- China's Modern Blueprint For Global Power
China’s Modern Blueprint For Global Power
Authored by Lawrence Franklin via The Gatestone Institute,
The People’s Republic of China, which celebrated its 70th anniversary on October 1, is led by the Chinese Communist Party’s General Secretary, President Xi Jinping. In his speeches, Xi often refers to “Qiang Zhong Gwo Meng” (“the Chinese dream“), a code phrase for the era of rejuvenation when China will eventually overtake the United States as the most powerful nation in the world.
Xi claims that China offers the world a different type of rising global leader — a “guiding power.”
Beijing apologists depict China as a non-predatory power, comparing it favorably to Europe’s colonial countries in the past and to today’s United States.
Similarly, the state-controlled Chinese media depict Chinese statecraft as being based on and reflecting ancient Confucian ethics:
Only when things are investigated is knowledge extended; only when knowledge is extended are thoughts sincere; only when thoughts are sincere are minds rectified; only when minds are rectified are the characters of persons cultivated; only when character is cultivated are our families regulated; only when families are regulated are states well governed; only when states are well governed is there peace in the world.
This portrayal is part of China’s traditional self-image as “Jungwo” (the “Middle Kingdom”), a society synonymous with “civilization,” as opposed to the “barbarians” beyond its borders. Such was the impetus for China’s Great Wall: to keep out uncultured barbarians.
In spite of China’s pretense of being a new type of global power, Beijing’s attempt to restore its historical role as a world leader involves ancient Chinese political concepts. Xi’s call for China’s “rejuvenation,” for instance, is a signal to his people that under the leadership of the Communist Party, the national humiliations endured during the 19th and 20th centuries will be redressed.
Xi’s nationalist sentiment echoes the ideas of Sun Yat-sen, the “founding father” and first president of the Chinese Republic. Sun called for the embrace of “Min-ts’u” (“people’s nationalism”) to redeem the nation from its status as a “hypo-colony” ruled by many colonial masters, including tiny Portugal, which dominated the South China Sea.
Xi’s doctrine includes rejecting as illegitimate any “unequal treaties” forced on China by Euro-Atlantic powers, such as Great Britain’s imposition of the McMahon Line, which awarded to the British Crown Colony of India hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of Chinese territory. China never recognized the McMahon Line; it was among the factors ultimately leading to an India-China War in 1962 and periodic skirmishes ever since.
This determination to retrieve Chinese territory might be rooted in Xi’s sense of humiliation, still felt among Chinese patriots of all political persuasions, who harbor an enduring resentment over such Euro-Atlantic encroachment.
Xi’s posture is also possibly an indirect warning to the West, which may be harboring a desire to assist the people of Hong Kong in their drive for more autonomy from Beijing. This warning underscores the willingness of the Chinese Communist leadership to engage the United States in a limited military conflict, should the US support Hong Kong’s or Taiwan’s official independence from China or if it positions offensive strategic-weapons systems on those lands.
In his essay, “If You Want Peace Prepare for War” — using the famous quote from the ancient Roman strategist, Publius Flavius Renatus — Chinese author Li Mingfu states that if the US attempts to block the Chinese Motherland’s unification with Taiwan, China is ready militarily to force unification.
There can be little doubt that Xi’s China is deeply committed to the retrieval of Formosa (Taiwan) as an integral part of the Chinese patrimony. Historically, China risked war with Japan after Japanese expeditions to the island province. China also has resisted past attempts by Britain to weaken its hold on Tibet. Moreover, despite fierce resistance to Russia’s 19th century invasions in the northwestern province of Xinjiang (Sinkiang), China lost control of the region. That event also might help to explain for China’s willingness to invite universal condemnation for its massive human-rights violations against the region’s Uighur Muslim population, rather than risk again losing control of the province to Islamist independence movements.
Chinese military exercises, new weapons systems and the surreptitious militarization of several landfill and disputed islands in the South China Sea, all indicate that Beijing intends to become — at the very least — East Asia’s dominant regional power, thereby supplanting the US as the pre-eminent authority in the Western Pacific Ocean. According to one American analyst on Chinese military affairs, in 2018 alone, China conducted approximately 100 military exercises with 17 countries.
In recent years, the Chinese Navy has been demonstrating better precision targeting by its anti-ship missile system, the presumed targets being US aircraft carriers. The Chinese Air Force now utilizes runways built on some of the disputed islands, and has also landed heavy bombers there.
In addition, the Chinese also have deployed anti-ship missiles and jet fighter planes on disputed islands. These developments suggest that in the event of a crisis or conflict with the West and its Asian allies, the Chinese Communist Party’s Military Commission is planning to leapfrog any possible Free World strategy to confine China’s naval and air assets to the Chinese mainland.
China’s economic model, according to which a socialist regime will for the first time surpass the world’s greatest capitalist enterprise, also has historical roots. For millennia, China was the premier power in Asia, if not the world. During that time, China’s diplomacy centered on the “Tributary System,” whereby regional states recognized the superiority of Chinese Civilization.”
Many of China’s neighboring states, such as Annam (Northern Vietnam), Korea and even Japan, for a period, rendered an annual tribute to the Chinese imperial court, acknowledging the imperial dynasty’s august standing under heaven. The emperor’s dynastic administration would in turn provide generous support for compliant neighboring countries. Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative bears some — dubious — resemblance to the tributary system of dynastic China. This initiative has China providing the income and expertise to build the logistical infrastructure of a recipient nation, which in turn imports Chinese goods and services employing that new infrastructure. Worse, however, China lends countries money; then when the country cannot repay the debt, China helps itself to resources or infrastructure or whatever, in a “debt-trap.”
To date, it appears that the strategic objective of China to establish regional primacy in the Western Pacific, and possibly in Asia, is militarily, politically and economically achievable. The world, however, is no longer under any illusions about China’s acquisitive intent.
US President Donald J. Trump also indicated recently — during his September 24 address to the UN General Assembly — that America harbors no illusions about China’s unbridled ambitions.
Trump said, in part:
“In 2001, China was admitted to the World Trade Organization. Our leaders then argued that this decision would compel China to liberalize its economy and strengthen protections to provide things that were unacceptable to us, and for private property and for the rule of law. Two decades later, this theory has been tested and proven completely wrong.
