- The Plot Against Libya: An Obama-Biden-Clinton Criminal Conspiracy
The Plot Against Libya: An Obama-Biden-Clinton Criminal Conspiracy
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 23:40Authored by Eric Draitser via Counterpunch.org,
The scorching desert sun streams through narrow slats in the tiny window. A mouse scurries across the cracked concrete floor, the scuttling of its tiny feet drowned out by the sound of distant voices speaking in Arabic. Their chatter is in a western Libyan dialect distinctive from the eastern dialect favored in Benghazi. Somewhere off in the distance, beyond the shimmering desert horizon, is Tripoli, the jewel of Africa now reduced to perpetual war.
But here, in this cell in a dank old warehouse in Bani Walid, there are no smugglers, no rapists, no thieves or murderers. There are simply Africans captured by traffickers as they made their way from Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Eritrea, or other disparate parts of the continent seeking a life free of war and poverty, the rotten fruit of Anglo-American and European colonialism. The cattle brands on their faces tell a story more tragic than anything produced by Hollywood.
These are slaves: human beings bought and sold for their labor. Some are bound for construction sites while others for the fields. All face the certainty of forced servitude, a waking nightmare that has become their daily reality.
This is Libya, the real Libya. The Libya that has been constructed from the ashes of the US-NATO war that deposed Muammar Gaddafi and the government of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. The Libya now fractured into warring factions, each backed by a variety of international actors whose interest in the country is anything but humanitarian.
But this Libya was built not by Donald Trump and his gang of degenerate fascist ghouls. No, it was the great humanitarian Barack Obama, along with Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Samantha Power and their harmonious peace circle of liberal interventionists who wrought this devastation. With bright-eyed speeches about freedom and self-determination, the First Black President, along with his NATO comrades in France and Britain, unleashed the dogs of war on an African nation seen by much of the world as a paragon of economic and social development.
But this is no mere journalistic exercise to document just one of the innumerable crimes carried out in the name of the American people. No, this is us, the antiwar left in the United States, peering through the cracks in the imperial artifice – crumbling as it is from internal rot and political decay – to shine a light through the gloom named Trump and directly into the heart of darkness.
There are truths that must be made plain lest they be buried like so many bodies in the desert sand.
The War on Libya: A Criminal Conspiracy
To understand the depth of criminality involved in the US-NATO war on Libya, we must unravel a complex story involving actors from both the US and Europe who quite literally conspired to bring about this war, while simultaneously exposing the unconstitutional, imperial presidency as embodied by Mr. Hope and Change himself.
In doing so, a picture emerges that is strikingly at odds with the dominant narrative about good intentions and bad dictators. For although Gaddafi was presented as the villain par excellence in this story told by the Empire’s scribes in corporate media, it is in fact Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, former French President Nicholas Sarkozy, French philosopher-cum-neocolonial adventurist Bernard Henri-Levy, and former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who are the real malevolent forces. It was they, not Gaddafi, who waged a blatantly illegal war on false pretenses and for their own aggrandizement. It was they, not Gaddafi, who conspired to plunge Libya into chaos and civil war from which it is yet to emerge. It was they who beat the war drums while proclaiming peace on earth and good will to men.
The US-NATO war on Libya represents perhaps one of the most egregious examples of US military aggression and lawlessness in recent memory. Of course, the US didn’t act alone as a wide cast of characters played a role as the French and British were keen to involve themselves in the reassertion of control over a once lucrative African asset torn from European control by the evil Gaddafi. And this, only a few years after former UK Prime Minister and Iraq war criminal Tony Blair met with Gaddafi to usher in a new era of openness and partnership.
The story begins with Bernard Henri-Lévy, the French philosopher, journalist, and amateur foreign service officer who fancied himself an international spy. Having failed to arrive in Egypt in time to buttress his ego by capitalizing on the uprising against former dictator Hosni Mubarak, he quickly shifted his attention to Libya, where an uprising in the anti-Gaddafi hotbed of Benghazi was underway. As Le Figaro chronicled, Henri-Levy managed to talk his way into a meeting with then head of the National Transition Council (TNC) Mustapha Abdeljalil, a former Gaddafi official who became head of the anti-Gaddafi TNC. But Henri-Levy wasn’t there just for an interview to be published in his French paper, he was there to help overthrow Gaddafi and, in so doing, make himself into an international star.
Henri-Levy quickly pressed his contacts and got on the phone with French President Nicholas Sarkozy to ask him, rather bluntly, if he’d agree to meet with Abdeljalil and the leadership of the TNC. Just a few days later, Henri-Levy and his colleagues arrived at the Élysée Palace with TNC leadership at their side. To the utter shock of the Libyans present, Sarkozy tells them that he plans to recognize the TNC as the legitimate government of Libya. Henri-Levy and Sarkozy have now, at least in theory, deposed the Gaddafi government.
But the little problem of Gaddafi’s military victories and the very real possibility that he might emerge victorious from the conflict complicated matters as the French public had become aware of the scheme and was rightly lambasting Sarkozy. Henri-Levy, ever the opportunist, stoked the patriotic fervor by announcing that without French intervention, the tricolor flag flying over five-star hotels in Benghazi would be stained with blood. The PR campaign worked as Sarkozy quickly came around to the idea of military intervention.
However, Henri-Levy had a still more critical role to play: bringing the US military juggernaut into the plot. Henri-Levy organized the first of what would be several high-level talks between US officials from the Obama Administration and the Libyans of the TNC. Most importantly, Henri-Levy set up the meeting between Abdeljalil and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. While Clinton was skeptical at the time of the meeting, it would be a matter of months before she and Joe Biden, along with the likes of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and others would be planning the political, diplomatic, and military route to regime change in Libya.
The Americans Enter the Fray
There would have been no war in Libya were it not for the US political, diplomatic, and military machine. In this sense, despite the relatively meager US military involvement, the war in Libya was an American war. That is to say, it was a war that could not have happened were it not for the active collaboration of the Obama Administration with its French and British counterparts.
As Jo Becker of the NY Times explained in 2016, Hillary Clinton met with Mahmoud Jibril, a prominent Libyan politician who would go on to become the new Prime Minister of post-Gaddafi Libya, and his associates, in order to assess the faction now garnering US support. Clinton’s job, according to Becker, was “to take measure of the rebels we supported” – a fancy way of saying that Clinton attended the meeting to determine whether this group of politicians speaking on behalf of a diverse group of anti-Gaddafi voices (ranging from pro-democracy activists to outright terrorists affiliated with global terror networks) should be supported with US money and covert arms.
The answer, ultimately, was a resounding yes.
But of course, as with all America’s warmongering misadventures, there was no consensus on military intervention. As Becker reported, some in the Obama Administration were skeptical of the easy victory and post-conflict political calculus. One prominent voice of dissent, at least according to Becker, was former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Himself no dove, Gates was concerned that Clinton and Biden’s hawkish attitude toward Libya would ultimately lead to an Iraq-style political nightmare that would undoubtedly end with the US having created and then abandoned a failed state – exactly what happened.
It is important to note that Clinton and Biden were two of the principal voices for aggression and war. Both were supportive of the No-Fly Zone from early on, and both advocated for military intervention. Indeed, the two have been simpatico in nearly every war crime committed by the US in the last 30 years, including perhaps most egregiously in support of Bush’s crime against humanity that we call the second Iraq War.
As former Clinton lackey (Deputy Director of Secretary of State Clinton’s Policy Planning staff) Derek Chollet explained, “[Libya] seemed like an easy case.” Chollet, a principal participant in the American conspiracy to make war on Libya who later went on to serve directly under Obama and at the National Security Council, inadvertently illustrates in stark relief the imperial arrogance of the Obama-Clinton-Biden liberal interventionist camp. In calling Libya an “easy case” he of course means that Libya was a perfect candidate for a regime change operation whose primary benefit would be to boost politically those who supported it.
Chollet, like many strategic planners at the time, saw Libya as a slam dunk opportunity to turn the demonstrations and uprisings of 2010-2011, which quickly became known as the Arab Spring, into political capital from the Democratic camp of the US ruling class. This rapidly became Clinton’s position. And soon, the consensus of the entire Obama Administration.
Obama’s War Off the Books
One of the more pernicious myths of the US war on Libya was the notion – propagated dutifully by the defense lobbyists-cum-journalists at major corporate media outlets – that the war was a cheap little war that cost the US almost nothing. There were no American lives lost in the war itself (Benghazi is another mythology to be unraveled later), and very little cost in terms of “treasure”, to use that despicable imperialist phrase.
But while the total cost of the war paled in comparison to the monumental-scale crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the means by which it was funded has cost the US far more than dollars; the war on Libya was a criminal and unconstitutional endeavor that has further laid the groundwork for the imperial presidency and unconstrained executive power. As the Washington Post reported at the time:
Noting that Obama had said the mission could be paid for with money already appropriated to the Pentagon, [former House Speaker] Boehner pressed the president on whether supplemental funding would be requested from Congress.
Unforeseen military operations that require expenditures such as those being made for the Libyan effort normally require supplemental appropriations since they are outside the core Pentagon budget. That is why funds for Afghanistan and Iraq are separate from the regular Defense Department budget. The added costs for some of the operations in Libya are minimal…But the expenditures for weapons, fuel and lost equipment are something else.
Because the Obama Administration did not seek congressional appropriations to fund the war, there is very little in the way of paper trail to do a proper accounting of the costs of the war. As the cost of each bomb, fighter jet, and logistical support vehicle disappeared into the abyss of Pentagon accounting oblivion, so too did any semblance of constitutional legality. In essence, Obama helped establish a lawless presidency that not only has little respect for constitutionally mandated checks and balances, but completely ignores the rule of law. Indeed, some of the crimes that Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr are guilty of have their direct corollary in the Obama Administration’s prosecution of the Libya war.
So where did the money come from and where did it go? It’s anybody’s guess really, unless you’re one of those rubes who likes taking the Pentagon’s word for it. As a Pentagon spokesperson told CNN in 2011, “The price tag for U.S. Defense Department operations in Libya as of September 30 [was] $1.1 billion. This included daily military operations, munitions, the drawdown of supplies and humanitarian assistance.” However, to illustrate the downright Orwellian impossibility of discerning the truth, Vice President Joe Biden doubled that number when speaking on CNN, suggesting that “NATO alliance worked like it was designed to do, burden-sharing. In total, it cost us $2 billion, no American lives lost.”
As is painfully evident, there is no clear way to know how much was spent other than to take the word of those who prosecuted the war. With no congressional oversight, and no clear documentary record, the war on Libya disappears down the memory hole, and with it the idea that there is a separation of powers, Congressional authority to make war, or a functioning Constitution.
