- London's Trains Packed With Commuters As PM Johnson Lifts 'Stay Home' Order
London’s Trains Packed With Commuters As PM Johnson Lifts ‘Stay Home’ Order
Last night, UK PM Boris Johnson laid out the broad strokes of the first phase of Britain’s reopening even as the outbreak inside the country continues to rage. He accompanied the announcement, which focused on 5 simple principles with promises of more details to come on Monday, by unveiling a new slogan “stay alert.”
Almost immediately, officials in Scotland and Wales criticized the slogan for potentially promoting bad behavior. On Monday, the British tabloid press published some reports suggesting they might have been correct.
According to Metro UK, many trains on London’s underground train network known popularly as “the Tube” bustling with commuters Monday even as Johnson urged that every Briton who could continue to work from home to continue to do so.
If commuters had no other choice, Johnson promised trains would be running, but during his speech, he beseeched Britons to travel to work by any other means – either in a private car, or – better yet – by biking or walking – if they absolutely needed to return to the office now that the ‘Stay at Home’ order has been lifted.
Everyone has a role to play in helping to control the virus by staying alert and following the rules.
This is how we can continue to save lives as we start to recover from coronavirus.#StayAlert pic.twitter.com/2z9yl1Fxs4
— Boris Johnson #StayAlert (@BorisJohnson) May 10, 2020
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Unsurprisingly, roads heading into London from the suburbs were also jammed.
One doctor who spoke with Metro said he worried commuters would ignore the government’s guidance, despite Johnson’s insistence that fines would be substantially increased for anybody caught violating the rules during the second phase.
“Based on what we have been seeing in London over the past few weeks about some people not following the rules, I am not sure they will follow the two-metre distancing rule when travelling” he said. Traffic in London as some workers encouraged to return to jobs.
“We have only just got past the peak (of the virus) and I think we need to see a longer period of things being sustained at this level. If we stop social distancing, we are going to see it back in three weeks.”
Construction worker Peter Osu, 45, complained about the crowding on the tube during an interview with a Metro UK reporter at Waterloo station, where every other bench was taped off: “I am nervous about going back because I have a family and they have been isolating since the start. I feel like I am now putting them at risk. People were sitting close together on the Jubilee line (Tube) and others were having to stand. There was no two-metre spacing. This is the first day, can you imagine what it’s going to look like by the end of the week? ‘It is not right at all. I listened to the Prime Minister yesterday and I thought it does not make sense.”
That certainly doesn’t bode well for the national figures, as infections have largely been centered in London.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 02:45 - Who Controls The British Government Response To COVID-19, Part 1
Who Controls The British Government Response To COVID-19, Part 1
Authored by Vanessa Beeley via Off-Guardian.org,
“The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants”
As Britain hurtles headlong towards neo-feudalist governance with heightened surveillance, micro-management of society and an uptick in fascistic policing of the draconian measures imposed to combat the “threat” of Covid–19, it is perhaps time to analyse the real forces behind this “new normal”.
There is now serious doubt over the correlation between lockdown and saving lives. Reality is creeping into the Covid–19 dialogue.
It is becoming apparent that people are getting sick because they are being isolated and effectively living under house arrest, condemned as “murderers” if they so much as think about breaking curfew, being snitched on by neighbours for “gathering” more than two people together in their back gardens.
The following graph was produced by UK Column and demonstrates the lack of correlation between lockdown and “saving lives”:
[click to enlarge]
The numbers game is acting in many instances as a smokescreen. It is impossible to rely upon “official” statistics, that vary wildly from one website to another: statistics that rely upon unreliable and sporadic testing procedures. and based upon death certificates that misrepresent the actual cause of death as Covid–19, regardless of pre-existing medical conditions.
Statistics, too, that were set in stone very early on in the development stages, when the perspective was limited and compressed, before a true picture could be seen. The newly emerging statistics are now increasingly undermining initial conclusions and pointing to the futility and negative consequences of lockdown.
NEW: Barclay Brothers Telegraph claiming an estimated 7,500 killed by coronavirus in UK care homes.
Boris Johnson government has not been revealing numbers to the media, claiming they couldn’t calculate them.
— Afshin Rattansi (@afshinrattansi) April 17, 2020
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It is now accepted that there is a high mortality rate among the elderly in care homes in the UK and globally — among the same elderly civilians who are being “asked” to sign DNRs (Do Not Resuscitate) forms.
This amounts to signing their own death warrant, should they present any of the Covid–19 symptoms. They will be neglected, isolated from their families when at their most vulnerable and left alone to die, even though it is possible that they have not contracted the virus.
Isolation is a proven silent killer. The UK govt is silent about the ‘expert’ estimate of 150,000 deaths as a result of the lockdown, not the virus. This figure may prove as unreliable as the estimates ‘modelled’ by Imperial College. But isn’t it time to break the silence?
— John Pilger (@johnpilger) April 16, 2020
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Instead of offering proactive and positive suggestions that will enable our immune systems to combat the disease, the British Government is ensuring conditions that will suppress immune systems to dangerous levels and create the perfect environment for Covid–19 to flourish.
Britain has now received an estimated 1.4 million new benefit claims for welfare payments, “about seven times the normal level”. The government has pledged to bail out “80% of pay of workers who are temporarily laid off” but I have personally spoken to self-employed individuals who find themselves falling between the cracks that qualify them for financial support and now face an indefinite period of time without income.
These measures are being imposed in a country that, since 2012, has seen an exponential growth in child poverty to potentially sub-Victorian levels.
In March 2019, the number of children living in “absolute poverty” grew by a staggering 200,000 in a twelve-month period, to a total of 3.7 million. How will this number be further impacted by lockdown?
How did we arrive at this point? Who steered the UK Government towards this questionable and alarmist lockdown policy?
The unexamined assumption is that conclusions were formed on the basis of sound epidemiological analysis and research by doctors and scientists who care about our welfare.
The reality is what we will examine in this article. Neil Ferguson, a professor at Imperial College, was responsible for the modelling of a response to Covid–19. His virtual model was recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and it passed through into policy with virtually no scrutiny.
Ferguson’s dramatic prediction of 500,000 deaths in the UK became the foundation of Boris Johnson’s U-turn from herd immunity to collective quarantine.
While some understood that Ferguson later reduced his mortality calculations, he actually doubled down on his projections on Twitter, insisting that without drastic lockdown measures being taken, the numbers would be even higher.
WHO IS NEIL FERGUSON?
Ferguson is acting director of the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium (VIMC), which is based at Imperial College in London. According to Ferguson’s biography on the website, “much of [his] work is applied, informing disease control policy-making by public and global health institutions.”
The professor who derailed Johnson’s semblance of “herd immunity” strategy is no stranger to controversy and is described as having a “patchy” record of modelling pandemics by one of his academic peers, Professor Michael Thrusfield of Edinburgh University, an expert in animal diseases.
Ferguson was instrumental in the modelling of the British Government’s response to Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) in 2001, which Thrusfield describes as “not fit for purpose” (2006) and “seriously flawed” (2012).
Thrusfield has highlighted the limitations of Ferguson’s mathematical modelling methods, and applied the doubts he expressed over FMD to the current Covid–19 “crisis” response.
An estimated twelve million animals were slaughtered as a result of Ferguson’s 2001 initiative. The farming community was devastated by suicides and bankruptcies that irretrievably altered the landscape of British agriculture — forcing healthy smallholdings into agri-corporate mergers and empowering the EU central governance in the agricultural sector.
Image copyright: Nick Green
Insight: Slaughtered on Suspicion, a documentary made by UK Column in 2015, provides a shocking insight into the suffering precipitated by Ferguson’s model and the “new normal” imposed upon Britain’s farming community. The following is a statement made by one of the contributors to the programme:
12,000,000 animals [Meat & Livestock Commission statistic] were slaughtered but that did not include lambs at foot, aborted lambs, calves or piglets. Further, tens of thousands of chickens were slaughtered in the early months — on welfare grounds, apparently. 88% of all animals slaughtered had not contracted FMD
[source: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs].Great Orton airfield was used to slaughter sheep under the “voluntary” cull: that was anything but voluntary, and farmers not participating were ruthlessly threatened. There was only one mild case of FMD recorded from the thousands of blood tests done at Great Orton
[source: DEFRA].There was a travelator that ran from the slaughter tent at Great Orton to the graves. This ran 16 hours a day, transporting “dead” young lambs. Slaughtermen working there told me that many of the lambs were buried alive.
The man that advised Blair during this fiasco was, as many will know, Prof. Ferguson of Imperial College. He was [reportedly] sacked by DEFRA late on during the epidemic, but the damage had been done! Prof Ferguson was awarded an OBE in 2002 for his work during FMD 2001.”
[Emphasis added]In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would die from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, better known as “mad cow disease”, increasing to 150,000 if the epidemic expanded to include sheep.
The reality is:
Since 1990, 178 people in the United Kingdom have died from vCJD, according to the National CJD Research & Surveillance Unit at the University of Edinburgh.” [2017]
In 2005, Ferguson claimed that up to 200 million people would be killed by bird-flu or H5N1.
By early 2006, the WHO had only linked 78 deaths to the virus, out of 147 reported cases.
In 2009, Ferguson and his team at Imperial College advised the government that swine flu or H1N1 would probably kill 65,000 people in the UK.
In the end, swine flu claimed the lives of 457 people in the UK.
Now, in 2020, Ferguson and Imperial College have released a report which claims that half a million Britons and 2.2 million Americans may be killed by Covid–19.
The report has still not been peer-reviewed; despite this and Ferguson’s glaring record of mathematical sensationalism, the British Government has adopted the devastating socio-economic lockdown that Ferguson has proposed.
WHY IS THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT SO QUICK TO FOLLOW FERGUSON’S PLAN?
1. GAVI and Imperial College
The VIMC is hosted by the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College. VIMC is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and by “GAVI, the vaccine alliance” (GAVI’s own title for itself).
Bill and Melinda Gates began funding Imperial College in 2006, four years before the Gates Foundation launched the Global Health Leaders Launch Decade of Vaccines Collaboration (GHLLDVC) and one year after Ferguson had demonstrated his penchant for overblown projections on mortality numbers from H5N1.
Up to the end of 2018, the Gates Foundation has sponsored Imperial College with a whopping $185 million.
That makes Gates the second-largest sponsor, beaten to the top spot on the podium by the Wellcome Trust, a British research charity which began funding Imperial College prior to Ferguson’s FMD débâcle and which, by the end of 2018, had already provided Imperial with over $400 million in funding. I will examine the Wellcome Trust’s connections in part two of this series.
Wellcome trust also has a focus on global immunization programmes.
The Gates Foundation established the GHLLDVC in collaboration with the WHO, UNICEF and the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The following is taken from the Gates Foundation website:
The Global Vaccine Action Plan will enable greater coordination across all stakeholder groups – national governments, multilateral organizations, civil society, the private sector and philanthropic organizations — and will identify critical policy, resource, and other gaps that must be addressed to realize the life-saving potential of vaccines.
The Collaboration’s leadership council at the time included the Director-General of the WHO, the Director of NIAID, the Director of UNICEF, the President of Gates Foundation Global Health, and the Chair of the African Malaria Alliance.
The steering committee included the Director of Immunisation, the UK Department of Health, and many other representatives from the WHO, UNICEF and associated organisations. It is a cluster of immunisation-focused individuals controlling the policy of world health governing bodies, who claim to be neutral.
The WHO was nominated as the “directing and coordinating authority on international health within the United Nations system” and was set up to be responsible for “shaping the health research agenda”, among other tasks linked to the policy of global immunisation.
UNICEF, the “world’s largest provider of vaccines for developing countries” has on-the-ground access to children in over 150 territories and countries (2010).
We are already seeing the potential for some serious conflict of interest behind the Ferguson model on Covid–19, and this will become even more apparent as the connections are now made to an entire pharmaceutical complex potentially protecting its own interests over any genuine concerns for the health and welfare of global populations.
“Gavi is the Vaccine Alliance, which brings together public and private sectors with the shared goal of creating equal access to vaccines for children, wherever they live.” [click to enlarge]
GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance
GAVI is funded and partnered by the same network that forms the GHLLDVC, with some noticeable additions: the World Bank and donor/implementing country governments. The Gates Foundation is a primary sponsor, but is topped by the British Government, which was instrumental in creating GAVI and is its largest donor.
While many sectors of British society have seen their living standards plummet, with the elderly severely neglected, a National Health Service in decline and homelessness on the increase, the British Government, via UKAID, has pledged £1.44 billion to GAVI for 2016–2020 and will be hosting the 2020 GAVI pledging conference, which is due to take place in June 2020 to [emphasis added]:
mobilise at least US$ 7.4 billion in additional resources to protect the next generation with vaccines, reduce disease inequality and create a healthier, safer and more prosperous world.”
The conference promises to bring together political leaders, civil society, public and private donors, vaccine manufacturers and governments to support GAVI, the vaccine alliance — which boasts that it has “helped vaccinate almost half the world’s children against deadly and debilitating infectious diseases”.
This claim will be met with praise from the pro-vaccine lobby but concerns over the efficacy and safety of these mass vaccination programmes must be taken into account, particularly when being tested in poorer, developing countries.
Global vaccination market revenue worldwide is projected to reach $59.2 billion by 2020; this number may well increase with the arrival of Covid–19.
The British Government’s investment in GAVI alongside vaccine promoter Bill Gates must, again, raise the issue of conflicts of interest. To what extent is the British Government protecting its own assets in forcing the lockdown upon its population? Vaccines are set to be a major source of income for the world’s largest pharmaceutical corporations, and the British Government is invested in that lucrative future.
The GAVI replenishment conference is to be hosted by a British Government whose lockdown policy is effectively shattering the domestic economy and is collectively punishing the most vulnerable in British society.
When Bill Gates partnered with GAVI twenty years ago, he had been considering where next to focus his philanthropy and was “increasingly focusing on the power and potential of vaccines”.
It was Gates’ substantial sponsorship that launched GAVI, and ten years later Gates launched his own “vaccine decade” plan for the 2010s.
The Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP) 2012–2020, endorsed by the 194 member states participating in the World Health Assembly (2012), is led by the same members of the Gates “vaccine decade” consortium, promoted by the WHO, and brings together governments, elected officials, health professionals, academia, manufacturers, global agencies, research and development, civil society, media and the private sector — to promote global immunisation.
This is a profit-driven corporate complex harnessing the “humanitarian” sector to lend credence to the claims of philanthropy, or more realistically, philanthrocapitalism.
2. GAVI and ID2020
A glance at the partner page of the GAVI website reveals that not only is GAVI heavily invested in immunisation campaigns, it is also closely connected to the Gates, Microsoft and Rockefeller Foundation seed-funded ID2020 project (Digital Identity Alliance), which incorporates Accenture, Microsoft (Gates), Ideo-Org and Rockefeller Foundation into the GAVI alliance, all with ties to the ID2020 initiative.
