Apr 13

Today’s News 13th April 2021

  • Merkel's CDU Backs Centrist Party Chairman Armin Laschet In Bid For German Chancellor
    Merkel’s CDU Backs Centrist Party Chairman Armin Laschet In Bid For German Chancellor

    As German conservatives fight it out seeking Angela Merkel’s successor to lead her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) into the September election, on Monday party bosses threw their weight behind Armin Laschet to represent the center-right’s candidate for next Chancellor of Germany.

    “We have expressed our clear support for our party leader and made it clear that we consider him to be exceptionally suitable,” CDU premiere Volker Bouffier said of broad party support.

    This comes after months of behind-the-scenes jockeying between the 60-year old Laschet – head of Merkel’s CDU –  and rival candidate Markus Soeder, who leads the CDU’s Bavaria-only sister party named the Christian Social Union.

    Armin Laschet with Angela Merkel in 2017, Getty Images

    “Everyone wants a quick decision,” Laschet said at the start of this week. “All the facts are on the table. The problems we have to solve… are so big that we shouldn’t occupy ourselves any longer with our internal issues.”

    The two sides have been gridlocked thus far, with it now appearing the party has finally tapped Laschet according to various reports.

    As the AP reviews:

    Laschet and Soeder — the governors of Germany’s two most populous states, North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria respectively — both officially declared on Sunday that they’re prepared to run for chancellor in the Sept. 26 parliamentary election, but insisted that they will find a harmonious solution. They didn’t specify how.

    Both have advantages and disadvantages: Soeder’s poll ratings are much stronger, but Laschet is the recently elected leader of by far the bigger of the two parties.

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    A potential Laschet chancellorship is likely to continue many of Merkel’s own centrist policies, given he tends to be viewed as consistently most in her corner and unlikely to break from her “pragmatic” and compromising approach in national politics. 

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    Merkel and her CDU have taken a serious hit and faced immense public backlash of late over botched coronavirus policies, particularly after she rolled out a draconian 5-day Easter weekend ‘strict lockdown’ which so angered the public that she was forced to rescind the plan almost immediately upon its proposal. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 02:45

  • "Significant Proportion Of Brits" Say They Have Enjoyed Lockdown, New Poll Finds
    “Significant Proportion Of Brits” Say They Have Enjoyed Lockdown, New Poll Finds

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    A new poll by the Sunday Times finds that a “significant proportion of Brits” say they have enjoyed lockdown, with younger people more likely to say they liked COVID-19 restrictions.

    They survey gave respondents a range of answers to measure their like or dislike for lockdown. Over 16 per cent in total said they liked or strongly liked lockdown.

    The figures are even more alarming when it comes to young people. 20 per cent of 18-24 year olds said they liked or strongly liked the lockdown, while 22 per cent of 25-34 year olds said the same.

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    An online poll even found that a majority of respondents say they enjoyed lockdown.

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    A separate opinion poll conducted last month by YouGov found that over half of Brits said they would miss “many” or “some” aspects of the lockdown.

    Public opinion surveys also routinely find vehement support for the lockdown in general, with large numbers believing that it hasn’t been strict enough.

    The figures are obviously deeply concerning in that they illustrate how compliant people have become in the face of the most authoritarian restrictions on freedom since World War 2.

    However, pro-lockdown sentiment is also undeniably driven by the fact that the government has covered 80% of people’s wages via a furlough scheme that has given many endless hours of free leisure time.

    Aldous Huxley’s quote on how people would be trained to love their servitude seems particularly apt.

    “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude,” wrote Huxley.

    “The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes,” he also warned.

    The UK is only destined to exit lockdown on June 21, when all restrictions are supposed to be lifted, although given that the government has shifted the goalposts so many times, there is widespread skepticism about whether or not this target will be met.

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 02:00

  • Guns Of April And Global War
    Guns Of April And Global War

    Authored by J.B.Shurk via AmericanThinker.com,

    War between Russia and Ukraine looks imminent.  Israel and Iran are engaging in tit for tat maritime altercations.  And China is ratcheting up provocative incursions into the airspaces and waters of Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines.

    Any one of these regional conflicts is incendiary enough to ignite World War III (or, more accurately, each one is capable of transforming the cold, hybrid warfare of cyberhacks, technology thefts, financial markets manipulation, and perhaps even biological attacks that has been underway for many years into total and unrelenting global bloodshed), yet trading markets and news media are largely ignoring what’s unfolding.  It’s as if the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1999 Kargil War between nuclear-equipped India and Pakistan, and the Soviet and Nazi Invasion of Poland were all happening concurrently, and the world decided it was too busy enforcing face mask mandates upon religious congregants and following the turmoil of Khloe Kardashian to care.

    Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August paints a vivid picture of European elites so mentally imprisoned by the mores and cultural etiquette of the nineteenth century that they failed to grasp the reality of the geopolitical chessboard before them or the likelihood of the monumental carnage of WWI.  Something eerily reminiscent of those miscalculations is going on today. 

    In the thirty years since the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has squandered much of its time as the world’s sole superpower.  Rather than winding down NATO’s mission in a post-Soviet world, the West redirected and revitalized the alliance after 9/11 into a global military engagement against “extremism,” with the U.S. fortifying its role as the world’s policeman.  And rather than using the end of the Cold War to balance budgets and fix America’s unstable financial footing, the U.S. aggressively burdened itself with new and unsustainable levels of debt.  In effect, the U.S. rejected the possibility of multipolar peace, assumed the role of global hegemon, and never saved up for a rainy day.

    Instead of broadly integrating a shaky post-communist Russia into European and trans-Atlantic institutions, the U.S. has wobbled between treating Russia as an ally in the “war on terror” and as a Cold War adversary that must be contained by driving the expansion of NATO-allied member countries all the way to Russia’s borders.  One moment Hillary Clinton is promoting a “Russia reset,” and the next moment Barack Obama and Victoria Nuland are orchestrating a Ukrainian coup d’état to swap a Russia-friendly government with a fiercely anti-Russian replacement.  In order to prevent Russia from becoming a thorn in the side of New World Order types utilizing the IMF, WTO, and World Bank as engines for maintaining American-led global governance, U.S.-controlled NATO and E.U. technocrats intent on building a European superstate have kept Russia relegated to the sidelines.  And in recent years, Democrats in the U.S., “Remain” Brits opposed to Brexit, and European integrationists who have taken umbrage at Central European countries such as Poland and Hungary defending their own sovereignty have tried to scapegoat lost referendums on illusory “Russian disinformation” campaigns.  The effect of this intentional ostracism has been to push Russia closer to communist China and into adversarial brinkmanship with U.S.-E.U. interests.

    Likewise, by largely ignoring China’s decades of human rights abuses and normalizing trade relations at the turn of the millennium in an effort to tame a large but poor communist country through globalization and cultural assimilation, the United States has instead elevated China to an economic powerhouse increasingly capable of bending the West to its will.  After hollowing out America’s manufacturing and industrial capabilities and orchestrating the largest intercontinental transfer of wealth in history from America’s post-WWII middle class to China’s emerging middle class, the U.S. now finds itself in a defensive geopolitical posture with a combination of national debt, crumbling infrastructure, and dependence on Chinese raw materials and imports endangering America’s rules-based international order.  In what should be seen as a shot across the bow of the U.S. financial system, the recent (and almost certainly intentional) self-destruction of the Chinese-controlled family firm Archegos that destabilized Western credit markets and threatened the solvency of numerous Western investment banks was a pointed reminder from China to the U.S. that the latter’s days of unilateral control of the global economy are over.

    Both China and Russia are deleveraging from American dollars, increasing their gold stores, and preparing for a future when the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency.  Without that ace in the hole, the U.S. loses not only its ability to continue printing and spending money without enduring the normal consequences of monetary devaluation and collapse but also its ability to inflict financial sanctions as a way to “club” other nations into obedience.  A Sino-Russian alliance that utilizes Russia’s oil, coal, and natural gas leverage over Europe and its outsized military capabilities; China’s manufacturing dominance and Belt and Road Initiative extending across and linking Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America; and both nations’ wealth of natural resources puts them in a strategic position to forge a stable gold-backed digital currency that will instantly interconnect most of the world’s population.

    It is in this volatile reshuffling of global power that an often addled and confused Joe Biden attempts to confront the military chess moves of Russia and China while somehow transforming Iran from a destabilizing regional belligerent (almost certainly already in possession of nuclear weapons) into some kind of U.S. and European partner capable of playing nice with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Middle East.

    U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg have laid out a military strategy in NATO 2030 that explicitly calls for the alliance to combat “Russian threats and hostile actions,” to “expand and strengthen partnerships with Ukraine and Georgia,” and to defend against Chinese “security challenges.”  Ol’ Joe has reportedly given personal assurances to President Zelensky that the U.S. stands with Ukraine, and he’s publicly committed to defending Taiwan’s freedom.  But “red lines” coming from America are not the same after Barack Obama’s presidency.

    U.S. warships have entered the Black Sea and are sailing through the Taiwan Strait.  Meanwhile, even though the Biden administration has capitulated to Iran by unilaterally dropping sanctions, Iran has promised to “respond” against the U.S. and Israel for the recent Red Sea mine attack against a vessel purportedly used as a covert Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forward base.

    Russia has been very clear.  It will not allow Kiev to reacquire Crimea or the Russian-aligned breakaway proto-states of Luhansk and Donetsk.  It has responded to Ukrainian President Zelensky’s signing of Decree No. 117/2021 directing the Ukraine Army to recapture and reunify these areas by flooding the Ukraine-Russia border with weapons, troops, tanks, and elite paratroopers.  Russia is ready for war.

    China has been very clear.  It considers Taiwan a renegade province and the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea and the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea as territorial possessions.  It has promised to use military force to safeguard these claims and has built artificial islands in disputed territorial waters and sent fleets of “fishing vessels” to surround disputed island chains.  China is ready for war.  And Taiwan is ready, too.

    Israel has been very clear.  It will not allow a nuclear-empowered Iran to become a Damocles sword threatening Israel’s very existence.  Israel is ready for war.

    How will Joe Biden respond to these three powder kegs?  The more important question is this: Is his mind so trapped in last century’s geopolitics that he’s now overestimating American strengths, miscalculating other nations’ resolve, and stumbling headfirst into global conflagration?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 23:40

  • Beijing Plans To Mix Chinese COVID Jabs To Boost Efficacy As 'Vaccine Diplomacy' Falters
    Beijing Plans To Mix Chinese COVID Jabs To Boost Efficacy As ‘Vaccine Diplomacy’ Falters

    The director of China’s CDC has acknowledged an uncomfortable truth: China’s vaccines aren’t nearly as effective as the country’s scientists have proclaimed – much less their competitors.

    “We will solve the issue that current vaccines don’t have very high protection rates,” Chinese CDC Director Gao Fu said at a Saturday conference, according to a report from the Associated Press. “It’s now under consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunization process.”

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    In the short-term, Chinese official are considering mixing COVID-19 vaccines as a way of further boosting vaccine efficacy, as well as testing different shot intervals according to Reuters.

    “Inoculation using vaccines of different technical lines is being considered,” Gao told an audience in the Chinese city of Chengdu, adding that China is taking steps to “optimize” its vaccine approach. In one small study, the efficacy rate of China’s vaccine increased to 62.3% when the doses were given at intervals of three weeks and longer – however the overall efficacy rate for the vaccine was slightly above 50% in the trial.