“Not only has China declined to adopt promised reforms, it has embraced an economic model dependent on massive market barriers, heavy state subsidies, currency manipulation, product dumping, forced technology transfers, and the theft of intellectual property and also trade secrets on a grand scale…
“For years, these abuses were tolerated, ignored, or even encouraged. Globalism exerted a religious pull over past leaders, causing them to ignore their own national interests.
“But as far as America is concerned, those days are over. To confront these unfair practices, I placed massive tariffs on more than $500 billion worth of Chinese-made goods. Already, as a result of these tariffs, supply chains are relocating back to America and to other nations, and billions of dollars are being paid to our Treasury.
“The American people are absolutely committed to restoring balance to our relationship with China. Hopefully, we can reach an agreement that would be beneficial for both countries…
“As we endeavor to stabilize our relationship, we’re also carefully monitoring the situation in Hong Kong. The world fully expects that the Chinese government will honor its binding treaty, made with the British and registered with the United Nations, in which China commits to protect Hong Kong’s freedom, legal system, and democratic ways of life. How China chooses to handle the situation will say a great deal about its role in the world in the future…”
It is imperative for the administration in Washington to continue to exert maximum pressure on Beijing, to prevent China’s hegemonic aims being realized.
* * *
Dr. Lawrence A. Franklin was the Iran Desk Officer for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. He also served on active duty with the U.S. Army and as a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/12/2019 – 23:50 - Visualizing The Rise And Fall Of Social Media Platforms
Visualizing The Rise And Fall Of Social Media Platforms
Since its inception, the internet has played a pivotal role in connecting people across the globe, including in remote locations.
While the foundational need for human connection hasn’t changed, Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley points out that the platforms and technology continue to evolve, even today. Faster internet connections and mobile devices have made social networks a ubiquitous part of our lives, with the time spent on social media each day creeping ever upward.
The Scoreboard Today
Over the last 15 years, billions of people around the world have jumped onto the social media bandwagon – and platforms have battled for our attention spans by inventing (and sometimes flat-out stealing) features to keep people engaged.
Here’s a snapshot of where things stand today:
Today’s entertaining video, from the Data is Beautiful YouTube channel, is a look back at the rise and fall of social media platforms – and possibly a glimpse at the future of social media as well.
Below we respond to some key questions and observations raised by this video overview.
Points of Interest
1. What is QZone?
Qzone is China’s largest social network. The platform originally evolved as a sort of blogging service that sprang from QQ, China’s seminal instant messaging service. While Qzone is still one of the world’s largest social media sites – it still attracts around half a billion users per month – WeChat is now the service of choice for almost everyone in China with a smartphone.
2. LinkedIn has been around for a long time.
It’s true. LinkedIn, which hasn’t left the top 10 list since 2003, is a textbook example of a slow and steady growth strategy paying off.
While some networks experience swings in their user base or show a boom and bust growth pattern, LinkedIn has grown every single year since it was launched. Surprisingly, that growth is still clocking in at impressive rates. In 2019, for example, LinkedIn reported a 24% increase in sessions on their platform.
3. Will Facebook ever lose its top spot?
Never say never, but not anytime soon. Since 2008, Facebook has been far and away the most popular social network on the planet. If you include Facebook’s bundled services, over 2 billion people use their network each day. The company has used acquisitions and aggressive feature implementation to keep the company at the forefront of the battle for attention. Facebook itself is under a lot of scrutiny due to growing privacy concerns, but Instagram and WhatsApp are more popular than ever.
4. What Happened to Snapchat?
In 2016, Snapchat had thoroughly conquered the Gen Z demographic and was on a trajectory to becoming one of the top social networks. Facebook, sensing their position being challenged by this upstart company, took the bold step of cloning Snapchat’s features and integrating them into Instagram (even lifting the name “stories” in the process). The move paid off for Facebook and the video above shows Instagram’s user base taking off in 2016, fueled by these new features.
Even though Facebook took some of the wind out of Snapchat’s sails, the company never stopped growing. Earlier this year, Snapchat announced modest growth as its base of daily active users rose to 190 million. For advertisers looking to reach the 18-35 age demographic, Snapchat could still be a compelling option.
5. Why is TikTok so popular now?
The simple answer is that short-form video is extremely popular right now, and TikTok has features that make sharing fun. The average user of TikTok (and its Chinese counterpart, DouYin) spends a staggering 52 minutes per day on the app.
Also propelling its growth is the company’s massive marketing budget. TikTok spent $1 billon last year on advertising in the U.S., and is currently burning through around $3 million per day to get people onto their platform. One looming question for the China-based company is not whether Facebook will co-opt their features, but when.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/12/2019 – 23:20 - The CIA Versus Donald J. Trump
The CIA Versus Donald J. Trump
Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,
It’s both pathetic and laughable that Democrats, the mainstream press, and Trump critics are referring to the CIA agent who turned in Trump for his telephone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “whistleblower.”
It’s pathetic because it denigrates real whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, and William Binney. Those people are the courageous ones. They risked their careers, their liberty, and even their lives to expose criminal wrongdoing within the national-security state agencies they were working for.
That’s not what that supposed CIA agent did when he filed his complaint against Trump. He didn’t blow the whistle on his agency, the CIA, by exposing some secret dark-side practices, such as MK-Ultra drug experimentation on unsuspecting Americans, secret assassinations of Americans, secret assets within the mainstream press, or secret destruction of torture videotapes of incarcerated inmates at a top-secret CIA prison center in some former Soviet-bloc country.
If he had done that, the CIA would have come after him with all guns blaring, just as the national-security establishment has gone after Snowden and those other genuine whistleblowers. In fact, that’s how one can usually identify a genuine whistleblower. That’s obviously not happening here. Instead, the national-security establishment is hailing this “whistleblower” as being a brave and courageous hero for disclosing supposed wrongdoing by Trump, not by the CIA.
That anti-Trump CIA agent isn’t a whistleblower at all. Instead, he’s nothing more than a spy and a snitch. He is obviously a spy. After all, he works for the CIA, the premier spy agency in the world. And by turning in Trump in an obvious attempt to get him into trouble, he’s also obviously a snitch.