America’s Dirty War in Libya
While the enduring memory of Libya for most Americans is the political theater that resulted from the attack on the US facility in Benghazi that killed several Americans, including US Ambassador Stevens, it is not nearly the most consequential. Rather, America’s use of terrorist groups (and the insurgents who emerged from them) as military proxies may perhaps be the real legacy from a strategic perspective. For while the corporate media presented the narrative of spontaneous protests and uprisings to overthrow Gaddafi, it was in fact a loose network of terror groups that did the dirty work.
While much of this recent history has been buried by bad reporting, establishment mythmaking, and conspiracist muddying of the truth, it was surprisingly well reported at the time. For example, as the New York Times wrote of one of the primary US-backed forces on the ground during the war in 2011:
“The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was formed in 1995 with the goal of ousting Colonel Qaddafi. Driven into the mountains or exile by Libyan security forces, the group’s members were among the first to join the fight against Qaddafi security forces… Officially the fighting group does not exist any longer, but the former members are fighting largely under the leadership of Abu Abdullah Sadik [aka Abdelhakim Belhadj].”
Even at the time, there was considerable unease among Washington’s strategic planners that the Obama Adminstration’s embrace of a terror group with known links to al-Qaeda could prove to be a major blunder. “American, European and Arab intelligence services acknowledge that they are worried about the influence that the former group’s members might exert over Libya after Colonel Qaddafi is gone, and they are trying to assess their influence and any lingering links to Al Qaeda,” the Times noted.
Of course, those in the know at the various US intelligence agencies already had a pretty good sense of who they were backing, or at least the elements likely to be involved in any US operation. Specifically, the US knew that the areas from which it was drawing anti-Gaddafi opposition forces was a hotbed of criminal and terrorist activity.
In a 2007 study entitled “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq: A First Look at the Sinjar Records” which examined the origins of various criminal and terrorist groups active in Iraq, the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy at West Point concluded that:
“Almost 19 percent of the fighters in the Sinjar Records came from Libya alone. Furthermore, Libya contributed far more fighters per capita than any other nationality in the Sinjar Records, including Saudi Arabia… The apparent surge in Libyan recruits traveling to Iraq may be linked with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s (LIFG) increasingly cooperative relationship with al-Qa’ida which culminated in the LIFG officially joining al-Qa’ida on November 3, 2007…The most common cities that the fighters called home were Darnah [Derna], Libya and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with 52 and 51 fighters respectively. Darnah [Derna] with a population just over 80,000 compared to Riyadh’s 4.3 million, has far and away the largest per capita number of fighters in the Sinjar records.”
It was known at the time that the majority of the anti-Gaddafi forces hailed from the region including Derna, Benghazi, and Tobruk – the “Eastern Libya” so often referred to as anti-Gaddafi – and that the likelihood that al-Qaeda and other terror groups were among the ranks of the US recruits was very high. Nevertheless, they persisted.
Take the case of the February 17 Martyrs Brigade, charged by the US with guarding the CIA facility in Benghazi at which Ambassador Stevens was murdered. As the Los Angeles Times reported in 2012:
“Over the last year, while assigned by their militia to help protect the U.S. mission in Benghazi, the pair had been drilled by American security personnel in using their weapons, securing entrances, climbing walls and waging hand-to-hand combat…The militiamen flatly deny supporting the assailants but acknowledge that their large, government-allied force, known as the Feb. 17 Martyrs Brigade, could include anti-American elements…The Feb. 17 brigade is regarded as one of the more capable militias in eastern Libya.”
But it wasn’t just LIFG and al-Qaeda affiliated criminal groups entering the fray thanks to Washington rolling out the blood-stained red carpet.
A longtime asset of the US, General Khalifa Hifter and his so-called Libyan National Army have been on the ground in Libya since 2011, and have emerged as one of the primary forces vying for power in post-war Libya. Hifter has a long and sordid history working for the CIA in its attempts to overthrow Gaddafi in the 1980s before being resettled conveniently near Langley, Virginia. As the New York Times reported in 1991:
The secret paramilitary operation, set in motion in the final months of the Reagan Administration, provided military aid and training to about 600 Libyan soldiers who were among those captured during border fighting between Libya and Chad in 1988…They were trained by American intelligence officials in sabotage and other guerrilla skills, officials said, at a base near Ndjamena, the Chadian capital. The plan to use the exiles fit neatly into the Reagan Administration’s eagerness to topple Colonel Qaddafi.
Hifter, leader of these failed efforts, became known as the CIA’s “Libya point man,” having taken part in numerous regime change efforts, including the aborted attempt to overthrow Gaddafi in 1996. So, his arrival in 2011 at the height of the uprising signaled an escalation of the conflict from an armed uprising to an international operation. Whether Hifter was directly working with US intelligence or simply complimenting US efforts by continuing his decades-long personal war against Gaddafi is somewhat irrelevant. What matters is that Hifter and the Libyan National Army, like LIFG and other groups, became part of the broader destabilization effort which successfully toppled Gaddafi and created the chaotic hellscape that is modern Libya.
Such is the legacy of the US dirty war on Libya.
The Past is Prologue
It is September 2020. Americans are focused on an election between an Orange Fascist criminal and an old-school right-wing Democrat war criminal. Where Donald Trump projects chaos and disorder, Biden projects stability, order, and a return to normalcy. If Trump is the virus, then surely Biden is the cure.
It is September 2020. Libya prepares to enter its eighth year of civil war. Slave markets like the one in Bani Walid are as common as youth literacy centers were in Gaddafi’s Libya. Armed gangs and militias wield power even in areas nominally under government control. A warlord regroups in the East as he looks to Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates for support.
It is September 2020 and the US-NATO war on Libya has faded to a distant memory as other issues like Black Lives Matter and police murder of Black youth have captured the public imagination and discourse.
But these issues are, in fact, united by the bond of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. The Libya once known as the “Jewel of Africa,” a country that provided refuge for many sub-Saharan African migrant workers while maintaining independence from the US and the former colonial powers of Europe, is no more. In its place is a failed state that now reflects the kind of vicious anti-Black racism forcefully suppressed by the Gaddafi government.
Libya as the global exemplar of the exploitation and disposability of the black body.
Squint a little and you can see President Joe Biden getting the old band back together. Hillary Clinton welcomed into the Oval Office as an influential voice, someone to give words to the demented thoughts of the living corpse serving as Commander-in-Chief. Derek Chollet and Ben Rhodes laughing together as they buy another round at their favorite DC hangout, toasting to the re-establishment of order in Washington. Barack Obama as the éminence grise behind the political resurgence of the liberal-conservative dominant structure.
But in Libya, there is no going back, no fixing the past to escape the present.
Perhaps the same might be true of the United States.
- Rise Of 'Technosexuals' – 14% Of Men Are Aroused By Amazon Alexa
Rise Of ‘Technosexuals’ – 14% Of Men Are Aroused By Amazon Alexa
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 23:20A new study commissioned by WeVibe, a sex toy company, found loneliness and anxiety during the virus-induced lockdowns has likely resulted in the emergence of “technosexuals.”
Readers must be confused about what exactly the term means. Well, it turns out that anyone who is sexually attracted to machinery, robots, and or, in this case, smart-speakers, is a technosexual.
WeVibe surveyed 1,000 men and discovered 14% of respondents confessed their Amazon smart-speaker sexually aroused them.
Also known as “Alexa,” Amazon’s smart-speaker is no longer just fulfilling questions about the daily weather or telling lame jokes, but rather the Chinese-made device is fueling men’s sexual fantasies.
U.K.-based psychologist, Lucy Beresford, wrote in The Telegraph that the number of technosexuals is increasing as their “primary source of arousal are through interacting with their tech,” indicating that society is “sleepwalking into a different kind of epidemic – one of loneliness and fear of intimacy” driven partially by the lockdowns.
Beresford said, “their [technosexuals] favorite gadgets. Whether it’s the ‘ping’ of a message, swiping right, or the seductive, authoritative tones of cloud-based voice service, their tech fulfills them by mobilizing the reward system in the brain and releasing dopamine – the ‘happiness hormone.'”
“The instant activity of using their tech – likes and comments – is like a sexual turn on. This ‘dopamine hit’ happens in all of us, but, in technosexuals, something else is at play,” she said.
Beresford said, “In all my years of practicing, technosexuals are perhaps the most troubling cohort of mental health sufferers I have seen, because the source of their distress appears, on the face of it, to be so innocuous. Where most of us just use tech when we need it — and, as Zoom-fatigue has shown, can get quickly turned off by it — the technosexual is hit by the double whammy of intensified use, which arises from (and is subsequently inflamed by) an existing fear of closeness to other human beings.”
She warned, “If we’re not careful, mindful even, tech has the power to tempt all of us to invest too much time in a ‘virtual’ life at the expense of our real one.”
Besides fantasising about Alexa, some technosexuals have been buying futuristic AI-driven sex dolls.
One sex doll company has announced the best of both worlds for technosexuals – embedding Alexa or Siri into dolls.
What a crazy world we live in. So will remote-working lifestyles drive a new era of technosexuals?
- Houthis Strike Riyadh With Missiles And Drones; Saudi Coalition Retreats In Yemen
Houthis Strike Riyadh With Missiles And Drones; Saudi Coalition Retreats In Yemen
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 23:00Submitted by SouthFront,
Late on September 10, the Saudi capital of Riyadh came under a missile and drone attack from the Ansar Allah movement (more widely known as the Houthis).
The Yemeni missile and air forces, loyal to the Houthi government, announced that they struck a “high-value target” in Riyadh with a Zulfiqar ballistic missile and three Samad-3 suicide drones.
“The attacks are a response to the enemy’s permanent escalation and its continuing blockade against our country,” Brig. Gen. Yahya Sari, a spokesman for the Armed Forces of the Houthi government, said in a statement promising more attacks on Saudi Arabia if the Kingdom “continues its aggression and siege” on Yemen.
The Houthis revealed the Samad-3 combat drone, which also can be used as a loitering munition, in 2019. At that time, they claimed that it has a range of up to 1,500km. As to the Zulfiqar ballistic missile, it is one of a variety of ballistic and even cruise missiles widely employed by the Houthis against Saudi-affiliated targets.
Commenting on the September 10 attack, a spokesperson for the Saudi-led coalition said that Houthi forces launched the missiles and drones at civilian targets in Saudi Arabia, without giving more details.
Every Houthi strike on a target inside Saudi Arabia is a painful blow to the Kingdom. Even without the almost lost war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has been passing through an economic and political crisis. So, it prefers to deny any damage or casualties as a result of such attacks, simultaneously censoring and silencing reports in social media.
Earlier this week, the Houthis already conducted a series of drone strikes on Abha International Airport in the southwestern Saudi region of Asir. Strikes were delivered on the target for a three days in a row and caused material damage to the installation even according to Saudi reports. The coalition also claimed that it downed at least 2 Houthi drones.