    Two injections of a vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech, when given shorter than three weeks apart, was 49.1% effective based on data from a Phase III trial in Brazil, below the 50% threshold set by World Health Organization, according to a paper published by Brazilian researchers on Sunday ahead of peer review.

    But data from a small subgroup showed that the efficacy rate increased to 62.3% when the doses were given at intervals of three weeks and longer. The overall efficacy rate for the vaccine was slightly above 50% in the trial.

    You’d think with Pfizer and Moderna vaccines ‘in the wild’ that China could simply do what it does best; procure samples, copy them, and sell a functional vaccine for pennies on the dollar.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 23:20

  • China's Huawei Blames US For Global Chip Shortage
    China’s Huawei Blames US For Global Chip Shortage

    Just around the time Joe Biden was concluding a meeting with more than a dozen CEOs on Monday addressing the global chip shortage that has snarled supply chains and brought high-tech industries to a stop (a meeting in which he offered $50 billion for semiconductor manufacturing and research), China’s Huawei Technologies – which has been stockpiling chips at an unprecedented pace for the past 4 years – blamed the U.S. for the chip crunch rocking the global tech industry, saying Washington’s sanctions against Chinese companies have spurred panic buying of semiconductors and other supplies.

    “Because of the U.S. sanctions against Huawei, we have seen panic stockpiling among global companies, especially the Chinese ones. In the past, companies were barely stockpiling, but now they are building up three or six months’ worth of inventory … and that has disrupted the whole system,” Rotating Chairman Eric Xu said at the company’s 18th Huawei Analyst Summit, the Nikkei reported.

    Huawei Rotating Chairman Eric Xu says U.S. sanctions on Chinese companies has spurred a rush to stockpile chips and other components

    So… it’s the US’ fault that China is buying up and stockpiling every chip it can find in advance of the next trade war? Got it.

    In retrospect, Trump’s decision to place Huawei and other Chinese tech companies on trade blacklists that restrict their access to American technology was prophetic as their behavior demonstrates.

    “Clearly the unwarranted U.S. sanctions against Huawei and other [Chinese] companies are creating an industry-wide supply shortage, and this could even trigger a new global economic crisis,” Xu added.

    In other words, if Biden even thinks about thinking about imposing a fresh round of tariffs, the industry-wide chip shortage which is created by Chinese companies – but is entirely the fault of the US – will get far worse and lead to countless high-tech industries grinding to a halt.

    Xu’s remarks came hours before the White House plans to host a summit aimed at addressing the chip shortage, with an emphasis on its impact on the automotive industry. Dozens of executives from U.S., Asian and European tech companies and automakers – including General Motors, Ford, Google, Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Samsung Electronics, and NXP – attended the event.

    Xu said US trade restrictions on Huawei have not only undermined the company but also damaged the relationship of trust that existed in the global semiconductor supply chain. Now, he said, more and more countries are pushing to onshore chip production and boost their own tech self-reliance, rather than relying on cross-border supply chains.

    And guess what that means for prices? According to Xu, this will entail at least $1 trillion in upfront investment, which will push up semiconductor prices by 35% to 65% and ultimately lead to higher costs of electronic devices for end users, he added, citing a recent report submitted to the White House by the Semiconductor Industry Association, the top U.S. chip industry alliance.

    The rotating chairman also said Huawei is planning its strategy under the assumption that the company will remain on Washington’s so-called Entity List, which restricts its access to American technologies, for a long time, which means the company will continue buying up every chip it can find… all while blaming the US. While Huawei’s inventories for its business-to-business segment are currently sufficient, they “will not last for a long, long time,” Xu acknowledged.

    Meanwhile, and as we explained back in December 2018 in “This is What The “Trade” War With China Is Really All About“, where we said that “chips, or semiconductors, have become the central battlefield in the trade war between the two countries. And it is a battle in which China has a very visible Achilles heel”, other Chinese companies worry they will face a similar situation to Huawei, Xu said, adding that he believes there will be companies willing to invest in chip manufacturing to satisfy the needs of Huawei and other Chinese companies while maintaining compliance with U.S. rules.  

    “If it can be done … and if our inventory level can help Huawei to last until that time, then this would be how we address the problems and the challenges we face,” Xu said.

    Still, he acknowledged that currently no chip manufacturers globally are able to help Huawei to put its chip designs into production because of the U.S. export control rules. Nevertheless, he said, Huawei will continue to fund its team for chip research and development “as long as we are able to afford it.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 23:00

  • They'll "Get What They Deserve" – Trump Blasts "Pathetic" Supremes As Biden Court-Packing Looms
    They’ll “Get What They Deserve” – Trump Blasts “Pathetic” Supremes As Biden Court-Packing Looms

    In what is likely to go down as one of his greatest rants yet (and longest run-on sentences), former President Trump weighed in tonight on President Biden’s court-packing commission – and in the process took a jab at the Justices, the Radical Left, Mitch McConnell, and dared to exercise his free speech a little further by reminding Americans of his beliefs that the election was fraudulent.

    As a reminder, in an executive order on Friday, President Biden created a 36-member commission charged with examining the history of the court, past changes to the process of nominating justices, and the potential consequences to altering the size of the nation’s highest court.

    The panel will be led by Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel for former President Barack Obama, and Cristina Rodriguez, a Yale Law School professor who served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel under Mr. Obama.

    The issue of whether to alter the size of the court, which has been set at nine members since just after the Civil War, is highly charged, particularly at a moment when Congress is almost evenly divided between the two parties. An attempt by Mr. Biden to increase the number of justices would require approval of Congress and would be met by fierce opposition.

    As Jonathan Turley recently noted, the Commission is set to consider a litany of truly looney ideas to prevent the conservative majority from deciding cases, including creating a new specialized court or limiting jurisdiction to remove certain cases from their docket.

    The commission includes such individuals as Harvard University professor Laurence Tribe, who called Donald Trump a “terrorist” and has a history of personal and vulgar attacks on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and others, myself included, who maintain views that he opposes.

    Tribe once ridiculed former Attorney General William Barr for his Catholic faith.

    The only ire Tribe has drawn from the left, however, was when he referred to the possible selection of an African American like then Senator Kamala Harris to be vice president as mere “cosmetics” for the party.

    Tribe has not been subtle about his sudden interest in court packing. After the election he declared:

    “The time is overdue for a seriously considered plan of action from those of us who believe McConnell and Republicans, abetted by and abetting the Trump movement, have prioritized expansion of their own power over the safeguarding of our American democracy and the protection of the most vulnerable who are among us.”

    And so, with all that said, here are Trump’s thoughts:

    Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

    (emphasis ours)

    Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Supreme Court of the United States, after showing that they didn’t have the courage to do what they should have done on the Great Presidential Election Fraud of 2020, was PACKED by the same people, the Radical Left Democrats (who they are so afraid of!), that they so pathetically defended in not hearing the Election Fraud case.

    Now there is a very good chance they will be diluted (and moved throughout the court system so that they can see how the lower courts work), with many new Justices added to the Court, far more than has been reported.

    There is also a good chance that they will be term-limited.

    We had 19 states go before the Supreme Court who were, shockingly, not allowed to be heard. Believe it or not, the President of the United States was not allowed to be heard based on “no standing.” not based on the FACTS.

    The Court wouldn’t rule on the merits of the great Election Fraud, including the fact that local politicians and judges, not State Legislatures, made major changes to the Election – which is in total violation of the United States Constitution.

    Our politically correct Supreme Court will get what they deserve – an unconstitutionally elected group of Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our Country.

    With leaders like Mitch McConnell, they are helpless to fight. He didn’t fight for the Presidency, and he won’t fight for the Court.

    If and when this happens, I hope the Justices remember the day they didn’t have courage to do what they should have done for America.

    We can only imagine the liberal media uproar that is about to be unleashed… and demands for Trump to be banned from the entire internet will be imminent.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 22:40

  • How Bellingcat Launders National Security State Talking Points Into The Press
    How Bellingcat Launders National Security State Talking Points Into The Press

    Authored by Alan Macleod via MintPressNews.com,

    Investigative site Bellingcat is the toast of the popular press. In the past month alone, it has been described as “an intelligence agency for the people” (ABC Australia), a “transparent” and “innovative” (New Yorker) “independent news collective,” “transforming investigative journalism” (Big Think), and an unequivocal “force for good” (South China Morning Post). Indeed, outside of a few alternative news sites, it is very hard to hear a negative word against Bellingcat, such is the gushing praise for the outlet founded in 2014.

    This is troubling, because the evidence compiled in this investigation suggests Bellingcat is far from independent and neutral, as it is funded by Western governments, staffed with former military and state intelligence officers, repeats official narratives against enemy states, and serves as a key part in what could be called a “spook to Bellingcat to corporate media propaganda pipeline,” presenting Western government narratives as independent research.

    Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins, PA Wire/Alamy

    Citizen journalism staffed with spies and soldiers

    An alarming number of Bellingcat’s staff and contributors come from highly suspect backgrounds. Senior Investigator Nick Waters, for example, spent three years as an officer in the British Army, including a tour in Afghanistan, where he furthered the British state’s objectives in the region. Shortly after leaving the service, he was hired by Bellingcat to provide supposedly bias-free investigations into the Middle East.

    Former contributor Cameron Colquhoun’s past is even more suspect. Colquhoun spent a decade in a senior position in GCHQ (Britain’s version of the NSA), where he ran cyber and Middle Eastern terror operations. The Scot specializes in Middle Eastern security and also holds a qualification from the US State Department. None of this, however, is disclosed by Bellingcat, which merely describes him as the managing director of a private intelligence company that “conduct[s] ethical investigations” for clients around the world — thus depriving readers of key information they need to make informed judgments on what they are reading.

    There are plenty of former American spooks on Bellingcat’s roster as well. Former contributor Chris Biggers, who penned more than 60 articles for the site between 2014 and 2017, previously worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — a combat support unit that works under the Department of Defense and the broader Intelligence Community. Biggers is now the director of an intelligence company headquartered in Virginia, on the outskirts of Washington (close to other semi-private contractor groups like Booz Allen Hamilton), that boasts of having retired Army and Air Force generals on its board. Again, none of this is disclosed by Bellingcat, where Biggers’s bio states only that he is a “public and private sector consultant based in Washington, D.C.”

    For six years, Dan Kaszeta was a U.S. Secret Service agent specializing in chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and for six more he worked as program manager for the White House Military Office. At Bellingcat, he would provide some of the intellectual ammunition for Western accusations about chemical weapons use in Syria and Russia’s alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal.

    Kaszeta is also a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank funded by a host of Western governments as well as weapons contractors such as Airbus, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Its president is a British field marshal (the highest attainable military rank) and its senior vice president is retired American General David Petraeus. Its chairman is Lord Hague, the U.K.’s secretary of state between 2010 and 2015.

    All of this matters if a group is presenting itself as independent when, in reality, their views align almost perfectly with the governments funding them. But yet again, Bellingcat fails to follow basic journalism ethics and inform readers of these glaring conflict of interests, describing Kaszeta as merely the managing director of a security company and someone with 27 years of experience in security and antiterrorism. This means that unless readers are willing to do a research project they will be none the wiser.

    Other Bellingcat contributors have similar pasts. Nour Bakr previously worked for the British government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office while Karl Morand proudly served two separate tours in Iraq with the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division.

