in “confusion.” This seemingly silly case actually foreshadows serious later issues:
34. In the docs, execs often expand criteria to subjective issues like intent (yes, a video is authentic, but why was it shown?), orientation (was a banned tweet shown to condemn, or support?), or reception (did a joke cause “confusion”?). This reflex will become key in J6.
35. In another example, Twitter employees prepare to slap a “mail-in voting is safe” warning label on a Trump tweet about a postal screwup in Ohio, before realizing “the events took place,” which meant the tweet was “factually accurate”:
36. “VERY WELL DONE ON SPEED” Trump was being “visibility filtered” as late as a week before the election. Here, senior execs didn’t appear to have a particular violation, but still worked fast to make sure a fairly anodyne Trump tweet couldn’t be “replied to, shared, or liked”:
“VERY WELL DONE ON SPEED”: the group is pleased the Trump tweet is dealt with quickly
thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>37. A seemingly innocuous follow-up involved a tweet from actor @realJamesWoods, whose ubiquitous presence in argued-over Twitter data sets is already a #TwitterFiles in-joke.
38. After Woods angrily quote-tweeted about Trump’s warning label, Twitter staff – in a preview of what ended up happening after J6 – despaired of a reason for action, but resolved to “hit him hard on future vio.”
39. Here a label is applied to Georgia Republican congresswoman Jody Hice for saying, “Say NO to big tech censorship!” and, “Mailed ballots are more prone to fraud than in-person balloting… It’s just common sense.”
40. Twitter teams went easy on Hice, only applying “soft intervention,” with Roth worrying about a “wah wah censorship” optics backlash:
41. Meanwhile, there are multiple instances of involving pro-Biden tweets warning Trump “may try to steal the election” that got surfaced, only to be approved by senior executives. This one, they decide, just “expresses concern that mailed ballots might not make it on time.”
43. In this exchange, again unintentionally humorous, former Attorney General Eric Holder claimed the U.S. Postal Service was “deliberately crippled,”ostensibly by the Trump administration. He was initially hit with a generic warning label, but it was quickly taken off by Roth: pic.twitter.com/UXoXxE9E1S
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 10, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>To read the rest, click on the tweet above.thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>thread#showTweet” data-controller=”thread” data-screenname=”mtaibbi” data-tweet=”1601354663265472513″ dir=”auto”>Stay tuned for part II tomorrow…https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 19:40 - "It's Time": Miami Mayor Asks Musk To Move Twitter HQ To Miami
“It’s Time”: Miami Mayor Asks Musk To Move Twitter HQ To Miami
Miami mayor Francis Suarez tweeted at Elon Musk Tuesday night about moving Twitter’s headquarters from San Francisco to South Florida.
“Elon Musk, it’s time to move Twitter headquarters to Miami. It’s not about politics, it’s about the soul of our country,” Suarez quote tweeted Musk’s complaint about San Francisco building inspectors launching an investigation into reports that conference-room sleeping quarters were built.
.@elonmusk it’s TIME to move @twitter headquarters to Miami. It’s not about politics, it’s about the soul of our country. https://t.co/oRHgmL7jJx
— Mayor Francis Suarez (@FrancisSuarez) December 7, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Suarez then replied to his quote tweet:
It’s what our entire #howcanihelp movement has been about. Creating a city that welcomes the American spirit of hard work, doers and dreamers. It’s on brand for the new iteration of @Twitter.
— Mayor Francis Suarez (@FrancisSuarez) December 7, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Suarez’s comments garnered positive remarks from some residents who said there was enough space for a new Twitter headquarters.
One Twitter user said: “We have all the office space you need, Elon Musk.”
We have all the office space you need @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/ObA5OP5PL8
— Ryan RC Rea (@volvoshine) December 7, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Musk seemed a bit frustrated with San Francisco officials while following through with his “extremely hardcore” vision for Twitter 2.0. If the world’s richest man were pressured enough, it wouldn’t shock us if he moved Twitter out of the progressive city to Austin or Miami.
After all, a big part of Suarez’s vision for Miami is drawing tech and crypto money. Crypto is in a winter phase, and the FTX collapse has worsened. Still, the business environment is so friendly that large financial institutions, such as billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities, are moving to South Florida.
Remember last year when Musk moved the headquarters of Tesla from Silicon Valley to Austin? That could quickly happen to Twitter. And really, it should.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 19:20 - Senators Press HHS As Whistleblower Alleges Unaccompanied Children Being Transferred To Criminals
Senators Press HHS As Whistleblower Alleges Unaccompanied Children Being Transferred To Criminals
Authored by Rita Li via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A group of Republicans is seeking information from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over allegations that the department “knowingly” places some unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors in the hands of criminals, according to a letter released on Tuesday.
“We write concerning an alarming report by a federal employee whistleblower that the [HHS] is knowingly transferring unaccompanied migrant children in the custody of criminals, including sex traffickers,” five GOP lawmakers wrote in a Dec. 5 joint letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. The group cited testimony that the government failed to settle minors, who were caught while crossing the U.S. borders, into homes of “safe, non-criminal sponsors.”
“If these claims are true, this is pure evil being committed by your agency,” they wrote.
HHS officially acknowledges that unaccompanied border crossers under the age of 18 are “especially vulnerable” to human trafficking, exploitation, and abuse, but states that the “majority” are looked after by state-licensed providers operating under cooperative agreements and contract to deliver high-quality care.