ID2020 is promoting the concept that there is a need for universal biometric verification, because “to prove who you are is a fundamental and universal human right,” as asserted on the ID2020 website.
An article by journalist Kurt Nimmo for Global Research dismantles the “humanitarian” alibi for tyranny.
OffGrid Healthcare explains:
What they really want is a fully standardized data collection and retrieval format, and cross-border sharing of identities of the entire population of the planet, in order for the stand-alone AI-powered command center to work without a hitch, and for purposes of calculating everyone’s potential contribution, and threat to the system.
Nimmo describes the potential for Covid–19 to be used as cover for mandatory biometric ID. An April article carried by Reuters confirms the suspicion that biometric ID might soon be introduced, ostensibly to “help verify those who already had the infection and ensure the vulnerable get the vaccine when it is launched”. This may sound perfectly sensible to those who are buying the government strap-lines on Covid–19 but — as Nimmo warns us — “COVID–19 is the perfect Trojan horse for a control freak state itching to not only micromanage the lives of ordinary citizens but also ferret out critics and potential adversaries and punish them as enemies of the state.”
Prashant Yadav, senior fellow at the US-based Center for Global Development, has said [Emphasis added]:
Biometric IDs can be a gamechanger. They can help governments target population segments e.g healthcare professionals or the elderly population, verify people who have received vaccination, and have a clear record.
Such statements can easily be interpreted as the harbingers of mandatory vaccination and the inclusion of biometric ID in the “humanitarian” package.
Martin Armstrong of Armstrong Economics introduces an even more sinister projection into the mix.
Armstrong talks about a digital certificate that verifies you have been vaccinated, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Microsoft, which will merge with ID2020. Covid–19 will be exploited to encourage us to accept digital implants and tracking devices that will enable authorities to keep an eye on us.
Armstrong argues that just as 9/11 conditioned us to accept X-ray booths at airports, now we will be chipped alongside our dogs and cats.
At this point, it is worth remembering that UKAID is heavily involved in GAVI, and one presumes they are on board with the digital ID2020 project.
Rob Laurence, director at UK-based Innovate Identity, presented proposals for the future of digital identity back in June 2019. The UK Government Verify scheme was identified as a fledgling version of the future of digital ID.
Laurence describes the digital ID “ecosystem” that is emerging: Oliver Dowden, Minister for Implementation at the Cabinet Office (the British Government’s co-ordinating department), will form a new Digital ID Unit to “pave the way for the government to consume digital identities from the private sector”.
Laurence describes 2020 as the “now-or-never year for government and industry to collaborate” in the creation of an “interoperable digital identity market”.
Covid19 provides the opportunity that might just fulfil these predictions.
It is no coincidence that a British start-up — Microsoft-funded Onfido — has recently raised $100 million to “boost its ID technology” to enable the creation of “immunity passports” for governments “battling coronavirus”.
In December 2019, researchers at MIT created a “microneedle platform using fluorescent microparticles called quantum dots (QD) which can deliver vaccines and at the same time, invisibly encode vaccination history in the skin”: the QDs can be detected by specially adapted smartphones.
The “new normal” will mean we are tracked and monitored by our own communication systems to an even greater and more intrusive extent.
THE FUTURE IS BEING MODELLED — BUT NOT FOR OUR BENEFIT
In part one of this two-part series, my intention has been to raise questions over who is driving the British Government response to Covid–19. Those who have influenced the lockdown policy have very clear conflict of interest question marks over their agenda.
The scientific clique influencing government decisions is one that is incorporated into a for-profit Big Pharma industrial network which will, undeniably, benefit from the measures being taken by the British Government — a government that is financially embedded in the same complex.
Why are the views of epidemiologists, doctors, scientists, analysts and health advisors who challenge the lockdown being ignored or censored by the media and by government? Why is the government not widening the circle of advisors to take into account these opposing perspectives that might bring an end to the misery that is a consequence of enforced quarantine?
Off-Guardian has recorded these views here, here and here. It is also worth following Swiss Propaganda Research for regular updates on emerging analysis and statistics that you will not always find in the mainstream media.
World Economic Forum report on the psychological experiment that is the Covid19 lockdown.
Instead, the British Government is effectively endorsing the breeding of distrust in society, the erosion of public assembly, the isolation and state-sanctioned euthanasia of the elderly, the emerging police state, snitch lines, loss of dignity and livelihoods, greater dependency upon the state for survival, depression, suicide and voluntary incarceration.
An article in New York Times reports on the death toll in care homes which “reflect a global phenomenon” in a world under lockdown.
The UN has issued a warning that the economic downturn could “kill hundreds of thousands of children in 2020”.
Gates, the WHO, the British Government and UNICEF are focused on global immunisation for a “pandemic” that is not living up to the alarmist virtual projections sponsored by Gates and the Big Pharma complex, while children really will start to die from malnutrition, neglect and a myriad of consequence of extreme poverty generated by the “steepest downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s” (IMF).
In part two, I will delve deeper into the interlocking interests of state and private corporate sectors that should not be interfering in policies which affect the welfare of British citizens.
I will reveal how the same players are influencing the media response and ensuring that their interests are given the most powerful platforms to promote their agenda.
The questions must be asked: Who is really in charge of the Covid–19 response? Who benefits most? Who will suffer most from the long term consequences?
And who will provide respite from those consequences when the “pandemic” has disappeared from view?
* * *
This is part one of a two-part article. We’ll be running the second part tomorrow…
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 02:00 - US Army To Develop Wearable COVID-19 Detectors
US Army To Develop Wearable COVID-19 Detectors
With more than 5,000 service members infected with COVID-19, the Army has issued a contract notice on The System for Award Management (SAM) website, seeking “to develop a wearable diagnostic capability for the pre‐/very early‐symptomatic detection of COVID‐19 infection.”
The notice titled “MTEC-20-12-COVID-19_Diagnostics“ is a request for project proposals through the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium (MTEC), which was posted Monday on SAM. It says ten contracts totaling $25 million could be awarded in weeks to companies that can help the Army rapidly field wearable coronavirus detectors, a move that would be an early warning sign to spreading.
“There is a dire and urgent need for the development of rapid, accurate wearable diagnostics to identify and isolate pre-symptomatic COVID-19 cases and track/prevent the spread of the virus,” the notice read.
It said the bidder “must have an established manufacturing capability for the platform and assay kits on a large-scale.” Testing is expected to be “minimally invasive,” and the device should not affect a soldier’s general movement while in the field.
“Physiologic surveillance for COVID-19 positive individuals that do not yet show clear medical symptoms is an ultimate goal. Physiological signatures, therefore, must produce predictive algorithms that can be tied into validated and relevant antibody/molecular measurements,” the notice went on to say.
The Army is after a solution that addresses the need for early detection and can determine if someone is a carrier of the virus without showing symptoms. The new device should include several indicators, “but are not limited to, physiological markers of early COVID symptomology—elevated temperature/fever, respiratory difficulty/cough, etc.—antibodies against COVID-19, and molecular biomarkers indicative of COVID-19 exposure.”
The device must already be proven technology that is “currently been in development or commercially available,” the notice read.
The Army is in urgent need of these wearable virus detectors before the second coronavirus wave strikes, with some estimates pointing to a surge in cases and deaths later this year.
President Trump, in late March, signed an executive order that gives him the ability to activate up to one million troops. Considering the Army is now searching for virus detectors that can be easily fielded, does that mean future lockdowns could involve the military testing civilians?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 01:00 - Declassified Doc Exposes FBI Spy Saying Israeli Mossad Spies Need To Be F**king Kicked Out Of USA, Executed
Declassified Doc Exposes FBI Spy Saying Israeli Mossad Spies Need To Be F**king Kicked Out Of USA, Executed
According to a secret transcript that was just declassified, one of the spies the FBI deployed against George Papadopoulos said that Israelis and U.S. Jews are “all f—ing spies,” referred to them as “f—ing c—suckers,” and said they should all be executed. The declassified transcript published on Tuesday revealed a “confidential human source” (CHS) from the FBI quoted as saying that Israeli Mossad spies need to be fucking kicked out of USA.
The 206-page transcript captured conversation between Papadopoulos and an unidentified CHS, seemingly across one continuous episode on November 26, 2016. George Demetrios Papadopoulos is a former member of the foreign policy advisory panel to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
On October 5, 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents about the timing and the possible significance of his contacts in 2016 relating to U.S.–Russia relations and the Donald Trump presidential campaign. He served twelve days in federal prison, then was placed on a 12-month supervised release.
During his supervised release from prison he participated in the filming of a still-unreleased docuseries. In March 2019, Papadopoulos released his book, Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump.
Papadopoulos is code-named “Crossfire Typhoon” (CT) throughout the transcript and referred to as such by an unidentified FBI agent at the beginning of the transcribed recording.
Foreign-policy advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump’s election campaign George Papadopoulos and his wife, Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos, arrive at U.S. District Court for his sentencing in Washington on Sept. 7, 2018. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
The CHS is quoted as saying, “No fucking Russians here that aren’t fucking…same with the Israelis they’re all fucking spies. Those fucking cocksuckers. They should execute them all.”
“I can smell an Israeli from a mile away, dude,” said the CHS in another moment. “I can tell you who is fucking Israeli.”
The CHS joked about being extradited to Israel. “Yeah I’m-I’m saying you probably fucking…you’re probably working out a deal with them [Mossad] motherfuckers on me [to] be fucking extradited to Israel.”
When Papadopoulos said he dated an Israeli girl, the CHS disparaged Russian Jews as “fake Jews.”
PAPADOPOULOS: I-I was actually dating a girl, the numb-, the assistant to the number three Israeli Embassy.
CHS: You were dating?
PAPADOPOULOS: Yeah.
CHS: Assistant.
PAPADOPOULOS: She was the assistant.
CHS: What the fuck you were dating her for?
PAPADOPOULOS: She was probably was Mossad and that, that’s why she took a [UI].
…
PAPADOPOULOS: Russian Jews.
CHS: Russian Jew, those fake Jews.
PAPADOPOULOS: No, but who was born and raised in Israel.
CHS: Yeah, she’s a fake Jew.
The FBI claimed to have begun surveillance of the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016. Papadopoulos told the Daily Caller that the CHS is named Jeffrey Wiseman.
Last year, one of the most high-profile Israeli spy network in the US was brought down by American intelligence. This secret high-society elite group was recently exposed on the global stage with the arrest of the sex-trafficking kingpin Jeffrey Epstein.
Welcome to the #HellfireClub – an 18th century British secret high-society elite club using perverted sexual desires as a cover to corrupt and infiltrate higher echelons of power in Govt (including India). The source of political sex-scandals.https://t.co/9uHKnSLNZo
— GreatGameIndia (@GreatGameIndia) July 13, 2019
Although, Epstein is portrayed as just another billionaire pedophile, he was actually a high-class Israeli spy. He used perverted sexual desires as a cover to corrupt and infiltrate higher echelons of power in government and businesses (including in India). This is the source of political sex-scandals and video-tapes which surface now and then when someone refuses to obey orders.
Read the full transcript below:
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 00:05 - Fed Will Start Buying Bond ETFs Tuesday; Blackrock To Make Over $15 Million In Fees
Fed Will Start Buying Bond ETFs Tuesday; Blackrock To Make Over $15 Million In Fees
Last Monday, in response to a Gundlach tweet in which the bond king said “I am told the Fed has not actually bought any Corporate Bonds via the shell company set up to circumvent the restrictions of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913” the New York Fed announced on its website that it expects to begin purchasing eligible ETFs – most notably the LQD and JNK – as part of its emergency lending programs in “early May.”
And yet, day passed, and then another, and another, and suddenly early May turned into mid May and… still nothing.
Until today when the Fed announced late in the day that the facility designed to purchase eligible corporate debt from investors will launch on May 12, bringing the most controversial part of the US central bank’s emergency coronavirus lending program – one which not even Bernanke dared to activate at the depths of the financial crisis perhaps realizing that there would be no extrication from that particular moral hazard – online following weeks of anticipation.
The Fed’s Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility “will begin purchases of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on May 12” the New York Fed website said, nearly two months after it was was first announced in late March, and served a key role in keeping financial markets relatively calm since then.
The NY Fed then again lists the ETFs that will be eligible for purchase:
As specified in the term sheet, the SMCCF may purchase U.S.-listed ETFs whose investment objective is to provide broad exposure to the market for U.S. corporate bonds. The preponderance of ETF holdings will be of ETFs whose primary investment objective is exposure to U.S. investment-grade corporate bonds, and the remainder will be in ETFs whose primary investment objective is exposure to U.S. high-yield corporate bonds. The SMCCF will consider several additional factors in determining which ETFs will be eligible for purchase. Those considerations include: the composition of investment-grade and non-investment-grade rated debt, the management style, the amount of debt held in depository institutions, the average tenor of underlying debt, the total assets under management, the average daily trading volume, and leverage, if any.
As the Fed further adds:
To expedite implementation, the SMCCF will begin by transacting with Primary Dealers that meet the Eligible Seller criteria and that have completed the Seller Certification Materials. Additional counterparties will be included as Eligible Sellers under the SMCCF, subject to adequate due diligence and compliance work.
We previously listed all the ETFs that the Fed will likely acquire via Blackrock.
And speaking of Blackrock, the Fed also posted to its website the 66-page investment management agreement with BlackRock, the world’s biggest manager, which is incidentally also the world’s biggest manager of ETFs, and which last month said explicitly that it would frontrun the Fed’s bond purchases, layering conflicts of interest upon conflict of interest, but who cares any more.
The document offered more information on the strategy the Fed would pursue:
Corporate-debt buying, including via ETFs, will occur in three stages, according to the agreement: a “stabilization” phase, an “ongoing monitoring” phase, and a “reduction in support” phase.
“Purchases will be focused on reducing the broad-based deterioration of liquidity seen in March 2020 to levels that correspond more closely to prevailing economic conditions,” the document said. It listed an array of metrics that would guide investments, including transaction costs, bid-ask spreads, credit spreads, volatility and “qualitative market color.”
“Once market functioning measures return to levels that are more closely, but not fully, aligned with levels that correspond to prevailing economic conditions, broad-based purchases will continue at a reduced, steady pace to maintain these conditions.”
The document also explained how much the Fed will pay Blackrock for engaging in perfectly risk-free purchases of ETFs at the Fed’s command. In other words, not only will Blackrock frontrun the Fed, but the Fed will pay Blackrock for the privilege.