    Government and intelligence officials are the opposite of journalists. The former exist to promote the interests of power (often against those of the public) while the latter are supposed to hold the powerful to account on behalf of the people. That is why it is so inappropriate that Bellingcat has had so many former spooks on their books. It could be said that ex-officials who have renounced their past or blown the whistle, such as Daniel Ellsberg or John Kiriakou, have utility as journalists. But those who have simply made the transition into media without any change in positions usually serve only the powerful.

    Who pays the piper?

    Just as startling as its spooky staff is Bellingcat’s source of funding. In 2016 its founder, Eliot Higgins, dismissed the idea that his organization got money from the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) as a ludicrous conspiracy theory. Yet, by the next year, he openly admitted the thing he had laughed off for so long was, in fact, true (Bellingcat’s latest available financial report confirms that they continue to receive financial assistance from the NED). As many MintPress readers will know, the NED was explicitly set up by the Reagan administration as a front for the CIA’s regime-change operations. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” said the organization’s co-founder Allen Weinstein, proudly.

    Higgins himself was a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s quasi-official think tank, from 2016 to 2019. The Atlantic Council’s board of directors is a who’s who of state power, from war planners like Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell to retired generals such as James “Mad Dog” Mattis and H.R. McMaster. It also features no fewer than seven former CIA directors. How Higgins could possibly see taking a paid position at an organization like this while he was still the face of a supposedly open and independent intelligence collective as being at all consistent is unclear.

    Bana Alabed, an outsoken anti-Assad child activist, promotes Bellingcat at an Atlantic Council event. Photo: Twitter

    Other questionable sources of income include the Human Rights Foundation, an international organization set up by Venezuelan activist Thor Halvorssen Mendoza. Halvorssen is the son of a former government official accused of being a CIA informant and a gunrunner for the agency’s dirty wars in Central America in the 1980s and the cousin of convicted terrorist Leopoldo Lopez. Lopez in turn was a leader in a U.S.-backed coup in 2002 and a wave of political terror in 2014 that killed at least 43 people and caused an estimated $15 billion worth of property damage. A major figure on the right-wing of Venezuelan politics, Lopez told journalists that he wants the United States to formally rule the country once President Nicolas Maduro is overthrown. With the help of the Spanish government, Lopez escaped from jail and fled to Spain last year.

    Imagine, for one second, the opposite scenario: an “independent” Russian investigative website staffed partially with ex-KGB officials, funded by the Kremlin, with most of their research focused on the nefarious deeds of the U.S., U.K. and NATO. Would anyone take it seriously? And yet Bellingcat is consistently presented in corporate media as a liberatory organization; the Information Age’s gift to the people.

    The Bellingcat to journalism pipeline

    The corporate press itself already has a disturbingly close relationship with the national security state, as does social media. In 2019, a senior Twitter executive was unmasked as an active duty officer in the British Army’s online psychological operations unit. Coming at a time when foreign interference in politics and society was the primary issue in U.S. politics, the story was, astoundingly, almost completely ignored in the mainstream press. Only one U.S. outlet of any note picked it up, and that journalist was forced out of the profession weeks later.

    Increasingly, it seems, Bellingcat is serving as a training ground for those looking for a job in the West’s most prestigious media outlets. For instance, former Bellingcat contributor Brenna Smith — who was recently the subject of a media storm after she successfully pressured a number of online payment companies to stop allowing the crowdfunding of the Capitol Building insurrectionists — announced last month she would be leaving USA Today and joining The New York Times. There she will meet up with former Bellingcat senior investigator Christiaan Triebert, who joined the Times’ visual investigations team in 2019.

    The Times, commonly thought of as the United States’ most influential media outlet, has also collaborated with Bellingcat writers for individual pieces before. In 2018, it commissioned Giancarlo Fiorella and Aliaume Leroy to publish an op-ed strongly insinuating that the Venezuelan state murdered Oscar Perez. After he stole a military helicopter and used it to bomb government buildings in downtown Caracas while trying to ignite a civil war, Perez became the darling of the Western press, being described as a “patriot” (The Guardian), a “rebel” (Miami Herald), an “action hero” (The Times of London), and a “liberator” (Task and Purpose).

    Until 2020, Fiorella ran an opposition blog called “In Venezuela” despite living in Canada. Leroy is now a full-time producer and investigator for the U.K.-government network, the BBC.

    Bad news from Bellingcat

    What we are uncovering here is a network of military, state, think-tank and media units all working together, of which Bellingcat is a central fixture. This would be bad enough, but much of its own research is extremely poor. It strongly pushed the now increasingly discredited idea of a chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, attacking the members of the OPCW who came forward to expose the coverup and making some bizarre claims along the way. For years, Higgins and other members of the Bellingcat team also signal-boosted a Twitter account purporting to be an ISIS official, only for an investigation to expose the account as belonging to a young Indian troll in Bangalore. A leaked U.K. Foreign Office document lamented that “Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

    Ultimately, however, the organization still provides utility as an attack dog for the West, publishing research that the media can cite, supposedly as “independent,” rather than rely directly on intelligence officials, whose credibility with the public is automatically far lower.

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    Oliver Boyd-Barrett, professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University and an expert in the connections between the deep state and the fourth estate, told MintPress that “the role of Bellingcat is to provide spurious legitimacy to U.S./NATO pretexts for war and conflict.” In far more positive words, the CIA actually appears to agree with him.

    “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love [Bellingcat],” said Marc Polymeropoulos, the agency’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia. “Whenever we had to talk to our liaison partners about it, instead of trying to have things cleared or worry about classification issues, you could just reference [Bellingcat’s] work.” Polymeropoulos recently attempted to blame his headache problems on a heretofore unknown Russian microwave weapon, a claim that remarkably became an international scandal. “The greatest value of Bellingcat is that we can then go to the Russians and say ‘there you go’ [when they ask for evidence],” added former CIA Chief of Station Daniel Hoffman.

    Bellingcat certainly seems to pay particular attention to the crimes of official enemies. As investigative journalist Matt Kennard noted, it has only published five stories on the United Kingdom, 17 on Saudi Arabia, 19 on the U.S. (most of which are about foreign interference in American society or far-right/QAnon cults). Yet it has 144 on Russia and 244 under its Syria tag.

    In his new book “We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People,” the outlet’s boss Higgins writes: “We have no agenda but we do have a credo: evidence exists and falsehoods exist, and people still care about the difference.” Yet exploring the backgrounds of its journalists and its sources of funding quickly reveals this to be a badly spun piece of PR.

    Bellingcat looks far more like a bunch of spooks masquerading as citizen journalists than a people-centered organization taking on power and lies wherever it sees them. Unfortunately, with many of its proteges travelling through the pipeline into influential media outlets, it seems that there might be quite a few masquerading as reporters as well.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 22:20

  • Japan Decides To Dump One Million Tons Of Radioactive Fukushima Water Into The Pacific; IAEA Approves
    Japan Decides To Dump One Million Tons Of Radioactive Fukushima Water Into The Pacific; IAEA Approves

    We live in a bizarre world: one where the the Keystone XL pipeline must be shut in case of a hypothetical (and extremely unlikely) leak, but where Japan is allowed to dump over one million tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. Actually, it’s either bizarre or simply exposing just how profoundly hypocritical, self-serving and corrupt the ESG/Green/Greta Thunberg theater truly is.

    Last week we wrote that ten years after the Fukushima disaster, Japan had finally come “clean”, and admitted that it is “unavoidable” that it would have to dump radioactive Fukushima water in the Pacific Ocean. Fast forward to today when moments ago Kyodo confirmed what we already knew: the Japanese government decided to release treated radioactive water accumulating at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the sea, having determined “it poses no safety concerns to humans or the environment” despite worries of local fishermen and neighboring countries.

    Tanks storing treated radioactive water on the premises of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant

    So an oil pipeline whose odds of leaking are virtually zero must be shuttered immediately, but a million tons of radioactive water is “safe” and can be released into the Pacific Ocean, from where it will eventually finds its way into billions of humans around the globe.

    But wait, the insanity gets better: Japan’s decision to release all this radioactivity into the ocean was backed by none other than the “scientists” at the International Atomic Energy Agency, with Director General Rafael Grossi saying it is “scientifically sound” and in line with standard practice in the nuclear industry around the world.

    So… the IAEA has a standard practice of what exploded nuclear power plants do with their fallout water? And how often has this particular standard practice been invoked we wonder?

    Between this and the covid debacle, one can almost see why nobody trusts the world’s so-called whores for hire scientists any more.

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    Anyway, back to the cartoonish nation of Japan, whose Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga met with members of his Cabinet including industry minister Hiroshi Kajiyama to formalize the decision, which comes a decade after a massive earthquake and tsunami triggered a triple meltdown in March 2011.

    It is here that over the past decade, water pumped into the ruined reactors at the Fukushima plant to cool the melted fuel, mixed with rain and groundwater that has also been contaminated, has been treated using a liquid processing system, or ALPS, which in theory removes most radioactive materials including strontium and cesium but leaves behind tritium, which according to scientists poses little risk to human health in low concentration. The water is being stored in tanks on the plant’s premises — more than 1.25 million tons in total.

    Of course, if the water is so safe, we wonder when the “scientists” will demonstrate that there is nothing to be concerned about by chugging a gallon of the “ALPS-treated” radioactive sludge. We won’t be holding our breath.

    The real reason why Japan has no choice but to dump the toxic fallout into the ocean is that plant operator TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings) expects to run out of storage capacity as early as fall next year, and the government had been looking for ways to safely dispose of the tritiated water. Having found no viable alternative, it decided to do the simplest possible thing: dump it.

    “Disposing of the treated water is an unavoidable issue in decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi plant,” Suga said at the meeting, adding the plan will be implemented “while ensuring that safety standards are cleared by a wide margin and firm steps are taken to prevent reputational damage.”

    A Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry subcommittee concluded in February 2020 that releasing the tritiated water into the sea and evaporating it were both realistic options, with the former more technically feasible. Hilariously, and as noted above, the International Atomic Energy Agency has backed the move, with Director General Rafael Grossi saying it is scientifically sound and in line with standard practice in the nuclear industry around the world.

    Yet despite Japan’s and the IAEA’s assurance, China and South Korea on Monday voiced deep concern over Japan’s plan – and now decision – to release treated radioactive water that has accumulated at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, saying discharging it into the sea would have a negative impact on its neighbors. Apparently they have not been briefed by the ALPS “experts” that there is nothing to worry about.

    China said it has conveyed its “serious concern” to Japan, calling on Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s government to make a cautious decision to protect the public interest of international society as well as the health and safety of Chinese citizens. Arguing Tokyo has come under criticism globally over the issue, “Japan cannot overlook or shrug off” such a fact and “should not hurt the marine environment, food safety and human health anymore,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.

    A South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman, meanwhile, said Monday that releasing treated water from the Fukushima plant would “directly and indirectly affect the safety of the people and the neighboring environment.”

    “It would be difficult to accept the release into the sea if the Japanese side makes a decision without sufficient consultation,” the spokesman said, adding South Korea will “respond by strengthening cooperation” with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Apparently he was unaware that the IAEA was already bribed convinced by Japan that there is nothing wrong what what is about to take place.