Unaccompanied minors hold hands as they await transport after crossing the Rio Grande river into the United States from Mexico on a raft in Penitas, Texas, on March 12, 2021. (Adrees Latif/Reuters) Whistleblower Testimony
The letter comes after non-profit investigative journalism watchdog Project Veritas spoke with Tara Lee Rodas, who formerly assisted the HHS with the processing of unaccompanied immigrant children at an Emergency Intake Site in Pomona, California, as an employee of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE). She told the outlet that she believes the current child sponsorship program funded by the department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is precarious for these minors.
“The tax dollars of people who are listening are paying to put children in the hands of criminals,” Rodas said of what she has witnessed. “[Most people] have no idea that children are going to unrelated people. That children are definitely—we have proof, evidence—that they are being recruited and transported. They are then in debt bondage.”
A Veritas journalist found one illegal immigrant female minor who corroborated Rodas’s concerns at an address Rodas provided. The minor told the journalist that her sponsor, who claims to be her aunt, had forced her into situations of sexual abuse: “She was pimping me and I didn’t like that. She would pimp me to men.”
The Epoch Times has been unable to independently verify the claims.
Rodas said she has expressed her concerns to department officials. However, this usually led to dismissals of her concerns and sometimes retaliation at work.
During a previous talk to the command center executives, the whistleblower alleged she was told, “Tara, I think you need to understand that we only get sued if we keep kids in care too long. We don’t get sued by traffickers. Are you clear? We don’t get sued by traffickers.”
“[The Biden administration] relaxed a lot of the stringent vetting by creating these additional field guidances, and there’s a focus on ‘move the children’ as opposed to ‘place children in safe homes.’ Right now, it is speed over safety,” she added.
Investigation
Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, speaks during a hearing in Washington on Dec. 3, 2020. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Now, leading four of his fellow GOP lawmakers, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), is demanding that Becerra release information regarding Rodas’s complaint on how the HHS vets sponsors of unaccompanied children who cross borders alone.
“This cannot be swept under the rug,” the senators said in the letter.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 19:00 - Defense Aid To Ukraine Tops $20 Billion As New $275M Package Announced
Defense Aid To Ukraine Tops $20 Billion As New $275M Package Announced
The Biden administration on Friday unveiled another $275 million in weapons and defense equipment for Ukraine, which crucially will come via the presidential drawdown authority.
This means the Pentagon will pull arms from its own stockpiles to send to Ukraine to fulfill this package, despite defense officials having long been on record expressing deep concern over dwindling supplies necessary to protect and defend America.
Via PA Wire: painting of Volodymyr Zelensky which was auctioned in Ireland. A Defense Department press release indicated the package is to include “more ammunition for high mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS), 80,000 155 mm artillery rounds, counter-unmanned aerial systems equipment, counter air defenses, additional High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles, ambulances and medical equipment, 150 generators and other field equipment.”
The Ukrainian government and armed forces have been especially interested in procurement of more and longer-range anti-air defense systems. A recent report in The Wall Street Journal indicated the Pentagon had altered missile systems transferred to Ukraine to limit their range at 50 miles, in order to prevent the Ukrainians from targeting Russian territory.
The Friday DoD press release stated further, “This security assistance package will provide Ukraine with new capabilities to boost its air defenses in addition to providing critical equipment that Ukraine is using so effectively to defend itself on the battlefield.”
This brings US defense aid commitment since the war’s start to $19.3 billion, while the total tab at the American taxpayer’s expense for Ukraine has reached $20 billion since the start of the Biden administration (accounting additionally for aid sent just prior to the Russian invasion).
One “lesson” on display this week (and an obvious longtime trend) is that the deep state and military-industrial complex will always opt for more spending and less accountability – even at the expense of national defense readiness. On Thursday the House passed the massive, record-setting annual defense authorization bill, which will now see the $847 billion measure go to the Senate. Its mammoth size includes plans for much more Ukraine aid to come for the next fiscal year.
Ukraine is fighting for “Western Values”… Well, you can keep your Western values thank you very much. pic.twitter.com/WwGMaI3aVi
— ThinkDeeper (@ThinkDeeper71) December 9, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Just two days prior to the House approving the massive, record-setting NDAA, the Democrat-led House Foreign Affairs Committee voted down a bill to audit the tens of billions of dollars that Congress has approved to spend on the war in Ukraine. This despite high-level admissions that much of the weaponry sent to Ukraine has little to no oversight once it enters the country, thus it could end up in the hands of terrorists or criminal gangs outside the borders.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 18:40 - Maxine Waters Confirms Bankman-Fried Will Testify Virtually Next Week… Alongside Current FTX CEO
Maxine Waters Confirms Bankman-Fried Will Testify Virtually Next Week… Alongside Current FTX CEO
Update (1830ET): The House Financial Services Committee confirmed that former FTX Chief Executive Officer Sam Bankman-Fried will testify at a hearing next week on the disintegration of his crypto exchange and hedge fund.
Bloomberg reports that Bankman-Fried will testify virtually.
He is now listed as a witness alongside current FTX CEO John J. Ray III, according to a media advisory the committee sent out late Friday. This should be fun since Ray described FTX’s collapse in recent court filings as an “unprecedented debacle” brought on by a culture of lax corporate governance.