Meanwhile, in Yemen itself, Saudi proxies continue retreating under the pressure of the Houthis and their allies in the province of Marib. Recently, Houthi forces cut off the highway between the provincial capital and an important stronghold of Saudi-backed forces, the Maas base. The expected fall of the Maas base will mark the collapse of the defense of Saudi forces in this part of the province.
For a long time, the conflict in Yemen has been a swamp for pro-Saudi forces and the Kingdom-led coalition, which even de-facto collapsed under the pressure of various obstacles and internal contradictions. So, the Saudis have been suffering from the consequences of their own actions.
- Never Forget: Smoking Gun Intel Memo From 1990s Warned Of 'Frankenstein The CIA Created'
Never Forget: Smoking Gun Intel Memo From 1990s Warned Of ‘Frankenstein The CIA Created’
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 22:40As Americans pause to remember the tragic events of September 11, 2001 which saw almost 3,000 innocents killed in the worst terror attack in United States history, it might also be worth contemplating the horrific wars and foreign quagmires unleashed during the subsequent ‘war on terror’.
Bush’s so-called Global War on Terror targeted ‘rogue states’ like Saddam’s Iraq, but also consistently had a focus on uprooting and destroying al-Qaeda and other armed Islamist terror organizations (this led to the falsehood that Baathist Saddam and AQ were in cahoots). But the idea that Washington from the start saw al-Qaeda and its affiliates as some kind of eternal enemy is largely a myth.
Recall that the US covertly supported the Afghan mujahideen and other international jihadists throughout the 1980’s Afghan-Soviet War, the very campaign in which hardened al-Qaeda terrorists got their start. In 1999 The Guardian in a rare moment of honest mainstream journalism warned of the Frankenstein the CIA created — among their ranks a terror mastermind named Osama bin Laden.
1998 CNN still of Osama bin Laden, right, along with Egyptian jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan, CNN/Getty Images But it was all the way back in 1993 that a then classified intelligence memo warned that the very fighters the CIA previously trained would soon turn their weapons on the US and its allies. The ‘secret’ document was declassified in 2009, but has remained largely obscure in mainstream media reporting, despite being the first to contain a bombshell admission.
A terrorism analyst at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research named Gina Bennett wrote in the 1993 memo “The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous,” that—
“support network that funneled money, supplies, and manpower to supplement the Afghan mujahidin” in the war against the Soviets, “is now contributing experienced fighters to militant Islamic groups worldwide.”
The concluding section contains the most revelatory statements, again remembering these words were written nearly a decade before the 9/11 attacks:
US support of the mujahidin during the Afghan war will not necessarily protect US interests from attack.
…Americans will become the targets of radical Muslims’ wrath. Afghan war veterans, scattered throughout the world, could surprise the US with violence in unexpected locales.
There it is in black and white print: the United States government knew and bluntly acknowledged that the very militants it armed and trained to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars would eventually turn that very training and those very weapons back on the American people.
And this was not at all a “small” or insignificant group, instead as The Guardian wrote a mere two years before 9/11:
American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.
But don’t think for a moment that there was ever a “lesson learned” by Washington.
Instead the CIA and other US agencies repeated the 1980s policy of arming jihadists to overthrow US enemy regimes in places like Libya and Syria even long after the “lesson” of 9/11. As War on The Rocks recounted:
Despite the passage of time, the issues Ms. Bennett raised in her 1993 work continue to be relevant today. This fact is a sign of the persistence of the problem of Sunni jihadism and the “wandering mujahidin.” Today, of course, the problem isn’t Afghanistan but Syria. While the war there is far from over, there is already widespread nervousness, particularly in Europe, about what will happen when the foreign fighters return from that conflict.
Good morning #America, your children in Syria،#September11#11septembre2001 # pic.twitter.com/6zqzgruD9x
— maytham (@maytham956) September 11, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
On 9/11 we should never forget the innocent lives lost, but we should also never forget the Frankenstein of jihad the CIA created.
* * *
The U.S. State Dept.’s own numbers at the height of the war in Syria: access the full report at STATE.GOV
- LA County's Public Health Director Accidentally Admits What Many Suspected About Lockdowns
LA County’s Public Health Director Accidentally Admits What Many Suspected About Lockdowns
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 22:20Authored by Andrea Widburg via AmericanThinker.com,
A Democrat bureaucrat finally said what we all have known to be the truth: The Wuhan virus limitations that Democrat politicians and bureaucrats have imposed on Americans will go away after the election because that was the plan all along.
As 2019 ended, the Democrats knew that Trump was cruising to reelection. He’d kept his base because he kept his promises about the wall, trade deals, the military, abortion, and our Second Amendment rights. Best of all, he’d supercharged the economy with tax and regulation cuts. The surging economy enticed other Americans who had not voted for Trump in 2016 to contemplating voting for him in 2020.
The Democrats’ troubles continued in 2020. In January, their impeachment imploded. Worst of all, the Democrat primary candidates did not excite the base. The only passion was for a spittle-flecked, wild-haired old communist, and the Democrats knew that, even in 2020, nominating a communist was a bridge too far. The Wuhan virus was an extraordinary and unlooked-for blessing for the Democrats because they used it to destroy Trump’s economy.
Right now, some might say, “That’s harsh. The Democrats have been trying to save lives. It’s worked out well for them that their efforts wrecked the economy, but that doesn’t mean that they deliberately manipulated the economy, destroying thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands, even millions, of lives, only to win the election.”
Sorry, but it’s true.
Rather than recite the history of America’s politics before the Wuhan virus struck, we’ll have Saturday Night Live do it. Some of you may recall that, in early 2017, SNL did a funny sketch about a team of scientists, led by Scarlett Johansson, who hooked up a dog to a contraption that translated its thoughts. To everyone’s horror, the dog was a Trump supporter:
The sketch was popular amongst conservatives. What passed almost unnoticed, though, perhaps because of all the impeachment craziness, was that SNL did a follow-up sketch in December 2019. Once again, Max, the Trump-supporting dog, had his say. The second sketch wasn’t as well written as the first one and, as someone commented to me, the actors seemed deflated. However, the sketch’s value lies in the fact that the points Max made reflect what Democrats feared most heading into 2020:
Although Democrats initially played down the Wuhan virus, denouncing Trump as a xenophobe for closing down most traffic to the U.S. from China and Europe, they soon realized that the virus had the potential to damage the economy. The 15-day lockdown to bend the curve was probably legitimate, but it didn’t take long to realize that extending the lockdown was where the real power lay. The lockdown also showed Democrats how remarkably compliant people are when fear is used to take away their liberty.
As the lockdown continued, and Democrats always gave passes to Black Lives Matter and Antifa, people began to suspect that politics drove the Democrats’ insistence that Americans must live abnormally constrained lives until the virus ends or there is a vaccination. Trump, therefore, terrified the Democrats by promising a vaccination before the election. Kamala Harris responded by saying preemptively that the vaccination would be dangerous.
Much of the above was and is supposition. But now we have something different and concrete.
Los Angeles County is America’s most populous county, the largest government entity in America that is not a state or the federal government, and the third-largest metropolitan economy in the world. It’s also entirely Democrat-run, as evidenced by poverty, drugs, and homelessness, as well as its vast wealth inequality.
Los Angeles students still cannot go to school but must, instead, do online learning. We already know that part of the problem is that the teachers’ union had some pretty stringent demands, few related to the students’ physical and mental well-being.
However, it turns out the continued school closures are also because of politics. We know this because LA County’s Public Health Director, Barbara Ferrer, admitted as much when speaking to a gathering of school nurses and other school administrators:
So we don’t realistically anticipate we will be moving to tier 2 or to reopening K-12 schools at least until after the election, after, you know, in early November. When we just look at the timing of everything it seems to us the more realistic approach to this would be to think that we’re going to be where we are now until we get, until after we are done with the election.
There is no scientific connection between the election and the Wuhan virus. There is, however, a cynical connection between the lockdown and the election. The Democrats know that, and Ferrer finally said it out loud. If you’ve suffered from the lockdown, be sure to remember that the Democrats did it on purpose.
- If You Feel Like Something Really, Really Bad Is About To Happen, You're Definitely Not Alone
If You Feel Like Something Really, Really Bad Is About To Happen, You’re Definitely Not Alone
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 21:40Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
If this is “the recovery”, what are things going to look like once economic conditions start to deteriorate again?
As you will see below, more than half of all households in some of our largest cities “are facing serious financial problems”, and Americans continue to file for unemployment benefits at a rate that the United States had never seen before prior to 2020. When 695,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits during a single week in 1982, it established a record which stood for nearly 38 years. But now we have been way above that old record for 25 weeks in a row. On Thursday, we learned that another 884,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week…
Weekly jobless claims were worse than expected last week amid a plodding climb for the U.S. labor market from the damage inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Labor Department on Thursday reported 884,000 first-time filings for unemployment insurance, compared with 850,000 expected by economists surveyed by Dow Jones. The total was unchanged from the previous week.
Of course it is always important to look at the non-adjusted numbers, and according to those numbers we actually saw an increase over the previous week…
The Labor Department changed its methodology in how it seasonally adjusts the numbers, so the past two weeks’ totals are not directly comparable to the reports from earlier in the pandemic. Claims not adjusted for seasonal factors totaled 857,148, an increase of 20,140 from the previous week.
This is the second week in a row that the non-seasonally adjusted initial claims have risen.
That definitely wasn’t supposed to happen.
We are supposedly in a “recovery” right now, and things are supposed to be getting better.
But instead they appear to be getting worse. According to Wolf Richter, continuing claims under all state and federal programs were way up last week…
Total continued claims for unemployment insurance (UI) under all state and federal programs rose by 380,000, to 29.6 million people (not seasonally adjusted), the highest since August 1, according to the Department of Labor this morning. This was the second weekly increase in a row, after the 2.2-million jump last week.
At any other time in American history, the numbers that were just reported would be considered “catastrophic”, but we have been getting these sorts of catastrophic numbers for so long that we have become desensitized to them.
But at least the unemployment numbers are not as bad as they were earlier this year, and other economic figures seem to have hit a bit of a plateau as well.
So for the moment there is relative calm, but it won’t last for very long.
If you feel like something really, really bad is about to happen, you are definitely not alone. There are countless others that are also waiting for “the other shoe to drop”, and I believe that it could literally happen at any time.
But for now we wait.
I would encourage you to enjoy these remaining days of summer while you still can. This weekend, put some burgers on the grill and enjoy some time with your family. Unfortunately, there are many Americans that are under such financial stress that it is hard to enjoy much of anything right now. In fact, one recent survey found that 50 percent or more of the households in some of our largest cities are currently facing “serious financial problems”…
There’s no question the coronavirus pandemic has forced many Americans into financial hardship, but a new NPR/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation survey provided a clearer picture of the extent of the struggles in the United States’ four largest cities.