    But wait… we thought that “scientists” said it was safe: does China and South Korea practice a different “science” – one where a million tons of radioactive water getting dumped into the ocean is actually – gasp – dangerous.

    Could it be that we have two “scientific” camps, one of which is motivated by things far more mundane than the scientific method to reach its conclusion. Things such as money?

    Of course, for Japan which prints trillions of said money every months, it’s not a concern, and that’s music to the “scientists” ears. Suga said the IAEA and other third parties will be involved in the plan, ensuring it is carried out with transparency. We can only assume that the “third parties” will also receive copious amounts of money to find that nothing is wrong here.

    In any case, the poisoning of the Pacific Ocean won’t take place for another two years: that’s when the the tritiated water is actually released into the sea due to the need to build new facilities and conduct safety screenings. The government had initially hoped to make the decision last October, viewing it as necessary to clear up space at the Fukushima plant in order to move forward with the decades-long decommissioning process, but decided it needed more time to convince local fishermen who have voiced strong opposition.

    Apparently the local fishermen have also not heard of this thing called “science” according to which there is nothing to worry about.

    The good news is that with a two year lead time, such aspiring eco-saints as Greta Thunberg will have more than enough time to prevent this plan from being realized. Unless, of course, Greta’s entire eco spiel is one giant lie. Failing that, and should Greta also be convinced by money the IAEA that there is nothing wrong with the water, we can only hope that she will drink several gallons of the radioactive substance on live TV.

    Meanwhile, we wonder how those other eco-saints at Blackrock will respond: having banned investments in such devious, diabolical industries as coal and shale, we can only imagine the loophole Larry Fink’s henchmen will have to come up with to continue investing in Japan without looking like total sellouts. One suggestion has already emerged: the “Blackrock Nuclear Treated Water Socially Responsible Inclusion Oil Sands Exclusion ETF”

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 22:00

  • Greenwald: Due Process, Adult Sexual Morality And The Case Of Rep. Matt Gaetz
    Greenwald: Due Process, Adult Sexual Morality And The Case Of Rep. Matt Gaetz

    Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,

    That Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is a pedophile, a sex trafficker, and an abuser of women who forces them to prostitute themselves and use drugs with him is a widespread assumption in many media and political circles. That is true despite the rather significant fact that not only has he never been charged with (let alone convicted of) such crimes, but also no evidence has been publicly presented that any of it is true. He has also vehemently denied all of it. All or some of these accusations very well may be true and, one day — perhaps imminently — there will be ample publicly available evidence demonstrating this.

    : Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fl) speaks during the “Save America Summit” at the Trump National Doral golf resort on April 09, 2021 in Doral, Florida (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images).

    But that day has not yet arrived. As of now, we know very little beyond what The New York Times initially reported about all of this on March 30: that “people close to the investigation” told the paper that “a Justice Department investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and an indicted Florida politician is focusing on their involvement with multiple women who were recruited online for sex and received cash payments.” The article also said the DOJ “inquiry is also examining whether Mr. Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl and whether she received anything of material value.” Both the NYT and, later, The Daily Beast, indicated the existence of financial transactions involving payments by Gaetz to his associate Joel Greenberg, currently charged with multiple felonies. The New York Times article made clear: “No charges have been brought against Mr. Gaetz, and the extent of his criminal exposure is unclear.” That is still true..

    But no matter. One is hard-pressed to find people willing to urge that his guilt not be assumed before evidence of it is presented (amazingly, just six months ago, many of the same people now treating these accusations as proven fact had no trouble casually asserting or strongly implying that Gaetz was having sex with a 19-year-old male whom he said he had been parentally raising for years, all without the slightest regard for the impact of such innuendo on that other person). So reckless is the discourse around this case that it is now frequently asserted in major outlets that Rep. Gaetz faces “charges” of sex trafficking and sex with a minor, even though that claim is, at least as of now, blatantly untrue. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said that explicitly this morning without contradiction on CBS News’ Face the Nation, and it was then repeated without contradiction by numerous media outlets:

    The Daily Beast, Apr. 11, 2021

    That is because — as many people learned in the case of 31-year-old Mayor Alex Morse, accused by the left’s creepy sexual morality police of the moral crime of consensually dating young adults only to be subsequently vindicated as the victim of a political hit — those who urge caution or basic precepts of due process are immediately accused of sympathy for the crimes themselves. Like free speech, “due process” is both a Constitutional guarantee (i.e., the state may not deprive someone of life, liberty or property without it) as well as a vital cultural norm (i.e., people should not be assumed guilty of heinous crimes without evidence being publicly presented). It is that latter sense of due process being mauled by prevailing discourse surrounding this case.

    But this case also raises interesting and important questions of sexual morality and political ideology about the right of adults to engage in consensual behavior without the state and societal moral judgments intervening to punish or castigate them for it — once a foundational view of left-wing, libertarian and even some strains of right-wing politics. It goes without saying that if Rep. Gaetz or the adult women he hired violated prostitution or drug laws, then they should be treated like anyone else who does so (in 38 of 50 states and the District of Columbia, the age of consent for sex is 16 or 17; only in 12 states is it 18, though Florida, Gaetz’s home state, is one of those; prostitution remains illegal in all U.S. jurisdictions except parts of Nevada).

    But legality aside, what are the moral principles that ought to govern how consenting adults have sex with one another, choose to engage in or patronize sex work, or ingest substances into their own body? That “sex work” should neither be criminalized nor stigmatized has been a growing view within leftist politics for years now (it is a major cause of the ACLU), and has long had significant support among libertarians and even some “limited government” conservatives.

    Tweets from the American Civil LIberties Union, 2020-2021

    To explore all of these complex and quite fascinating legal, political and cultural issues, I discuss this case in the video below, roughly 30 minutes in length. In addition to the above-referenced questions, I examine how the liberal-left view of private adult consensual behavior has radically shifted within the last ten-to-fifteen years (the USA Today article I referenced about the 1994 sexual relationship between the married-but-separated California House Speaker Willie Brown, 60, and county prosecutor Kamala Harris, 31 years his junior, is here). My discussion in this video also explores the state of the law and relevant moral principles applicable to Rep. Gaetz’s case and those like it:

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 21:40

  • China's Credit Growth Moderates In April, Putting Credit Impulse In Jeopardy
    China’s Credit Growth Moderates In April, Putting Credit Impulse In Jeopardy

    Last Tuesday we reported that “China Credit Impulse Is Set To Collapse As Beijing Orders Banks To Curtail Loan Growth For Rest Of 2021“, and just a few days later we got the latest confirmation of this critical – for the global economy – transition.

    Overnight, China reported that the sequential growth of total social financing (TSF) moderated in March following a strong rebound in January and February, with robust loan growth offset by a contraction in shadow lending.

    Reflecting the normalization in monetary policy in past months, and the PBOC’s most recent attempt to rein in runaway debt, Goldman believes that credit growth should moderate this year but remain broadly in line with nominal GDP growth. This would be primarily driven by moderation in government bond and corporate bond issuance, and slower loan growth. On the other hand, a big test to China’s commitment to contain debt will emerge in the coming months, when issuance in local government new special bonds will increase significantly, which would be supportive of credit growth in the near term, but would once again put into question Beijing’s dedication lowering or even containing the country’s debt.

    Here are the key numbers:

    • New CNY loans: RMB 2,730bn in March, beating consensus est. RMB 2,300bn.
    • Outstanding CNY loan growth: 12.6% yoy in March; down from February:12.9% yoy
    • Total social financing: RMB 3340bn in March, missing consensus est. RMB 3700bn.
    • TSF stock growth was 12.6% yoy in March, lower than 13.5% in February. The implied month-on-month growth of TSF stock moderated to 10.6% from 13.5% in February.
    • M2: 9.4% yoy in March (11.9% SA ann mom), missing consensus est. 9.5% yoy., and down from February’s 10.1% yoy

    Key points:

    1. The sequential growth of TSF slowed to 10.6% M/M annualized in March,following the acceleration in January and February. This is roughly similar to the average of sequential growth of TSF stock in November-February. In year-on-year terms, TSF stock growth moderated to 12.6% yoy in March from 13.5% yoy. M2 growth slowed to 9.4% yoy in March from 10.1% in February. 
    2. Among major TSF components, new Rmb loans was robust in March. This was driven by strong mid-to-long term loans to corporates. It may reflect strength in investment demand, which was echoed by significant pickup in business expectation sub-index under construction PMI and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business’s business condition index on investment outlook in recent two months. And while household mid-to-long term loans growth remained robust, Goldman notes that average growth for short-term household loans weakened notably, probably related to regulations on consumer credit. Meanwhile, the drag from shadow lending widened: banks’ undiscounted acceptance bills fell significantly in March (after seasonal adjustment), and contraction in trust also widened. Corporate bond issuance in March was similar as the average in January and February, and net government bonds issuance has been relatively mild so far this year.
    3. According to Goldman, reflecting the normalization in monetary policy in past months, credit growth should moderate this year but remain broadly in line with nominal GDP growth (the bank forecasts TSF growth to moderate to 11.5% this year). This would be primarily driven by moderation in government bonds as suggested in the budget, milder corporate bond issuance reflecting normalization of liquidity conditions, and slower loan growth (due to slower public investment and smaller liquidity demand which increased notably last year amid the pandemic shock). For instance, policy bank loans, which may have increased significantly by around Rmb 2.5tr last year to support public investment, would probably slow this year. And inclusive SMEs lending, which increased by around Rmb 3.6tr, could also moderate (big five banks’ inclusive SMEs lending increased sharply by around 55% last year, and was required to increase by more than 30% this year). In coming months,issuance in local government new special bonds, which only started in March, will increase significantly, with the majority of pre-allocated quota of Rmb 1.77tr likely being issued in Q2, and this would support credit growth in the near term.

    Details aside, as Bloomberg’s Ye Xie notes when looking at the continued slowdown in growth in both TSF and M2, “at this rate, the credit impulse, or the change of new credit as a percentage of GDP, could start to shrink by July or August just as the Fed may lay the groundwork for its own tapering.” This confirms what we discussed last week…

    … when we said that a slowdown in credit creation would have dire consequences on China’s all-important credit impulse which, as we have profiled repeatedly in the past, is arguably the biggest driving force behind global reflation (or disinflation, as the case may be).

    While we urge readers to go over some of our big level (and correct) observations laid out last December in “In Historic Reversal, China’s Credit Impulse Just Peaked: What This Means For Global Markets“, the latest Chinese credit data means that SocGen’s forecast for sharply lower credit impulse in the coming years…

    … will be validated. And as this all too critical metric fades, virtually every asset across the globe will be affected (especially if it is joined by the double whammy of the Fed also tapering in late 2021/early 2022).

    As a reminder, the credit impulse first reaches assets that are driven primarily by the Chinese economy (Chinese bond yields and industrial metals). Next to be impacted are inflation breakevens and sovereign yields in Western economies. The peak correlation for other growth-sensitive assets such as eurozone banks and AUD/JPY arrives with bigger lag of around 4-5 quarters. This result, while logical, is quite significant, as it gives us a playbook for the ebb and flow in Chinese credit impulse.

    The table above shows the correlation between different assets and Chinese credit impulse for varying lag times. The extent of the differences between lags in correlations is exemplified in the left-hand chart below. While peak correlation for Chinese interest rate swaps arrives with an eight-month lag, the peak correlation for eurozone banks manifests itself with a lag of 14 months (read more here “In Historic Reversal, China’s Credit Impulse Just Peaked: What This Means For Global Markets“).