“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” Mr. Ray said in the filing.
The hearing will be split into two parts, each one featuring one of the men.
* * *
Update (0720ET): Having missed yesterday’s deadline to respond to a request to testify at an upcoming Senate Committee hearing, Sam Bankman-Fried
1) I still do not have access to much of my data — professional or personal. So there is a limit to what I will be able to say, and I won’t be as helpful as I’d like.
But as the committee still thinks it would be useful, I am willing to testify on the 13th. https://t.co/KR34BsNaG1
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) December 9, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
He continued…
2) I will try to be helpful during the hearing, and to shed what light I can on:
-
FTX US’s solvency and American customers
-
Pathways that could return value to users internationally
-
What I think led to the crash
-
My own failings
3) I had thought of myself as a model CEO, who wouldn’t become lazy or disconnected.
Which made it that much more destructive when I did.
I’m sorry. Hopefully people can learn from the difference between who I was and who I could have been.
Presumably there is zero chance he will testify in person.
Does anyone believe this is anything but stalling for time?
Meanwhile, Binance founder ‘CZ’ went off on Twitter overnight, lambasting Kevin O’Leary’s ‘woe is me’ tale of wrongdoing by SBF, and detailing the attacks he himself suffered at the hands of the inclusive left’s (second) favorite donor:
As an early investor in FTX, we became increasingly uncomfortable with Alameda/SBF and initiated the exit process more than 1.5 years ago.
Sam was so unhinged when we decided to pull out as an investor that he launched a series of offensive tirades at multiple Binance team members, including threatening to go to “extraordinary lengths to make us pay” – we still have those text messages.
Shortly after that Sam began “investing” in friends in high places – from media, to policymakers, to celebrities (like Kevin). And he used that network to manipulate public opinion, including attacking me and others in the industry.
My ethnicity was a focus of those attacks and @kevinolearytv signaled his intention to continue those attacks in the media and will likely repeat them at next week’s Senate hearing. I’m Canadian and Binance is not a Chinese company.
You don’t have to be a genius to know something don’t smell right at FTX. They were 1/10th our size, yet outspent us 100/1 on marketing & “partnerships”, fancy parties in the Bahamas, trips across the globe, and mansions for all of their senior staff (and his parents).
Which appears to have pissed SBF off…
You won, @cz_binance.
There’s no need to lie, now, about the buyout.
We initiated conversations around buying you out, and we decided to do it because it was important for our business.
And while I was frustrated with your ‘negotiation’ tactics, I chose to still do it.
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) December 9, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
But hey, he did say he was sorry, right?
As CoinTelegraph’s Martin Young detailed earlier, Crypto’s public enemy number one, Sam Bankman-Fried has missed a crucial deadline to confirm his appearance at an upcoming Senate Committee hearing.
The former FTX CEO missed a Thursday 5:00 pm ET on Dec. 8 deadline for responding to a Senate Banking Committee request that he testify at the Committee meeting on Dec. 14. This has set up the possibility of a congressional subpoena.
On Dec. 8, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Sherrod Brown, and ranking member of the Committee, Senator Pat Toomey, released a statement on the request.
“FTX’s collapse has caused real financial harm to consumers, and effects have spilled over into other parts of the crypto industry. The American people need answers about Sam Bankman-Fried’s misconduct at FTX,” they stated before adding:
“The Committee has requested that he testify at our upcoming hearing on FTX’s collapse, and will consider further action if he does not comply.”
According to the official Committee website, the hearing titled “Crypto Crash: Why the FTX Bubble Burst and the Harm to Consumers” will be webcast on Dec. 14.
So far, two witnesses have been confirmed to attend the hearing — including American University Washington College of Law professor Hilary J. Allen and actor and author Ben McKenzie Schenkkan.
Allen is an academic whose research focuses on the impact of new financial technologies on the stability of the financial system.
Schenkkan is an anti-crypto actor-turned-commentator who played a troubled teenager on a U.S. television series called “The O.C.”
Messari founder Ryan Selkis commented on the futility of the witness selection:
The Senate Banking FTX hearing is a complete goat rodeo and mockery of the system.
I offered to go even though it would have been a distraction, but instead the Senate opted for the former child star of the OC and a “never crypto” academic.
Another waste of taxpayer $$$.
— Ryan Selkis 🥷 (@twobitidiot) December 9, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Meanwhile, Cointelegraph has reached out to Schenkkan for comment but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
Other than the Dec. 14 Senate Banking Committee hearing, Bankman-Fried has also been requested to attend a separate hearing called “Investigating the Collapse of FTX” on Dec. 13 with the U.S. House Financial Services Committee.
Bankman-Fried was first requested to attend the hearing via a tweet from Congresswoman Maxine Waters but seemingly declined the invitation on Dec. 5, stating that he wasn’t sure what would happen by the hearing date, “but when it does, I will testify.”
Waters responded on Dec. 8 stating “a subpoena is definitely on the table” should Bankman-Fried fail to voluntarily testify at the hearing.
The collapse of SBF’s FTX empire has initiated a tsunami of backlash from U.S. lawmakers and regulators threatening to drown the fledgling crypto asset industry.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 18:25 -
- Does Trump Really Want To Be President Again?
Does Trump Really Want To Be President Again?