Blackrock’s compensation for doing something the NY Fed’s desk is perfectly capable of doing itself (furthermore, since it only has to buy and never has to sell, the Fed can just hire any millennial on tweetdeck – they have precisely the required skill set; now if selling is ever required the Fed may have trouble finding traders that actually are familiar with that particular skill, but we digress). Here the key fees are:
Fixed SMCCF Program Management Fee, as follows:
An AUM-Based SMCCF Program Management Fee, as follows:
An SMCCF Asset Management Fee, as follows:
And an SMCCF Cash Management Fee:
So in addition to earning over $5MM just for just sitting there, looking pretty over for the next 12 months (and this program will last far, far longer than that), BlackRock will also make – assuming only payments under the AUM-Based SMCCF Program Management fee and the SMCFF Asset Management Fee and ignoring any cash AUM-linked payments – approximately $7.5 million on the former, as asset purchases cap $350BN, and another $3.5 million on the latter, with a $250BN cap. In short, Blackrock is set to make over $15 million for simply waving bond ETFs in on behalf of the Federal Reserve.
Since such a role has neither custody risk nor transaction risk, we look forward to the Congressional hearings in which Larry Fink, that noble crusader for the common man, explains why US taxpayers had to pay him billions and billions for doing, well, pretty much nothing.
Oh, and all of this of course excludes all the profits that Blackrock will pocket from simply purchasing ETFs on its own account ahead of the Fed, something which Blackrock’s head of global allocation team, Rick Reider last month admitted the world’s largest asset manager will do.
Below we attach the full Schedule D (pdf link here) listing all the payments that will be due to Blackrock, so that readers can be shocked at their own pace.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 23:31 - "OBAMAGATE!" Trump Tweets Tucker Carlson's Crushing Breakdown Why The Former President Should Be Panicking
“OBAMAGATE!” Trump Tweets Tucker Carlson’s Crushing Breakdown Why The Former President Should Be Panicking
Why is former President Obama calling forth all his defensive resources now? Why did former national security advisor Susan Rice write her CYA letter? Why have republicans in congress not been willing to investigate the true origins of political surveillance? What is the reason for so much anger, desperation and opposition from a variety of interests?
In a single word in a single tweet tonight, President Trump explained it perfectly – with help from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s detailed breakdown” “OBAMAGATE!”…
OBAMAGATE! pic.twitter.com/pFbb6hgDhF
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2020
As around 2:15 in the clip above, Carlson explains that then president of the United States Barack Obama turned to the head of the FBI – the most powerful law enforcement official in America, and said “Continue to secretly investigate my chief political rival so I can act against him.”
Comey’s response? “Yes, sir.”
Having watched that clip in detail, here is ‘sundance’ from TheConservativeTreehouse.com laying out the details surrounding political surveillance in the era of President Obama…
With the release of recent transcripts and the declassification of material from within the IG report, the Carter Page FISA and Flynn documents showing FBI activity, there is a common misconception about why the intelligence apparatus began investigating the Trump campaign in the first place. Why was Donald Trump considered a threat?
In this outline we hope to provide some fully cited deep source material that will explain the origin; and specifically why those inside the Intelligence Community began targeting Trump and using Confidential Human Sources against campaign officials.
During the time-frame of December 2015 through April 2016 the NSA database was being exploited by contractors within the intelligence community doing unauthorized searches.
On March 9, 2016, oversight personnel doing a review of FBI system access were alerted to thousands of unauthorized search queries of specific U.S. persons within the NSA database.
NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers was made aware.
Subsequently NSA Director Rogers initiated a full compliance review of the system to identify who was doing the searches; & what searches were being conducted.
On April 18, 2016, following the preliminary audit results, Director Rogers shut down all FBI contractor access to the database after he learned FISA-702 “about”(17) and “to/from”(16) search queries were being done without authorization. Thus begins the first discovery of a much bigger background story.
When you compile the timeline with the people involved; and the specific wording of the resulting review, which was then delivered to the FISA court; and overlay the activity that was taking place in the GOP primary; what we discover is a process where the metadata collected by the NSA was being searched for political opposition research and surveillance.
Additionally, tens-of-thousands of searches were identified by the FISA court as likely extending much further than the compliance review period: “while the government reports it is unable to provide a reliable estimate of the non compliant queries since 2012, there is no apparent reason to believe the November 2015 [to] April 2016 period coincided with an unusually high error rate”.
In short, during the Obama administration the NSA database was continually used to conduct surveillance. This is the critical point that leads to understanding the origin of “Spygate”, as it unfolded in the Spring and Summer of 2016.
It was the discovery of the database exploitation and the removal of access as a surveillance tool that created their initial problem. Here’s how we can tell.
Initially in December 2015 there were 17 GOP candidates and all needed to be researched.
However, when Donald Trump won New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina the field was significantly whittled. Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich and Carson remained.
On Super Tuesday, March 2, 2016, Donald Trump won seven states (VT, AR, VA, GA, AL, TN, MA) it was then clear that Trump was the GOP frontrunner with momentum to become the presumptive nominee. On March 5th, Trump won Kentucky and Louisiana; and on March 8th Trump won Michigan, Mississippi and Hawaii.
The next day, March 9th, NSA security alerts warned internal oversight personnel that something sketchy was going on.
This timing is not coincidental. As FISA Judge Rosemary Collyer later wrote in her report, “many of these non-compliant queries involved the use of the same identifiers over different date ranges.” Put another way: attributes belonging to a specific individual(s) were being targeted and queried, unlawfully. Given what was later discovered, it seems obvious the primary search target, over multiple date ranges, was Donald Trump.
There were tens-of-thousands of unauthorized search queries; and as Judge Collyer stated in her report, there is no reason to believe the 85% non compliant rate was any different from the abuse of the NSA database going back to 2012.
As you will see below the NSA database was how political surveillance was being conducted during Obama’s second term in office. However, when the system was flagged, and when NSA Director Mike Rogers shut down “contractor” access to the system, the system users needed to develop another way to get access.
Mike Rogers shuts down access on April 18, 2016. On April 19, 2016, Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson’s wife, Mary Jacoby visits the White House. Immediately thereafter, the DNC and Clinton campaign contract Fusion GPS… who then hire Christopher Steele.
Knowing it was federal “contractors”, outside government with access to the system, doing the unauthorized searches, the question becomes: who were the contractors?
The possibilities are quite vast. Essentially anyone the FBI or intelligence apparatus was using could have participated. Crowdstrike was a known FBI contractor; they were also contracted by the DNC. Shawn Henry was the former head of the FBI office in DC and is now the head of Crowdstrike; a rather dubious contractor for the government and a politically connected data security and forensic company. James Comey’s special friend Daniel Richman was an unpaid FBI “special employee” with security access to the database. Nellie Ohr began working for Fusion-GPS on the Trump project in November 2015 and she was a CIA contractor; and it’s entirely likely Glenn Simpson or people within his Fusion-GPS network were also contractors for the intelligence community.
Remember the Sharyl Attkisson computer intrusions? It’s all part of this same network; Attkisson even names Shawn Henry as a defendant in her ongoing lawsuit.
All of the aforementioned names, and so many more, held a political agenda in 2016.
It seems likely if the NSA flags were never triggered then the contracted system users would have continued exploiting the NSA database for political opposition research; which would then be funneled to the Clinton team. However, once the unauthorized flags were triggered, the system users (including those inside the official intelligence apparatus) needed to find another back-door to continue… Again, the timing becomes transparent.
Immediately after NSA flags were raised March 9th; the same intelligence agencies began using confidential human sources (CHS’s) to run into the Trump campaign. By activating intelligence assets like Joseph Mifsud and Stefan Halper the IC (CIA, FBI) and system users had now created an authorized way to continue the same political surveillance operations.
When Donald Trump hired Paul Manafort on March 28, 2016, it was a perfect scenario for those doing the surveillance. Manafort was a known entity to the FBI and was previously under investigation. Paul Manafort’s entry into the Trump orbit was perfect for Glenn Simpson to sell his prior research on Manafort as a Trump-Russia collusion script two weeks later.
The shift from “unauthorized exploitation of the NSA database” to legally authorized exploitation of the NSA database was now in place. This was how they continued the political surveillance. This is the confluence of events that originated “spygate”, or what officially blossomed into the FBI investigation known as “Crossfire Hurricane” on July 31.
If the NSA flags were never raised; and if Director Rogers had never initiated the compliance audit; and if the political contractors were never blocked from access to the database; they would never have needed to create a legal back-door, a justification to retain the surveillance. The political operatives/contractors would have just continued the targeted metadata exploitation.
Once they created the surveillance door, Fusion-GPS was then needed to get the FBI known commodity of Chris Steele activated as a pipeline. Into that pipeline all system users pushed opposition research. However, one mistake from the NSA database extraction during an “about” query shows up as a New Yorker named Michael Cohen in Prague.
That misinterpreted data from a FISA-702 “about query” is then piped to Steele and turns up inside the dossier; it was the wrong Michael Cohen. It wasn’t Trump’s lawyer, it was an art dealer from New York City with the same name; the same “identifier”.
A DEEP DIVE – How Did It Work?
Start by reviewing the established record from the 99-page FISC opinion rendered by Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer on April 26, 2017. Review the details within the FISC opinion.
I would strongly urge everyone to read the FISC report (full pdf below) because Judge Collyer outlines how the DOJ, which includes the FBI, had an “institutional lack of candor” in responses to the FISA court. In essence, the Obama administration was continually lying to the FISA court about their activity, and the rate of fourth amendment violations for illegal searches and seizures of U.S. persons’ private information for multiple years.
Unfortunately, due to intelligence terminology Judge Collyer’s brief and ruling is not an easy read for anyone unfamiliar with the FISA processes. That complexity also helps the media avoid discussing it; and as a result most Americans have no idea the scale and scope of the Obama-era surveillance issues. So we’ll try to break down the language.
Top Secret FISA Court Order… by The Conservative Treehouse on Scribd
For the sake of brevity and common understanding CTH will highlight the most pertinent segments showing just how systemic and troublesome the unlawful electronic surveillance was.
Early in 2016 NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers was alerted of a significant uptick in FISA-702(17) “About” queries using the FBI/NSA database that holds all metadata records on every form of electronic communication.
The NSA compliance officer alerted Admiral Mike Rogers who then initiated a full compliance audit on/around March 9th, 2016, for the period of November 1st, 2015, through May 1st, 2016.
While the audit was ongoing, due to the severity of the results that were identified, Admiral Mike Rogers stopped anyone from using the 702(17) “about query” option, and went to the extraordinary step of blocking all FBI contractor access to the database on April 18, 2016 (keep these dates in mind).
Here are some significant segments:
The key takeaway from these first paragraphs is how the search query results were exported from the NSA database to users who were not authorized to see the material. The FBI contractors were conducting searches and then removing, or ‘exporting’, the results. Later on, the FBI said all of the exported material was deleted.
Searching the highly classified NSA database is essentially a function of filling out search boxes to identify the user-initiated search parameter and get a return on the search result.
♦ FISA-702(16) is a search of the system returning a U.S. person (“702”); and the “16” is a check box to initiate a search based on “To and From“. Example, if you put in a date and a phone number and check “16” as the search parameter the user will get the returns on everything “To and From” that identified phone number for the specific date. Calls, texts, contacts etc. Including results for the inbound and outbound contacts.
♦ FISA-702(17) is a search of the system returning a U.S. person (702); and the “17” is a check box to initiate a search based on everything “About” the search qualifier. Example, if you put a date and a phone number and check “17” as the search parameter the user will get the returns of everything about that phone. Calls, texts, contacts, geolocation (or gps results), account information, user, service provider etc. As a result, 702(17) can actually be used to locate where the phone (and user) was located on a specific date or sequentially over a specific period of time which is simply a matter of changing the date parameters.
And that’s just from a phone number.
Search an ip address “about” and read all data into that server; put in an email address and gain everything about that account. Or use the electronic address of a GPS enabled vehicle (about) and you can withdraw more electronic data and monitor in real time. Search a credit card number and get everything about the account including what was purchased, where, when, etc. Search a bank account number, get everything about transactions and electronic records etc. Just about anything and everything can be electronically searched; everything has an electronic ‘identifier’.
The search parameter is only limited by the originating field filled out. Names, places, numbers, addresses, etc. By using the “About” parameter there may be thousands or millions of returns. Imagine if you put “@realdonaldtrump” into the search parameter? You could extract all following accounts who interacted on Twitter, or Facebook etc. You are only limited by your imagination and the scale of the electronic connectivity.
As you can see below, on March 9th, 2016, internal auditors noted the FBI was sharing “raw FISA information, including but not limited to Section 702-acquired information”.
In plain English the raw search returns were being shared with unknown entities without any attempt to “minimize” or redact the results. The person(s) attached to the results were named and obvious. There was no effort to hide their identity or protect their 4th amendment rights of privacy; and database access was from the FBI network:
But what’s the scale here? This is where the story really lies.
Read this next excerpt carefully.
The operators were searching “U.S Persons”. The review of November 1, 2015, to May 1, 2016, showed “eighty-five percent of those queries” were unlawful or “non compliant”.
85% !! “representing [redacted number]”.
We can tell from the space of the redaction the number of searches were between 10,000 and 99,999 [six digits]. If we take the middle number of 50,000 – a non compliant rate of 85 percent means 42,500 unlawful searches out of 50,000.
The [six digit] amount (more than 10,000, less than 99,999), and 85% error rate, was captured in a six month period, November 2015 to April 2016.
Also notice this very important quote: “many of these non-compliant queries involved the use of the same identifiers over different date ranges.” This tells us the system users were searching the same phone number, email address, electronic identifier, repeatedly over different dates.
Specific person(s) were being tracked/monitored.
Additionally, notice the last quote: “while the government reports it is unable to provide a reliable estimate of” these non lawful searches “since 2012, there is no apparent reason to believe the November 2015 [to] April 2016 coincided with an unusually high error rate”.
That means the 85% unlawful FISA-702(16)(17) database abuse has likely been happening since 2012.
2012 is an important date in this database abuse because a network of specific interests is assembled that also shows up in 2016/2017:
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Who was 2012 FBI Director? Robert Mueller, who was selected by the FBI group to become special prosecutor in 2017.
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Who was Mueller’ chief-of-staff? Aaron Zebley, who became one of the lead lawyers on the Mueller special counsel.
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Who was 2012 CIA Director? John Brennan (remember the ouster of Gen Petraeus)
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Who was ODNI? James Clapper.
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Remember, the NSA is inside the Pentagon (Defense Dept) command structure. Who was Defense Secretary? Ash Carter
Who wanted NSA Director Mike Rogers fired in 2016? Brennan, Clapper and Carter.
And finally, who wrote and signed-off-on the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment and then lied about the use of the Steele Dossier? The same John Brennan, and James Clapper along with James Comey.
Tens of thousands of searches over four years (since 2012), and 85% of them are illegal. The results were extracted for?…. (I believe this is all political opposition use; and I’ll explain why momentarily.)