At least half of all households in those cities — 53 percent in New York City, 56 percent in Los Angeles, 50 percent in Chicago, and 63 percent in Houston — reported facing serious financial problems, including depleted savings, problems paying credit card bills, and affording medical bills.
How can that be possible if we are in the midst of a tremendous “recovery”?
Of course the truth is that we aren’t in any sort of a recovery, but at least things are a whole lot better than they will be after the upcoming election.
I had such an ominous feeling coming into 2020, and I shared this repeatedly with my readers, and now I have such an ominous feeling about the rest of 2020 and beyond.
In particular, I am extremely concerned about what will happen in November. No matter who is ultimately declared the winner, the other side is going to be convinced that the election was stolen from them and that is likely to throw our nation into a state of chaos.
And we are already being told that we probably will not know the winner until long after election day. That period of uncertainty is almost certainly going to spark more civil unrest, and I believe that faith in the integrity of our elections will be greatly shaken.
Before I end this article, there is one more thing that I wanted to mention that I found to be extremely interesting. This year the Federal Reserve has been buying up mortgage bonds worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and according to Mish Shedlock the Fed now owns nearly a third of that entire market…
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The Fed has snapped up $1 trillion of mortgage bonds since March. It bought around $300 billion of the bonds in each of March and April, and since then has been buying about $100 billion a month.
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The Fed now owns almost a third of bonds backed by home loans in the U.S.
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Buying the securities has pushed mortgage rates lower, with the average 30-year rate falling to 2.91% as of last week from 3.3% in early February.
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Morgan Stanley analysts pointed out in late March that the buying was running at eight times the pace seen in prior episodes of Fed purchasing under programs known as quantitative easing.
No matter who wins the election, the direction of the Fed is not going to change. They are going to continue to engage in exceedingly reckless manipulation of the markets, and that is going to have very serious long-term implications.
All around us, we can see our society being thrown into convulsions as all of our systems begin to fail.
I know that so many of you out there are feeling the exact same way that I am.
A sense of anticipation hangs in the air, and millions of people are waiting for the next big crisis to erupt.
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- Youth Suicides Soar 57% In Past Decade: Is Social Media To Blame?
Youth Suicides Soar 57% In Past Decade: Is Social Media To Blame?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 21:20The suicide rate among Americans ages 10 to 24 increased by 57% between 2007 and 2018, data published Thursday from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) shows. New concerns are mounting that social media could be contributing to the wave of suicides among younger generations.
Between 2007 and 2018, the national suicide rate among persons aged 10–24 increased by 57.4%. The increase was broad, as it was experienced by the majority of states. -NCHS
On a state-by-state basis, the percentage change between 3-year averages of suicide rates for 2007–2009 and 2016–2018 increased down to 47%. The largest increases were seen in New Hampshire, Oregon, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Michigan.
Forty-two states had significant increases in their suicide rates between 2007–2009 and 2016–2018, and eight states had nonsignificant increases. Most states had increases of between 30%–60%. Suicide rates in 2016–2018 were highest in Alaska and lowest in New Jersey. – NCHS
Courtesy of Bloomberg, here’s a complete visualization of the youth suicide crisis that has unfolded across the country.
NCHS’s data only covered suicides between 2007-2018, but there’s reason to believe the trend is continuing, due mostly to the virus pandemic-related stress.
“There are many reasons to suspect that suicide rates will increase this year too, not just because of Covid-19 but because stress and anxiety seem to be permeating every aspect of our lives,” Shannon Monnat, co-director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health Lab at Syracuse University, told Bloomberg.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among youngsters. Readers may recall we covered the troubling trend developing in youth suicides in late 2019. A significant influencer behind the trend could be the proliferation of social media in the last decade.
“There is an independent association between problematic use of social media/internet and suicide attempts in young people,” a study recently published in the LWW Journals titled “Social media, internet use and suicide attempts in adolescents” said.
Making matters worse, teen and youth anxiety/depression have sharply risen this year as the virus pandemic, depressionary unemployment, and social unrest, have resulted in a pessimistic outlook for the country.
“At the end of June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed almost 10,000 Americans on their mental health. They found symptoms of anxiety and depression were up sharply across the board between March and June, compared with the same time the previous year. And young people seemed to be the hardest-hit of any group.
“Almost 11 percent of all respondents to that survey said they had “seriously considered” suicide in the past 30 days. For those ages 18 to 24, the number was 1 in 4 — more than twice as high.” –NPR News
The UK’s Royal Society for Public recently ranked the top five social media platforms that impact mental health. It found Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter had the most negative effect on the psychological health of youngsters.
In a separate report, the use of social media was directly linked to an increase in depressive symptoms in teenagers.
Days ago, we noted how an older millennial, aged 33, also an Army veteran, killed himself with a shotgun on Facebook Live. The chilling footage circulated across the internet and went viral on TikTok.
Long and short term trends suggest the American youth are slipping into the abyss as a suicide crisis is worsening.
- Have Pollsters Figured Out How To Poll The Midwest?
Have Pollsters Figured Out How To Poll The Midwest?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 21:00Authored by Sean Trende via RealClearPolitics.com,
In 2016, as I was preparing to write my “Why Hillary Will Win” piece, I decided to have my able then-assistant, David Byler (now of Washington Post fame), do a bit of research. His job was to look up the share of the electorate that pollsters were anticipating for whites without college degrees and for African Americans.
What he found put an end to the piece.
It seemed a big bet was being placed on 2012 levels of black turnout occurring in 2016 and, more importantly, that pollsters were badly underestimating turnout for whites without college degrees. In previous years, that hadn’t really mattered – whites with and without college degrees voted Republican at roughly the same levels. Underestimating the share of whites without college degrees and overestimating whites with college degrees wouldn’t have mattered in 2012 or 2008, because their votes were fungible.
On a hunch, I went back and looked at the poll errors for 2013-15, and it became apparent that the errors for 2016 followed much the same pattern: They were concentrated in areas with large numbers of whites without college degrees. Indeed, the size of the poll error correlated heavily with whites-without-college-degree share (p<.001); you could explain about one-third of the difference in the size of poll miss just from knowing the share of the electorate that was whites without a college degree.
We all know what happened next. Trump surprised observers by winning states that Republican presidential candidates hadn’t carried since Debbie Gibson and Tiffany fought it out for top placement in the Top 40 charts. The misses were particularly pronounced in the Midwest.
Most pollsters attributed the misses to the failure to weight by education, and when one brings up the errors from 2016 with respect to the 2020 election, the answer typically is “pollsters now weight by education, so they’ve fixed it.”
But have they? We actually have a pretty nice sample from 2018 to draw upon. If pollsters have really figured out where they went wrong in key states in 2016, we should see a marked improvement over 2016 and 2014.
So, I went back and looked at the Democratic bias in the polls for swing states in 2014, 2016, and 2018. I could not use North Carolina, since there was no statewide race there in 2018. One problem I encountered is that in 2018 many states were under-polled, so RCP didn’t create an average. I’ve gone back and averaged the October polls for those states, if available (note that we don’t have three polls in October for Minnesota in 2016, hence the asterisk there). As a check on this approach, I’ve also included the error from the 538 “polls-only” model for 2018.
The results are something of a mixed bag, but overall it isn’t clear that the pollsters have really fixed the problem at all. While the bias toward Democrats was smaller in 2018 than in 2016, the bias overall was similar to what we saw in 2014, especially in the Midwest. If people remember, the polls in 2018 suggested that we should today have Democratic governors in Ohio, Iowa and Florida, and new Democratic senators in Indiana, Missouri and Florida. Obviously this did not come to pass.
Moreover, almost all of the errors pointed the same way: Republicans overperformed the polls in every Midwestern state except for Minnesota Senate/governor and Wisconsin Senate (none of which were particularly competitive). This is true, incidentally, across the time period: We see marginal Democratic overperformances in the Michigan and Minnesota Senate races in 2014, but otherwise pollsters have consistently underestimated Republican strength. Note that if we had added the competitive Senate race in North Dakota and the governor race in South Dakota in 2018, we’d also see Republican overperformances of a couple of points.
Outside of the Midwest the polling improvements were a mixed bag; Florida was worse than it had been in 2014 or 2016, Arizona was much better, and the uncompetitive races in Pennsylvania were something of a wash (people forget that the Pennsylvania polling in 2016 really did suggest a tight race).
At the same time, we should keep in mind that predicting poll errors is something of a mug’s game; pollsters change techniques from year to year, and they do learn. In 2014 there was something of a fight among elections analysts regarding whether we should expect an error in the Republicans’ direction in that year, given the results in 2012 and 2010. As I said in then:
The bottom line, I think, is that it is difficult to translate these observations into a prediction. It is one thing to say, “There may have been skew in the previous two cycles.” It is quite another to say, “On the basis of this, we can predict what will happen in the following cycle.” … After all, the claim here is not simply that the polls may be skewed. The claim is that the polls may be skewed in a Democratic direction in this year.
In other words, to take this seriously, you have to take it as a prediction. The problem arises when you ask the question: How can we make this prediction reliably, e.g., with some sort of methodology and based upon actual evidence?
So, the point here is not that we should expect that polls in the Midwest or Florida will be biased against Republicans in 2020. They may well not be. We should also keep in mind that the Upper Midwest was under-polled in 2016, and that will not be the case this year. Instead, the point is that we should remain open to the possibility that this can still happen, and not take at face value assurances that pollsters have fixed this problem.
- China Launches First Human Trials For 'Nasal Spray' COVID-19 Vaccine
China Launches First Human Trials For ‘Nasal Spray’ COVID-19 Vaccine
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 20:40Markets were already heading lower earlier this month when AstraZeneca announced that the vaccine it had been developing in partnership with Oxford University had hit an unexpected snag: a patient showed an unexpected “adverse reaction” resembling a form of meningitis. Suddenly, all the skeptics’ warnings about a vaccine not being available for months, perhaps even years, are ringing in professionals’ heads again.
But in China, regulators within the CCP have allowed vaccine maker Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy to launch “Phase 1” human trials of a nasal spray vaccine, which is being co-developed by researchers at Xiamen University and Hong Kong University.
Intranasal spray has previously been developed as a vaccine for the flu and is recommended for use among children and adults who want to avoid the more common needle injection. While it is not the most frequent choice for delivery, scientists around the world are working to develop sprays as an alternative to muscle jabs for all sorts of vaccines.
It’s China’s tenth vaccine candidate to proceed to human testing, though Beijing has much more sway to “relax” certain standards than the FDA, as the world recently learned. And with the AZ-Oxford vaccine now on hold, Beijing now has a chance to close the gap.
The new spray contains weakened copies of the virus implanted with the genetic segments of the coronavirus’s spike protein that will allow it to take hold inside the patient’s nasal passage.