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,
Team Trump has sometimes compared former President Donald Trump’s current quest for a non-sequential second term to two-term President Grover Cleveland’s similar three election bids.
Cleveland remains our only elected president (1884) to have lost a reelection bid (1888) — in a disputed vote — only to be reelected four years later in 1892.
Yet Trump seems determined instead to follow a different, and bullheaded, Teddy Roosevelt model.
Roosevelt left the presidency in 1908, sat out four years, and then lost a reelection bid in 1912, split and alienated the Republican Party, and ensured the election of the progressive Woodrow Wilson.
President Joe Biden’s first “corrective” two years have been an utter disaster.
Biden birthed hyperinflation. He destroyed a secure border and Trump’s energy self-sufficiency. Crime is now out of control. The United States was humiliated abroad in Afghanistan. Rising interest rates will soon spark a recession.
After promising to unite the country, Biden smeared half the voting population as “un-American” and “semi-fascist.”
In addition, almost all of Trump’s prior complaints, predictions, and assertions that the media dismissed as conspiratorial, or crackpot have proven eerily prescient.
Hunter Biden’s laptop was all too authentic.
The FBI was compromised and acted as an agent of the Democratic Party. Anthony Fauci proved a partisan.
Russian collusion was an utter hoax. It was engineered by Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and the FBI.
The Wuhan lab did likely birth the engineered COVID virus. That possibility was covered up by the media and public health establishments.
Trump did not take “nuclear codes” to Mar-a-Lago. He did not plan on hawking his presidential papers for profit.
Germany did weaken NATO. Berlin was foolish to mortgage its future with energy dependency on a hostile Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Biden family was utterly corrupt. It was deeply involved in lucrative quid pro quo machinations abroad with China and a crooked Ukrainian government-related company.
John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Anthony Fauci, and Robert Mueller all either did mislead, feign amnesia, or lie either to Congress or while under oath.
Twitter was corrupt in asymmetrically banning the free expression of conservatives. Silicon Valley elites did conspire to sandbag Trump.
The media was a fake news corrupt enterprise, as we see from the new Twitter trove, and the mass firings at CNN.
So given events since Trump’s departure, he should be in the driver’s seat. But he is not.
Why?
Rather than offering detailed correctives for Biden’s disastrous record, Trump is again dabbling in social media madness. He needlessly floated the absurd idea that constitutional norms might need to be changed to allow the disputed 2020 election result to be overturned.
He seems oblivious that the Left, not conservatives, talk of altering the Constitution. They call for the destruction of the Electoral College, and wish to dilute the Second Amendment and redefine the First.
Why did Trump need to descend into personal invective when prior to the midterms, many primary polls were confirming his front-runner status?
Why did he not remain magnanimous, unite the party, and focus on giving millions to his endorsed but endangered candidates like Dr. Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters, and Herschel Walker?
Why did Trump bizarrely claim that possible presidential rival candidate Glenn Youngkin’s name sounded “Chinese”? What was the logic of attacking Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s, R-Ky., wife in racialist terms?
Every elected public official or candidate — with the exception of former President Barack Obama who once was photographed smiling with a grinning, Jewish-hating Louis Farrakhan — knows there is only one rule concerning antisemites: Go nowhere near them.
Yet Trump dined with two, the now unhinged Kanye West (“Ye”) and the 20-something crackpot Nick Fuentes.
Why would Trump all but announce before the midterms that after the election he would be a candidate?
Or why right before November 8, did Trump attack Ron DeSantis (whom he calls “DeSanctimonious”), the miracle-worker Republican governor of Trump’s own Florida?
Did Trump wish to rile up left-wing Trump-haters to rush to the midterm polls, or to persuade miffed conservative DeSantis voters to stay home?
In the impending Trump-DeSantis collision, voters will be looking for resolution of two respective unknowns.
One, will Trump run on his stellar record, avoid controversy, and stick to the issues? And will he thereby win back independent, swing voters on assurances that they could get more MAGA successes, but this time around without the insults and spats?
And two, could DeSantis assure Republicans of a fire-in-the belly, Trumpian zeal to take on the Left, while soberly promoting a MAGA agenda — and thus win over the hard-core Trump base?
So far, De Santis is reassuring donors and primary voters he can be as tough as his record is impressive.
But Trump is not encouraging the donor class and independent voters that he has learned that melodramas and social media riffs are not his friends.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 18:20 - Marijuana Industry's Buzz Wears Off As Pandemic Party Over
Marijuana Industry’s Buzz Wears Off As Pandemic Party Over
The party is over, and the buzz is wearing off. Mature legal cannabis markets are experiencing a slowdown in sales since the pandemic boom.
A new report from cannabis data firm Headset said the industry in established marijuana markets, such as Oregon and Washington, has slowed down from a year ago. For example, Colorado’s market recorded sales that dropped 11.4% in June from a year ago.
“What we saw in 2020 was a massive spike in sales tied to the pandemic as people stayed home, had government stimulus money, and not a lot to do,” Chris Wash, CEO of Marijuana Business Daily, told CNBC.
Headset noted marijuana sales spiked between March 2020-21, with monthly average year-over-year sales of around 25.8% in Colorado. But sales began sliding last year as people returned to work and stimulus checks ran out. The report found the number of purchases and amount of money people spent declined.