OK, that’s the stunning scale; but who was involved?
Private contractors with access to “raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to FBI’s requests“:
And as noted, the contractor access was finally halted on April 18th, 2016.
[Coincidentally (or likely not), the wife of Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson, Mary Jacoby, goes to the White House the very next day on April 19th, 2016.]
None of this is conspiracy theory.
All of this is laid out inside this 99-page opinion from FISC Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer who also noted that none of this FISA abuse was accidental in a footnote on page 87: “deliberate decisionmaking“:
This specific footnote, if declassified, could be a key. Note the phrase: “([redacted] access to FBI systems was the subject of an interagency memorandum of understanding entered into [redacted])”, this sentence has the potential to expose an internal decision; withheld from congress and the FISA court by the Obama administration; that outlines a process for access and distribution of surveillance data.
Note: “no notice of this practice was given to the FISC until 2016“, that is important.
Summary:
The FISA court identified and quantified tens-of-thousands of search queries of the NSA/FBI database using the FISA-702(16)(17) system. The database was repeatedly used by persons with contractor access who unlawfully searched and extracted the raw results without redacting the information and shared it with an unknown number of entities.
The outlined process certainly points toward a political spying and surveillance operation; and we are not the only one to think that’s what this system is being used for.
Back in 2017 when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was working to reauthorize the FISA legislation, Nunes wrote a letter to ODNI Dan Coats about this specific issue:
SIDEBAR:
To solve the issue, well, actually attempt to ensure it never happened again, NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers eventually took away the “About” query option permanently in 2017. NSA Director Rogers said the abuse was so inherent there was no way to stop it except to remove the process completely. [SEE HERE] Additionally, the NSA database operates as a function of the Pentagon, so the Trump administration went one step further. On his last day as NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers -together with ODNI Dan Coats- put U.S. cyber-command, the database steward, fully into the U.S. military as a full combatant command. [SEE HERE] Unfortunately it didn’t work as shown by the 2018 FISC opinion rendered by FISC Judge James Boasberg [SEE HERE]
There is little doubt the FISA-702(16)(17) database system was used by Obama-era officials, from 2012 through April 2016, as a way to spy on their political opposition.
Quite simply there is no other intellectually honest explanation for the scale and volume of database abuse that was taking place; and keep in mind these searches were all ruled to be unlawful. Searches for repeated persons over a period time that were not authorized.
When we reconcile what was taking place and who was involved, then the actions of the exact same principle participants take on a jaw-dropping amount of clarity.
All of the action taken by CIA Director Brennan, FBI Director Comey, ODNI Clapper and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter make sense. Including their effort to get NSA Director Mike Rogers fired.
Everything after March 9th, 2016, had a dual purpose: (1) done to cover up the weaponization of the FISA database. [Explained Here] Spygate, Russia-Gate, the Steele Dossier, and even the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (drawn from the dossier and signed by the above) were needed to create a cover-story and protect themselves from discovery of this four year weaponization, political surveillance and unlawful spying. Even the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel makes sense; he was FBI Director when this began. And (2) they needed to keep the surveillance going.
The beginning decision to use FISA(702) as a domestic surveillance and political spy mechanism appears to have started in/around 2012. Perhaps sometime shortly before the 2012 presidential election and before John Brennan left the White House and moved to CIA. However, there was an earlier version of data assembly that preceded this effort.
Political spying 1.0 was actually the weaponization of the IRS. This is where the term “Secret Research Project” originated as a description from the Obama team. It involved the U.S. Department of Justice under Eric Holder and the FBI under Robert Mueller. It never made sense why Eric Holder requested over 1 million tax records via CD ROM, until overlaying the timeline of the FISA abuse:
The IRS sent the FBI “21 disks constituting a 1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The transaction occurred in October 2010 (link)
Why disks? Why send a stack of DISKS to the DOJ and FBI when there’s a pre-existing financial crimes unit within the IRS. All of the evidence within this sketchy operation came directly to the surface in early spring 2012.
The IRS scandal was never really about the IRS, it was always about the DOJ asking the IRS for the database of information. That is why it was transparently a conflict when the same DOJ was tasked with investigating the DOJ/IRS scandal. Additionally, Obama sent his chief-of-staff Jack Lew to become Treasury Secretary; effectively placing an ally to oversee/cover-up any issues. As Treasury Secretary Lew did just that.
Lesson Learned – It would appear the Obama administration learned a lesson from attempting to gather a large opposition research database operation inside a functioning organization large enough to have some good people that might blow the whistle.
The timeline reflects a few months after realizing the “Secret Research Project” was now worthless (June 2012), they focused more deliberately on a smaller network within the intelligence apparatus and began weaponizing the FBI/NSA database. If our hunch is correct, that is what will be visible in footnote #69:
How this all comes together in 2019/2020
Fusion GPS was not hired in April 2016 just to research Donald Trump. As shown in the evidence provided by the FISC, the intelligence community was already doing surveillance and spy operations. The Obama administration already knew everything about the Trump campaign, and were monitoring everything by exploiting the FISA database.
However, after the NSA alerts in/around March 9th, 2016, and particularly after the April 18th shutdown of contractor access, the Obama intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to create a legal albeit ex post facto justification for the pre-existing surveillance and spy operations. Fusion GPS gave them that justification in the Steele Dossier.
That’s why the FBI small group, which later transitioned into the Mueller team, were so strongly committed to and defending the formation of the Steele Dossier and its dubious content.
The Steele Dossier, an outcome of the Fusion contract, contains three insurance policy purposes: (1) the cover-story and justification for the pre-existing surveillance operation (protect Obama); and (2) facilitate the FBI counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign (assist Clinton); and (3) continue the operation with a special counsel (protect both).
An insurance policy would be needed. The Steele Dossier becomes the investigative virus the FBI wanted inside the system. To get the virus into official status, they used the FISA application as the delivery method and injected it into Carter Page. The FBI already knew Carter Page; essentially Carter Page was irrelevant, what they needed was the FISA warrant and the Dossier in the system {Go Deep}.
The Obama intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to give them a plausible justification for already existing surveillance and spy operations. Fusion-GPS gave them that justification and evidence for a FISA warrant with the Steele Dossier.
Ultimately that’s why the Steele Dossier was so important; without it, the FBI would not have a tool that Mueller needed to continue the investigation of President Trump. In essence by renewing the FISA application, despite them knowing the underlying dossier was junk, the FBI was keeping the surveillance gateway open for Team Mueller to exploit later on.
Additionally, without the Steele Dossier the DOJ and FBI are naked with their FISA-702 abuse as outlined by John Ratcliffe.
Thankfully we know U.S. Attorney John Durham has talked to NSA Director Mike Rogers. In this video Rogers explains how he was notified of what was happening and what he did after the notification.
* * *
After tonight’s tweets from President Trump, we should expect a full-court press from ‘the resistance’ to distract from the cracks appearing in the former President’s halo of invincibility…
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 23:25 -
- New Orleans Uses Prison Labor After Garbagemen Go On Strike
New Orleans Uses Prison Labor After Garbagemen Go On Strike
Dozens of striking New Orleans garbagemen who are demanding hazard pay and paid sick leave due to the coronavirus have been replaced by inmates from a nearby prison, according to Payday Report. The workers were employed by the temp service People Ready, which contracts with New Orleans Metro Disposal.
“$10.25 to pick up trash – come on now. It’s contaminated now with coronavirus,” strike leader Gregory Woods told the outlet.
Instead of meeting their demands, which include proper safety equipment, $15 an hour, and fixing broken trucks, the city is using workers from the prison in nearby Livingston Parish.
“Metro Services Group has long been an advocate of helping persons who had been incarcerated return to society in a meaningful and productive way,” said the city’s sanitation services in a statement. “Metro makes no apologies for this policy as a core element of our commitment to being good corporate citizens.”
Under state rules, prison inmates, employed by Metro Services, will be paid only 13% of what garbage workers, who only make $10.25-an-hour, are being paid.
“I really don’t like it,” says Woods. “They are really trying to use those dudes to do our job, and they paying them way less than they were paying us.”
“They are trying to show the world that people will still do our job without giving us the proper protective equipment,” says Woods. “All of it is a hustle for them, a scam for them. They saving money that’s all they are doing – that’s all it is”. –Payday Report
“We need them to provide us with the proper PPE — to all the workers immediately and consistently and on a daily basis,” said fired worker Jonathan Edward, who added “Provide us with our hazardous pay due to the pandemic of COVID-19.”
Sanitation workers in New Orleans were fired bc they were on strike to get proper PPE, $15 an hour, and sick leave. Metro Service Group has replaced them with prison labor they pay $1.20 an hour. This should make you outraged. pic.twitter.com/ogrxRGYcQ5
— the movement continues (@sumthingnew12) May 11, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Worker Harold Peters says he wants his job back if they can reach an agreement.
“We’re out here. We’re doing our job. We take pride in our work,” he said, adding “Actually, we can’t wait to get back to work. We just want to be compensated.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 23:05 - As COVID-19 Spreads In Meat Plants, 200 USDA Inspectors Test Positive
As COVID-19 Spreads In Meat Plants, 200 USDA Inspectors Test Positive
Authored by Lillianna Byington of FoodDive,
Summary:
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A U.S. Agriculture Department spokesperson told Food Dive that 197 field employees in the Food Safety and Inspection Service are absent from work after testing positive for coronavirus and 120 FSIS employees are under self-quarantine due to contact with or exposure to COVID-19 as of May 5.
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The American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing 6,500 federal food inspectors, said three inspectors have died in Illinois, Mississippi and New York, Meat and Poultry reported.
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“FSIS has taken the unprecedented step of protecting its employees by allowing those inspectors in high-risk health categories to self-certify with their supervisor and excusing them from inspection duties until the risk from COVID-19 decreases or is mitigated,” the spokesperson told Food Dive. “Additionally, FSIS now has enough masks and face coverings on hand to keep our inspection personnel supplied for the next few months. Despite these numbers our dedicated personnel are still meeting all of their inspection responsibilities so that consumers can continue to enjoy a safe supply of meat and poultry products.”
As coronavirus has spread rapidly among meat plants across the country, it’s not just the workers that are getting infected. Many people have strongly criticized the industry’s response for waiting too long to implement safety precautions and close processing plants as thousands have tested positive for coronavirus and at least 20 workers have died. But the inspectors checking these facilities and their products are not immune to the virus either.
FSIS inspectors are classified as essential workers, so they have continued to travel to monitor these facilities. But as the plants become coronavirus hot spots, reports have shown the inspectors haven’t been able to protect themselves adequately.
A FSIS inspector interviewed in Government Executive said moving inspectors exposed to an outbreak at one plant to another location isn’t safe because they could then be coronavirus carriers and further the spread.
Last month, Politico reported many of the inspectors were expected to find their own protective gear since USDA wasn’t able to secure face masks for all of its workers. In April, USDA said it would give a $50 reimbursement for inspectors to find their own, according to Politico. But now the department says it has enough masks.
Since more than 300 inspectors have either tested positive or self quarantined, that can make it challenging to inspect every plant. Recent closures, however, could make that easier. More than 20 meatpacking plants, including facilities run by Tyson Foods, JBS USA, Smithfield Foods and Cargill, have closed temporarily or indefinitely following pressure from local authorities and their own workforce. But as plants start to reopen, the smaller FSIS workforce could weigh on meat processors.
Two weeks ago, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring meat plants as “critical infrastructure” using the Defense Production Act to keep these facilities open and help prevent shortages. But as plants reopen, inspectors will need to travel to them and there is still risk of the virus continuing to spread.
The new executive order puts USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue in charge of coordinating with companies to reopen or continue operations during the pandemic. Perdue previously said he anticipated plants would reopen in “days not weeks.” Already, a major beef and pork plant for Tyson reopened with limited production last week after nearly 900 of its workers tested positive. A Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where hundreds contracted the virus, also reopened with limited staff last week.
Several labor groups have criticized the USDA, asking if it can’t protect its own employees from the virus, how can it protect workers? ”The health and safety of federal inspectors and plant workers is in the hands of an industry that the administration is now pressuring to stay open, no matter the costs,” Paula Schelling, acting president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 45, which represents 6,500 federal food inspectors, said in a release.
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Occupational Safety and Health Administration created guidelines calling for distancing and other safety measures, there are no requirements forcing companies to reconfigure facilities. And if inspectors continue to catch the virus traveling from plant to plant, they could risk spreading it themselves, or if even more get sick, then there may not be enough inspectors to properly check each facility. It’s just the latest hurdle to challenge the meat industry hit hard during the recent pandemic.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 22:45 -
- Disinfecting Drones Could Be MLB's Solution To Reopen Stadiums
Disinfecting Drones Could Be MLB’s Solution To Reopen Stadiums
A startup in New York must be closely watching the response efforts seen in Asia and Europe because any country decimated by the virus tends to deploy an army of robot drones with sprayer devices to disinfect public areas. These drones have been seen in China, South Korea, Italy, Spain, Germany, and will be shortly coming to the US.
Syracuse-based EagleHawk One, Inc. has joined the battle against coronavirus and mounted a sprayer device on one of its drones to disinfectant stadiums, a move the company believes could support efforts in reopening America.
“As a team, we just kind of took a step back and said, ‘How can we help be part of the solution going forward with COVID-19,'” CEO Patrick Walsh told local newspaper Syracuse, indicating that his company has been gearing up in the last several months to fight the virus with technology.
Walsh’s drones are a variant of the ones seen overseas. In China, many of the drones we observed had sprayer devices completely contained underneath the belly of the drone, with a 5-8 gallon container of disinfectant. EagleHawk One’s have the disinfectant stored on the ground and is pumped to the drone through a hose. A second drone flies near the disinfecting drone to hold the hose and prevent it from getting tangled on seats or other objects.
EagleHawk drone disinfecting seats at Sahlen Field in Buffalo. h/t EagleHawk Walsh said the disinfecting drone could cover a large stadium, outdoor public area, and or other indoor facilities. He said his company is trying to market the system to colleges, sports teams, and minor leagues so they can safely reopen facilities.
“We’re getting strong interest now, but I think everybody’s in a waiting game, unfortunately,” he said.
The company has tested the disinfecting system at several stadiums, including KeyBank Center in Buffalo, Sahlen Field in Buffalo, and Oncenter War Memorial Arena in Syracuse.
EagleHawk drone carrying hose for disinfecting drone at Oncenter Arena in Syracuse. h/t EagleHawk Walsh said using drones to disinfect thousands of seats is a much better solution than employing dozens of workers on the ground — this is cost-cutting and time-savings, he added.
“Say you have a hockey game at the War Memorial,” he said. “We would come out that evening or the next morning, do the cleaning and have it ready to go for the next day,” he said.