    Looking ahead, with high correlations and short lag times, Chinese interest rate swaps and industrial metals should be the first assets to be adversely impacted by the topping of the Chinese credit impulse. Australian house prices and US 5Y forward 5Y inflation will likely also be hit in this first group.

    The mining and industrial sectors also have short lag times, but their correlation is slightly lower. The other highly correlated group of assets, including eurozone banks, also gets strongly affected by credit impulse, but the rather large lag time opens the door for other factors to influence the price action of these assets as well.

    Low correlation with certain assets suggests that Chinese credit, while being one of the drivers, may not be the main driver of price performance for these assets (e.g. semis/software ratio, sovereign yields in the West and value/quality ratio).

    In the chart below, SocGen provides a critical estimated timeline of the peak Y/Y performance for each of the assets it sees as impacted by China’s credit impulse slowdown. While these assets are influenced by multiple factors and therefore could easily diverge from expectations, the chart below does present a neat output from a lagged regression analysis and is a useful guideline for the balance of this year and next.

    Bottom line: if the world is hit by the double whammy of continued deleveraging in China which pushes the credit impulse into contraction, coupled with Fed “thinking about thinking about tapering” sometime in late 2021, then all bets are off.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 21:20

  • Big Government Rides To The Rescue Of Labor Unions
    Big Government Rides To The Rescue Of Labor Unions

    Submitted by Sovereign Man Blueprint

    The US House of Representatives has passed a bill called the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. If the Senate passes the bill and the President signs it, this would usher in a union labor coup.

    It would become illegal for employers to attempt, in any way, to influence employees to not join a labor union or participate in collective bargaining.  The bill would overturn right to work laws in 27 states. These laws prohibit unions from requiring workers to join a union, and prohibit unions from forcing non-union members to pay dues.

    The bill would also force employers to share employees’ private information with union organizers:

    “a voter list to a labor organization… shall include the names of all employees in the bargaining unit and such employees’ home addresses, work locations, shifts, job classifications, and, if available to the employer, personal landline and mobile telephone numbers, and work and personal email addresses.”

    And it would allow unions to do away with secret voting, leaving plenty of room for unions to intimidate workers who don’t fall in line.

    What this means:

    Unions are a big reason why American education has declined substantially against the rest of the world, why it is so hard to hold police accountable for crimes they commit on duty, and why the costs of American-made products are so high.

    Labor regulations help unions form a protectionist racket which keeps certain people out of jobs, weakens competition for the best employees, and raises costs for both employers and consumers. It seems like most people realize this, since union membership has been declining for decades. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership has declined by almost 3.5 million members since 1983, while the labor force has grown by about 50 million workers.

    State laws, like the ones threatened by this legislation, protected workers against unions bullying them into joining and paying dues. So here comes the giant union bailout from the federal government— using the employees’ money.

    Regulations like these are bad for the business owner, bad for the employees, bad for the consumers, and bad for the economy. Unions gain more power, but everyone else is left with less choice and less prosperity.

    What you can do about it:

    There are still some places in the world where the freedom to run a business still exists. Here are a couple jurisdictions which actually go out of their way to attract businesses, and position themselves as commerce and innovation-friendly environments.

    Estonia

    Since gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Estonia has positioned itself as a relatively free market jurisdiction. Over the past few years, Estonia has developed e-residency. It’s not actual residency— Estonia sells it as a “digital nation for global citizens.”

    They have tailored the product to entrepreneurs, freelancers, digital nomads, and business owners who want remote exposure to European markets, funding, and services.

    E-residency is open to anyone in the world, and allows the e-resident to register a business in Estonia. This has certain advantages, like the ability to open a business bank account in the European Union, which could allow non-EU residents to do business in the region more easily.

    E-residents also have access to to an online marketplace where they can use services to launch and grow a business. For example, different companies which offer accounting, payment processing, legal advice, and insurance are all available through the e-residency portal. In a sense, Estonia is providing secure online infrastructure for online businesses.

    United Arab Emirates

    The UAE is home to dozens of free trade and special economic zones, which offer special tax rates and reduced regulation to various types of businesses. For example, Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC) is a free trade zone with 0% corporate and personal income tax rates, which allows 100% foreign ownership of companies established in the zone. Companies can be owned by a single or multiple owners, and the zone does not restrict the movement of capital out of DMCC.

    You do need a physical presence in the zone, but the good news is an approved application to set up your business in the zone also comes with residency for the owner. Most zones operate in a similar way, but cater to specific industries, like e-commerce, media, or technology.

    This isn’t to say that either of these options is necessarily right for everyone. The point is that while some governments are making it harder to do business, there are always other jurisdictions happy to attract productive people.

    Of course the easiest place to start a business depends on what type of business you want to run.

    Industrial manufacturing might lead you to choose a place with fewer labor restrictions (see: union slams Ford for moving production to Mexico), while services and consulting businesses might be able to locate anywhere, and hire contract workers (i.e. Puerto Rico’s 4% corporate tax on businesses exporting services).

    If you are in the medical profession, for example, you may want to check out the January Alert (for Sovereign Man: Confidential subscribers) on Medical tourism destinations in Latin America. The reason most of these places can offer inexpensive, high-quality healthcare is because the lack of government restrictions, which translates to easier business start-up for medical professionals.

    Although it can be sad to see the US become a less friendly place for businesses and productivity, it should be encouraging that more jurisdictions are positioning themselves to attract productive people and companies.

    As long as competition exists, there should always be options— with any luck, more every year.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 21:00

  • Fed's Tapering Roadmap Sets Up A Volatile Summer
    Fed’s Tapering Roadmap Sets Up A Volatile Summer

    The Fed tipped its hand today, and unveiled its “viral reaction function” revealing the timetable according to which the Fed will start talking about QE tapering.

    As discussed previously, James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that getting 75% of Americans vaccinated would be a signal that the pandemic was ending, which is a necessary condition for the central bank to consider tapering its bond-buying program. According to our calculations, extrapolating current vaccination rates would mean that – all else equal – we could see the Fed’s 75% bogey be hit in just two short months.

    As we further said, one thing Powell did not want to do is give any calendar estimation as to when the Fed could start “thinking about thinking” about tapering. Well, thanks to Bullard, it may have no choice but to do so as soon as the summer. And what’s worse, now that the market is aware of the Fed’s “viral reaction function”, any sharp jump in the vaccination rate will provoke risk off moves as traders start pricing in the inevitable tapering of QE which they now know will be catalyzed by a “normalization” in the pandemic.

    A subsequent calculation by Bloomberg came up with a slightly later D-day: as Bloomberg commentator Ye Xie wrote, “at the current rate of inoculation, that threshold could be met by early August, just before the Fed’s Jackson Hole Symposium, a venue known for major policy announcements.”

    So assuming the Fed gives markets a couple of months to prepare for the move, the actual tapering could start early next year. That time frame is roughly in line with the median forecast in the Fed’s survey of primary dealers, even though market pricing suggests a more aggressive timetable.

    Meanwhile, as we also laid out last week in “China Credit Impulse Set To Collapse As Beijing Orders Banks To Curtail Loan Growth For Rest Of 2021“, China’s stimulus tapering is already under way, with Bloomberg pointing out that “the year-on-year growth of total social financing fell to 12.3% in March, from 13.3% in February and a peak of 13.7% in October. At this rate, the credit impulse, or the change of new credit as a percentage of GDP, could start to shrink by July or August — just as the Fed may lay the groundwork for its own tapering.”

    So, as Bloomberg’s Xie concludes, “from a liquidity perspective, the summer could be a challenging time for markets. In the past decade, the slowdown of China’s credit impulse has consistently been accompanied by investors cutting the valuation of the MSCI China Index.”

    But it’s not just Chinese stocks that are subject to the monthly injections and drains of the all-important credit impulse: As a reminder, the credit impulse first reaches assets that are driven primarily by the Chinese economy (Chinese bond yields and industrial metals). Next to be impacted are inflation breakevens and sovereign yields in Western economies. The peak correlation for other growth-sensitive assets such as eurozone banks and AUD/JPY arrives with bigger lag of around 4-5 quarters. This result, while logical, is quite significant, as it gives us a playbook for the ebb and flow in Chinese credit impulse.

    In the chart below, SocGen provides a critical estimated timeline of the peak Y/Y performance for each of the assets it sees as impacted by China’s credit impulse slowdown. While these assets are influenced by multiple factors and therefore could easily diverge from expectations, the chart below does present a neat output from a lagged regression analysis and is a useful guideline for the balance of this year and next.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 20:40

  • Top Republican Posts Video Of 'Child Abuse' At Texas Border Patrol Facility
    Top Republican Posts Video Of ‘Child Abuse’ At Texas Border Patrol Facility

    Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) posted video footage of numerous unaccompanied children being housed in a Donna, Texas, Border Patrol facility and said it’s tantamount to “child abuse.”

    “I visited the Donna processing facility yesterday. … This is the devastating result of their disastrous left-wing immigration agenda. RT so everyone can see what they’re trying to hide. This is child abuse,” Scalise wrote on Twitter on April 10.

    The video showed what appeared to be possibly hundreds of children covered in aluminum-style blankets, packed next to each other in transparent pens. The sound of people talking loudly in the background can be heard.

    A day before releasing the video, Scalise, the No. 2 Republican in the House, posted a video of himself talking near a section of the U.S.–Mexico border.

    “This is out of control. It’s the middle of the night. We’ve seen dozens of children flow freely across the border in just the past few minutes,” he said in a tweet as dozens of people who appear to be trying to cross the border illegally walk past him.

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    The Epoch Times has contacted the Department of Homeland Security for comment.

    On April 12, the White House reached a deal with Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras to potentially stem the flow of illegal immigration into the United States, a Biden administration official said.

    Special assistant to the President for Immigration for the Domestic Policy Council Tyler Moran said in a TV interview that the administration “secured agreements” that would place “more troops on their” respective borders.

    “Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala have all agreed to do this,” Moran said. “That not only is going to prevent the traffickers and the smugglers and cartels that take advantage of the kids on their way here, but also to protect those children.”

    The announcement comes as numerous illegal immigrants have attempted to cross the U.S.–Mexico border in recent months. In March, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered more than 171,000 illegal immigrants, including a significant number of unaccompanied children, according to data provided by the agency.

    Authorities encountered 18,890 unaccompanied children in March, well above previous highs of 11,475 in May 2019 and 10,620 in June 2014 reported by the Border Patrol, which began publishing numbers in 2009.

    More than 4,000 parents and children—mostly unaccompanied minors—have been crammed into a CBP tent complex designed for 250 in Donna, Texas. More than 600 children were packed into a room built for 32 last week, according to Reuters.

    Reuters contributed to this report.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 20:20

  • China Smartphone Sales Rise 67.7% Despite Semi Chip Shortage
    China Smartphone Sales Rise 67.7% Despite Semi Chip Shortage

    It was just a day ago that we were writing how the automotive industry in China had returned back to its pre-pandemic levels. Now, it looks like, despite a semi chip shortage, the smartphone industry is also roaring back.

    According to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, smartphone shipments were up 67.7% year over year for March. The huge comp was helped along by last March’s lockdowns across most of Asia due to the pandemic. 