Once administered, the vaccine mimics the natural infection of respiratory viruses to stimulate the body’s immune response against the pathogen that causes COVID-19, according to Science and Technology Daily, a paper affiliated with China’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
Some scientists hope a vaccine that gets sprayed through the nose may have a better chance of stopping the spread of the virus because, as we continue to learn, the virus appears to primarily spread through the air via aerosol infection.
Intranasal spray has previously been developed as a vaccine for the flu and is recommended for use among children and adults who want to avoid the more common needle injection. While it is not the most frequent choice for delivery, scientists around the world are working to develop sprays.
China’s new nasal spray vax project joins about 35 other candidates currently in human testing, as the global race to be first with an effective vaccine intensifies, with the candidate from Russia so far holding its own alongside a battery of projects developed in the West. In the wake of AstraZeneca’s setback, China’s most advanced vaccine developers, including CanSino Biologics Inc. and state-owned China National Biotec Group Co., have emphasized the safety of their own shots.
CNBG said the two shots it is testing are effective in staving off infection. None of the Chinese diplomats and workers traveling to virus hot spots overseas has reported infections several months after receiving the vaccines, Zhou Song, CNBG’s general counsel, said.
- A Farewell Letter From An Independent Restaurant Owner
A Farewell Letter From An Independent Restaurant Owner
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 20:20Authored by Heather Lalley via RestaurantBusinessOnline.com,
Danny Abrams opened a restaurant six blocks from the World Trade Center site six weeks after 9/11.
Even during that difficult time, the restaurant was welcomed by the city with more than 100 covers a night for the first year.
“But this is very different,” Abrams said. “It’s hard to compare.”
This, of course, is the pandemic.
Abrams and his partner, Cindy Smith, run seven restaurants in New York. They recently made the difficult decision to close The Mermaid Inn in the East Village after more than 17 years.
“I think there’s a restaurant-closing tsunami on the way,” Abrams said. “It’s going to happen after September. They’re not seeing a wave of closings yet because people are still trying to hang on and people are still playing with some of the PPP they might’ve gotten.”
The Mermaid Inn, which was known by locals for its happy hour deals, had about 80 seats inside, 20 in the garden, and 16 on the sidewalk. Abrams said it typically did strong business in the spring and summer, before quieting in the winter.
“We really needed May, June, July, August, September,” he said. “If we miss that window and then get to do 50% in October, 50% in November? Forget about it.”
Abrams and Smith wrote a detailed letter, explaining the closure and detailing the current pressures on independent restaurant operators, and shared it on their Facebook page.
The two are currently doing everything they can to reduce expenses at their existing concepts, to try to stay afloat until this crisis passes.
“It’s all about survival right now,” he said. “I want to be the last man standing.”
This letter, written by Mermaid Inn co-owners Danny Abrams and Cindy Smith and shared on social media, has been edited slightly from its original and shared here with their permission.
The Mermaid Inn at 96 Second Ave. Farewell Letter
To All Our Valued Guests and Friends
It is with great sadness that we announce the closing of The Mermaid Inn at 96 Second Ave. Our lease expired on August 31st and we were not able to come to an agreement with the landlord on how to move forward both during and after the pandemic. We want to thank all of our wonderful guests and employees for supporting us over these past years. What began as a little 29 seat restaurant on a sleepy stretch of Second Ave. grew into a place that had welcomed hundreds of thousands of guests and employed thousands of people over the years. We are extremely humbled that so many embraced our restaurant and that we were able to succeed as long as we had. For a restaurant to survive and thrive in New York City for 17.5 years is an accomplishment of which we can all be proud. And we could not have done it without all of you.
We all mourn the loss of our favorite restaurants for they provide us with so much more than food. They provide nourishment for our soul and when they are gone, much of the soul of the neighborhoods in which they resided will be gone as well: missing out on seeing our favorite bartender who remembers what we drink, saying “hi” to our favorite server and sitting at the table that makes us most comfortable, talking to the owner about life in general, seeing the hardworking support staff take extra care to provide us with a dropped napkin or a missing fork. All of these small gestures that make us feel at home in our neighborhood will be missing. And that will make our neighborhoods feel lacking as well–less interesting, less familiar, less inviting. These are one of the things that defines BEING AT HOME in our community. They are a gathering place to share accounts of our days, to celebrate big events in our lives or just share a table with our friends.
Mermaid By the Numbers
We are sharing this information to illustrate what ONE SINGLE RESTAURANT adds to its community and to the city. Many restaurants have closed since COVID and many more will close as the pandemic continues. The ripple effect will be incalculable.
Over the years, The Mermaid Inn on Second Ave has:
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Welcomed over 850,000 guests
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Paid over $15 million in wages to our more than 2,000 employees who have spent time with us
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Contributed more than $2.1 million in taxes to the city, the state, Medicare, SS, UI, etc
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Sent in excess of $4 million in sales tax to New York state
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Paid over $ 15 million to our hundreds of hard-working vendors
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Given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the city and state for permits, licenses, etc
We are providing these numbers to show the effect that the closing of a SINGLE restaurant has. Now multiply that by THOUSANDS of NYC restaurants closing. The loss of opportunity for employees, the loss of income for city, state and local governments, the loss of sales to our fish companies, our vegetable company, the linen company, even the company that comes to take our used oyster shells or our discarded grease. If we don’t pay them, they do not pay their employees and so on and so on. The chain is never ending.
The restaurant and hospitality industry has been woefully neglected during this pandemic. Actually, all small businesses have. The Payroll Protection Program has given us eight weeks of funds for what will be a 52-week problem. And look at who that money was allowed to pay: we were only allowed to pay for payroll (which is good) but also to the landlords, the insurance companies and the utility companies. Think about that for a second. Real estate owners, insurance conglomerates and large utility providers. Not one cent could go to the hundreds of small businesses that had provided us with goods and services. NOT ONE PENNY. Having lived in NYC since 1984, it seems that during every crisis, the big companies get bailed out and taken care of—the banks, the airlines, the insurance companies, etc. During the Great Recession, the banks and insurance providers played fast and loose with their money and brought the world economy to the brink of failure. They got bailed out with OUR TAX DOLLARS. Where is the reciprocity? Why do the small businesses always give and never get? It seems immeasurably unfair.
Our restaurants were MANDATED by the government to close down on March 16. Some of us had closed in advance of that date for fear that our employees and guests could get sick. We did so willingly so we could do our part in helping to contain the virus. But here we are, five and half months later, still closed, with no clear indication of what our future holds. There is no clear communication from the City or State that we can point to.
As for business in the meantime, we have few options. Delivery, while keeping a few people employed, does not provide any profit for the restaurant. The outdoor seating has helped some restaurants but it is weather-dependent, which leads to much uncertainty. And re-opening at 50% for many restaurants is a non-starter. How can a 75-seat restaurant, that only makes money in the best of times given the cost of doing business in NYC, reopen with 40 seats and no bar? Seriously? We would not even be able to make enough money to pay the employees, let alone our purveyors or rent.
We cannot continue to pay our key employees. The federal supplemental insurance has ended. Servers, bartenders, managers, bussers, food runners, etc. who had been making a decent living by New York standards are now left with only NYS Unemployment which pays out $504 a week AT THE MOST. How is anyone supposed to be able to provide for their families on $504? And that is for the top earners. Most of the recipients are getting far less than that. This is a slow-rolling humanitarian disaster and financial disaster in the making.
What hope do we have? The PPP money has run out. There is no more money to pay the rent. We are at the mercy of our landlords to give us some relief. We go to them like beggars, hoping they will find it in their hearts to allow us to survive. And if they don’t, then we are out of business. Just like that. How is that fair? Is that how an industry that provides so much in terms of employment and contributions to the economy should be treated?
When a restaurant is forced to close suddenly, as NYC restaurants were, there is no time to prepare for “the end.” Not only do we lose our income from that business but now we are saddled with debt to our vendors, utilities, insurance, etc. If someone said to us that you have to close your business in six months, we could plan and walk away. But the suddenness has left us all unprepared. Restaurants operate owing vendors 30 to 40 days’ worth of bills. As long as the business continues, everyone gets paid. This is like some cruel game of musical chairs and when the music stopped, small businesses were the ones left without a chair. The larger companies can tap credit lines, take out loans or avail themselves of other solutions that small businesses don’t have. Sure, some have been lucky to get Economic Injury Disaster Loans from the SBA but to what end? Why should we take on debt only to be opening to an uncertain future, not knowing if we can pay it back?
The Hospitality Industry needs a bail out just like every other large business. Not loans, but grants for us to pay our employees, vendors, to keep the lights on and be ready when the pandemic ends. We have earned it. We deserve it. Everyone knows that opening and running a restaurant in NYC is a herculean task. But we do it because we love it and we deserve to get some love back from our government. There are several bills floating around— a new round of PPP (helpful but not the best solution) and another bi-partisan bill called the RESTAURANTS ACT. This bill actually addresses our needs. I encourage all of you to call your representatives to express support for this legislation. We also need rent relief and a unified way for restaurants to negotiate with landlords. We need the insurance companies to honor the business interruption insurance that we’ve been paying for years. We need the loans we have received to be converted into grants. We need the street seating to continue each year. We need a way to use the street seating during the cold weather so we can at least keep some people employed. We simply need the basic relief and assistance that every other big business has received when faced with similar economic circumstances.
We have dealt with NYC adversity before. We opened a restaurant six blocks north of Ground Zero, just weeks after September 11th, 2001. It was the first business to open in Tribeca after that tragedy. We have felt the outpouring of love and resources available when the government has the will. We got through the Sandy Blackouts. We survived (barely) the Great Recession. We may not survive this if there is not some action at the state and federal level.
Lastly, I do not believe all the predictions that New York City is “over.” It will be back. It may take longer than it has in the past, but it will come back. New York will continue to be the beacon for theater, dance, food, music, nightlife, tourism and financial services. It will always draw young people, eager to express themselves in a place that allows for that. It will continue to encourage talented young chefs to open their own restaurants. It will always beckon people to come here to open a new business or just be in a place that has the energy that New York has. I believe the Jerry Seinfeld op-ed that said you won’t feel that energy over a ZOOM call. And if that becomes the norm and somehow replaces the energy that we have come to love and expect from NYC, then maybe, just maybe, we will have to move out as well. And your beloved NYC restaurant will disappear as well.
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- "De Blasio Has Been A Disaster": Former NYPD Commissioner Predicts City Will Take Longer To Recover From Mayor Than 9/11
“De Blasio Has Been A Disaster”: Former NYPD Commissioner Predicts City Will Take Longer To Recover From Mayor Than 9/11
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 20:00Former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly says that New York City will take much longer to bounce back from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ‘radical policies’ than from the destruction of the 9/11 attacks, according to Fox Business.