In July, customers spent an average of $55.21 per visit at Colorado stores — four dollars less than the average of $59.73 in July 2021, according to the data.
“Right now, the Colorado marijuana industry is going through the largest downturn that we’ve ever seen,” Truman Bradley, executive director of the Wheat Ridge-based Marijuana Industry Group, told the local media outlet 9News Denver.
Even though marijuana sales are normalizing in mature markets after a pandemic-fueled party, the industry nationwide is expected to grow as new markets come online. Marijuana Business Daily expects US medical and recreational cannabis sales could exceed $33 billion this year, up from $27 billion last year. Forecasts for 2026 are around $52.6 billion.
So why are sales slowing in mature markets? Well, these states were the only ones open for business during the pandemic, and when tens of millions of Americans were out of work or forced to stay home because of the government shutdown, there was nothing better to do than sit on the couch, consume marijuana, and watch Netflix. Now that people aren’t stuck at home, they aren’t purchasing as much cannabis, and producers have to readjust production levels lower due to declining demand.
One exchange-traded fund tied to the cannabis sector, called ETFMG Alternative Harvest ETF (MJ), has plunged more than 84% since the February 2021 peak of $33.
The buzz is over.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 18:00 - Roughly 60% Of Students Fear Expressing Their Views In Higher Education; New Poll Finds
Roughly 60% Of Students Fear Expressing Their Views In Higher Education; New Poll Finds
There is a new poll out and it is strikingly similar to the polls previously featured on this blog on free speech and intellectual diversity in higher education. The Buckley annual survey found that almost 60 percent of college students fear sharing an opinion in classrooms or on campuses. That tracks other polls by different groups. Yet, colleges and universities continue to exclude Republican and conservative faculty members and maintain environments of speech intolerance.The poll shows a sharp increase from just last year with 63% reporting feeling intimidated in sharing opinions different than their peers. That is almost identical to the 65 percent found in other polls.
The poll of over 800 students included many liberal students, as reflected in the 67 percent who would require all professors and administrators to make statements in favor of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Half of students believe “America is inextricably linked to white supremacy” and another 33 percent would prefer to live in a socialist system.
The poll tracks earlier polls showing a rising view of viewpoint intolerance that now characterizes higher education in America. That intolerance is reflected in the overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal makeup of faculties.
A new survey of 65 departments in various states found that 33 do not have a single registered Republican. For these departments, the systemic elimination of Republican faculty has finally reached zero, but there is still little recognition of the crushing bias reflected in these numbers. Others, as discussed below, have defended the elimination of conservative or Republican faculty as entirely justified and commendable. Overall, registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans by a margin of over 10-1.
The survey found 61 Republican professors across 65 departments at seven universities while it also found 667 professors identified as Democrats based on their political party registration or voting history.
While there may be a couple professors missed on either side of this ideological divide, most faculty will privately admit that it is rare to find self-identified Republicans or conservatives on many faculties. Most faculties are overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal. Diversity generally runs from the left to the far left.
Another survey found that only nine percent of law professors identified as conservative. The virtual absence of Republican or conservative members on many faculties are just shrugged off by many academics. It is the subject of my recent publication in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. The article entitled “Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States.”
Notably, a 2017 study found 15 percent of faculties were conservative. This is the result of years of faculty replicating their own ideological preferences and eradicating the diversity that once existed on faculties. When I began teaching in the 1980s, faculties were undeniably liberal but contained a significant number of conservative and libertarian professors. It made for a healthy and balanced intellectual environment. Today such voices are relatively rare and faculties have become political echo chambers, leaving conservatives and Republican students increasingly afraid to speak openly in class.
The trend is the result of hiring systems where conservative or libertarian scholars are often rejected as simply “insufficiently intellectually rigorous” or “not interesting” in their scholarship. This can clearly be true with individual candidates but the wholesale reduction of such scholars shows a more systemic problem. Faculty insist that there is no bias against conservatives, but the obviously falling number of conservative faculty speaks for itself.
As discussed earlier, the editors of the legal site Above the Law have repeatedly swatted down objections to the loss of free speech and viewpoint diversity in the media and academia. In a recent column, they mocked those of us who objected to the virtual absence of conservative or libertarian faculty members at law schools.
Senior editor Joe Patrice defended “predominantly liberal faculties” based on the fact that liberal views reflect real law as opposed to junk law. (Patrice regularly calls those with opposing views “racists,” including Chief Justice John Roberts because of his objection to race-based criteria in admissions as racial discrimination). He explained that hiring a conservative academic was akin to allowing a believer in geocentrism (or that the sun orbits the earth) to teach at a university.
It is that easy. You simply declare that conservative views shared by a majority of the Supreme Court and roughly half of the population are not acceptable to be taught.
We have previously discussed the worrisome signs of a rising generation of censors in the country as leaders and writers embrace censorship and blacklisting. The latest chilling poll was released by 2021 College Free Speech Rankings after questioning a huge body of 37,000 students at 159 top-ranked U.S. colleges and universities. It found that sixty-six percent of college students think shouting down a speaker to stop them from speaking is a legitimate form of free speech. Another 23 percent believe violence can be used to cancel a speech. That is roughly one out of four supporting violence.