    For March 2021, 5G mobile phone shipments came in at 27.5 million units, according to Bloomberg. They comprised of 76.2% of all total domestic shipments for the month. 

    Sales were up despite an ongoing semi chip shortage that has caused chaos not just in the electronics sector, but also in the automotive world, where it has forced numerous automakers to delay production. 

    Recall, the China Passenger Car Association released auto sales numbers last Friday, indicating that sales are back to levels they were at two years ago, despite still being far below the country’s record set in March 2018. 

    The demand for electric vehicles was “red hot”, according to The Wall Street Journal. The country sold 437,000 electric vehicle units during the quarter, marking about 8% of the country’s market share. EVs remain in high demand in large cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

    SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile Co., one of GM’s local joint ventures; Tesla; and BYD Co. combined to for 55% of the EV market in March. U.S.-listed Chinese EV startups Li Auto Inc., Nio Inc. and XPeng Inc. combined for sales of just 46,000 cars.

    China is expected to head back toward its sales record by 2024, analysts note, as recent weak performance of the country’s stock market has zapped citizens’ purchasing power.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 20:00

  • Watch: Two US Navy Ships Recently Encountered Extraordinary UFOs
    Watch: Two US Navy Ships Recently Encountered Extraordinary UFOs

    Authored by Sara Carter via SaraACarter.com,

    Several classified Pentagon videos of alleged encounters between the U.S. Navy and Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon/ UFOs were leaked to filmmaker and investigative journalist Jeremy Enyon Lockyer Corbell.

    The videos he obtained contained exclusive never before seen encounters with triangular shaped flying objects, as well as a more spherical object that was witnessed coming out of the water and into the sky. The UFO phenomenon has garnered more valid attention in recent years since Pentagon officials came forward to admit that the Defense Department has a continuing program to monitor the UFOs, or as it is now called Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.

    Moreover, during President Donald Trump’s tenure, his $2.3 trillion appropriations package includes a provision that the Secretary of Defense and Director of National Intelligence collaborate on a UFO report and release it to the public. That report is expected to be released on or around June 25. It is uncertain how much information will be made public. But former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo last month that the U.S. government is aware of far more incidents than have been reported.

    “There are a lot more sightings than have been made public,” said Ratcliffe to Bartiromo.

    “Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain.”

    “Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for,” he said.

    “Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”

    Several U.S. sources familiar with the classified videos have confirmed to SaraACarter.com that the videos obtained by Corbell are authentic and that an ongoing investigation into who leaked the videos is ongoing.

    The two separate alleged encounters occurred in 2019 and 2020 respectively. Both incidents were contained in a classified briefing to senior Defense and Intelligence officials, according to documents and sources who spoke to Corbell.

    The sources who spoke to SaraACarter.com confirmed that the video and documents obtained by Corbell of the USS Russell and the USS Ohio are authentic and real. The USS Russell incident occurred in July 2019. The incident involved Strike Group 9 within “the Warning areas off San Diego,” according to Corbell. The crew witnessed and “recorded multiple ‘pyramid’ shaped craft.” According to Corbell, the observations were detailed in notes and submitted to the Pentagon along with the footage.

    According to Corbell’s website:

    On May 1st 2020 a classified briefing was generated about the UFO / UAP presence, via the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Those familiar with the briefing articulated to me that the goal was to de-stigmatize the UAP problem and to promote more intelligence collection regarding UAP incursions and encounters with active military deployments. This UAP briefing was a build-on to a previous ONI briefing, generated October 18th 2019. Both were distributed across a wide range of intelligence networking platforms (such as SIPRNet, JWICS and various Intelink systems).

    I was able to obtain information regarding these and other UAP related briefings – as well as – two unclassified slides and some of the most intriguing military captured UAP footage I have ever seen.The context surrounding this content is important to understand – as its evidentiary value is best demonstrated through the lens of provenance. I want you to understand why this new evidence is worth your full attention – if it’s not inherently obvious to you.

    Jeremey Corbell, Extrodinary Beliefs

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 19:40

  • Q1 Earnings Will Be Stellar, But Are Fully Priced-In And Only Guidance Will Matter
    Q1 Earnings Will Be Stellar, But Are Fully Priced-In And Only Guidance Will Matter

    On one hand, the coming earnings season (77% of the S&P 500 market cap will announce results between April 19 and May 7) will be one of the strongest on record at least when measured on a Y/Y basis for the simple reason that Q1 2020 was the first quarter of the covid pandemic. On the other hand, as Deutsche Bank’s Binky Chadha writes, the sellside now expects impressive beats having lifted the bar high enough to where just mere “strong” EPS reports may not be sufficient (incidentally, consensus currently forecasts aggregate sales growth of 5%, margin expansion of 66 bps to 9.9%, and EPS growth of 19%. However, median EPS growth will be only 10%).  Finally, as Goldman notes, no matter how strong earnings are, they will not matter and instead all investors will care about is future guidance which however may be quite disappointing due to the recent surge in input costs which could lead to a big hit to projected profit margins.

    Starting at the top, we remind readers that the last 3 quarters saw record-breaking beats in S&P 500 earnings, ranging between 14% to 20%, eclipsing even those seen coming out of the 2008-2009 recession as DB’s Binky Chadha shows in the chart below.

    The record earnings beats mirrored unprecedented positive surprises in macro data, easily the largest on record in terms of magnitude and approaching the longest ever stretch in duration.

    The record surprises in earnings and data in turn have seen Q1 2021 consensus estimates rise by 9.2% since June…

    … and by 5.6% just over the past quarter, the largest upgrade going into an earnings season in our sample going back the last 10 years.

    The market has also already rallied strongly going into this earnings season. The S&P 500 rally of 7.5% since the end of the previous reporting season in February, is one of the largest on record, and compares to an average +1% historically.

    What does the consensus now expect?

    The bottom-up consensus sees Q1 earnings rising a robust 22.6% yoy, significantly higher than 2.9% in Q4 2020, but this growth is greatly exaggerated by the low base in Q1 last year.

    Relative to Q1 2019, the consensus sees earnings rising 1.9% on an annualized basis. This compares poorly to the historical long-run trend rate of 6.5%. Median company growth is expected to be 10.9%, a little higher than 9% in Q4.

    A far different picture emerges when earnings are looked at sequentially (i.e., compared to Q4 2020) where earnings are expected to fall -5% qoq. However, Q1 is typically a seasonally weak quarter, and adjusted for seasonality, growth is expected to be +3.4% qoq.

    Around half of this increase comes from higher oil prices which should boost Energy earnings. Excluding Energy, the consensus sees growth of a modest 1.5% qoq on a seasonally adjusted basis, following +27.1% in Q3 and +8.6% in Q4 in the last 3 quarters.

    Is the bar high enough?

    The bar for Q1 2021 earnings has been raised significantly more than it was for the last 3 quarters, when consensus was unambiguously far too low and out of sync with massive upswings in activity and macro data surprises.

    Is it high enough, as the DB chief equity strategist? At the top-down level, he notes that the 1.5% growth (ex- Energy) over Q4 that consensus expects is equal to the GDP growth expected by DB’s US economists, and thus looks far too low considering a typical multiplier of 4x. At a more granular level, DB evaluates consensus estimates through the lens of its framework based on 4 groups of stocks and sectors defined by very different trend growth and cyclical sensitivities to macro growth and the dollar: (i) the secular growers (mega-cap growth and Tech), (ii) the defensives, (iii) cyclicals with a trend and (iv) cyclicals without a trend.

    • The bar has been raised the most for the secular growers. Blockbuster beats last season saw large upgrades (+10%) to Q1 estimates for the secular growers. The consensus has already largely accounted for not only the strong underlying trend but also the cyclical boost from stronger macro growth, and sees earnings rising above long-run trend levels. With the bar already raised substantially, beats for this group are likely to be below their historical average and at the lower end of the range (+4%).
    • Defensives earnings already back at trend levels. Earnings for the defensive sectors already rose back up to trend levels in Q4 and are seen rising in line with it in Q1. Beats for the defensives have historically ranged from 2.5% to 6.5%. However, delivering even average beats would need earnings to rise significantly above trend, which are seen as unlikely. Instead beats are likely at the lower end of the historical range (+2.5%).
    • Energy should post large beats, but off of a low base as estimates do not look to fully reflect the move up in oil prices. Oil prices rallied strongly in Q1 to average $60 a barrel, up from $44/bbl in Q4. While estimates for the sector have been revised up significantly since January (142%), there is room for them to rise further, pointing to a fairly large beat in earnings, albeit off of very low levels.
    • Financials provisions key. After posting massive provisions for loan losses in Q1 ($44bn) and Q2 ($54bn) last year, provisions moderated to near average levels in Q3 ($11bn) and to near zero in Q4 as a few banks even began releasing reserves. The consensus, however, expects a rise in provisions in Q1 ($6.6bn) despite the strengthening macro backdrop. That said, even a conservative assumption of no additional provisions implies significant beats for the Financials (+8%) with the risk to the upside.
    • Other cyclicals. Large concentrated losses in pandemic-hit companies are unlikely to see significant improvement in Q1, and will continue to be a drag on cyclical earnings. For the remaining cyclicals, consensus sees earnings rise only modestly (+3% qoq on a seasonally adjusted basis). Given the sharp increase in macro growth in Q1, Deutsche Bank views the consensus as too low and expect large beats (+15%).

    Overall, DB sees S&P 500 earnings coming in 7.5% above consensus. While lower than the record surprises over the last 3 quarters, this would still be well above the historical average (+4.5%).

    Will such a “beat” to expectations be sufficient to push stocks even higher? Don’t bet on it, if Goldman’s David Kostin is right.

    According to the Goldman chief equity strategist – who notes that consensus currently forecasts aggregate sales growth of 5%, margin expansion of 66 bpto 9.9%, and EPS growth of 19%. However, median EPS growth will be only 10% – from a sector perspective, Consumer Discretionary is anticipated to pace the market with 97% year/year EPS growth powered by an 11% rise in sales. The stellar growth in part reflects the contribution of AMZN and TSLA. At the other extreme, Industrials on an aggregate sector basis will witness a revenue decline of 2%, roughly 100 bps of margin contraction, and a year/year EPS drop of 17%. But the median stock will actually post EPS growth of +9% as Airlines are a headwind to aggregate sector growth.

    While this is great, Kostin then cautions that “backward-looking performance metrics have been ignored by most investors for the past year.” Consider that in 4Q 2020, fully 62% of S&P 500 firms reported EPS more than a standard deviation above consensus, ranking just behind 3Q 2020 as the best quarter in at least 23 years. However, the median stock beating estimates actually lagged the index by 85 bps on the subsequent day! This represented the weakest post-report performance on record, extending the pattern exhibited during the 2Q and 3Q 2020 seasons.

    As Kostin puts it “simply”, the trajectory of the economic recovery will continue to make backward-looking metrics less relevant for the forward-looking market. Underscoring this point, firms providing EPS guidance more than 5% above consensus estimates outperformed as usual, by a median of 115 bps.