In a Friday interview with Fox Business Network‘s Neil Cavuto, Kelly – who took up the mantle as police commissioner for the second time following the 2001 terrorist attacks – remembered how “north of Canal Street [after the attacks], restaurants were open, people were living their lives in the other boroughs of New York City.”
“Now the problems of the city are all over the five boroughs,” Kelly continued. “People are moving out in significant numbers. De Blasio has lost the police department. They are reluctant to take proactive measures such as they were doing just or six or eight months ago, so it’s different.“
The former top cop is also “pessimistic” that New York will see a short-term comeback, saying that the pandemic and racial unrest gripping the city “has a feel or sense of being much more long-lasting.”
“[De Blasio] has been a disaster,” Kelly said, adding “I don’t see anything changing significantly, unfortunately, until he leaves office and even then it’s gonna be a bit of a crapshoot.”
“We see virtually nobody on the streets … you do see traffic, there’s automobile traffic, but there’s virtually no pedestrian traffic,” the former commissioner added. “The city has a very different feel than six months ago. People are anxious. People are worried about their own safety.” -Ray Kelly
Of course, according to the Wall Street Journal‘s Jimmy Vielkind, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo shares much of the blame.
In Worst-Hit Covid State, New York’s Cuomo Called All the Shots
As part of the @WSJ’s COVID Storm series, I spent months with @joe_palazzolo & @jacobgershman looking at how @NYGovCuomo managed the early days of the pandemic.
Here’s what we found —>https://t.co/O55zCvc8PY
— Jimmy Vielkind (@JimmyVielkind) September 11, 2020
(continued via Thread reader, emphasis ours)…
Cuomo and his small team took command of the Health Dept and overrode local govs that wanted to go beyond the state’s social distancing restrictions. That delayed the New ork City shutdown and slowed the reaction time as the virus spread in nursing homes.
Cuomo’s aides said the state shut down as soon as possible, and that a few days delay didn’t make much difference.
“It’s because it was here for five weeks and nobody knew it,” Melissa DeRosa, the governor’s top aide, said.
Now, the rate of positive coronavirus tests statewide—which topped 40% in April—has been under 1% for more than a month.
Mr. Cuomo and his aides have attributed those results to his tight control over the state’s reopening.
From the beginning, @NYGovCuomo was focused on communicating with the public. While flying with him on the state plane on Feb. 9, he said panic can sometimes be worse than the underlying disaster.
“When the governor got on the phone, he said, ‘Guys, don’t think this isn’t going to happen or that we’re being hysterical or foolhardy. This is what I want, and I want it by tomorrow.’”
.@BilldeBlasio was so concerned by the governor’s reaction that he asked a city lawyer whether the governor had the power to remove him from office, city officials said.
After GNYHA President Ken Raske complained nursing homes were refusing to accept patients, Mr. Cuomo’s team approved an order from the NYSDOH which said nursing homes couldn’t refuse to admit patients simply because they had tested positive.
On March 18, Cuomo issued an executive order mandating state approval of local orders.
“I found a hot spot, and they did nothing,” said Ed Day, the Republican county executive. “Guidance from Albany is a good idea. But ruling from Albany is not.”
Cuomo was concerned about the ripple effects of closing the world’s financial capital. On Sunday March 15, the governor’s aides had helped the New York Stock Exchange keep its trading floor open by arranging for doctors to screen workers.
While the rates of infection were starting to rise in Southern and Western states, the virus had loosened its grip on New York. The number of New Yorkers hospitalized had remained flat since the middle of May.
In an Aug. 19 radio interview, Mr. Cuomo acknowledged making a litany of mistakes.
“We were late in finding the virus here,” said Mr. Cuomo, adding that he believed the federal government shared some blame. “The collective ‘we’ made many mistakes.”
- Watch: This Is What "White Privilege" Looks Like, According To Some
Watch: This Is What “White Privilege” Looks Like, According To Some
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 19:40Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Video footage from inside the cabin of a plane shows an African-American woman belligerently refusing to let a flight attendant pass her in the aisle because of “white privilege”.
Yes, really.
The clip begins with the flight attendant attempting to get past the black woman as the obnoxious passenger repeatedly expresses her demand to go to the bathroom before accusing the attendant of “getting aggressive with me.”
Another female passenger then gets involved in the argument as the black woman gets in her face and tells her, “Are you my boss? You are white privilege, you’re not my boss. Sit down,” (she is already sat down).
Won’t let anyone pass her in the aisle cause that would be ‘white privilege’. pic.twitter.com/je5BV3FJEG
— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) September 11, 2020
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The black woman then accuses the flight attendant of exercising her “white privilege” while still blocking her way.
The encounter is made all the more stupid by the fact that the black woman could at any time just turn around and enter the bathroom, but she is intent on being insufferable and having an argument.
“I need to get to my door,” repeats the flight attendant as the black woman continues to bicker.
“You have white privilege and it’s not here, it’s over with, it’s 2020, wake up.”
“I’m a Queen, California, she was from a black queen,” says the woman before again arguing with the other passenger and accusing her of having “white privilege” and telling her to “shut up.”
“You need to understand, you don’t run America no more sweetheart,” she tells the blonde white woman before explaining how she once “slapped the shit” out of a “white bitch” for disrespecting her.
Despite the fact that the black woman is not wearing a mask and she is clearly acting aggressively and impeding flight staff, she was not removed from the plane.
That could be referred to as “black privilege”.
* * *
In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Also, I urgently need your financial support here.
- Call Buying Frenzy Is Back As Daytraders Flood Into Apple "Lottery Tickets"
Call Buying Frenzy Is Back As Daytraders Flood Into Apple “Lottery Tickets”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 19:20Earlier today we presented the zeitgeist-defining episode of a top Bank of America strategist whose 16-year-oldson received the following mass text following the implosion of Apple stock late last week: “Guys I am freakin’ out right now Tesla is down 45 points can’t concentrate on Rocket League Billy ask your dad what is going on.” In case anyone needed further proof, that text message is exhibit A that Gen-Z is very involved in this market.
To be sure, we have been following the unprecedented impact daytraders have had on price formation since May when we first described “how retail investors took over the stock market“, it all came to a boil in late August when the daytrading frenzy was supercharged with the help of SoftBank’s brand new strategy of buying call spreads in a very illiquid summer market, sparking the now infamous “gamma crash up“, and which culminated in the fastest Nasdaq 10% correction from an all time high in the first days of September.
And while the debate still rages how much of the gamma squeeze was the result of SoftBank’s “costless collar” and how much the result of Robinhooders YOLOing their way to fame and fortune by buying deep Out of the Money calls, we now know that having suffered a dramatic loss in market cap – despite reportedly generating a $4 billion profit on its public stock derivatives – Masa Son is already “reconsidering” the infamous “Gamma Squeeze” option strategy which was conceived by Askhay Naheta, the man who also responsible for SoftBank’s costless collar in Wirecard back in 2019. The reason: investors has been dumbfounded by the recent revelations, asking if SoftBank is a venture capital investor or had pivoted into hedge fund territory. In any case, as Bloomberg puts it, “the collapse in shares has caused Son to reconsider continuing the trading strategy, but it is not clear what changes might be made.”
Of course, it is possible that this is merely a soundbite for public consumption, one released strategically in hopes of stabilizing the stock price and easing fears that SoftBank will engage in similar strategies in the future, although as we first reported earlier this week, SoftBank is now on the record stating that at least 70% of its public stock exposure has been wound down, which we assume also includes any associated calls and call spreads. Furthermore, the Japanese conglomerate will have to make an update of its publicly held securities in the near future, at which point we will know for certain if SoftBank is indeed out of public equities and has ended its brief flirtation with becoming a hedge fund.
However, whereas Masa Son appears to have learned a lesson about dabbling in risky derivative trades – or rather what it means for his stock price when the public learns through the media that he has been dabbling in risky derivative trades, we can’t say the same thing for the daytrading public which, dauntlessly led by Dave Portnoy whose hourly tweets encourage his 1.8 million twitter followers to keep Buying the Dip and double down…
#DDTG was right again. Shocker. pic.twitter.com/6qyheC6zfp
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) September 9, 2020
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… has brushed aside the recent modest correction and has Leroy Jenkinsed itself into the latest market ramp, and doing so in a way that would make Masa Son proud: by buying OTM calls in tech names of course.
Consider what happened with Apple on Thursday when the stock opened near $120 and drifted lower all day: as Bloomberg reports, a call with a $120 strike price and expiring the very next day on Friday traded nearly 200,000 times, making it the day’s most-active option. Even more jarring is that trading surged even as the value of the contract plunged over 87% while the stock closed at $113.49 on Thursday – well below the option’s strike – and then expired worthless on Friday when Apple continued to slide following a JPMorgan report that selling of the iPhone 11 has slowed materially. As Bloomberg further points out, despite the trading burst, the option’s open interest only increased by about 10,000 contracts, suggesting that the vast majority of the trading volume was positions opened and closed the same day.
While one doesn’t have to be an expert to figure out what is going on, Nomura’s Charlie McEliggott said that to see such frenzied activity in what’s effectively a one-day option suggests that day traders are behind the flows.
“The Robinhood set continues to play the ‘lottery tickets’ in options market,” said McElligott, adding that “retail is still an issue, if that Apple type flow is indicative of anything.”
The flip side of the so-called short-gamma hedging that lifted stocks is what likely helped to exacerbate moves in the opposite direction. When shares fall, market makers are likely to undo hedges at an increasing speed, spurring more losses. Unwinding the build-up of bullish call options will be a “turbulent process,” according to UBS Group AG.
The reasoning behind this call-buying frenzy is also easy to discern, and has to do with muscle memory and the habituation of making outsized profits for the past 6 months on modestly out of the call options as the market continue to rise. In fact, the call buying was so aggressive in August, that it created its own “gamma” feedback loop which we discussed previously, and which ultimately ended up pushing the underlying stock as dealers had to delta hedge the outsized call buying.
Of course, at some point the piper will have to be paid, as the flip side of this short-gamma hedging that lifted stocks is what also helped to exacerbate moves in the opposite direction, as the drop in shares that started last Friday and accelerated over the next three days as the Nasdaq experienced its first correction since March, prompted market makers to undo hedges at an increasing speed, spurring more losses. The unwinding the all this gamma will be a “turbulent process,” according to UBS.
“They’re using the Nasdaq and they’re using cash positions to try and reduce this risk as much as they can, but that’s a turbulent process,” Kaiser said in a Bloomberg interview, discussing the substantial gamma overhang that has been built up over the past few months. “This is just a process the Street is going to have to go through to digest those large positions.”
And yet, none of that seems to matter for retail investors who were crushed in last week’s bruising finish… and then resumed their buying spree all over again as if nothing had happened.
“It doesn’t seem like that retail flow has been deterred,” said Chris Murphy, a derivatives strategist at Susquehanna.