A “gotcha” moment
In fact, the entire episode has a “gotcha” feeling to it. For almost three years, Americans have been made to suffer under a constant stream of speeches, commentaries, op-eds, and editorials about what Trump rightly called the “collusion delusion” theory. Democrats, the mainstream press, and Trump critics were 100 percent certain that their real-life hero Robert Mueller, the special counsel, was going to find evidence that Trump conspired with Russian officials to deny Hillary Clinton her rightful place as president of the United States. They had impeachment plans set in place, ready to go.
And then Mueller dashed their hopes. His report disclosed that the collusion delusion was the biggest conspiracy theory in U.S. history, one openly promoted by Democrats, the mainstream press, and Trump critics on a daily basis for almost three years.
All they needed and wanted was an opportunity — any opportunity — to apply their impeachment process to another set of a facts. Fortunately for them, Trump himself gave them that opportunity. That supposed CIA agent was ready with a “gotcha!” and proceeded to snitch on Trump with his “whistleblower” complaint.
Trump is obviously a smart man, both businesswise and politically. But to make that telephone call to Zelensky and request him to investigate Joe Biden, while holding up a foreign aid package to Ukraine, immediately after being exonerated by Mueller of the collusion delusion allegation, was about the dumbest thing he could do. How could he not realize that his enemies would be looking for any opportunity to set their impeachment process into motion against him?
The likely explanation lies with arrogance and hubris. After Trump got his exoneration on the collusion delusion accusation, he figured that he was now all-powerful and could do whatever he wanted. The fact that he was, at the same time, exercising such dictatorial powers as raising tariffs, starting trade wars, building his Berlin Wall along the border, and imposing sanctions and embargoes, all without the consent of Congress, was also making him feel omnipotent and untouchable. His admiration for foreign dictators no doubt filled his mind with the same sense of totalitarian, untouchable power.
That’s what likely caused Trump to give his enemies the “gotcha” episode for which they were clearly thirsting. Trump turned out to be his own very worst enemy.
National security enmity toward Trump
Despite his campaign rhetoric against “endless wars,” Trump has kept U.S. troops in Afghanistan and the Middle East, where they have continued to kill, die, and wreak massive destruction. He has also authorized the continuation of the Pentagon’s and CIA’s assassination program. He has also continued the Pentagon’s and CIA’s indefinite detention and torture center at Guantanamo Bay. He has done nothing to rein in the NSA and its secret surveillance schemes. The fact is that Trump’s term in office, despite his “America First” rhetoric, has proven to be nothing more than a continuation of the Bush-Obama administrations.
That’s what he should be impeached for, but unfortunately his critics feel that those high crimes don’t rise to the level of impeachable offenses.
But it’s also true that Trump has failed to demonstrate the complete deference to authority of the national-security establishment that Hillary Clinton and other Washington, D.C., political elites have. Trump’s failure to bend the knee to the national-security establishment made him suspect from the very beginning, especially since the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI were certain that their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, was going to be the new president.
Thus, there has been a war between Trump and the national-security establishment from even before he was elected and especially after he was elected. In a remarkable moment of candor and honesty, Congressman Charles Schumer, commenting on the war between Trump and the national-security establishment, stated, “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
One way of getting back at Trump is, of course, through assassination, a power that the Supreme Court has confirmed that the national-security state wields against American citizens, so long it is necessary to protect “national security.”
Another way of getting back at Trump is smear tactics through the use of assets within the mainstream press. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird comes to mind.
Coup through impeachment
And other option to get back at Trump is through impeachment and conviction, especially through assets within Congress. But before any collusion-delusion proponent cries “conspiracy theory,” recall that President Eisenhower warned Americans in his 1961 Farewell Address about the threat that the “military-industrial complex” poses to the liberties and democratic processes of the American people. Actually, Ike planned to use the term “military-industrial-congressional complex” but changed his mind at the last minute. He was referring to the intimate, integrated relationship between members of Congress and the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, Eisenhower is not perceived to be a “conspiracy theorist,” the term that the CIA popularized to keep people from examining the Kennedy assassination too closely.
Speaking of the Kennedy assassination, early in his administration Trump announced that he intended to comply with the deadline for releasing the CIA’s long-secret records relating to the assassination. At the very last minute, Trump folded and granted the CIA’s request for continued secrecy.
Why did Trump do that?
One possibility is that he became convinced that “national security” would be jeopardized if the American people were to see the CIA’s long-secret JFK assassination records.
Another possibility is that he struck some sort of secret negotiated deal with the CIA.
A third possibility is that he figured that if he would ingratiate himself with the CIA in the hope that they would leave him alone. If that was the case, Trump might well go down as one of the most naïve presidents in history.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/12/2019 – 22:50 - American STD Cases Rise To Record High
American STD Cases Rise To Record High
Health officals are voicing serious concern after it emerged that the U.S. is experiencing a significant spike in sexually transmitted diseases.
As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, 2.4 million cases of gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis combined were recorded in 2018, an all-time high. The data was part of the Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance Report which was published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday. The scale of the problem can be seen by the pace of new infections documented since 2014. Chlamydia went up 19 percent, gonorrhea rose 63 percent, primary and secondary syphilis grew 71 percent while congenital syphilis soared 185 percent.
Numerous factors are being blamed for the increase, particularly funding cuts for local health departments that have caused staff shortages and clinic closures, as well as a decrease in condom usage. Reuters quoted the CDC’s directer of STD Prevention, Gail Bohan, who sad that “the resurgence of syphilis, and particularly congenital syphilis, is not an arbitrary event, but rather a symptom of a deteriorating public health infrastructure and lack of access to health care.”
You will find more infographics at Statista
That is resulting in less people going to get screened despite the fact that antibiotics can cure chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis.
Cases are highest among adolescents and young adults with over half occurring among young people aged between 15 and 24.
The CDC called for urgent action to curb the problem, with the report stating that “it is imperative that federal, state and local programs employ strategies that maximize long-term population impact by reducing STD incidence and promoting sexual, reproductive, maternal, and infant health”.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/12/2019 – 22:20 - Will American Exceptionalism Rise Again?
Will American Exceptionalism Rise Again?
Authored by Richard Moser via Counterpunch.org,
American Exceptionalism remains one of the innermost ideas shaping our national identity and still lies behind all of the war stories used to justify US foreign policy. Exceptionalism has been a part of American culture since the very first European settlers landed.
At its core, exceptionalism places America outside of normal history into a category of its own. Our initial “escape” from history followed two interrelated tracks: one was the religious radicalism of the Puritans, the other was the frontier experience. Both paths were the warpath.