    In short, the past quarter is already fully priced in – and expected to be spectacular – which is why actual earnings may only disappoint. Which means, the only upside will come from stellar commentary and even stronger guidance for the rest of the year.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 19:20

  • From American Dream To American Nightmare
    From American Dream To American Nightmare

    Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

    For most of the ninety years since James Truslow Adams coined the term American Dream, most Americans still believed the fairy tale of the American Dream, that no matter how humble your beginnings, everyone had a fair chance to become a success in America, based upon your individual talent, intelligence, work ethic and a society that rewarded those who exceled. Sadly, that dream is no longer achievable for most Americans. Our society has devolved into an oligarchy since The Epic of America was published in 1931, where a powerful few rule over a willfully ignorant many through propaganda, mistruth, fear, and an iron fist.

    “But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position…

    The American dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.” 

    – James Truslow Adams – Epic of America – 1931

    It is terribly distressing the American dream has vaporized in less than a century after Adams wrote those profound, and at one time true, words. The real questions are why did the American dream turn into an American nightmare and is there a pathway back to the kind of country our forefathers created? There are numerous reasons why the country has fallen far from its original conception as a proud defiant Republic to its current state as a dying empire of depravity, decay, debt, and decadence. The conspiratorial creation of the Federal Reserve and implementation of a Federal income tax in 1913 marked a true destructive turning point for America.

    These two choices, implemented by greedy bankers and sleazy politicians, put the country on a road to perdition. They centralized the power of money printing and confiscation of our wages at the point of a gun. The result has been a 96% loss of purchasing power of the dollar and an average tax burden of at least 30%, when all Federal, state, and local taxes are taken into consideration. The standard of living has steadily eroded for the average working class, while extreme wealth has been accumulated by the ruling class. And it was not an accident or miscalculation. It was purposeful. We have been fleeced by bankers, politicians, and the ruling oligarchy for decades.

    Our world is now ruled by a tyrannical few who have used the system, created by their class, to accumulate immense wealth and power, sustained by a government they manipulate by buying politicians and having their cronies and thugs write and enforce the laws. The misinformation, propaganda, and fake news dished out by a mainstream media, owned, and controlled by the ruling oligarchy, creates a smokescreen to obscure who wields the true power in this country. The Deep State is no longer a looney conspiracy theory, but the reality of how this country is now controlled and run.

    Despite his personality deficiencies, the four-year reign of Trump tore the curtain away and revealed the vile creatures wielding their traitorous power within the swamp of D.C. These despicable vermin (Obama, Clintons, Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Soros, Bloomberg, Gates, Biden) conducted a coup against a duly elected president and ultimately drove him from office by successfully executing a fraudulent election in conjunction with Big Tech despots and Democrat governors in a few swing states. The oligarchs have boldly gone where their criminal counterparts throughout history have gone before. In a just world these wretched traitors would be executed for their crimes against humanity.

    What commenced in 1913 has come to fruition in 2021, as their goal of you owning nothing and being happy, while they own everything and rule by dictate and truncheon is within reach. The most distressing aspect of this Great Reset scheme is how a vast swath of the populace are willingly beseeching their overlords to impose restrictions, mandates, and censorship to accelerate their un-Constitutional takeover of our nation. Their fear of a weaponized annual flu given a scary name, a continuous propaganda marketing campaign using frightening terms like “cases”, “double mutant” and “UK variant”, and lying doomsayers like Fauci and Walensky, have convinced most Americans to trade their freedom and liberty for the false hope of safety and security.

    They have been convinced to wear face diapers despite all scientific data proving they are useless against viruses and are now terribly excited to be the animal guinea pigs for an experimental gene therapy which was rushed to market, has unknown long-term impacts, and generates billions for Big Pharma, who have zero liability for any deaths or injuries caused by their concoctions. It appears the herd has gone mad in believing government drones and billionaire techno-geeks like Gates, while simultaneously believing they can get rich day trading Gamestop, Tesla and Bitcoin on Robinhood. Human nature never changes.

    “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.” 

    – Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

    When men go mad over tulips or stocks, they only lose money and can regain their senses one by one, but when they go mad and allow themselves to be injected with an experimental drug, they may never get the chance to regain their senses, as they meet a premature demise, as thousands have already. This irrational belief in authority is a testament to a combination of public-school indoctrination centers and relentless propaganda designed to manipulate the minds of the masses by shaping their opinions, preferences, beliefs, attitudes, and mental processes in a preferential manner designed to benefit those pulling the strings of society.

    Our educational system has been an embarrassing failure for decades, as hundreds of billions of our taxes have been wasted on mediocre union teachers, useless curriculum, and bloated administration, while math and reading scores have steadily declined. If you were to pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850, you would see what today would be considered college level material.

    Every fact, book, historical event, and mathematical equation is at our fingertips, but somehow all our technological advances have only made us dumber. Upon closer examination, our public education system is not designed to encourage learning, individuality, critical thinking, or creating curious questioning citizens. It is purposely designed to matriculate non-thinking, obedient, rule following, non-questioning consumers who do as they are told by those designated as their superiors.

    And this was before the more recent humiliating descent into madness wrought by the idiocy of wokeness, gender absurdity, censorship of speech, cancel culture, and anti-racist tripe. John Taylor Gatto has been decrying the uselessness of public education for decades, as 50% of college students are not intellectually capable of meeting the minimum requirements for success. The ridiculousness of degree majors (Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Pop Culture, African American Studies) would be laughable if it were not so pathetic.

    Radical Communist professors infest our universities. With 76% of K-12 teachers being female, the feminization of boys from twelve years of indoctrination has been unavoidable. They have been forced to feel and emote, rather than think, question and experience life outside prison classrooms. When boys act like boys, they are diagnosed by women as having ADHD and immediately drugged into submission. School is now a detriment to learning and irrelevant to a person attaining wisdom and understanding.

    “I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.” 

    – John Taylor Gatto

    The rot within our educational system does not appear to be a mistake. It seems to be a calculated goal of those controlling the system. Our overlords want obedient, easily manipulated, non-questioning, conformist, robotic consumers of material goods who believe debt equals wealth, the family unit is irrelevant, systematic racism is real, there are 65 genders, a flu with a 99.7% survival rate is a reason to surrender their remaining freedoms and liberties, and an all-knowing benevolent government is here to help them.

    So, the ruling class does not see the dumbing down of Americans as a detriment to the country. They see it as an essential cog in their wealth seeking ventures and by raising barely sentient sheep, they can herd them in any desired direction. This entire Covid pandemic “crisis” hoax is nothing more than a further power grab by the ruling elite, who gladly embrace tyranny and false narratives to achieve their aims of more wealth, power, and control over your lives.

    This country has been in a downward spiral since 2001, obscured by the use of debt to give the appearance of economic growth and rising financial markets. The Federal Reserve and our politicians have sold unborn generations into debt slavery, in their myopic, self-centered, destructive attempt to prop up this cancer ridden empire of lies, delusions, and greed. By still leaning on the relative strength of the USD and our military might, the American Empire gives the appearance of strength, but the rot within has hollowed out the tree of liberty and the coming storms will deal a final death blow to this noble experiment, started two centuries ago.

    It did not have to happen this way, but we willingly surrendered our country to rapacious psychopaths bent on enriching themselves at the expense of current and future generations. These evil men who constitute what some call the Deep State, ruling oligarchy, or Davos crowd, are ego-maniacal tyrants bent on implementing their new world order, with them as supreme rulers and the rest of us as nothing more than chess pieces to be sacrificed at their will. It would be clear to a critical thinking populace, but we know the term “ignorant masses” is used to describe Americans because it is true for the vast majority. Plunder has become the way of life in our society.

    “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

    – Frederic Bastiat

    Whenever you observe what seems to be a senseless irrational policy or mandate, you always need to ask yourself, “who benefits?” Who benefited from the 9/11 hysteria? Who benefited from the 2008 financial crash? Who has benefited from this faux Covid pandemic? The answer is in plain sight. The moneyed interests benefited. The military industrial complex benefited. The surveillance state benefited. The Federal government bureaucracy benefited. Wall Street bankers benefited. Mega-corporations and their CEOs benefited.

    I can tell you who did not benefit – wage earning taxpayers, small business owners, senior citizens, young people, poor people, and unborn future generations. The top .1% ruling elite accumulated more treasure and more authority. In the past year alone, the global billionaire class increased their wealth by $4 trillion, with the top 20 increasing their riches by 68%. It seems pandemics are good for business if you are in the ruling class. Meanwhile, it further shattered the hopes of achieving the American dream for tens of millions.

    “In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.” 

    – Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

    Those who constitute the true power in this world, understand the mental processes of the masses. They are highly educated and have learned the lessons of history. They know which buttons of fear and greed to push to prod the herd in the direction they desire. They have become particularly adept at using fear to achieve their treacherous aims.

    9/11 fear was used to create the surveillance state through the implementation of the Patriot Act, while enriching bankers and the military industrial complex with never ending Middle East wars. The fear of a systematic financial collapse (entirely false) in 2008 was used to bailout the criminal Wall Street banks through TARP and initiate never ending QE to enrich those banks and the billionaire class.

    This convenient, man-made, pandemic fear has been their coup de grace, as it allowed them to paper over the crumbling financial system with trillions more debt, solidified the dominance of mega-corporations by eliminating hundreds of thousands of small businesses, quashed free speech and dissent through Big Tech censorship, allowed the billionaire class (Gates, Soros, Bloomberg) to gain more power and treasure, eliminated a thorn in their side (Trump), proved the ignorant masses would believe and do anything they were told (masks, lockdowns, experimental vaccines) to remain safe, and initiated their global reset to build a dystopian world for the masses and complete control for themselves.

    Their formula is to create mass hysteria through their corporate mainstream media mouthpieces spreading fear and misinformation, while suppressing facts and truth. The oligarchs control the politicians and have partnered with the Silicon Valley Big Tech tyrants to spread falsity, fabrications, and fear to steer the herd towards the slaughterhouse. The pillaging of the middle class with the collaboration of politicians, regulators, rating agencies and their ultimate weapon, the privately owned Federal Reserve bank, that has enriched its owners while impoverishing those whose only aspiration was to do an honest day’s work, raise their families, and live-in relative comfort, safety, and happiness, is almost complete. Once you own nothing and are told you are happy, the Great Reset will have been accomplished. All done for the welfare of humanity.

    The dystopian American nightmare into which we are descending is not solely the fault of the globalist cabal. Americans need to look in the mirror and honestly assess their role in this plunge into madness. The once independent, self-sufficient individualists that populated this country have become dependent, government reliant, materialistic, quivering shadows of the patriots and frontiersmen who created this country.

    In the name of safety and security, the American people have allowed their government to accumulate complete control over every aspect of our lives. The American Dream has become a nightmare as we have allowed individualism, materialism, and selfish greed to override our duty to be good citizens, good fathers, good mothers, good neighbors, and going as far as our ability and hard work would take us.

    Up until 1913, the American Dream, where every person had the opportunity to live a richer and fuller life, was achievable.  Up until that time, every generation born in this country had an excellent chance to live a better life than their parents. Relentless progress was the American way. Based on the actions of those controlling the direction of this country, I doubt my three sons will live a richer and fuller life than myself. The debts are too extreme, the military overreach too excessive, the looting by the financial class too great, the political corruption too extensive, suppression of truth speech too stifling, and opportunities too few.

    The dream of a social order where everyone could rise to the highest level of their capabilities, regardless of their birth, has been systematically crushed by those who prefer the masses to be debt slaves doing the menial labor necessary to keep their money-making machine running. With all out assaults on the First, Second and Fourth Amendments by those who find the U.S. Constitution inconvenient to their despotic intentions, time is running out for those who still believe in and will fight for their country.