Meanwhile, as McElligott said “that much accumulated ‘short gamma’ doesn’t just go away in a ~4% flush,” noting that “the Street is still very much in a dangerous space.”
However, judging by the furious return of retail call buyers, none of that matters because as Dave Portnoy said, the market never goes down, and if it does well, then Jerome Powell will just step in and buy everything.
- America's 1984: Welcome To The Hate
America’s 1984: Welcome To The Hate
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 19:00Authored by Caroline Breashers via The American Institute for Economic Research,
Is it time for The Hate?
It’s a question that we, like the protagonist of George Orwell’s dystopian 1984, may be asking ourselves now as we tune into a news program or click on our favorite website.
For Orwell’s Winston Smith, the Two Minutes Hate occurs at 11:00 a.m. as coworkers assemble in front of a telescreen. Together they watch as Emmanuel Goldstein, designated enemy of the Party, demands freedom of speech and an end to war. And together they scream, kick their chairs, and hurl books at Goldstein’s image.
The scene reveals the devastating effects of sustained hatred. After thirty seconds, half of the spectators are enraged. By the second minute, they are in a frenzy. As Smith reflects,
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness… seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.”
It’s Oceania’s 1984. But it’s becoming America’s, too, as any news program or social media feed will confirm.
Left uninterrupted, the current of hate could start a fire we may never extinguish. But how are we to stop it?
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words”
Start with language. In 1984, one editor of the dictionary of Newspeak rhapsodizes about the destruction of words. By eliminating phrases, the Party destroys the ability of people not only to express ideas but to think them: “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
What words have ceased to exist in this dystopia? Honor, justice, and morality, to name a few. One cannot demand something one cannot express.
Today we might build our own list, starting with civility. It is elitist, we are told, to insist on treating other individuals with dignity and courtesy. To use it in some contexts, particularly at universities, is to incite a frenzy akin to The Hate.
To be safe, one must use sanctioned slogans, such as those in 1984: “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength.”
And now we are on the verge of creating new slogans, such as “Riots are Peaceful Protests,” “Unequal Treatment is Equity,” “Looting is Justice.” After all, looting is “a political mode of action” that “attacks the idea of property” and the way in which it’s “unjust.”
Perhaps people really believe these mantras. Or perhaps they know that today’s Big Brothers are watching, ready to cancel them as quickly as the Party vaporizes its opponents.
“To extinguish . . . the possibility of independent thought”
But we have to resist, because as our language shrinks and twists, so does our ability to think. This is one of the two aims of the Party in 1984: to conquer the earth and “to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.”
In fact, the individual hardly matters in such a world. We are only members of a tribe, pieces of a body. “Can you not understand,” a Party member tells Winston, “that the individual is only a cell?”
A cell does not reflect or judge. This is why the Hate escalates. And because our culture, like Orwell’s 1984, is bent on rewriting or canceling history, we are losing the sources that would enable us to fight this trend morally as well as politically.
Consider Adam Smith’s warning in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that in a nation distracted by faction, a “spirit of system” takes hold, inflaming the public “to the madness of fanaticism.” “Intoxicated” by the beauty of a new system, its advocates fall for their own sophistry. Only a few individuals “preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion.”
And so our ability to consult our conscience, our impartial spectator, the demi-god within, diminishes. We turn instead to the mob.
“We can have things for free”
Today, politicians and activists inflame mobs with lies that confirm the orthodoxy, which in 1984 means “not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
And the most popular lies concern property. Consider Vicky Osterweil’s justification for looting:
“It also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed. It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that’s unjust. And the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories. So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.”
Never mind the process of exchange. Never mind the individual innovation that creates the products that are exchanged. Simply take away the police and “state oppression” and businessmen, and we can all have things for free.
Why didn’t Adam Smith think of that?
But if Osterweil is no great shakes at economics, she’s brilliant at Hate. Looting, she enthuses, “provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be.” She adds, “riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.”
With the promise of such delights, no wonder activists have a following. In fact, they seem to have taken Orwell’s depiction of Hate Week in 1984 as a guide. Certainly we have seen recent examples of delirium and savagery along with Orwellian phrasing: CHAZ was merely a block party, a “summer of love.”
It’s time to interrupt the current of Hate, time to name both its causes and the long-term effects on individualism and prosperity. Contra 1984, Freedom is not Slavery.
- 'Party Of Science' Leader Pelosi Mocked For "Mother Earth Is Angry" Comments
‘Party Of Science’ Leader Pelosi Mocked For “Mother Earth Is Angry” Comments
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 18:40House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday, during an interview on MSNBC, that raging wildfires in California, Oregon, and Washington are direct proof of the climate change disaster unfolding across the country.
“Mother Earth is angry,” Pelosi said.
“She’s telling us – whether she’s telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is … that the climate crisis is real and has an impact.”
As Pelosi spoke about the climate crisis, MSNBC showed a series of short clips highlighting the widespread devastation in her home state.
“Mother Earth is angry,” Speaker Pelosi says, discussing wildfires burning in California. “She’s telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is…the climate crisis is real and has an impact.” pic.twitter.com/ulY4Vwh7AC
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 11, 2020
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Pelosi is the latest in a recent line of leading ‘Party of Science’ Democrats to attempt to directly connect the wildfire situation in the western US to the climate crisis.
For example, California Governor Newsom, on Sunday (Sept. 6), told reporters during a news conference that wildfires in California were “the realities of climate change.”
“California has always been the canary in the coal mine for climate change, and this weekend’s events only underscore that reality,” he said. “Wildfires have caused system failures, while near-record energy demand is predicted as a multi-state heatwave hits the West Coast for the second time in a matter of weeks.”
And none other than former President Barack Obama tweeted that humans were at fault for the orange skies over San Francisco:
The fires across the West Coast are just the latest examples of the very real ways our changing climate is changing our communities. Protecting our planet is on the ballot. Vote like your life depends on it—because it does. pic.twitter.com/gKGegXWxQu
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 10, 2020
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Pelosi was also heard on Thursday, speaking at a news conference, indicating if Joe Biden wins the White House and Democrats return to power – she would be fully committed to passing climate change legislation.
She said legislation to combat the “climate crisis” would be among the top agenda items.
“It is absolutely a priority,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi made no mention of the Green New Deal, put forth by AOC.
Notably, as RT reports, both the left and the right were offended by Pelosi’s colorful rhetoric…
“Didn’t Pelosi mock the idea of a green new deal? Spare us your crocodile tears,” one self-proclaimed ‘progressive’ person wrote.
Nancy “The green dream, or whatever” Pelosi
— Diana TC (@DianaTC19) September 11, 2020
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And on the right, made light of what they perceived as hyperbole, mocking Pelosi for presuming to speak for the forces of nature and calling into question the Democrats’ definition of themselves as the “party of science.”
This just in – the “party of science” would like to read a prepared statement from Mother Earth…
— John Quigley (@JquigleyESP) September 11, 2020
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The Party of Science is Full of *It
— Heather Champion ™️ (@winningatmylife) September 11, 2020
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However, while Democrats desperately try to connect wildfires and hurricanes to the climate crisis, maybe La Nina (see: here) could be the culprit.
Or… California’s “horribly mismanaged forests” might be responsible for the wildfires’ scale.
But our method of managing forests in CA must change too. Climate change is a factor in starting fires and creating prime fire conditions. But it’s forest management that has allowed so much fuel to build up, and that is caused by humans making decisions that we now know are bad.
— Susan Griggs (@cyclemom21) September 11, 2020
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Or… new concerns are growing in Oregon that some of the wildfires have been started by arson.
Nevertheless, Democrats are seizing the moment to push through climate change legislation that would be nothing short of ushering in an era of Modern-Monetary-Theory-funded Green new Deals, and ‘Democratic’ socialism.
- Daily Briefing – September 11, 2020
Daily Briefing – September 11, 2020
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 18:40Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal is joined by senior editor Ash Bennington to reflect on the latest financial newsflow as well as Real Vision’s new projects. After briefly discussing oil’s recent price action of oil, Raoul and Ash break down how the Fed’s action is affecting different segments of the credit market, and they also weigh in on Jeffrey Gundlach’s recent comments that default rates on high-yield credit could double. Raoul then explains why the importance of demographics means that inflation is not always purely a monetary phenomenon. Raoul and Ash then discuss Real Vision Creative Studios, the forthcoming Real Vision crypto channel, as well as “The Exchange,” Real Vision’s brand new platform for members to share knowledge with each other. In the intro, Ash speaks to editor Jack Farley about Nikola, Softbank, as well as a week of ample credit issuance. - Taibbi: Woodward Tapes Buried An Even Crazier Story This Week
Taibbi: Woodward Tapes Buried An Even Crazier Story This Week
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 18:20Authored by Matt Taibbi via taibbi.substack.com
Tape shows: ethically, CNN chief a little shaky
A conversation between Jeff Zucker and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen removes all doubt: our hated president is a beloved commodity to network executives
America this week is obsessing about conversations between Donald Trump and Washington Post legend Bob Woodward. It’s a scoop, but a crazier story is being buried.
Beginning on September 1, tapes were released of conversations between former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and top CNN figures, including Chris Cuomo and president Jeff Zucker. The conversations between Zucker and Cohen especially go a long way toward explaining how Donald Trump became president. We see clearly how Zucker, famed now as a supposed stalwart force of anti-Trumpism, actually encouraged him during the 2016 campaign, to the point where he offered Trump help on how to succeed in a CNN-sponsored debate.
The tapes are devastating enough to media pretensions of non-responsibility for the Trump phenomenon that they’ve gone mostly uncovered, outside of Fox. The few outlets that have tackled the tapes focus on the fact that they were released on Tucker Carlson, for example the Washington Post’s “What’s up with Tucker Carlson’s leaked tapes of Michael Cohen’s secret CNN conversations?”
Conventional wisdom about the media role in electing Trump in 2016 focuses most on the quantity of free coverage he received. “Trump rode $5 billion to the White House,” was a typical treatment by The Street in November, 2016, noting that Trump’s best month of “earned media,” May, 2016, was driven by his “infamous Cinco de Mayo message.” That was the one in which he said “I love Hispanics!” over a Trump Tower taco bowl:
Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics! https://t.co/ufoTeQd8yA pic.twitter.com/k01Mc6CuDI
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2016
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The implication with these stories was that Trump was so good at driving social media interest with “controversial” gambits like these, he pushed news outlets to match audience demand. While this is true to an extent, it doesn’t really get at what happened.
Other areas of media behavior in 2016 that have been investigated include the amount of negative versus positive coverage devoted to Hillary Clinton, as well as the greed of network executives like Les Moonves of CBS, who infamously said of the Trump campaign, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
Among reporters, the story of the media’s evolving attitude toward Trump goes like this: they thought he was amusing initially, gave him too much coverage in a lust for ratings, then got religion and began “calling him out” once he sewed up the Republican nomination. It is said we adopted a new, more responsible approach to Trump as time went on, featuring “copious coverage and aggressive coverage” in an effort to be “true to history’s judgment,” i.e. to do everything to stop a unique threat from becoming president.