The early settlers believed that they were “chosen” — blessed by a special relationship to their God. They viewed their “errand in the wilderness” as a holy mission destined to bring a new and better way of life to the world. God’s judgment on their progress was revealed in the bounty of a harvest or the outcome of a war.
Exceptionalism was not a free-floating idea but was forged into a lasting culture by the frontier wars aimed at the elimination or assimilation of native people and the conquest of land. America’s frontier history produced a lasting mythology that popularized empire and white settler culture while cloaking their many contradictions.
I know it is hard to believe that the Puritans are still camped out in our minds. The old religious radicalism has taken modern form in the liberal-sounding belief that the US military is a “force for good (read God) in the world.” The double-edged sword of exceptionalism traps us into repeating history: our high moral standards and special role in the world gives us license for wars and aggressions. It is the liberal elements of exceptionalism that are most seductive, most difficult to wrap our heads around, and the most effective at winning our consent to war.
Exceptionalism Wins Our Consent to War With A One-Two Punch
On the one hand, we have the “hard” exceptionalism like that of the Cold War (New and Old) and the War on Terrorism. These war stories revolve around a rigid binary of good and evil. After 9/11, in scores of speeches, George W. Bush repeated the mantra that there were “no gray areas” in the struggle between good and evil.
On the other hand, “soft” exceptionalism takes a slightly different tack by appealing to the liberal in us. Stories of rescue, protection, democracy and humanitarian efforts assure us of our goodness. Obama mastered this narrative by claiming the US had a “duty to protect” the weak and vulnerable in places like Libya.
These two strains of war stories are the narrative one-two punch, winning our consent to war and empire.
Here is how war propaganda works: if authority figures in government and media denounce foreign leaders or countries or immigrants as an evil threat and repeat it thousands of times, they do not even have to say, “We are the chosen people destined to bring light to the world.” They know that millions of Americans will unconsciously refer to the exceptionalist code by default because it’s so deeply embedded in our culture. Once made brave by our exceptional character and sense of superiority, the next moves are war, violence and white supremacy.
Myth Meets the American War in Vietnam
The Vietnam War, and the resistance to it, profoundly challenged all existing war stories. At the heart of this disruption was the soldier’s revolt. Thousands of US soldiers and veterans came to oppose the very war they fought in. An anti-war movement inside the military was totally unprecedented in US history. The war-makers have been scrambling to repair the damage ever since.
Following the defeat of US forces in Vietnam, the elites shifted gears. The idea that the US could create a new democratic nation — South Vietnam — was an utter illusion that no amount of fire-power could overcome. In truth, the US selected a series of petty tyrants to rule that could never win the allegiance of the Vietnamese people because they were the transparent puppets of American interests. The ruling class learned a lesson that forced them to abandon the liberal veneer of “nation-building.”
The Next Generation of War Stories: From “Noble Cause” to “Humanitarian War.”
Ronald Regan tried to repair the damaged narratives by recasting the Vietnam War as a “Noble Cause.” The Noble Cause appealed to people hurt and confused by the US defeat, as well as the unrepentant war-makers, because it attempted to restore the old good vs. evil narrative of exceptionalism. For Regan, America needed to rediscover its original mission as a “city on a hill” — a shining example to the world. Every single President since has repeated that faith.
The Noble Cause narrative was reproduced in numerous bad movies and dubious academic studies that tried to refight the war (and win this time!). Its primary function was to restore exceptionalism in the minds of the American people. While Regan succeeded to a considerable degree — as we can see in the pro-war policy of both corporate parties — “nation-building” never recovered its power as a military strategy or war story.
The next facade was Clinton’s “humanitarian war.” Humanitarian war attempted to relight the liberal beacon by replacing the problems of nation-building with the paternalistic do-gooding of a superior culture and country. In effect, the imperialists recycled the 19th Century war story of “Manifest Destiny” or “White Man’s Burden.” That “burden” was the supposed duty of white people to lift lesser people up to the standards of western civilization — even if that required a lot of killing.
This kind of racist thinking legitimized the US overseas empire at its birth. Maybe it would work again in empires’ old age?
From the “War on Terrorism” to the “Responsibility to Protect.”
After the shock of 9/11 the narrative shifted again. Bush’s “global war on terrorism” reactivated the good vs. evil framing of the Cold War. The “war on terror” was an incoherent military or political strategy except for its promise of forever wars.
Just as the Cold War was a “long twilight struggle” against an elusive but ruthless communist enemy, terrorists might be anywhere and everywhere and do anything. And, like the fight against communism, the war on terrorism would require the US to wage aggressive wars, launch preemptive strikes, use covert activities and dodge both international law and the US Constitution.
9/11 also tapped into deeply-rooted nationalistic and patriotic desires among everyday people to protect and serve their country. The first attack on US soil in modern memory powerfully restored the old binary: when faced with unspeakable evil, the US military became a “force for good in the world.” It’s easy to forget just how potent the combination is and how it led us into the War in Iraq. According to The Washington Post:
Nearing the second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, seven in 10 Americans continue to believe that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had a role in the attacks, even though the Bush administration and congressional investigators say they have no evidence of this.
The mythology is so deep that at first the people, soldiers especially, just had to believe there was a good reason to attack Iraq. So we fell back on exceptionalism despite the total absence of evidence. Of course Bush made no attempt to correct this misinformation. The myth served him too well — as did the official propaganda campaign claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
But in due course, some of the faithful became doubters. A peace movement of global proportions took shape. But in the US far too much of what appeared as resistance was driven by narrow partisan opposition to Republicans rather than principled opposition to war and empire.
But fear not war-makers — Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton came to the rescue! As they continued Bush’s wars in the Middle East and expanded the war zone to include Libya, Syria and then all of Africa, they sweetened “humanitarian war” with a heaping dose of cool-coated “Responsibility to Protect.” Once again, American goodness and innocence made the medicine go down and our wars raged on.
Obama restored legitimacy to the empire so effectively that it took years for the illegal, immoral, racist and “unwinnable” wars to reveal themselves to the public. I was told by one of the leaders of About Face: Veterans Against War that they almost had to close shop after Obama was elected because their donor base dried up. Obama’s hope was our dope. Just as the daze was finally lifting, Trump started to take the mask off.
Is The Mask Off?