He also said spraying with drones is much safer than having workers manually disinfect each seat.
“Now, people won’t be directly exposed,” said Walsh. “The drone will do the job.”
Watch EagleHawk operate the drone at the Oncenter War Memorial Arena:
And with Major League Baseball owners proposing to start games in July – EagleHawk One’s drones could be the perfect solution to reopen stadiums. After all, life is boring as hell without sports.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 22:25 - Yuan, Futures Slide After Trump Orders Retirement Fund Investment In Chinese Stocks Blocked
Yuan, Futures Slide After Trump Orders Retirement Fund Investment In Chinese Stocks Blocked
Having threatened last week that “COVID reparation” would be paid one way or another – and following Peter Navarro’s comments echoing the same rhetoric this morning – FOX Business reports that President Trump is moving ahead with his plans to block a government retirement fund from investing in Chinese equities considered a national security risk.
As we detailed previously, Trump made his initial threats from the Rose Garden at the White House two weeks ago after he was pressed by a reporter over a German newspaper report suggesting that China should be issued a $160 billion invoice for the impact on Europe’s economy.
Since then plans have been strawman’d, escalating up to last Wednesday’s threat that the Trump admin is planning an executive order to block a 2017 decision that The Thrift Savings Plan, the federal government’s retirement savings fund, would transfer a massive $50 billion to an international fund which would mirror the MSCI All-Country World Index.
The issue being China’s addition to the index, and thus the fund being forced to allocate significant capital to the Chinese stock markets, at a time when the gloves between the two nations are clearly off.
In one letter written Monday, obtained exclusively by FOX Business, national security adviser Robert O’Brien and National Economic Council Chair Larry Kudlow write to U.S. Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia stating that the White House does not want the Thrift Savings Plan, which is a federal employee retirement fund, to have money invested in Chinese equities.
Specifically, the letter directly links China’s handling of COVID-19 as one of several reasons why investment in Chinese companies should not occur.
It says the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board is “Departing from the Board’s established index for the International Stock Investment Fund (I Fund) to track one that maintains Chinese equities is risky and unjustified.”
In a second letter, FOX Business reports that Scalia writes to Michael Kennedy, the chairman of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, sharing the Kudlow/O’Brien letter noting the two have “grave concerns with the planned investment on grounds of both investment risk and national security.”
460987415 Sec Scalia to Cha… by Zerohedge on Scribd
The letter concludes by saying that moving the assets out of a certain fund is “at the direction of President Trump.”
Needless to say, the optics of the US halting capital from entering China would be staggering and could result in a reversion of China-bound capital flows across all Western countries until the current war of words between Trump and Xi rages.
The main reaction so far is a drop in US equity futures…
And some weakness in yuan…
The only problem is that this particular war of words could last a long time, since there is no longer any impetus to kiss and make up, and if anything, Trump will only escalate the anti-China sentiment into the election (and after), to keep pounding that the collapse resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic is not his fault, but rather Beijing’s, even as China pursues a mirror image approach, blaming the US for launching the pandemic (and perhaps as we saw tonight, taking its retaliation against US allies like Australia).
Additionally, Trump knows The Fed will defend his stock market (he does not need a ‘trade deal’ to levitate it) into the election, giving him leverage in any war of words (or deeds) against China.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 22:07 - PBOC To Cut Rates Next: China CPI Huge Miss, PPI Prints At 4 Year Low
PBOC To Cut Rates Next: China CPI Huge Miss, PPI Prints At 4 Year Low
Heading into today’s Chinese inflation print, the bond market was sending a mixed message: while consensus expected that China’s economy would be hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, the yield on China’s government bonds climbed to the highest level in nearly two months, suggesting either the worst from the deflationary drag was now behind China, or was the result of expectations for a large supply increase later this month.
In retrospect, it was the former, because moments ago China’s NBS reported that in April, CPI rose just 3.3%, sliding 1% from March and not only a huge miss to consensus of 3.7%, but missing the lowest estimate (the range was 3.4% to 4.3%). This was the lowest print since September 2019 when China was suffering from an acute surge in food prices driven by pork hyperinflation (the result of another virus).
The bulk of the miss was due to a drop in food inflation, which dropped from 18.3%YoY to 14.8% vs March (a -3%MoM decline), with pork prices falling 7.6% as supply continues to come to market just as demand is fleeing said market. There was also weakness in transportation and recreation segments, reflecting subdued activity despite China’s bombastic reopening.
Meanwhile, factory gate prices, or Producer Price Inflation a proxy for corporate profits, plunged deeper into the red, sliding to -3.1%, more than double the March decline of -1.5%, missing consensus estimate of a -2.5% drop, and the lowest print since April 2016.
And since PPI is a close proxy for industrial profits which as discussed recently are in freefall, it is very likely that we will witness a record low PPI print as soon as next month.
And while China’s accelerating disinflation is bad news not only for the country but also the entire world, as China was critical during the last financial crisis do unleash a global reflationary wave across the globe, the fact that China is also succumbing to lower prices has very adverse consequences for global growth.
There is a silver lining: as we wrote earlier today when looking at China’s credit creation, the elevated CPI inflation in recent months had been an unfavorable factor for monetary policy (even though it has largely been due to virus shock impacts such as supply shock to food). However, as the PBOC noted over the weekend in its quarterly monetary policy report – in which it reaffirmed its expansionary stance by promising stronger monetary policy action ahead – CPI inflation has started to go downward, and inflation expectations are currently stable.
As a result, with inflation now sliding fast the biggest hurdle before the PBOC for a wholesale rate cut is now gone, and instead of using a targeted approach to injecting liquidity in the system via new yuan loans, local bond issuance and the occasional RRR cut, the central bank will very soon enter the comfort zone where it too follows the rest of the world in cutting rates sharply lower in hopes of stimulating the economy.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 22:07 - Snyder: It's Much Worse Than You Are Being Told
Snyder: It’s Much Worse Than You Are Being Told
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
For a long time I warned that our economic bubble would burst and that we would plunge into a nightmarish economic collapse. Now it has happened, and it turns out that fear of COVID-19 was the “black swan event” that triggered the collapse. The ironic thing is that COVID-19 is not even close to the worst thing that is going to happen to us. But it was more than enough to topple our incredibly fragile economic system, and now tens of millions of Americans are deeply suffering. On Friday, the April jobs report was released, and it was the worst jobs report in U.S. history by a very, very wide margin. According to the official numbers, 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs during the month, and the unemployment rate shot up to 14.7 percent. During the last recession, the unemployment rate peaked at about 10 percent, and we have already left that number in the dust.
The figures that we are seeing now are truly, truly horrifying, and what is even more frightening is that they aren’t even that accurate.
But don’t take my word for it.
On Friday, the U.S. Labor Department publicly admitted that the true unemployment rate in April was closer to 20 percent…
Millions of U.S. residents were counted as employed in April despite having no job, suggesting April’s true unemployment rate was closer to 20%, much higher than the official 14.7% reported, the Labor Department said Friday.
The jobless rate should have included people on temporary unpaid leave, furloughed because of the coronavirus pandemic, the government said.
I applaud the Labor Department for trying to be honest. In the report, they openly admitted that an “additional 7.5 million workers” should have been classified as unemployed…
But responses to the survey by which the data was collected show 11.5 million people were categorized as employed but absent from work because of vacation, parental leave or other reasons, but including 8.1 million absent for “unspecified” reasons, a group that usually numbers about 620,000.
“One assumption might be that these additional 7.5 million workers …should have been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff,” a note attached to the government’s jobs report Friday said.
If those workers had been correctly classified, the official unemployment rate would have been about 19.5 percent, and that would have put us solidly in Great Depression territory.
But others have looked at the numbers and calculated that the true rate of unemployment should be even higher than that.
For example, Standard Chartered has calculated that the true rate of unemployment could be as high as 27.5 percent…
While it is true that what the BLS reported that the April unemployment rate (UR) was less than expected (14.7% versus consensus of 16.0%) and the drop in payroll employment of 20.5 million was also less than the 22.0 million expected, Standard Chartered bank has calculated that adjustments to the headline unemployment rate push the effective number of unemployed to 42 million and the effective UR rate to 25.5%, higher even than the U-6 underemployment rate of 22.8%. Worse, if one treats underemployed in line with the U-6 methodology, the true April unemployment number would rise to an mindblowing 27.5%.
So how did Standard Chartered arrive at those numbers? The following is how Zero Hedge explained it…
How does one get these numbers? As the bank’s chief FX strategist Steve Englander explains, start with the 23.1 million unemployed as published by BLS. To this add 8.1mn people who have dropped out of the labor force since February (previously the labor force had been growing steadily, so these are likely unemployed).
Add back 7.5MM workers classified as ‘employed but not at work for other reasons’ – BLS states that these workers are likely misclassified as employed, when they are in fact unemployed. Involuntary part-time work for economic reasons has gone up by 6.6MM and we treat these as half-unemployed (i.e., a contribution of 3.3MM).
This totals almost 42 Million effectively unemployed.
And Standard Chartered is not the only one that has come up with such a high figure.
In fact, John Williams of shadowstats.com says that if honest numbers were being used that the U.S. unemployment rate would now be an eye-popping 35.4 percent.
Wow.
Of course everyone admits that things are really, really bad and that the numbers for next month are likely to be even worse.
If you can believe it, even White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett is admitting that the official unemployment rate is likely to surge above 20 percent in “May or June”…
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett believes the unemployment rate could rise above 20% and the worst job losses would come in “May or June” because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
When asked Sunday what the “bottom” of the country’s unemployment pain would be, Hassett, who advises the Trump administration on economic policy and is the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, told CBS’s “Face the Nation,” “to get unemployment rates like the ones that we’re about to see … which I think will climb up toward 20% by next month, you have to really go back to the Great Depression to see that.”
And even once this pandemic fades, many of those jobs won’t be coming back.
Initially, many employers had anticipated that they would be bringing all of their employees back following a short, severe crisis. But at this point reality is beginning to set in for many of them.
For example, a restaurant owner in Kentucky named Britney Ruby Miller has had to lower her expectations as this pandemic has dragged on…
In late March, Britney Ruby Miller, co-owner of a small chain of steakhouse restaurants, confidently proclaimed that once the viral outbreak had subsided, her company planned to recall all its laid-off workers.
Now? Miller would be thrilled to restore, by year’s end, three-quarters of the roughly 600 workers her company had to let go.
Yes, the state of Kentucky is starting to “reopen for business”, but for now her restaurants will “be limited to 33% of capacity” and there will be all sorts of other new expenses that Miller will be forced to deal with…
Yet business won’t be returning to what it was before. In Kentucky, the restaurants will be limited to 33% of capacity. They are putting six feet between tables in all their restaurants, thereby limiting seating. Miller estimates that the company’s revenue will plunge by half to three-quarters this year.
And expenses are rising because the company must buy face masks and other equipment for the workers it does recall and restock its food, drink, and equipment supplies.
There are very, very few restaurants that can be profitable under such circumstances.
Unless the state of Kentucky lifts those ridiculous restrictions, Miller may soon lose all of her restaurants and all of her employees may soon be permanently out of jobs.
Of course more layoff announcements just keep rolling in from all over America with each passing day. The following examples come from the Wall Street Journal…
This past week, General Electric Co., Uber Technologies Inc. UBER 6.01% and Airbnb Inc. said they would lay off thousands of workers. MGM Resorts International MGM 4.42% warned that some of the 63,000 employees it has furloughed may be let go permanently starting in August. Aerospace supplier Raytheon Technologies Corp., RTX 2.91% job-listings site Glassdoor and United Airlines Holdings Inc. UAL 11.74% also said in the past week that they had reduced jobs or planned to do so.
This is what an economic depression looks like, and it is going to be so incredibly painful.
And it is critical to understand that what we have experienced so far is just a warm-up act for the next chapters.
If you remember how bitter the last recession was, that should motivate you to take action to prepare for what is ahead, because this economic downturn is already even worse.
Yes, the months in front of us will be exceptionally challenging, but you can get through this. Things may look really bleak, but for now you just need to keep hanging in there.
There will be life on the other side, but your future may end up looking far different than you originally anticipated.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 22:05 - How To Get A Free Hotel Stay (And Free Drugs) In San Francisco
How To Get A Free Hotel Stay (And Free Drugs) In San Francisco
Even as San Francisco ushers its homeless population into ritzy hotels (at city expense), the city’s streets – particularly in districts like the Tenderloin – have seen a growing number of tents pitched by the homeless. And according to a lawsuit filed by law schools and the business community, the number of tents pitched by homeless in the district has climbed 300% since the coronavirus outbreak began.
We first reported on San Francisco’s latest genius policy idea – simultaneously wasting city money and burnishing its reputation for extravagant handouts to the homeless – more than a month ago, when the city first announced plans to place up to 3,000 homeless in hotels.
The lawsuit, which was filed by residents, businesses and the University of California Hastings College of Law, is pushing the city to clean up drug needles, human waste and liter in the streets.
But the demands also call for more sensible policies to be enacted to ensure that assistance can be provided for individuals living in sidewalk tents, arguing they are at an increased risk of contracting COVID-19. About 400 tents currently occupy the neighborhood as San Francisco has had 1,943 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. The virus has killed at least 34 people in the city.
Before rose-emoji Democratic socialists rush to slam these residents of the Tenderloin for acting like a bunch of rich liberal “NIMBYS” it’s worth hearing them out.
David Faigman, chancellor and dean at UC Hastings, which is heading the case in federal court, says the suit was filed because ‘our neighborhood has become a pandemic containment zone,’ reports Fox News.
“The city has basically cordoned off our area. Tents are blocking the streets. Tents are blocking doorways. There are needles in the streets. There’s open-air drug dealing” Faigman said.
The Tenderloin is home to more children, elderly persons and vulnerable populations per capita than any other neighborhood in the city.
Faigman adds that those populations are not being protected due to a lack of public COVID-19 testing.
He says residents fear the “virus is raging in the neighborhood.”
“There’s no other neighborhood in San Francisco that would tolerate that, and they would stand up and be counted. Tenderloin needs to stand up and be counted,” Faigman said.
Of course, if the city simply decides to settle this lawsuit by moving more homeless people from the neighborhood into ritzy hotels – where they are also sometimes supplied with drugs and alcohol – it would fully cement the following theory.
We present: How to get a free hotel room in San Francisco.
Step 1. Pitch a tent (preferably on a busy stretch of sidewalk).
Step 2. Harass the locals.
Step 3. Wait for the nice people from the city to take you to your new hotel suite home.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 21:45 - CrowdStrike Had No Evidence Of Russians Stealing Emails From DNC, Declassified Transcript Shows
CrowdStrike Had No Evidence Of Russians Stealing Emails From DNC, Declassified Transcript Shows
Authored by Ivan Pentchoukov via The Epoch Times,
The cybersecurity firm that investigated and remediated the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee’s servers in 2016 found no direct evidence that hackers stole any data or emails, according to a newly declassified interview transcript.