Anyone who wants to understand what the change in editorial attitude toward Trump in 2016 was really about need only listen to these tapes.
The public legend about Zucker, furthered by Donald Trump himself and buttressed by reports in conservative media like Project Veritas, is that he despises Trump. We’ve heard reports in recent years of Zucker ordering staff to be “fully committed” to Trump’s impeachment, for instance.
What these new tapes make plain is that this is likely neither a personal nor political issue with Zucker, who had a relationship with Trump dating back years. Zucker, after all, had made Trump a media star back when he was running NBC. He’d green-lit The Apprentice, which a pair of Washington Post writers would later describe as a “virtually nonstop advertisement for the Trump empire and lifestyle.”
Zucker also had a relationship with Cohen, who served on the board of a Manhattan nonprofit school called Columbia Prep with Zucker’s wife, Caryn. It’s not clear how the tapes got out, but we do know one conversation between Zucker and Cohen took place just hours before the last Republican primary debate, on March 10, 2016.
In that recording, Zucker reassured Cohen that “the boss,” i.e. Trump, was going to do great at the debate, because he always did:
I think the other guys are going to gang up on him tremendously, and I think he’s going to hold his own, as he does every time. He’s never lost a debate. And do you know what? He’s good at this… he’s going to do great.
The 2016 campaign was marked by scores of stories about how terrible a debater and campaigner Trump was. Headline after headline speculated that a trembling Trump might skip debates with Hillary Clinton.
“Will Donald Trump skip the debate with Hillary Clinton?” wondered New York that summer. “Is Donald Trump planning on skipping the presidential debates?” asked the Atlantic. Why might someone so far behind skip debates? Because “he’s not very good at them,” the Washington Post explained, adding Trump won the Republican primary “in spite of his lackluster debate performances.”
Reviews aside, the camera didn’t lie: Trump onstage so bullied GOP rivals that he commanded the most debate airtime by far, in one early case more than doubling the amount of time taken by Mike Huckabee and Scott Walker. No matter the morality of what Trump said — and there were repulsive moments, like the Megyn Kelly episode — voters came away with the impression that he’d been the center of gravity of each debate.
It would have been a journalistic service to explain how this worked. Instead, a legend was created that Trump was inept and his wins were losses. The biggest head-scratcher was the New York Times describing the debate that was clearly fatal to Jeb Bush — when he said his mother was the “strongest woman I know,” and Trump retorted, “She should be running” — as a “slashing attack” by Bush, whose “most forceful performance” left Trump “roundly pummeled.”
Zucker’s private assessment of Trump’s debating was noteworthy for that reason. Cohen went on to joke about what would likely happen in the debate, wondering how many times “Cruz” would call Trump a con man. Zucker corrected him, noting it would be Marco Rubio making such attacks, and offered advice:
You know what you should do? Whoever’s around him today should just be calling him a conman all day so he’s used to it, so that when he hears it from [Marco] Rubio, it doesn’t matter… “Hey conman, hey conman, hey conman, hey conman, hey conman.” So He thinks that’s his name, you know?
Remember, this was a CNN-hosted debate, with Jake Tapper emceeing the festivities:
Read the rest of the report here.
- Walmart Launches "Drone Delivery" As Last-Mile Delivery War Heats Up
Walmart Launches “Drone Delivery” As Last-Mile Delivery War Heats Up
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 18:00Walmart has partnered with Flytrex, an end-to-end drone delivery company, to launch an on-demand drone delivery service at one of it Supercenters in Fayetteville, North Carolina, this week. The unveiling of this new rapid last-mile delivery service comes a little more than one week after the company officially unveiled Walmart+, an alternative to Amazon Prime.
The new service, launched on Wednesday, will allow drones to deliver select products, such as groceries and essential items, Senior Vice President for Consumer Product Tom Ward wrote in a blog post on Walmart.com.
In an era of a virus pandemic, remote-working, and eruption of e-commerce shopping, last-mile deliver wars between Walmart and Amazon appear to be developing. In August, we noted Amazon was cleared by the FAA to test drone deliveries.
Flytrex’s automated drones can fly hundreds of feet in the air at 32 mph, with a distance of about 6.2 miles. Each drone has a maximum cargo load capacity of about 6.6 pounds, allowing overweight Americans to order corndogs and Twinkies on demand.
“We know that it will be some time before we see millions of packages delivered via drone,” Ward said in the post. “That still feels like a bit of science fiction, but we’re at a point where we’re learning more and more about the technology that is available and how we can use it to make our customers’ lives easier.”
A demo video was published on Walmart’s blog, showing the drone loaded with a customer’s order, then flying across a suburban neighhood, delivering the package to the customer’s front yard. Flytrex received FAA approval last year to deliver goods in North Carolina.
Walmart is joining an elite club of companies that are exploring drone programs for last-mile delivery. Those companies are Amazon, CVS, UPS, and Wing, an Alphabet Inc subsidiary.
“At the end of the day, it’s learnings from pilots such as this that will help shape the potential of drone delivery on a larger scale and, true to the vision of our founder, take Walmart beyond where we’ve been,” Ward said in the blog post.
In a contactless environment, propelled by the virus pandemic, drones appear to be the best means of transportation for last-mile deliveries by mega-US corporations.
As for all the airline pilots who are getting laid off – your next calling could be a Walmart drone pilot.
- California's Real Wildfire
California’s Real Wildfire
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/11/2020 – 17:40Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,
Hot dry winds have returned to the land of fruits and nuts. After baking away all summer long in the blistering sun, the dense sage and chaparral covering the coastal hillsides and canyons and the inland mountain forests are dry and toasty. Vegetated areas are a giant tinderbox.
What happens next is as predictable as night follows day. Just one spark – from a downed powerline or a backfiring semi-truck – and the whole thing conflagrates into a blistering windblown wildfire. The Golden State goes up in smoke. The sky turns to an orange haze; the sunsets are magnificent. And ash sprinkles down and coats the pavement with residue.
Of course, this happens every year. And every year is the worst year ever. The fires rage until the mild winter weather arrives. Then everyone seemingly forgets the fires ever happened…until the mudslides.
Indeed, California is a whacky and wild place. The Governor’s an absolute loon who fancies himself a leading presidential candidate for the 2024 election. State and local governments are largely socialist. The general populace generally wants first rate infrastructure, at a second rate price. And nearly half of all U.S.’s homeless people live here.
Yet the real story with California. The story only geeks and dweebs will tell. Is a story of its state and local governments. It’s a story that’s also being written in a state or city near you. The story has nothing to do with wildfires, per se. But it does have to do with conflagration.
This is the story of an army of public servants. And the promise of retirements that are unaffordable. More so than the wildfires ravaging the state are the wildfires ravaging the big pension fund. This is the story of grand promises that must be broken. And the painful level setting that comes with it.
Where to begin?
Doing Time
Over a decade ago, while providing consulting services to a county sanitation district, we crossed paths with a grumpy fellow who had only a secondary interest in providing industrious work. His primary interest was deliberating on his upcoming retirement. He had only six months to go before he met an important milestone.
This grumpy fellow was closing in on two important marks: (1) his 55th birthday, and (2) exactly 36 years of doing time at the district. As he explained it, after 55 years of age the retirement formula went from 2 to 2.5.
So after collecting a paycheck every two weeks for the past 36 years, something special was about to happen. He could take 2.5 and times it by 36 to equal 90. Specifically, he would now receive 90 percent of his final year’s pay for the rest of his life. Apparently, doing another four years’ time for the remaining 10 percent was not for him.
Our son had a similar experience when he was in fifth grade. His teacher, who had a condition that manifests when you consume an abundance of food without corresponding exercise, repeatedly shared with the class something special. She had only a seven year stint remaining before she could call it quits and start enjoying her fat retirement.
Mr. Grumpy and Ms. Rotund, you see, are entitled members of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). The nation’s largest public pension fund. In fact, it’s so large it takes 2,875 full time equivalent positions to administer it.
At last count, there were over 2 million members in the CalPERS retirement system. Some of these people may have done good work prior to retirement. Others, were likely career loafers. All, without question, did their time with purpose and intent.
But what they end up getting may not be what they traded their time for…
California’s Real Wildfire
The real fire in California is the wildfire that’s raging at CalPERS. The fire, you see, is a fire of arithmetic. It’s a fire that won’t go away. And it’s a fire that’ll burn the whole state to the ground.
Officially, CalPERS has roughly two-thirds of the money it needs to pay benefits that state and local governments have promised their workers. However, this is based on an assumption of future investment returns averaging 7 percent a year. Historically, CalPERS’ returns have fallen well short of this assumption.
In the 2019-20 fiscal year that ended June 30, CalPERS reported a 4.7 percent return. Over the last 20 years, the average annual return has been 5.5 percent. Hence, the unofficial gap between what CalPERS has and the promises it owes is much larger. For instance, if CalPERS investment returns assumption was lowered to its historical average, unfunded liability would rise from $160 billion to over $200 billion.
Of course, there are other ways to close the gap. Government employers and employees could chip in more. Similarly, future benefits could be reduced. Alas, for the latter, the state Supreme Court has ruled against it.
As for the former, state and local governments are having trouble meeting their CalPERS obligations as it is. They’re having to shift funds from other services, raise taxes, and borrow money…all to float a giant Ponzi scheme.
Some local governments are even turning to financial gimmicks to further extend the problem and pretend everything’s fine. The chicanery uses something called lease revenue bonds (LRB). According to Forbes writer Elizabeth Bauer, and brought to our attention via Zero Hedge:
“Two cities in California are issuing bonds with their own city streets as collateral to pay down their unfunded pension liabilities […].
“The two cities, West Covina and Torrance, are in SoCal. The city councils of the two communities in recent months have borrowed a combined $550 million in funds backed by their own city streets to try either to ‘refinance’ money owed to CalPERS, or to use on projects – or even more hospital beds and respirators, depending the circumstances.
“These so-called ‘lease-revenue bonds’ have one primary advantage to the local officials authorizing the borrowing. Unlike normal general-obligation bonds, LRBs can be undertaken without a vote, and quickly enough to allow officials a range of excuses, like taking advantage of low rates. According to Forbes, some of the money is being used to offset past under-funding of pension contributions.”
Whoever’s buying these LRBs should have their head examined. The revenue stream of a leased street seems a tad suspect. But what do we know. Given the circular Ponzi of modern day finance we wouldn’t be surprised to find these LRBs in CalPERS’ portfolio.
Regardless, California’s real wildfire rages on at CalPERS. The ultimate destruction will be breathtaking.
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