This has been an issue of contention with some academics who believe that free speech includes the right to silence others. Berkeley has been the focus of much concern over the use of a heckler’s veto on our campuses as violent protesters have succeeded in silencing speakers, including a speaker from the ACLU discussing free speech. Both students and some faculty have maintained the position that they have a right to silence those with whom they disagree and even student newspapers have declared opposing speech to be outside of the protections of free speech. At another University of California campus, professors actually rallied around a professor who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display.
In the meantime, academics and deans have said that there is no free speech protection for offensive or “disingenuous” speech. CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek showed how far this trend has gone. When conservative law professor Josh Blackman was stopped from speaking about “the importance of free speech,” Bilek insisted that disrupting the speech on free speech was free speech. (Bilek later cancelled herself and resigned after she made a single analogy to acting like a “slaveholder” as a self-criticism for failing to achieve equity and reparations for black faculty and students).
There are now a wide array of polls and surveys showing a rising sense of viewpoint intolerance and a lack of ideological diversity on faculties. When confronted, faculty often shrug and say that the students are simply wrong about speech intolerance. They also dismiss the importance of labels (even self-reported party affiliations). Few, however, seriously deny that faculties are now overwhelmingly, if not exclusive, Democratic or liberal. Intellectual diversity today on faculties often runs from the left to the far left.
I frankly do not understand why professors want to maintain this one-sided environment in hiring. I was drawn to academia by the diversity of viewpoints and intellectual challenges on campuses. However, the lack of diversity works to the advantage of those on the “correct” side of this new orthodoxy. Conversely, those with dissenting views are often targeted or isolated on faculties. They risk the loss of everything that gives an intellectual life meaning from publishing to speaking opportunities. For faculty, the viewpoint intolerance seen by students is magnified a hundred times over for those seeking to enter or to advance in teaching.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 17:40 - Top EU Parliament Officials Arrested In Huge Qatar-Linked Corruption Probe
Top EU Parliament Officials Arrested In Huge Qatar-Linked Corruption Probe
A European Parliament vice president along with a handful of other EU officials and aides has been arrested and brought in for questioning by police in Brussels on Friday, with the AFP identifying that “Belgian police arrested Greek socialist MEP Eva Kaili, a European Parliament vice-president, in connection with an investigation into corruption implicating World Cup host Qatar.”
Police have further sealed off the European Parliament offices of three MEPs, including Kaili, as well as Belgian S&D group members Maria Arena and Marc Tarabella. “Today’s searches have enabled investigators to recover about 600,000 euros in cash,” the prosecutors said in a statement, after their homes were also raided.
Greek MEP Eva Kaili The evidence is pointing to a large influence-peddling operation which involved an exchange of cash and favors from Qatari officials. The explosive story is grabbing international headlines at the sensitive moment the Qatar-hosted World Cup is headed into the semi-finals on Saturday, down to the final four.
Earlier in the day police said that 16 raids in total were launched across Belgium’s capital, and only later on Friday was Qatar named at center of the probe.
“Computer equipment and mobile phones were also seized. These elements will be analysed as part of the investigations,” the Belgium-based EU prosecutor’s office stated after it was “suspected a Gulf country (of influencing) the economic and political decisions of the European parliament.”
It was done “by paying large sums of money or offering large gifts to” prominent figures in the European parliament, according to the official allegation.
European Parliament Vice-President Eva Kaili has been arrested on suspicion of corruption with Qatar, via ISOPIX/SIPA 44-year old Kaili has been a European MEP since 2014, and initially rose to visibility as a popular Greek television presenter. According to more via the AP:
The raids targeted in particular assistants working for EU lawmakers, the statement said. The EU assembly has 705 elected members from the bloc’s 27 member nations. Each lawmaker has a number of assistants.
Her party PASOK, or the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, moved swiftly to formally expel her, effective Friday evening, following revelation of the corruption investigation.
Eva Kaili, EU VP arrested for taking Qatari bribes, praised the country’s “labor reforms” as countless stories of stadium slave labor emerged.
And @vonderleyen says Qatar is an ideal energy partner for the EU…because of Russia’s human rights violations.https://t.co/zyxdqsL9H6
— Lindsey Snell (@LindseySnell) December 9, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
She is alleged to have been one among a group of European Parliament officials with a “a significant political and/or strategic position” who was bribed by Qatari officials.
Despite the World Cup having thus far gone relatively smoothly, and Doha celebrating its current ‘success’ – this is sure to put a black eye on its image headed into the World Cup final, also as the story is sure to drive weekend headlines. Qatar has also long been known to engage in significant lobbying efforts in Washington as well, and has an extensive international media reach – funded by its ample oil and gas revenue – which it uses to sow influence abroad.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 17:23 - Putin Says He's Open To More Prisoner Swaps With US
Putin Says He’s Open To More Prisoner Swaps With US
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signaled that more prisoner swaps with Washington might be on the horizon, at a moment the profiles of detained Americans Paul Whelan and Marc Fogel are rising in the wake of Brittney Griner’s Thursday release. There’s greater pressure on the Biden administration to obtain ex-Marine Whelan’s release especially.
Putin in Friday comments before the press said that “everything is possible” in terms of possible future prisoner exchanges. He recounted that “compromises have been found” that led to the Griner for Bout deal.
“We aren’t refusing to continue this work in the future,” Putin said. “We didn’t set the task to move from those talks to something else, but they do create a certain atmosphere.”