Shawn Henry, the president of CrowdStrike Services, told the House Intelligence Committee in late 2017 that his firm had no evidence that the alleged Russian hackers stole any data from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers.
“There’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated,” Henry said.
“There’s circumstantial evidence, but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.”
The publication by WikiLeaks of more than 44,000 emails from senior DNC officials became one of the biggest stories of the turbulent 2016 presidential race and served as the predicate for the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Special counsel Robert Mueller, who took over the probe in May 2017, eventually charged a group of Russians with hacking the DNC. The indictment alleges that the Russians hacked into the DNC and stole thousands of emails.
Prior to Mueller’s indictment, the public knowledge of the alleged DNC hack consisted of CrowdStrike’s brief report on the matter released on June 14, 2016, days after the firm claims to have ousted the hackers from the committee’s systems. The report makes no mention of stolen data, although Henry told The Washington Post in an article published the same day that the Russians allegedly “stole two files.”
Of the more than 44,000 emails published by WikiLeaks, more than 98 percent were sent and received by senior DNC officials between April 18 and May 25 of 2016. During more than half of that time frame, CrowdStrike had already installed its software on the DNC’s servers and was monitoring the network. The company did not respond to a request to explain how the emails were allegedly pilfered under its watch and why it failed to find evidence despite closely monitoring the servers with full awareness that hackers were present.
Mueller’s indictment alleges that Russian hackers broke into a DNC server and stole emails on or about May 25 and June 1 of 2016, roughly three weeks after CrowdStrike installed its software on the DNC servers and assessed that Russian hackers had gained access.
CrowdStrike’s involvement in the events surrounding the alleged DNC hack has long been the subject of controversy. Some facts about the firm’s involvement remain disputed by key players, including Henry, who told the House Intelligence Committee that he was not aware of the DNC or CrowdStrike denying any FBI requests related to the server hack. Henry’s testimony contradicted what then-FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017. Comey told senators that the FBI sought and was repeatedly denied access to the physical DNC servers.
Henry was not the only one to contradict Comey. The DNC’s director of technology, Andrew Brown, told the House Intelligence Committee the DNC fully cooperated with every FBI request. The DNC’s IT director, Yared Tamene, told the committee the FBI never requested access to the physical servers. And Michael Sussman, the DNC’s outside counsel, told the committee that the FBI declined a DNC offer for full access to its servers.
According to Tamene, the DNC handed over images of its servers to CrowdStrike, which then handed them over to the FBI in May and June of 2016. Mueller’s final report on the Russia investigation cites these images, alongside redacted grand jury material, as the source for the allegation that Russian hackers stole the DNC emails.
According to a CrowdStrike report cited by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) the hackers allegedly “staged” a trove of DNC files for exfiltration on April 22. According to the Netyshko indictment, the hackers allegedly “compressed gigabytes of data from DNC computers, including opposition research” and “later moved the compressed DNC data” to a computer leased in Illinois. The indictment does not allege that the hackers moved the files from the Illinois system.
The charges in the Netyshko indictment remain alleged as the case is unlikely to be heard before a court since the defendants are in Russia. The government recently moved to drop the charges against an alleged Russian social media influence operation after the defendants mounted a defense in court.
The special counsel concluded his 22-month investigation last year finding insufficient evidence that anyone on the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election.
The DNC did not respond to a request for comment.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 21:25 - Futures Slide After China Punishes Australia Over Coronavirus Origin Probe, Bans 35% Of Beef Imports
Futures Slide After China Punishes Australia Over Coronavirus Origin Probe, Bans 35% Of Beef Imports
At the end of April, China sparked a diplomatic row after it threatened Australia with an economic hit if it doesn’t stop investigating the origins, and Beijing handling, of the coronavirus pandemic. As a reminder, Chinese Ambassador Cheng Jingye told Sky News that while China’s response may not have been “perfect,” Australia’s inquiry was “dangerous,” and could lead to Chinese consumers avoiding Chinese exports and travel.
“So what is being done by the Australia side?” asked Cheng. “The proposition is a kind of teaming up with those forces in Washington and to launch a kind of political campaign against China. The Chinese public is frustrated, dismayed and disappointed with what Australia is doing now,” Cheng warned Asutralia, adding that “in the long term… if the mood is going from bad to worse, people would think ‘Why should we go to such a country that is not so friendly to China?’ The tourists may have second thoughts.“
“The parents of the students would also think whether this place which they found is not so friendly, even hostile, whether this is the best place to send their kids here,” Cheng continued (via the Daily Wire). “It is up to the people to decide. Maybe the ordinary people will say ‘Why should we drink Australian wine? Eat Australian beef?’“
Australia’s Foreign Minister Marise Payne hit back saying “Australia has made a principled call for an independent review of the COVID-19 outbreak, an unprecedented global crisis with severe health, economic and social impacts.”
“We reject any suggestion that economic coercion is an appropriate response to a call for such an assessment, when what we need is global co-operation.”
And in confirmation, on the very same day, Australia’s Daily Telegraph reported that Western intelligence agencies are “looking closely at the work of a senior scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Peng Zhou,” as part of a joint international investigation into the origins of COVID-19. The Australian newspaper Australian newspaper reported that “the Five Eyes intelligence agencies of Australia, Canada, NZ, UK and US, are understood to be looking closely at the work of a senior scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Peng Zhou, as they examine whether COVID-19 originated from a wet market or whether the naturally-occurring virus may have been released from the level four laboratory in Wuhan that was studying deadly coronavirus pathogens from bats.”
None of this went unnoticed by Beijing which, not used to having its threats ignored, has just escalated the trade war when it imposed an import ban on four Australian slaughterhouses, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports, adding that, as noted above, China’s trade barriers are “in retaliation to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s demand for an independent investigation into the COVID 19 outbreak.”
The blacklisting of the beef plants – three in Queensland and one in NSW – came just days after China flagged plans to introduce an 80% tariff on Australian barley, bringing the trade to its knees.
Three Queensland meatworks — Kilcoy Pastoral Company, the JBS owned Beef City, near Toowoomba, Dinmore, near Brisbane, and the New South Wales’ Northern Cooperative Meat Company at Casino — have been suspended by China; together the four “meatworks represent 35% of beef exports to China, a trade that had been on track to reach $3.5 billion this year”, the ABC reported.
The news, which came around the time BOJ governor Kuroda said that the global economy was rapidly worsening, sent S&P futures down 0.5% to session lows…
… and slammed the Aussie which dropped 50 pips on the news.
In fact, risk is off broadly with the New Zealand dollar down more than 0.5% while the Mexican peso, the euro, the British pound and the Canadian dollar are all suffering. S&P 500 futures are down about 0.5%, while WTI crude pared its earlier advance. Risk havens such as Treasury futures are up 5 ticks, the yen is climbing and gold trimmed losses.
And now that China has acted on its threat to retaliate against countries seeking a probe into origin of the coronavirus, we wonder how long before officials realize that where there is smoke, there is likely a fire burning all the evidence. Speaking of which, the Wuhan Institute of Virology still hasn’t been burned down, but considering China’s adamant refusal to open up the facility to global inquiry and its openly punitive act against those who accuse Beijing of being behind the pandemic, it is clearly time for a full-blown inquiry just in case some WIV scientist has another accident, this time involving a flamethrower and a few hundred pounds of explosives.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 21:11 - Modern Alchemy: This Is How Wall Street Converts A Portfolio Of 96% Junk Loans Into 87% Investment Grade Bonds
Modern Alchemy: This Is How Wall Street Converts A Portfolio Of 96% Junk Loans Into 87% Investment Grade Bonds
There is a reason why so much attention has fallen on Collateralized Loan Obligations since the March market crash, and it has more to do than merely why an AAA-rated CLO recently breached its overcollateralization test, something which as we first reported last month was previously viewed as impossible, or why as many as 1-in-3 CLOa are expected to limit payouts to holders of the riskiest and juiciest, tranches and after that impair the less risky tranches as well, resulting in billions in losses to CLO investors .
The reason is that, for lack of a better word, CLOs – like CDOs over a decade ago – are the financial equivalent of alchemy: these structured credit products take a portfolio of mostly junk loans – which are used to fund much of corporate America – and repackage them in such a way that the resulting product looks and feels much higher in credit quality, even though it consists of the exact same junky underlying securities, just presented in a different way.
The problem with such financial alchemy, of course, is that it does not actually work and instead it relies on a set of underlying conditions that will prevent any participant in the CLO market from yelling “the emperor is naked.” The most important such conditions are that risk assets continue to rally, that cash flows remain more or less in line with expectations, and that there are no major shocks to the system preventing wild rating swings forcing a repricing of the collateral stack.
Alas, March unleashed a “perfect storm” for CLOs where these three conditions hit at the exact same time, with risk assets plunging, cash flows for countless levered companies suddenly cut off, and rating agencies warning that hundreds of CLOs would face widespread downgrades. And suddenly this alchemy which facilitated the issuance of hundreds of billions in leveraged loans, resulted in billions in arrangement fees, and made dozens of hedge funds managers filthy rich, is nothing more than lipstick on a pig.
But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s answer the most important question: how does the CLO alchemy work in practice?
Take the example of the 2017 Long Point Park CLO. As part of the CLO process, the asset manager bought 361 loans worth $610 million, of which over 96% were rated junk. Having thus compiled a pool of almost entirely junk-rated loans, the manager then divided the scheduled payments from the CLO into tranches offering declining safety and increasing rates of return – starting at the top with AAA, then dropping to AA and so on, all that way to BBB, BB and B, before concluding with the riskiest, equity tranche, at the bottom. In such a way, 361 current-pay junk-rated loans were used to create a synthetic cap table, with the least risky on top and most risky at the bottom.
And here is the alchemy itself: since everything above the BB bond is by definition investment grade, this meant that a portfolio of mostly junk debt, thanks to the “magic” of CLO transformation which is also the process where investors collectively agree that the naked emperor is, in fact, dressed, ended up rated investment grade. In fact, as shown in the chart below, the original pool of a 96.4% junk-rated loans, was transformed into 86.6% investment grade synthetic bonds, and just 3.7% of the resulting “bonds” were rated speculative grade, or the same rating as the original assets!
Just like that, the Wall Street structured credit machine has converted a portfolio of 96.4% junk-rated loans into bonds that are just 3.7% junk rated, with 87% rated investment grade through the magic of “diversification”, even though all those synthetic “investment grade” bonds have as collateral junk assets which are all effectively worthless during a systemic crisis.
And here is where the perfect coronavirus storm came into play.
Thanks to the law of large numbers and simple statistics, when aggregated across a large enough number of loans, defaults become a perfectly predictable and mundane event where one can easily extrapolate both cumulative losses and severity given a set of economic conditions. That’s precisely why investors then end up buying any given CLO tranche: given an investor’s risk tolerance and assumptions about marginal changes in the global economy, a risk-tolerant investor such as a hedge fund, who believes an economic slowdown is nowhere near, can buy the lowly-rated B note and earn a respectable yield. Other, more risk-averse investors – such as Japanese pensioners or UK insurers – end up buying the AAA or AA rated tranches, as these effectively guarantee no impairments, absent some unprecedented shock.
However, for all that to work, the core assumption is no outlier events, no unexpected turmoil, no sudden stop in the global economy, and certainly no economic depression where over 20 million people suddenly lose their jobs. The coronavirus crisis was precisely that, and suddenly virtually every loan that comprised the original portfolio of underlying CLO “assets” is in danger of default – after all these are nothing more than junk-rated loans issued by heavily levered companies whose cashflows are very risky and which are critically reliant on the lack of major outlier events. Which also means that all the bonds that were issued by the CLO, from the “safest” AAA tranche to the riskiest Bs and the equity tranche, can very well be worthless in a cataclysmic stress event such as a global economic shutdown.
Now, since none of what happened in March was supposed to happen – or was even conceivable by the CLO arrangers or investors – let’s go back again to how a CLO is supposed to work in an ideal environment.
Traditionally, most CLOs limit the worst-rated loans to a maximum of 7.5% of the portfolio, the so-called CCC bucket. The limit is designed to protect investors from managers who may otherwise be tempted to take outsized bets to juice returns by loading the portfolio with higher-yielding, lower-rated loans (think Paulson’s double-dealing with Goldman on various pre-financial crisis synthetic CDOs). Any CCC loans over the limit will be suddenly subject to mark-to-market rules, which means they’ll be counted at the current trading value rather than at par, reducing the value of the entire portfolio. That puts the CLO at risk of failing a critical test that measures asset-coverage, also known as the over-collateralization, or OC test. Failing that test cuts off cash-flow streams to certain investors – a mechanism designed to protect those who purchase less-risky segments of the CLO bonds.
But while CLOs tripping B, BB and even BBB overcollateralization tests is a frequent event during economic recessions, what happened in late April was unprecedented: a CLO just failed its AAA overcollateralization test for the first time. The CLO deal in question is JFINC152, where downgrades had sent the reported CCC percentage to 19%, up 9%, and the result is that every single test cushion is now showing impaired results, from BB (-4.7%) all the way to AA (-0.6%).
Which brings us to that other key variable: ratings.
As Bloomberg reported last month, Ratings companies were roundly criticized during the last financial crisis in 2008 for acting too slow in sounding the alarm over deteriorating credit. To avoid the same criticism, this time they are being far more proactive and have embarked on an unprecedented downgrade spree. Through the middle of last month, S&P and Moody’s had already cut ratings on some 20% of the loans that are housed in CLOs. Many more are coming. The loan downgrades have come so fast, one after another, that Stephen Ketchum of Sound Point Capital Management likened it to a spill “at the Daytona 500, where the cars are crashing into each other.”
The barrage of loan downgrades will also prompt ratings agencies to downgrade the securities sold by the CLOs themselves, which are separate from the ratings on the underlying loans. On April 17, Moody’s surprised the market by putting $22 billion of US CLO bonds – nearly a fifth of all such bonds it grades – on a watchlist for a downgrade, saying that the expected losses on CLOs have increased materially. Some 40% of those securities had investment-grade ratings. Now keep in mind that among the buyers of CLOs are “rating-constrained” investors, such as pension funds, banks and insurance companies. If CLO bonds are downgraded – especially if they are cut from investment-grade to a junk tier – investors usually are forced to sell or risk higher capital charges.
The more the downgrades, the greater the losses to CLO investors. As of a month ago, the vast majority of CLOs had already blown past the CCC cap, up from just 8% that were breaching buckets earlier this year. In addition, some 20% of CLOs that submitted their monthly reports indicated that they are failing tests and will be turning off some cash flow to equity investors. And, as we first reported last month, things are so bad that a few were even failing tests that measure asset coverage of the highest rated AAA/AA tranches, according to an April 20 report from the bank.