Today’s we face an empire with the mask half off. Trump’s doctrine — “We are not nation-building again, we are killing terrorists.” — is a revealing take on military trends that began with the first US – Afghan War (1978-1992). US leaders gave up nation-building and opted for failed states and political chaos instead of the strong states that nation-building, or its illusion, required. The US military began to rely on mercenaries and terrorists to replace the American citizen-soldier. The soldier revolt of the Vietnam Era already proved that everyday Americans were an unreliable force to achieve imperial ambitions.
Nothing rips the mask off of the humanitarian justifications better than the actual experience of combat in a war for oil and power — so the war managers tried to reduce combat exposure to a few. And they succeeded. The number of official US troops abroad reached a 60-year low by 2017. Even still a new resistance movement of veterans is gathering steam.
Can the mask be put back on? It’s hard to say, because as The Nation reports, Americans from a wide spectrum of political positions are tired of perpetual war.
Can the “Green New Military” Put The Mask Back On?
The recycled imperial justifications of the past are losing their power: Manifest Destiny, White Mans’ Burden, leader of the free world, nation-building, humanitarian war, war against terrorism, responsibility to protect — what’s next? If only the military could be seen as saviors once again.
A last-ditch effort to postpone the collapse of the liberal versions of war stories might just be the “Green New Military.” Elizabeth Warren’s policy claims, “Our military can help lead the fight in combating climate change.” It’s a wild claim that contradicts all evidence unless she is also calling for an end to regime-change wars, the New Cold War and the scaling down of our foreign bases. Instead, Warren is all about combat readiness. She did not invent this — the Pentagon had already embraced the new rhetoric. Given that the Working Families Party and some influential progressives have already signaled their willingness to accept Warren as a candidate, she might just silence dissent as effectively as Obama once did.
But, the lie is paper-thin: “There is no such thing as a Green War.” You can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time but you cannot fool mother nature one little bit. War and climate change are deeply connected and ultimately there is no way to hide that.
The New Cold War and More of The Same Old Wars
So far the New Cold War against Russia and China has recycled the anti-communist conspiracy of the old Cold War into the xenophobic conspiracy theory of Russia-gate. Even a trusted tool like Mueller could not make it work as a coherent narrative but no matter — the US did not skip a beat in building up military bases on Russia’s borders.
The media and political attacks on Russia or China or immigrants, or Iran or Syria are likely to continue because propagandists cannot activate the exceptionalist code without an evil enemy. Still, it takes more than evil. An effective war story for the US ruling class must project the liberal ideas of helping, protection, saving and the spread of democracy in order to engineer mass consent to war. Hence the need for “Humanitarian War,” “Duty to Protect” or maybe the”Green New Military.”
Let anyone propose a retreat from any battlefield and the “humanitarian” war cry will rally the empire’s pawns and savior-types. If we practice our exceptionalism religiously — and religion it is — then the US empire will never ever pull back from any war at any time. There is always someone for the empire to “protect and save:” from the “Noble Savages” and innocent white settlers of the frontier, to the Vietnamese Catholics, to the women of Afghanistan, to the Kurds of Syria.
We so want to see our wars as a morality play, just as the Puritans did, but the empire is all about power and profit.
“War is the Continuation of Politics by Other Means.” — Carl von Clausewitz
All the Big Brass study Clausewitz because he is the founder of western military science — but they are so blinded by the dilemmas of empire that they make a mess of his central teaching: War is politics.
None of the war narratives and none of the wars can solve the most important question of politics: governance. Who will govern the colonies? The overwhelming verdict of history is this: colonies cannot be democratically or humanely governed as long as they are colonies. Until the empire retreats its heavy hand will rule in places like Afghanistan.
The empire is reaching the limits of exceptionalism as both war narrative and national mythology. This is why our rulers are forced to desperate measures: perpetual war, occupation, intense propaganda campaigns like Russia-gate, the reliance on mercenaries and terrorists, and the abuse and betrayal of their own soldiers.
Just as damning to the war machine is the collapse of conventional ideas about victory and defeat. The US military can no longer “win.” The question of victory is important on a deep cultural level. According to the original mythology, the outcome of wars waged by “the chosen people” are an indication of God’s favor or disfavor. In modern terms, defeat delegitimizes the state. Endless war is no substitute for “victory.”
But it’s not military victory we want. Our victory will be in ending war, dismantling the empire, abolishing the vast militarized penal system and stopping irreparable climate chaos. Our resistance will create a new narrative but it can only be written when millions of people become the authors of their own history.
The empire is slipping into decline and chaos – one way or another. Will we be actors deciding the fate of the American Empire or will it’s collapse dictate our fate? But these wars will, sooner or later, become the graveyard of empire — or else America is truly exceptional and we really are God’s chosen people.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/12/2019 – 21:50 - Retail Investors Are Acting As If A Financial Crisis Is Just Around The Corner
Retail Investors Are Acting As If A Financial Crisis Is Just Around The Corner
While algos continue to zig and zag, daytraing the barrage of optimistic and pessimistic US-China trade deal headlines, and stock buybacks are set for another record, with a recent report finding that cumulative buybacks YTD are already up +20% YoY compared to 2018 which was already a record year for stock buybacks…
… while insiders quietly dump stock, selling an estimated $26BN of their own stock in 2019, the fastest pace since the year 2000, when executives sold $37bn of stock amid the giddy highs of the dotcom bubble…
… retail investors are acting as if a financial crisis is just around the corner.
A recent report by Bank of America found that retail investors haven’t been this bearish since the collapse of Lehman. The bank looked at money market fund flows, which attracted a near record $322 billion in the past 6 months, the largest since the second half of 2008 when the global financial crisis was unleashed.
As BofA explains, this means that instead of putting their money to work, investors are doing the opposite and raising cash at a furious pace, expecting a market crash, even though – just like in like 2007 and 08 – rates are now falling, while the S&P 500 put-call ratio has soared to the highest since April 10.
One explanation according to BofA’s chief investment strategist, Michael Hartnett, is that investors are suffering from “bearish paralysis,” driven by unresolved issues such as the trade war, Brexit, the Trump impeachment investigation and recession fears. Underscoring this point, in the week ending Oct. 9, investors continued to aggressively exit equity funds globally, with outflows reaching $9.8 billion according to EPFR data, while allocating cash to safe havens, with bond funds enjoying $11.1 billion of inflows.