Kremlin via Reuters The Russian leader acknowledged that the success of the prisoner swap talks was due in part to not taking into consideration other issues, such as the ongoing Ukraine conflict.
The White House responded Friday to these remarks of Putin, with National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby saying that indeed more prisoner swaps remain “possible” – stressing there are active channels of communication for this but that the US wants further “actions” and not just words out of Moscow.
Additionally, the US State Dept. said the following responding to Putin’s remarks about future prisoner swaps: “It’s not often we can say that we actually agree with something President Putin said, but today I can say that,” Net Price told CNN.
“President Putin himself has said that these discussions will continue. These discussions absolutely will continue,” Price added.
Meanwhile, Russian media continues to celebrate the swap as a huge victory in the Kremlin’s favor, as convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout receives a hero’s welcome…
In Russia, commentators are calling the prisoner exchange of U.S. basketball player Brittney Griner for notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout a victory for President Vladimir Putin pic.twitter.com/gHElIMAvLz
— Reuters (@Reuters) December 9, 2022
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 16:40 - Musk Confirms Political Candidates Were Shadow Banned By Twitter’s Censors
Musk Confirms Political Candidates Were Shadow Banned By Twitter’s Censors
Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Elon Musk has confirmed that political candidates were shadow banned by Twitter while running for office, in the latest revelation on the social media giant’s meddling in conversations of public interest, including by putting disfavored users on blacklists and suppressing distribution of their tweets.
Tesla head Elon Musk talks to the press as he arrives to have a look at the construction site of the new Tesla Gigafactory near Berlin, on Sept. 3, 2020. (Maja Hitij/Getty Images) Following the release of the second part of the “Twitter Files,” which revealed the social media giant put users on secret blacklists and used other shadow banning tools, Musk was asked by political commentator Ian Miles Cheong if political candidates were also subject to such censorship.
“So here’s a question for @elonmusk and @bariweiss: were any political candidates — either in the US or elsewhere — subject to shadowbanning while they were running for office or seeking re-election?’” Cheong asked in a tweet, tagging both Musk and journalist Bari Weiss.
“Yes,” Musk replied, confirming that Twitter has, as many have alleged, put its finger on the scale of conversations that were of importance to public interest, including in the context of elections.
Yes
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The Epoch Times has reached out to Twitter for comment.
Twitter ‘Has Interfered in Elections’
Musk did not go into further detail but he has previously said that Twitter had “failed” to be impartial in content moderation and “interfered in elections.”
“The obvious reality, as long-time users know, is that Twitter has failed in trust & safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections,” Musk said in a Nov. 30 post on Twitter.
In that message, Musk was responding to criticism from Twitter’s former head of site integrity Yoel Roth, who said during a recent interview at the Knight Foundation conference that he didn’t believe safety had improved on Twitter after Musk’s takeover.
Roth also said that he thinks Twitter blocking the explosive Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election was a mistake.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, the New York Post published a story about a laptop abandoned at a computer repair shop that purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden and contained emails suggesting that then-candidate Joe Biden had knowledge of, and was allegedly involved in, his son’s foreign business dealings.
President Joe Biden has repeatedly insisted he had no knowledge of or involvement in his son’s business operations.
U.S. President Joe Biden (L) waves alongside his son Hunter Biden after attending mass at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Johns Island, South Carolina on Aug. 13, 2022. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images) ‘Secret Blacklists’
Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press, released the second volume of the so-called “Twitter Files” on Dec. 8, revealing the social media platform’s “secret blacklists.”
Weiss has been working with Musk and independent journalist Matt Taibbi to disclose internal Twitter information regarding censorship.
The Twitter Files, Part Deux!! 🍿🍿 https://t.co/bH9UiTSEK2
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Twitter’s censorship methods, according to Weiss, included placing specific users on a “Trends Blacklist” or a “Search Blacklist.”
The popular Libs of TikTok account, as well as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, are among the users who were secretly added to the “Trends Blacklist” by the company.
Bhattacharya was put on the list because he stated that children would be harmed by COVID-19 lockdowns. This action stopped his tweets from trending, Weiss said.
Conservative talk show presenter Dan Bongino was also put on a so-called “Search Blacklist,” Weiss disclosed.
Weiss also noted that conservative activist Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was put on a “Do Not Amplify” list.
4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.” pic.twitter.com/AdOK8xLu9v
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The second installment comes just a week after Taibbi published, with Musk’s endorsement, details about the social media platform’s decision to suppress the New York Post’s report on the contents of a laptop tied to Hunter Biden.
Republicans had long accused Twitter—and some media outlets—of suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, which included reporting that bolstered claims that the president lied when he said he had no involvement in his son’s overseas business dealings.
In order to suppress the Hunter Biden report, Twitter executives marked it as “unsafe,” limiting its spread, and even blocking it from being directly shared via the platform’s direct message function, Taibbi said in comments on the first installment of the disclosures. He also noted that such extreme restrictions were normally reserved for content such as child pornography.
‘Shadow Banning’
Weiss, in comments on the latest Twitter Files release, detailed various ways that Twitter employees acted to suppress speech on the platform.
“A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users,” Weiss said on Twitter.