    Two hundred and forty-five years ago, our Founding Fathers declared we all had the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These rights have been severely restricted, compromised and bastardized over two centuries. Liberties have been ruthlessly constrained as your government tracks you through your social security number, monitors your phone and internet communications, taxes your earnings, and dictates the rules for your education, healthcare, business, and a thousand other daily activities. And now they want to force you to inject a dangerous gene altering drug into your body or not be able to work or enter businesses without your vaccine passport papers. It is not a stretch to see non-vaxers being sent to “special” camps until they comply.

    The right to happiness was based upon James Treslow Adams’ view we were free to attain “the fullest stature of which they are innately capable”. The happiness of becoming a success through your individual determination, intelligence and hard work has been subverted by the fictitious happiness of a materialism, egoism, instant gratification, and self-interest, all financed by debt peddled by the ruling class. We have made fateful choices in the last century that have methodically stolen the spirit of the American Dream.

    Opportunity for each according to their ability or achievement has been replaced by – from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The twist to the Communist Manifesto is those with ability who worked hard have had their wealth redistributed to the rich, who then portray themselves as humanitarian by keeping the poor dependent on handouts. The working-class sinks, the poor remain poor, and the rich get richer. But at least we have our iGadgets, 600 channels of worthless drivel on the boob tube, Twitter followers, Facebook likes and that $50,000 SUV with only 70 payments to go.

    There is only one route back to the American dream, wrought with obstacles, with an entrenched enemy ready to ambush those embarking on the journey, and a majority unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve the objective. Those intent on destroying what is left of the American dream know the destruction of the traditional family unit, obliteration of all community standards, and abolition of all societal norms, create chaos, conflict, and ruin the cohesion necessary for a functioning society, where everyone understands what behavior is acceptable and what conduct is damaging to the community.

    Shared beliefs, values, customs, traditions, respect for the family unit, and an unspoken understanding of right and wrong, dictate the actions and responsibilities of a good citizen. With Soros and his cronies instigating race wars with their BLM and ANTIFA terrorist thugs, 40% out of wedlock births (up from 28% in 1990), delusionary untruths about there being more than two genders, and feminists preaching the mantra of woman power, has terminally damaged what remains of shared community and societal values. All behavior is acceptable in our decadent civilization, no matter how immoral, depraved, or criminal. We have not lived up to the standard recorded by John Adams at the outset of our country.

    “We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

    – John Adams

    We have ignored our obligation to the past and the future. The Founding Fathers created an imperfect Republic. Ben Franklin knew its future depended upon the people administering it well. The founders did not want a national religion to be misrepresented as keeping religion out of America. The Founders were religious men. They believed religion and morality were vital to the country, being administered in a moral ethical way and guided by a code of conduct. As God, religion and morality have been disparaged by those in power we have moved further and further from the letter and spirit of the Constitution. Only a people with a strong moral backbone can be trusted to honor the Constitution.

    The people have allowed the country to be corrupted by evil self-seeking men, and as a result, we are on a course towards despotism. We are descended from rebels and revolutionaries. The future of our country requires the restoration of that revolutionary spirit of dissent and opposition among a sufficient number of patriotic citizens, as there is no longer a chance to vote ourselves out of this predicament. Sadly, bloodshed will be required in any effort to regain control of our country. Time is growing short.

    “Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

    –  Dwight D. Eisenhower

    George Carlin clearly assessed the state of our society near the end of his life, during his epic rant in 2005 about who owns and rules America and why nobody seemed to care. His assessment of the American dream has regrettably turned out to be 100% accurate.

    “It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

    – George Carlin

    *  *  *

    The corrupt establishment will do anything to suppress sites like the Burning Platform from revealing the truth. The corporate media does this by demonetizing sites like mine by blackballing the site from advertising revenue. If you get value from this site, please keep it running with a donation.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 19:00

  • SEC Drops Accounting Bomb, Blows Up SPAC Boom
    SEC Drops Accounting Bomb, Blows Up SPAC Boom

    Having dropped their first major warning that something was coming last week with a subtle tweet suggesting “it is never a good idea to invest in a SPAC just because someone famous sponsors or invests in it,” The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) just turned up the SPAC bubble-busting amplifier to ’11’ by signaling changes for how accounting rules apply to a key element of blank-check companies.

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    That was followed the tsunami of newly launched SPACs suddenly and dramatically hitting a brick wall. As we noted here, just three SPACs listed last week (including 2 on Wednesday), compared to more than 20 deals per week on average for most of the year.

    Tonight we found out why as Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter, that The SEC last week began privately telling accountants that warrants, which are issued to early investors in the deals, might not be considered equity instruments. Bloomberg explains:

    In a SPAC, early investors buy units, which typically includes a share of common stock and a fraction of a warrant to purchase more stock at a later date. They’re considered a sweetener for backers and have thus far been considered equity instruments for accounting purposes.

    The proposed changes could result in warrants being considered a liability for accounting purposes, according to the Marcum note. The shift would spell a massive nuisance for accountants and lawyers, who are hired to ensured SPACs are in compliance with the agency.

    Shortly after the Bloomberg story dropped, exposing the ‘private’ conversations, the SEC was forced to come clean and releases a press release detailing the accounting changes. For those so inclined, the full briefing is here, but this was a section we found notable…

    We recently evaluated a fact pattern involving warrants issued by a SPAC. The terms of those warrants included a provision that in the event of a tender or exchange offer made to and accepted by holders of more than 50% of the outstanding shares of a single class of common stock, all holders of the warrants would be entitled to receive cash for their warrants. In other words, in the event of a qualifying cash tender offer (which could be outside the control of the entity), all warrant holders would be entitled to cash, while only certain of the holders of the underlying shares of common stock would be entitled to cash. OCA staff concluded that, in this fact pattern, the tender offer provision would require the warrants to be classified as a liability measured at fair value, with changes in fair value reported each period in earnings.

    Simply put, as Bloomberg notes, the communications mean that filings for new SPACs may not go forward until the warrants issue is addressed.

    Perhaps worst still, SPACs that are already public and that have struck mergers with targets may have to restate their financial results.

    And the ‘fervor’ behind the SPAC bubble is bursting…

    Which leaves Chamath Palihapitiya looking for the next asset bubble to be ‘early’ in.

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 18:40

  • Hordes Of Demoralized Cops Are Quitting Their Jobs, And America's Streets Are Less Safe As A Result
    Hordes Of Demoralized Cops Are Quitting Their Jobs, And America’s Streets Are Less Safe As A Result

    Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

    The United States has never faced a more severe law enforcement crisis than it is facing right now.  All over the nation, police officers are quitting in droves, and many of those jobs are going unfilled because of the difficulty in recruiting new applicants.  Since the death of George Floyd, police officers have been relentlessly demonized by the corporate media, police budgets have been dramatically slashed in major cities all across the country, and many prominent politicians have publicly expressed disdain for their local law enforcement authorities.  In such an environment, serving the community as a police officer is not an attractive option, and it makes perfect sense why so many officers have been throwing in the towel on their once promising careers.

    In Portland, 115 officers have either retired or resigned since July 1st.

    Exit interview statements are not mandatory for police officers that are leaving the force in Portland, but those that have filled them out have been quite frank about their reasons for leaving…

    In 31 exit interview statements, the employees who turned in their badges or retired were brutally frank about their reasons for getting out.

    “The community shows zero support. The city council are raging idiots, in addition to being stupid. Additionally, the mayor and council ignore actual facts on crime and policing in favor of radical leftist and anarchists fantasy. What’s worse is ppb command (lt. and above) is arrogantly incompetent and cowardly,” one retiring detective wrote.

    I can’t understand why anyone would still want to be a police officer in Portland at this point.  There has been endless civil unrest in the city for months on end, and most of the politicians are far left radicals that are clearly on the side of the protesters.

    Another officer that left the force stated that he has “never seen morale so low” among officers in Portland…

    “What the city council has done to beat down the officers’ willingness to do police work is unfathomable,” he wrote. “I have never seen morale so low. Officers leaving mid-career and sometimes sooner to go to other agencies. Officers retiring when they would have stayed longer if the situation were different.”

    He said he knew it was time to go because he stopped looking forward to work that he once loved.

    “It is no longer a fun place to work. … There is no end in sight and the negatives far exceed anything positive … hate what Portland has become.’’

    He is not alone in hating what Portland has become.

    It should be one of the most beautiful cities in America, but now it has literally been transformed into a crime-ridden hellhole.

    Seattle is another city that has seen over a hundred officers leave, and those that have moved on have also expressed very bitter feelings in their exit interviews…

    Over 175 pages of exit interviews from more than one hundred SPD officers stating their reasons for leaving their jobs. The same handwritten complaints–often including the same phrasing–can be seen repeatedly. KIRO-7 obtained the exit interviews after a public document request.

    One cop wrote: “I refuse to work for this socialist City Council and their political agenda. It ultimately will destroy the fabric of this once fine city.”

    Another outgoing officer cited: “An unwinnable battle with the City Council. It will be the downfall of the city of Seattle.”

    When I was growing up, working in law enforcement was considered to be a noble profession, and young people were taught to respect the police.

    But now they are severely underpaid and are treated like trash in many parts of the country.

    Sometimes a political decision can prompt a mass exodus.  In Colorado, a new law that was signed by Governor Jared Polis prompted over 200 police officers to turn in their badges…

    More than 200 law enforcement officers across Colorado resigned or retired in the weeks after Gov. Jared Polis enacted sweeping police reforms by signing Senate Bill 217 into law on June 19, according to state data.

    Though it’s unclear how many of the separations are the direct result of the new law — with its striking implications that include officers’ personal financial liability for their actions — interviews with chiefs of police and union officials suggest a number of them are, and the state’s largest police organization has launched a survey to find out.

    As police departments struggle to fill scores of vacancies, crime rates have surged from coast to coast.

    According to CNN, homicide rates rose by an average of 33 percent in major U.S. cities in 2020…

    Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.

    A 10 percent increase in one year would be cause for alarm.

    A 33 percent increase in one year is catastrophic.

    Our society is literally coming apart at the seams all around us, and it is difficult to know who to trust.

    These days, just about anyone could be a murderer.  For example, a 54-year-old woman went to buy a fridge from a 26-year-old man that was advertising one on Facebook, and she ended up getting murdered…

    Investigators say a woman who was found stabbed to death in Geistown Tuesday was killed by a man whom she met on Facebook Marketplace to buy a fridge for her boyfriend.

    Authorities say 26-year-old Joshua Gorgone was arrested Tuesday and has been charged with criminal homicide in the slaying of 54-year-old Denise Williams.

    She just wanted to buy a fridge.

    Sadly, the increase in violence in our society is causing people to keep their distance from one another more than ever.  There is such a reluctance to interact with “strangers”, because the next “stranger” that you meet could be a sex predator or a violent criminal.

    I have written extensively about the moral crisis in our country, and it really matters on a practical level.

    At this point, a large chunk of the population no longer cares about basic morality, and many people have quickly come to the realization that they can no longer trust others on a fundamental level.

    The thin veneer of civilization that we all used to take for granted is rapidly dissipating, and crime rates are increasing dramatically.

    In the old days, we could trust the police to restore order when things got out of hand.

    But now police officers are quitting in droves, and America is headed for a very, very uncertain future.

    *  *  *

    Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/12/2021 – 18:20

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