Picking up on this there, JPMorgan’s Nick Panagirtzoglou writes that the bearishness of retail investors with respect to equity funds has been getting progressively worse during the course of 2019, which as captured in the chart below, shows that retail investors globally sold more equity funds in Q3 vs. Q2 and in Q2 vs. Q1.
To the extent that this growing equity fund selling is indicative of retail investors’ confidence, or lack thereof, the JPM strategist writes that “the picture above points to waning consumer confidence reinforcing the message from the negative trend in the economic measure of Figure 3” which shows that after peaking in 2017, consumer confidence has stumbled and is now at 3 year lows.
Such diminishing consumer confidence would naturally raise further expectations of recession by both economists and markets given the key role the consumer is playing in gauging recession risks.
Indeed, the release of the October 2019 Blue Chip Economic Indicators survey which every month presents economists’ forecasts for the US economy, showed a rise in the average probability of a US recession taking place in 2020 to 39%, surpassing the previous high recorded in the February 2019 survey. This 39% probability is also the highest for this cycle. This is shown in the next chart, which depicts the probability of a US recession taking place in different years based on successive Blue Chip Economic Indicators monthly surveys conducted since 2017. There has been an upward shift in the recession probabilities pattern after each successive year and the current 39% US recession probability represents the highest reading for this cycle.
What to the JPM strategist is also striking is that in the Blue Chip Economic Indicators surveys, the probabilities of a US recession taking place in 2020 based on the monthly surveys conducted during the course of 2019 are significantly higher that the probabilities of a US recession taking place in 2008 based on the monthly surveys conducted during the course of 2007.
In other words, according to at least one measure, what is coming will be even worse compared to the financial crisis – after all, this time economists see what’s coming; that nobody is acting on it yet, is a different matter.
As Panigirtzoglou recounts, a decade ago, “we had to wait until the December 2007 survey for the probability of a US recession taking place in 2008 to approach 40% and it was only with the February 2008 survey conducted, after the 2008 recession had started, that this probability went above 50%.”
Which again brings us back to fund flows, as a proxy of consumer confidence.
As JPM notes, “the vast majority of the fund universe in the world is owned by households or retail investors. And retail investors’ behavior in the fund space this year has the hallmarks of late cycle investing with outflows from equity funds and inflows into bond funds.”
As the next chart shows, the last time we saw such strong outflows from equity funds was during 2008! Admittedly Figure 4 shows that during 2008 we had seen outflows from bond funds also, in contrast to the strong bond fund inflows seen this year. But the difference is less significant than appears in the chart below, as the bond fund outflows at the time had mostly taken place post Lehman crisis once credit spreads rose to unprecedented levels post September 2008
But, Panigirtzoglou asks, “what if this selling of equity funds does not reflect fears of a recession or late cycle dynamics but rebalancing, i.e. an effort by retail investors to prevent their equity weighting from rising too much given the strong 15% rally in global equities YTD.”
Indeed the equity share in the fund universe has been hovering at pretty high levels by historical standards since the end of 2017. This equity share is proxied by the AUM of equity funds plus the equity holdings of hybrid funds divided by the sum of the AUM of equity, bond, hybrid and money market funds. And it could be considered as a proxy of how overweight equities retail investors are as shown in Figure 6 (since 1996 for US domiciled funds and since 2005 globally).
As JPM further notes, this equity fund share has exhibited mean reversion since the mid-1990s. It had increased sharply in the five years to 2017 as a result of the equity rally, with most of the increase taking place during 2013 and during 2017. The metrics in Figure 6 declined sharply during the equity market correction of Q4 2018 but all of this decline reversed in the first quarter of this year shifting retail investors to very overweight territory.
As a result, at 59% currently at a global level, retail investors are entering the fourth quarter of this year at a similar equity overweight position to the record high of the end of 2017. For US domiciled investors, the equity share is currently somewhat lower than the record high of 63% seen at the end of 2017. But at 61% this equity share is still pretty high by historical standards and equal to the previous cycle peaks of 1999 and 2006.
In other words, even if they aren’t dumping stocks because they fear a financial crisis, retail investors appear to be very overweight equities at the moment given the strong 15% rally in global equities this year. So it is possible to view their growing equity fund selling this year as an effort by retail investors to rebalance and prevent their equity weighting from rising too much rather than as a reflection of waning confidence or increasing fear of recession.
This, however, is also not good news, because even if this alternative “rebalancing” hypothesis is correct, it implies that the equity weighting of the household sector has peaked and thus retail investors are likely to limit any equity market upside from here. Therefore, as JPM concludes, “this alternative hypothesis has rather negative implications for equity markets also” asretail investors could act as a drag on equity market upside from here even if consumer confidence improves.
In conclusion, even an optimistic read of the ongoing liquidation by retail investors “poses a challenge to the bullish equity market thesis emerging from this week’s positive news on US-China trade negotiations and Brexit” Panigirtzoglou concludes, because any upside from this week’s news could be constrained by retail investors trying to prevent their equity overweights from rising too much.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/12/2019 – 21:20 - The World's Least-Free Countries Reveal Just How Much "Socialism Sucks"
The World’s Least-Free Countries Reveal Just How Much “Socialism Sucks”
Authored by David Gordon via The Mises Institute,
[Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World. By Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell. Regnery Publishing, 2019. 192 pages.]
Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell are well-known free market economists, and they do not look with favor on a disturbing trend among American young people.
“In the spring of 2016,” they tell us, “a Harvard survey found that a third of eighteen-to twenty-nine year olds supported socialism. Another survey, from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, reported that millennials supported socialism over any other economic system.” (p.8)
Unfortunately, the young people in question have little idea of the nature of socialism. Lawson and Powell would like to remedy this situation, but they confront a problem. Ordinarily, one would urge students to read Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, Mises’s “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” and similar classic works, in order to understand the basic facts about the free market and socialism, but the millennials are unlikely to do so. One must attract their attention. What can be done?
Lawson and Powell have had the happy idea of presenting elementary economics in a humorous way that will appeal to those “turned off” by serious and sober scholarship. In the latter adjective lies the key to their approach. Both of the authors enjoy drinking beer, and they travel around the world to various socialist countries in pursuit of their beloved beverage, making incisive comments about the economy of each country as they do so. They write in a salty style that will make millennials laugh, though some readers will find it jarring.