“Twitter once had a mission ‘to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.’ Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected,” she added.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 16:20 - BlackRock: Prepare For Recession "Unlike Any Other"… And What Worked Before "Won't Work Now"
BlackRock: Prepare For Recession “Unlike Any Other”… And What Worked Before “Won’t Work Now”
The world’s largest investment manager has gone all in – and says a global recession is right around the corner. What’s more, the financial tricks deployed by Central Banks in the past ‘won’t work this time.’
According to BlackRock, the global economy has entered a phase of elevated volatility, and that a recession is imminent due to central banks aggressively boosting borrowing costs to tame inflation. Their actions, according to a team of BlackRock strategists, will ignite more market turbulence than ever before.
“Recession is foretold as central banks race to try to tame inflation. It’s the opposite of past recessions,” the team wrote In their 2023 Global Outlook (embedded below), which says that the global economy has already exited a four-decade period of stable growth and inflation, and has now entered a period of heightened instability.
And when things get bad, “Central bankers won’t ride to the rescue when growth slows in this new regime, contrary to what investors have come to expect. Equity valuations don’t yet reflect the damage ahead.”
“What worked in the past won’t work now,” said the strategists. “The old playbook of simply ‘buying the dip’ doesn’t apply in this regime of sharper trade-offs and greater macro volatility. We don’t see a return to conditions that will sustain a joint bull market in stocks and bonds of the kind we experienced in the prior decade.”
So what can actually tame inflation? A deep recession, according to the report.
To navigate the coming storm, BlackRock recommends more frequent portfolio changes and taking a more “granular view on sectors, regions and sub-asset classes.”
Compounding the issue is aging workforces around the world – which is one key reason that the supply of US labor is struggling to keep up with demand.
The initial sharp drop was driven by Covid shutdowns: Many who lost their job didn’t look for another one right away given healthcare worries or care-giving responsibilities.
Some of that drop in the workforce has now unwound. But the yellow line shows that the part not made up is almost entirely down to aging – the increasing share of the population that is of retirement age – rather than pandemic-specific effects. That’s why we don’t expect an improvement in the participation rate from here, and so no material easing of the worker shortage that is contributing to inflation.
A New World Order – (of course)
According to BlackRock, “we’ve entered into a new world order,” in which “We see geopolitical cooperation and globalization evolving into a fragmented world with competing blocs.” The team further writes that geopolitical fragmentation is likely to foster “a permanent risk premium across asset classes, rather than have only a fleeting effect on markets as in the past.”
The warning from BlackRock echoes those from Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank – which have produced dire predictions ranging from a 20% stock plunges in 2023, to Goldman’s David Solomon seeing a 65% chance of recession.
“We don’t think equities are fully priced for recession,” said the BlackRock team. “Corporate earnings expectations have yet to fully reflect even a modest recession. This keeps us tactically underweight developed market equities.“
In short…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 16:01 - Stocks, Bonds, & Black Gold Battered In Ugly Week Ahead Of Fed
Stocks, Bonds, & Black Gold Battered In Ugly Week Ahead Of Fed
A relatively quiet (but weak) macro week (Jobs weak, inflation hot, surveys slump) and the pre-Fed blackout meant the combination of pre-holiday low liquidity and headline risk chopped market around intraday with stocks hurting (Small Caps and Big-Tech worst), bond yields higher (in the belly of the curve), and a bloodbath in black gold (as WTI fell to one-year lows).
US Macro Surprise data has drifted sideways for almost three months now – Goldilocks-like perhaps…
Source: Bloomberg
But amid the sparse macro data (claims, PPI etc), the market’s expectations for The Fed’s terminal rate was unchanged and the market’s expectations for rate-cuts in H2 2023 also ended unchanged…
Source: Bloomberg
All the majors puked lower on the hotter than expected PPI this morning then the machines levitated things for a few hours until Europe was closed. Then the last 15 mins saw stocks puked to the lows of the day…
Small Caps were the week’s worst performers (down 5%), followed by Nasdaq and S&P and The Dow was the prettiest horse in the glue factory…
The S&P 500 held above its 100DMA…
All sectors ended the week in the red with Energy by far the worst. Utes outperformed with a very small loss on the week…
Source: Bloomberg
Tech has been outperforming energy stocks since the start of November…
Source: Bloomberg
US Treasuries were sold hard today, erasing all of the week’s gains for the long-bond, and leaving the rest of the curve notably higher in yield (belly underperforming)…
Source: Bloomberg
The yield curve (2s30s) ended flatter (more inverted) on the week, but barely after a big steepening day today post-PPI…
Source: Bloomberg
The dollar ended the week higher, but back in the range from Friday’s payrolls pump and dump)…
Source: Bloomberg
Cryptos were broadly unchanged on the week, despite some intraday volatility (BTC up marginally, ETH down marginally)…
Source: Bloomberg
Bitcoin ended the week back above $17,000…
Source: Bloomberg
Oil prices are down 6 straight days, with WTI ending the week down over 12% with a $70 handle – its worst week since the first week of April – and back at one-year lows (-2% YoY, first decline since Jan 2021)…
As fund managers abandon black gold…
Source: Bloomberg
Gold ended the week unchanged, above $1800, while silver outperformed modestly…
Finally, will we get a sense of deja vu all over again next week when The Fed hikes?
Source: Bloomberg
Would that kind of downsing be enough to tighten financial conditions and allow Powell to lift his boot from the market’s neck?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/09/2022 – 16:00
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...