Keep in mind that all that it taking place before the “biblical” wave of bankruptcies has even hit. Just wait a few months.
So what are portfolio managers to do? Strictly speaking they have two options: dump lower-rated loans at fire-sale prices, or cut cash payments to some of their investors. In the first case, selling loans can cause a CLO to crystallize losses – a likely event because lower-rated loan prices are lagging. The other path of turning the cash spigot off and shifting to payment-in-kind, or PIK, where interest is paid with more debt, can ravage equity returns, depress lower-rated CLO bonds and cut off a substantial portion of the CLO manager’s fees.
A look at CLO prices tracked by Palmer Square shows that there certainly has been a lot of dumping: and while higher rated tranche prices have enjoyed a modest rebound in recent weeks, the BB and BBB remain stuck deep underwater, because one of the few assets the Fed has not (yet) bailed out are CLOs.
And just like stocks, the underlying assumption for the rebound shown above is that the reopening from the coronavirus pandemic will be swift and V-shaped. We disagree, especially since the cascade of downgrades signaled that a wave of defaults is coming. As Bloomberg notes, analysts have hiked their expectations for how many of the underlying loans will sour, and lowered their forecasts for how much might be recovered from each bad loan, although as with equities, their forecasts remain anchored to a cognitive bias of normalcy, when the global economy is anything but. This means that US high-yield default rates could run to double-digits, perhaps surpassing heights of about 15% in the last financial crisis, while loan recovery rates could be slashed to far below the generic assumption of 60 cents on the dollar, and far lower than past norms. But, as Bloomberg correctly points out, history provides only a limited guide: The market for leveraged loans has exploded in recent years, with U.S. total issuance ballooning to $1.2 trillion as the market became the go-to place for private equity firms to finance debt-fueled buyouts.
And it all worked splendidly as long as nobody questioned the “alchemy” behind the biggest magic trick Wall Street pulled in the past decade. Alas, alchemy does not exist, and just like all those buying “gold” from carnival charlatans eventually realized they were holding on to lead, so all those who naively believed they had purchased investment grade securities are about to learn the hard way that what they really owned was, aptly-named, junk.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 21:05 - Alameda County Folds, Allows "Minimum Operation" After Elon Musk Defies Coronavirus Order And Dares Authorities To Arrest Him
Alameda County Folds, Allows “Minimum Operation” After Elon Musk Defies Coronavirus Order And Dares Authorities To Arrest Him
Update 1920 EST: It appears that Alameda County has folded to Elon Musk’s temper tantrum, now stating that Tesla can “maintain minimum operation” at its Fremont facility, according to a press release issued moments ago.
“We have notified Tesla that they can only maintain Minimum Basic Operations until we have an approved plan that can be implemented in accordance with the local public health Order,” the release says.
The county ended its press release sounding neutered: “We do not have any further comment and will not be taking any requests for interviews.”
The county said it “hoped” Tesla would comply without enforcement, to which one social media user wryly stated:
Overheard in 1940:
“France hopes Germany respects the Maginot line” https://t.co/LU7pOQlk6j
— Donut Shorts (@DonutShorts) May 11, 2020
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Some other theories emerged about the re-opening, including one theory that Alameda’s move will spark a larger legal dispute:
My take:$TSLA knows there is no way in hell they can comply with any semblance of new safety regulations. So they’re jumpstarting the legal battle early.
I mean, fuck, they couldn’t even comply with the pre-COVID safety regulations…$TSLAQ https://t.co/vBlx1FgINN
— Value Dissenter (@ValueDissenter) May 11, 2020
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Alameda County said earlier that it had reached a tentative agreement with Tesla to re-open on May 18, but that Tesla wanted its plant to open a week early to “prep parts” for production. According to KTVU, the county disagreed.
This is apparently what led to the confrontation between Elon Musk and California reaching a climax of sorts, when following earlier reports that Tesla had reopened the Fremont plant despite not having permission from Alameda County in California, and despite California Governor Newsom saying he “expects the Tesla factory can resume work next week”, Elon
Spartacuspardon Musk tweeted thatTesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.
Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2020
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In other words, Elon Musk, whose Tesla Fremont plant is now burning tens of millions of dollars every day that it is shut down, has unilaterally decided to violate California regulations and directives, and has forced his employees to work so the company resumes production just so that Tesla’s cash burn is not catastrophic and leads to a crash in the stock price.
It was also reported this afternoon by Business Insider that Tesla was telling employees that if they did not return to work, they would not receive benefits and would be unable to apply for unemployment.
“I love my job personally, just tired of feeling like a chess piece,” one employee told The Verge.
Meanwhile, Gov. Newsom – who earlier said he expects the Tesla plant to reopen later this week – said he didn’t know Tesla reopened its factory, in defiance of Alameda County’s Covid-19 health orders.
So what happens next, and will Elon Musk indeed be arrested? According to CNBC’s Lora Kolodny, a spokesperson for Fremont district supervisor Scott Haggerty told CNBC, “If Tesla violates the order, it would be Fremont Police Department’s decision to enforce or not enforce.”
Kolodny also notes that “it’s not clear to me why it would take an entire day for law enforcement to decide whether or not the Tesla factory is allowed to be open.” Furthermore, “now that Tesla is open can’t all other “non-essential businesses” open seeking equal treatment under the law? Gun shops & all?”
Musk’s “noble” stance promptly generated amusement on social networks:
What’s really pathetic here is that he thinks he’s being noble. https://t.co/b5GbxpOZ3l
— Linette Lopez (@lopezlinette) May 11, 2020
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With some comparing the billionaire who on occasions tends to abuse mind-altering substances before unleashing on twitter, to Nelson Mandela:
Every era gets the Mandela it deserves https://t.co/plNo0qOCuZ
— Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) May 11, 2020
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Yet others cut to the chase, asking Musk to “imagine if you valued your workers’ right to organize a union as much as you value your workers’ right to die to raise your stock prices”
Man, imagine if you valued your workers’ right to organize a union as much as you value your workers’ right to die to raise your stock prices
— Mike Drucker (@MikeDrucker) May 11, 2020
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Of course, that was in jest: after all Tesla has already warned any employees that do not follow it in its head on collision with California regulations that they risk losing their benefits, forcing them to be on Musk’s side.
Some asked if Musk is purposefully abandoning his newborn son with the unproounceable name to pursue a insurrection against California:
Why is it okay for @elonmusk to abandon his infant to do this? https://t.co/utd0Guu1z8
— melissa CANCEL ALL STUDENT DEBT NOW byrne (@mcbyrne) May 11, 2020
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Some thought Elon was just trying to escape dad duty:
Classic response to a newborn at home. https://t.co/IRwsTxKl1l
— Peter Forbes (@PeterSForbes) May 11, 2020
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One person called Tesla the “most amazing freak show in the history of modern American business”:
I know one thing for sure:$TSLA is the most amazing freak show in the history of modern American business!
Hell, Musk could give the “There Will Be Blood” guy a run for his money and that was a fictional character!
— Mark B. Spiegel (@markbspiegel) May 11, 2020
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Another person said that a fine from Alameda County would just be a “cost of doing business”:
Just so we’re all clear on what is happening, Musk has declared the laws of Alameda County don’t apply to him, and has restarted Fremont
If the County has the stones to sue him, he’ll run out the clock w/ appeals in court until the 18th. Any fines are a cost of doing business
— Donut Shorts (@DonutShorts) May 11, 2020
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Someone else reminded the Tesla board that Elon is their D&O insurer now:
A brief intermission in our coverage to remind you that the Tesla Board’s D&O insurance is self-funded using margin loans on $TSLA stock by a guy the SEC moved to permanently ban from public markets.
— The Final Straw (@evdefender) May 11, 2020
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Even as most were in it purely for the humor…
Can’t believe I’m actually agreeing with Elon Musk, but he is absolutely correct: please arrest Elon Musk. pic.twitter.com/NH1vyDoJHN
— Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) May 11, 2020
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I also ask that you arrest Elon Musk https://t.co/qB0q9gr19l
— Alex Yablon (@AlexYablon) May 11, 2020
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“I regret that I only have my freedom to sacrifice for the noble cause of producing $60,000 luxury cars!” #FacePalm https://t.co/2lUj12JpgX
— Diogenes (@WallStCynic) May 11, 2020
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It’s long past time I learned how citizens’ arrests work.
— Josh Olson (@joshuarolson) May 11, 2020
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… as #ArrestElonMusk is starting to trend.
And the most amusing aspect of this whole comedy – because apparently Musk just can’t wait another week or so to reopen as Newsom said – is that as law professor Ben Edwards notes “there is a good chance Musk will also have to personally indemnify Tesla for any damage to stockholders for this. Delaware doesn’t allow directors and officers to engage in knowing violations of law.”
There is a good chance Musk will also have to personally indemnify Tesla for any damage to stockholders for this. Delaware doesn’t allow directors and officers to engage in knowing violations of law. https://t.co/WKwA8Qx6si pic.twitter.com/S9Ye2Dd9qk
— Ben Edwards (@BenPEdwards) May 11, 2020
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And now we to see if the Fremont Police Department will confirm that when it comes to law, billionaires generally tend to be above it.
“rules” Some folks refer to these as “laws”. https://t.co/yC7F34f6Hx
— Keubiko (@Keubiko) May 11, 2020
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* * *
Update 1530 EST: In in a violation of California orders, Tesla began making cars again at its Fremont, California plant over the weekend despite an ongoing battle with local officials about whether it should remain closed during the pandemic, The Verge reports, adding that the company called back some of its workers and has completed around 200 Model Y and Model 3 vehicles.
This happened as CEO Elon Musk threatened on Twitter to move Tesla’s operations out of state and sued Alameda County over its stay-home order.
Adding to the confusion, moments after the Verge report, Bloomberg reported that Cali Gov Newsom expects that the factory can resume work “next week”:
- NEWSOM SAID LOCAL `CONSTRUCTIVE TALKS’ ON REOPENING CA FACTORY
- NEWSOM” `BELIEF AND HOPE AND EXPECTATION’ CAN OPEN NEXT WEEK
- CA GOV SAYS HE EXPECTS TESLA FACTORY CAN RESUME WORK NEXT WEEK
So did Musk violate another prohibition, or did he simply rush ahead of the permitted date, well aware that every day of delays leads to tens of millions in cash burn?
But wait it gets even more interesting, because it appears that Newsom – having been put in a corner by both Musk and Trump – is now seeking to avoid the public glare, and is throwing Alameda county under the bus:
- NEWSOM SAID HE SPOKE WITH ELON MUSK `A NUMBER OF DAYS AGO’
- NEWSOM SAYS ANY ENFORCEMENT IS GOVERNED BY ALAMEDA COUNTY
- NEWSOM: `I HAVE GREAT REVERENCE FOR THEIR TECHNOLOGY’
- CA GOV SAYS HE’S BIG FAN OF TESLA COMPANY, TECHNOLOGY
As a reminder, the Tesla’s Fremont factory has been closed since March 23rd, one week after Alameda County issued the initial stay-home order, and a few days after the governor of California issued a statewide version. The company had spent that intervening time trying to convince local officials that it should be allowed to keep making its electric cars because of Department of Homeland Security guidance that auto manufacturing is “national critical infrastructure.”
While Alameda County officials said in a statement on Saturday that they were “communicating directly and working closely with the Tesla team on the ground in Fremont,” and that the company was engaged in “a collaborative, good faith effort to develop and implement a safety plan that allows for reopening while protecting the health and well-being of the thousands of employees who travel to and from work at Tesla’s factory”, the county officials said they had still not reached an agreement with the company on whether it could reopen its factory. At the same time that the officials released their statement, Tesla sued the county over the stay-home order. Musk also threatened to move Tesla out of California because the plant would not reopen, and urged Tesla supporters on Twitter to “please voice your disagreement as strongly as possible with Alameda County.
As such it appears that Musk has rushed ahead of the Newsom statement, and decided to unilaterally resume production before being granted permission.
Workers who spoke to The Verge described difficult decisions they made about whether or not they should report in this week as their employer and CEO wages a public battle with local officials. Since they are both hourly workers, they won’t be paid if they stay home. If they do go in, they will make less than they used to thanks to recent company-wide pay cuts. And while Tesla previously told its employees that they can use paid time off (PTO) days to stay home if they feel uncomfortable coming in, the company recently cashed out many of those workers’ remaining PTO days because of the extended furlough.
“It’s either we feed our families or go hungry at this point,” said one, who decided to go into the factory.
The other is staying home. “I love my job personally, just tired of feeling like a chess piece,” this person said. They also said they wouldn’t feel safe assembling cars right now because it requires such close-quarters work. “We get lured in by the ‘Tesla Dream’ of saving the planet only to get treated so poorly that even though I love my job, I’m not willing to risk my health for him.”
* * *
Updated 1410 EST: Elon Musk continued his war of words with, well… the entire world, which reacted with shock to Musk’s decision to sue Alameda County over not allowing him to re-open his Fremont factory. Former Secretary of Labor and Berkeley professor Robert Reich, who Musk had previously called a “boring idiot” in both English and Russian in a Twitter flame-war on Sunday took another jab at the embattled CEO, saying “Billionaires are not the answer”.
Responding to one of Musk’s insults, Reich said, “if only you had put as much effort into delivering the ventilators you promised as you put into this tweet.”
Elon, if only you had put as much effort into delivering the ventilators you promised as you put into this tweet. https://t.co/hJoFHwr1Qc
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) May 10, 2020
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Separately, perpetual Tesla cheerleader Adam Jonas at Morgan Stanley also offered up his take on Musk’s claims to want to move from California over the weekend. First and foremost, he predicted a gigantic $2 billion to $4 billion cash burn for Q2 and said GAAP loss estimates of $500 million could be too high:
We believe that the sentiment consistently displayed by Musk is likely out of genuine concern for the severity of the decline of profits and cash flow for the company in Q2. While we believe the liquidity / balance sheet of the company is intact, we are prepared for Q2cash burn to be on the order of magnitude of $2BN to $4BN,given large payable outflows and revenues down as much as 30% Y/Y.
In our view, while the situation is clearly out of Tesla’s control, Elon Musk’s urgency and willingness to take decisive action shows the impact the shutdown is having on the company globally. Taking a look at consensus numbers for 2Q20,expectations call for nearly $900MM in cash burn and GAAP net loss of ~$500MM; we believe these may still be too high.
He also predicted that Tesla’s next U.S. Gigafactory would be announced in 1-3 months and could happen in Texas. The note does little to address the financial implications of such a move and estimates it could take “up to 3 years for a complete relocation from California”.