For the young, “socialism” means no more than vague ideas about “fairness”, but, the authors note, the term has a precise meaning:
“To separate the state from socialism in any large society is like trying to separate private property from capitalism. It can’t be done. I’ll say it once more for the people in the back: socialism, in practice, means that the state owns and controls the means of production.” (p.128)
No country is completely socialist, but some are more socialist than others. How can the degree of socialism be evaluated? Lawson has, along with James Gwartney, produced an annual economic freedom index for the Fraser Institute, which the authors use to answer this question, sometimes with surprising results.
Many professed socialists look to Sweden for inspiration, but according to the freedom index, “Sweden gets a 7.54 rating, which is good enough for twenty-seventh place out of the 159 countries in the study. . .Bottom line: Sweden is a prosperous, mostly capitalist country.” (pp.10-11)
The authors must now confront an objection. Why should we not prefer welfare-state capitalism to the straightforward free market economy the authors want? They reply that Sweden prospered under freedom, but the increased taxation needed to finance the welfare state has brought about stagnation. “Sweden grew most when it was freer than it is today.” (p.13)
If some people admire Sweden, few except fanatics have good words for the economy of Cuba. Nevertheless, must we not recognize the wonders accomplished by the Cuban socialized medicine? We must give the devil his due. Lawson and Powell are not convinced.
“Official Cuban health statistics are impressive. . .Yet, we also know that the hospitals most Cubans use are so poorly equipped that people often have to bring their own sheets. What gives? The silence [on the streets} is part of the answer. The lack of automobiles means a lack of traffic fatalities. Since automobile accidents are a leading cause of death among younger people, the lack of automobiles has a disproportionate impact on life expectancy statistics for reasons that have nothing to do with health care. The low rate of infant mortality is a product of data manipulation.” (p.53)
Why has Cuban socialism, like all other centralized socialist economies, failed? The authors present with great clarity the essential point:
“’[A]lmost a hundred years ago, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained that socialism, even if run by benevolent despots and populated with workers willing to work for the common good, could still not match capitalism’s performance. Socialism requires abolishing private property in the means of production. But private property is necessary to have the free exchange of labor, capital, and goods that establish proper prices. Without proper prices, socialist planners could not know which consumer goods were needed or how best to produce them. . .Socialism also gives tremendous power to government officials and bureaucrats who are the system’s planners—and with that power comes corruption, abuse, and tyranny.” (p.37)
Socialist tyrants were the greatest mass murderers in history, and the young must be apprised of this melancholy fact.
“Stalin ranks just behind Mao as history’s second greatest mass murderer, with Hitler coming in third—and all three dictators were, of course, committed socialists of one sort or another.” (p.115)
Some millennial socialists respond with a distinction. The despotic governments mentioned were not genuinely socialist. The authors answer with appropriate severity:
“This is the same dirty trick socialists have played for decades. Whenever things go south, as they inevitably do, they claim that it wasn’t ‘real’ socialism. I [Lawson[ find the whole thing more than a little disingenuous and very irritating. When socialists, democratic and otherwise, held up Venezuela as a great socialist experiment in the 2000s, the message was, ‘See, we told you so; socialism works!’ but when failure happened, the message changed to, “No, wait—that’s not real socialism!’ They want to claim socialism during the good times but disavow it during the bad.” (pp.127-128)
A related gross error, the famous “nirvana fallacy,” is to compare an ideal state of affairs, conjured up by socialists, with difficulties of real-world capitalism.
If the authors are ready to rebuke the errors of misguided youth, they look with sympathy on some of their hopes. Many young people condemn the drug war, with its rampant racism and mass incarcerations, and they are right to do so:
“The U.S. government’s war on drugs is unwinnable because, in the language of economists, it is a supply-side war, when demand isn’t very price-sensitive. This means when the U.S. government scores a ‘win’ in the war, the price of the remaining drugs goes up more than the usage falls. As a result, net revenue to drug cartels increases, which increases their ability to corrupt law enforcement and buy weapons and other smuggling equipment. The result has been an endless cycle of increasing violence along the entire supply chain in Central and South America. . .” (p.135)
It is not only the drug war, but the war on terror as well, that ought to be condemned, and here once more, the many millennials who protested against the war are in the right.
“We feel the same about the war on terror. The wars and violence associated with it in the Middle East are a major reason for Europe’s immigration wave. . .advocates for capitalism can be against war precisely because war undermine capitalist institutions and freedoms.. . .Chris Coyne wrote a book entitled After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy, in which he shows that when the U.S. engages in foreign intervention, it rarely creates the kind of lasting institutional change that supports what some might call a ‘neoliberal’ society. Economist Robert Higgs’s classic book, Crisis and Leviathan, shows how crises in the United States, especially wars, have led to expanded government at the expense of markets. Chris’s latest book, Tyranny Come Hone: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism, co-authored with another friend of ours, Abby Hall, has shown how U.S. military interventions abroad ‘boomerang’ back to the United States in ways that decrease our freedoms at home. See, anti-war isn’t a uniquely leftist position. Capitalists should be anti-war too.” (pp.136-137. I regret the use of “neoliberal” as a term of praise and the solecism “advocates for.”)
I confess that I approached the authors’ project of a drinking tour of the socialist countries with skepticism. Would it be more than ajeu d’esprit? Reading the book has laid my skepticism to rest. Socialism Sucks has the potential to do great good, if it gets into the right hands, and its impressive sales suggest that it will do so.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/12/2019 – 20:50 - Apple Warned Apple TV+ Showrunners Not To Anger China
Apple Warned Apple TV+ Showrunners Not To Anger China
As Apple embarked on the development of a series of exclusive programming for its Apple TV+ service in early 2018, the company’s leadership advised content creators not to piss off China, according to BuzzFeed News.
In early 2018 as development on Apple’s slate of exclusive Apple TV+ programming was underway, the company’s leadership gave guidance to the creators of some of those shows to avoid portraying China in a poor light, BuzzFeed News has learned. Sources in position to know said the instruction was communicated by Eddy Cue, Apple’s SVP of internet software and services, and Morgan Wandell, its head of international content development. It was part of Apple’s ongoing efforts to remain in China’s good graces after a 2016 incident in which Beijing shut down Apple’s iBooks Store and iTunes Movies six months after they debuted in the country. –BuzzFeed
And for all the left’s virtue-signaling over ‘microaggressions’ and the patriarchy depriving every gender their own bathroom, the progressive minds behind Hollywood and Silicon Valley After are hypocritically mum when it comes to China’s well-documented human rights violations.
“They all do it,” one showrunner told BuzzFeed. “They have to if they want to play in that market. And they all want to play in that market. Who wouldn’t?“
Apple of course relies on China for tens of billions in annual sales – not to mention the annual manufacture of hundreds of millions of iPhones – which as the report notes, makes it “particularly important to avoid running afoul of Chinese government,” especially in light of what we’ve seen over the past weeks with the NBA and other organizations whose employees have expressed solidarity with Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators.
Apple Told Some Apple TV+ Show Developers Not To Anger China- hey and don’t mention that Turkey is bad. We sell a lot of watches there. And don’t mention Saudi Arabia murdering journalists- they love the iMac and don’t mention Russia—big iPad market. https://t.co/1sHGO18MxX
— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow) October 12, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Apps yanked
Last week, Apple removed HKmap.live from the iOS App Store – an app which helped Hong Kong protesters track, elude, and stage counterattack operations against the police. The removal sparked outrage, including Hong Kong IT legislator Charles Mok, who tweeted in a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook “We Hongkongers will definitely look closely at whether Apple chooses to uphold its commitment to free and other basic human rights, or become an accomplice for Chinese censorship and oppression.”
Today I wrote to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, to tell him his company’s decision to remove HKmap live app from Appstore will cause problems for normal Hong Kong’s citizens trying to avoid police presence while they are under constant fear ofpolice brutality. Values over profits, pls! pic.twitter.com/guaBfV8Pnf
— Charles Mok 莫乃光 (@charlesmok) October 10, 2019
As BuzzFeed notes, “Apple’s recent actions in China are a continuation of the company’s years-long practice of appeasing Beijing.”
To do business in China, the company adopts to local dictates, distasteful as they may be to its CEO Tim Cook, an outspoken gay rights advocate and privacy crusader. It’s an ironic inversion of a longstanding argument in the West that by bringing China into the world trade system, the country would adopt western values. Instead, China is asking tech companies to adopt its values — and Apple is willing to pay that price.
…
The removal of HKmap.live was one of a series of actions Apple took at China’s instigation in the past week. Apple removed the Quartz app from its app store in China — “Presumably because of the excellent work our team in Hong Kong has been doing covering the protests,” Quartz technology editor Mike Murphy said — and removed the Taiwan flag emoji for iOS users in Hong Kong. –BuzzFeed
Also noted is that Apple only rejected just two of 56 app takedown requests from Beijing – eliminating 517 apps the communist government disapproved of, according to the Cupertino, California company’s transparency report. What’s more, “Apple provided customer data to the Chinese government 96% of the time when it asked about a device, and 98% of the time when it asked about an account. In the US, those numbers were around 80% and the US government did not make any app removal requests.”
Read the rest of the report here.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/12/2019 – 20:20 - The "Safe Drivers Act" Is A Real-Time National Driver Surveillance Program
The “Safe Drivers Act” Is A Real-Time National Driver Surveillance Program
A new Senate bill would create a real-time national driver surveillance program that would allow law enforcement to know anything and everything about a driver at the click of a button.
A recent article in WCVB Channel 5 revealed that the “Safe Drivers Act” is designed for one purpose and that is to share everything a motorist has ever done with law enforcement nationwide.
Outside the Danvers branch of the Registry of Motor Vehicles on Tuesday, Congressman Seth Moulton publicly announced legislation he’s filed in hopes of making it easier for traffic safety officials to share information about drivers across state lines.
How Moulton plans to make it easier to share drivers’ personal information with law enforcement across the country is frightening.
The ultimate goal of the bill is to help lead to the creation of a national, real-time data sharing program, Moulton’s office said.
Apparently, knowing a driver’s Social Security Number, address, date of birth, checking their driving record and running their name against a national criminal database is not enough.
There are few places in America that do not use Automatic License Plate Readers to track our every movement and even that does not appear to be enough for Big Brother’s insatiable desire to know everything about everyone.
The Salem News revealed that the bill would “incentivize states” into creating a national real-time driver sharing program.
Moulton said, “the goal is to incentivize states to modernize their systems and work together to make sure their databases are compatible to improve communication on dangerous drivers.”
WCVB Channel 5 explains how the U.S. DOT would offer states more than $50 million to help create a national real-time data sharing program.
Moulton’s bill would also create a $50 million competitive grant program that would allow states to bid for additional grant money and would enable the U.S. Department of Transportation to connect states that have similar modernization needs.
One has to ask, why would states need bribes grant money to help create a national driver surveillance program?
According to The Salem News, this bill would also give law enforcement, real-time alerts of every driver.
Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has also called for the creation of a nationwide system to alert states when one of their drivers incurs a violation that could trigger a suspension in another jurisdiction.
Will Amber Alerts become a thing of the past? Because this bill would give law enforcement real-time alerts about every driver.
I wonder if they will be called Bad Driver alerts?
THE SAFE DRIVERS ACT IS A PRIVACY NIGHTMARE
H.R. 4531 would also give law enforcement access to videos of accidents a driver was involved in and much more.
Developing or acquiring programs to identify, collect, and report data to State and local government agencies, and enter data, including crash, citation or adjudication, driver, emergency medical services or injury surveillance system, roadway, and vehicle, into the core highway safety databases of a State.
Collecting and storing court judgments of any auto accident a motorist has been involved in will give law enforcement unprecedented access to a motorist’s driving records.
It would link core highway safety databases of a State with such databases of other States or with other data systems within the State, including systems that contain medical, roadway, and economic data.
Calling this a national, real-time data sharing program really doesn’t do it justice. It should be renamed and called a real-time national driver surveillance program.
You can bet that this bill will be modified to monitor motorists in ways that we haven’t dreamed of yet, making the “Safe Drivers Act” even more of a privacy nightmare.
By storing and tracking everything a motorist has ever been involved in, we are turning every driver into a suspected criminal, and that scares the you-know-what out of me.
Americans do not need or want another national surveillance program. We already have a national ID program called Real-ID, which gives law enforcement an unprecedented look into everyone’s personal lives.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/12/2019 – 19:50
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