Jonas still predicts a majority of the company’s global production volume will come from Fremont over the next 2 years and also believes there is “morale risk” to employees from Musk’s erratic behavior:
We believe that there is risk to the morale of employees and staff currently in Fremont, as the questions of not only returning to work by June 1st in California continue to loom, but now the new question of continuing to work in California at all.
All OEMs and other contingencies in the supply chain are struggling with similar issues in the road to their targeted May 18th restart. As investors model a number of scenarios for cash consumption in Q2, we believe some attention should be paid to the potential problems for other counter-parties that could add to the volatility of near term financial outcomes.
Yet despite the massive predicted cash burn and the slate of numerous new risks, Jonas kept his $680 price target on the name. Because when Morgan Stanley underwriting fees are at risk, one does what one must…
California seems fed up with Musk. The Sacramento Bee published an article over the weekend mocking Musk, claiming that even though “COVID-19 has killed nearly 2,700 Californians so far, [Musk] is the one who’s truly suffering during the coronavirus pandemic.”
It continued, calling Musk a “bratty billionaire”:
California’s public health officials must ignore Musk’s ranting and stay the course. Twitter threats from bratty billionaires, anti-vaccine activists and middle-aged “militia members” should play no role in guiding public health policy in the middle of a deadly pandemic.
“And what should California’s leaders say if Tesla decides to pick up its toys and move elsewhere?” the op-ed asks rhetorically.
“Adiós,” it answers.
In the interim, Tesla owners and once-fanboys have been spotted on social media all weekend echoing the thoughts of these owners:
@elonmusk I’m a Californian was considering buying a Tesla later in the year. You threaten to take California jobs away and are careless in endangering the lives of people during this pandemic. I am reconsidering my future purchase. I thought you were for the environment 😡
— Jules (@pintobeanyoga) May 10, 2020
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As an owner of a #Tesla I am embarrassed to of been supporting @elonmusk right now. pic.twitter.com/BGTVqJJVuH
— Kyle (@AirbusDaddy) May 10, 2020
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Sending liberals and Tesla owners further into a rage alike will be the fact that Sen. Ted Cruz openly petitioned for Musk to move his operation to Texas over the weekend, as well:
Come to Texas! We would welcome Tesla HQ in Texas. We love jobs & Texans very much want to open up & get back to work (while still staying safe & following sound science). We make lots of cars & trucks in Texas, and we’d love more!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 https://t.co/F9O0N3yase
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 9, 2020
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If that isn’t enough to trigger the left, perhaps this is: on Monday morning, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin commented that California should “act to ensure Tesla can operate” and that he “agreed with Musk” on California’s re-opening.
Finally, mid-day on Monday, Hidalgo County Texas Judge Richard F. Cortez penned an official letter to Musk telling him that the county was “pro-business” and “ready to accommodate” him.
“What we no longer have is a shelter at home mandate,” the letter says:
Hey @elonmusk: Hidalgo County @JudgeCortez and @GovAbbott are ready to accommodate @Tesla. @john_jwitt #HidalgoCounty #WelcomeTesla pic.twitter.com/YSINvFM8Ca
— Hidalgo County (@HidalgoCounty) May 11, 2020
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Recall, yesterday, we pointed out how the world was turning on Elon Musk after he decided he was going to pick up and leave California, after the state would not bow to his demands for re-opening.
For now, it still looks as though it is Tesla’s intention to re-open Fremont when Elon Musk, not the government, says so.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 20:45 - McGovern: Twin Pillars Of Russiagate Crumble
McGovern: Twin Pillars Of Russiagate Crumble
Authored by Ray McGovern via ConsortiumNews.com,
House Intelligence Committee documents released Thursday reveal that the committee was told two and half years ago that the FBI had no concrete evidence that Russia hacked Democratic National Committee computers to filch the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks in July 2016.
The until-now-buried, closed-door testimony came on Dec. 5, 2017 from Shawn Henry, 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.
Via Reuters Henry retired in 2012 and took a senior position at CrowdStrike, the cyber security firm hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to investigate the cyber intrusions that occurred before the 2016 presidential election.
The following excerpts from Henry’s testimony speak for themselves. The dialogue is not a paragon of clarity; but if read carefully, even cyber neophytes can understand:
* * *
Ranking Member Mr. [Adam] Schiff: Do you know the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data from the DNC? … when would that have been?
Mr. Henry: Counsel just reminded me that, as it relates to the DNC, we have indicators that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have no indicators that it was exfiltrated (sic).… There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.
Mr. [Chris] Stewart of Utah: Okay. What about the emails that everyone is so, you know, knowledgeable of? Were there also indicators that they were prepared but not evidence that they actually were exfiltrated?
Mr. Henry: There’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. There’s circumstantial evidence … but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. …
Mr. Stewart: But you have a much lower degree of confidence that this data actually left than you do, for example, that the Russians were the ones who breached the security?
Mr. Henry: There is circumstantial evidence that that data was exfiltrated off the network.
Mr. Stewart: And circumstantial is less sure than the other evidence you’ve indicated. …
Mr. Henry: “We didn’t have a sensor in place that saw data leave. We said that the data left based on the circumstantial evidence. That was the conclusion that we made.
In answer to a follow-up query on this line of questioning, Henry delivered this classic:
“Sir, I was just trying to be factually accurate, that we didn’t see the data leave, but we believe it left, based on what we saw.”
Inadvertently highlighting the tenuous underpinning for CrowdStrike’s “belief” that Russia hacked the DNC emails, Henry added: “There are other nation-states that collect this type of intelligence for sure, but the – what we would call the tactics and techniques were consistent with what we’d seen associated with the Russian state.”
Interesting admission in Crowdstrike CEO Shaun Henry’s testimony. Henry is asked when “the Russians” exfiltrated the data from DNC.
Henry: “We did not have concrete evidence that the data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have indicators that it was exfiltrated.” 🤔 pic.twitter.com/TyePqd6b5P
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) May 8, 2020
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Not Transparent
Try as one may, some of the testimony remains opaque. Part of the problem is ambiguity in the word “exfiltration.”
The word can denote (1) transferring data from a computer via the Internet (hacking) or (2) copying data physically to an external storage device with intent to leak it.
As the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity has been reporting for more than three years, metadata and other hard forensic evidence indicate that the DNC emails were not hacked – by Russia or anyone else.
Rather, they were copied onto an external storage device (probably a thumb drive) by someone with access to DNC computers. Besides, any hack over the Internet would almost certainly have been discovered by the dragnet coverage of the National Security Agency and its cooperating foreign intelligence services.
Henry testifies that “it appears it [the theft of DNC emails] was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.”
This, in VIPS view, suggests that someone with access to DNC computers “set up” selected emails for transfer to an external storage device – a thumb drive, for example. The Internet is not needed for such a transfer. Use of the Internet would have been detected, enabling Henry to pinpoint any “exfiltration” over that network.
Bill Binney, a former NSA technical director and a VIPs member, filed a sworn affidavit in the Roger Stone case. Binney said: “WikiLeaks did not receive stolen data from the Russian government. Intrinsic metadata in the publicly available files on WikiLeaks demonstrates that the files acquired by WikiLeaks were delivered in a medium such as a thumb drive.”
The So-Called Intelligence Community Assessment
There is not much good to be said about the embarrassingly evidence-impoverished Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017 accusing Russia of hacking the DNC.
But the ICA did include two passages that are highly relevant and demonstrably true:
(1) In introductory remarks on “cyber incident attribution”, the authors of the ICA made a highly germane point: “The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber operation – malicious or not – leaves a trail.”
(2) “When analysts use words such as ‘we assess’ or ‘we judge,’ [these] are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.… Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary… High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong.” [And one might add that they commonly ARE wrong when analysts succumb to political pressure, as was the case with the ICA.]
The intelligence-friendly corporate media, nonetheless, immediately awarded the status of Holy Writ to the misnomered “Intelligence Community Assessment” (it was a rump effort prepared by “handpicked analysts” from only CIA, FBI, and NSA), and chose to overlook the banal, full-disclosure-type caveats embedded in the assessment itself.
Then National Intelligence Director James Clapper and the directors of the CIA, FBI, and NSA briefed President Obama on the ICA on Jan. 5, 2017, the day before they gave it personally to President-elect Donald Trump.
On Jan. 18, 2017, at his final press conference, Obama saw fit to use lawyerly language on the key issue of how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks, in an apparent effort to cover his own derriere.
Obama: “The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked.”
So we ended up with “inconclusive conclusions” on that admittedly crucial point. What Obama was saying is that U.S. intelligence did not know — or professed not to know —exactly how the alleged Russian transfer to WikiLeaks was supposedly made, whether through a third party, or cutout, and he muddied the waters by first saying it was a hack, and then a leak.
From the very outset, in the absence of any hard evidence, from NSA or from its foreign partners, of an Internet hack of the DNC emails, the claim that “the Russians gave the DNC emails to WikiLeaks” rested on thin gruel.
In November 2018 at a public forum, I asked Clapper to explain why President Obama still had serious doubts in late Jan. 2017, less than two weeks after Clapper and the other intelligence chiefs had thoroughly briefed the outgoing president about their “high-confidence” findings.
Clapper replied: “I cannot explain what he [Obama] said or why. But I can tell you we’re, we’re pretty sure we know, or knew at the time, how WikiLeaks got those emails.” Pretty sure?
Preferring CrowdStrike; ’Splaining to Congress
CrowdStrike already had a tarnished reputation for credibility when the DNC and Clinton campaign chose it to do work the FBI should have been doing to investigate how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks. It had asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s struggle with separatists supported by Russia. A Voice of America report explained why CrowdStrike was forced to retract that claim.
Comey briefs Obama, June 2016 (Flickr) Why did FBI Director James Comey not simply insist on access to the DNC computers? Surely he could have gotten the appropriate authorization. In early January 2017, reacting to media reports that the FBI never asked for access, Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee there were “multiple requests at different levels” for access to the DNC servers.
“Ultimately what was agreed to is the private company would share with us what they saw,” he said. Comey described CrowdStrike as a “highly respected” cybersecurity company.
Asked by committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) whether direct access to the servers and devices would have helped the FBI in their investigation, Comey said it would have. “Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that’s involved, so it’s the best evidence,” he said.
Five months later, after Comey had been fired, Burr gave him a Mulligan in the form of a few kid-gloves, clearly well-rehearsed, questions:
BURR: And the FBI, in this case, unlike other cases that you might investigate – did you ever have access to the actual hardware that was hacked? Or did you have to rely on a third party to provide you the data that they had collected?
COMEY: In the case of the DNC,… we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work. But we didn’t get direct access.
BURR: But no content?
COMEY: Correct.
BURR: Isn’t content an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?
COMEY: It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks – the people who were my folks at the time is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016.
* * *
In June last year it was revealed that CrowdStrike never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, according to the Justice Department.
By any normal standard, former FBI Director Comey would now be in serious legal trouble, as should Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, et al. Additional evidence of FBI misconduct under Comey seems to surface every week – whether the abuses of FISA, misconduct in the case against Gen. Michael Flynn, or misleading everyone about Russian hacking of the DNC. If I were attorney general, I would declare Comey a flight risk and take his passport. And I would do the same with Clapper and Brennan.
Schiff: Every Confidence, But No Evidence
Both pillars of Russiagate–collusion and a Russian hack– have now fairly crumbled.
Thursday’s disclosure of testimony before the House Intelligence Committee shows Chairman Adam Schiff lied not only about Trump-Putin “collusion,” [which the Mueller report failed to prove and whose allegations were based on DNC and Clinton-financed opposition research] but also about the even more basic issue of “Russian hacking” of the DNC. [See: “The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate.”]
Five days after Trump took office, I had an opportunity to confront Schiff personally about evidence that Russia “hacked” the DNC emails. He had repeatedly given that canard the patina of flat fact during an address at the old Hillary Clinton/John Podesta “think tank,” The Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Fortunately, the cameras were still on when I approached Schiff during the Q&A: “You have every confidence but no evidence, is that right?” I asked him. His answer was a harbinger of things to come. This video clip may be worth the four minutes needed to watch it.
Schiff and his partners in crime will be in for much tougher treatment if Trump allows Attorney General Barr and US Attorney John Durham to bring their investigation into the origins of Russia-gate to a timely conclusion. Barr’s dismissal on Thursday of charges against Flynn, after released FBI documents revealed that a perjury trap was set for him to keep Russiagate going, may be a sign of things to come.
Given the timid way Trump has typically bowed to intelligence and law enforcement officials, including those who supposedly report to him, however, one might rather expect that, after a lot of bluster, he will let the too-big-to-imprison ones off the hook. The issues are now drawn; the evidence is copious; will the Deep State, nevertheless, be able to prevail this time?
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 20:45 - Luxury Real Estate Suffers Price Declines, Suffocated By Social Distancing And Lockdowns
Luxury Real Estate Suffers Price Declines, Suffocated By Social Distancing And Lockdowns
Deutsche Bank published a new note this week, suggesting its global forecast “has turned decidedly gloomier…[M]uch of the world has struggled mightily with the virus, and the economic fallout…we now see global GDP falling 10% in Q2 and remaining well below pre-virus levels through most of next year.” If correct, the bank’s latest forecast implies that a recovery in the global economy could take several years. With that being said, luxury real estate across the world will likely get marked down through this unprecedented economic collapse. A new report via Knight Frank LLP indicates that a decline in luxury real estate could already be underway.
Bloomberg, citing Knight Frank’s latest global real estate report, says luxury homes in New York, London, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Singapore recorded price declines in the first quarter on a YoY basis as the pandemic began to destroy complex supply chains and entire economies around the world.
Knight Frank said the virus pandemic “was in its nascent stages in the U.K. and the U.S., meaning it is likely to be the second quarter before we can accurately gauge the full impact.” Knight Frank has a point because when it comes to actual impacts of aggregate demand getting completely crushed across the world because of lockdowns, and entire supply chains crumbling to the ground, full effects won’t be realized until the second half of the year.
But in the meantime, Knight Frank provides a full list of luxury home markets where noticeable price declined have been seen in Nairobi, Bangkok, New York, St. Petersburg, Dublin, Vancouver, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, and London. On the flip side, home prices in some cities, including Manila, Taipei, Stockholm, and Tokyo, saw advances during the quarter.
Knight Frank said luxury real estate markets would stagnate as social distancing measures and travel limitations will likely be in effect for many parts of the world for the foreseeable future.
“With travel restrictions firmly in place and with many solicitors and land registries largely closed, we expect the second quarter to see a marked drop in sales volumes,” it said. Prices, on the other hand, may display more resilience.
As the pandemic unfolds, rich people aren’t hanging out in their million dollars flats, they’re weather the virus storm in doomsday bunkers. Did coronavirus top tick the global luxury real estate market?
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/11/2020 – 20:25
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